#((listen i went crazy over your reply and IMMEDIATELY continued it fksdhffhsdjak))

[ladyseidr]

@runeians ( continued from here )

He was nothing like his father. He was exactly like his father. Two facts intertwined, both true and false. Schrödinger's monster / son / victim. He hated it all—the literal and figurative blood passed down, inheritance in veins and on hands. Hating the very flesh he lived in, ever now more as he begun to face the realities of his father. ( It wasn't time. The burning, the hollowed husk would come later. Now he was just a mediocre security guard in a ghost-filled restaurant. Freeing the souls came then. He was only learning about their existence now. )

Her response shut him up, mouth clamped and jaw tight. The light shining from his flashlight wobbling, then clattering to the tiled floor as glass shattered. Stumbling away several steps, hands instinctively grasping at ears. ( It would be years before he stopped flinching, before the only thing that struck fear into him was his father's shambling corpse. ) Now, he was scared. Petrified, trembling like a child.

He deserved it. The fear and the words directed his way. His own special dose of irony.

What clawed its way out of his mouth wasn't easily identifiable to him—desperation and rage and remorse and grief combining into a voice ragged, tired, and loud all at once. "I don't want redemption!" God, he meant it. And here he made the promise that would haunt him for decades upon decades, eternity hanging over his head without him knowing it: "I'll do anything to stop this." The murders, the hauntings, the trails of blood that led directly back to the Afton family. "He can't keep getting away with this."

He didn't know that he'd be heard out, but the words rang true enough to steady him a bit. Flashlight snatched back up, he took a long, shaky breath. "I don't expect you to believe me." Either of you—because he knew. Knew if there was another, it had to be his brother. But he couldn't ask, couldn't hear it confirmed. Couldn't know that he had inadvertently followed another one of his father's sins, beyond even murder.