The Man Who Murdered Love ✔ [Completed]

Soul Searcher

Summary- "Somewhere, somehow, he knows he's not himself."

(Through me the way into the suffering city. Through me the way to the eternal pain. Through me the way that runs among the lost.)

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There is something raw about him. Like if you touch him, all you'll feel is spirit. Raw soul. You'd expect reaction. A shudder, a twitch, a fair trade of expression. But there is nothing. As raw as he is, there is something in him that is just too dead and gone to care what sensation feels like. What fingertips brushing against open wounds tastes like. No matter. Taste and sensation are but wraiths now; they have faded away to atrophy from little use as necessity and apathy take their place.

For a moment, he stills. He is ever the eye of the storm, ever on the brink of quiet destruction, but this time it is almost death-like in proportions. How utterly motionless he has become in nothing more than a simple bat of the eye. Like he has been cast in sun-burnt casings of fair skin. The deadly stillness at last allays and he flickers the ashes of his smoldering cigarette to the wind. He'd say, if someone were near, that he is offering his adornments, ribbons of stifled fire, to the strands of wayward breeze that pass him by.

The others are unnerved by him. The things he does, says even, they're precariously close to being lunatic with the way he skirts on cruelty as if it is a precipice. The yawning gap of this lunacy, it is a face that he seems to know by name, by countenance.

Grace does nothing to restrain him. This unnatural practice of incongruity that he has long since taken to. No amount of bodily elegance will do to persuade his outlandish character otherwise. His movements are like that of a summer's dream. Quiet and life-like, almost pensive in a budding poet sort of way. But beneath, there is no masking the rot. The gangrene that throws itself upon them and makes them recoil, as if it is truly the tangible stench of slaughtered humanity meeting their unsuspecting noses.

They say animals can smell fear. Surely they can detect him even before he opens his mouth to speak - the embodiment of their dread, the narrator of their every secret thought. They fear him because he is the darkest part of their mind taken to human form. He knows every apprehension, every buried wish to flee that they would strive to keep in shallow graves if he did not already snatch them from the loosened vaults of cognizance. He unwraps them from their candy-coated stupor. Shows them what they will be like when those fears adhere to the physical world.

Every appendage that ever aided him in feeling, in vying for sympathy and companionship, has been removed in order to survive out here. It's not personal, don't make it out like that. Like anyone means anything in this bigger picture where the individual is lost in a sea of blood and martyrdom.

It's just war.

He can't blame them, not really. He finds that the emptiness in him can only be filled by the emotions he entices from others. Some would say fear is his partiality. But it's not. What do they know? They have yet to unearth from the walking graveyard of this man, this sepulcher of skin and bone, the code which unlocks him. Which frees him into the grasp of their knowledge and makes it known to them what he truly is.

If he were to tell them, he'd say he doesn't quite know what partiality really is all that much anyway. Partial? Only humanity can be partial. He is a machine of war. Programmed to destroy that which does not have a place in the free world. What is the free world anyhow? If it were free, he thinks to himself, we'd all be formless. There would be no such thing as shape. No triangles, no words, no tell-tale smoothness of pomegranates in his hand that are heavy with ripened seeds. Certainly no fuckin' guns either.