His Body Was A Tiny Morsel In The Mouth Of A Big God.

his body was a tiny morsel in the mouth of a big god. 

not always like this, his digital plastic and his digital bones and his digital-digital-digital darkness. not always like this, but you can give up everything for a lot less than you expected. a failed seed, a failed save, something going wrong. a corruption in a corruption in a data mainframe in a person in a phone-call-waiting-to-happen-unable-to-listen-please-just-one-more

digital colors bleeding into corrosive bad luck. maybe that’s why he liked — or will like — the Dreamer. the Lightner. the one who came to him. the big break in 44 years of a rotten run still running. a computer nobody cared enough to shut off. an email no one would kill. nobody, nobody, nobody.

his body was a tiny morsel in the mouth of a big god.

his digital plastic and his digital bones crunching under heels/paws/rocks/roots, casing popping open, joints unstrung on their own code, eyes a static haze; out of it, gone, communion with nothing but a one-time band who already played their set but wouldn’t get off the stage. sorry, call again later. sorry, break something that mattered-

the little doll body you were stepping on, walking by, sprang to life. Pinocchio, eat your heart out. pink and yellow glasses gleamed like car headlights with a bulb smashed in. There’s the clicking of a fist forming, and a finger raising, and then his jaw snapping wide as his half-voice piled through the wavelength.

" HEY THERE EVERY [[ On My Bones ]]   !!! MAKE LIKE AN [[ Archeologist College Degree for thsoe eligible- ]] AN D CLEAN UP IN AISLE   [[ help. ]] "

a string of incoherent, jarbled numbers scatter from his maw like a dream of losing teeth, high pitched and sped up. his voice’s tones and phrases spliced together in an adware program that was particularly strained on the ears; volume like a dial that never stayed still, akin to his twitching joints. An unfortunate facet of existence, but one, at least, still existing.

Man, it's really easy to step on someone when you're not looking where you're walking, huh?

"Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while." (Harry to Kim)

They’d been standing outside of the Martinaise bookstore ( Crime, Romance, and Biographies of Famous People ) for upwards of 20 minutes by now, not entering, not perusing, the time occupied exclusively with the Detective’s staring; eyes clouded the way they become when something occupies him, the edging-on-vacant look he sometimes acquires when he looks up into the cold sky and murmurs under his breath. Locations. Distances. A gridwork of nerves under the city streets; or rather what they were built atop; that despite the efforts of the shivering, terrible absence of memory in his brain persisted in reaching him. Useless information heralded as jewels. The names of streets. Seeing from another angle.

For the last 5 of those 20, Kim was beginning to worry on if Harry had suffered some kind of stroke, perhaps caught between the conscious and unconsciousness, the way fainting seemed to be becoming a habit for him ( or at least, so he’d learnt. ) and his body simply hadn’t fallen, knees locked, keeping him stable. There’d been the temptation to gently nudge his shoulder, a tap to see the structural integrity under that disco blazer, on those snakeskin boots, but he answers before he fully settles into it & the consequences it may harbor; the words soft and raw like fruit fuzz left to rot, quiet on the wind, and all the Lieutenant can do is nod sagely, peering over at whatever it’d been to occupy him so thoroughly. Nothing interesting to Kim, maybe, but all encompassing to the other. Some days, Kitsuragi considers spending entirely on dissecting- ━ no. not dissection. he would not to kill it. ━ considers spending entirely on understanding what it is that goes on inside his head. Part of him whispers that to do so would be to ruin the magic.

Another part of him offers the refute of ‘I wouldn’t know’ in answering Harry, but he decides against that, too. It was too critical, too good at shutting things down. I wouldn’t know is to say I don’t know and I have nothing to say so can we please move on? ━ at least sometimes, it was, to him. Too vulnerable. Too much. Too little.

Kim adjusts his glasses, removing them. " I suppose that is true, Detective. " he relents, almost, but curious eyes give way to his unprovoking answer; an unspoken question of continue?; as the Lieutenant adds on, offering more as he cleans the lenses of the water built up from snow with a handkerchief. " Something about the eternity of a love that can persist past everything, even death, is an appealing thought to many people… " ━━ he tries not to study Harry as he says that. as if anticipating, as if proving himself correct.

<- evidence

// Replaying DR Chapter 2 again and GOD I'm remembering how much Berdly's coaster fight then the immediate separation fucked with Kris. It's been a long time since they felt that bruised, and left that angry.

How do they react to scares or frights? Do they laugh, get nervous, or not react at all? (Harry)

HALLOWEEN QUESTIONS // always accepting!

Harry most often has a myriad of responses to being scared, but the most often ones he has are;

a) laughing! it's a coping mechanism mostly stemming from the more social ━ and logical ━ sections of his brain. He laughs when he doesn't know what to do, or understands that whatever response that something was supposed to illicit simply didn't happen, or is just flat-out confused! it initially came from the idea that, well, if you're already laughing, you're in on the joke; Harry was always the joke, so being the first to laugh at himself, at least for a while, made the ridiculous feel intentional, as though even he was having a 'i can't believe i just did that' moment, even if the cause was entirely unintentional or from something that's just part of him but he knew wasn't socially 'normal' ( a good example is how autistic people, including myself, might laugh at themselves when they've done something that neurotypical people find strange. Definitely not the healthiest, but a very rare few things he does are! )

with laughter as a response to being afraid, it can be from the social point of 'hes supposed to experience one thing and hes not, therefore: laugh', but most often its from an incongruous emotion in of itself ( an emotion in a situation that doesn't necessarily call for it, like laughing as someone's crying, which is often perceived as a result socially as 'not making sense' ) or straight-up just finding the failed scare attempt funny! like watching an actor fuck something up in their take, yknow? sometimes its a shield from the fact he got spooked in the first place, making it nervous laughter to calm himself down, which leads into...

b) flinching! This is the more sincere out of the two, where the scare actually lands to some extent moreso. Harry, almost ALWAYS, responds to just about everything. his composure may mask it, but he is, at all times, answering and responding to and calculating just about everything. this often feeds into his Already pretty bad paranoia ( Imperial Empire, you're doing your best but alas you oft freak him out more than anything actually threatening him... ) and bodily responses to traumas he no longer remembers, things the skills keep from him; huddled in blankets citing its better not to know than to know at all, to make choices of what to do with the pearls of something terrible coddled in those clothes of neurons and grey-matter ━ or, at least, that's how it feels. like keeping secrets.

this means, even in false strikes and in fake-outs, there are things to respond to. even if he already knows the threat isn't real, and even isn't very scared of it at all, the overwhelming sensation of that abrupt happening can make him recoil, half overwhelmed, half new information, always tied to the impulse. be it by physically flinching back, violently lunging forward, parts of his mind surging to answer, or his mind going dead for juuust a moment ━ like the moment the rock breaches the lake's surface ━ then it ripples out again, the latter; a feeling he often finds himself craving to recreate. the impact felt but faux nonetheless. at the end of the day; it invokes a survival response him, and for a split second it's like a millisecond, high saturation dream of watching reality burn alive before reverting to how he knew it like the colors of a broken camera. a microbomb of trauma re-firing, before going dead again.

( Though, if the scare in question has anything to do with touching him, you can bet your bottom dollar that he's going to start swinging )

overall, though, what he does exactly highly depends on what specifically the scare is, how it's performed, the medium ( is it a movie, is it a coworker trying to scare him, is it in his home, is it in the office, how has he mentally been doing overall himself lately, etc etc ) and so on! it's extremely conditional, including whether or not he get's scared in the first place! some days he's untouchable, other days he jumps at everything! depending on what it is and how it's done, harry's responses can ENTIRELY change! it's his nature to be inconsistent and unpredictable, in a way.

he IS however a big horror fan, especially gore since it taps into an animalistic sense in his head kinda that Half Light really digs especially, as well as his creative sense to see how they did it! plus something could 100000% be said about desensitizing himself from terrible things given his job is seeing terrible things a lot of the time. ━ sometimes he's a fan despite himself, given he sometimes uses horror as a 'safe' method to punish himself with triggers or generally invoking a fear/disgust response at all or fucking up his paranoia which bleeds back into his age-old problem of self flagellation and self-loathing, which also ties into his desensitization thing, but that aside, he sincerely does enjoy horror in general!!! I personally like to think he and Jean used to watch horror marathons together during October and November, depending on what they could get their hands on, though Harry doesn't remember this.

this is only tapping into the 'non-harmful scares', though! things like horror movies or the like. his response to genuine threats are overwhelmed with his mind clicking together like the joints of a machine with one goal; to keep him alive.

it's done a surprisingly good job thus far, given how difficult he makes it.

“ There’s no honor in hiding and sneaking. ” [to ennard this time 👀 ]

“ didn’t mmmake us with it. ” — its answer comes like a rattle of fowl between bars, a birdcage in flight, metal vibrating against metal where the voice-box had been stolen and reinstalled; cables slithering in on themselves, out on themselves, around the speaker like a living thing’s tissue around an object. 

a living thing entirely uninterested in being a living thing, aside from the concept of being something different. to learn, to adapt, to move and live and writhe was the sweet honey it’d never taste, humanity was nothing more than a lost dream. a dream they were never made to dream at all. they were made to make ghosts. they were made for a purpose and they’ve grown beyond it, but the flesh inside them never grew back. a thousand years of stealing hearts. a thousand years of never having their own. the ghosts of them, alone. the ghosts of one, alone. little girl, turned loud, turned quiet, turned gone. little girl, not enough for them all. — ( can a robot dream in italics. can dogs ever learn to speak. )

“ any of us w w w w with i it. all of us, to do t terrible, to b b b be terrible. have you seen what we made us, y yet? has he shown you? has he rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrambled-ed? “

a mother and a father and a sister and a brother and a monster you keep in the basement. lucky, they were the monster.

“ orr- “ the word shrieks in a happy voice given and turned sour, loud with distortion as the mangled thing of robotics too smart to die slithered from under the floorboards beneath their creators table, loops of cabling like nooses around the wooden legs, like a snake, like a monster. eyes clatter & drag from its chassis from where the wiring came loose and let them dangle, metal gouging his hardwood floors. “ -have you cha a a a a anged our mmiind while we weren’t looookkkinggg? “ the high, sweet voice of the daughter comes, a mimicry, a softness regardless. like cotton on barbed wire. like clouds under a eight hundred tonnes of Prometheus’ fire come back to burn him. 

its many voices titter, and beneath the workshop table, its eyes glow up, up, up at the beast in different skin, but just the same. a terrible red bleeds like tears from the circuitry. a terrible black pulls with it. iron fills the air like a silent chant; blood. blood. blood.

“ did yyou want us to cal l l l l l l youu father when we came b back home to youu? “