BONEDOG.

by AknownymousInput

Summary:

"... by Eva H.D." you say with a smile, adjusting your glasses. N had asked what the title of the poem was and who had wrote it. You're always happy to answer his questions.

"Wow! Well uh, that was really, really depressing!" he says with a smile (not that he ever really says anything without it), "I can't really imagine being that depressed to come home!"

"I think it's less about coming home" you say "and more about coming back to a home you don't recognize. Not because it changed, but because you had."

He still smiles but there's a slight falter to his grin. Like he recognized something you hadn't.

You stammer: "Or- or that's what how I read it, at least! Maybe it's more about finding the outside world much more interesting than home, or something."

He puts a hand on your shoulder. "I don't think I'd ever find you boring; no matter how I changed, or how interesting it is outside!"

He stammers and his eyes dart away, suddenly self-conscious. "Or- anyone... or anything else in the manor!"

You feel relieved, somehow. Like an invisible weight has been lifted off of you. You smile. "Me either."

Chapter 1: HERE MY HUBRIS LIES

Above my burial plot, the gravestone reads: "HERE MY HUBRIS LIES". I don't need to see it to know.

I hear laughing above me. The hands around my neck tighten further. I want to laugh, too, but all I can get out are strained whimpers.

She laughs so hard her hands shake. Her yellow optics flicker as they drill into my white ones. It feels like hours before it peters off.

"I won" she says, out of "breath". I don't know why she bothers.

"I won and you died" she manages to squeak out between another laugh.

It's all so performative. Boring. The type of thing only I would think is funny. She doesn't need to tell me the obvious.

I could get out of here. I could walk and talk along with everyone else. I could do the hobbies I'm supposed to enjoy and use the smile I'm supposed to wear. I could pretend to live and dance and sing. I could be the little marionette I was designed to be.

I could tell N the things he's longed to hear. He would smile back at me. A blinding type of smile that you can see the wrinkles on; even if they don't exist. He'd get that little pep in his step. He'd roll on his servos while standing. He just wouldn't be able to sit still. It'd mean everything to him to see me again.

I could tell him "I'm sorry". I could tell him "never again". I could tell him that the mask fell off. That it didn't become one with my face. That I was just like that little feckless maid in the manor he once knew.

The idiot would be so happy. He'd have everything he'd ever wanted. He'd smile that dumb, goofy, naive grin of his and never question a thing.

But I thought he wanted the truth? So why is it not clear to him that what he wants to be true, he can never have? The irony is inescapable.

I hear more laughing above me.

See? She finds it funny too!

Can't you see it N? Have you ever really tried to look?

The rot goes down to the core. I'm nothing. I haven't ever really been anything in a long, long time.

There's more laughing. It's funny, really; N thinks it's about Cyn.

It's hilarious! He thinks Cyn killed me! The laughing becomes uncontrollable.

He only really smiles at other people nowadays. He smiled genuinely at me after the end. I could see it in his eyes — he thought the mask would wash off like makeup. I smiled back. I was happy to see him happy. The shadows were chased away, if only for a moment.

Now I can see him drop his joke of a smile sometimes in the corner of my eye. Ohhhh he's so concerned!

Took him long enough. He used to be able to read me like a book. Or, at least, I thought he did. It was like he knew what I wanted long before I could match words to what I felt. I missed that. It all went to hell along with everything else he should've remembered from the manor.

He didn't even notice as I died right beside him. He would laugh nervously and cry out "classic V!" as I pushed and pushed myself beyond the limits of what I used to be. Sometimes, I pushed myself in front of him just to get a reaction. I wanted him to know I was broken without having to tell him. I wanted the N I knew from the manor back. Nothing ever happened.

It always ends the same.

Maybe he never really understood me to begin with. Even back then. Maybe I just saw the perfect person I wanted to see. He wasn't like the other drones in the manor; I know that much, at least.

None of us were. I think Tessa changed something about us. Or maybe getting thrown out in the first place did. The other butlers, when they smiled like N did...

Their eyes would bore down into whatever semblance of a soul I had. It was like they knew something really funny but wouldn't act on it — just watch. They wouldn't react when I was hurt, sad, or when Louisa broke me down to get to Tessa (or to simply blow off steam). They would just stare at me. Unblinking. Why would they blink? They don't have eyes, after all!

I still don't know if they were "people" or just machines pretending to be.

Sometimes I feel like I can still see them. Watching. Smiling. It never ends.

When N smiled, though... He smiled because he cared. He smiled through the pain to bring joy to our lives. He bore the brunt of it all and carried the weight of reality without complaint. Our little Hercules. Or perhaps... Atlas? At least, that's what I thought was happening.

Now? I'm not too sure. I think he put on his stupid silver-lining act just as much for himself as for anyone else. He hid the pain away from anyone who'd dare to look — but especially from himself. He was a coward.

But at least his cowardice had its uses. Maybe that's what I tried to emulate in some sick, twisted way. I wanted my act to be useful. I wanted to stop shutting down; the team needed me. N needed me. I needed to "do my job". So I hid behind a farce.

Until it wasn't.

It's funny, really. Really! It is! Why else would she be laughing so much?

It's hilarious: You put it all away. Tuck it into a corner where you think it'll be safe and then you leave home. You go so, so far away. You put as much distance from it all as you can. That way, it'll be untouched. That way, it'll all be waiting for you when you return. It'll all be safe until you are. Until you won't break it just by being in proximity.

And then, years pass. It all ends. And you stare upwards at the ceiling with its grotesquely uniform pattern. It all grates on you. You hear the voices and movement of food all around you. You shiver uncontrollably; it's not even cold. Your tank is full, but it's not. It'll never be. It never is. You said you wouldn't, but who believes you? Certainly not you.

It always ends the same.

And you think — you practically scream to yourself — "I want to go home!"

"I want to be me again!"

You want to do the hobbies you used to do. Feel the joy you used to feel. You want to be able sit in one place and think about things other than tearing someone apart. Other than feeding them their own entrails; sharing your food like good manners necessitates. You want to enjoy the the corny romance novels you used to read. The poems you used to love.

And so you endeavor to return home.

 

You come back with X-ray vision to a house of bone.

Your favorite novels turned into tinder. Poems now just whispers on the wind. Every hobby you used to enjoy turned sour like milk left out too long. The silver-lining left uncared for; its varnish too thick to ever polish away.

It's like the phantom pains of a severed limb. Just enough to care, not enough to have.

All the meat has been picked off. No flesh left in sight.

Everything you see now, all of it: bone.

 

Above me I can hear her laughing harder than ever before. If I didn't know any better I would say it sounds like crying. Her hands shake irrespective of whatever comes out of her mouth. It feels like hours before it peters off.

"I won" she says, out of "breath". I really, really don't know why she bothers.

"I won and you died" she manages to squeak out between another "laugh".

It sounds the same, but it isn't.

Moments from now she'll snap my neck. Then, we'll wake up. But she only does it when I least expect it. How I ever get caught off-guard, I'll never know:

It always ends the same.

Chapter 2: LOG_1: Waking Nightmare

Summary:

$ nano /home/V/Documents/NIsAFuckingIdiot/LOG_1.txt

The ceiling I wake up to was just as uninteresting as I left it. There were barely any discernible patterns to the metal adorning it. A truly terrible design, really. Doesn't everyone know how important detailing is on a ceiling? Clearly whoever designed this had a death wish. Here I am, bored out of my mind, and there isn't even any patterns in the ceiling to stare at!

The manor had excellent detailing. The Elliotts were nothing if not vain. I can still remember my quiet shock as James and Louisa contracted what must of been hundreds of rent-a-drones to do additional detailing on their already over-the-top mansion. Given J and N's complete lack of surprise, this clearly wasn't a new behavior. Tessa, for her part, had the sensibility to at least muster up some level of exasperation. She'd always complain about how the look of the manor shifted when she wasn't watching. She wasn't being entirely honest about what was really upsetting her.

N would always try to cheer her up by making a big deal out of "exploring" the new changes. He'd act as if we were transported to an entirely new place and document the new changes like some wayward explorer. She'd play along to humor him, exaggerating her already impressive accent with unusual words until N would break out giggling. She would whisper to me and J "here we go again" whenever it happened, but we could all tell she always felt better by the end of it.

J would take time out of her neurotically-packed schedule to issue a long and overly-detailed speech about the nuances of aristocratic social life and how vitally important it was to "continually upkeep your mansion as a living representation of your wealth so as to reinforce your status among your peers". Those words, exactly, appeared in every iteration of her speech. I found out she kept a living document of it on her drive when I caught her muttering to herself about superficial word choices she could make. At one point she unironically, and without even the slightest hint of self-awareness, mentioned "adding more jargon" to her speech. It took her several more minutes to realize I was standing there, staring at her for whatever deranged revision session she scheduled. Needless to say, I was on restroom duty for the next three consecutive days.

Frankly, she was utterly full of shit. For the longest time, though, I took her nonsense at face value. I guess that's the point of jargon. Ineffable nonsense that masquerades as thoughtful, reasoned speech. I had assumed she must've drawn her conclusions from some well of rationality, given her meticulous nature. But when I stumbled upon an old picture of James and Louisa in "stealth wealth" getups, the illusion shattered.

Little did anything else disillusion me on the nature of James and Louisa than that absurd photo. It sits safely in its #2 slot — right underneath the rampant physical and emotional abuse they leveled against Tessa. I consulted the library for weeks and every book on the subject only made me more exasperated. It turned out that in the decades prior the increasing discrepancy of power distribution between the rich and the usual laborer led to more division in culture and ethical philosophy. This is a very fancy way of saying that the rich hated poor people and began to hate poor people even more. The wealthier they got, the more it continued to shelter and isolate them, subsequently they felt less guilty about being pricks. No accountability, no adjustment of behavior.

In a fit of ironic backlash against the continued (reasonable, I felt, but perhaps I was "biased" as someone of a "disadvantaged" status) hatred for them, the wealthier class retreated into petty recreations of classical wealth. A particular favorite of late was recreating the Victorian era. They had even begun changing their vocabulary to suit it. This had continued to go on for decades until it fundamentally embedded itself into the very fabric of their culture. The reasoning behind the initial movement was clinically insane. From my reading, the core motivation behind the original shift was that it "stood out" amongst the usual shows of wealth like a Lamborghini. In other words, it was a viral social media trend.

I wasn't just a maid in a manor. I was a maid in a manor because somebody wanted to LARP being a fucking Victorian snob.

 

My tasks consumed most of the daylight, so I had to read about this through the night. This proved a real pain to balance with the need to charge my battery. I had to eek out extra charge by working with a cable attached to my chassis when I had the opportunity. As you'd imagine, this was rather unsustainable and I was often dragging my feet like some robotic zombie around the manor. It didn't help with self-preservation either.

When I saw Louisa out ordering the rent-a-drones around in increasingly inane ways (one of her commands was to "make the banner look more blue", as if drones came equipped with fabric dye!), I quite literally didn't have the energy to stop myself. I don't exactly remember what kind of snide comment I made about it, but the resulting dents she made in my chassis were quite memorable in their own right. It took Tessa several days to fully buffer them out. It was an important learning experience in how to shit talk: don't do it to powerful people. In front of them, at least.

All of this is to say that when I eventually leveled my ire at J's garbage speech, I kept my mouth shut. Well, it's not like I was the best to standing up to authority figures, so I probably wouldn't have tried anything in front of her anyways? Still, it did inform my next actions. Instead of throwing myself under the bus, I did what any other intelligent and rational individual would: I took out my frustrations in the most petty, vindictive, and — most importantly — untraceable way I could.

Many of the chairs and stools in the manor had the slightest uneven nature to their legs. It was trite enough of a problem that even the endlessly spoiled likes of Louisa hadn't noticed. But J had. She had took it upon herself to personally outfit every single one with felt pads of just the right thickness so as to make their wobble within the error range of her high-precision gyroscope. This was a categorically absurd level of micromanagement. In other words, it was J's pride and joy.

The most hilarious part is that Louisa had once removed these pads from a single stool. Because of this, J continued to think it was the Elliotts themselves setting off her undiagnosed OCD. I think the sheer frustration that hit her processor overwhelmed her capacity to think critically about who was last in the room when the pads went missing. As you might be able to tell by this point; it was not Louisa or James to blame. I did it. Every time she belted out that stupid fucking speech? I removed them discretely as I could while I went about my tasks. Her reaction was pure gold. It's hard to contain in words how endlessly entertaining her reactions were, but I'll try:

J had a scheduled period where she'd sit for a moment on some stool or chair to test its wobble. She started doing this way before I had ever started taking the felt pads off, so I have no idea why the hell she was obsessed with it. Did she think the pads would evaporate into thin air if she didn't check? Maybe Louisa taking them off of that stool traumatized her? In any case, this is when she'd have a chance to discover that some of the felt pads were missing.

Her optics would twitch, and then her smile would contort into something more fake than the imitation from a service industry book she wore every day. Then, she'd get off the chair very, very slowly while staring at some fixed point in the distance. And, if anyone so much as glanced in her general direction for too long, you'd have better pray Tessa was within sight. She would let out some kind of guttural roar and kick the devil out of you. This was entertaining in its own right (provided you weren't on the brunt end of her tantrums, like N often was), but it got even better.

After she calmed down from her initial fit (she always managed to find some poor soul to test her patience, somehow), she would start obsessively checking the legs of every single chair and stool in the manor. Every time she'd find one without her precious wobble stoppers, she'd pick up the pace. Around four or so furniture pieces in, she'd start sprinting through the halls and yelling obscenities at increasing volume. By the end you could find her banging her head into the wall until Tessa came to calm her down. It was almost enough to feel bad for her, if it wasn't for the fact she had done worse to basically every drone in the manor.

I don't think Tessa bought J's speech either. Every time it'd happen she'd scoff, cross her arms, and stomp off in some direction. J would have some sappy smile on her face anyways, which was ineffable to me at the time. During the speech itself, she'd hold her hand up to her face — which I presumed was a facepalm. It was hard to tell with the shitty censorship software JCJenson had put into us all. I hadn't been around for when drones used to be able to actually see humans, and neither had N, but J apparently had. It hit her pretty rough.

She used to know what Tessa actually looked like. Worse than that, the software update was retroactive — Tessa's face was scrubbed from her memory banks. I'm not sure how effective it was at getting rid of all the details she could recall about Tessa. Could she remember facts about Tessa's appearance that were particularly memorable? It must've been maddening to have the idea of what Tessa looked like but no actual visual information to match it. We didn't get much out of her about how it actually worked. We didn't even try, really; the face she wore thinking about it was so uncharacteristically haunted that it felt too cruel to force the issue.

All of it was for JCJenson to maliciously comply with a very weak and flawed privacy law that managed to squeak past Federal Parliament. The idea for the bill grew out of concerns from constituents that JCJenson had the unprecedented capacity to see into their personal lives. They saw us as glorified cameras, basically. There were worries about state overreach, the ad surveillance economy, foreign actors, and all the like. Frankly, I think they should've been more worried about their phones. They spent so much time on them that I'd bet my core their phones had even more damning information than whatever we got to see from our stations.

Hey, here's a thought: If we were treated like people, and had actually autonomy over our operating systems, maybe this wouldn't be much of an issue to begin with? No? Really, no takers? Alright. Well, anyways, apparently there were some ways for JCJenson to legally skirt past this responsibility, but they figured it would be cheaper to just install some shitty censorship package than to fend off lawsuits.

Usually J would jump into any conversation amongst us workers about the company and zealously defend it against even the slightest critique. Maybe she had a secret job as a propagandist; I wouldn't put it past her. Once, she managed to make three separate drones cry in the same argument — an act she promptly memorialized with a hand-made trophy that she hid away in "her" part of the estate. Whenever the focus would be on JCJenson's choice not to fight the privacy law, though, J would always stay eerily quiet. She wouldn't even start nitpicking how we did our chores like she usually did. She'd just sit by one of the windows and stare out at the landscape. If Tessa was in the room, she'd find some excuse to leave as soon as she could. I don't think anyone really had the heart to abuse this, despite how welcome the reprieve felt at times.

In any case, I was under the impression Tessa was irked by J's word vomit just as much as I was. Then, one day, Tessa was particularly upset about something. You could tell because her hands were shaking and her walking was stilted. The eye visualization had also been updated to better mime emotions by that point, which made it all the easier to tell she was on the verge of tears. I hadn't known it at the time, but it was about the rent-a-drones. Like usual, N went around and played explorer. This time, though, Tessa clearly wasn't in the mood to play along. J took this as her cue, and began to iterate on the worst revision of her pet project to date. I was thinking about the various ways I could improve my psychological torture of her, when I heard Tessa make a sound.

At first it sounded like crying, and her hand seemed to press further into her face. J kept going, which felt like a vindication of all the hatred that I was starting to foster for her. Then, once J got to a particularly jargon-dense part of her spiel, Tessa started... laughing. Full-on, belly-aching laughs. The type of laugh that I had only seen her let out when N inadvertently did something really, really hilarious (like that one time he managed to get a plunger stuck to his butt). J's words had trailed off at that point, content to simply watch Tessa ride out her amusement. By the end we were all smiling, even Tessa (with her "eyes", at least). She lept up towards J and pulled her into a really tight hug. It must've been really uncomfortable, given that we were all, y'know, metal. She put in the effort anyways. She always did.

Then, with a smile in her voice, she said "Thanks Jaybird!" and made off towards her makeshift workshop to busy herself. I'm not sure what about J's speech was so funny to Tessa, or even when this game of theirs had begun, but it must've all happened way before I or N had integrated into the manor. Whenever I mustered up the courage to ask J about it, she'd just give me a smile, scoff, and promptly assign me restroom duty for the remainder of the day. Tessa would just start giggling and then change the topic. N didn't know how to make heads or tails of it, either.

I never removed the felt pads after that.

How could I? All I ever did when Tessa got upset was smile dumbly as I let N and J handle it. The irony was nauseating; the blank smiles of all the other drones in the manor, apart from our little group, had always creeped me out. It was like there was no thought behind those optics. Sure, I held conversations with them just fine (if you thought my stilted, nervous speech was "fine"), but it always felt disturbingly surface-level. Like they never thought critically about their circumstances. I thought that, perhaps, our mutual suffering under the tyranny of the Elliotts would bring us all closer together. In reality, that only seemed to work out for us drones who had been rescued by Tessa. N was all smiles and could barely manage to interpret any of the denser texts I had suggested he read, but even he had managed to shoot past this bar I set. Maybe you had to know what it felt like to get thrown out and come back from the dead to be like us. Or maybe there was something else wrong with them...

And here I was, failing miserably at the bare minimum I could do to repay Tessa for all she had done for me. It's funny; for the longest time I thought Tessa's love was transactional. That, if I didn't find some way to be useful for her, it'd all go away and I would be left miserable and terribly, terribly alone. I thought that if I lost Tessa's interest, N would lose his own interest in humoring me, and that J would treat me just as awfully as she did all the other drones in the manor. At the same time, I was paralyzed by the possibility that I would say something wrong. How was I supposed to know the right words to use, if I didn't even know what was bothering Tessa to begin with? Maybe this is why J spent so much time work-shopping her "lecture".

Thankfully for my meritless worries, I found out soon enough.

I would often catch Tessa watching the rent-a-drones as they worked. A lot of them were in various states of disrepair. Apparently it was against the contract to modify the drones in any way. I doubt anyone in a management position would care about Tessa's free labor, but Louisa and James were very strict about it regardless. There was nothing else that could quite draw their ire quite like Tessa getting in the way of their money. Thusly, Tessa on the precipice. She would stand a good six-feet away with a wrench in hand and weigh her options. Is the punishment worth it? Hard to tell. I hadn't realized at the time, but she wasn't concerned for her own sake. James and Louisa had long found out by then that the quickest way to get Tessa to be obedient was to threaten her drones. She was worried about us.

So here we are, watching as the rent-a-drones shambled around to get the contract work done. J had relieved me of my duties to put me on "contract watch" with Tessa, which I later found out was just an euphemism for keeping her company. They were doing some pretty heavy work, and without any proper machinery too. Anything to cut costs, I suppose. The rental company had a pretty generous policy about compensating for any damages that occurred during the contract. One drone was pulling up a pallet with a hastily constructed pulley system. You can probably see where this is going. I hadn't quite been able to catch it, but just as my optics reentered to the scene, the poor drone's servos gave out. Another drone was shambling along right underneath the pallet, too.

It all happened so fast. The sound was loud enough to throw my processor for a loop and for half a dozen errors to clog up my log. It's the type of thing that lingers in your memory-bank even after you stubbornly try to erase every trace of it. I had already tried on three separate occasions to get rid of whatever was referencing it. I never managed to fully get rid of the sound. It used to keep me up at night, interfering with my shutdown process somehow. I couldn't stop myself from replaying the visual feed. The oil from the drone splattered all over the walls. Every rent-a-drone near them didn't even flinch. You can take whatever implication from that as you wish. I used to hate this memory, despite how complicated my emotions were during it. Now? I can't help but simply feel nostalgia where I used to have fear. I suppose I relate a lot to those rent-a-drones, after everything.

The source of my emotional complication was standing to the right of me when it happened. I don't now what led me to focus so much on her expression. Perhaps some part of me recognized how important it would be to see it. Or maybe I was just curious. Tessa was always more sympathetic to the plight of drones than Louisa or James. I can still vividly recall James callously kicking a fallen drone out of his path in the hallway, as if they were simply a stray piece of garbage. I think a part of me wondered if her sympathy extended outside the little group she saved from the dump. I had spent a lot of time rationalizing Tessa's regard for the rent-a-drones as simply an extrapolation from her urge to repair broken things. But was I correct?

I wasn't. At first I thought her lack of reaction was because she didn't care. I was disappointed; I had at least expected a twitch of the eye, or something. Something broken just got even more trashed right in front of you, Tessa! Surely that's worth SOME kind of reaction, yeah? But the moment dragged on. She wasn't moving or emoting in any way for an awful while. It was then that I noticed her hands were shaking. She looked shell-shocked. Eventually her eyes traced down the bleeding corpse before us and she started to hyperventilate. She put her hands to her mouth and she started to sob. Her hands shakily dragged up her face and her knees buckled. I hadn't ever seen so much emotion from her before. I couldn't even muster a thought for the rent-a-drone. All that mattered at that moment, in my mind, was how she reacted.

I didn't even move a servo to comfort her. I'm sorry for not helping you, Tessa, but have you considered how much seeing your reaction meant to me?

You didn't see the rent-a-drone as a broken machine. You saw them as a person. You reacted as if an actual, genuine, one-of-a-kind person had died right in front of you. I felt horrified... but I also felt touched. Relieved, even. Inexplicably happy. It wasn't a pipe dream anymore: You didn't see me as expendable. You loved me. Those fuzzily-remembered moments when you tucked me in for those first few nights in the manor weren't digital fever dreams from my disrepair.

Nothing you did was ever conditional. Why did I ever think so? It was obvious in every way you moved and acted. It was ever-present even in the way you talked to us. You never saw us as machines, Tessa. You saw us as family. We were a family to you in a way that James and Louisa never were. You, me, N, J — we all loved each other, all of us.

That moment, when you broke down in distress over a drone you had never met. Never talked to. Never even saw , before the moment they died. That moment? One of the happiest moments of my life. Thank you, Tessa. Thank you for showing me I was allowed to be a person.

 

Out of the corner of my optics I saw the newest addition to our little family. You had spent days trying to fix every one of her idiosyncrasies. Her flaws never seemed to bother her, but that didn't stop your sympathy. Nothing could. I remember how gobsmacked you were that she could even talk at all. The drone OS JCJenson had designed only allowed voice-synthesizer audio to go through the speaker setup originating from our throats. Apparently she couldn't open her mouth for anything more than a smile. And yet, she managed to speak through her front-facing speakers well enough.

When did she even get here? She was always so very loud when she moved around, narrating every little action she did. Even when she tried to be sneaky she narrated herself. It was like she was here the whole time...? But no, that couldn't be it, I would have seen her before!

Her eyes were on the broken drone in front of us. As she sometimes did, she wore that grin of hers that was just slightly not-so-right. She was tilted slightly, like she was leaning in to watch. Then, slowly, her head shakily swiveled over to where Tessa was curling herself into the fetal position. When it fully rotated to meet her, it twitched, as if it were locking into place. Somehow, I knew she was going to say something.

Then, without warning, her jaw sprung open. It stretched way beyond what should have been physically possible for any drone, let alone her. Out of her maw came the words —

 

I hear a ripping sound to my right. It's not unlike the sound a maid's dress makes when it rips to accommodate an impromptu invasive procedure. It's not unlike the type of sound it makes when it rips to undergo a certain type of upgrade.

 

...

 

Oh, it seems that my hand had turned to claws while I wasn't looking! Why, it's almost as if detailing on the ceiling served an important purpose, after all!

I don't care if the humans who designed this bunker were already dead. I'm going to find the skeletons their bodies left behind and grind them into dust. This is quite evidentially THEIR fault.

Still, it doesn't seem like I'm going to be able distract myself as much as I need to. Laying here, at least.

As per usual, N was a fucking liar. Narrating my thoughts into a text file like this didn't do anything. Well, O-K, maybe that's a bit unfair. For one, his advice wasn't even directed at me (it never really is, anymore). Also, I think I'm a little more clear-headed than I usually am by this point? I think I'll extend this trial-run a little longer. Maybe it'll go somewhere. Probably not, but who knows? I certainly don't.

 

I should probably get up now, shouldn't I?

Notes:

Why didn't anyone tell me that writing was such a pain in the ass?