Current Date: June 28, 2024
Character: Orpheus Rose
Race: Halfling – Demon / Fox
Age: 25
Current residence: Los Angeles, California
Years have passed but there still are plenty of things that make little to no sense to him. Things on the television—that he finds boring more often than not, there is enough going on with his own vision most of the time that he has no need to watch these things. Movies, he believes they’re called. It hardly seems important to remember that information for how little it changes his life.
The missions have become less common, he spends more time at home with His Carlos than not anymore and while it leaves him feeling restless at times—exercise in the form of running has been picked up—he refuses to complain about how quiet things have been. He knows that they are still watching him through his eyes. He knows that they still keep track of everything he says and does.
There has not been a single other unauthorized kill since the one that took him away for a full year. The longer missions have all but stopped, which means that the nightmares have done the same. The nightmares only came to him following missions that took him away for more than a day from His Carlos. The mental and emotional torture from years ago now still has left deep claw marks in him and being apart from the man he suffered through it all for, for more than just a few hours, does him no good.
He remembers one of the men asking him, back then, what he thought about when he was just… there. Sitting, staring off, seemingly disconnected from the world. The question had come long before he had met His Carlos and Orpheus had found that he had no answer for the man in the white lab coat. He didn’t know what his mind did when it wasn’t thinking about all of the things that were necessary to his daily activities, at least back then.
It really was a little bit like a computer just being turned off. He still breathed, he functioned just fine, at least, so it seemed, but if he wasn’t interacted with, he just sat and stared off. Mind empty, or so it seemed. Even now, Orpheus wouldn’t be able to tell what goes on in his mind when his eyes go out of focus, and his body simply settles.
There are high chances that his body merely settles into a sort of meditative trance, it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time, and it keeps the nanites in a calm state; there seems to be no need to change something that works out for everyone, in the long run.
Of the things he has tried to do during quieter times—though closing his eyes and merely sitting pretty, so to speak works well for him—is book-reading. Being able to read and write is something that was taught to him for his job, far more than anything else. Orpheus knows that, back at the bunker, the lab, and everywhere else that he hopes to stay as far away from for the rest of his life, they had no need for him to keep entertained during quiet times. Like a robot, he was expected to just sit and be.
The few books he’s tried reading up until this point have been lacking in ways he isn’t sure how to put into words. They held his attention for a few pages—a few chapters for some but rarely more than a few pages—and then they just were not. The books were closed and set down somewhere before he even realized what he’d done. As though his mind had, well, a mind of its own and refused to read more of the garbage—or so it felt for some of them—that he was trying to read.
The only book he made it a few chapters in, turned into a farce in the fourth chapter and lost his attention. Even now, he still remembers what made him close it and put it away. This was the only book he remembers actually closing and setting down. The only one. The rest is still a mystery to him. There he was reading the first few pages and one single blink later, the book was on the low table next to him as though he’d never even picked it up.
At times it makes him wonder if he did indeed just not pick it up and imagined those first few pages and the feel of the paper between his fingers. He feels no need to look through his own memory vaults, it feels like a complete waste of energy.
That one book, however. It did have something good going for it until it just didn’t. Up until the point where things turned strange, it had been strange and mysterious, something a little noir more than anything else and then, out of the blue, someone being blamed for turning the school’s three most people students into werewolves.
It made him pause in his reading abruptly and even now, Orpheus has no idea where that came from at all.
There hadn’t been any schools mentioned so far. No magic, nothing that would bring out that sort of sentence as being necessary in the book at all and yet, there it was. It still makes him wrinkle his nose in mild confusion when he does stop to think about it.
No more books for a while. It’s for the best.
Works of JD Beckett 