[SIDESTORY] Morbit Vignettes

[skinstealer]

Zeb- 2020
Miles Mortis
CW: Death, implied violence
Zeb hasn't slept in weeks.

---

Zeb’s alarm sounds, a loud ringing noise that he’s far too used to at this point. He hits the snooze button as soon as the first chime starts, already having been awake for hours. Sleep hasn’t come easy to him over the past few weeks, and he doubts it will any time soon. Tiny bursts of unplanned naps are all that the corvice has been able to manage, and he’s gotten used to it more and more with every passing day.

This is just how life is now.

He gets to his feet slowly, his fin lingering on the sword laying sheathed beside him. No need to use it all night, nor had there been on any other night- but he had to be careful. There’s no telling what kind of killer for hire will be sent after him next, or if there even will be any more to begin with. He had been assured that he’d been through the last of them, but Zeb has gone long enough in this community to know that words are empty, meaningless things without sufficient proof to back them up. 

Zeb makes his way over to his kitchenette, loading up his coffee pot and starting it up. The cheap stuff, as usual. All he needs is to stay awake. As long as he’s awake, he can fight, and as long as he can fight, he can stay alive. No one can kill him if he’s ready for it.

It feels like only a second passes before the coffee pot dings at him, yet another horrible sound cutting into his head. The coffee itself tastes even worse than it usually does, and he makes a note to himself to get some kind of light creamer when he goes out next.

If I ever go out again.

He had made the mistake of telling anyone where he lives, a rookie screw up that any other self-respecting spellblade wouldn’t dare make. Even his own mother told him as a child to never let anyone trail him back home, not when he has powers that other people, bad people, might want to obtain. He ran with those bad people instead, as soon as he was old enough, and now he has to pay for it. 

So did his mother. 

“You need to get a grip, man…” He takes another swig of coffee and runs a fin down his face, refusing to let any tears come out at the thought of his dear mother, who never did anything wrong to him in her life. She was a saint in all departments, and now, thanks to him, no one will ever know that goodness firsthand. All it took was a string of screw ups, mistake after mistake, so small in isolation but crushing in sequence, for her to become a target executed in a single strike. 

Zeb was not so kind when he returned fire. The assassin sent after the only blood he had left went down fast, but the rage in his heart did not let him send them off mercifully. The exact events are still a blur to him, lost in the moment, but he knows it wasn’t something to boast about in kind company.

These events loop in his mind over and over, the same facts haunting him now as they have been for weeks. There’s nothing to be done about it. Nothing except wait. 

And so he waits for the end.