#like the tarnished is functionally immortal thanks to grace | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

handlewcaare · 4 years

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Origins: ?

The first time he died, it was a little over in the 730’s.

No one really takes into account that immortality was not one evidently diagnosed, not when it first occurs. Similar to those who passed, he was subjected to smallpox. The manifestations were all there: malaise, chills that did nothing to coax the fever, he could even hardly stomach what food was provided to him. However, the mild mannered man—his birth name lost to him—never once barked or snarled in distaste of his family’s efforts. Rather, even in his enervated and delirious state, he always offered his gratitude in the form of a slight nod and a mumbled ‘thank you’ that weighed too heavy along his lips.

By the time the winter came, his immune system became more worn and enervated. His strength wilted like the flora underneath the pelt of the tundra. Had it not been so long ago, he would have described how his family’s voices sounded, what woe and distraught that would amplify by the final breath of their oldest brother and son—or maybe, he was the youngest? He vaguely recalled being an uncle, but maybe he was a father as well. He was a little attuned to a small one’s cry; a habitual feeling. He didn’t know now, as immortality never guaranteed a permanent memory.

For whoever his family was, it was the end of their line. One of their own would never survive to see how their generation would flourish. He would never witness the following summer, nor would he recall anything but the hearth of the fireplace as his immune system failed him. They would have been right, normally—

—until he attempted to breathe through a thick penumbra of dirt an hour later.

The suffocation of the cold, dark earth evoked natural panic thorough his senses. His fingernails nearly cracked under the strain of him clawing him out of his grave. The absence of home left him cold and pale, as if his circulation could never be initiated ever again. By the time he rasped out for a heave of breath he believed he didn’t need, his russet gaze blearily peered toward the silhouettes of astonished grave robbers.

As groggy as he was—as if stirred into the early morning—he could only provide an awkward “hello” until one of them attempted to ram the tongue of his shovel into his frontal lobe.

Everything around him always changed. Ailments became easier to cure, people lived longer (not as long as himself, but a decade or two later). Yet, he was drowned in an neverchanging state; no matter how many injuries he succumbed (with slight annoyance), no matter how many diseases infiltrated his system, he was in a constant within a world full of variables. He had been thirty-three for the past several centuries, not a wrinkle, nor a callus, nor a scar to his name. It made him somehow nauseated that children could develop more scars than he could.

While people lived longer, however, their actions became easier to predict. What desperate beau would ready his blade to kill his lover’s fiancé would be intercepted by his cold and unrelenting hand. An admirer of a serial killer would only copy their tactics (and their mistakes). Once he started to apply the patterns, catching felons was a habit of his.

It was roughly in the spring of the 1920’s that he countered a pseudo-Duchess, a beautiful woman should he be frank, but not enough to pry him out of his own head.

“And where were you last night, Madam?” His baritone was demure, soft enough to never be tarnished by the nicotine they both breathed in.

She could only align a cherry-lipped smile, a bit wistful at the contours, “I was over in New York City with a friend at West Egg,” unlike his voice, her’s felt coarse with one too many huffs of nicotine.

His brow raised, “Don’t have friends with old money?”

“They’re not as respectful with the loss of my mother,” her vanity perished under the devestating weight of her relative. Had he not been emotionally aware of such a loss, he would have entirely missed the falsetto of her chocking up. “Y-You have to understand, I was in need of some company to cope.”

The private investigator briefly skimmed over his notes scribbled in his pad. “I’m sure you did,” he reflected, reverence couldn’t have sounded so potent, “so much so that you had to pay your debts to a nicely suited man with a violin case.”

The Duchess’s verdant glare widened by the mention of her ‘company.’ As she guffawed, she hastily attempted to light up another cigarette after shakily snuffing out her half-finished one. She was getting restless, “what? So I can’t befriend someone from an orchestra?”

“Said friend is affiliated with many of the bootleggers of West Egg,” another bullet to fire that stained her pretty countenance with a snarl, “it wouldn’t be a problem, if you didn’t hire him to lay a hit on your mother for—“ he suddenly became rather pensive, “—ah, fourteen milli—!”

“I don’t have to answer a damn thing from you.”

She was right, she didn’t have to. As the prime suspect outright splashed her cherry wine into his face, he made no attempt to hastily chase after her for interrogation in sheer furor. Rather, he only trailed after her out of the restaurant neither of them could afford. Had he not encountered the same type of crime in the seventeen hundreds, he wouldn’t have put a wheel lock to prevent her from escaping so soon.

His smile was a bit too smug when she glared over her shoulder.

His detective work never got much recognition. In truth, it was what he preferred in the first place. The rough cases where he would hold the hand of someone who wasn’t the same as him left him sleepless at night.

Sanguine was never a pretty sight to see seep from the lips of a young woman just trying to go home late, nor was the sound of an old man’s whimpers—“I don’t wanna go”—the equivalent of a swan song. Death was a hideous thing that clambered and infiltrated what should have had warmth and color. None of them should ever look like him. Oddly enough, he could feel how much colder their hands were compared to his own. How lifeless and stagnant they were; a grotesque reflection, should he ever try to be the poetic type.

The more work he did, the more he couldn’t stomach the cases he failed in. There was always a private victory he would have in saving people from monstrous situations in the form of a simple shot of bourbon, but most of that had changed when he encountered a man in a well-dressed suit.

It was Autumn when a seat beside him was occupied at the pub, roughly thirty years later after the Duchess was hauled off to court for the murder of her mother. The glass balanced along the stranger’s frames held more hearth than the eyes that saw the detective through them.

“You’re quite handsome,” for a specimen, the sentence would eventually trail off to someone the private eye wasn’t. As acrimonious as the private eye was, his manners were still prevelent.

“Is there anything I can help you with?”

“More along the lines of what I can help you with,” the man assertively corrected. The smile that graced his demeanor would have disarmed anyone, but the private eye became too keen.

After that, it was all a blur. Immortality could never guarantee a permanent memory, but after he was succumbed to various experiments, he didn’t think they were worth it. As the cold water splashed over his cyanotic skin, his body jolted when the tongue of lightning crept along his scalp and left him a panting mess. What would soon follow would be his body partially submerged to an acidic bite that cindered and charred through bone and tissue; hungry for the blood that could only become more bitter and citrated the more Subject 66 aged.

He could handle pain easy, but not to this vehement extent.

“Can you get up, subject 66?” A hauntingly calloused baritone spoke to his hunched physique across the tessellated floor.

That isn’t my name.

When he didn’t answer immediately, the toe of a leather shoe prodded into the progressively healing ulcer from the acid. If only half of his body could function, he would have seized that leg with the acid still singeing through his withering palm. Instead of the guttural cries of the injured genetist, Genus hummed in a low tone.

“Your healing factor has improved marginally,” he declared, as if it was an advancement. “We’ll have to be more creative with our experiments.”

Subject 66 couldn’t help but align a coy simper, copper tasted heinous along his lips, “why don’t we trade places then?” He challenged.

Subject 66 couldn’t recall what his name was prior, not since he was under the knife of a genetist who conjured himself a god-complex (as if he wasn’t pretentious enough). Not since his brain was dissected in several quadrants, leaving him hollow. He was but a phantom that lurked within the murmurs of a shell. He was quite handsome for a specimen, but the compliment only served as pure vitriol for what would will him to escape.

Dr. Genus never accounted for the fact that near-perfect regeneration could be used against him. As clones of mutated animals and copies of the scientist’s self-made image were torn through by the weight of his arsenal—a fireaxe he stole from a little compartment, twin machetes he smuggled under his shirt from his torture, and a desert Eagle that always fractured his radius—he could only feel a sense of relief that swarmed his senses to the acrimonious aroma of copper and salt.

It wasn’t the rivers of blood that was euphoric. Not in the slightest. What was euphoric was the bleeding sunshine that welcomed him when he used a healing stump of his arm to open the door. The symphony of cicadas that beckoned the enervated to sleep the summer away. After—how long? Months? Decades?—some time of being confined to fluorescent lighting and pale, minimalistic cages. Subject 66 could only chuckle to himself as he staggered out and back to the world that would be ever changing.

#opm #one punch man #Origins Headcanon #Zombieman #OPM Zombieman #I wrote... a novel #lmao #ken.txt #long post #I was also inspired by the Old Guard when I wrote this #so that’s another reason why it’s quite hefty #character study

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