wu_lo (wu_lo) wrote in rrinitiative, @ 2012-11-21 18:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | day nine, wu |
A clear message
Characters: Wu
Setting: Courtyard, 7 A.M.
The smell was what eventually got his attention, though Wu had unknowingly been awake throughout. But no, it was that odd mixture of damp and soot that crept into his nostrils, piercing Wu's awareness as he finished a halfhearted workout. What had happened? He'd felt such resolve just one day earlier; a fierceness that had banished this mood. Today, though?
Today Wu felt as if the world had already ended.
It was as inescapable as the memories that had woken him early, leaving him shocked with alertness and disturbed internally. Like a constant ripple on a lake, he'd thought, but Wu had no one to share such things with. If he had, they would've been stunned by the man's ability to just sit in stillness, to exist only in the misery that had come back.
It was gone, all of it. Hundreds of millions of dollars, more than eighty men ready to die to him at a moment's notice, three times that in their crews... the very literal control over life and death he'd wielded. Gone. Why live? It became an echo that had no answer over those silent hours for Wu, and then? The smell.
He stepped out from his room, bare-chested despite the chill and downpour of the weather, and Wu saw the patch of burnt earth as he moved for the balcony past his door. What it had been before the fires consumed it and were snuffed by the rain, he didn't know. He didn't care. No, Wu's mind went to the day he'd met Leandro, and what he'd told the younger convict. 'Scorched earth sends a clear message.'
Had it been him? Were there other arsonists in the facility? He couldn't remember, couldn't care enough to look. Wu was too focused on what that message was, what it had always been when fire was leveraged this way. "Nothing will grow here. Nothing will flourish," he murmured to himself, reaching up to push both hands wearily against his soaked hair, then turning for his door.
Sleep wouldn't come, not with that truth hanging in his mind. But a drink? A drink might silence it, or at least smooth out the edges of the world until nothing was defined enough for it to matter. It'd have to do.