Sick Puppy

From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

Sick Puppy
Player: @drfancypants
Origin:	Natural
Archetype:	Blaster
Threat Level:	35
Personal Data
Real Name:	Samuel J. Sikes
Known Aliases:	Sick Puppy, Black Dog, Prince of Spades
Species:	Wolf demon
Age:	28
Height:	6'6"
Weight:	116 lbs
Eye Color:	Garnet
Hair Color:	Brown-black
Biographical Data
Nationality:	American
Occupation:	Mercenary
Place of Birth:	New Orleans, Louisiana
Base of Operations:	'
Marital Status:	Single and uninterested in monogomy
Known Relatives:	None worth noting
Known Powers
Being completely off his rocker and fearless; shapeshifting
Known Abilities
Good with guns and devices, especially things that burn and explode
Equipment
Military assault rifle, sniper rifle, trip mines, caltrops, drones
No additional information available.

STRAY

CHAPTER ONE

The apartment's study always reminded Sam of a Dickens novel - plush, dark, so romantic, a physical manifestation of life in the aristocracy. It made him uncomfortable to come into that room. If Dickens wrote his life, he would be pathetic little Pip or Oliver. His youthful self would gawk widely at the ornate decor, he'd be welcomed into the arms of a some old yuppie boiling with a deep seeded sadism, and then he'd be fucked over by a mysterious benefactor.

Dickens. Jerk.

The person who haunted the study was, thankfully, no greedy aristocrat. His name was Raven and his golden eyes hinted at a smile behind his mask of a face, beckoning Sam to sit across from him with a subtle gesture of his hand. The long hand retreated to rest in his lap when Sam settled into the decadent armchair opposite him. For a long time, they stared at each other in silence. Raven was the only person in the household that could make Sam feel awkward. His face was a cold sculpture, reliably emotionless aside from the occasional flicker of concern or irritation in his oddly colored eyes. Sam could never tell what he was thinking, only that he was thinking constantly - analyzing, plucking out the perfect words to arrange into neat sentences. Sam imagined the inside of Raven's head was not filled with the mushy chaos of brain matter, but an army of well oiled gears rotating with rhythmic efficiency. A psychiatrist would also need a degree in mechanics to decipher him.

"You seem like you need to talk," Raven said.

Sam snorted and rolled his eyes, glancing toward the window that would look over busy St. Ann Street were not the heavy velvet curtains drawn. He felt his skin crawl, uncomfortable in his own flesh, Raven's eyes burning pinpoints into his turned cheek. Sam did not "talk." Talking was a chick thing, irritating then infuriating, perhaps number five on his long list of reasons he despised women. The thought of becoming that sickened him.

Raven's even voice broke into the tearing discomfort of his thoughts and his dark eyes snapped back towards the man. "I won't respect you any less," Raven was saying. Sam's jaw tightened at the words, comforting as he wouldn't admit they were. He hated the way Raven seemed to have a VIP pass into everyone's psyche. But he had come to talk - somewhere on the edge of his thoughts, he knew this.

"I need to work some things out," he said.

"About your mother," said Raven. Sam sucked at the inside of his cheek, eyes narrowing as he stared hard at Raven's face. Raven's golden irises did not flicker, his pupils were unchanging as if tattooed into his cornea, his red eyelashes were stagnant above his own unsettling stare. Sam's eyes softened and he turned his gaze to the side, wetting his full lips.

"I loved her incredibly," Sam began, closing his eyes and exhaling with a slight tremor. "I felt the pain my father inflicted on her as if I had adopted every one of her nerves - my own punishments didn't matter to me. I felt guilty about being born. My father hated me because my mother had conceived me. He hated my mother because she had given birth to me. He had wanted a child - he just hadn't wanted me. Something about me made him sick. It was Jack Daniels who made him sick...

My mother suffered so badly at my expense. The only way for me to make amends was to put her out of her misery. So I did. My father kept his guns within easy reach of a child, probably dreamed of me accidently offing myself one fine day. I put my mother down." Sam formed his sinewy fingers into a gun, made a popping noise. "I was twelve years old."

Sam paused, eyes still closed, but the corners of his mouth were twitching into the beginnings of a wicked grin.

"And then," Raven's voice floated past his ears. Sam's eyes opened, eyes the dull copper of curdled blood.

"And then many years passed. And I realized I had made an unforgivable mistake. I let that bitch die way too easy."

CHAPTER TWO

A shudder made Raven's composure quiver like a freestanding gelatin mold, not quite sure he had heard Sam correctly. "You let her die too easy?" he paraphrased, the intensity in which he tried to control his vocal inflections far too obvious. The way Sam's right eyebrow twitched upwards told him he'd made no mistake. He gave his head a single, sharp shake as if forcing the gears in his cranium to get back to work.

He picked his words gingerly. "What happened to change your feelings about her?" he asked, his expression melting back into cool serenity.

Sam was scraping the black nail of his index finger across the brocade upholstered arm of his chair, creating a sickening noise much like tendons snapping in a dried out corpse. The smile that had begun on his sharp face began to twist into something wide and potentially unstable, one corner of his mouth higher than the other. He seemed to be floating through the corridors of some morbid nostalgia, something only Sam would find pleasurable - or at least, he'd seem to find it pleasurable on the surface, for pleasant memories did not produce madmen.

Raven found himself openly curious about the details; the realization gave him a twinge of guilt. "Sam?" he asked quietly, trying to catch the attention of Sam's feral eyes, to coax the animalistic face back towards his own.

"Hm," Sam laughed, shrugging one shoulder with expertly feigned casuality. "I didn't change my mind so much as I just had too much time to think.

"My father had given me a gratuitous ass-kicking after I killed my mother, which I suppose would be understandable even if he wasn't a drunk, right?" He laughed with an absence of bitterness that concerned Raven, unsettled him. Sam continued. "I waited till long after my father had passed out to leave the house and find my way to the city for help. Help was foster care, and when foster care didn't work out so well for me, I was dumped in a home for children. It wasn't an orphanage. Hell, it couldn't've been because none of us little fuckups were ever adopted!

So you can imagine that there was a helluva lot of time to fill, a lot of opportunity for reflection. Sure we had therapists to talk to, were required to talk in fact, but you just can't trust somebody that smiles when you describe the exit wound in your mother's skull in full, technicolor detail. Fuck, man...

I kept my mouth shut and thought about what had happened on my own, hours and hours of questions, self-interrogation. I had killed my mother out of sympathy. I knew that for sure. I felt no guilt, but at the same time I felt like I had made a mistake, that I hadn't done enough. Why? And then I remembered a night when my father was really trashed.

The boy was average, if not slightly tall for his age, with the soft ruddy cheeks and fleshy fingers of any seven-year-old. He couldn't sleep, even though it was well past midnight and the sky was the cosmic shade of indigo that he shouldn't have been familiar with yet. His mother was crying in the next room - in their rented house beside the swamp, the walls might as well have been made of parchment. Her sobs were the type that left her gasping and coughing from the exertion, cries born from years of abuse but mostly the trapped frustration that came with it. These were the nights that Sam felt guilty for being conceived.

Sam rolled off his mattress, his blanket clutched in his chubby fist, groping for his door in the purple darkness. The hallway was brighter, lit by a familiar blue light. He padded down the hall into the living room, blanket in tow, where the television cast the entire room in an alternate universe of lonely cyber daylight, his father's personal world. The burning tingle in his nose told him that his father was nearby: the acrid stench of cheap whiskey, not even Jack Daniels tonight. Sam should've known to go back to his room then and there, but he continued to wade through the electric aquarium to his father's chair.

"Dad," he said, his little voice barely filtering through his cautiousness to escape his mouth. There was no answer. Sam's dollish feet slid closer to the chair, across the rigid carpet. "Daddy..?" he tried again.

"WHAT?" growled daddy, head snapping in Sam's direction, eyes ablaze with crackling TV static and inebriation. The stench of liquor on the man's breath was dizzying, and Sam stumbled back a few steps.

"Mom is...something's wrong with mommy," the boy squeaked.

"Something's wrong with mommy," the man repeated in a mocking whine. His eyes were glazed and rimmed with wet lines of red and white, the same rusty brown as Sam's but far less lucid and eons from innocent. He stood from his chair and wobbled, and for a relieved moment Sam thought he was going to sway down the hallway to comfort mommy. The little boy turned to follow, only to find himself on the floor with his right ear ringing and his jaw aching sharply.

"You're what's wrong with your mommy!" barked his father, and Sam felt his scalp desperately clinging to his skull as he was pulled off the ground by his fine, dark hair. Something hard and flat was rammed into the pit of his yielding stomach, his father's knee. The small boy had the horrifying realization that he couldn't breathe, imagined that his lungs and all of the other unnamable organs in him had been smooshed out of his body.

"You parasite, you fucking brat! You're not my son!" The hysterical male voice stung his injured ear, crippled a part of his undeveloped ego that he wouldn't be aware of for many years. His hair was released, and his useless body crumpled to the ground. "My son would get up!" his father persisted. "Goddamn pussy! You're nothing, you're pathetic!"

He was kicking his son, but Sam didn't make a noise. He felt nothing. Maybe his nerves had oozed from his pores like from the Playdoh spaghetti maker he loved tinkering with at school. Daddy's voice was far off. "You're not even mine. Fucking stray."

Sam was so tired. So numb. He had gone to an objective place where the only pain he felt was in the childish truths that he'd been convinced of during his short life. I'm the problem in this family. He could not think of it being any other way, could not fathom that he had nothing to do with it. He became vaguely aware of the vibration under his cheek of bare feet thumping down the hallway in a sprint, followed by the high shriek of his mother who grappled her husband away from her son. "...isn't worth my energy," Sam barely heard his father say before large male feet pounded back to the bedroom. The slamming door made the entire house cringe and shudder.

Everything became quiet and weightlessly still, apart from the wet snuffling sounds of mommy wiping the tears and snot from her face, choking with the sobs that threatened to start up again. "Look what you made your father do," she said in a voice that had to wriggle free of her constricted vocal chords, high and hoarse. Sam opened his mouth to apologize, but could not find the breath to speak yet.

"Why do you do this, Sammy? You always have to make him so mad," she continued to lament, words connected with damp sniffling and phlegmy gurgles from her throat. "Can't you just be a good boy for him? I can't take this, Sammy. Oh God, I can't take this!" She crumbled to the scratchy carpet beside her son, beginning to cry again, painful, pitiful squeeks. She dropped her head to his bruise and blood painted shoulder and all but howled with grief.

Sam's mouth tasted of metal when he spoke to her. "I'm sorry mommy. I'll be better, I promise. Please don't cry anymore. Please don't cry!" He felt his own tears starting like hot seawater seeping over the levees of his exhausted eyelids.

He never meant to hurt his mother like this, to disappoint her, to make her cry until the sky faded from its deep indigo black into the jaded blue of twilight. But somehow, he managed to do it over and over. He never meant to be a bad child, especially to his mother. His sweet, ever-forgiving mother.