09-22-2018, 05:10 PM
[align=center][div style="background=transparent; borderwidth=0px; bordercolor=; width: auto; font-size: 9pt; font-family:helvetica; line-height: 135%; text-align:justify; width: 500px"]The last two years had been about rebuilding trust. Single-figures Damian had been a reckless child, running away from home whenever the unexplainable jealousy he'd felt towards everything had become too much to stomach, returning when the cold numbed his fingers and made it harder to breathe than his own emotions had. He'd dipped in and out of isolation, learning from the best how to bottle things up, and though he had never been the greatest at schooling his own features, he'd become a child prodigy in the art of refusing to communicate. For lack of a better analogy, he'd locked his heart and thrown away the key  and then spent twelve months scrounging like a beggar for said key again, so that he could begin to repair the things he thought he'd broken. Relationships, mostly. The art of being a child, and not bitterness in the body of an infant. Now, at ten, things were a little different. Easier for everyone, softer on him, and people no longer looked at him like he was liable to bolt at the slightest provocation. Stability came with privileges; his presence on the fringes of Flintlock territory proved that much. There were no parents, no prying adult eyes  just a boy, a knife, a baseball bat, three dogs and a cat. It was a family in its own right.
Quiet commands brought the two largest dogs to complete standstills; the eldest, a female, untrained and led solely by a wild love of the boy she followed, paced placidly at Damian's side. Flintlock was different to what he remembered; it was no longer the place he had grown up, and he fought to find some of that old loyalty, the fierce allegiance that had defined his childhood. Nothing. Perhaps that was a sign of ageing, or of things moving on in his absence  life outside his family home was difficult to characterise when he rarely interacted with the wider world. Part of his motivations for being here was to change that. "We wait here," he said mostly to himself, fingers rubbing absentmindedly at the chin of the cat draped over his shoulders. "Someone will find us." They always did.
Quiet commands brought the two largest dogs to complete standstills; the eldest, a female, untrained and led solely by a wild love of the boy she followed, paced placidly at Damian's side. Flintlock was different to what he remembered; it was no longer the place he had grown up, and he fought to find some of that old loyalty, the fierce allegiance that had defined his childhood. Nothing. Perhaps that was a sign of ageing, or of things moving on in his absence  life outside his family home was difficult to characterise when he rarely interacted with the wider world. Part of his motivations for being here was to change that. "We wait here," he said mostly to himself, fingers rubbing absentmindedly at the chin of the cat draped over his shoulders. "Someone will find us." They always did.
[align=center]
[color=#000]INFORMATION. | HEY MODERN-AGE HERO, YOU LOVE HARD AND LET GO; BURN YOUR TRACKS TO LEAVE THE PAST BEHIND. YOU'RE BLAZING DOWN THE BLACKTOP AT A FEVER PITCH, COUNTERFEIT HEART FROM A BAIT-AND-SWITCH; YOU KNOW THAT WHAT THE WORLD WANTS AIN'T ALWAYS WHAT IT NEEDS. [color=transparent]xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[color=#000]AND HEY MODERN-AGE HERO, YOU LIVE FAST AND DIE SLOW