it's raining somewhere else

[almostinhuman]

((Jacob Winters continued from yeah...))

Jacob stood in the road and stared, silent as death. He could scarcely breathe.

It wasn't his injuries, though they all still troubled him. It wasn't that there was a corpse here. There were a lot of those nowadays. You kinda had to get used to it, sooner or later, and after what happened to Greg, Jacob was very used to it. It wasn't the way the corpse was posed, an arm through a window and still as upright as he reasonably could be - was that someone else's doing, or his own? It'd nearly given Jacob a heart attack before he realized the boy was dead. And it wasn't how the wall next to the body was absolutely covered in dried blood, seemingly smeared there by the deceased via the blasted ruin of an arm Jacob could see hanging limply by his side.

No, it was what the blood had to say for itself that had Jacob's brain whirring.

IN HONOR OF VALENTIN SHULGIN:

TORQUE REMOVES THE COLLAR; CHECK THE GROUND NEAR THE WATER.

— ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE

That... that couldn't be right? He'd removed it? How in the fuck did he manage that?

But Jacob could see the body's - Alexander's - neck, and it did indeed seem to lack the collar the rest of them had been fitted with - and not because it had been blasted apart by it. Clearly, whatever method he'd used hadn't ended terribly well for him, but still. He'd done it. Somehow. And if he'd done it...

Jacob's hand gently reached up to just barely touch his own collar. His heart was racing at a blistering pace. He stood so, still paralyzed, weighing what now seemed to be a viable - if incredibly risky - set of options.

Should he...

...

But... like, look at how it'd turned out for him. And he was, presumably, someone who'd known what he was doing, at least more than Jacob would. If Jacob tried to follow his example, he'd be lucky to just walk away with exploded hands. He'd more than likely blow his entire head off. He was already, probably, going to die on this island. He had to at least do the one fucking thing he'd promised to do. He couldn't afford to just blow himself up on a hunch he found next to a corpse. Perhaps, if he survived it, he'd come back. At that point, he'd probably have a lot less to lose.

He hoped Alexander, whoever he'd been, would understand. Somehow, though, as he backed down from this potential way out, he got the vague sense the corpse's blank eyes were judging him. Judging him for choosing violence over freedom. For being too much of a coward to take the risk. For leaving this last, desperate writing of a dying boy where he'd found it, path untaken and freedom lost.

Jacob trudged down the road, trying not to look back.

((Jacob Winters continued in A Catastrophy Played By a Symphony))