bigby blackwolf [ peacekeeper . fin ]

b i g b y.

[ i'll stay awake,
'cause the dark's not taking prisoners
tonight. 

"Uhh, I ain't got the patience for this shit-"

Through the groans in my voice, I wipe my drowsy face and rest my hand on my knee. This shit's too boring, like watching paint dry, filling out paperwork and looking over evidence and cases I'm not even a part of purely because Astrid told me to check them all, and like an obedient dog, I listen. Because it's how we keep them safe, us safe - the stowaways. But night after night after goddamn night, sometimes I can't take this shit, and I ain't gonna be able to take it forever. Two piles of this hoard the room on my desk, as cluttered like the rest of my apartment: a smaller one on the right, and then the other son of a bitch I have to work through. 

I listen to Ms. Astrid Winters, because it's how I stay on the justice side. Because it's a guide on what's right, her actions are to help chisel me out of the man I was districts away. And hell do I need it. because she demands respect, it's called a wolf pact, and even when she locks me in this apartment I gotta listen to her.

There's a pause before I break my stare with the folders, a moment where it's just me frustrated and dying starting through squinted eyes at a robbery case in upper neighborhoods, and a murder in east, and another insignificant shady name and another crime. ("What the hell Bigby, they say you're breaking enough as it is!") "Well I ain't breaking, Winters" it's called justice, righteously fixing bullshit and-

I pull a cigarette out of my pocket; "I ain't breaking."

Never have I actually liked the smell of nicotine, I remember as I light the cigarette. It's obnoxious, latches onto anything and everything, but I like it more than the smell of seafood take out that's been sitting in the living room since I left for work two days ago. And it almost helps with stress, I preach to myself as I exhale before pressing my forehead into my left hand, reading the frown lines printing on my palm like braille. It says 'bullshit,' but the Astrid Winters on my shoulder tells me to continue. Not like I'm getting paid any more for this, two years from now I'll be as grey as my father but the difference will be that I'll be living in a shoe box and he'll be living in his coffin. 

I bet his is comfier.

Such a stubborn asshole - of course, my ma always said the same about me. I tick ashes into the tray, before my wiping my face again. Stowaways always believed in these types of endings, happily ever after, the grande finale to match the once upon a time of their birth; either that or just for a general new start. A man made rebirth, "sounds like a dream, huh," it sounded easy back when it was then. Back when I was just looking into a dreamer's thicket instead of a mirror.

Well, it's nothing but bullshit. Even back then I knew it wouldn't live up to expectations, that someway or another capitol life would reject us like an illness, but we made it anyways. Drowning in paperwork and paper cuts, but that's life it seems. Break after break, they're anything but it, (inhale, exhale, watch the smoke, tick the ashes) the only thing that seems to break is me.

But in the words of my ma, I'm as much a stubborn asshole as my father, and I ain't breaking, no matter what they say - "not today, not ever." It's just a mumble, like the inhale, exhale, watch the smoke, smudge into the ashtray, sparks burnt away under the weight of a peacekeeper's fingers but it's just a cycle, get use to it asshole. Thick strangler fingers run through the brunette curls of my chin before I stand up, knees cracking in accordance. ("My job isn't just to sit on my ass and file through crime reports, Astrid, it's to save peop-"

"No, your job is to do as I say, and I already gave you a job.") I rub the back of my neck.
 
'Once upon a time' I believed that a second life meant something better than the bullshit I had been dealt before; that with the capitol's embrace I was free of the bounds of those sins I still carry on my shoulders. "Bullshit." It wasn't always just grey of working under Astrid's words, and sometimes I wonder if walking out of that detention center and coming here was the right choice. Back then it wasn't grey; not colorful of course, but a wolf can live with black and white at least. There was excitement, climax, not just these stacks of papers painting the walls and floors and desks of this tiny apartment. I clench my veins in their place forming a balled fist. 

It was no paradise, but it wasn't a life of building myself upon distractions and voices creaking into my ear canal, it was more than this shit of cases and working for a woman who constantly gets caught up in dreams of the next solution before fixing the one at hand. A beat in my chest ticks alive, like the ashes tick tick ticking into the tray on my desk - tick tick tick, inhale, exhale.

Watch the smoke.

When do I get to pick the life I live, the line between chaos and justice always blurs so goddamn easily, what's the point of being on the right side when it's driving me insane. They say I'm cracking, breaking, that vines are growing between the fables of my fine marble, and at one point I was just the people I help get locked up, not the stowaways but the bad memories: murderers, thieves, assholes. For every second I read those files, Astrid I just feel envy, a sense of green trying to rip me open like a full moon, because it's the adrenaline and I don't feel that, not locked between the walls, scratching at my own skin drowning in amnesia and take out food and beer and cigarette smoke and pills. 

I slam my hand on the desk, pacing between that blurred line, the green and red mixing together into the beige carpet with rum stains dotting every few steps and I can't even remember from when the hell they first tattoo'd themselves there. Sometimes I feel better ripping myself open then sitting through the silence, breathing to the beat of my dying heart in shushed tones; they don't trust me. The stowaways I protect, every minute I waste of my own skin trying to stitch their's back together, yet they still say I'm a lion handing them skin of someone else's, what's the point of saving those who would throw me to the wolves I'm forged from.

It goes through the wall, my beating fist, before sweeping the desk clean, papers sliding into the wall and the cracks in the grapevine, and once again I slam onto the desk. Once upon a time, what a bunch of bullshit, it ends like this: cigarette burns and alcohol stains and empty pill bottles. I swallow the blue one, because after the night I'll pick up the pieces of both mine and their lives.

Once again.