Control

When it came upon him, that flash of insight, it struck him like lightning with all the rage and fury of nature's full measure of wrath.
 
He staggered, leaning a hand against the desk down in the caves underneath the manor, what they had begun to call the Twilight Manse. Memories and lives never lived crossed over him, and the feeling of his heart, pounding in his chest as somehow, through some strange confluence of fate and time, he and his war timeline self suddenly became aware of each other - and for the barest of moments, were each other.
 
The beat hammered in his chest like some insane orchestral drum and he was passingly aware of the strange dulling of his senses as the weight of the alcohol hit him, mixed with the all too familiar fear that he recalled from his first nights as his other self became aware of his deathless nature.
 
Was this all he was? A disaster?
 
Until I should die, until I should break
Not a god, not a devil my soul shall take
If I should lie to betray myself
Then I would damn myself, and my soul forsake
 
In an instant, he knew what he was looking for and he found it in the barest fragment of whiskey soaked memories:
 
His mother's voice. Singing lullabies, birthday songs, scolding and gentle and warm. He'd never heard his mother's voice and if there was one thing he wished to keep from the timeline filled with death and destruction, it was that. His mind - their mind - raced over each others lives in growing horror; his over the Detectives because of the sheer absurdity of it - his mother was alive, his family well. He bore no curse and was not provoked to stalk the Novandrian rooftops like some gargoyle come to life.
 
And the Detective, on seeing his life, recoiled in horror from the monster he had become, seeing only the rigid control during the entire trip to Marketh. The close quarters, the hightened emotions - and underrunning all of it, his gnawing desire to feed.
 
I don't want fifteen minutes want a whole lot more
Don't want to suffer the fools and the spoils of war
I don't want fifteen minutes, or a reason why
I want a stainless steel road stretching off to the sky
 
I don't need sentiment, want, or hate on my mind
No crimes of passion or obsessions in kind
No walls, restraints, or momentary thrill
No blood on my hands, no time to kill
 
Two voices joined together in one anguished cry.
 
Was this all he was? Man or monster, was his fate to wallow in darker climes and to always be apart from the rest of them? The man, separated from family and loves by war and whiskey, and the Monster, separated from the common live by the hunger which drove him.
 
In a moment of blind rage, he threw the goblet - thankful it only yet had ice in it and was neither filled with whiskey or blood which would be hard to explain - and watched as it crashed against the wall, shattered like so many pieces of himself. Why couldn't he just be normal? Was there no fate, no timeline, no place in this world where he was just allowed to be happy?
 
I want more body, I want more soul
Flick the switch to automatic, I want control
I want control
I want control
I want control
 
In his blind fury, he wasn't sure which god he was cursing. He wasn't sure if it was Kallias and the fact that even those second chances had saved his mother but not him or if it went deeper than that. Some part of him latched onto the fate that seemed to be woven into his very bones regardless of his time, and blind, ignorant, anger rolled through him like a living thing; born of both his own powerful rage and the urgings of his hunger.
 
His oath and curse had neither words nor sound, only a target. Only the gods that had writ the world like this, and whichever one had writ his fate to follow such darker threads. He railed against whatever curse lay upon him and the hand of fate that moved all his lives towards the silent and inevitable dark of shadows.
 
If I should give in, if I should turn away
Not a god, not a devil my soul could save
I want more body, I want more soul
Flick the switch to automatic, I want control