Killing Butterflies - Empires SMP

Four - Egotist

A/N; Sorry this is later than the Ao3 version! I ran out of data and had to rest when I got home since I had some quite bad period cramps. It's here now though!

Xornoth blinked their eyes open.

And they were still in Scott's house. Damn it.

To be honest, they really should have expected that they would still be stuck here, and that they hadn't teleported out in their sleep. No matter how weird their dream was (a girl running desperately through the night to bring a dying black ish back to its home fish tank in an aquarium), they wouldn't mind being stuck in that aquarium any longer. The girl hadn't minded their presence at all, and the only distinctly weird thing about her was that one of her eyes was glowing blue. At the very least they didn't think they had killed her, which was welcome from the now boring dreams of their victims screaming their heads off.

As opposed to Scott, who's eyes were always blue and they couldn't do anything about it. He had never taken them to an aquarium.

They rolled over and wrapped the blanket a little tighter around themself. They had to admit the blanket was soft and warm and partially shielded their ribs from the floor, and if they found a way to get out they would definitely take it with them. Not because they liked it or anything but just to spite Scott. That was it. They weren't attached to anything, no, no.

Ideally, Xornoth would already be awake and starting their daily mental plan of things to do, people to harass, people to fight, people to kill, and what to do with the people they'd killed, but they had no idea how they were supposed to do any of that whilst stuck in such a cage. And to make everything 1000% worse, their head burned with an unusual, uncomfortable itch.

They grumbled something under their breath and turned over, tracing the pattern of the floorboards with their eyes. They imagined a tendril of corruption bursting through it, tearing the room apart and allowing them to escape, wrapping around Scott's throat and choking him to death, but the floorboards remained just that. Floorboards. Nothing happened to change them.

The itch stayed. It was hot and heavy and felt like someone had carefully dragged sandpaper inside their skull to get it to ache in as many ways possible, and when they blinked it only got worse. Which they had to say, wasn't a very fun experience.

With a grunt, they shuffled themself around into a slightly more comfortable position and tried to ignore the way it slowly, slowly became a burn. The blankets were thick enough that they could push it up and bury their face in it, but then their antlers scraped along the frame of the bed and they were forced to push their head back into the position it was before. Fucking hell, antlers were annoying. What was the point in them carefully sharpening them into deadly weapons if all they did was inconvenience them at every opportunity available? They hadn't even done much whilst fighting, apart from occasionally killing someone by surprise and one time headbutting the Codfathers arm in such an angle that it broke.

To be fair, it had been pretty funny, hearing the snap as the arm went limp and him screeching at the top of his lungs as he grasped it and started running away towards where his sister, the Ocean Queen, had stopped by with the intention of visiting him. Seeing the confused look on her face snapping into anger as she charged towards them with a trident taller than them was admittedly not, but hey, it had been funny in the moment.

They mumbled and buried themselves deeper into the blanket. Scott probably didn't care when they woke up, but if he did then they were going to be a little bitch about it. Because fuck him.

They stared at the bedframe. It had been so thoroughly sanded that the grains were barely visible, but the tiniest remnants of a pattern still rolled across it. They looked like miniature waves had washed over every piece, smoothing it over but still leaving ridges, and then dissipated in seafoam before they had managed to stray too far.