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Red Forest; Medved
Topic Started: Jan 27 2014, 04:29 PM (161 Views)
Sumitomo
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Something drew Medved to the forest.

It had been a long day. Extra, unpaid hours working - the usual hard, back-breaking labor Medved had become accustomed to when he chose to settle down in Nagashima. He joked with his coworkers, poured concrete, filled potholes, surveyed roads, swung hammers, all of it. All of it. His muscles ached, and his eyes refused to stay open without a contest of wills for more than a few minutes, but still, even through all of this...


Something drew Medved to the forest. His mind rationalized it as the red string that had been tied around a particular three that led into the forest's depths, or perhaps the sign in Kanji that read 'Please Reconsider: Your Life is Precious, and Wasting it Hurts More Than You.' It was a little bit of those things, plus a few extra coincidental factors. But it was the forest itself, its presence that attracted Medved the most. This forest was a place for him. It was relevant to him.

But how?

He adjusted the backpack on his shoulders.

This was ridiculous. Go into a forest with no provocation? Just start an evening hike, just walk around some unfamiliar woods, take an evening to re-commune with nature? Medved almost scoffed at himself.

But the forest drew him in. He took one step forward. His mind consulted the presence in his head, the Wish Granter, a powerful artifact, a burnished copper ball made of man's every dream and desire, every vice and greed.

It said nothing. The Wish Granter never said anything, only made strong suggestions in his mind, thoughts so real he almost thought they were his own.

But weren't they? Ah, see, that was the tricky question.

He wasn't sure. But he took another step, then another, and soon, he was swallowed up, only the red ribbon to guide him. He grasped the fabric in his hand, following it, tugging it to let it guide him through the dense foliage. Eventually, the trees grew too close together and the sky too dark, so he took as flashlight from his backpack (found entirely by touch) and turned it on, illuminating his surroundings with an eerie glow. He was still holding the ribbon, unsure of what he would find. He took his hand off of it, and reached into his pocket.

The hand came back out, this time with a set of brass knuckles looped through the fingers. Medved clenched his jaw, gripped the ribbon again, and continued to follow it to its inevitable end. He became more and more unsure of himself and his purpose as he clenched, walked forward, and released, clenched, walked forward, and released. He stopped, attempted to turn back.

Medved froze. Broke into a cold sweat. He swore the flashlight flickered for a second (impossible, surely, he'd replaced the batteries only yesterday!). He was prepared to do anything but turn tail and flee this insane quest - he could walk forward, clench his hand and release, or stay here, frozen in terror. A scared little bunny rabbit, ears pressed flat to his skull. How had that one book described the behavior? Medved clenched his teeth, desperately attempting to remember the samizdat copy of Watership Down he'd read as a boy.

Tharn. Medved had gone tharn. The remembrance of this little word, this simple bit of trivia, galvanized Medved. He thought he was ready to take another step, and to his mild surprise, he was. He continued his impromptu nature walk, somewhat more at peace this time. Knowing that he was incapable of turning back eliminated fear from Medved's mind - not unease, that was still there, but fear is the weapon of uncertainty, and it didn't get simpler than following a red ribbon to its end. Medved knew it would end sometime, and he also knew he had to reach that end.

His mind wandered off into though, like it had on long marches back when he and his unit used go on long patrols in Chechnya. He thought of home long ago, of faces he'd never see again. He released a wistful, somewhat frustrated sigh. He didn't know why these thoughts kept surfacing. He wished they'd just go away, leave him. Medved wasn't fooling anyone, he was a broken hull of a man, only kept afloat by his secrets. By his memories.

By his sins.

A ghoul that fed on the misery he'd created of others. So many better than him had died, perished, while he, Medved (not even his real name, an alias he'd created because he was too ashamed to use his real name anymore. Perhaps that's why he took money for guesses, perhaps he was trying to auction off his own name, let someone else take it, make it something to be proud of instead of a talisman of the past that weeps and jeers at the monster you are now), father and husband to a dead family and alumnus of an extremely qualified band of state-sponsored murderers and thieves, rapists and crooks.

No, it was him that had to live. Medved, a survivor. Strong, like the bear that you named yourself after.

Pah. What a load of shit.

Self-loathing chased Medved like a pack of hunting hounds chased a particularly clever fox. Medved thought he could hide for a while, even make himself comfortable, but he was always thrown from his hidey-hole, forced again to run into the dark, blind, afraid, of the beasts that snapped and bit at his heels, laughing and snarling and growling at his pathetic attempts to escape their cruel retribution, at his attempts to deny their insatiable hunger, their instinct to chase and tear and kill. There was no question. He hated himself. He'd hated what he'd done. Hated what he felt while he did it.

But what did that have to do with this ribbon that he kept following? Focus.

"Son? Exactly what are you doing hiking this hour? This area's off limits for a good reason."

Medved initially thought he was talking to himself, then he saw another flashlight. His heart skipped a beat. Adrenaline surged through his veins. Someone else! In this dark ass forest? Medved unconsciously widened his stance, prepared to fight.

"Show yourself!" he croaked, sounding fiercer than he felt.

"Ooooh. Big man. Gotcher self a pair of knuckles I see. Maybe I don't want to show myself, eh? Maybe I just walk away, and we pretend this conversation didn't happen."

What a strange thing to say. Medved faltered, unsure how to respond. What he did know, though, was that he didn't feel like he wanted the man to go away. He couldn't pin down what was making him feel this way, he just...

Knew. The same way he knew he needed to walk into this forest. "No, please! Don't go. Don't go! Where am I?"

The man, a silhouette against the bright white light flashlight he held in one hand, clearly sighed. "Alright, alright, make up your mind. First you want ot knock my jaw off it's hinges, now you want what? Answers?" The silhouette shrugged. "You know where you are. The sign said so. This is an off-limits area."

That didn't help Medved much. "I... why?"

"Why? Why?" The man asked, imitating Medved's voice with a petulant whine, "Why why why? Do you know what you're holding?"

"No I... a ribbon?" Medved felt his answer sounded very stupid, and said it the way a student who is unsure answers a trick question from a stern teacher.

"It's a lifeline. I call them that because the people who tie them still leave themselves the option of finding their way out."

"What? That answer doesn't make sense." Medved said, flatly, disbelievingly.

"It's simple. It's called a lifeline because they haven't yet chosen to die."
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The man sounded familiar, yet not. It was as if Medved knew him previously, but couldn't quite place the name.

"What is your name?" Medved said, shielding his eyes from the man's bright flashlight. "Do I know you?"

"Awfully strange questions to ask a man who stumbled upon you in this forest." The man almost sounded as if it were a particularly funny joke. "I would've thought you'd ask more about that lifeline you're holding."

A pause between the the two of them occurred. The forest was silent for a minute, then the man (who, curiously, didn't seem to be illuminated no matter where Medved pointed his own flashlight) harrumphed.

"Tell you what. You clearly don't know what you got yourself into." The man paused, considering what he was going to say next. At least, that was the impression Medved got. "Follow that lifeline to the end. I can't guarantee things will become clear, but, it's about all you can do for now. Do that, and I'll get back to you. I need to figure out what I can and can't say."

"What? What is with these answers?" Medved shouted, but the man walked away. The sound of leaves crunching underfoot soon faded into the distance, and Medved knew he was alone once more. His world shrunk again, reduced once more to the light, the ribbon (a lifeline now) and a flashlight.

The ribbon seemed to lead him for hours. Branches slapped him in the face. He tripped several times, being thrown bodily to the ground by a section of raised root. He acquired numerous cuts and bruises from this journey - it hurt, but he knew he couldn't turn back, so why let it bother him?

Eventually, a clearing. Medved shined the light around him, and found the tree the ribbon was tied to. It was a sapling, barely even a tree - Medved was surprised the constant tugging hadn't broken the thing in half. The forest, as he'd gone deeper, appeared to him to get more sickened looking, more twisted, as if it started in the real world and slowly turned into the dark woods of some forgotten fairy tale the deeper and deeper he went.

This sapling though, this tiny tree, still appeared normal. And propped up against it, was a body.

Medved's eyes opened in shock. He rushed to the slumped figures side, shaking it on the shoulder.

"Hello, are you alright?" Medved asked, softly but urgently, "Say something if you are okay. Are you injured?"

No response.

"Hello?" Medved asked again, then again in Russian. "Privet?

The figure looked up at him. Medved shined the light into its eyes, and bit his tongue in an attempt to stifle a frightened, confused scream.

The light shone on his face. It was younger, softer. His hair was still worn long, in a combover. His eyes were red, and there were bags under the eyelids. A man in grief. Medved remembered that this was how he'd looked when his family had been taken from him - shortly before he'd volunteered the first time.

Young Medved opened his mouth to speak. "You wanted to kill then, didn't you? You'd heard rumors that the perpetrators who killed your families were Chechen, so you joined to kill, didn't you?"

Medved blinked, and reeled. He lept up from his crouch and kept his flashlight pointed towards Young Medved, his breath coming in gasps. Medved's (Our Medved) heart hammered frantically in his chest, as if it were trying to break out of his ribcage.

He reached out, using the Wish Granter's mental radar to ping the forest around him. Numerous life signs came back to him - he was surrounded. He shone the light around - and found he was surrounded by corpses. All wore russian military gear - some wore only tattered fatigues, some were in full body armor. Most sported some kind of obvious wound - one, he was missing his arm. Another had no head on his neck, instead he held it under his arm like a basketball - where it was missing its lower jaw. The tongue lolled restlessly against the corpses's pale forearm.

Another, a gaping facial wound. One man's skull cavity was cracked open and empty, like an eggshell. Medved recognized the corpses as people he'd seen killed during his military service, from both wars he'd fought.

At the very front, were the members of his old unit. That old unit of killers and rapists, labeled as Spetznas by his government, as the special forces - these men were supposed to be elites, the cream of Russian society, but all they were to Medved were just bullies and savages given too much power and too many weapons. They were men who took what they wanted by force, and had a thin veneer of military legitimacy to get away with it.

"You liked to kill, Medved. You liked to hurt. Don't you remember?" A voice from the crowd of corpses spoke up. A tall figure, in an officer's uniform, with a pistol wound to the side of the head stepped forward. "Don't you remember how you got that 'name' you go by now? We called you Bear because you were the PKM man, you carried the machine gun. You carried that thing like a man might carry a hunting shotgun. You liked to kill with it, Medved."

"Colonel Donilkov?" Medved asked. The corpse nodded.

"This is a strange place for us to come back to you." Donilkov shrugged. "Japan? You went this far just to run away from yourself?"

Medved didn't know what to say. Donilkov looked at him expectantly, then shook his head. "You picked a poor place to drift to, Medved. Nagashima is sick, diseased. One needs only look at those Ruins of theirs to figure that out. Most people here, they are lucky. They have one Shadow self. Their psyches are healthy, and young, or old, and resilient."

Donilkov looked at Medved directly. "You have two wars worth of shadows, Medved. You've had them even before that lie in your head awoke, but rest assured, it, and us, had always been there. Watching you. Chasing you."

"Shadow selves?" Medved asked, lost and confused. "What do you mean?"

"Have you ever read any Jung?" Donilkov asked. Medved, agape, shook his head. "The psyche is essentially a divided thing. The persona is the mask you use to interact with the world at large, it's the filter by which you, your mind, grasps at individuality with. The truth is, humanity as a whole is one, sleeping consciousness, fractured and divided by personae."

"We are you. The true you. Yes, we are also the people in your life, we know what we look like, but we CAME from you. We ARE you. Not this broken fuck that stands before me." Donilkov said, waving his hand, as if to dismiss a contradiction Medved was about to form. "But you're not going to admit that. No, no one ever admits that. No one ever admits that they like to kill or hurt people if they want to maintain a veneer of humanity, but you lost that, Medved, a long time ago. You became like us; a fucking savage animal with only self-awareness to separate you from the rest that walk on four legs and wear fur, and you think you can give up that life? Run to the far corners of the earth and it will cease to become your problem? Drink fucking habusake on the beaches of Okinawa and watch the sun set over the water? Is that what you thought you could do you dense Muscovite fuck?"

"No." It was a lie. In a second, Donilkov's ghost had laid bare his intentions, even if he'd never voiced them personally. Medved knew that had been exactly the reasoning behind it, his own mind's rationalization.

"You fucking liar." Donilkov pointed accusingly. "You shit-eating lying fuck! Just the answer I expected! Do you know what this is? What this place is? It's a forest so soaked through with human misery that the world we live and the world you live in's barriers are paper-thin, like tissue. All it takes is a little determined effort, and we can come through, easy as day. Almost like your ruins, but not nearly as large and porous. This forest, is like cheesecloth. The ruins are like a great cave mouth."

Donilkov shook his head and waved his hand dismissively, as if he was getting ahead of himself. "But that's neither here nor there. The point is, this forest is Nagashima's number one fucking suicide destination. How about you do us all a favor and lay down to die?"
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Medved awoke on the cold forest ground, his body aching. In his hands he gripped the lifeline and the flashlight from the night before. The flashlight still put out light, it was a reliable old thing with an advertised battery life of far longer than any tool had a right to.

Medved grunted, and accidentally shined it in his face. Pain lanced through his skull, as if the flashlight produced some sort of mad scientist's pain-ray instead of simple incandescent light. He dropped it, disturbing the leaves that had fallen. His hands shot up to his eyes, and he curled into a pathetic fetal position.

Here he was, mighty Bear, mighty Medved, killer, done in by a fucking Maglite. Gradually the sharp tang in his skull devolved into a blunt throb, and he deemed it safe to open his eyes again.

Forest in winter. Weren't bears supposed to be hibernating by now?

He sat up, his aches protesting with screams of pain and cracking joints. He looked around, detecting no danger.

The flashlight. He turned it off and returned it to his pocket. Now, to consider the object in his other hand, the lifeline. This was real, and the forest was real.

There were supernatural elements at work here. Medved laughed aloud at the obviously unhelpful thought, then quickly stopped when his brain asked the next question.

Just how much of it had been a hallucination? That he couldn't give a concrete answer disturbed him on a level he wasn't prepared for. Reality, what was real and what wasn't had become such a fuzzy line, a more and more meaningless distinction since the arrival of his Persona and the situation it had plunged him into. When so many things thought impossible were now, not only possible, but routine? Accepted?

What was the point of making the distinction between a hallucination and the waking world when a butterfly can visit you in a dream and change the world you lived in, assumed you knew things in, forever? A sigh escaped him like a gust of wind winding its way out of an empty cavern. Complicated, so complicated! He cursed the Wish Granter, cursed the irony of the persona in his head.

What Wish had been granted to him? What had he even asked for that had to be granted like this?

For the first time since... since the day he'd lost everything, Medved felt his eyes begin to water. This scared him, shocked him, his first instinct to try and bottle it, hide it away. He'd not allowed himself to, crying was what people did, humans, and he was...

This was like putting a hurricane in a glass jar. Not only would the lid not close, the jar itself got obliterated. He didn't just cry, he bawled, he screamed, his cries echoing in a forest of corpses of the disillusioned. It was like screaming into a cavernous tomb, the kind of sound that might drive a person to madness if they listened for too long, but Medved wouldn't, couldn't listen.

He saw his wife, stabbed to death. He saw his daughter, a red, gristly smear on the subway tracks. He screamed, his eyes clenched shut, his face soaked with misery. He cried for all the people he'd lined up and shot to the laughs of his comrades. He cried for all the damage he'd done to himself, drinking and vomiting and pressing his service Makarov to his head and squeezing the trigger until some force, some muted-but-not-dead spark of self preservation that would keep his finger from moving the final fraction of an inch that would relieve him of the burden of consciousness forever.

He cried, and realized that in that instance, he wasn't Medved, he was not the Bear pretending to be a man, but the man who became the Bear. He was...

No. No, and he shook his head, as if to physically reinforce the thought. He couldn't go back to that name, not yet.

He wiped his face on his sleeve, and got up. He looked at the lifeline in his hands, and let out another sigh, this one not muted in defeat, but fast and loud, a sigh of determination.

The Bear, The Medved, was a killer, and he decided he had one left thing to kill.

He walked the way he came into the forest.
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