Daisychain Fiction

Lore [8/???]

Added 2025-03-12 16:57:55 +0000 UTC

Trigger Warning - self-harm (in the abstract)

Hunter's mind is a divided thing.

There is the person he is in the kitchen - sure-handed and focused, working with trance-like efficiency.

There is the person he is outside of the kitchen - nervous, fidgety, plucking at the skin around his nails.

It's hard for an outsider to see these two sides of him and understand why. Especially if they knew him before he came to Deerbourne.

Hunter desperately wants someone to see. To put the pieces together. To notice that, no matter how fast he dices fruit or halves dough or uses the mandoline slicer without a guard -- he never slips.

No one has ever seen him bleed. Never seen him get hurt.

God, he wants it. He wants to see that red bursting up, reassuring him that he's still human. That he still has some fragment of his family inside of him. That he isn't just flesh, bone, and rot.

His mind never fully leaves the kitchen, even when his body does. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he is forever longing.

Longing for the knives and the dough splitters. The sharp edges of cookie cutters, the shriek they make against the marble countertop.

The blood that spilled out of him after the car accident.

Longing for proof. Proof that he's still alive

*if Hunter was injured during Chapter Two:

When that 𝘁⃥𝘩̸𝗶⃥𝘯̸𝗴⃥ from the woods attacked him, he finally saw his own blood again. And it was beautiful.

That night, he laid in his bed, staring at the gauze-covered gashes on his leg. The pristine white had gone pink in places, deep red oozing through Nadia's stitches.

He poked at it. Hissed at the pain and relished in it. Relished in finally, finally, being able to see proof.

And he smiled.