King Elk Forest drive my heart into the night

i got carried away....no need to match the length! ^-^

She did not take his words and leave as he'd fully expected her to. She did not comply with what his experience with others — as limited and fake as it'd been — and Ghost struggled with this...with her defiance of his expectations. So brazen, so courageous. His brow furrowed and he swallowed thickly, his salmon pink tongue drawing across his jowls as he attempted to process what it was he intended to do with that information. The distinct lack of orders in his ear caused him great discomfort because his independence had been broken. Shattered and then rebuilt to be entirely dependent on The Officer. Perhaps the old man had never anticipated this: his death. Or perhaps he had. Perhaps he'd intended to train the young girl that Ghost had killed The Officer over had been intended to take The Officer's place. It was no life for a child and it hadn't been a chance that Ghost had been willing to take. His slip of conscious had been his first and seemingly last act of independent thinking. The world around him was a foreign place without The Officer.

In the ways of the world outside The Officer's control Ghost was little more than a child when it came to thinking for himself. Admittedly, a very lethal child. Hidden beneath the killer instincts was a startling naivety. A drone without a pilot. A robot without it's AI. A soldier without his commands. Not for the first time, regret swelled within him. He had destroyed himself for the sake of a child and in his great confusion, loneliness and never ending straying he wondered if she had been worth it. Sometimes, he convinced himself that she had. That he'd done a good thing even when it hadn't been good for him. Freedom was a lie. He was more entangled in The Officer's control now in his death than he'd ever been while the old sadist had drawn breath.

He was a walking nightmare in a never ending nightmare.

Her voice coaxed him out of his thoughts as they'd taken hold of him, threatening to drown him in a past he could not change and in a future he had no control over. It was crushing but her voice brought him to the surface and he took a surprised breath he hadn't even realized he'd been holding. Her words were gentle, her politeness of a begone era. A muscle in his tallied shoulder jumped beneath the mahogany brown fur, beneath the gruesome scarring. “No,” He did not think she could help him. “I'm not safe.” A(n admittedly large and scarred) forlorn puppy he might have, perhaps, looked like  as he lowered his head and looked away from her, his silver gaze settling on the gnarled roots of the closest tree to him, but his words conveyed the truth. He had no idea what he would do in prolonged company without commands to comply to and he could not promise that she would be safe or spared if he became unstable. He had no idea what to expect of himself for the memory of who he'd been before The Officer had long since been eradicated and had never been given the opportunity to bloom. There was only the next mission, the next kill. That was all there had ever been, and all there ever would be.