Tear In My Heart (COMPLETE)

Chapter Four

It took a year and some odd months before Hoody - or rather, Brian began to fully speak, much less relearn all that he had lost. His voice often trembled when he spoke, sputtered and stuttered; so unused to speaking that it almost seemed painful. Tim was ever patient with the other, often helping to pronounce words or simply sitting back and waiting until the other managed to stutter out what he was going to say. That could often take a few minutes at a time, but Tim was ever patient and waited calmly until the other was finished speaking before replying. Brain seemed ever grateful for that.

It would come to Tim that the one speaking, the one who revealed a face that was slowly regaining color and eyes that began to shine like stars again, that this person was not simply just a shell for Hoody -- but rather, Brian had been hiding in there somewhere, waiting to make some sort of return. His body had been far too broken, Hoody had once explained through writing -- he still didn't seem too sure about talking, even as his vocal cords began to function once more through Brian -- for the human to withstand it. Entities such as himself, who overtook bodies for their own use as zombies or puppets before being discarded like ragdolls, were more than capable of reusing bodies that were mangled and distorted and broken. Humans, however, could not sustain their lives nor very souls in a body deemed dead; so they had often simply left it for the afterlife. All except, of course, for Brian.

Slender had been unknowingly swift in Hoody's reincarnation. Brian's spirit had held steady, nearly clutching on by strings by the time the Operator had found the fallen body and brought it to life through unknown and ancient means so his Proxy could still live on. Brian had been too weak from waiting, too weak from the fall, too weak from his death to overtake the hooded man for control of his body; and so had lied dormant until he could regain his strength and begin the struggle for dominance once more in his body. Yet, Hoody did not decline -- hence the sudden outburst of speech followed by almost two years of relearning how to talk. Hoody was still there, of course. Still there to take over when it came time to kill, when Brian knew he couldn't do it but knew he had to for fear of the Operator sending him back to the grave.

That didn't mean it was the same old Brian, of course. It came to their knowledge that through being overtaken by Hoody even before his substaquensl death, when he had first become Hoody and began taking so many different pills, that Brian's memory was more than just hazy. He remembered Tim, of course, and that the two were close friends. But that was primarily due to Hoody's input; anything else often came to him as a blank, or some random dream or memory. It often came down to Tim either questioning Brian into remembering, or jogging his memory with memories of his own. That was how Brian seemed to enjoy it; enjoyed Tim talking almost endlessly when asked about a certain event or point in time he was unsure about, almost to the point of rambling on and on if not for Brian laughingly telling him that that was enough.

Which was how it came to the two walking down the sidewalk during the late hours, heading to another location the Operator had sent them to. Something about an informant for the government that they needed to either kill or scare the shit out of into submission. He had also been known to solicit young, underaged girls into sex -- which meant Tim and Brian were more than happy to take the first option, if not have a little bit of sadistic fun with him first. They walked steadily along the almost empty streets of the otherwise barren city, face masks hidden away so as to appear as normal as possible as they walked.

"So, if you don't remember anything from when you were a kid," Tim was saying, slicking back his hair as he spoke, "do you remember anything from college? I mean, that's about as close as it can get to recently, right? And Hoody must've been there for some of that, right?"

"I guess," Brian said with a shrug, kicking at a small rock in his path. Said rock went tumbling several feet ahead of them and quickly forgotten. "I mean, I remember we went to college and -- bad stuff made this happen to us, but that's about it except for what you've told me."