Runner John

 So yeah, been quiet for a while, still not sure why I'm bothering with updating, probably because latest posts started receiving comments from a new person, which shows that there's somebody else reading these apart from the regular lunatic shit-heads that I tend to attract for some reason, not quite sure why that's a motivator though.

Last time I published a post, I left off on me following the weirdo named Eko who I believe is an Archivist, for those of you who don't know those are essentially the Blind Man's servants and if you don't know what the Blind Man is, then you haven't really been paying attention for too long. Long story short, yet another weird monstrosity that can fuck with your memories, ranging from entirely removing them, to outright replacing them with some other false memories. That's the bare bones of it.

So why would one of his servants be interested in me at all? Originally I thought Eko was specifically around to monitor the Bandaged Idiot's activities, so why the fuck he would show up near me and seemingly guide me in some kind of direction is beyond me.

But guide is exactly what he did, he guided me right into an alleyway and then suddenly disappeared on me. Now considering the fact that I was wet from top to bottom because I was forced to take a dip in the local lake and now I was stranded in some shitty alley that stank like the devil's asshole, I figured a break and a hot meal was in order, the thinking was that once I was filled with warm food and coffee, I could go back to figuring out a way to kill myself.

Said warm meal and coffee I was going to get at a diner that was one of the many buildings facing the alley that I was in. So I went in there, not paying much attention to people looking at me and probably wondering why I was so dirty, went up to the counter and ordered myself a baguette, and coffee. As soon as I turned around to look for a seat to grab I saw hi yet again, Eko who appeared out of nowhere and was already sitting behind a table, waving me over. The second I spotted him it was very obvious that he was invisible to everybody else, otherwise a guy who is dressed as weirdly as he is would have definitely attracted all of the attention in the Diner.

Playing along with the facade that he wasn't there, so as to not risk getting the cops called on me I walked over to the table and took a seat.

"I agree, a break is in order." His Jamaican accent shining through like before.

I looked around to see if anyone had heard, just to make sure I wasn't going completely off the deep end, and the answer was not a single soul looked in our direction when he spoke, everyone went about their day as if there wasn't a cult looking weirdo sitting in their dinner, talking to a dirty, hobo-looking goth guy.

"Relax, an observer is never observed, they can only see and hear you."

Thinking of a way to respond to him without looking like I'm talking to myself, I let my hair down allowing it to cover up my face and proceeded to talk to him in a low voice, essentially asking him what the fuck he wanted from me.

"I want nothing from you Kyle [My Last Name], the question you should be asking is what do you want?" He answered without moving an inch.

Great, philosophy, retrospective philosophy no less, the worst kind. Not exactly sure why he was trying to lecture me about it and I highly doubt that he would explain if I asked, at the same time he also wouldn't leave me alone if I asked, so I didn't say anything, instead I just decided to ignore him and wait for my order, after that the plan was to have my meal and get the fuck out of there, back to what I was doing before.

Of course, as you might guess that plan got derailed when my meal had arrived on my table. When the waitress set my baguette and coffee down and began to walk away, my Jamaican guest decided to take his leave as well, at the time 'a welcome change of pace' I thought, but obviously nothing is ever so simple. As he was leaving, he bumped into this really tall guy causing the poor guy to fall, so in order to balance himself he leaned on my table and as a result spilled my, very hot, coffee all over my legs. To say that it burnt, would be an understatement, I literally had to freeze in place and not move a muscle so that the skin of my legs made as little contact with my pants as it possibly could.

Only after the man that tripped began to lean over me, to pick up the coffee cup did I begin to pay attention to who was in front of me. First thing that threw itself into my eyes was the fact how tall this guy was, I'm talking the distant cousin of Sasquatch here.

"Sorry there, bud." An apology came out of a mouth that was covered up by the ginger beard on his face. As he moved his hand back away from the coffee cup I noticed a ridiculous amount of scars covering his forearm peeking out at me from underneath the long sleeves of his green jacket.

You know how things that when thought about don't tend to make sense and yet still somehow manage to 'click' into my place, with there being no rhyme or reason for it? This is what happened for me when I finally noticed a massive hiking backpack strapped to his back. This was a runner in front of me, I don't know if there is such a thing as a "proxy sense" or some dumb shit like that, but I guess hunting, scaring and stalking the same type of people for a great amount of time, tends to create a certain amount of bias in your head that leads to the natural assumption that if a person looks disheveled and is carrying a massive backpack with them, it automatically means they are a runner, or as it used to be, an enemy.

"I can't do anything about the pants, but I can pay for a new cup of coffee for ya." And he walked off to the counter to buy me a new cup. As he was waiting by the counter, I started to get a better look at him, just so I could confirm that my assumption had merit. He had this long, green, tactical jacket with a lot of pockets, grey cargo pants which also had a lot of pockets, implying that those were some kind of industrial work pants that he had on. Said pants were firmly tucked into steel toed, black boots, the guy could easily come off as some kind of construction/warehouse worker if it weren't for the scars and that massive hiking backpack. On his head he had a black beanie and his face was fairly wrinkly, I'd says he was in his late 40's.

For some reason, the assumption that he was a Runner was not leaving my head and so I did something to definitely confirm it. Thinking back on it now, I'm not exactly sure why I even bothered to try and confirm on whether he was a runner or not, it's not like I still work for the Proxies, maybe some part of me was hoping that he would kill me, or something, I don't know. What I do know for a fact is that whilst he was fetching my coffee for me, I poured some salt out on the table and drew the idiotic "operator" symbol, remember that thing? Circle with an "X" in the middle, yeah been a while since that shit showed up, but it was definitely the most recognizable symbol for those that are running for their lives.

Naturally, when he was finally bringing me my coffee back that was the first thing he saw. The look of careless politeness was replaced with a look of sobering clarity, he was now faced with an individual who knew of his secret and worst thing for him, he had no idea which side I was on. I wasn't in a much better position, because as soon as I saw the look on his face, the sudden thought process of "wtf are you doing" dawned on me, at best I just singed my death warrant, at worst I just got my ass potentially kicked out of a cozy place without even having a bit to eat. To my surprise, he didn't just bolt for the door, which would be the smart thing to do, instead he asked me: "So, which one are you then?"

Considering that I looked like a wet, dirty rag the stench of which was now a mixture of the local river and the hot coffee that was spilled on me earlier didn't leave much to interpretation, so I didn't really have to convince him of not being a proxy "Which one do you think I am?"

"You can never really know, can you?" He kept looking down at me, gears are clearly turning, looking for any excuse to deem me a threat, but failing to do so "Regardless..." the serious look was replaced with a careless one, he shrugged: "Still owe ya a cup of coffee." He placed the cup on the table after which he said his farewells and was about to start heading for the door, but I stopped him.

"You came here to eat, right?" I asked him matter-of-factly, if you're a runner then you should understand how rare it is of an opportunity to actually stop oneself from constantly running and being on the lookout and manage to have a few minutes of peace eating some well cooked food. I wasn't about to ruing this guy's chance to take a break "Go ahead, I don't want to be the reason why you might skip out on some warm food."

He looked at me again and after a few seconds of obvious contemplation, he gave me a smile and sat down at my table, something that I didn't expect nor was planning on, I figured he'd just move to a different table or something "Well alright bud, a nice change of pace from eating alone under a bridge somewhere."

He set down his hiking backpack next to him and began to take an order from the waitress that just now showed up to wipe up the table from the earlier spilled coffee. As soon as the waitress walked off he immediately introduced himself "Name's John by the way, nice to meet you."

I decided to refrain from using the name that I go by here, just in case he knows of my blog, chances of that are very slim, this guy looks like he's been around the block for quite some time now, but there is always a small chance, so I just went with my real name: "Kyle"

After that we engaged in some war stories, so to speak, apparently John was a blogger at some point himself, he told me that he was writing around the time the first Sages were being named, so yeah, he's been around for a while. I was willing to catch him up to the events that had transpired but he wouldn't let me, told me that there was a reason that he withdrew from the blogs and concentrated on survival, said that the more people wrote about their tortured lives, the more dread they created, especially when things would start becoming complex, whatever that meant.

We talked about how we ended up in that diner that we met in (I obviously made up a story as to why I was covered in lake water) and that carried the conversation in an unpleasant direction for me, we went from talking about how we ended up in the diner to how we ended up in this situation to begin with. Obviously he withdrew certain bits of information, but the overall message was clear, he started running during his Uni years, which would make him somewhere around in his 30's, which blew my mind when I thought about it, because the amount of gray hairs in his ginger beard and wrinkles on his face made him look as if he was in his 50's.

But yeah, his story didn't really stand out all that much from a typical Runner story, looked too much into certain things on the internet, got visited by the Tall Fuck, started running, then started blogging and etc. You know the drill, I'm sure, he talked about how he used to run with this one specific group, said how they were like family to him, how they took care of one another, you can pretty much guess how that ended for him. One by one his "family members" began to get killed off, by suspiciously precise ambushes from the Proxies, except for one, the one he was in love with apparently, she met her demise by the Tall Fuck's hands.

Later on he found out why the ambushes were so precise, one of their own was leaking information to the Proxies in their area, in exchange for safety. When John found out about it, he "murdered the shit out of the piece of crap". After that a typical reaction followed: Devastation, depression and eventually contemplation of suicide, according to him he was about to go through with it too but two things prevented him from killing himself. He had a realistic nightmare about how his loved one was still alive, but was trapped somewhere, suffering unspeakable torture's and then he checked up on the blogs for the first time in years and he saw that people were still trying to fight against the Tall Fuck and were actually trying to scientifically research the damn thing. That apparently gave him the motivation and resolve to try and contribute, to try and fight it, to find out on whether that nightmare was real and his loved one was indeed still alive, or if it was just that, a nightmare. And so many years of fighting began, he would try his hardest to be the hunter rather than the prey and apparently his efforts would eventually lead him to meeting up with a different group of runners who were just as hell bent on fighting as he was and for a few years they did just that, only quietly.

He began to develop similar bonds with this new group, to a point that he began to completely forget about why he was even fighting to begin with. So naturally, he was very quickly reminded of it, when one of the members of the group died in a confrontation with the Tall Fuck. Rest of them managed to escape but John couldn't get over that loss, he claims that he thinks it was the PTSD that led him to his breakdown, after which he deemed it to be much safer for the rest of the group if he left them, since he was a liability.

That's where his fight was finished, from that point on he would only continue to concentrate on his survival and nothing else. Originally he wanted to be alone in order to find a different solution, an approach to his situation, but in the end he decided that isolation from other people was the best course of action and so he's been running ever since, trying his best to forget about the nightmares. Since then he's bumped into plenty of runners, never really sticking together with them for too long, helping where he could and then leaving.

At first I was slightly judgmental of him, what's the point of surviving if you've lost everything and you know for a fact there's nothing more to your life other than survival, pain and suffering? Stop prolonging the inevitable and just kill yourself, you know? It wasn't until he asked for my backstory (I told him, but obviously it was sprinkled with a few lies in order to not reveal that I was a proxy, or that I was involved with the Bandaged Idiot) that I realized how our backstories mirrored, despite the fact that I was a proxy and he was a runner.

So I asked him, what was the point?

You know what he said?

He said that ultimately, there is no point, at some point we'll bite the dust and that there is no happy ending for us, that's the belief at least. However personally, he wants to prove that belief wrong, partially he admitted is because he is still driven by revenge, the fact that he is still alive after all those years and had managed to escape his pursuers and the Tall Fuck to this day, in his mind, is a big middle finger to them. But that's only a small portion of the motivation, the bigger reason is the fact that he has always been a rebel at heart, apparently he flirted with the idea of suicide several times, 3 times he almost went through with it and yet every time he stopped himself, because this idea of just handing them the win and just giving up knowing full well that, that's not how his loved ones (deceased and living) would want to see him end up bothered him a lot more than the survival game.

In retrospect, it sounds so fucking dumb, like who cares right? The loved ones that are alive probably already think that you're dead because you've been gone for so long and the dead ones, who cares what they think? They're dead, they can't think.

But at the time, it struck something in me, don't know why but I started thinking about death in a different light since that conversation, let's just put it like that. Me and John would end up sitting in that diner for a few more hours and just chatting, hell we even ended up hanging out for a bit after we were done with our food, talking about our hobbies, interests, experiences and other shit like that.

I miss my drum set.

After that we parted ways and I haven't seen or heard from him ever since, he's probably long gone in a different city, or country. Rest of the summer I spent thinking, relaxing, suicidal thoughts would creep in on occasion, pretty sure I came close to ending it all when I was just walking across the bridge. The sudden urge to just throw myself over the railing was too strong, the memories and the nightmares hitting me like a train in that instance and yet somehow I managed to will myself out of it, I collapsed by the railing, gasping for air, ended up vomiting's, it's funny how when I had a gun to my temple I had no fears of pulling the trigger, no shock, no second thoughts and yet, for some reason I couldn't do it. Now I was very willing to throw myself off the bridge, all I had to do was just step forward and yet, for some reason I fought against it, hence the shock.

My mind's a fucking mess, hence why I wrote this up, not for your sadistic pleasure although you'll probably still enjoy it, you sick fuck. It's more for myself this time, in hopes that it'll help me figure this shit out.

Nothing so far, but fuck it, I wrote up so much, might as well publish it.