Strahm wails angrily, moving his feet up until his boots are scrabbling at the wall facing him, but it’s no use. There’s nothing to save him, no way to survive this. He’d made his choice, had refused to trust Mark with his life. Now that very life is about to be snuffed out, about to vanish along with all the others, and all Mark will do is watch. There’s nothing else for it. Just another mistake. Just another failure. He’s not sure where to go after this.
And then, quite abruptly, the walls grind to a halt.
Strahm lets out a sob, but he’s still alive, and Mark stares up at him. Strahm’s wedged there, his legs the only thing really holding him in place. His back is shoved hard against the one wall behind him, and he looks a little like he’s just a second or two away from either folding in half or simply snapping into two separate pieces. Even from down below, Mark can see the way he shakes, the way he cries, the way he curses and snarls and spits like a rabid animal in a cage.
“Ah, shit,” Mark says.
Mark had never planned for Strahm to survive if he didn’t get into the glass coffin. It’d never even crossed his mind that he could, so when the hydraulic systems fail… well, he doesn’t really know what the fuck to do about that.
Now he has a very injured, very pissed off FBI agent on his hands that he may or may not have framed for murder. But maybe Mark can still try to make Strahm understand just what it is he’d been trying to tell him in the first place.
(or, mark and peter go on a road trip to get peter’s arm taken care of, and learn things about each other along the way.)
I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m advocating for casual cruelty or whatever but something that grates so much about this current social moment is how many people are incapable of saying they dislike something or someone without cooking up some higher morally correct reason for their dislike. Sometimes you just disliked a book. Sometimes you don’t “get” an actor or a musician. There’s nothing morally wrong with your girl’s fuckass boyfriend he’s literally just annoying and you’re annoyed that you have to pretend you like him when you know he’ll be history in six months. It’s fine. You don’t need to justify your dislike.
I will open the fucking TikTok app just to watch this video multiple times
TIKTOKER: I swear to God, no one tickles my testicles more than the people of my own fucking country. Okay, so like WHAT HAPPENED was this year, this summer, I was in Korea. And I linked up with a homie that I haven’t met in a long time, just catching up. “Oh my God, how are you? You GRADUATED? That’s insane, where do you work!?” Whatever. Okay.
So there was a conversation about like, food and preferences. So I just asked him! I just asked him: (in Korean, pronoucing “asparagus” as a Korean loan word) “Hey, when you eat steak, do you put asparagus?”
(in English) And this BITCH. He looks at me DEAD STRAIGHT IN THE FUCKING EYES. Has the AUDACITY to just…. degrade, I guess! Ask me: (in Korean) “HAH! Hey, aren’t you from America? Why are you calling it (emphasizing the Korean pronunciation of asparagus) ASPARAGUS?”
(in English, in an exaggerated stereotypical American accent) OH, I’M SORRY. I’M SORRY! Am I supposed to say ASS-PARA-GUSS? ASS-PARA-GUSS? DO I GO (says his question again in Korean, but breaks up the flow of the speech by pronouncing all the loan words with American pronunciation).
IT FUCKS THE FLOW!!! WHY ARE YOU BITCHING!? I’M TRYING TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY! YOU MONOLINGUAL FUCK!!!!
god i literally have thought of little else in the way of strahm dog motif since i first conceived of the idea, I JUST LOVE THE SCRAGGLY BREED THAT HAS ENORMOUS CHASE INSTINCTS AND WAS BRED TO HUNT WOLVES!!!!
this is the best album release of all time because where else are you going to get unironic takes like this and then even get a few hundred people to agree with it
