One Last Time

From head to waist, the hunter was drenched in the sticky, metallic-smelling coat of blood. It was uncomfortably warm, and unnaturally viscous, sticking to his face like second skin. He could not see a wink as it glazed his eyes, keeping it shut to keep the crimson liquid out. 

In his left eye, there was a massive, searing pain that he was unfamiliar with. Unlike any pain he's been through before.

He lifted a finger to graze the wound, to check what was wrong with his left eye, and gushing out was more amount of blood than anywhere else on his body, bar his severed arm of course. 

The man wiped the blood away from his face, and where on his right eye he could see the night sky pass through the canopies of the trees, he couldn't see anything in his left. Only darkness, and specks of colour.

The hunter let only a soft sigh escape him. 

Killjoy had rested enough to be able to sit up against the mound of snow. From where his left arm used to be, he tightened up the wound with the remains of his cotton shirt and a durable stick on the ground for a makeshift tourniquet, and his gouged left eye with a piece of cloth. He had checked around his body given the excessive amount of blood on him, but most of it had come from the monster after he stabbed the bastard inside its throat. 

For something so surprisingly cunning to have covered up its orifices, it leered its teeth at him at the last second. What is a beast remains a beast, he concluded.

He bellowed out another sigh as he draped his arm over his knee, staring off into the woods. The aching of his body, his leg still slightly shaking, and the searing pain in his eye and arm; it hurt him, it hurt his body, it hurt his soul. 

For what he thought was strong, was frail. He was frail.

His hand balled into a fist. It squeezed the pool of blood that drenched his palm so that it seeped through the fingers before dripping onto the cold earth below. 

The reminder of his mortality, how weak he was, itched him. Perhaps he wasn't cut out for this anymore. 

For all his years, there is still much he did not know apparently, including that demonic thing that nearly got him killed tonight. Killjoy was never one for the superstitious, never even one to have gone to church, but what that was… it was not earthly. He had stoked the flame of a fire he thought was all ruckus and noise, but now it had scarred him beyond repair. 

To think even someone as well-lived as he was barely survived the attack with but the cost of an arm and an eye shook the stubborn man. Killjoy did not want to admit it, but it did.

Killjoy fell back onto the snow, taking in the coarse slush as it hugged him in return. He glanced to his side and saw the laying body of the beast, and atop a pile of snow on the ground, he found the harmonica he had used to slay it. His gift, his only token of his wife.

This life had consumed so much of his time that Killjoy thought there couldn't be anything else he could take away from Adeline. But he stained her present with the blood of his work. Now even his only memorabilia of his loved ones, who so resented his hunting, had been used as an instrument of it.

Killjoy let out a shallow sigh once more, digging into one of his pockets. He didn't know what he was trying to get; his cigarettes had fallen out, his lighter was cold and damp, and everything else was in disarray. He just had to do something to get this itch away from him. 

But he couldn't. It gnawed, beating at the back of his skull in ways that even that ghoul couldn't hurt. 

Shifting to the side, the hunter reached for the harmonica with his remaining arm and grasped it with his palm, the snow falling through the fingers like a waterfall. 

He stared at it. Despite its sullied appearance, the silver had kept its shine. The metal, though bruised and battered, persisted to be tough and cold against the pores of his skin. And then it became blurry.

The harmonica in his palm swirled and the world before him turned hazy, like bubbles. Killjoy immediately turned his head, trying to find whatever was making his vision like this. But as he felt the salty wetness of something swell in his eyes, its surface tension broke and the water streamed down his face. 

The hunter sat there as he let the tears escape his eyes, both his missing and remaining, staring off in the distance to nowhere. 

He then gasped as he clutched the silver instrument tighter in his grip, pulling it against his chest. Killjoy coughed on his sorrows, grinding his broken teeth.

"I…I'm sorry, Adeline…I didn't mean to use it in that way…I swear I didn't…" Killjoy said aloud to no one. "I had to, I-I needed to survive—I know I said I wouldn't get hurt…"

He grew quiet. 

Killjoy then got up, at least with great difficulty with all of the injuries tolling on him, and started ambling his way outside the forest. He stumbled on his lead foot, dragging his other weak limb against the coarse snow. The hunter didn't know if it was broken or he was just fatigued.

Killjoy dug the harmonica as neatly as he could into a torn pocket in his pants, some sparse threads barely stopping it from slipping out. 

"I….I think I'm not cut out for this anymore…" Killjoy muttered as he tried to walk. "When I get back…you can stitch me up one last time…and I won't ever leave again…you can barricade the door if you have to…"