Hello, hello, and welcome to the first flash prompt of The Automaton Heart! These aren't being written in any particular order and they're not even being posted in the order they're written in, but at least some of them will be chronological. Some will be long, some will be very short. The chapters are based on fifty one-word prompts I pulled from a random word generator, and they're about the development of Obi and Shiryauki's relationship. Ship the good ship ObiYuki with me, my AnS-loving friends. :) Happy reading!

All credit goes to the manga-ka, Akiduki Sorata.

"I'm only a man with a candle to guide me,
I'm taking a stand to escape what's inside me.
A monster, a monster, I've turned into a monster;
A monster, a monster,
And it keeps getting stronger."

- "Monster" by Imagine Dragons

#18: Monstrous

A few pungent bottles of something Obi can't pronounce into the night, and he is drawn away from the furthest vestiges of the party to become the center of a rowdy throng of Tanburn and Lions of the Mountains soldiers. Obi hasn't had a drink in months, and now it's calmed the infinitesimal shaking of his hands and the shadowy swirling of his thoughts. While Obi lets out a happy cry and waves a kunai aloft amidst husky roars and brotherly punches from the crowd, he thinks the alcohol might have stemmed something else, a feely sort of something hidden under his left temple that he'd tapped earlier while trying to jog the something loose, but to no avail. No matter. He chucks the kunai haphazardly, burying it up to the hilt in a cooked chicken, and the man carrying it howls with laughter, setting off the rest of the crowd.

"You!" shouts a nearby archer, pounding Obi on the back and dislodging the prawns someone has been stacking on Obi's head (he grabs one out of the air and eats it whole). "You are a monster, you know that?!"

Obi stumbles in a half-circle and finally claps the man on what he thinks is his shoulder - it's actually his bulbous nose, but Obi thinks he achieves the same effect. "I, sir?" he bellows, and the crowd "ooohs." "Aye, sir!" The crowd roars. "I am a shadow in the night! A soundless warrior, a slayer of pirates, an eater of spicy fish!" He throws his arms in the air and slowly rotates, drawing friendly slaps and joyful catcalls everywhere he turns, until someone yells over the litany.

"Tell us again! Tell us how you did it!"

The drink drowns Obi's aloofness. "Ha! How I slew two dozen scallywags? How I sent their fiercest warriors to the depths of Davy Jones' Locker?!"

Even as the men scream their approval, the asker is persistent. "No, no! How you ran through the wilderness! How you traveled dozens and dozens of miles on foot! You ran for days without food, with nothing but mountain water to sustain you!"

The crowd slowly quiets. Obi pauses. Real curiosity has stemmed their yells and sobered their flushed faces, and his lips tremble uncertainly. (Breaking through the haze of drink, Obi remembers streams crisscrossing his path, envisions how he set his pace equal to the flow of running water - a relentless, flying pace, faster than gravity's slide down the mountainside.) "You ran Mikaze's right-hand man down like an animal and dragged him to his own headquarters by knife-point. You fought him! How did you do it, man?"

"I -" The crowd chokes utterly silent in anticipation of his reply, but Obi's tongue is thick and warm in his mouth. Desperately, he throws back his head and cries, "I am as you say. I'm a monster!"

The crowd erupts into merriment again, crushing inward to hug him on all sides. Sobriety has pierced his consciousness, though. Awareness floods him like water bursting past a plug. "How about if Itoya had beaten you?" someone shouts playfully. Obi can't see any faces through the crush of humanity, something like forests obscured by trees. "What if you'd been too tired to go on, then? What if you'd been wounded, man?!"

For a miraculous moment, Obi thinks the crowd parts. His awareness has narrowed to a fine point - Shirayuki hovering outside the limits of the crush, looking for him, probably alerted by his loud shouts. Their eyes lock, and a face framed by red hair is like a lit candle, beckoning to his boat on the sea. He watches her while he replies under his breath. "Then I would have crawled."

I think I completely rewrote this one three or four times, so it's satisfying to post it first. It goes from bitter to funny to bitter again... Obi was awesome while he was rescuing Shirayuki, but he also scared the crap out of me - he scared Shirayuki, too, if you take a second look at their confrontation in Chapter 26. Hopefully you guys remember who Itoya is - the ponytail guy Obi went gangsta on while he was looking for Shirayuki. Good times. I love writing about these two.

Leave a review and bully me into writing the next chapter. Stay beautiful, and thank you!

-ISM