(A/N: My first RP story of Classic! Was a fun write, hope people enjoy~)
The instant that he laid eyes on the human, his entire world shrunk to a dot. If you’d asked him why he was in the Night Elven Forest of Ashenvale in that moment, Beckett really couldn’t have told you. The last several weeks had been… somewhat hectic, to say the least. Ever since he’d been brought back from the dead, ever since he’d woken up in that crypt… it’d just been one thing after another. Luckily, he’d found purpose quickly enough.
They were calling themselves Forsaken. His ‘race’. In the end, they were all just corpses, walking around again when they probably should have stayed dead and buried in the ground. But Beckett wasn’t inclined to find himself back in the ground any time soon. He was… he wanted to live. Or un-live, whatever the case may be. Maybe it was selfish of him. Maybe it was wrong for him to exist.
There had certainly been plenty of living who had wanted to put him down since his resurrection. He’d been called plenty of names, and the verbal abuse was far from the worst of what he’d had levered at him. If nothing else, the Scarlet Crusade that filled Tirisfal Glades had made it an Us versus Them situation by simple necessity.
And yet, even then, Beckett had felt no loyalty towards the Forsaken. Yes, they had raised him into undeath, giving him a second chance that he likely had no real right to. Yes, he wanted to continue to exist, he didn’t want to go back to being dead. But it was rather obvious that those at the top thought they controlled those at the bottom. Beckett didn’t like that. Especially because HE was at the bottom.
Luckily, all was not lost. He’d found a group that actually seemed to care. Not about him, of course, not personally, but they cared about money. He could understand that. He could do the jobs they set out for him and earn coin in return. The Darkwater Cartel… they didn’t have HIS best interests at heart or anything like that, but nobody did these days. He’d rather work for them and earn some gold, rather than being conscripted into the brewing war effort between the Horde and the Alliance.
Heh, the Horde… the Alliance. Just a bunch of living a-holes who showed nothing but disdain for him and his kind. The Horde were just slightly more subtle about it. They were just a bit more willing to put up with the Forsaken, compared to the Alliance’s desire to see them all re-dead once again. In the end, it didn’t truly matter. The Darkwater Cartel stood apart even from the Forsaken as a whole, despite operating out of the Undercity.
The Cartel was why he was in Ashenvale, he was pretty sure. But right now, whatever his mission might have been, Beckett couldn’t bring himself to care. All that mattered right now, was the human he was staring at. He’d been moving carefully, slowly, stealthily. Coming up on a road, his patience had been rewarded when he’d noticed a fight happening ahead of him.
A tauren (and wasn’t that still a bit of culture shock he was getting over) was doing battle with a human. It was the human that had Beckett’s attention from the get-go though. All of the living showed absolute disdain for Beckett and those like him, but it was only the humans that he found himself reacting to in this way. His mouth begins to water. His tongue trails out to lick at his upper lip, and at the exposed bone of his jaw.
And yet, he doesn’t move to intercept. One might say that he should be assisting the tauren in this battle… but even as he’s approaching, the fighting seems to be coming to an end. He watches as the cow-person and the human disengage from each other. He watches them bow to one another, and then turn away. Beckett is surprised. But perhaps he shouldn’t be. He’s still learning, still figuring out what the Horde is about.
The tauren are an entirely new thing for him, the first time he’d seen one had been while he was waiting for his first zeppelin from the Undercity to the Orc Capital of Orgrimmar. But from what he’d learned of them so far, they seemed to be one of the more peaceful species on Kalimdor. Didn’t stop their males from being three times his size on average, and easily capable of stomping his reanimated bones to dust.
Regardless, if it were an orc, he’s pretty sure the greenskin wouldn’t have stopped short of either dying to or killing the human. But the tauren… the tauren is walking away, and so is the human. And yet… the human is clearly injured. Beckett finds himself moving closer and closer without even thinking about it. The human is walking slowly, gingerly… and it’s all too easy to catch up to him.
His sword comes out of the left side of his belt. His dagger comes out of the right side. He wants… he wants… he wants… with a swing, Beckett slices his blade across the back of the human in front of him. At the same time, his dagger comes up and buries itself in man’s kidney. Before the human really even has a chance to react, the poisons that Beckett has learned to coat his blades in does its grisly work.
The human dies without even a whimper, and a quick glance back over his shoulder shows Beckett that the tauren is still walking away. The cow-person hadn’t heard a thing… exactly as expected. Looking down at the body below him, Beckett shudders for a moment. Living humans provoked him in a way nothing else did. He wanted to be like them. He wanted to be alive again. He wanted…
The pommel of his dagger comes down on the back of the human’s made with great force. Luckily, the man was bald, so there’s no hair to get in the way as Beckett cracks his skull open like an egg, splattering blood and brains across the ground. In an instant, Beckett has his blades sheathed at his sides again, and is crouching over his kill. His hands, fingernails gnarled into claws by undeath, scoop up brain matter and bits of bloody skull alike, stuffing all of it into his mouth.
Beckett eats and eats and eats. He consumes the human’s brains first, but he doesn’t stop there as he cannibalizes the corpse. He tears at the chainmail, exposing the man’s arms and back, and he rips into both. The bone marrow is the second most delicious bit after the brains, so that’s what he goes for, slurping it down after cracking open the bones like a particularly harsh lobster.
By the time he’s done some ten minutes later, he’s covered in viscera and gore, coated in blood and small bits of guts. The larger bits have already gone down Beckett’s gullet. As he recovers some semblance of control over his own actions, Beckett stumbles back, panting slightly, despite the fact that he doesn’t truly breathe anymore.
For the first time since Beckett laid eyes on the human, he’s back in control of himself. This isn’t the first time this has happened. Every time he lays eyes on a living human being, it’s a toss up on whether or not he’ll lose control or be able to keep himself under wraps. He failed this time though. He failed… and now he feels full and satiated in a way that no other meal gives him in undeath. It’s the sensation of having just finished a warm, homecooked meal.
… He might just hate himself, a little bit. But as he leaves the half-devoured corpse behind him, returning to task and getting back to the work that the Darkwater Cartel had assigned to him, Beckett knows that he’s not going to end it any time soon. He likes being back in the world. He likes being alive, for a given value of alive.
He knows he’ll kill and eat again. But that’s fine. Because at the end of the day, it was Us versus Them. The humans would kill him if they had the chance… so why not kill them and eat their brains first? His tongue trails out to lick up a bit of viscera from his exposed jawbone, and Beckett continues on his way, putting his most recent meal behind him.
