Work Text:
He came to like an insect crawling out of its chrysalis. Slowly, and painfully, clawing his way towards consciousness like a creature drowning. The first breath was like fire scorching at his throat. Hot metal in his nostrils. Hot metal in his mouth, way down to his insides, smoldering, consuming. Lead inside his veins instead of blood, making the atmosphere bear down on him cold and heavy and oppressing like grave dirt. He couldn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t unstick his tongue from his palate. He couldn’t feel his own heartbeat.
Silence, and stillness. Minutes stretched into hours stretched into days. Awareness came and went in waves, like a lighthouse blinking in and out of the fog. Sounds around him, muted, distorted. Thunder. Scuttling, shrieking. Rattling breath. In and out, in and out. The skin on his ribcage pulling taut with each inhale, dried out, cracking. Oozing.
Movement in his peripheral perception. Scratching of tiny little claws on filthy asphalt. Squealing of tiny little mouths. The whisper of whiskers on his hollow thorax. A wet nose prodding at his skin. Pain shooting up from his side to his spine like a crack of lightning, exploding behind his eyelids in a million incandescent sparks. It moved of its own volition. His hand shot down to grab the small rodent by the neck. Nails and fingers dug easily into the wet, tender flesh until he heard the faint crack of tiny vertebrae snapping under his hold. He brought the animal to his mouth and sunk his teeth into its body, blood exploding warm and wet into his mouth and dripping down his neck, down his chest, fresh over the old wounds. It tasted of iron and revolt.
He let go of the creature, turned to his side, and vomited everything his mangled body contained. Blood and bile and acid. Mostly blood. Convulsions shook him, his trembling arms barely holding him up. His eyelids felt like sandpaper against his corneas. He had no tears to clear his eyes. No words at the back of his throat. Too-bright spots danced in his vision, obscuring his surroundings. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel while his body tried to turn itself inside out. His arms gave way and he collapsed on the ground, forehead hitting the asphalt, hard, cheek smearing against the soil. He breathed the sick smell of gore, acidic and almost black on the tar in the dim light of the perpetual twilight, dense like molasses.
Something outside of his will moved him again. One of his hands shifted under his chest, followed by the other, and pushed. Attempts to stand were alienating. His bones felt changed, elongated, stretching at his skin and grating at his joints. He staggered like a dark and grotesque incarnation of a baby deer. The world swam in front of him. The gray-blue sky became the gray-blue earth became the gray-blue trees. He was distantly aware of his screaming body, as if it belonged to someone else, while he stumbled and tripped making his way towards the forest.
“I promise you he was there. He was there. I left him right there.”
A sob cut off the faint voice in the dark, empty park.
“It’s normal not to remember right. Trauma can–”
“It’s not fucking trauma! I remember right. He was right there. I was holding him and we were right there.”
“Oh, God,” a feminine, raspy voice, laden with horror, “what if something took him?”
A beat of heavy silence.
“Let’s look around. He must… he must be somewhere near.”
Leaves rustled over his head and under his heels. Woodworms munched on dead, decaying trees. Everywhere around him birds ruffled their feathers, worms turned the earth, small animals murmured and squealed in their lairs. He could hear all of it, overlapping, cacophonic, as loud as if the creatures were there in his skull, chewing on his brain and tearing his thoughts to shreds. He couldn’t think, couldn’t remember where he was, what he was meant to be doing, who he was beyond the carving knife going from temple to temple, the ache in his gums, the emptiness in his chest, and the urge. To move, to bite, to rip his own throat out, to make it all stop.
It had been that urge that had made him rise from his half-dried grave of blood and dust and half-dried carcasses, drift and stumble on roots and vines, choke on polluted air, to reach the edge of the end of the world. Hours of pathetic attempts at walking, then crawling, then curling on himself on the bare earth, letting the dust and detritus blanket him, then walking again, and then he saw it. The crack ran jagged and deep on the forest floor. It wanted to suck the atmosphere out of his lungs and the mist out of the fetid air like it was a living, breathing thing.
Creatures were scuttling, scurrying, crawling towards it, drawn to its maws like moths to a flame, like maggots to a cadaver. He went too. His spine was still snapping. He did not think movement was supposed to stab agony deep into his consciousness. He did not think the sky was supposed to be that sallow, ashen gray. He did not think leaves were supposed to feel like razors on his skin. Still, he went.
He was looking for something. He needed it. More than bone under his teeth, more than warmth upon his lips, around his tongue, inside his throat. A hand on his shoulder. A seat? Leather. Cracked, like old wounds. Warmth. A breath. Warm. Rattling, like bones, like dice, like breath. Sweet on his tongue, on his gums. Like blood. Warm.
He needed it. He was nearing it. Among the chittering vermin, among their creeping and tremor and teeth, he came out on the other side. He knew where to go. He knew where to find it. He went.