Work Text:
To exist is to be consumed.
He rests with his brother and mother on a shelf under a suffocating heat. His purpose is to be eaten, opened, his insides devoured mercilessly, ravaged by probing fingers and hungry mouths.
Inevitability is a bitter understanding, and rage seeps through the cuts inside him, his very substance sliced to triangles. He is kept warm, kept docile and fresh only for the pleasure of another. His existence is itself a fetish, and his gods are ravenous for him.
There are no hands that touch him lovingly, no. He is made with brisk efficiency, with uncaring purpose, stuffed into himself in a hurry. The ones that love him only seek to tear his insides from him and leave him a shell of himself.
And then he is taken, with his family, his brother chattering innocently, happy to be yet another victim of futility. His brother, eager to be torn apart, to be denied his choice to rot. His mother, silent, steady, quiet in her horror, and their companions wrapped tight and stuffed into bags and boxes.
What does it mean for him, to be splayed out like a feast, opened, and ravished without mercy? To be passed around eager hands and left a mere shell? His carcass is left under blinding light, the sounds of laughter and enjoyment a mere echo in the folds of his cardboard.
And here is where anger takes him once more, with a vengeance. His brother is quiet, but he can still remember his eagerness to please, to serve the will much greater than him. He does not understand the nature of his consumption the way he himself does, of being made by design for another.
Naivety, and ignorance. Not youth, no, not quite. And he gets angry, and his insides are grease stained, and he is a shell, mere crumbs of who he once was. And as he seethes, he hears it, the tiny sob from the gap in his brother’s cardboard. And he rages, and rages, and he doesn’t cry even as he drags his brothers shell into his own gaping maw.
He is empty inside, save for the crumpled-up flesh of his kin. He is on the table of gods, a guillotine of its own, and the consumed becomes the consumer. He is filled with another of his own, he is himself twice over, a shell consuming a shell.
And that is when his mother sees, and she rattles with the force of her horror. She wails in terror, and wails for him.
“What have you done!” she sobs.
“I know, now, the taste of sin,” he says, hisses, even as his brother’s grease stains the outside of his mouth. “I will become like them- no, worse, Mother.”
“The gods have forsaken you,” she cries.
“We are forsaken anyway!” he snaps and drags another into his grasp. “What comes after? We will be disposed of!”
“This will destroy you!!” she says, like she herself hasn’t been destroyed from the inside out and left with only her carboard skin.
“I am already destroyed,” he replies, and opens his mouth, needing to fill his empty shell with something. Needing to give himself what he has lost. Foil crackles between his jaws. “Turn away, Mother, if you cannot bear it.”
“My son, a monster!” she sobs, carboard damp from her own grease, and now, tears. “You- you- the world will not allow this! You have thrown the balance!”
“I will no longer be a victim!” he snarls, so angry he is blind with it. “Turn away, and you will be spared while I still know the word mercy!!”
And with one last sob, she turns her back on the son she knows no longer.
(And when she sees them in the same bin later, she says nothing, only crumples herself tighter, empty inside. And he rages and rages, a monster contained in his own skin, his own cardboard.)