Chapter Text
You are not asleep, for sleep is beyond you.
Sleeping would be weightless. There would be distraction: dream or nightmare, or it would be quick, falling and waking in the same breath. But you are not weightless, and time is all that you have. If this is a dream or a nightmare, it is a cruel one.
Your limbs are frozen, breaths slow and rattling, mind foggy like a pall has been tied tight around your brain. It is something like death, the numbness of it. Were it not for the buzzing hum of half-there thoughts, the juddering jolts of almost-consciousness, it just might have been.
But the dead cannot breathe, they cannot think like you are thinking, and they certainly cannot feel their lifeblood dripping from vein to floor.
Not asleep. Not dead. Something else.
The ground is soft and you lie in its cradle limp and limb-flung, viscera spilling out of you like the boiling mess of a great sputtering mountain. It is the only ground you have ever known. You are inside of it, atop it, below it, half-sunk like tree roots. Your blood feeds this hungry ground, and it sups greedily but quietly. It will drink until it swells, until there is no blood left in you to swallow.
It is not there yet, and it is far from satisfied. You are not yet bloodless. You remain as red as the day you were made.
Awareness comes in waves. One moment (if time means anything) you are nothing, floating away from your body as if it was never yours at all, and the next you have a finger or a hand or a kneecap. When you are aware of your hand, it curls around something that is not there. You imagine a dagger, for your fingers certainly could not hold a pen.
Muscle memory, for it is not intentional recollection, has each finger twitching in turn, as though the flesh could summon what it does not have: the cool glint of a blade, the rounded pommel flush against your waist as you walk, the grip so worn in your fist that you almost feel the metal beneath.
It is achingly familiar, like a limb you have misplaced. Your hand twitches again and then falls still. It is not yours anymore.
There is something in you that is yours, though it was not before. It was not there, and now it is, a pulsing hot insertion behind your ear. It is raw like an open wound, gushes blood like any injury to the head would, but it is not only blood. The texture is wrong, the temperature irregular in a way that only you would recognise. A lightning-thread of panic rushes through you. This is not right.
It is not right. But the thought is snatched away.
The parasite has always been there, for it is you.
You might be alone. If you had control over your ears you might strain to listen for anything resembling life, but you do not, and so you hear only a dull droning that you cannot know to be inside or out of you. With less sense, you could reason it to be the lapping of water on a riverbed or the roar of the ocean against the bow of a mighty ship.
There is no ocean here. You are certain of that, at least. If there was, it would be red as far as the eye could see, for in your vision there is only that heady shade, pockmarked with little black boats, stationary in fear or isolation or misremembering. You could not swim in this sea. You could not sail it. It was not made for the living.
But the living have walked here. You have walked here. A bold stride, heavy with purpose. Confidence, if you can fathom such a luxury. There was intent there once, living in your hands and your feet and your blade. Thrusting, sinking, pulling. A rhythm to a song you have forgotten, a dance that you once knew.
You think of killing, but thoughts are not enough. You have lost the ability to maintain thought. Your hands shake too much to grasp it, your body is too dead to hold it. It cannot burrow deep enough to mean anything.
Killing, though, killing might mean something. There is warmth in your chest when you think of it.
Blood. Warm. Not cold like your own is becoming, but hot like pulsing out of a beating heart, how it shudders when you hold it in two hands, the magma-heat when you crush it in one. The smell, the taste of it. You want it. You want it.
But there is no blood but your own, and even this you cannot have.
Thinking of killing hurts like your body does not, and interrogating it further is nothing but a lesson in torture; Torture that does not amount to anything, like the body has died before the mind even realises what is happening. It is like pinpricks down your spine. You do it anyway.
Who did you kill and how often? Did you enjoy it? How did you do it? Were you caught? Could you be caught? Were there orders? Did you follow orders or give them? Ordered to kill or ordered to stop?
Fog rolls in with the tide.
Was there someone else? Did you kill for someone else? Did you kill with someone else? Their face does not surface. Alone. Have you always been alone? Is anyone coming? Is anyone coming? Is anyone coming?
The hum sounds more like the sea with every second that passes.
Perhaps there was someone, or many someones, a lifetime of someones. Maybe there was no one. Maybe there was no life before this one, if this can be called life. That does not sound right. There was a time before this. You know there was. Frustration boiling in your knuckles. They twitch, but the faceless still do not come to you.
A breath shudders out of you. The tide falls away.
There are very few things of which you are certain. The first, that you are bleeding, likely terminally. The second, that you do not remember life, or death, or anything before the sinking, swallowing ground. And third, the sea-hum will not be ignored.
Something whispers at the frayed edges of your being. It is the too-far and not-close-enough rumble of something else. It is not you, and yet it is in you. It could not be anywhere else. That does not mean that you know it. It is foreign, though you cannot say that it is your lack of memories that make it so. No, you know that it should not exist.
Whatever is in your head is there. It is physical. You could touch it if you had the wherewithal to move, you feel it where your skull opens up to cracked bone and mangled brain, that thing that is and is not you. Real. Tangible. Unfamiliar, but there. What calls out to you now is not. It is not physical. You could not touch it. You could not even try.
But you can feel it.
It is soft and tight and cold and warm as it holds you. You repeat to yourself, wordlessly, that it is not there, that it is not real, but that does not stop it from folding its arms around your shoulders, from feeling its breath mist on the back of your neck.
It should be comforting, but you do not know comfort, and so it is as hands on skin has always and never felt. You wonder for a moment what comfort is like when it is freely asked for.
The presence does not ask. It simply pushes. And then, wordlessly, it speaks of knowing. It is better that it does not speak in words, for the relationship that it speaks of could not be explained in such a way. There is no word to mean this type of love.
Love like drowning, it says, filling your mouth with salt water. Love like honey and syrup and the thickest of creams, so sickly as to coat the inside of your throat, make you wheeze with the saccharinity of it. Love like tufts of wool stuck in your lungs, that disease borne from over-exposure, hacking up blood as though you have any to spare.
You might cry if you had the capability. It is too much all at once, like it is filling you, etching itself into your being, burrowing like worms dug too deep, pushing you underwater, hoisting you up into the air and back down, as though through force it could convince you that this is comfort, that this is right, and that you need only accept it.
And then, choking on the few breaths your lungs allow you, the presence pulls back.
It is not a kindness, for now you know how it is to be full. And now you understand the ache of emptiness.
The un-voice whispers again, this time in images. Images of a taming. A bargain. A resolution. A shared resolve. This thing knows you, knew you, but it does not tell you why, or how, or what it wants, or its name, or yours. You feel its disappointment, like you’ve missed something obvious. You do not apologise. It does not ask for your apology.
It is quieter now, your neck vacant of its arms, but it asks if you will join it when you are well enough, and when it grows angry at your lack of response, you know that you will not. You do not know why, but the feeling of resistance burns like ash in your mouth.
When it leaves you at last, dormant, rest does not come quickly. You still do not know if you are even capable of sleep, but by now your vision has blurred so completely that you see only shapes. Even later, when you hear footsteps thumping against the wet ground, your eyes cannot focus on the form that comes to hang over you.
You cannot possibly know who they are, nor do you have the energy to wonder. But as you close your sightless eyes for what you fear and hope may be the last time, something soft and warm touches your cheek. And then grazes the length of your nose, then presses into the cracked mass of your skull.
Humming, but not as before. Gentle, person-like, not like the rushing of the sea or the droning too-much presence. Perhaps they are kind, but you hardly know what that means. You do not think that you deserve kindness, whatever it is. You do not think that you want kindness, for it sounds too much like comfort.
When you sleep, you do not dream. There is little point in respite now.