Work Text:
It doesn't hurt any more.
It's a strange thought to have, he thinks idly, when he has the chance to think.
It doesn't hurt.
Any more.
Maybe it's foolish to take for granted things you have, like hands or voices or eyes. Maybe it's foolish to think that things that go bump in the dark are content taking physical parts of you. Maybe the childish fear of being eaten is better than adult realization that you won't be. That it will let you go, choose to not consume you, and you have to live with the knowledge that you were spared when others were not.
The train rocks back and forth as Hildy reads and Stud fights to school his thoughts to the lack of pain and not the memory of static and imperfection and black ooze dripping across his cheeks as Gertrude jams his face into her chest and the whirring buzzing of a moviola—
It doesn't hurt any more and that is more dangerous than it hurting.
Pain is a way for the body to check itself, to remind itself that it is pushing too far, that this is the point of no return. This new thing, this information spun into cellophane strips and woven into blades that tear and take?
It does not hurt.
It just takes. Replaces. Sticks deep in the holes where it has removed something important.
And the place where his eyes used to be—covered with sunglasses and painted thinly over with smiles and compliments and fumbling stumbling apologies—are holes it lives in.
He wishes it would hurt. That would be a light in the tunnel, something he could think about. But it doesn't.
It doesn't hurt in the slightest.
So he has to focus on that instead.