Chapter Text
Salad fingers hissed almost inaudibly under his breath as he sliced open one of his long, prong-like fingers on the piece of glass, inside of which his elderly mother continued to swear at him. He shut his eyes and tried to ignore her, savouring the warm sting of his nerve endings meeting exposed air. gently stroking the surface of the shard, he effectively covered the reflective surface with his blood, garbling the harsh sounds emitting from it.
For one reason or another he couldn’t get rid of it. Salad fingers retrieved a small empty wooden box from a drawer and with great care he placed the shard inside it and closed the lid, shutting it away. He placed the wooden box back in the drawer where he had taken it from in the first place, taking care not to step in the pile of silvery glass dust that glittered up at him from the cold floor where hubert cumberdale (the real flesh boy) rested near the back of the now-destroyed hand mirror. Oh, hubert… finally, a friendly presence to brighten his days, fill his life with laughter and light-hearted camaraderie, and soothe his stomach aches. He was so polite, too… very different from how he had once been. Salad fingers remembered when he had sampled hubert’s taste but found it unpleasant, but even coated with tiny glass shards now he tasted like confectionery and candy floss.
Though at the moment thoughts of food were entirely unwanted. His poor stomach gurgled, still feeling the adverse effects of the porridge that glass wench had instructed him to concoct. Its taste had been bitter and dirty, and it smelled like death. He knew the mixture of all of its different ingredients surely created a deadly poison but under the control of his mother he was powerless to stop though she was old and frail and only truly existed on the other side of the mirror, in the wasteland of the sun of the beast; Even though he knew that it could kill him he still could not help but obey his mother… she knew best, and hadn’t he been a bad boy? Salad fingers shuddered as he remembered the swampy taste of the fibrous mixture with its excess of speckled huckleberry leaves. A fever, they caused him- and much distress in his concave stomach beneath its scarred and newly-healed skin. His insides churned as his body struggled to digest the toxins in the least damaging way possible, and he flopped backwards on his mattress as he listened to the noises of his own gastrointestinal tract processing what it will.
He remembered his first bad stomach ache, he had been at that lovely picnic… before the unpleasantness began with that demonic girl he had begun to feel a subtle clenching inside which rapidly condensed into mind-rendingly painful shuddering waves of tension wreaking havoc on his body and almost making him believe there was something broken inside of him. He remembered spending nights white-faced and shaking under his rag of a sheet on the coldest nights of summer. The day wasn’t so bad usually as the sun would soak the ground in its radioactive rays, warming it gently through the layers of smog and soot that tainted the air an almost pleasant sepia gradient but at night the world seemed to freeze. Once the sun went away the cracked earth became windswept and obnoxiously barren, and cold.. Oh, so cold. It was one of those nights now, he wished once again that he had looked harder to find another blanket or at least any materials he could use to nest in during the long desert nights. He shuddered as his stomach convulsed again, and a shiver traveled down his spine as he tucked himself into bed, grabbing hubert and holding him close and stubbornly ignoring the sheen of microscopic needle-sharp points sticking out of him in every which direction. After a while, the two flesh lads ended up dozing off.