Work Text:
Time passes in the Dark Place like sand in a flipped-over hourglass. An hourglass, that is, if holes had been bored in its lid, the grains slowly flowing down and out, forever lost to cracks between the floorboards.
He measures it in sticky notes on his board, in crumpled-up pieces of paper in his wastebasket, in bullet holes and his bloody fingertips.
Every time he passes through the gates, makes the same turns, and arrives here, head blown back and body slumped in his chair, he makes his measurements.
He doesn’t know, of course, if that does him any good. He doesn’t know if his measurements are even remotely accurate. He can’t know. That isn’t for him to know.
He might be the creator of this place, but he’s basically powerless, a writer bound by a power-hungry editor’s wishes. The patterns will repeat until he manages to find a way to escape from this contract, to locate the loophole and crawl his way through it.
Every day - or from the start of every cycle - he tries to count the ways in which he loses.
–
The anger is too much to bear. It takes the place of the fear, ever-present in his mind, when it’s become too loud, too red-hot and electric.
Anger, on the other hand, is much more steady. It’s a constant. It wouldn’t seem like it, but it is reassuring, too, in the way it always comes forward in moments like this, in these moments when he shivers and shies away.
Anger comes, and it runs the show. It replaces words with action, pens with guns, and all, of course, in the name of self-defense.
Every cycle contains this anger. It’s inescapable; even if he wanted to leave it behind, he couldn’t. It’s as much a part of him as his own thoughts, his own being.
There will never be one without the other.
–
Sometimes, he feels like he’s just writing over measurements he must have taken before, the eerie shiver of deja vu too powerful to ignore. There’s a lot that he’s tried to ignore, maybe even more that he’s succeeded at ignoring, especially in those moments when anger takes control.
But sometimes, he runs his bloody fingertips over a bullet hole, and he feels like he’s done this before. He’s written these words before, etched these whispers into existence before, held that gun and rubbed this blood off before.
It’s a fleeting thought, and it never seems to stick around long enough to truly consider its validity.
–
There is so much blood. It’s on his shoes, his suit, his face. It’s everywhere.
It drips from his fingertips to the ground, thicker than raindrops.
This blood is not his.
–
He feels hopeful, every now and again. Like the light from his flashlight, shining out into all the darkest corners, there’s a burning ember of the idea that he’ll eventually be successful in his attempts to melt away what scares him most.
He remembers reading once, before all of this, that trying and failing and trying and failing at the same thing over and over and over again equals madness.
Ever since he was a much younger man, he accepted the madness in his head, the persistent buzz of too-fast thoughts and too-anxious fears, the way he could fly from one idea to the next…
And the anger rooted deep within him, its tendrils wrapped around his ribcage from the inside out.
No one ever told him that it was madness, of course. No, they used words they said were much kinder, the type of words found in textbooks and letters from his insurance company.
But he knew what it was then, and he knows what it is now.
It’s as much a part of him as the paradoxical hope is.
He has to leave here. He has to get out.
He’s scared that he won’t.
–
The anger is capable of consuming him, but it never really does. It gets close, yes, but it only takes up as much space as it thinks it can in that moment, pushing at the boundaries and testing how they flex.
He never used to think about boundaries. Alice had taught him about them, had shown him how they worked after yet another fight, tears running down both of their faces.
She had taught him in the way she taught him so many things, by learning them herself and placing them between their bodies and minds, by introducing them in her defense, by showing him how to never hurt her again.
He always had the choice to listen, to learn.
Or to turn away and continue in his ways.
The anger always steered him away from harm, spurring the inaction of freezing fear into rushing blood and movement.
Really, in the end, it was looking out for him. It protected him from the fear, from confrontation, from tears and hurt and everything painful.
The anger bristled at boundaries, because boundaries meant distance.
It couldn’t survive if it was kept away.
Without him, the anger would die, too.
Alice used to encourage him to write about his feelings, to pull them out of the hidden places in his mind and show them what light looked like.
She always knew how to make him uncomfortable.
She also made a good point.
But here, stuck here in the Dark Place, every letter he typed felt like renewing a contract, and he couldn’t risk letting the darkness grow and fester and consume.
Not again.
The anger wasn’t good at putting ideas into words. It was pure emotion, pure color.
It burned.
He opens one of the drawers of his desk and pulls out a stack of yellow sticky notes and a pen.
He strides over to his board, idly clicking the pen in his hand.
He pulls one of the yellow squares away from its infinite clones and presses it to the board, ensuring a seal with his knuckles.
He writes.
“Read me!”
Another note: “Beware Scratch!”
The fear and the shivers and the -
The anger lurks.
The anger waits.
The anger rises.
A final note, the one that means the most: “Alice”
–
When he lurches forward again, blood on his fingertips, he feels drawn to his board. It’s where he goes first, legs moving as if propelled forward by some other force.
He sees the notes, the pleas, the hopes.
There are countless crumpled-up pieces of paper in his wastebasket. He tries to make note of how many there are, but either he can’t tell, or his mind won’t let him measure them this time.
He sits back at his desk, hands hesitant over the keys of his typewriter.
He must write.
He must write as much as he must breathe.
He must escape.