Work Text:
You feel sick. Everything is red. He pries himself open, left bare before you, heart pulsing. Desperate. It's almost hypnotizing, and as your hands fall from your mouth and his body falls apart from him, you--
You think you understand. Soft threads of something that is not something, chilling the room. The torches burn just as strong, but their heat can no longer reach you. The cabin is the same. You are somewhere else. Sharper lines, softer shades than you have ever known. You are in the same room you always have been. Sitting by the wall. There is no chain, but there is still no escape. For eighty years, and then eighty years more. The days stretch until days have no meaning, until a year stops being anything. You are exactly as lonely as when you started. You are exactly as afraid.
You kill him. He loves you. You kill him. He loves you. You kill him. He loves you.
Here is a body. The flesh sloughs off in pieces, and it walks on. Feathers fall, then skin, then muscle. It bloats. It withers. It is nothing. It walks on. It does not realize it is nothing. Pain drags onward, stillness stretching each motion.
All of existence at once, then nothing. Contentment. Complacency. The door never existed, after all. Here is a rock, sitting in a river. It does not change. The river slows. It does not change. The river halts, water lapping at it. A plea. It does not change.
You kill him. He loves you. You do not know him. He loves you. He sits, awaiting a knife to his throat, to his heart, to his lungs. He loves you.
He kills you. He loves you. Your existence hurts him.
He loves you.
Unchanging. You are happy here. You are happy here. The cabin is the same. It has always been the same. There is nothing outside. There is nothing inside, save for pure, stricken bliss. The sun hangs heavy in the sky. Motionless. Euphoric.
You pick up the rock. It does not change. Your fingers find the gaps in it. Sink in. Prying it apart. It breaks too easily, too brittle, into far too many crystal pieces. A geode of rich colors you have never seen, greens and golds, shimmering, shifting. Scattered on the ground. It's... Beautiful.
You think you're going to throw up.