Work Text:
You are a monster.
That is to say, you are an organism unlike any other. You live in the warm undercurrent at the edge of the sea. You lay unmoving at the ocean floor, silently allowing the waves to wash over you — one by one, by two hundred and fifty-five.
You are a monster among monsters. You are a monster outside of monsters.
You understand the world in layers, the surface merely a thin veneer to hide the truth. You alone are able to bear witness to the strings that lie beneath everyone's skin, intricately woven in beautifully arranged sequences that make up the fiber of their being. Yours alone are frayed and tangled, splitting open and bursting from the seams, spilling freely into the salty water that surrounds you.
You are normal. You are a bird. You are a wailing and gnashing of teeth. You are glowing.
You see the monster that is loved, and fed, and protected in someone's arms, and a part of you recalls that you were meant to be in their place. You may only observe as they are ordered to sink their teeth and claws into your shredded flesh.
You are a life scraped together from pieces discarded; what is left of your tattered form being dredged up and paraded for the amusement of others. Your presence alone brings harm to those that dare get close, ripping into and flaying them to resemble your likeness. You peel back the veneer to expose the strings.
You are a tower. You are the sinew and the remains. You are a ghost of your former self, trapped in a liquid crystal display. You are invalid garbage.
You are inside out, reversed, laying on your side in shattered fragments. You are the writhing wall of black and white and sweet orange and lavender blood. You are nothing, yet you are everything, and anything, and something after which there is no more, and defined wholly by what you are not.
And you, mindless creature that you are, given no means to form your shrill cries into words — if you were to be granted such a gift, you would bear only one request. You would plead to the world, do not see me for the spectacle that hangs from the sky before you. Lay your wide eyes upon my mangled form, and embrace me for what I should have been.
So the monster remains at the ocean floor, and it dreams.