Work Text:
It is the respiration upon a threshold, shallow and juddering before oblivion snatches all in its grasp. It doesn't come as one swift gesture; mercy is a stranger here.
It lingers, deliberate, pulling at the corners of your existence like some disentangling thread. The world yawns open around you, vast and uncaring. Its expanse feels asphyxiating. You are being crushed with indifference.
The sound of your own pulse grows fainter, replaced by the silence of stone and shadow. The red warmth inside you spills out in gradual, agonizing waves, pooling beneath your groveling mass, sinking into the earth.
Your body, shaken and unwilling, clings to the shreds of its own destruction, folding in upon itself as if to protect it from that with which it is familiar. Yet there is no flight, no reprieve. The fire you feel, that is not salvation. It's hunger tormented, merciful, eating away the last parts of you. It is the lie of the body, the last trick it plays as it tears itself apart: that which once was warmth now mocks life with its cruel mimicry, a phantom comfort consuming the very essence it pretends to preserve.
And yet, as the flames lick at the edges of your consciousness, the pain shifts, settling. It doesn't go away, it goes down, plunging to something further, something beneath even pain. The thoughts scatter away like ash upon the wind. Flickers of memory struggle to the surface. Faces, voices, snippets of a life no longer available. They become distorted, out of focus -- their edges hazed by a weight of something coming. You try to grasp them, but they fall through your fingers, taking with them the ache of what they meant, of what you were.
The noise now is excruciating, a smothering tide that drowns out everything except the pressure in your head. It is not music. It is not solace. It is the sound of expiring.
And then warmth.
It seeps into your flesh, subtle and insidious, a ghost of something once cherished. For one moment, it is relief. For one moment, it is hope. But it is neither. It's the last betrayal of the body, the fire of a dying wisp burning itself up in one final futile spasm. It tells you you are safe, that you will be saved, even as it devours what little is left of you. It is kind. It is cruel. And it is a lie.
No crescendo, no final cry, only the slow dimming of what you were, until even the echoes fade. Until the warmth fades. Until you are no longer.