Work Text:
Hand to hand with the beast, there was no fur-bound book that could’ve compared.
He knew the feeling of his own skin across the wood grain of his shelving. If only by the monotony of lazy hands skating the edges until they hit leather. He liked to trace the covers. He knew them by heart, treasures under no gaze but his own, he’d loved, penned, loved again. They hadn’t needed much else, he’d never let dust settle. He could say the same of himself.
In his own four dirty, windowed walls, there was music. In ink, composition sweet and old, there was his vintage love. A desk that smelt of Camellia, bittersweet, of grace and preciousness or long lost love, or whichever he’d read them to be that day.
There was life in the dog-earred guide to flowers pressed and yellowing between the first slips of his novella. Here was his dignity, even laid tight fisted in the small of his blankets, sweaty and live. Animal, quite possibly, or whatever he’d pictured himself to be that day.
This was not his desk. This was not his, at all. He had not put this to pen.
Wind stirred about his loose limbs, cold beat above the heat behind his eyes, his collar pulled up snug to his neck. Knuckles pressed to his skull. Regaining himself, slowly, finding himself in his own description.
Watching his legs move was, by all means, different than moving his legs; each sensation was fixed upon him, no more the writer than he was the reader. His breath became buried under a huff and snort. Simply, cold. His words lending to snow, further and further straying from literate, until they escaped him entirely.
Trenched in that slow, roiling drag, he saw the cabin, and then nothing at all.