Archive of Our Own ^beta

Sometimes, as you pitch another dead body into the vast maw of your lusus, you wonder what life must be like for the trolls you deprive of family on a daily basis. What must it be like to have a normal life? One without duties, without this crushing sense of responsibility. How must it feel to have a lusus that isn’t a malevolent god from outside space?

It was her size that amazed you the first time you saw her. Vast white expanses of blubbery, shifting flesh stretching off into the darkness. Of course, you’d never forget the first time she saw you.

Two huge eyes blink sluggishly, barnacles cascading from the lids. You shiver as her gaze falls upon you. Blank and somehow unseeing, her eyes stare directly at you for a long, long time. You are just beginning to feel able to move again when you feel it. A scratching sensation at the back of your mind, as if something is trying to get in. It continues for a while, probing your mind gently, sending exploratory tendrils around your head. The feeling intensifies, filling your head with the imagined sound of flabby tentacles scraping across your brain. It gets louder and louder until you can bear it no longer; tucking into a ball, you clasp your head between your knees and scream.

Eventually the assault eases and you can think again, but it never quite leaves. From that moment on your mind has never truly been your own.

You have to keep her fed. It keeps her docile. If she got hungry, then she might wake up properly, and you can’t allow that.

She wants to wake up. You know this because she told you. She whispers to you all the time, quiet hissing words sliding smoothly into the corners of your mind like oil.

Quiet words, but not words you trust. Sometimes, when you’re tired, you can feel her mental tendrils caressing your brain again, stroking it and searching for weak spots. She’s desperate to get in and tear down your defences.

You try to keep up a positive face to your friends, but it’s difficult. Her whisperings never cease, always there to distract you and wear you down. Sometimes she tries playing nice, sending slimy lies into your head, all wrapped up in the shape of prophecies. Never mind how much you may want to believe them, you mustn’t let yourself consider it. You know that none of her words are true, but sometimes you wish they were.

Sometimes you come so close to letting your guard down, and that scares you. The survival of your entire race depends on the strength of your will. That scares you too; it’s an enormous level of responsibility for a troll your age, never mind your position.

She knows you. She knows everything about you. All your hopes, all your dreams, all your fears. She knows you  as well as you know yourself, and that means she knows how to frighten you.

Sometimes she doesn’t even try to trick you. Sometimes she just tries to wear you down.

Some of your friends are surprised by how excitable and confident you seem, and you don’t blame them at all. That’s not you. You try to force yourself to be as happy as you possibly can all the time, but that’s only a distraction. She’s still there in your head, still talking to you. Telling you how weak you are. How you’re not good enough. How you’ve never been good enough for anything. How you won’t win this one. You can’t win this one. You’ve never won anything in your life. You know none of it’s true, but that doesn’t stop you from worrying, a nervous feeling eating away at you. What if you aren’t good enough for this? What if you can’t win? After all, she knows you as well as you know yourself.

Sometimes you wonder if you should just give up. Maybe you should just stop feeding her, let her wake up. Is it really worth it, living with this presence in your head? Wouldn’t it be better to just end it all?

But then that’s not you thinking that, is it? That’s all her. Or at least you think it is. It might be you; you don’t really know. It’s hard to tell. You hate not knowing how many of your thoughts are really your own.

Her words aren’t all lies though. Sometimes, in quiet moments, she whispers secrets to you. Secrets about yourself. Things you try to hide, squashing your darkest corners down into the depths of your mind where you can pretend they don’t exist. She tells you dark things about yourself that even you didn’t know. Invariably they’re things you never wanted to know at all. You hate the side of yourself that she brings out, and so you do your best to hide it from your friends. Sometimes you think you might be able to hide it from yourself, but it never works. It’s still there, under the mask, and you know that if you ever crack it’ll get out. She’ll get out.

She knows how to frighten you and wear you down, and she never stops trying. It’s ceaseless. There’s never a pause, apart from when she tries flattery and lies, and that never lasts long. She’s always there, just waiting for you to make a mistake. You hate living with this kind of pressure, but you have no idea what life would be like without it.

You kick out and swim backwards away from the hulking, corpse-white shape of your lusus and watch as she swallows the corpse whole, a thin stream of blood (impossible to tell the colour in this dim light) trailing out into the dark water from her mouth. Forcing your mind to other things, you turn away and leave in search of more food for your repulsive charge. As you leave you bitterly think that everything is wrong. She’s meant to be your custodian, not your responsibility. But you shouldn’t think about that. You mustn’t think about how much you hate her; it’ll only make it easier for her to get in.