Work Text:
I’m… very tired.
Actually, no.
There’s a better word to describe this.
I’m… exhausted.
Been out and working for… a really long time.
The clock says that it is two thirty in the morning.
I’m never up this late… er… early, I guess.
My eyes keep wanting to close, which is rather annoying. I need to see in order to burn the advertisements properly.
If I miss… and hit his letters on accident…
uh… one of my fingers is still mis-aligned from the last time I screwed up.
So.
Nothing good.
I haven’t eaten in a while either.
He hasn’t stopped to take a break, which means I have to keep blasting away at stupid obnoxious windows and am unable to quell the relentless ache in my stomach.
He got home around three in the afternoon, where he took me out and proceeded to watch random animations online for hours. Every advertisement I burned, I could feel my energy seeping out through my fingers.
Usually I’m able to replace the energy I lose during the day by stealing some text while he eats dinner, but today he didn’t do that and instead holed up in his room, watching video after video until he read his email and realized that he forgot to write an essay that’s due tomorrow… er, today.
Dear lord it’s early.
I barely have enough energy to generate tiny, pathetic sparks now and I’m not sure how much longer it’ll last… he doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon.
If I could have maybe just one letter… perhaps I’d be less tired? Just one miniscule letter, just one… he wouldn’t miss that, right?
But… I have learned from experience… he misses every letter.
He gets very, very angry with me when I take one.
They are all very precious to him, or something, even though he likes to write and erase and rewrite slightly different ones over and over and then deletes the whole thing months later.
I can guarantee that the letters are more precious to me.
My stomach growls every time he highlights a wall of text and sends all the letters to the trash.
If he dislikes them so much, he should give them to me instead of deleting them from existence.
It would work better in every way, but he probably thinks my reliance on letters is a problem with the code instead of his sentient adblocker trying to not starve to death.
As it turns out, living things need food to continue living.
Shocker.
—
I glance at the clock again.
It is now three a.m.
If I wasn’t leaning against the wall there is no way I could stay upright.
My arms feel like limp noodles. It gets harder and harder to lift them.
I really want to go to sleep…
My eyes are burning from the bright white of the computer.
Why is everything so bright?
Who decided that essays should be typed on the most blinding color possible?
I never thought I’d miss being inside the horrible antivirus chest, but I swear I’m about to pass out.
And at least it’s dark.
I can’t really move in there…
But I’m so tired it probably won’t matter much.
My body begs me to let go and slip into unconsciousness, but I force myself to stay alert-ish. I’ve… done longer shifts before. Probably.
Yeah, there was that one time he binged some anime series all night. The only reason I was able to stay awake was because he’d been on a website where there were letters in the corner that he didn’t mind being eaten.
Or… uh…
I…
I must…. stay…. hhh…. stay awake!
I have to….
have to…
…
NO!
If I fall asleep he’ll punish me… it’ll be bad…
He’s already mad because he’s writing and he’s always in a bad mood when he’s doing that.
Not sure why.
Words are delicious.
Take “cornobble” for example.
It means to slap someone with a dead fish.
Nice word, not sure where I found it, but it’s one of my favorites.
Maybe it’s because he doesn’t use the nice words.
He uses the same ones over and over and they’re boring and stale.
Maybe I should help him?
That’s probably a better job than this at any rate.
Since he doesn’t seem to want to let me go, he might as well let me do something interesting, right?
Especially because I can read his writing, and it’s not that good.
Very bad, actually.
Clippy dislikes editing with him a lot because he never takes his suggestions. The paperclip might be a little annoying, but at least he knows the difference between “they’re” and “their” and “there.”
Whenever he complains to me about it, I offer to switch jobs. He always declines because he probably doesn’t like the idea of sleeping in a tiny box or walking around with a heavy ball chained to his foot.
Unfortunate, really. Being an adblocker has tons of perks. For example, you get to experience gravity in a neat way when the animator throws you across the computer! So enticing!
Oh yeah, you also have to stay up until the earliest hours of the morning because the animator forgot to do his homework.
Yup.
hhhhhhh…
It’s like there are weights attached to my eyelids because they cannot stay open. They keep shutting. Don’t they know I need to see in order to destroy the… uh…
destroy the…
hhh…
wham!
Suddenly I’m careening through the air and whack against the side of the window.
A strangled cry leaves my throat as I crash and tumble to the ground.
wh-
what happened??
My eyes are definitely open now.
I blink a couple times.
My head is throbbing painfully.
Something tightens around my ankle and suddenly I’m flipped upside down, swinging slightly from how fast he yanked me into the air.
Through the screen he looks… angry.
That’s not good.
My stomach churns although I’m not sure if that’s anxiety or hunger.
He shakes me a couple times in irritation. My brain feels like scrambled eggs… I wonder what those taste like.
They always look so delicious in the commercials…
I thud to the ground once more.
Sharp pains shoot up my spine.
My ankle was already scabbed and annoyed at me, now it is definitely bleeding from where the edges of the cuff bit into it.
I wince as I try to move to a more comfortable position, lifting my hand and incinerating the advertisement that the animator was apparently allergic to closing on his own.
It’s not that hard.
Just click that little x at the top.
There aren’t even that many pop ups in Word, but just enough that I have to stay awake at ungodly hours and nearly fall asleep before another one shows up. Then if I don’t get rid of it within 0.000001 seconds, the animator thinks I’m being disobedient and tosses me into a wall to uh… teach me a lesson? I don’t know honestly…
The animator returns to typing furiously, banging more boring sentences into the page.
I slump once more and attempt to keep my eyes from closing. It works for about three seconds.
hhhhh…
I don’t want to fall asleep!
er… I do.
But the animator will beat me up and I don’t want to deal with that.
I search my brain for words to repeat out loud but my mind comes up empty.
so…. hhh… tired…
My head is drooping. My neck doesn’t want to hold it up anymore. Not good.
I try to prop it on my knees and start reading the animator’s essay out loud. It’s about something mind-numbingly boring so I start babbling to myself about dinosaurs. That works until I realize I don’t actually know that much about dinosaurs.
Then I register that he’s stopped typing and is looking his essay over.
He doesn’t look pleased…. in fact he looks just as tired as me.
But that doesn’t make sense…
It’s not like someone is forcing him to stay up this late. He can go to bed whenever he desires.
Or, y’know, he could have written it when it’s not fricking three thirty in the morning.
I think maybe he’s almost done? Because he’s starting to fix misspelled words and do some editing stuff… finally.
My eyes close for the five billionth time and I give up on trying to open them again… because I’m so… hhh… exhausted… and need one second of rest. There’s been no pop ups in a while anyway, so it’ll probably be fine.
Just as that thought enters my brain… I hear that irritating little noise, the bane of my existence, and crack open one eyelid to see an obnoxious flashing window with some sketchy link on it.
I barely look, just lift a hand and send some feeble sparks into the air, burning the advertisement.
burning the advertisement…
burning the…
why’s it still there?
and why is his essay–
My eyes snap open
to see all the letters melting and charring and–
forming into a pile of ash that grows larger and larger until all that’s left is–
a blank white document a-and–
the burnt, smoky remains of… of words–
that he’d been pounding out all night–
My breathing is shaky and panicked now.
I blink, blink again, because this is clearly some sort of vivid hallucination out of tiredness, or perhaps I’ve fallen asleep and am having a nightmare…
I can’t even start turning my head to see how furious the animator is before I’m yanked into the air, the joints in my leg screaming, and slammed into the side of the window with a wham!
There’s not even a moment to catch my breath or shield myself before he does it again (wham!)
My pounding headache grows stronger and (wham!)
I try to protect my head with my hands (wham!) unsuccessfully.
I’d probably throw up if I had eaten anything recently (wham!)
With each smash the stabbing, shocking pains multiply (wham!) and keep getting more and more and more–(wham!)
My head is bleeding.
Red spots drip onto the pristine canvas below (wham!)
I got a glimpse of his face.
He’s absolutely livid (wham!)
seething… enraged… irate…
nice words… (wham!)
I must be delirious now… hehe
words…
I’m… I think I’m broken (wham!)
There’s a crack
probably one of my teeth
or one of the small bones in my hand (wham!)
my vision is swimming
can’t…
stay…
awake…
(wham!)
before the world fades into oblivion (wham!)
I think
at least… I’ll get… to sleep now… hhh…
right...?