Chapter Text
Agliophobia: The Fear of Pain
The dictionary defines pain as a “highly unpleasant sensation following an illness or injury or mental suffering or distress”. Thus, pain is subjective and what is extremely painful to one might trigger little or no response in another. Therefore, pain is treated as a complicated subject by psychologists and experts in the field of medicine. Pain indicates that something is wrong in the body. But in case of Agliophobia, there is an intense and constant anxiety in the sufferer’s mind about experiencing pain. This tends to aggravate his/her physical/emotional distress and can be highly disruptive in everyday as well as medical settings. —Editorial Staff (FEAROF.net)
The first thing you will remember being aware of is the dark.
The next thing you will remember is pain.
The feeling that something was wrong. (The dark isn’t supposed to hurt.) That the burning and ache wasn’t always there.
It wasn’t.
The pain would start to fade, the burning cooling into an itch, the ache going numb. You feel relief and then… anxiety. The kind that makes a pit in your belly.
The kind of anxiety that should make you shake, starting with your paws and spreading, creeping through you until you shake from bill to tail.
You don’t shake now.
You are too small to.
(Why do you feel like this?)
You wait.
(What are you waiting for?)
The anxious energy builds and builds until…
A sharp prick. After, the pain comes shooting back.
Fire racing through your veins.
A dull but constant throbbing.
A twisting sort of stress.
(That… doesn't feel like something that should happen. It feels wrong.)
It feels like your joints and bones are being warped into shapes they shouldn’t be.
They are.
A cycle begins. Pain. A brief moment of relief. Anxiety. A prick. Agony.
Over and over, again and again.
And Again.
Again.
Eventually, you stop feeling the relief. The darkness hurt. (It always hurts.) It starts feeling cold. (A new type of pain? No. It doesn't feel nice, but something tells you it could.) Starts becoming tighter and tighter. The darkness pushes at you until you have no choice but to try to push past it.
You push.