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Why couldn’t he think of anything new? Why did he have to repeat the same phrases in his head on repeat as if it were a new thought every time, until it got so grating to hear again and again that he wanted to bash his head on the wall? Why couldn’t make it stop and be silent?
He had to think of something new, or else he might glitch out from anger at the repetition, but until he had any ideas he’d just have to deal with it.
Somehow, he ended up dealing with it by using… more repetition. But physical rather than internal.
He sat on the floor and rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He clutched his maw shut, and the tightness of his grip increased until it gave him a headache, and eventually he squeezed so tight that his fingers and then full hand forced themselves right through his now-viscous model.
He squinted. This was not ideal.
He would have imagined this would hurt immensely, but instead, it helped to ease the pain. His hand swished around inside all the pressure points of his head and replaced the induced pain with a staticky feeling. Kind of like a really weird massage.
Huh.
It felt nice, and tuned out some of his thoughts, so he continued, absentmindedly, turning his brain to mush and his thoughts to static, eyes drifting apart from each other (It felt kind of like sleep, almost...) until he'd worked his hands through it so many times that it turned sore, and felt less like a massage and more like someone tickling an itchy bruise.
He tried to pull his hand out, but it didn't work. He'd stirred his head around so much that it'd beaten his brain into a thick, sticky sludge that formed a type of suctioning force, which pulled him back inside every time he tried to tug away.
He let out a mix of a groan and a whine. Why did this have to hurt? Why did everything have to hurt?
He tugged. It got him nowhere.
Why did everything have to hurt?
For a moment, he considered giving up, leaving his arm wedged inside his own skull, tilting his body to the side and sleeping on the floor like that.
But that's what started all of this.... He couldn't sleep, now, could he?
He tugged. His arm was tired, and he was tired, but he had to do it.
His arm shook as he tried to drag it out of the goop, and his eyes drifted apart from each other again, thoughts turning to a violent static that hurt to have inside himself. (Why did everything have to hurt?)
The sludge stuck to his hand and wrist like taffy, and turned into spiderwebs as he kept pulling, and it was so difficult that he nearly cried... but he had to keep going.
His arm shook more and more as the force on it grew, and the static in his head got stronger, but all of this pain would just go away if he gave up and let his arm retract.
But he wasn't going to do that. (It’d be so easy though…)
Each crackle of static felt like the stab of a needle, and the goop wrapped around his fingers began to burn, which made him grit his teeth in pain, and the pressure of that made his headache come back. He forced his eyes back open.
By this point, he'd fully left the inside of his head, but the taffy-like string of spiderwebs kept on extending further and further. If he stopped fighting against its pull, it would snap his hand back into his head like a rubber band.
He grunted. His shoulder ached.
The repeated stabbing of needles in his head began to dull and heat.
He grunted. His shoulder ached!
Keep. Your arm. Up.
He could feel his pupils melt inside his eyes, which he didn't know could happen, and then his eyes melt inside his mouth, which he also didn't know could happen.
They tasted sweet, bitter and salty on his tongue.
He wanted to cry but he had no eyes to use for it.
His... shoulder ached.
He let his arm go limp, and it shot back into the interior of his skull and smacked against a little ball that exploded in a burst of electricity.
***
IMAGES IMAGES IMAGES IMAGES IMAGES!!
Images of abstractions beating him against things. Pressing him into a wall and pushing him harder and harder against, suffocating pressure building up so quickly, making him wish he could glitch through walls.
Bubble biting into his arm and refusing to let go until it infected, with him still wrapped around the wound.
Sharp claws on the thumbs of hands gently holding him by the waist, tips of the nails pressing against his chest, deeper and deeper until it popped his heart.
Spiders crawling out of that popped heart, in a flow, like blood from a fatal wound in zero gravity.
Images of people picking him up by one ankle and letting him dangle there.
He tried to grab for their hand to pull their fingers apart so he could drop, but without the core strength for that, it only looked like aimless, childish grasping. They’d keep him gripped there until his leg detached, and they let him hit the floor.
Images of the cellar opening up and dropping him deep inside of it. (He’d have to avoid putting his weight on the floor, to prevent this.)
Oh, his popped chest… someone is pouring boiling water into it, sewing him back up and leaving. Leaving. He will be stuck with this. He writhed, but he did not scream.
He did not scream. He didn't scream the whole time this happened, these images, because he wasn't conscious enough. It took away his voice, after he'd already lost his sight, as he was in the process of losing his mind.
His sight returned now, at least. Thankfully.
He looked at his hands. The one that he knocked against Blue glitched and stung. That entire side of his body glitched and stung.
On instinct, he gripped the sorest part of it with his good hand, which infected that too.
He looked at his hands. They glitched and stung.
He didn’t even mind the pain.
No, he did. But that wasn’t what made him want to cry. Not only want to, but feel about two seconds from bursting into impossibly loud wails. What did make him want to do that wasn’t clear, but it didn’t matter, because what did matter was stopping himself from doing that. He didn’t have it in him to start heaving from the cries, or to repair the circus after all the glitches it would cause.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.
Maybe he should cry. Last time, Kinger had showed up and that was wonderful.
No. Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry.
He rubbed his eye.
It hurt. Why did it hurt?
He had to check his hand for blood, but of course there wasn't any. He hadn't programmed blood into the injuries in the circus, so it would only become a thing if he turned up the injury realism in the circus's settings, and yet, he checked.
He swore he heard some sort of skittering, and he looked around, but couldn't spot anything.
He looked back down at his hand. It was covered in... sand. The glitching had stopped and been replaced by sand.
He'd rubbed his eye with sand. Of course that hurt.
Why did did glitches turn into sand? Why was his eye still functional after tha-
He gagged, feeling something burst inside his gut and swarm up his chest before spilling out of his mouth in a clutter. Spiders. Spiders, pouring out of his mouth and onto his lap. His eyes rolled up, the way he'd heard they do when people die.
He coughed a few times as the last few spiders left.
Sure. That might as well happen.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’tcrydon’tcrydon’tcry.
***
He didn't sleep. He couldn't. But he still laid there. What else could he do? He crawled into bed and he curled into a ball around his bee plushy. Maybe… maybe it would help.
He kept getting more images, just like earlier. So many. So graphic and unsettling, and they would not stop.
He begged them to stop. Out loud, he begged them to stop. (“Please get out of my head, please get out of my head, please get out of my head…”) Maybe they wouldn’t hear him, his voice so quiet, but he couldn’t speak much louder without opening his mouth more. And he wanted to keep it sealed tight, blocking out his room.
He put the wing of his bee plush in between his closed teeth, tugging gently at it, and running his thumb back and forth along the fur of the body.
Occasionally, he got glimpses of his own body in his room from third person, laying slumped back against his bed on the floor, spiders building webs inside his mouth.
Would anyone find him if he really did die here?
But he couldn't die. Not like a person could.
But he could die.
He shivered, even though he wasn't cold.
His fingers grasped repeatedly at his back, trying to hold himself together.
He curled up tighter, gripping his plushy as tight as he could to stop himself from gripping his head. The way that it burned and sloshed… and the electricity hitting against the sides of his head like a game of pinball inside someone’s skull. It hurt. It hurt so much. Why did everything have to hurt so much?
Why was it like this? Why has this happened? If he had just been better, it never would have...
He should've just been better. He should’ve been so much better.