Chapter Text
It's half past 6 and pale dawn pours in through the thin cobblestone windows studding the walls of your room. Early enough still to catch another few spare hours of sleep, maybe. It's rare enough to get more than 5 these DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT SETTLING YOUR PATHETIC ASS BACK INTO THAT RECUPRACOON. GROWING BOYS NEED THEIR REST MUCH LESS THAN I NEED TO NOT STARVE YOU FUCKING WHELP.
Not a single fucking break. Each and every day this bitch ransacks whatever plans you try tI KNOW YOU'RE AWAKE.
SON.
NEST. NOW.
BRING FOOD.
Every screeching sentence hits your skull like canonshot. Ballistic barrage ripping past grey matter into red hot thought pulsing at the core. Throttling psychic grip forcing your head under pitch waves. Sheer disorienting venom creeping up your spine, constant demands coursing through every neuron in your fucking thinkpan. You've never gotten used to this. It's too mFOOD.uch too muNOW. HAVE I REALLY RAISED A KID SO WORTHLESS AND Cch too much too much too muRUEL AS TO LET ME STARVE? YOUCH too M8R EVERY SECOND IS A GIFT FROM ME TO YOU. ONCH F8CK.E THAT CAN BE REVOKED. COME HERE. NOW. TOO M8CH. Head in hands, forcing yourself out of bed, scampering the second your bare feet scratch against icy stone. She's always known how to drag you out of bed by your strings.
Her voice fades in the echoing mass of your hallways, lost in the ambience of a poorly built castle grinding in on itself. You had no damn idea what you were doing when you commissioned this mess as a wriggler, but you can thank yourself for this minuscule rotten mercy. Grinding to a halt, you find yourself lingering at the center of the thinly carpeted hall.
The portrait sizes you up and down. You bear yourself to it every day, half a sweeps worth of saving and scrounging in corpse pockets manifested in this monumental ancestral goddess of judgement rendered in painstaking detail. She weighs every inch and pound of the curls on your head and the stubble on your cheeks. On good days, when your hair is washed and the outfit is perfect, when the gloomy light cast by long lusus tallow candles shifts across your face just right, you can bear the scrutiny of the mirror for a few fleeting moments, and whatever fragment of similarity you manage to draw forth grants you enough strength to push forward into another grim day of Work
This is not one of those days. The light reveals too much. Your gaze slips off the mirror, and the smug glare of the perfectly made up face hanging above casts you into a familiar abyss far darker than any hidden inch of this estate. But you've lingered too long already, no time to wallow just yet. No time to reflect. No time to message Pyrope, no time to initiate the rhetorical dance you two love so much, no time to wring an ounce of validation out of the only source in your life that bears that fruit. You trudge forward, into the cold depths of the castle, into places you know her voice can reaYOU PETULANT LITTLE PIECE OF TRASH I KNOW WHY YOU'RE TAKING SO LONG. DO YOU THINK I'M STUPID? You really can't do this right now you're just going to bring her her food it's going to be fI SHOULD'VE KNOWN THAT JOURNAL WAS GOING TO MAKE YOU A PERVERT. OF COURSE YOU'D GROW UP LIKE THIS.You scamper back into the warmth of the the upper floors. Cant do this cant do this cTHE LONGER YOU RUN THE WORSE IT'S GONNA BE WHEN YOU GROW THE SHAME GLOBES TO FACE ME. YOU'RE PATHETIC, YOU KNOW. YOU'RE SICK. EVEN IF YOU WANTED TO LOOK LIKE HER
Tears blur your sight as you dash up 3 flights of stairs back into the warmth. You sit under her, wretched beneath the weight of her painted gaze. A soft, chilly draft rustles the tear and snot stained fabric of the overcoat you're huddling beneath. YOU NEVER COULD, YOU LITTLE FAGGOT.