Work Text:
there is light, white and blinding, shattering, sunlight, small creatures crawling blind into light of day. there is the chirping of birds and the sound of cool breezes and the laughter of children and cut, scene, cut, scene
cut, scene, there is a child pleading, begging, toy knife in hand, and tears down cheeks and crying in hope of mercy that doesn't come and a child hiding a smile and stifling a laugh and a child coated in ash and dust and a child who smiles empty and hollow and golden
and the world cuts, scenes shifting, and old tape cutting static in glitch and snow and falling, another child falling in another time, another place, another universe and
*┌ IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN ┘
and it is quiet and ice floats gently and hot winds blow and rain drops into puddles that never evaporate can't evaporate will never evaporate not in this time in this space
if space meant anything and if time was more than illusion, if there were more to hold onto than abstracts in the abstract and if the void held comfort, if the void held anything at all
but there is nothing was nothing, will never be nothing, nothing but a thousand identical consciousnesses and a miserable pile of destabilizing molecules too weak to touch anything real
and you ache for touch, you yearn for it, anything to remind you that
it is real (it is not)
you are whole (you are not)
you exist (you do not)
( and you ache for memories that do not exist in this time that never existed that stopped existing long ago, memories where you can weave your fingers between phalanges and poke the pads through metacarpals and feel thumbs against the edges on the inside of your holes and teeth against your mouth and it never happened no those memories are false it couldnt happen if you never happened, get a hold on yourself, focus, concentrate, remember what you were really )
but you were everything all at once, parent and brother and tormentor and confidant and perhaps in this time if you existed you would have been a lover, and false memories swell and rip at the holes where your molecules part and you collapse until whichever piece of you that would have been in this time takes control --
the martyr this time, the lover, the tragedy, and there is dust on the stone and you know how this time will end – see it happening as it begins, see the pain and grief and this you wants nothing more than to make it end, rewind and replay false memory until the world cuts and the next one fades in and maybe this time it won't be written in carnage.
there is dust in the snow and this you wants only to comfort, to envelop the grieving in the mass that was your body, broken now into molecular sludge, to create a home in your body and never let go, to take small, wide hands into long, thin ones, and destabilize forever into nothingness until even names are lost to the passage of time and the warping of reality.
but that would require you first existing.
reclaim the time.
the story continues.
violence begets violence. grief is rage. here, they all fall at once.
( there is a curious child who Knows Too Much, who Sees Too Much, who reaches into the fabric of reality and pulls strings, and there are creatures who should not exist, did exist, once, faded souls trapped in the seams between times, souls with stories and answers to questions that should not be asked and you hear them, you hear every one before reality shudders and tears again and there's that name that used to – no longer – exists and when your voice echoes it you sound like a choir of a thousand dying monsters, half speaking forward, half hissing in reverse: )
*┌ WINGDIN GASTER DOES NOT EXIST┘
on cue, as always, cut to static. rewind the time. rewind the world. a child falls.
you fall, too.