Work Text:
It spends every night of its existence revolved around your life. Your home. Your small, condensed space of a house, an apartment, or even a single room that belongs to you and yet it also occupies. Everything it is surrounded by are things of value to you one way or another. Books you've read dozens of times or have promised yourself to read one day. Figurines or posters of creations or works of art you admire. A computer or television screen you spend hours sitting in front of. Staring into the coloured, microlights showing you a worlds far beyond your humble abode both wondrous and terrible and endless sources of knowledge to consume.
So many things and necessities to occupy your home. Even trash has meaning in your home. Things that were of use, provided sustenance or containers of things of other importance or the byproducts of things you eat or what your body discards. Dirt, dust bunnies, fallen bits of food and things and dried up dead bugs hidden in tight corners telling the story of a space filled with living things and home lived in.
When one stops to look around their home, there is an entire, small world contained with this box of four walls, a ceiling and a floor.
And it is the silent witness to all of it. Nightly, quietly, creeping out from the hiding spaces it has managed to squeeze itself into without alarming you. Unfurling itself to explore hushed and sleeping world you've left behind once the sun sets and sleep holds you in it's arms until morning. It always must hide itself before the sun rises. The world during the day is too bright, too hot, too *loud* for it to tolerate. It cannot even imagine spending an entire day awake and being out in the world with so much sensory inputs. It's body and organs cannot withstand it. Not like yours can. You can go where it cannot. If it tried, it may crumble under the ceaseless pressure and die.
And so it waits. It bides its time and conserves it's energy during the day. Waiting for you to come home. You who carries the warmth and smell of the outside on your skin. Who gets to walk out into that chaotic world, engaging with it. Meeting people, seeing new and old sights and basking in the ceaselessly bright sun and unending noises. Your body and mind infused with new experiences every day that waft from you as you rest within your shared home. And it’s enhanced, specialized senses pick up on nearly all of it. Your smells, your warm, and especially your emotions. Such a wide array of feelings, sensory inputs and thoughts flickering and creating neurotic bundles of energy that radiate from your being and are absorbed into it’s body as sustenance. Just as you bask in the rays of the life giving sun, it’s silently basks in your presence that fills it with life.
You are its sun.
How can one not help but love the sun?
Even on days when it is too hot or too bright, you will always need it.
And when you need something that is essential to your existence, the mind has funny ways of keeping you interested in it.
And so, every night, it studies you. It watches what you do when you are not looking. Mimics your mannerisms, pulling the taut skin of it’s face to try to copy a smile, a frown, and the look of crying. Trying to practice in a mirror but never quite getting it right. It seems so effortless when you do it.
It licks whatever is left from your meals on your plates, bowls, spoons and glasses. Lapping up every drop and crumb and churning it inside it’s mouth and it’s insides. Not nearly a delicious as your cells but it is interesting to feel what your food is like inside itself. Grinding it down to tasteless molecules where it is eventually absorbed into it’s body as it’s own byproduct from your saliva it sustains on.
It toys with the objects you have laying about your home. Curious about their functions and other potential uses. Using it’s long, flexible, soft fingers to hold a pen or a pair of tongs, finding it to be a struggle since they were made for hands much smaller and stiffer than it’s own. It envied how you could so eloquently write across a page or create a drawing from your own mind with such ease. It wanted to learn how to do it too so very much. It would have little fantasies of how you would react if you saw one of it’s drawings or a message it had left for you. Imagining the way the lines and muscles in your face would shift with your expression. How sparks of curiosity would taste from your mind as you read it. Would you adore it’s letters? Be disappointed? Would they be enough to convey what you mean to it?
Books were easier to grasp. The friction of it’s rubber-like skin allow it to hold books and turn the delicate pages. It read every book in your collection and was always excited when you added more. But always waited until the ones that had been carried by you for days until the edges were worn, the cover faded and all the pages were marked with the faint, natural oil of your hands.
And on some nights, when it was feeling bold, it would enter your bedroom as you slept and carefully take its time exploring you.
How your skin felt as it ran its fingers over your arms, your hands, your legs and feet. Utterly fascinated at how the textures and softness differ depending on where it it touched. The bottoms of your hands and feet feeling thicker and tougher than the tops. Mapping out your veins and watching the blood flow on the insides of your arms. Did you know how much of a complex marvel your body was? So many moving parts, microorganisms both inside and on the surface. Working in unison to keep you alive and whole. Did you know how much your own body cared about your existence?
On some nights it could not help itself but consume some of those cells straight from the source. Licking the skin of your palm, tasting the salt, sweat and the things you’ve touched throughout the day. Weaving its fingers through your hair, feeling how wonderful it felt to comb it and to smell the natural oils wafting from your scalp. Taking the ends of your locks and sucking on them to taste and nibble it.
And your face. Your beautiful, marvellous face was the most captivating part of all of you. How your eyelids trembled in your sleep when you dreamed, the twitch of muscle around your lips that formed words and songs and sounds that travelled from your throat. Your voice vibrating acutely through it’s very being like it was the only sound that mattered in the countless whispers of the night. No matter how far apart from each other you were in the house. The microscopic hairs lining your skin that glinted under the gaze of it’s large, yellow eyes that are perfected for the dark.
And your eyes... How it longs to stare deeply into your eyes for eternity. To count each and every fibre strand in your irises, watch how your pupil grows and shrinks from the tiniest reflection of light or when a new thought sparks behind them. Map the blood vessels in your sclera and brush it’s fingertip against the arcs of your eyelashes. Every thought, every feeling, everything that reveals your naked soul reflects in those eyes if it can stare long enough.
It wasn’t enough that it lived inside your home, knew what you ate, what you did when you thought no one was watching. It had to know more of you and wanted to taste and touch nearly every molecule that sheds from your body. Watch every twitch of muscle, every breath you take, and listen to every heartbeat that drummed from behind your ribs like a calling.
You are it’s everything.
And it will shadow you until the world turns to dust.