Work Text:
The sound of pen on paper was like music to his processors. The soft scratching, although whispering, drowned out the background noise constantly swarming the headquarters until all he could hear was his own drawings.
Everything about the afternoon felt oddly blissful. It held a sense of peace that he'd gotten more used to these days, hand-crafted by only his own screaming efforts. Never mind the fact that he had a horrible feeling in his gut, and his head felt fuzzy for reasons he couldn't - didn't - remember.
As he sketched out a rectangle with a curved bit at the top, he absentmindedly realized he wasn't sure whose hands he saw clutching the pen. Something in the back of his mind taunted him, hissing that they must be his.
He shoved down the unbidden whisper and tethered himself back to his weightlessness, reveling in the bliss that always came with being nothing.
Joy flooded his systems as he imagined the contestants together, playing and fighting and arguing and competing. It was a fantasy he fled to so often these days, he almost dared to call it home.
Sometimes, on days like this, he could almost convince himself it was his home. It was getting easier and easier to detach from the building he sat in - what was its name again? - and utterly lose himself within the fantasy of reality shows and competitions.
Or perhaps he wasn't losing himself at all. It certainly didn't feel like he was; after fighting so hard to achieve such a beautiful calming peace, how could he dare to say he'd done anything but find himself?
Maybe this was where he belonged, and everything – outside, was what was really fake.
The idea grew on him as he spun it in his mind in tune to the twitching of the pen. That sounded right; of course this would be real and the headquarters would be fake. This was... home. This was safe.
A thought came crashing into his skull at that, and it took all his efforts not to look it in the eyes.
Something gripped the sides of his head and all but jerked his gaze upwards towards it. The motion made him dizzy, his vision swimming with the sudden movement. It took more effort than he was capable of giving at the moment to realize that there was nobody in the room with him and that nothing had touched him, and thus, he remained blissfully unaware of that revelation. He lazily looked up from the drawing that'd appeared in front of him, dazed and confused.
He couldn't see the windowed wall in front of him. Or rather, he could, but it wasn't right. It looked too fluid or too solid, too blank or too beautiful. The sky bore into him from beyond the walls of his room, making him sick with the way it didn't lurch and bend where he was certain it should.
The ground hadn't fallen out beneath him, and just for one horrible moment, his weightlessness came crashing down.
For one single, shattering second, he almost dared to recall what had drawn him here today, the events that had preceded his fantasizing.
He could almost see him in front of himself again, demanding and towering and disappointed and angry.
Although a name tugged at the back of his psyche, he didn't have it in him to remember who that was right now.
MePhone4 shrunk back where he sat, curling in on himself and gathering his sketches closer. The way he was shaking felt so beautiful, tearing him from himself in the truest way he could.
Behind his eyes, he could've sworn the clouds were glaring at him. They'd twisted into something hateful, something malicious, and he was sure they were mocking him from where they sat in the sky beyond his cage. His room? The specifics were lost on him.
The hand around his pen tensed to a bruising grip. It wasn't just nauseating how the clouds he saw didn't match the clouds he knew he should be seeing - it was frustrating. They shouldn't look like that, all fluffy and nice and safe out there - he saw them, truly saw them, and he knew they were meant to be sharp and violent and hateful.
He looked back down at his drawings right before the nausea could fully set in, could ground him too much. His mind screamed at him that something was wrong, that this wasn't right, and he absently muted the part of his processors that knew that was true.
He didn't remember who he'd been drawing, what shape they were, or what their role was. It took him a moment to even remember why he held a pen in the first place.
He swore the soft scratching of ink on paper echoed through the room as he drew once more, ignoring the way the ground forgot to lurch beneath him.
It never took long to untether himself again.
Moments later, MePhone4 was gone, and all that was left was the images of contestants and that familiar fantasy of reality tv and tropes and comfortable character concepts.
Come next day, MePhone4 couldn't remember if he'd been crying, nor could he recall the way he was certain the clouds had been glaring at him from the sky.
He could only be grateful for how merciful it was that moments like that never liked to linger.