Work Text:
And as you turn away, he grabs your shoulder. Without a care to the shulker box in your arms, his clawed nails turn your body around— the muscles there twitch, sting.
“Come on!” his eyes dig into you, and your hair jerks when you’re yanked, forwards and back, again and again and again, “Say something! Give me something to work with here! I’ve given you enough time!”
From eleven to three, you count down the years. Groupings of the varying times between seasons— you count from eleven to nine, nine to three. Ten months, nineteen months, fourteen months since. Is that ever enough time? Has it been that much time? You’ve been serving time. This is your sentence from now since forever to forever, and the definition of forever has not been defined in this context but seems to resemble infinity, from void to void—
Void engulfs you, a burn, his eyes inked black, “Listen to me! Haven’t I done enough? Are you ignoring me?” his claws sink in, a tremble running up your veins, “Stop ignoring me!”
He is black, void itself, no longer contained to his skin. He is secret and he is salvation and he is lust and he is horror; the last dredges of his time playing criminal becoming the base of a monster. No longer human, becoming disconnected from what it means to be one, the embodiment of laughter turned sour and laughter turned cruel as he dangles not life but to live in front of your barred eyes for years on years on end.
To live is to survive is to be worn down until nothing remains. Your eyes remain barred, yet hollow, as you yourself have been hollowed and emptied and gone. You much rather get back to cleaning out your skeleton farm, really.
Despite having seen the collapse of your brain, he doesn’t let you go, and you give a tight-lipped smile in appeasement, a small thing that’s more habit than emotion. He presses in, cold and warm all the same, and a hand shoves against your forehead.
“Are you sick? Is that it?” and his face twists, cheeks tearing once, twice, again to bare his teeth to the stiff air, dust stark against the moonlike white— a calamity; your spine, disk by disk, begins to tense and you stare, a deer to the headlights on a server with neither, “I guess spending all your time working didn’t do you any favours, is that it?”
He laughs. And he keeps laughing. Spit flies on your face. You don’t move— maybe that says something about you, since you never do —and the weight on your shoulders drags you down, further still.
“Do you need a break? Let’s go on another vacation! It’s been a long while, right?” and you continue smiling; it crinkles the undersides of your eyes. There’s something thick sticking to your shoulders, right onto your sleeves, and it thrums to your heart’s pump. You do have work to do, and your best friend’s going to be here for crafts soon. It wouldn’t be fair to do that to them again, and she was praising you recently too! No, it really wouldn’t be fair.
Though, it wasn’t fair of her to leave you then too, but you don’t care about that anymore.
You step back, and his hand
shifts.
“Yeah! That’s what you need! You need to get out of this place for a bit!” he presses forwards as you stumble back from his added weight, the sensation on your jaw tingling. “Let’s leave now! It’s not like you’re going to miss anything important. Hermitcraft will always be here, right?”
You open your mouth, “Shush.” and get a finger jammed right over it, shoving right up against the tip of your nose, “You don’t need to say anything. I got it.” and you smile again instead, though you can’t believe he does. Your focus fuzzes, and expands, and narrows, and before you could even begin thinking of cold metal, your next step welcomes you to hell— that is, the physical placement of it, as your spine twinges hard against the sharp pavement of the stone ground, alphabetized bone scattering everywhere—
—and suddenly, an explosion of sun, moon, star, and galaxy; a solar system collapsing into a black hole of warmth and cold and absolute devastation and deprivation, deprivation, deprivation. It’s a body against your own, you plead to yourself, but the placement of hands has shifted once more and you kick out, clawing at the sun. The buzzing around your head is chiming laughter.
“I’ll drag you there myself, if I have to!” he laughs, and laughs, and laughs, wringing the stardust straight out of your neck. The countdown has reached ten to nineteen to fourteen, back to five, down to zero, and the cycle starts again. Life and death and living on, and on, and on; a crashing of a star, the silence of a cave, the jeering of a courtroom— a mockery on display. An instrument that has been played by the stabbings of a sword, the laughter of a flight, and the quick descent into the insanity of night, as it spots your eyes and wears your limbs to not and drags you down and down and down, clawing at nothing but Pungence then the ground then…
…nothing.