Easier

Easier

Feitan x Reader // word count 4.3k

If you drink with him tonight, you’ll still be trapped. Things will not get better, and they’ll likely get worse. You know that. But it’s so hard to resist a chance to feel good.

Tags/warnings: dark content, kidnapped reader, noncon (both parties are intoxicated, it’s implied that reader is more so), drinking, coping through drinking, unsexy smut, drunk sex, outdoor sex, reference to previous threats of violence, attempted knifeplay

Feitan has a habit of bringing you things that you do not want. He does not hand them to you - instead, he deposits them on your bed or your floor and then looks at you expectantly, in much the same way that a cat might deposit a dead mouse on your doorstep. It happens often, so when you hear the rattle and click of the lock on your door, you are not surprised to see him enter with something in his hand.

“Here.” He doesn’t make eye-contact - not until he yanks the door shut behind him, forcing it to scrape against the warped wooden frame, and pulls the chain that dangles from the bare, yellowed bulb in the center of the ceiling. Then, he brandishes his offering, raising it up with an awkward jerk of his wrist. “For you.” A bottle of clear liquor, with his knuckles white around its neck, and a single glass tucked under his arm. It’s a regular one, and not a shot glass (not surprising - you’re shocked that he even owns any cups that aren’t made out of plastic), and the bottle is cheap, but neither of those little details are really the problem.

You shift your weight backwards slightly, bracing your hands against your bare mattress. “I don’t want it.”

Feitan crosses the room, somehow managing to avoid a single creak in the rotting floorboards, and sits on the ground directly beside your bed. He looks at the place on the floor beside him, and then stares at you without blinking until you give in, sliding cautiously from your bed and pulling your knees up to your chest as you sit.

You eye the dubious gift with apprehension.

“I didn’t put anything in it.”

“I wasn’t worried about that,” you say, before you can really think about your answer.

He tilts his head. “Really?”

“…not just that.”

“Smart.” He nods curtly, as if he expected this response, although his gaze drops for a moment and his hand twitches anxiously at his side. “I show you.” He pours out about a shot. The cowl over his face comes down with a sharp tug, and he wrinkles his nose at the contents of the glass before downing it with a straight face.

You’ve never seen him drink before, or smelled it on his breath, so you are almost inclined to be impressed.

“What else are you worried about?”

His breath usually just smells like he doesn’t own a toothbrush. You pointed this out once, and ended up with a pair of pliers in your mouth. He didn’t actually remove any of your teeth, and the corners of his eyes were creased as his face hovered over yours, like the whole thing was good fun, you teasing him and him paying it back in kind. His breath was fresh the next time you saw him, washed out with a sickly-sweet-something that repulsed you even more than the rot it replaced.

“What else?” he prompts.

“I don’t like your presents.”

He pauses for a moment, as if he finds what you’re saying baffling. “You like this one.”

“No, I don’t.” There are plenty of reasons not to like it. For one, the fact that it is different from all the others. He usually gives you harmless things. Some of them have been truly undesirable, like the half-wilted flower with strangely shaped leaves and an even stranger smell, or the scuffed silver ring for which the previous owner, he assured you, had no further use. Others, you tried to reject only because they came from him, and took advantage of in the moments when you were too tired to care about your pride. Soap of the exact same kind that you used to stock in your home. A soft pair of socks that very nearly matched and were very nearly clean. They were all unsettling in their own way, of course. But this one is different.

Why is it different? You do not like the answer, but it is creeping up on you, getting stronger by the second. If you drink, you will stop thinking, if only for a few hours. You will stop caring about his breath, and picturing his face hovering over you, and wondering when it will stop merely hovering and do the things he wants it to do.

Why is it different? Simple. Because you want it, for once.

He tilts his head. Waiting.

“I don’t like it,” you repeat, all too aware of the way he’s sizing you up, wondering what little movement or twitch of your facial muscles might give you away. “I want it gone.” You are still picturing exactly what those eyes look like when they’re so close that they make yours go blurry and crossed. He didn’t kiss you then - he still hasn’t. But that’s only another thing to fear. It will happen, and everything else along with it. It’s only a matter of time. “Go away.”

“No.” He pushes the glass towards you, and the bottle along with it. He doesn’t say anything else, and he doesn’t leave.

You should pour it down the sink, or throw it out the window. He’d probably let you. He never forces you to accept anything he gives you, although the look of genuine disappointment in his eyes when you refuse is so unsettling that you usually play along. “Why…” You drop your gaze along with the rest of the sentence. It’s obvious, isn’t it?

He shrugs. “Why not?”

You ask yourself the same thing, and come up with a multitude of reasons, and an answer to them all. You are already here, in this room, in this house, with no way out, and nothing to think about except the things he will do, and when. There is no good choice here. And there is an easier one. You bite your tongue, and then your lip, but it does nothing to stop you. “Okay.”

You hold the bottle parallel to the ground, and count one-two-three like someone once told you to do when measuring out a shot, but it’s full and it comes out fast and maybe just maybe you let your handle tilt a little too far in the wrong direction. It doesn’t go down easy, either. You’ve got nothing to follow it with, or to add to cut through the bitter taste. It wouldn’t be hard to stand up and get water, but you don’t feel like moving at the moment. The usual warm, pleasant sensation that you experience when you down the first drink of the night is absent, drowned out by the face staring back at you.

He smiles, and drops his gaze, and his cheeks are flushed, and you don’t know if it’s just from the liquor -

This was a mistake, of course. Of course. You knew that going in. But it’s too late to correct now, and there’s only one way left to go: down, and down, and down. You splash another helping into the glass - one-two-three-four-five - and close your eyes as you choke your way through it.

As soon as you’re done, before you can set the glass down, he takes it out of your hand, fingers brushing cautiously against the back of your hand before easily prying it loose. “I go now.”

You think, for a moment, that he means he’s going to leave, and take his gift along with him (a twinge of disappointment, or maybe something closer to panic, comes along with this, and you hate yourself for it). Instead, he matches the portions you’ve drank with his own. From his face, you would think that it was only water in his cup, although you think you see that faint look of disgust appear once again in the moment before he drinks. When he’s done, he fidgets with the bottle cap, flipping it effortlessly between his fingers. It’s a repetitive motion, one that might be soothing to watch if it wasn’t for the dark stains beneath his nails. He is focused, almost meditative, not even glancing up at you as he toys with the small plastic round, but there is a tension in his shoulders and the way he sits.

You feel it too. It will be a relief, you think, when the waiting is over.

He offers the bottle cap to you. Silently, another little gift in the same night, perfectly centered in his palm. A part of you wants it. But your hands are not elegant - not now, not ever - and you have accepted too much from him already.

Too much, and not enough. You watch him for several more minutes, and will the bottle to remain on the floor, instead of making its way into your hand.

Outside, a slight wind has picked up, the noise dulled by the metal slats fastened across your window. You turn away from Feitan, towards the sound, and slump forward, holding your face in your hands. It’s peaceful, for what feels like a long time. Peaceful enough that you can concentrate on the presence of your body, and the pace of your thoughts, and imagine the alcohol slowly creeping up through your veins and covering up all the things you don’t want to have in your head.

Feitan comes to crouch in the periphery of your vision. You did not hear him move, but that is nothing new. You would not have heard him, you’re sure, even if you had had nothing at all to drink. But now that he is here, you are imagining how you will feel once the warmth has peaked and faded away, and you are still alone with him, and nothing has changed at all. He passes you the bottle, and you drink straight from its mouth, barely registering the taste, too much, too fast. He snatches it back, and matches your swig -

You have an amusing thought that you know he wouldn’t like. It expresses itself on your face before you can snatch it back.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” You arrange your features carefully, and shut your mouth. “It’s nothing.”

“Okay.” He doesn’t look at you with suspicion, like he normally would. He just shrugs, and follows your gaze to the slit of starlight that pokes out from an unobstructed section of the window. “No moon tonight.”

“I wouldn’t know.” It comes out bitter, and you are only slightly surprised to realize that you no longer care how you sound.

“You know now.” He does something you’ve never seen him do before: takes off the cowl entirely and discards it on the floor. “If I take you outside, will you be happy?”

“No.” Your tongue is starting to feel heavy in your mouth, fuzzy around the edges. “I’ll still hate you.”

“Okay.” He looks away from you, reaches again for the bottle, then seems to think better of it. “We still go.”

“Now?” You don’t think you want to stand up, but you do it anyways, before he can even tell you what to do. You’re proud to note that the movement comes easily to you; if you were asked to walk in a straight line, you think that you could. Maybe you could run, too. Maybe faster than him, in your current states.

“Now.” He stands up beside you, surefooted, and grabs your hand. His fingers do not interlock with yours - instead, he wraps them around the back of your palm, and presses his thumb hard against the other side of it. His grip is stronger than it has any right to be, but it does not hurt.

“Why?”

“Why not?” He actually grins, and it’s so jarring that it brings you back down to earth for a moment. “You won’t run away.”

“You don’t know that.” You can see his teeth. By some miracle, they are white enough, and straight enough, but you are still disgusted by them. “I’ll probably try.”

“Okay.” He tugs you towards the door by your hand. “You try.”

You hesitate for a moment, and he pauses, allowing you to pick up the bottle from the floor. It is still open, but the smell of it has become far less offensive, and you grip it as tightly as he does to your hand. Then, you are out - out of the room, first, then past the staircase that he has not yet forced you to descend, where he comes up at the end of the day or night - past that, and then you are past the front door, and the wind that you listened to for so many minutes is howling in your ear. It occurs to you that you do not even know what the house looks like from the outside, but you do not bother turning around.

“This way.” Trees surround the house on every side, and he takes you into them, guiding you through the most spacious paths between the trunks. “I show you something.”

The last time he showed you something, it was not nice - you think about this, and clutch the bottle tighter to your chest, and try not to picture the bones beneath the skin of your hand, small and coated in blood and easy to break. He has similar bones in his possession, not all of them in one piece, belonging to bodies that were once people, with names he told you he had forgotten.

What are you doing? You tip the mouth of the bottle up to your lips, but he jerks you sharply in a new direction, and you only manage to catch a bit of what sloshes out. You vaguely register, moments later, that there is a clearing in front of you, and that it might be pretty in the daytime, and that there are weed-flowers at your feet, the color of which you cannot make out. More lucidly, you observe that the collar of your shirt is wet, and that Feitan’s grip on your hand is tight enough to hurt after all.

“We sit down now.” He sits, and takes you down with him, and more of the contents of the bottle slips away as you struggle to keep it in your grasp. The grass is wet, too. His face is very close to yours. His head tilts to a bizarre angle, his face seeming to blur in front of you, the curve of his smile higher on one side than the other. He laughs - it’s a raspy, quiet sound that is completely unfamiliar to you. Unfamiliar to him, too, you think. “You’re drunk.”

“So are you,” you say, although you do not know if it is true (it probably is - you don’t think he would laugh otherwise). The amusing thought comes back, and this time, you do not filter it away from your mouth. “You shouldn’t have drank as much as I did. We’re not the same size.”

“We’re not.” He blinks unnaturally slowly - or maybe he’s consciously closing his eyes, or maybe it’s just that everything seems a little slower, even the wind yanking his hair away from his face. “Closer sitting down.”

You snort. “Barely.”

“Then lie down.”

You realize that you have been wanting to laugh for a long time, and you do it wildly and bitterly, a grinning scream that you cut short with another swig of the thing which is starting to taste more like water than anything else. “I’m not stupid.”

“No.” He sways forward and puts his hand over yours, and you - after a moment, a stupid, stupid moment - snatch it away.

“‘m not stupid, and I hate you.” Your head feels light and heavy at the same time, scared and free, and neither feeling really matters, and you don’t want to think about it.

“I know.” He looks disappointed, you think, although he might just be tired. How late is it? Late enough that before he arrived - how long ago? - you were scared of falling asleep - you have bad dreams, every night - but you feel okay now -

“Why’d you bring me here?” Your words are not coming out the way you want them to. You don’t mean this clearing - you mean here, with him, forever, or however long he wants you -

“I wanted to.” He gets what you mean, you think. “Might change your mind.”

“I won’t.”

“I know.” He slips his hand into his pocket, and fidgets with something inside, and you do not think to wonder what it is.

“You should let me go.”

“No.”

“I should run away.” You laugh, because the idea of running right now is ridiculous, just like every other idea that passes through your head. All of this is awful, and stupid. Better to be stupid. “That way.” You raise your hand, and point to a place where the trees are less dense, where you think you could run without falling, if you really tried. “I’ll live in the woods. Hunt squirrels.” Oh, how nice it would be right now to talk to someone who wasn’t him. But it is good not to be alone. You think you would cry if you were alone. “You’d never find me.”

He coughs out another rusty laugh (but it’s mean this time, or it feels mean, anyways) and sticks his hand into his pocket. “Then go.” His eyes narrow, and he does not look disappointed anymore, but you’re not really thinking about how he feels to begin with. “I give you ten seconds.”

“Really?” You swing backwards where you sit, then straighten, then shake your head. Make it clear. Do you bring the bottle with you? It will slow you down, but you want it. If you do not have it (oh, god) you will have to wake up and think about all of this, and you don’t want that. It scares you. You can’t.

“Ten.”

You blink. “Now?”

He nods. “Nine.”

“Fuck.” You rise clumsily to your feet, stumble on your first step, and take off straight ahead, with what’s left of your liquor held tight to your chest. The trees are dense, your footing unstable, and suddenly you are going sideways when you mean to go straight - a branch scratches your face, and you grab it, as if to tear it straight off the tree. What number is he on? He was not talking loudly, and you cannot hear it except in your own head, where you are trying to keep track. Three, two?

You hear the crackle of dead leaves somewhere close. Closer. Then his hand is on yours, and you have fallen, and you have no idea which one of these things happened first, and your hands are empty, and the ground is wet on your back. You open your mouth. At the same moment, you feel something hard and sharp against your neck, but you don’t register that in time to stop yourself from speaking - or attempting to. You don’t know what you’re trying to say.

“You stop talking now.” The blade that appeared from nowhere (his pocket?) presses down, just shy of breaking the skin, and does not move for what feels like a very long time. But time is strange at the moment. You are not as scared as you are confused. You do not talk, and he takes it away, and it is such a relief that you do not think much about the other things. He is warm on top of you (he is lying on top of you) but not very heavy (but blurry) and his face is close and you can feel his breath on your face and it does not smell bad. Just like yours. The rest of that smell is pouring out on the ground (you heard the bottle crack when you dropped it, you think).

He kisses you before you can laugh about it, or cry about it, and his tongue is strange and slow and thick. Your hands come up, and push, but they fall down before long, and he kisses your neck. Bites. Doesn’t hurt very much at all. Knife catches at the neckline of your shirt, cuts -

Not far. His hand is not steady. Slips. Prick. You don’t think you’re bleeding but you wouldn’t know if you were. Nothing hurts. You think you hear him curse. Heavy metal leaves you and thuds in the pretty wet grass. There’s a strange expression on his face which makes you think that he might be close to laughing or crying too, and you don’t like it. Your shirt is still wet and noticing it again is a relief - you can think about that, and nothing else.

“You want to?” He tugs at the waist of your pants and pulls them down before you really answer. Your legs are apart now, and you do not want it to be him between them, but it feels good to be touched there - there - and you cannot make yourself hate it. You can’t hate anything. You can’t feel much besides him. There is a warm haze, and beneath that, there is shame and fear and loathing that you do not have to feel right now, that would make everything worse if you did feel it.

You do feel it, for a second too long, and your legs slide closer together, but not close enough to make it stop.

“You don’t want to?” His two fingers slide inside you (too easy, easier than it should be) and curl up like they’re trying to push an answer out of you, and your mouth opens and something comes out, but not words. His eyes narrow and he smiles and the darkness or something else makes it all look different than it did before. “I want to.”

Your hips move in the wrong direction, into him, and the thing you should and want to say does not come out, because he makes you feel good when you try. If he was not doing that he would be making you feel scared instead. This is better. This is the best it could ever be.

The smile drops, all at once. “Answer.”

You close your eyes so you don’t have to see it. Now, it doesn’t have to be him. Could be anyone. Could be no one at all. “Feels good,” you mumble.

“Good.”

The hand slips out of you and lands on the side of your face, slick, and you are kissed and you do not kiss back. “Good.” He says it into your mouth between kisses. His other hand is somewhere else. Down. “Good.” You try not to hear it. The wind whips up around you and you listen to that, and feel it hard against your cheek, and him hard against your stomach. Wind scrapes over your skin. He scrapes over your skin. Finds your entrance and holds himself there for too long. “You want to.” Not a question. Maybe he believes it and maybe you do too.

“Mm.” You’ll fall asleep as soon as it is over. It will be easy. Like taking a drink.

His breath shudders as he presses inside you. His whole body goes along with it, tightens against your skin, face shoved into your neck. Your eyes snap open and you fight their lids back down. When you let yourself think about it, the good feeling starts to go away. But it doesn’t hurt. It would’ve hurt, if it happened a different night, when you had to think…

He looks up and you somehow raise your head just enough to see his eyes. Wide. “Talk.”

“Feels good,” you mumble, and it must be enough, because his nails scrape your scalp and snag firmly into your hair and he is going and going but you can barely feel anything at all anymore. You lied, you guess.

It ends quickly. He says something that you can’t hear and then he is out of you and there is wet on your thigh that has nothing to do with the grass. And still, he is not done with you. His weight stays. His arms hook under your shoulders and hold tight.

One final time, you force your mouth and eyes open, because you cannot sleep like this. He’s staring at you, waiting, and you barely recognize his face at all. If you did, you would hate it.

You manage to say it. Exactly what you want to say. “Get off.”

His gaze drops to the grass. It’s quiet, for a long time.

You close your eyes. “Get off.”

“Okay.” His hand flutters against your cheek, and you feel his hot breath over your face, close enough to kiss you one final time.

He doesn’t. His weight lifts, and you can breathe.

And you can sleep.

***

There is a moment when you wake up before you feel any pain. Your head does not hurt, your stomach does not churn, your eyes do not flinch at the sunlight that pokes them through the trees.

But you would take all of those little kinds of suffering over the feeling that overrides them all. It strangles your chest and your throat and keeps you from rising or moving even an inch to look around. You hear his breathing. You hear his body shift in the grass, and know that he knows you are awake.

And yet, he doesn’t say a thing. Not yet. When he does, all the things you half-remember will flood your brain, and you will have no defense, except to hope that he has another bottle stashed away somewhere, and that he will be kind enough to give it to you.

Not yet. You feel the dampness of the shirt on your back, and taste the foulness of your own breath and the rot rising up from your throat, and smell the bitter stench of the night before. And you pretend, for as long as you can, that not yet means never again.

Change

Mahito x Reader // word count 2k

In which Mahito offers to make your insecurities disappear. Quite literally.

Tags/warnings: dark content, yandere, implied noncon, body horror, kidnapped reader, biting, blood, non-consensual kissing, discussion of death, gender neutral reader, reader has body image issues and is implied to have dealt with them in unhealthy ways 

A/N: Not as painstakingly edited as usual because I'm trying to get out of the write-something-and-then-pick-at-it-until-I-hate-it time loop

You are sitting with your knees pulled up to your chest, facing the wall of the sewer. It is not the first time you have sat like this, nor the first time you have spent so long in this position. In the early days, Mahito would tell you to turn around and watch him experiment, and you’d feel your stomach writhe in time with the contorted things on the floor. But he lets you look away now. You’re not sure why, but you don’t bother wondering. It’s easier not to look, to pretend that you are alone, to tell yourself that the almost-human sounds echoing in the tunnel are merely figments of your imagination. That his laughter is only a memory from your nightmares, and not a constant reminder of what your life has become.

There isn’t much laughing this time. It’s mostly noises of surprise and keen interest, the kind a normal person might make upon viewing something mundane under a microscope, and seeing its hidden world beneath. You do not know what worlds Mahito is discovering, and you hope he doesn’t force you to find out. 

The worst part, of course, comes after his mouth finally closes. When you hear nothing but his footsteps upon the ground. Coming closer. You don’t run from it, or lash out, like you used to. Your stomach churns, and your pulse quickens, but you still let him spread his legs on either side of you, press his chest to your back, and wrap his arms around your waist. His hands cross beneath your ribcage, and you try not to think about what they were touching before. What you might see if you turn around. What he might be feeling, now that he has you so close.

“You would’ve liked it this time,” he says, as if he actually believes it. “It was interesting. And less…hm. Less dramatic than usual, I guess. For a while.” A high-pitched little spurt of laughter ruptures in your ear. “I got really carried away at the end. But I did try.”

“Why does that matter?” Even hearing him talk about it makes you nauseous, but not so much that you can’t speak. Not anymore. “It ends the same no matter how it starts.”

“Maybe! But you’ve got a saying about that. It’s…ah. What is it…?” He presses his face into the side of your neck and inhales deeply. Kisses your skin with cold lips before breaking away with a sudden start. “Oh! I remember. ‘The journey’s more important than the destination.’ It’s a very nice saying. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

You don’t like the way his mind drifts when he touches you. He makes you go rigid, takes away your ability to blink and breathe, but you seem to do the opposite to him. He kisses you again, in the same place, and then bares his grin, scrapes at you with his teeth and tongue, pulls and sucks and bites at your skin -

It is a long time before he says anything again. Long enough for you to be grateful that you have no way to see your reflection, to assess the damage he’s left behind, the growing collection of reminders on your body.

“I could take you on a journey, too.” He tightens his arms around you, presses in until you can barely tell where he ends and you begin. “I could change you, like I changed them…well.” He giggles. “Not quite like that. You’d still be alive at the end.” 

You go stiff. Breath catches in your throat. “No.” Your voice creaks out, so quiet that he might not even notice how terrified you are. “No.” Louder. There’s more, there, if only you could find the strength to say it. Don’t touch me, let go of me, stay far, far away, let me go -

“Don’t worry. I’d let you decide what you wanted me to do. Although I’m pretty sure I already know.” You squirm desperately against his hold, and he sighs, and presses his lips to your ear. “I’m not trying to scare you, you know. I don’t want to change anything about you. You’re so so cute already. But…”

There is a trickle of blood dripping down your neck. Slow, already drying. How long has it been there? How long have you tuned it out? 

“I know there are parts of your body that you don’t like.” His voice is uncharacteristically gentle, and you search it for any hint of amusement. “You really don’t like them. I was watching you for a while before I brought you here, so I saw the things you did to hide them. To change them. It’s not so different from what I do.” He lifts his hand from your waist, wiggles his fingers in the air. “I’m just way, way better at it.”

“No.” You don’t even know what you look like anymore. Even if you did -

Maybe you’d still hate it. But it doesn’t matter here.

“I know I could do it.” He lets go of you for a moment, repositions his hands, and spins you around, the force of the sudden movement knocking your own hands from the places where they dug into your shins. You splay them flat against the floor, and keep your eyes down. “Here.” He crouches in front of you, and points. “And here. And here. I could make all of it look just how you want it to.” 

You close your eyes, scared to get a glimpse of what lies behind him. (That’s not the only reason, is it?) It’s better not to look at him, either. (And…)

“It’s really a very tiny difference between what you have and what you want, so it won’t be easy to do perfectly,” he admits. “But it also means that you probably wouldn’t die. And if I mess up, I can always just try again!”

He’s so close to you. Breathing on your face, even though you’re pretty sure he doesn’t have to breathe at all. If you open your eyes, you won’t be able to see what’s behind him - his stare will take up your entire field of view.

“I don’t want to mess up, though. You wouldn’t be very happy if I did that. And I want you to be happy.” He touches the side of your jaw, and then tugs carefully at the corner of your mouth, like he thinks it might rip open if he pulls too hard. “You smiled a lot before I brought you here. It was cute.”

Your eyes are still closed. His hand is just as cold as his lips. You could even feel it through your clothes, moments before. Here, and here, and here…you wish he didn’t understand the way you think about yourself. He’d be so much easier to tune out if he was wrong.

“I want you to smile because of me.” His hand crawls up the side of your face, and pulls at your eyelids, his touch a bit less gentle than it was a moment before. “If that means making you look a tiny bit different, I don’t mind. As long as I don’t have to change your mouth”-

You look at him, because you truly believe your eyelids might rip off if you don’t.

“Oh. Or those eyes. Not those, either.” He’s leaning so far forward that his nose brushes yours. So that you can see him, and only him - and you. Just a bit of you, in his eyes, the tiniest glimpse of your own reflection that you wish you could erase. “I’ve been practicing a lot,” he says, “but I never change those.”

Practicing. 

“What do you mean?” You’re not sure if you actually say it, or if it’s only in your head. Either way, he doesn’t answer you with words. Instead it’s with a kiss, which is worse, because his tongue is in your mouth now, and his hands are on all the places that he just pointed out on your body, and they don’t change. You’re exactly who you are, far too grounded inside yourself as this thing makes you wish you had no body to touch at all.

And yet, you don’t want it to end. Because when it ends -

He sits down at your side.

And with that, there is nothing between you and the rest of the mess he’s created.

And you cannot tear your eyes away.

“I told you it was interesting.” He folds his hand over yours. “You really should have watched. I almost got it right this time.”

There is the usual mess. Fleshy and fluid things, undulating slightly, with holes that open up as if to scream but make no sound. The vague suggestions of limbs, on some, nothing but huddled slimy masses remaining of others. Eye sockets, empty, migrated into strange places. Colors and textures stolen from the insides and outsides of human bodies, so that you can’t for a moment forget what you’re looking at. That’s usually all that there is. And it’s enough to send your guts crawling up the walls of your throat, all on its own. 

But the one there -

It is not moving at all. And it has eyes. Glazed. And it has limbs, twisted off at the ends, but clearly four, clearly only half-heartedly destroyed. And it has lips. And teeth. And they are stretched out in a grimace, pasted-on even after its heart stopped pumping blood to the muscles of its face, even after its chest caved in and its lungs burst out from under the wreckage and the rest of its head fell away -

“I’m getting very good at making copies.” He leans his head against your shoulder. “Your body is easy…it’s just your face that’s hard. But that one had a face kind of like yours to begin with, so I did okay.” His grip on your hand tightens. “Not perfect, though. So I had to get rid of it.”

The mouth does not look familiar. Not anymore. But the eyes, lifeless as they are -

“I’ll show you once I get it right,” he sighs. “Once I make one look exactly like you. And then you can tell me how you want me to fix it, and once we’ve got it all figured out”-

You retch. But everything stays inside. You wrap your free arm around your waist for a moment, and then snatch it away, repulsed for reasons you don’t entirely understand.

“Don’t worry, cutie. It won’t take too many more.” Mahito lifts his hand from yours and turns towards you. “I wouldn’t mind if it did, though.” You look at him, if only to avoid looking at the other things in the room, and watch as he smiles back at you. His head is tilted, eyes shining, mouth closed. He stares at you for far too long, and slowly, slowly, his lips curl back, revealing the bleach-white grin underneath. “For you…I wouldn’t mind doing anything.”

You don’t see him move, not through the spots of black in your eyes and the haze of blood that’s rushed to your head. But you feel yourself falling, feel your back hit the ground, and feel him flattening himself on top of you. You feel every inch of your body where it presses back against his. And you feel radiating, all-consuming disgust at every place where you connect.

“If you want to stay like this,” he murmurs, “forever, that’s okay too. I’ll change you, or I’ll keep you the same…you’ll be my favorite human no matter what.”

You do not want to stay like this, trapped in your skin as he worms his way over and beneath it. But that isn’t the question, and the answer - that it doesn’t matter what body you panic inside of, or what, exactly, he touches, that nothing will make it better -

Even if you tried to say it, he’d swallow it up before a single word made it off your tongue.

lil update:

I’ve been taking a bit of a break from writing because honestly, my brain is just not doing what I want it to do. I’m on vacation now, and when I get back from vacation I’m moving. Life is good, but life is busy. My goal is to get back to writing by mid-late July, I have a couple WIPs currently but I don’t imagine I’ll be able to get any significant work done on them for a bit.

Tbh the main reason I’m posting this is to remind myself that it’s okay to not be writing all the time. This is fun for me, but it won’t keep being fun if I stress myself out over it. So I’m trying to Not Do That.

Ok that’s all for now <3

… no comment!!

taggingggg… whoever wants to play ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks for the tag @thelastplantagenet 😊💚

1. Do this uquiz.

2. Do this picrew.

3. Tag people.

feel free to play if you’d like :)

@buncha-angry-kids-with-no-money @thatoneandlonelyemo2005 @with-the-words-all-wrong

'this too shall pass' well can it pass fucking faster??

um. locked in my own head again. does anyone have The Password