#cw: unreality | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spontaneousglitterbees · 1 year

Text

Welcome to the New Age

[TAPP AU Masterpost]

The following fic goes into descriptions of canon character death and resulting Angst; reader discretion is advised. NDRV3 spoilers ahead!

--------------

Your eyes have pried themselves open three times now, wide, still seeing nothing.

The green-grey lights clouding the hangar feel scalding hot on still-clammy skin. You know you should be cold; freezing, in fact, but the Strike-Nine curled back a finger of the monkey’s paw on your behalf. You wonder if your gentle exhales fog the underside of the metal slab looming over you from this distance. It’s not as though you can check.

The smell of motor oil, sawdust, and far too much copper will probably never leave your lungs.

You find yourself wishing you had control of your hands. The lid of the press has been descending for ages. A mechanical whirrrr of struggling gears loops over and over, notes discordant with themselves in a canon, yet it never actually gets any closer. Deep down, you know it never will. Misery is kind of the point of punishment.

There’s little else to do but figure that much out. Your back has adhered to the spot where you lie (and lie, and lie-and-lie-and-lie), bleeding through Kaito’s borrowed jacket that will invariably see much worse. Stuck. Stationary. You can’t even fidget, let alone etch an epitaph in the gummy-rubber texture of the hangar floor. It’s nearly enough to make you consider whether Yonaga really was right.

… You miss Angie, really.

You miss a lot of people.

At least they aren’t here, echoes the thought through the barren room.

You briefly indulge the thought of cyan light streaking in through a rising garage door, the sound of footsteps smacking dents into soft, dirt-encrusted polyurethane with urgency. The shift of fabric against fabric of a suit as the detective drops to his knees at your side. He would be within arm’s reach, if your arm would move. Of course you can’t comfort him now that you want to.

Misery. What part of ‘punishment’ do you not understand?

What’s worse is the ghost of his hand over the side of the metal slab. It doesn’t adhere to logical geometry anymore; it is simultaneously still lowering, and hovering just above the tip of your nose, and snapped as a trap over your still-lying form. You are both the scattered remnants of a human being and perfectly fine, whole, all of your vitals approximately where they’re supposed to be. Hell is a quantum state where everything is both true and false simultaneously, and you cannot open the box from the inside.

His hand ghosts over your press (it’s part of you, now, as much of you smeared on its hidden surface as lying beneath), and you want to force it open. Not to show him your last neat parlor trick, but to knock him flat on his ass and get him away from you. The world cannot be yours, but this hangar is. You’ve carved out the territory in your own blood. Get your own headstone, you cheap bastards.

You want to laugh. You do, because if you aren’t laughing you’re crying, and if you have to hear your own strangled voice resound up over the catwalks and metal beams to the high ceiling and back you will start a one-man riot.

Then you are reminded that you can’t laugh, because you lack any control at all of this body you’re locked in, and you loathe that you’re being kept from the keys.

If you didn’t know better, you’d swear Shuichi just said something. That’s a lie, of course, because Shuichi is alive, and outside, and even if he isn’t he’s certainly not headed wherever it is you are now. You are never going to see Saihara again, and the ghosts you hear pounding on the inert slab with a calloused metal CLANG! are simply the demons here to torment you. They’re mean. Saihara-chan is so mean.

As is Momota-chan, and the two of them together gathered around gawking at your punctured chrysalis are twice as bad as either alone.

“I know you’ll pull through this! I believe in you!” Liar.

“You aren’t alone. I’m sorry.” Liar.

“Do you want to die?”

Well.

You do not know what is keeping the wraith from reaching through and grabbing you by the throat. You’d welcome the change of pace, at this point, dizzy with the anticipation, sick to your stomach without recourse. You know better, really, but part of you is certain you can feel cranial fluid leaking from your ears and sizzling on this oversized hotplate. You’re tired.

You are tired, and vaguely aware you’ll never wake up.

(Momota-chan is mean, but it’s a lie to call him cruel. If he really wanted you to suffer, he wouldn’t have taken that third bolt. It should have lodged in your heart. If he only wanted to avoid Harukawa’s condemnation he could have just shoved you away, but he took the shot for you instead. At the last minute, he’s won your game: he’s cemented a space in your thoughts, for what little life you had left and for eternity afterward.)

Here you lie at the start of a little journey through forever, and you are already sick of it. So much for your willpower, your determination, any conceivable quality that would make you anything beyond a piss-poor leader; DICE wouldn’t take you back.

You can’t even remember their faces anymore.

(Did you ever know them in the first place?)

You have eons upon eons here to lay by yourself— unbothered at last, no intervening idiocy to be found, you did it, you pushed everyone away. Isn’t this what you wanted at the end? Eons to ruminate and reflect on every bad thing you have ever done.

At least it keeps you busy.

(Did they ever have faces for you to know?)

The killing game becomes a blur. You find yourself pausing and re-playing the memories like an old scratched-up DVD of a movie lovingly, clumsily cobbled together by a clueless hand with all the default settings enabled. Fond memories of fifteen classmates crowded around a long breakfast table project onto the metal sheet above you in rough camcorder quality. Trembling, home video taken with unsteady hands where all ten pixels slide in mesmerizing array, you took a long sip of grape soda and nobody spoke to you. It feels correct. Disappointing, maybe, but this is the way things are.

They offered you a plate. You, as usual, try to quietly refuse (because you are a burdensome child, because everything they try to get you to eat makes you feel more nausea than not eating at all, because you are unreasonable, because good children cannot taste the consistency of something more than its flavor, because you make problems on purpose but never in a fun way) and are swiftly overturned. You know your place is not to make demands. Some people need to have their hand held through life, and you had the fortune to have one extended to you before you became un-salvageable. You know better than to reach out for it now. There is no point even twitching your fingers anymore; that gracious hand never reaches back these days.

You aren’t sure why you brought your camcorder to such a scattered excuse for a family dinner. The sheen of novelty still hasn’t worn off. It was a birthday present, after all, and even if neither it nor you are capable of making anything worthwhile the idea that you might drives you to preserve the memory. It keeps you busy. Everyone in the house takes dinner to a separate space. Yours is currently sitting on your corner cushion with an opaque water bottle secretly filled to the brim with gas-station soda. You’ve grown to hate the lingering syrup stuck to your tongue, but it keeps you awake and you can always drown it out with another swig. After a long day, it hits. Not good or well, but precisely where it needs to.

(One in the upper right arm, one in the center of your back, and one …?)

Where is everyone?

Where are you?

You can imagine the pound of footsteps one-after-another launching you up the staircase, pulling the door too-softly shut behind you. You have nothing worth hiding, of course, but you can’t very well have anyone seeing your work-in-progress; it has to be perfect. You can almost feel the button cave in beneath your fingertip as you release the USB-A to plug your little toy into the computer. The spring seems crunchy today. You aren’t sure why you shiver; it’s still the tail-end of June.

This is going to be the one. Maybe the footage isn’t much, but if anyone can spice it up, it’ll be you! You have an eye for making things engaging, so you’ve been told (and never shown by anyone under the age of whatever-impossible-age-teachers-are, sixteen at least, right?) but this one, this one will be the one to really grab attention, and people will like it, and if you’re lucky they might even talk to you. All according to plan.

You say this every time you invent a new magnum opus, sure, but you have a good feeling this time. First, you show your classmates your movie. They’ll watch it, be so impressed they just have to gush to you about it, and you can keep them on the hook long enough to start to get to know them. That’s when you hit them with the promise of friendship, and you all can do all kinds of things from there. Hangout spots in big trees in the park (one of them has to be tall enough to help you climb, you’re quick but your upper-body strength isn’t enough to get you beyond the first couple branches yet), codenames, secret handshakes; you can play games together! You can wear matching outfits, and make movies, and make more friends, and they’ll all look at you and you’ll hold them all together, because if there’s one thing you’re good at it’s clinging to your status quo in the face of overwhelming odds. It’ll be incredible, you just know it. Maybe if you do well enough, there will be enough of you to play Werewolf, or Mysterium, or Coup, or maybe you’ll put together a full party—

The d20 you’ve been stimming with, idly smoothing over between the fingers of your right hand, comes down with a clatter and bounces across your desk. Huh. Strange.

Of all the shiny math rocks in your collection, you don’t remember any bright magenta dice.

Flecks of hot pink slough off on each impact with the hard surface. Plink, plink, plink.

Clack.

You try to blink the encroaching color out of your vision.

Natural one.

You can feel the stress limit of your bones down to the fourth decimal place. You tense up, attempting to brace for impact, but absolutely nothing is touching you while it rends you limb-from-limb and keeps going. The white-hot agony you feel as splinters of you break free, each cell another part of you desperate to roll out from under here and get-out-get-out-get-out, even if they can’t do it together, supersedes the temptation to pretend someone is outside waiting for you.

No. You may be angry with them, or disappointed, or at the very least uncertain what it is you feel for them, but you even hope Momota is well out of the splash-zone. Off of that awful catwalk and its CLANGK-ker-kCLANGs. Off with his sidekicks, somewhere. Maybe they’re sitting in a courtyard, and Kaito helps Shuichi into a tree (Maki had beaten them both to it and decided to watch them figure out the logistics) and they watch the stars move overhead together, breathing in the crisp night air in late August, and pretty soon you’ll have that new project of yours in a state to show off….

You find you take refuge in the idea of stars. They’re cosmic happenstance, ambivalent the same way as the rest of the universe, distant and impersonal, but even a static image is still new to you. You were always too busy looking at other people to look up. The only way you could survive out there was to meticulously study the fine details of an expression in your every conversation. You streamlined the tricks and tells that passed for signals into your muscle memory because, unlike for most, they were never innate for you; you had to be certain to echo emotional information to people in a way they were certain to understand. It had to be perfect. Why would you ever waste the time to look up at a universe that did not have an opinion for you to care about?

Now it’s all you can do. Lying on your back, eyes open, or shut, or both-and-neither, you stare unseeing. Somewhere past the hydraulic press, beyond the high ceiling, beyond the LCD-sky, there are stars. You’re looking their way now. Forever. The survivors will see them for you.

You do not care if it is a lie. You choose, against your better instinct, to believe it.

The remains of your nerves seem to have gone supernova; what was the worst pain you ever knew melts away into nothing. You don’t feel anything at all. Not relief. Not floating. Just the absence of sensation.

Before you have a chance to fully process your new state of non-being, blissfully, it seems your tenacity has finally run out. You are surrounded by a bright, white light.

---------------------------------------------------------

Kaito Momota never thought he would be a killer.

Most people tend not to, certainly, though Kaito is well aware he tends to pick more fights than average. It was always a far-flung possibility, technically any young man fit enough to be an astronaut can generate the force vector required to do something everyone involved will regret, but if you had asked him. Well. Within the first minute of uploading to TAPP, during which “Kaito Momota” Began, he would likely have been too dazed to respond with much other than confusion. And the second minute after being uploaded to TAPP, during which significant alterations to the code finished uploading and “Kaito Momota” as he is known today Began, he never would have thought himself morally capable of it.

But it was, by strictly literal definition, a murder. A murder he committed. Successfully.

Though, also in a strictly literal sense, that murder saved his victim’s life. Had Kokichi gone much longer without dying, the likelihood his data would reflect the symptoms of blood loss and poison damage in the physical world (or worse yet corrupt irretrievably) would have risen dramatically by the second. 'If anything,’ Momota mutters under his breath, 'you should be thanking me.’

But Kaito didn’t know that at the time. Kokichi still doesn’t, and it was his idea.

The irreverent young man kicks his feet up onto the folding chair in front of him. A mass of sheets and blankets threaten to swallow the still-breathing shape in the hospital bed whole. Ouma practically blends in, already ghastly pale on a good day, the only color to his face a deep, bruised purple under the eyes.

Rantaro will be happy (or, at least, interested) to know Kokichi’s eyes are open. Again. For the third time in as many weeks, the kid remains almost entirely unresponsive save for a blank stare at the ceiling. After the second false alarm, Kaito has steadily been… no. No, the improbable is possible, even if it’s hard to keep spirits high. There’s still a chance these little fits indicate the Ultimate Pain-in-the-Ass is at least a little closer to waking up. He has half a mind to gently coax those violet eyes closed because it would really suck to wake up to a horrible case of dry-eye, right? himself. Then it looks like he’s just sleeping for once in his life. Kaito can hardly fault him for that.

Granted, he has to mentally prepare himself to do it; Kokichi is alive, his heart monitor is right there, and yet still Kaito searches for the slow rise and fall of his chest. It’s not like touching a dead body. In fact, can’t you just hear him insist you’re flirting with him, screwing up the oxygen mask laughing, ‘nishishishishi’….

Kaito is no longer afraid he will be haunted by Kokichi. He already is.

“Only a grade-a bastard can make you miss a sound that irritating, so you gotta get back here and atone. Got it?”

He does not expect a reply. He leaves room for one anyway.

“… Do you do this on purpose,” Kaito asks the smattering of abstract brushstrokes hanging in a frame on the opposite wall. Ouma is… too fragile, like this. The thought ambles forward. Nothing good comes of saying it out loud, he knows, but there is no-one around to hear but the boy who can’t. "I swear, Ouma, if you found a way to lie about this too,"

… Then what? What will you do, Kaito? Would you get your hands dirty, again, this time for keeps? Is that the kind of person you are? Is it who you’ve become, or is some degree of violence-as-problem-solving innate within you? So deeply ingrained that the person you used to be was willing to be replaced for an opportunity to be something he could be proud of…

Kaito scrolls through a custom RSS feed on his phone. It keeps his line of sight away from the center of the room and blocks out the thoughts he’d rather not consider with an unending wall of text. He mindlessly flicks his finger over the glass, ignoring three-then-four message notifications flashing at the top. It’s no secret where you are. You have come here almost every morning since the rest of you emerged from TAPP and plunged back into society. All of us make it out means all of us, no matter what.

He still believes that. He still curses his previous self, though, for promising it. It took him a good five minutes on the staircase to get up to the second floor, and every step hammered in the thought that much more: if you can’t do this, what else can’t you do anymore? You can’t, be the, SHSL Astronaut if, you stop part, partway up the stairs to breathe. You’re making terrible time leaning on the rail like that. Thing is, doubling down, makes it worse and. Hh. It took a puff of his inhaler to smooth out his breathing. God, if you can’t do this then what do you honestly expect to do for anyone else?

Besides, when on-record has anyone managed to tell Kokichi Ouma what to do?

Most of the class has accepted that Ouma is going to die. It makes the most sense. Even the school is questioning what to do with him. Something about an inability to track down a next-of-kin, for reasons that are certainly none of his business (Kaito will definitely be listening out for). But he has a vice grip on hope. The impossible is possible, after all!

(… Even if that’s only a lie you tell to yourself to keep going.)

If there’s one thing you know about Kokichi, it’s that the guy does not know when to quit.

Besides, it’s nice to have somewhere to go in the mornings. Kaito still insists on getting moving at oh-too-early, so used to exercise drills he may-or-may-not have ever actually had to do that he naturally wakes an hour or two before sunrise. The distinct feeling of his chest being scraped out with a wire brush has only barely deterred him from insisting on a morning jog. Even then, it only worked in combination with a couple trips to Tsumiki’s and the persistent chastising from his sidek–

His. Friends.

They’ve always been his friends, of course. But crashing back to Earth, the real Earth, and landing in a strange translucent pod, meeting the concerned eyes of curiously spectating-specters he watched die makes a man feel significantly less in-control of a situation, you know?

(You had just killed a child. And it reminded you, strapped in for one last ride, that you were also a child. You all were.

You weren’t sure what exactly you expected would happen once you finally succumbed to the itch ingrained in your lungs, but ‘blearily sit up to see a room of your walking, chattering dead classmates and your unconscious very not-dead sidekicks, then Angie cheerfully beckoning everyone to crowd around you and help you stand before they cash in on their bets’ was not on your bingo card. It also clarified absolutely nothing. Ryoma? Kaede?

… Why was everyone passing whatever they’re trading to Miu?

“Where’s 'kichi?” You asked the clowder of teens before you really registered I am both alive and can speak without spitting up my own blood. Nobody else seemed quite as confounded by that information as you were. They were all far too busy looking at one another in dead silence, expressions morphing with slow-encroaching horror.

Kaede stepped up to break the tension.

“We thought you were the victim.”)

Friends. Not sidekicks. He has to keep reminding himself.

His best friends keep chastising him for jogging when he really shouldn’t, but a little common sense never kept Kaito Momota, Luminary of the Stars sedentary for long! The infirmary isn’t even that far from the dorms, allowing for a reasonable, he swears, leisurely walk over. He even gets to pass through the courtyard garden, taking in the fresh air.

The heavy, humid late-summer air.

They can’t all be winners.

Most mornings, his routine starts early. The kind of early where:

About 4:30 AM, to the minute without an alarm clock, he jolts awake and rushes to get acceptably dressed, hurrying down the stairs. All the while, he checks his pockets meticulously for his phone-wallet-keys, in that order.

5:05 AM he opens the door of the dorm complex and realizes that it is raining today, and he is wearing slippers.

5:11 AM he comes back up to the interior welcome mat of the building in shoes less likely to fall apart in this weather (now that their uniforms are, presumably, not infinitely re-stocked) and with the foresight to grab an umbrella on the way out and under the jet-black pre-dawn sky.

5:15 AM Kaito is reminded that the rest of humanity sure does still exist, huh, because some part of it has deemed it perfectly acceptable to spit out their gum on the sidewalk instead of an inch over in the grass like a marginally more reasonable person. Incredible what a lack of the looming threat of death as punishment for basically any infraction does to your manners.

He does not think of how Ouma would probably do the same thing with clear glue in the most highly-trafficked spots on campus, seeding it in intersections like flypaper and letting foot traffic carry the adhesive to every part of the school by lunch. Kaito does not snicker to himself imagining how quickly that kid would convince the upperclassmen not to even try messing with Class 79, characterizing the caliber of shenanigans they’d invite immediately. Those fireworks would absolutely not be any fun to watch.

5:17 AM he faintly recalls he’d intended to grab a granola bar from the kitchen on his way out, and resigns to just picking up breakfast at a vending machine instead.

At 5:23 AM he knocks his forehead gently into the plexiglass, realizing why Kiibo hated these things so much. It’s spit the same note back at him at least five times, now, and he is not about to try and ask it for change. Instead, he picks up an energy bar for the receptionist who opens the door for him and a Panta with everything else. Just in case. (Shit, they’re out of purple. What’s second place? Peach? Fuck it, he’s lucky you’re too invested to ditch the machine all together)

Culminating in arriving at the hospital at 5:30 AM, setting the energy bar on the front desk as he heads directly for the stairs. He could take the elevator, sure, but he’ll cite the blinding-brightness of the fluorescence compared with the lamp-lit path he just came from (and really mean that no, I can’t, because I still have some pride, damn it, let me have this)

Every morning.

Something like that, at least.

Physical therapy doesn’t start until 6:00, so the extra half-hour he’s free to do as he likes. He’d like to hang out with a friend, but he has the misfortune of being the only morning-person in a band of night-owls. Thus, if he wants familiarity, he has to head up to talk at Kokichi. The peace and quiet up there (and soft beep-ing of a heart monitor that proves what Kaito has been trying to tell himself since the moment he woke up) is soothing enough to take a nap in the visitor’s chair. If Ouma minds, he hasn’t said anything about it.

(Hah.)

So, until he can fall asleep, Kaito scrolls through a feed full of space news and photography. He’s taken to reading the horoscopes posted in the ‘for fun’ section of his favorite astronomy blog out loud first. “Because it’s supposedly space-related and also complete horseshit, so it’s perfect,” Kaito said to the pockmarked ceiling. In reality, it’d initially been a mis-click on account of his still-shaking hands. He’d been preoccupied trying to banish the memory of condensation on a painted steel handrail slicking his palms with either his or Kokichi’s blood, probably both.

It made him laugh.

“I have no idea when your birthday is. You know that? You could be any of these if it’d get you free ice cream, huh? So we’ll cover the bases. And if you don’t like it, just tell me to stop.”

He’s not sure whether or not he really believes Kokichi might hear him. But if funerals are for the living, so is cracking the kind of joke you think a distant friend might like. One of these days, he might be able to laugh with you about it. He’s read down the list every morning since. Something in the routine of it is grounding; a signal that the day really has started.

This particular day, Kaito leans back in the chair and reads off the horoscopes between bites of granola. The unopened soda bottle rests at the foot of Kokichi’s bed.

“Big changes are coming for you this fall, Gemini. As tempting as it might be to reminisce about times gone by, the slow pace of the dog days of summer are a perfect time to start planning ahead. This week, things snap into focus. Work on strengthening your connections– you have more of them than you think.”

Kaito yawns.

“Jeez, Kichi, I think I could probably write this shit. There’s an Ultimate Programmer a year ahead of us, do you think anyone would notice if they set up a bot?” he half-laughs, looking over toward the bed. It hardly seems restful, hooked up to so many machines, but Kokichi looks like he needs any scrap of sleep he can g—

That’s. Weird.

Didn’t you close his eyes already?

Kaito sits up straight, stretching, shaking the drowsy haze from his head before standing up. You’ve got to keep better track of these things. He strides to the side of the bed, a careful hand blotting out the harsh light overhead as the other reaches to carefully

Shut. His, eyes?

But they’re already closed.

“… Ouma?”

The heart monitor picks up pace, a thudding beep-beep-beep-beep startling the SHSL Astronaut back a step or two. Remember your training. Keep a level head, Kaito, he might be having some kind of seizure. That can happen, right? You just need to call in the nurse. Probably nothing they haven’t seen before.

That thought evaporates almost instantly.

As Kaito presses the call button, he’s met with a desperate, terrified shriek. It’s a little muffled through the respirator and after weeks of silence, but the plea is unmistakable.

“WAIT!”

53 notes · View notes

dreamlostdevourer · 10 months

Text

Of coffee, dreams and witchcraft.

Three times a week, a sleep deprived witch orders from your coffee shop.

She stands out, but in the way people with charisma do.

Her voice is mellow yet scratchy, like an old phonograph,

Her order is always simple, eaten at a lonesome table.

Any time she surveys the cafe, a transient gleam catches your eye.

Still she sits alone, always alone, never nervous.

At first, her visits were consistent. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, repeat.

The same order too. Hot fruit tea, a non milk milkshake, the sandwich du jour.

Bill paid in full with a 25% tip.

Steadily alone, unrushed and unworried.

Never escorted by a doll, a person, a witch, or anything at all.

Always half removed from reality, as if she might dip her head and fall into a deep sleep.

Yet she never orders coffee, never meets with anyone.

Never even attended a social night, yet always taking the pamphlets and checking posters.

If anything, how un-wrong itself is proof of her wrongness.

She doesn't seem to exist in the flow of society, nor does she fit into a complex social system.

Frustratingly uncomplex.

Slowly, she accepts that she is a regular.

Eventually stopped being surprised that people remembered her

She started to exchange polite greetings and sharp humor, half lidded eyes sparkling.

And never speaks of witchly matters.

But the variety of charms on her tunic, and the precise rituals of her movements and words?

Unmistakably magical.

It takes time, but she started to let her knowledge slip out, in unguarded ways.

In permanent marker, on cardboard, she'd scrawl symbols.

One day it would be a counter curse for an unlucky employee.

Another an enchantment for the would be green thumb.

Or a tranquility charm to tame restless dreams.

She's never more awake, true, but she's never more tired either.

Still, deep black bags under her eyes, a dark blue marker in her purse.

Never more than a charm a week.

The question percolated and danced in your mind.

Why is this witch here?

At my coffee shop?

Who is she?

The whisper networks don't recognize her.

She had never interacts with the doll unions.

The registrar of magic lacks her name and face.

No connections.

No enemies.

No allies.

No one is willing to follow her home.

No one knew where she went.

No patron knew her name.

She barely existed.

Still she comes, with sharp smiles.

Rich voiced and shaking hands.

Familiar, but unknown.

It was better to leave well enough alone.

No need to disrupt a witch you know.

Let alone a strange one.

So she sifted back below focus.

You stop seeing her, even as she helps your staff.

Not your business.

But she did eventually come to one social night.

After two years.

Then another the next week. And another.

Suddenly regularly appearing, and never extending herself outwards.

The same murmurs and patterns, proof of a slowly opening door.

A glimpse of her behind her facade?

Always aware, never awake.

Naturally.

Three and a half years from her first debut, she finally approached you.

Your brain flinched at the way light refracted off her smile.

She took your hand and pressed a small phial into it.

Topped with a dull green bow ( How did she know it was your favorite? )

And a simple card. "Drink, and learn."

It sat above your sink for a week.

Mind torn between refusing a witch and obeying a witch.

So you reached out to your contacts yet again.

Tried to decipher the ominous fluid.

Spent favors on calculating intent.

To judge if it was gift, or poison.

Once again, nothing was gained.

Four full months passed since she gifted you the liquid.

Still she had shown no malice or harm.

Cordial and friendly with all.

On a quiet Monday morning, at lunch, you decided to drink it.

Minutes after that thought, she appeared, pressing a fresh phial.

Confusion started to form, but she smiled.

"Expires after one week."

Unnerving, faintly malicious, yet friendly.

You tried to be assured.

After work, you threw the old phial out, and uncorked the fresh one.

A careful waft of the scent. It smelled of boiling vinegar, fresh asphalt sun warmed steel, old snow and woody oils.

Nerves steeled, you slammed it down your throat like a jello shot.

It tasted of nothing but water.

On the couch, you waited for it to kick in.

Nothing happened.

Hours later, unnerved and cautious, you headed to bed.

Moments after you were snug and warm, sleep rushed in.

And you dreamed a new dream.

The witch was waiting for you in it.

She guided you through lost realities, a world of bright oceanic depths, a city calmly living inside magma. Her hands harvested the sky itself, collecting emptyness.

And yet there was more.

She pressed her palms against the empty spaces at the edge of your dream.

And the dream was torn asunder, fabric of thought and hallucination pulled apart like air.

She did not wait or ask, but sweeped you out of your dreams, to the spaces between sleeping minds.

Into the infinite fractal void.

Mind shared the space, but in the same way the sun and the moon share the sky.

She walked quietly, confidently.

Wisps of sleep clung to her. Distorted unrealities jockied for position, gathering around her.

A cosmic nova of color, dreams and thoughts squirmed around her.

She grinned.

Her mouth opened, and all were devoured from around her.

Your body bolted awake, mind soon follows.

It's somehow Monday morning again, right after you decided to drink it.

Before the witch would have given you the container.

You never dream of her again.

You never see her again.

No one else remembers her.

But you have the empty phial.

And a permanent hole in your dreams.

You try to decide if you miss her.

You're never actually sure.

#dreams unlost #cw: unreality #empty spaces #coffee shop au

13 notes · View notes