I've had this lurking on my old computer, jump drive, old laptop, and now new laptop. After playing F.E.A.R 3 I really wanted to write something with Fettel, and even though I have mixed feelings with his design in the third one I loved his red inky ghostness.
Anyways, this is an idea that came to me once I beat it, with Fettel as the winner of course. It's set about forty years after the game goes to black. World's not much different, but well...Fettel's host is dead, and he's got wind of something else now. Something new.
Don't own F.E.A.R. or any of it's depicted characters.
Absolute black; so dark that the darkness could not be seen.
They'd turned the lights off in spite of the already increasing hypovitaminosis, and since the men in white cared little for the shape of her decaying bones they cared even less that she complained to herself about the dark. It shifted from warm to cold like a rainshadow desert from wet to dry. All other senses were heightened and tight; ready for something that would never come.
It's been abyssal for two days…
She can tell – lying flush against the block-shaped bed - because every hour the red fiber optic light in the far corner of the room blinks once for every stacked hour for the current cycle. Right now the red incandescent bulb blinks once, twice…and then nothing; illuminating enough for the darkness to feel enough like hell that eventually the thought becomes something of a comfort.
Two a.m. is the time...and the dark-periodic-red-atmosphere - it is fitting in the same way the drool slips, unbidden, down the side of her mouth.
They kept the restraints tight, never once coming in to lessen them; never caring.
They didn't worry if she was near death; in pain or close to madness, as long as she pulled in breaths past the restrains, no matter how shallow, they were content to leave her where she linger and nothing more.
In the pitch-black, staring ahead and unsure of which way was up - it was bound to spur the confusion of simple situational vertigo to clinically induced hallucinations. Sometimes the purple clouds of colored-black would coil into figures, objects…useless things that did nothing more than pass the time and drive her further down that rabbit hole of insanity. Life before this room seemed less like a life and more like a dream…or a nightmare.
Before the straps - anchoring her and making mobility a relishing desire - the room had little more to offer her societal needs than a single mirror in which to watch herself decay into a pale, thin, monstrosity of what she once was…and what was worse than the sight of her, was forgetting what she'd been like before. Did her eyes always watch her like they belonged to another? Did her mouth curve in such a drastic and morbid copy of a smile since now? There were no answers to her questions, but that too was beginning to seem…alright.
They bathed her, but never as often as one would think. They rubbed her body with red abrasive soaps that felt like acid and lemon juice if they'd ever been married together. The heavy alkaline cleaner left the strands of her hair feeling sticky and sharp, teasing her raw skin which never seemed to grow resistant against the callous scrubbing. Did they have a goal to transform her into a walking muscle mass? - exposed from between the toes to the white cut of her cranium?
After three days; three dark, dragging days of nothing but red swellings of timed red-lights - the purple objects started to speak, nothing important or intelligible. Words like that of a babies first and second sound combined every now and then and something understandable would surface. Sometimes the noises would sound like rain, like the throbbing of heat in a jungle or the endless sounds of summer crickets, but amidst the white noise there'd be whispers, and always they would catch her understanding for the barest second before fading back from wens't they came.
They'd call a name ever so often, but as soon as she'd hear it she'd forget it; as if there truly had never been a voice in the first place, and that…that was almost a guarantee. No matter how many times the name was repeated it would never stick. Her mouth would motion the syllables on and on. She'd form her lips and move her tongue until she realized another hour had passed and she'd be left hollow; forced to relax her body in an act of submission against the words. The decent was bad, but not as bad as the mind of a little girl's imagination could conjure.
At some point she found the silence dithering enough that sleep came to her. She never dreamt, waking was for dreams…sleep was for the escape, and by the heavens it was sweet.
When her eyes opened against the goo of sleep - the lights were back on and a dull-pulsing throb in her neck brought her unbidden hands to touch along the puckered ball of hot skin. There was a thick pronounced hole where a syringe had been slipped inside; a recent occurrence if the blood left on her melded two fingers was any indication.
It took awhile to realize she was free to roam; that the restraints were gone, and even when her eyes saw that the thick aluminum-weaved straps had been replaced by dusty residue imprints on her thighs and arms…even then she did not react with surprise. It would not be the last time they did this, with or without her change in behavior.
They'd find an excuse.
A certain lack of emotion was growing steadily with each day and even the act of caring for her own well-being was withering away; like it was unnecessary or even a hindrance for something in the works. Abstract thoughts were over saturating the intellectual ones she'd found solace in before, and the hunger for food was passing away into hunger for…
….
Her rationale mind closed out the image of warm blood and easily-rendered soft muscles under her fingers just as easily as she closed her eyes. She blamed the red light.
The egg-shape of the room was just as mundane as when she'd last seen it. The walls were glaring against the dome of protected illuminum-lights and without the soft-glare it posed in her own lenses, she'd have shielded her eyes from it.
In the mirror she saw herself; upright on her bed, staring with a terse neck and hair like a tesla coil. The white suit hung on her body; a body that was beginning to concave. She remembered maturing properly at one point in time; healthy and fit. She must have had a round enough belly at one point even for there to be a small crease of loose skin where her navel lay now. Even the sharp jut of her cheekbones was no longer an attractive feature, but an eye-sore even worse than her blank eyes.
When she raised, the vertebra in her spine popped in a line from her middle back to her tailbone, similar to the swipe across a piano; slipping back in place to a bone-jingle. In the mirror she was hunched unnaturally. Her arms hung as though they had no right to be called her own and her eyes looked empty even when staring back inside them.
The red domed light blinked eight times, then nine, then ten, and still she stared at her poor reflection; saw her lips move with unheard words even though she couldn't feel her own mouth moving. Inside that mirror her reflection moved, but her limbs remained at her sides when she dared a glance down. The graying brown eyes fluttered with the sudden dilation of her pupils, and glared back at her with a face that didn't reflect her own. It occurred halfway through seeing her second half moving before her that she was hallucinating again. Her reflection was smiling at her softly.
Bearishly, she stared as the woman before it crossed her arms, tapped her fingers and curled them as if pressed for time; as if in a place like this there was still impertinent situations to attend to.
When she spoke, her throat was dry, "Who are you?"
When she spoke back, the voice was not hers, "Not you.", followed by another smile.
After that she closed her mouth, turned unhurried and stood with her back to the mirror until the red-light glared. The tickle of company still ran up and down her spine, never fading until giving the object of hesitation a sparse glance to make sure the stranger was gone. In the mirror was herself. Her eyes were the same and her mouth only moved when she could feel it.
When the red light blared fifteen times he came in. The pudgy graying man stared her down at her seat on her bed; stared harder and then came to her. He pulled her face into latex-gloved hands, turned her chin and pushed the crinkling hair from the face.
He said nothing, just tugged her up by an arm and brought her into the blinding hallway. They'd bred her in this short or long amount of time to relish this moment. The abject stares of people passed her by. The stern stares and the expressionless ones were all absorbed. She would recall what they were wearing, what they were doing and how later on…when her imagination turned violent in the darkness.
Above her pipes followed; branching off into other rooms or corridors, some hung off as if they'd been broken and neglected; uncared for while the rust and water stains grew like mold. The walls and floors were as sterile as her egg-shaped room, but the ceilings…they were bare and real. The dust and the dirty darkness of them was gorgeous, and into each room it only grew more beautiful. The decay above her very head extended into the sharp corners of some rooms, as if it were an infestation growing so slow that it's victims would be caught by surprise when they choked on spore-filled lungs.
They feed her in this room; the room with the heavy post-apocalypse drill-bit, but she didn't eat in here. The grey chair, big enough for the fat-man folding the arm of her suit up, was rock hard and cold; always cold. The fat-man looked down tiny micro-CFL spectacles before inserting the thick needle at the crease of her inner elbow. When the muscles under her arm jerked, his rings of opposing CFL circles swirled furiously and then locked into place on the left lens; a soft blinking red dot in the corner. He was recording…
The pain was short, but he (like all the others) were not gentle when screwing caps and nozzles to the hollow needle. The nicks of nerves and veins woke up a part of her brain that'd been dormant for days.
Armed men in black masks stare off like statues across the room; each one equipped but with guns hidden. She'd seen them in action; pushed hard against her temple and deep in her bony chest while others pinned her tight. It was the last time she'd been afraid; truly afraid.
The sight of them isn't any longer itchy, and no more does she think of protesting against them, except…in times where she lay awake when they shut the lights off. She thinks, sometimes, that if she tried hard enough they'd kill her outright and that would be that, but…death doesn't seem so desirable yet.
They don't shove things inside her anymore. Her legs haven't been pried opened by mechanical-hands for a few weeks and even now they only feed her and examine her on the outside…more or less.
They strap her throat to the chair, but leave her arms and legs free while the heavy fluids pass into her blood stream; delivering just the nutrients to survive under their needless studies. Struggle is impossible. The weights in her veins from the feed is so heavy that wiggling her fingers is a pain, and in the end…she's too tired anyways.
When they speak (the men and the other men) she listens, but words from others are beginning to loose any meaning. These words, that should spark knowledge in her, only make her think of intelligible sounds, like that of blowing wind and shaking leaves; pleasant…but lackluster, better than petty meaning.
While they speak her eyes wander, and they absorb, and they find knew relationships between what her eyes see as a scalpel and what her brain sees as a weapon.
Another dull sting of a needle is shoved up on the back of her hand. The pain in her hand is always worse than that of her arm and this time her face actually scrunches up in reaction to the sensation. Out the corner of her eye they begin tapping on portable computing-pads furiously, as if something groundbreaking has occurred and she's once more left in the dark.
In moments like this she feels The Captive in her own mind. The body she's in does not want to move, and in a way she herself doesn't want to either, but there is another part that wishes to claw with fervor at their faces until just the meat and bone lay exposed and glistening. These violent urges are not new, but they are more pronounced with each cycle that edges on by, and with each new found lust, she finds that…it's enjoyable; no...not just enjoyable, but pleasurable to imagine such things.
Yellow fluid that reminds her of piss combines with the feed, and it tickles her hand up to her shoulder like thin nails prodding in a maddening rhythm. Whatever is swimming in her veins is new and in turn the sudden rush of heat over her body is oddly frightening; shocking. Time alters briefly and a part of her left lung tightens as the breath leaves her.
Two men stand before her (one tall and one very tall, but both with those red curling spectacles on; reflecting light like glass against the sun). They watch the display on her face, but they fade from her mind as the edges of her vision cloud with purple-black. In the sudden throbbing and unsteady crawl of her vision, there is a face that doesn't belong; a new face that is neither there or not there. It is nestled high, thin but strong between the gap of the white-men's near-joined shoulders. The face is unfamiliar, but the color it emits is red, and as soon as it disappears she forgets it, but remembers the color of violence.
Questions barrage her, but…when she moves her lips there is no sound and they stop asking after awhile. It isn't that she wants to answer them, or doesn't want to – it's just that…she's forgotten how suddenly.
While the bag of feed above her drains and the bag of yellow piss-chemical begins to shrink and crinkle as it empties in her body, she watches with hooded eyes as an armed man at the far wall shifts secretly at his spot. He is thick (a soldier; trained or bred) and swiftly there is a red glow about him, like an inky trail as if he were dipped in water.
He must have known she was staring, because his masked face turns like his neck is part of some heavy mechanical nut; swiveling slow. From the glare of lights above, she watches dimly as the contours of a mouth under the standard nylon-fabric curls up into a sinister smile. Never once before had one of them turned to face her, let alone smile – it feels warm.
The bones in her neck remain even and stuck with the strap around her neck, but her head tilts in a display of unbridled intrigue at the sudden sight. It is unnatural how wide the smile becomes on his hidden face…but oddly enough she feels her lips curl in a returning smile. The opposing one only grows and grows; grows until her mind tells her his face is splitting and soon…blood will seep forth…and sure enough…the sudden shine of dark red in a black mask forms and dribbles into the tight-buttoned collar of urban combat armor. It stains down on mostly black patches, but what lighter materials it touches it turns red and wet.
The smile is still there and…so is her own. A suckling noise is distant and says that the bags are drained, but the slow flashes where her brain registers this sound and where she realizes she doesn't care, is when the dangling glow of red curls away and the man drops dead before her eyes. A soft smack of death is the ending of her concern and as if it'd never happened, her eyes are back ahead of her as her fingers twitch sharply.
The smile on her face is still there when the other armed men reach for their fallen comrade in a bustle of sudden activity and concern, and the white-dressed men fumble with his clothing; inspecting the cause. They block her view, but she isn't looking at him anymore. He is dead and her mind says that he needs no further comprehension – it is everything that human-kind has evolved against…but the lack of emotion is there on her face; plain.
A whisper of that forgetful word pulls her eyes to the side, where the dead soldier lay with the countless men wracking their brains and grouching like bewildered pigs.
Suspended in mid-air are the red remains of that smile, etched into the air as if it's floating on an invisible current for just her eyes to see. No longer is it unnaturally wide or hidden by the thick blackness of fabric, but…it is just as sinister and just as inhuman. It fades eventually into that same red inky light that'd caught her attention in the first place. This time she doesn't forget the word whispered.
'Mother.'
After that the yellow-piss-chemical doesn't seem so bad any more.
When they put her back in her room the lights are off and the red timer only burns once.
In the blackness she sits at the edge of the bed; knees hard and bony under her palms. The sounds are stifled by the dark white-noise and the purple blotches of moving people. These people do nothing interesting, they walk down halls and hold things to their eyes. They shake hands and type on absent computers. Some of these people sit in chairs at the largest expanse of her room and watch her.
It doesn't occur until hours later that the movements of these purple people mimic what she sees the people in the halls doing. Her brain seems to forget things in order to learn new things constantly and this is just another example. Sometimes, in the darkness and the soundless space, she stays very still, enough that there is a tapping (like a mite) inside her head that crawls around; slinks cautiously from nerve to nerve like a parasite. She can follow it from one side of her brain to the next and always…it's moving, and always it's rearranging things…but never does it scare her. In fact the sensation is always welcome in the near sensation-less world she now lives in.
When her eyes close – funny that they'd been open at all – she feels the warm scraping drag of fingers running the grooves between her own. The hand that is not her own is light, as if it's made of nothing, but the texture is all too real – right down to the calluses left by guns. It is a male hand; hardened by war and feels uncanny to the touch of the fake leather on the armrests she grabs when they stick her with the needles…and it's the most desirable thing she's touched since the last time her memory has failed her.
Again her throat is packed with sand when she questions, "The red man?", she keeps her eyes shut, almost afraid of what she'll not find when she opens them. Darkness isn't wanted any longer.
But this time, it is not her voice that corrects her.
"Father."
The smooth drag of sound is enough for her body to deflate; sinking in on itself as her touched hand twists to latch onto that leathery hand. Instead of finding nothing – two fingers trap inside the death grip of her fist; warm skin.
An emotion of deceit filters past whatever chemical filters they've been growing inside her for however long – it isn't the emotion she wants, but she takes it like it's a breath of air in a depleted world. If her hallucinations mean her harm, then let them be the death of her rather than the hands of those white-clad men.
She tugs, feeling the brief moment of sanity taking hold, and above all, she thinks that staying mad is the best idea at this point. The phantom hand is all that's left and desperately she grabs at a forearm, pulling, yanking. The arm turns up an elbow, covered in worn fabric, and soon there is a shoulder and a chest and pleadingly she pulls that inward as well.
The safety of a man – flesh and blood only in the deepest concaves of her psychosis – is just enough to shatter that fragile barrier. In this moment the years of conditioning have been for nothing…and she is the little child they'd stolen so long ago.
Hot breath – just like any real thing – is being exhale above her head.
"Take me.", she whispers – the hard shell all but melted and useless long before that leathery hand catches fingers in the tight knots of her hair. In truth, she's wished for death every night, every day, but the only part of her that cared was the part that was too coward to let it take her. The fear would explain this artful hallucination. He is Death.
There is a sound like a dark chuckle; so soft it almost sounds like a breath, "Where is it you think you're going?"
Evil seeps into her bones – not her own, but like all things she absorbs it and in a way…enjoys it.
"Anywhere", she pleas, but the apparition has other ideas for her; ideas just as sinister as any of the white-clad men in those red-twirling spectacles…maybe worse.
For a moment there is no answer, just the comfortable embrace of darkness and then…
A cold, jumpy feeling strikes the front of all her nerves, like a heavy jolt of icy electricity – no worse than the shocks the men have given her in the past, but without that crispy warmth to ease the tingle afterwards. The ice is so cold inside that it soon feels hot, enough that it feels possible to burn from the inside out.
The seconds it takes for her body to relinquish control to the cold-heat, it feels like a month has past while her veins, tendons and muscles strive for fruitless independence. Something is inside her and it – understandably - seems to enjoy the vacancy it finds.
Somewhere she assumes this is part of the dip into madness, but it grows smaller and smaller the more her body proceeds to move without her command; fingers curling and picking at her short nails like the invader was tidying up a new home.
The moment is similar to when she saw her body pressing on rebelliously on the other side of her mirror, but more frightening and…yes, even worse than the death she'd near begged for. The fear is potent, and like a drug – the level of intensity becomes addictive, no matter how horrible the emotion may seem. Her puppeteer seems to sense this, and soon she is laughing – vocal cords bubbling – with a voice the tone and pitch of the red-mans. He is inside her; enjoying himself as well.
When he moves it's akin to her soul being dragged behind and outside her own body as he moves her physical form. From side to side he moves her; inspecting with her eyes. She sees blackness, but he carries on as if he sees everything with rich clarity.
The fear she feels dims and soon all she does is remain where he wants her – at the back where she is of no concern.
As if whatever gives him the ability to control her – it also gives her the ability to feel him; to experience the form of a man that isn't quite alive. The sinewy muscles are unfamiliar, and the sharp lines and cold intestines feel deadly. When something supernatural allows her the ability to feel his face inside her own he stills. Her body is motionless for five seconds, enough for a sudden little spike of pain to infect the middle of her brain, and suddenly she knows he's stuffed her back in her own mind.
There is a silent command, but still she strokes down the neck inside her own with fleshless hands…and there truly is nothing he can do about it but carry on with whatever task he's planning on using her body for.
She remains oblivious to the outside world; familiarizing herself with his form all the way to his protruding calf muscles. Shame isn't an emotion she's been capable of for awhile, and the moment when she feels the alien genitalia inside her body there is still no shame.
When his/her eyes find light, she realizes he's somehow found his way outside her room (through the seven mechanical locks and six inches of carbonated steel).
She questions, but he either does not hear her (since she cannot hear herself) or he does not care, which seems highly likely.
Her body in his hold is agile and as the cold wall at her back slides her suit against her skin, he smiles with her mouth, aware of the odd bond between them, which seems just as different to him as it does to her.
He's constantly bending her body as he moves; small little motions that express his curiosity beyond a simple use and abuse level.
The more he possesses her – the more her inferior senses cloud with red enhancement. The dark corners grow red and bright, and the lights emit soft vibrations that appear to be the actual slowed working of electrical currents. The exploration of his body inside her own stops short when she watches the familiar body of one of the white-dressed men through an open archway – he is sucking up a pasty yellow agent with a glass sucker; oblivious.
His neck is warm with a rich blood flow underneath the skin. The now less-oblivious man makes a sudden gasp – such a terrified and base noise - and the fragile bones snap and sever easily with the twist of her puppeteer hands. The quick death that falls at her feet is part of the gentle rush that floods her, but its also part of what floods the man inside her. They share (oddly enough) in the murder, but with the more he controls her – the more she also seems to control him, and he seems to shudder inside her body at the intense thirst she suddenly craves.
Blood. She wants blood; sticking between her suit and her skin, in her mouth, under her finger nails and clouding her eyes.
A chuckle – half her own and half not – is all at her own expense as her bare feet step on the corpse, going with less resistance deeper inside her prison; her palace.
With each – almost tranquil – act of murder, she sees the true enjoyment her intellectual brain has kept impregnable. Her hallucination scratches her nails into her palms as they both move effortlessly past a glass dome-window. On the other side of the thick glass is a spectacle of the old and the bare – it is a garage. Broken glass, un-swept floors, and peeling walls resembles something much larger than what she could absorb from the multitude of pipes and electrical wires over the hallways. The sterility she knows only makes what she sees through tinted eyes that much more real.
The grit – a combination of outside dirt and metal shavings – feels like a hundreds pricks of the needle, but the pain is replaced with the joy of something new; something inexperienced.
The man inside her drags the soles of her feet along the ground, perhaps relishing in the little jolts from her soul it gives him. If what he feels from her sensations is anything like what she does…then he must enjoy as she in some way.
There is a heavy craft sitting with tires half deflated in the center of the garage. The plates are dull, but still picks up a glitter on the detailing around the flat edges. It looks used – bullet dents, scuffs, and rust peeking out from the undercarriage.
Blood pools like mush under her feet; mixing with the sandy floors and the earth to create a thick glue that makes her soles stick to the floor with each step closer to the vehicle. Inside, the man hums something as familiar as the red-light in her room, pulling her fingers to the velcro straps at the front of her suit.
Modesty was not something she remembers well, and it wasn't something she remembers now. There was a brief feeling that being disrobed by her own hallucination (without knowing why) was not proper, but even so she did not struggle while his needs continued briskly peeling off the closures.
The stark air is not cold, but it is not warm either, and even naked as she is now the temperature does not change even as she finds her body moving up a short ladder on the craft. It does – for a moment- seem odd that escape had been so easy once outside her rooms door. It does, in a way, seem strange how simple the white-clad mens neck snapped under her touch; their touch.
Through the top latch of the cold metal craft, her bare skin catches against upturned drives of metal; opening against the knife-like edges. The blood from her sides is no different from the blood on her feet, and the sensation is no less.
The man inside pulls her body into the dark confines of the craft, where a sole red dot of light blinks; similar to the one in her room. Her fingers – without her seeing where they touched- glide over buttons and levers like a most well-trained driver. Soon the cabin is filled with led-screens, flushed up against oval walls like projections of greens and oranges.
For a brief moment her body's still – the man inside unable to move her as her eyes run over the array of technical mayhem encompassing her. There are screens that emit a three-sixty view of the hanger around them. There are graphs and levels that rise and sink while the slow hum of the living vehicle grows strong and noisy. Under her naked body, the worn plastic of the seat vibrates up inside her, in places that only thick syringes have been; where only latex covered fingers have pervaded.
There is talking inside her, but only one word makes it past her lips, "Submit."
No fighting, no resistance – she looks away from the glowing projections and is once again at the will of the hallucination inside. Submission was something easy, and not caring either way was even simpler.
Behind her eyes she sat between the lobes of her brain and watches silently as her body moves around the phantom bones of this man – the man with the sneer and the red inky glow.
Distantly she knows they are moving now. She's closed her sights off from her eyes and finds solace in the dark warmth inside her skull, but the rumble encasing her isn't as easily ignored. They are moving, they are not in the compound anymore, they are escaping…and still…so much time has passed that she feels very little but curiosity for the new things happening. Such is life now that freedom and captivity have much more in common than not.
Passing the time – the hands inside her body (the hands that are still the remnants of her own) run down the hallucination. A male body is interesting, like anything alien and unmapped. There isn't really 'touch', in the essence of the word for what she's doing now, but all the same she can feel muscles and sinewy tendons attaching limbs to torso. She can feel thicker fingers with short nails and permanent calluses. Short hair is greasy but soft under her 'touch' and soon she finds herself whisking down the length of a strong neck; no pulse, but warm. Everything is becoming very, very warm.
"Stop that.", the tone from her throat is definite and final; the same kind she's received since her memory can remember, and it is (ironically) mimicked perfectly from her own lips.
"No.", she replies, but it comes from her throat like a breath more than a word and the man inside closes her throat before she can speak further.
The strange liquid hands passing around between her veins and capillaries find thick thighs inside her soul. They move in sync with the throttle her own legs are being pushed on, but the muscles are harder and the quivering she feels from her own body is not apparent in his.
If anything her interest is like that of a child's. The thought of a sexual drive never registered, but that was probably the will the white-clad mens doing when they filled her womb so many times. When she brushes over the obstructed feel of the male genitalia (hidden inside her body like a memory she can touch and feel), she fingers the strange workings clinically.
The man inside her body rocks her body against a curved wall, slapping her temporal lobe into metal and holographic displays violently. The pain rattles her skull and her tendrils run back up into the safety of her brain. She feels her face sneer and the man inside bark. The loose trappings that kept her body from being truly her own ten-fold, and there is no where but inside her brain that she can wander. Fear finally grips her when not a single part of her soul can move.
"I said to stop that.", he speaks from her throat again and something inside her quivers with resentment, as if a sick part of her would rather be back in her room where she was trapped just as she was now. The room was safer than this, safer than what she might find drooling behind her in her own memories.
There are questions she wants to ask, but there is no way to translate them rather than to think them, but alas…he ignores her as her fingers yank hard on a lever, and the vehicle jolts forward on an increasing hum.
Where they are going, how long will she remain this way, why, and how such things are possible – are only some of the questions she repeats.
Eventually the act of thinking so desperately and painfully begins to wear her inner-light, and eventually she is asleep; nuzzled warm and frightfully in the confines of her own mind like a hibernating animal.
When consciousness returns – static-like at first – the smell of wet iron is the first sense she relishes in. It takes much longer for her to realize her body is her own once more; longer even to see with her own eyes at the disarray her host-hallucination has left her in.
Blood is everywhere; painted on her still naked skin like a sloppy paste that is dry and wet in different places. When her breath fills her – the dried blood around her chest cracks and peels like a shedding skin, stretching what doesn't give way tightly.
Her eyes are dry, but eventually – when she can see the carnage – they won't stop dripping. Bodies, or more like parts of bodies, are strewn in neat piles; stacked and arranged by order of meat still attached.
On her tongue the flooding taste of blood is finally registered and with a swallow she realizes that she'd been holding in a mouth full of it this whole time. The blood is literally everywhere, and the shock of such a notion is enough that she has yet to see the hunched man to her right – the only other being alive in this horror-show.
The inky glow of red – a thing that would normally have caught her eye – is lost in the sea of red blood and even redder meat. Some of the flesh looks ripped and torn as if it'd been eaten or clawed. For a moment she thinks that she has eaten some of them; for a moment she thinks that the more bone-exposed pieces are the remnants a meal she can't recall, but some part of her tells her no (if just to keep her waning sanity intact).
The squelch of putrid meat takes her wet eyes from the piles around her to the man wringing his mouth around a broken off shoulder. His head shakes like he's removing pieces with his teeth, and his spine makes a small outline is the thin suit he wears. There is little blood on him from this angle, but when he pauses, turns and lets her see his face, she is mistaken.
Blood dribbles darkly down from his lips, and his teeth are lost in the bodily fluid as well as the tip of his nose. Briefly she is reminded of something very much dead, and very much mutilated. He looks and then looks away, continuing his feast with little but a look of mild acknowledgment.
This is the man that'd been inside her, and suddenly she is too interested to stand still any longer. Under her feet – as she walks to him – slimy, hard and soft things slip out of the way. Bile (or old blood) bubbles in her throat, but simmers back down when she swallows hesitantly. Brief images of odd things surface in her memory as she grows closer; hapless things like people, places and emotions (some are good, but most are bad).
Her feet stop when her shins brush the fabric of his pants – the memories continue only a few moments longer as she listens to his feast viciously on the near meatless limb. He does not act like a ravenous man at the prospect of food, but more like an impatient specter.
In a voice that is truly hers, and hers alone, she queries in a whisper, "Why do you eat them?"
He seems to pause, but there is still a wet sound like he's licking his lips. She waits; naked and painted in red cracks for him to answer her. He takes another bite and throws the gory, shredded limb into a pile of others and wipes a sleeve over his mouth before rising. He is tall, and when he turns to look at her, she feels the child and him the father.
He seems to ignore her question, for he asks her his own, "What do you see?"
She is not dumb. The memories – not her own – are what he is referring to, but she has only answers that she would hate if they'd been given to her. Her eyes wander around the expanse of rot and death. It is dark aside from the high-brights of the vehicles headlights shining into a clearing of grass and decaying logs. They are in a field, or a flattened portion of forest. In the distance more similar-looking crafts are parked, but the lights are dead and they themselves are deserted – their drivers laying around them in heaps.
"What did you see?", he asks again – his voice sinister, but malicious in a teasing sort of way as if the change in tense will get a better reaction out of her. He is right.
"People…places…what they feel, what they felt.", the dead look pained and suddenly she feels as dead as them, "Are we alive?"
There is silence for long enough that she does not remember why he suddenly begins to chuckle; why his voice starts off hard but soon fades into a close lipped rumble of hateful laughter. He is laughing at her; at her question and for some reason she laughs too.
"You are.", he finally answers her, but believing him is hard when her body feels like nothing, "…soon so will I."
For a second there is a flicker in her skull, like recognition, as if she understand what he means and what will become of that very statement, but it is gone when that grated-texture of his hand grabs the loose meat of her cheek. His grip is hard and unforgiving, but the pain isn't a terrible nuisance, more an awakening from some slippage into nothing.
The eyes she sees in his head mimic this knowing, and his thumb rubs her teeth from the outside in response.
Copper – her own this time – falls upon her tongue and she swallows without thought. Vast, muddled thoughts ignite like a stubborn spark, failing to make a fire of memory like when she'd swallowed the mouthful moments ago.
"What now?", he questions; impatient and mad.
She shakes her head, unable to vocalize her answer now that his thumb has wedged itself between her lips, between her teeth and above her tongue; stroking it and flooding her taste buds with more rot and copper like some putrid dead-thing.
"That's good. I'm going to need you to lie down for this next part now, young mother."
There is another part to this - it's only two parts, but it's been written without looking back in a while now. So I'll get to that between my other stuff. In the mean time let me now how his settles. Fettel makes me giddy, and I'd hate to ruin his reputation by sullying that pure evil image he has. Review in other words if you have time. And, like always, thanks for reading.