The prompts are from the 20 Heartbeats Livejournal community: .com/20_heartbeats/

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01. Absent [what do i do when you're not here]

[ apathy ]

Darkness was the stuff of nightmares. Ugly, deep, and raw patches of fog that grasped and trapped shrouded the horrible things it did to the ones writhing inside. That was dismissible, though, because it was only supposed to stay in your head.

Aerith couldn't stop shaking. She sat on the hard, gritty floor, holding her knees close to her chest. Her skin shivered with goose bumps and her bones ached from the tremors running through her. Long, warm burns spread across her grimy skin like she had been out baking in the sun too long. Inside, she was trembling like a violent ghost was trying to rip her body apart. Her head felt swollen with bad things that were leftover from the rotten dreams in her head. She had woken up and still they didn't go away.

The darkness was everywhere. It saturated the walls and crawled up her arms like little ants. She slapped her limbs, shook out her skirt and rubbed furiously at her hair, but she could still feel it, climbing up her back and reaching for her heart. She hid her face behind her arms and squeezed her eyes shut, counting each and every beat of her pulse to make sure it was still there. The darkness was waiting and it would swallow her alive. She would be damned forever in all those hellish nights spent sweating and screaming.

"Mother?" She yelled to someone, her voice breaking from her dry, ashen throat. She wasn't sure who was left to yell to. She couldn't feel their world anymore. The voice of the planet was dead. Her chest clenched around that empty, gaping hole that it left. She had never felt so alone. Even when no one else would so much as give her the time of day, the world would speak. It told her things no one else knew. It was wide and impossible to comprehend, making her feel no bigger than a speck of dust in its veins, but when she had no friends it gave her ones to talk to. Even those were gone now. All she had now were those secrets spinning around in her empty head.

"Mother."

No one answered.

Outside the cold, dark emptiness of the not-space pressed against the little ship like a vacuum. She tried not to think about how there were only so many inches worth of metal and sky-candy keeping her from the endless abyss. She could feel the engine rumbling reassuring somewhere below, like the ship had its own heartbeat. She could feel the heat it generated through the walls, the warmth making her dress stick to her body. Small beads of sweat ran down her face and limbs like those little dark claws trying to reach through her flesh.

"Don't think about it," she told her knees, rocking back and forth. The gum walls creaked, the engine hissed and she twitched. Her face grew so hot she thought she would burst.

"Mo-ther?"

"I SAID NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

A scream pierced through the hall, rocking Aerith from her concentration. A little girl they'd grabbed at the last second was throwing a fit in the cockpit. Aerith knew she'd seen the girl running wild on the streets before they had been destroyed. The pilot was trying to figure out how to communicate with her.

Aerith turned her head away, like that could block out the anguished wails. She had to decide if they were better or worse that listening to her own body rip away from its consciousness. She had one soul for company in the little space and her first look at him and nearly caused her to jump out of her skin. All she noticed at first was the dirt, the soot, and the blood. There was so much blood. It oozed over his face, shiny and red, covering his nose and cheeks, running into his mouth and rolling down the sides of his jaws to seep into his neck and what was left of the torn, gray t-shirt. He didn't even seem to be human. He wouldn't live for much longer.

"Are you okay?" she asked, her voice coming out a little stranger than she'd planned, like it wasn't even hers.

The person didn't say anything.

"You're bleeding," she said unnecessarily.

Two eyes, cloudy and gray, suddenly popped up. She didn't think she could ever be so terrified of eyes in her life. A rough sound like a cough rolled in his throat, and then he managed to croak something out.

"…go…away…" he shuddered, barely managing to wheeze enough breath. "…j-just…let…me…die…"

It was a sound of such despair, mournful and hypnotic, that Aerith couldn't help but consider taking a loose gummi block and actually smashing it against his skull. She shuddered at herself. She stood up, shaking hands rubbing furiously at her gooseflesh and looking down at the pathetic lump bleeding and gasping in front of her. Angry screams continued to resonate behind her. She could smell the smoke and bodies of the handful of other people stuck with her on that boat.

Mother?

There was no answer. There was only a painful, panging loneliness that tore at her heart. Slowly, convinced she was in a dream, Aerith turned around and walked away from him. She traveled deeper into the ship and found a porthole. She clutched at the metal frame and squared her jaw as she looked into the darkness pressing against the ship.

Something was wrong. There was something she had forgotten.

One by one, stars flickered into existence as her eyes got used to watching them pass by. They circled and spun as the ship tumbled through space, bringing them far, far away from the disaster that was their home.

She couldn't remember what it was that they were running from. In the jumble of mess and shape there was something she'd left behind.

Aerith dug her fingers into her hair and ground her teeth. What was it, what was it. She'd never felt like this before in her life. Inside, she burned and writhed with the dark until she thought she was going to be sick.

"MOTHER!"

She tore at her hair and screamed. She couldn't remember ever feeling anything else but this. This terror of things that no one could fight, terrified of her own body, the unfamiliarity of absolutely everything around her. She was alone, just her and these strange people she neither knew nor cared about, spinning through nothing, going nowhere. Everything she had known, the house she'd lived in, the streets she'd played in, the colors and that deep, ancient rhythm that had flowed through her veins whenever she breathed were gone.

It was like all of that had been a dream, and now she was waking up.