Let me tell you how it is.
There's a black hole in the pit of your stomach, right at the back by your spine. It's sucking you in and in and in, your intestines, your nerves, your bile and bone and blood. It's eating you and you want to curl up into a ball to make the pain stop but it just gets worse. You sweat and shake and hurt and want, your brain circles the drain with your gaze fixed on the blackness and the drop and the sucking need. You were fighting this with logic but logic is in your brain, a thing your brain made up. It crumbles like a sandcastle under this greedy eating tide. And still you hold out, because all you are is holding out. All you are is this death-clenched grip on some principle that you're rapidly forgetting.
It can't last forever. You hold out as long as you can; but in the end, you always decide to give in. Like a muscle cramp easing, the relief is not instantaneous; ti's a slow unclenching as you feel certainty settling down inside you. You were a shaken snowglobe, now all is growing still and peaceful. You start to plan.
There's a moment when you shudder and your skin tingles and you close your eyes because it's all so crystal clear. Your skin is literally crawling with goosebumps but they're familiar, old friends come back to visit. You can safely leave them alone to do their own thing while you get on with the prep work.
The routine kicks in, the muscle memory of every other time you've done this same thing. Your brain isn't quite on autopilot but the focus isn't on the work, not really. It's half a step ahead. You're only paying attention to the sweet cold touch of your tools in the periphery; all your real attention is focused on the still-unseen goal.
Who would ever understand? Only other beasts like you can ever sympathize. And truly, all beasts are the same inside. All beasts are focused on their own need, their own singing sinking stomach-cramping desire. They can spare no thought for you.
The only beast who ever loved, the only beast who ever came and hunted you and wanted to share his kill with you is gone and you are listening to the drip of his blood in the pail while you crouch in the smoking cold of his killroom and shudder and howl the screaming pain in the silence of your mind while the black hole in the pit of your stomach slowly devours every moment of grace you've ever had in the inescapable gravity of his death. Of your brother's death.
And the inescapable truth is that this too shall pass, because you will not huddle here forever. You will eventually stand up and plant the knife in his cold fingers, curling your gloved hands around his one last time. You will let it fall and hear it clatter to the ground. You will collect your things and leave, walking out the door numb from the cold inside and out into the heat and you will thaw and it will stop hurting, like a root canal over when the nerve is gone.
And you'll be back to the dead emptiness inside and you will be *grateful* for it, for the complete lack of human sensation that comes back when it hurts too much to breathe. The lizard brain that keeps you going and going long past the point when human sensitivity would shut your systems down.
You'll walk in the sun and it won't burn you. But oh, how those moments when your brother comes crawling back up out of the muck of your mind will sting.