A/N: This was the first fic of the year... not Ordinary World, by the way. XP Anywho... a little experimentation in structure, trying to convey confusion, but I probably made it suck more. D: Ah well, it's just testing and stuff anyway. You don't have to like it. :P

Enjoy and R&R! XP

asthenophobia

Am I dead?
Oh God...

A statement of distress, half-plucked from the vast expanse of vocabulary I surely still retained... Didn't I?

Wait, what?

- - - -

Blood.
I gasped, or thought I made an attempt, tasting bitterly as it tricked down my ravaged throat, dull pangs, ran rivers down my body. Pain.

Wipe it away.

I strained, reached to swipe at my mouth, defiant, but could not find it. Trapped. Inside my own body. No sense of touch other than the vague perception of heated liquid pouring down me, out of me.
Searching wildly for a grasp on something, anything, I came upon a glacial presence. Felt it extending into my very substance with a leering malevolence. Regarding me as predator observes prey. Exhausted, I instinctively undertook struggle against it, somehow knowing, feeling, that I must fight...
Or cease to exist...
Perhaps even suffer a fate worse than the infernal flames.

It slithered away, leaving me suspended in a malformed world.

...It returned with a vengeance, coiling like a snake in the blackness. I pushed to it, almost despairing to grasp it and toss it away, fearfully snapping back so as to construct a shield around my consciousness, but finding myself without the memory of how to do so.
Recollection betrayed me and the invader escaped my vision. I raced against time to redetect the trespasser, but could not even begin to perceive just what that was.

How long...?

I lost focus, slipped beneath the blank horizon.

Nothing...

. . .
Then, abruptly, everything ignited in sheer agony. Heat, pulsating, tearing directly through me as I screamed with a voice I could not find. Every vein erupted with molten flame, every particle of my being submerged in burning paroxysm as I inhaled sharply, sensing charred and ash-laden lungs gratefully take in the stale air, tasting blood on gritted teeth.

Slowly, a twisting pain surged as the creature yanked itself from my spinal cord.
Snapped open my eyes.
Realized there was something horribly wrong with me.
Crying, suddenly able to hear my own pathetic screams.

He probably enjoyed that.

My back arched in rejection of the agony. I didn't want to feel. Not anymore. They're all gone.
They're all dead.
Keening, the loss took my heart, snapped it in two, and stomped on the shards until I was left with only mere splinters of the love that had been.

The creature grinned horribly, picking the pieces of my broken heart from his incisors, laughing maniacally as I writhed under the knife.

Screams ripped at my already marred throat, sobbing while I squirmed, only to recognize the bite of metal at my wrists and ankles, restraining me.

With violent perspicacity returned to me, if only for a moment, my mind threw down the only word, no, name, that came to it.

"SHADOW!!!" I cried out, howling with all the strength I had left in me. "--"

He smirked. Downstroke of the needle. Slumber in a bottle.
I knew.
Lost in time. Fading.

I remembered asking.
What if there was no tomorrow?
What if that was today?
...He's gone, too.
There's no one here.
Shattered. Leaves falling down. Alone.

...In tears, I drown.

A/N: On a side note... asthenophobia is the fear of weakness... if that may enlighten some of ya'll.