I just wrote this in under ten minutes and haven't really edited it at all. Just a vent-y Sollux fic that I did real quick.
Stop stop STOP
The voices are uncontrollable, they never started, they never stop, they're just there. They exist in a never-ending state of incoherent babbling, of screams and whispers that no matter how much I shut them out, they fill up every inch of space in my brain. Screaming, screaming, and I think most of it is my mind - what reason do the nearly dead have to scream when they're nearly dead.
SHUT UP.
If I could tear out my mind, shred it to pieces, and put in a new one - a new one, filled with nothing but peace. One that wasn't filled with screams and whispers and mutters and demands. A mind without the plague of endless banter, of those poor souls who don't get to live anymore - I would in a second. But I can't and I'm always going to be left with nothing but a torturous, endless screeching, starting in my mind and crawling through every inch of my body. They're not screaming, they whisper, they mutter, they speak, I'm screaming. I shout and scream at them to shut up, why don't they shut up?
Can't the world go ten seconds without someone dying. Ten seconds, that's all I ask. Ten seconds of quiet, ten seconds or normalcy, ten seconds of sweet silence that I'd never experienced. It feels like they're screaming, trying to overpower my own, trying to drown out my noise with theirs. My stupid selfish self won't give up, and so it's a cycle of screaming over one another until everything dies down. It goes on forever, they whisper and I scream, so they scream back until I'm left with a blistering headache and a thousand voices screaming into my ears at once and only I can hear it.
And do you have any idea
What it's like to hear my girlfriend's voice? To hear her voice filling my brain when her lips are still and her lungs are full of air. To know that soon enough, she'd be dead and gone and there was nothing I could do to stop it because her voice was whispering to me and soon enough she would be joining the choir of screams when I begged her to be quiet, when I asked her if she was okay, what had happened. To know that no matter what, she would be dead and in my mind, she already was. As she wakes up and smiles at me, to know that that smile wouldn't be there for long and it'd be replaced with lips that were still and lungs absent of air.
Twice. It happened twice, little did I know that the first time it would be my fault. Little did I know that I would be the reason that my girlfriend was talking to me the moment I woke up, despite the fact that she was no doubt still asleep in her own hive, happy and safe and warm. The voices tried to drown her down too, as if they were more important. Maybe she was just garbled, maybe that was the blood, I don't KNOW.
All I know is that I killed my girlfriend, and I couldn't protect the other and I knew first thing I woke up that that was how it was going to end up - with them dead and me unable to stop it. And it wasn't just my girlfriends, all my friends. Every single one of my friends, I heard their voices, heard their screams as I tried to go about my day without showing the signs of how distressed I was, how tired and done I was. I couldn't look at them, still couldn't if I tried to. I knew they would die. I knew all of them would die and I didn't say anything and maybe that's the reason they're all dead.
Because I'm a pathetic, lonely piece of shit who doesn't know how to talk to anybody. Maybe if I could have forced the words out, despite my stubborn tongue, besides the knot in my throat created by the words "I hear you in my head," besides the fact that I knew that they would die anyway. There could have been a chance. And I took that chance away. From all of them. From Aradia and Feferi and Nepeta and Equius and ALL OF THEM.
My name is Sollux Captor and there is a never-ending string of tortured souls that haunts me.