18- Creature Comforts
"But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called 'today,' that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin." – Hebrews 3:13
"Why the fuck is there service down here, anyway?!"
It was a mutter that came out so spitefully and so high pitched that it seemed comedic, but it was a legitimate question. It was also of course because she habitually tortured herself, even after the sheer number of unread messages turned her stomach again and again.
Fortunately, they seemed to die down, what must have been a total of a hundred-so messages from her loved ones eventually trickling into…nothing. So her antagonization had worked, and this is what "bittersweet" meant. How long had she been asleep to allow this to happen? She glanced to a corner of the room pensively. How long had she sat in that ink, stapled to the floor by her tears until Sammy took her away?
In such an ocean of heartache and unadulterated shock, her thoughts about that moment didn't resurface until she left Sammy behind on the bed. She didn't recall a terrible amount of detail, but she remembered him just…staring. He knelt to her level and when she finally saw him, it was a terrible connection between her eyes and the paint over his face. Wordlessly, he lifted her out of the pool previously made thicker and thicker by a…a…thing…and they left it behind. If he had said anything she wouldn't have had the ability to reply, and yet she didn't like the way his silence felt. That same sentiment remained upon the bed and refused to leave, even as she cast him out of her sight.
There was an emotion about him she couldn't place, and it made her unsure how to feel herself. This seemed to be the trend, regretfully.
The inquiries about time itself, however, were at least plausible to answer if not for one incredibly unsettling change in her phone. The muscles of her cheeks tightened and wrinkled in a frown.
It no longer told time.
The timestamps of old messages remained the same. Actually, so were the ones from right after- oh gosh was it really…?- "Bendy" gave it back to her. But…-
Holding her breath and closing her eyes until she scrolled past the bulk of the rejection, pleas, and anger, she rechecked the timestamp of her last messages to her mom and found that it displayed the hour and minute…but nothing else. All messages before what was presumably the moment her phone fell in the ink were normal; they displayed any measurement from the minute to the year. Her thumb tapped the home button.
No, the analog clock still didn't work. It was just a blank grey box against an otherwise unremarkable background. She didn't dare test it by messaging someone again, but she didn't seem to have any sign of current time at all, not even hour or minute like before. It was like its passage slowed or just…crumbled and decayed, like it was slowly eaten by the liquid abyss. She wished she could stop staring; her eyes were so sore from doing so. Quietly and abruptly, her heart rumbled up her neck so she may hear her own desires.
"You know what?"
She opened a gaming app, green light kissing dead eyes and a flat mouth.
"Fuck it." Might as well get her use out of it if she really couldn't take herself away from the thing causing her pain.
Just like many times before in her life, distracting herself couldn't numb the pain, but at least it kept the voices of unspeakable anxiety from getting louder and louder.
"People made out of ink that I'm trapped with forever. Ah shit. Ah dang."
Sarcasm couldn't save her now either, her pulse only quickening as she failed to overlook the troubles of existence.
Clothes.
Clothes rested at the end of the short corridor- a pair of overalls like his and then what appeared to be short pants with a childish design on them. They were boxers, but that wasn't a word in his vocabulary yet. They were decorations that had remained since whoever was here last- maybe even before them- but it still brought him pause.
Sammy didn't notice someone in the next room spot him standing in front of the garments, he being swallowed up in his own worry and fascination that his search necessitated a trail back to the first doorway he passed, not the one she waited for him in.
More clothes.
More clothes were hung in this strange space of tall squares and long glass.
This room scared him. It was enticing, oh so enticing, but it was a path of misery- a firewalk to things of value.
He couldn't see himself in the mirrors yet; he didn't want to. But he could see in two places that this surely was her cloak in front of him.
Oh no…oh no…
…He had to.
Sammy's foot scraped the floor, hardly lifting, as he made his way straight towards the cloth hung over the bathroom stall. Even as he reached up and held its limp softness in his grasp- so unusual-…the fear over what this object could mean was corroded by the one lurking by his side, gnawing into his shoulder from a distance.
Should he look? Was he…obligated to look? Alas, that decision was made for him by the morbid instinct of a past life.
Dripping. Dripping. He was dripping. A huddled pile of black hardly clothed himself by yellowing paper and scratched wood.
His cursed, horrible fingers squeezed the cloak tighter in front of his unspeakable flesh.
A sound scraped his throat. What was it? He didn't know, not what it said- if anything- nor how loud it was.
It brought her to him all the same.
"Woah, hey!"
So fortuitously, this was enough to claw his gaze away from the beast that enraptured him. Oh so barely, his nightmare still stood by his side, but at least like always it was now only in the back of his mind. Having it in front of him again was…-
The woman saw him sway side by side like he was about to fall in dizziness. With each swing a drop or two scaled down his collarbone.
"…You okay?"
His head raised up and down, but it was more likely to be a look rather than a nod. Oh boy.
The woman before him stopped leaning against the doorframe, having made her decision in this oh so bizarre, unsettling scene.
"…Come on."
She threw her hand from a flat position between them to over her shoulder, hoping it would be enough to take him from his place. She could touch him, but a sink of her heart became a reminder that it would be much too soon. It wouldn't feel right after what she just did.
There was a strange nostalgia as he came forward to her, as she stepped out of the hole in the wall to watch him exit; there was a certain- again unidentifiable- feeling in her chest as she saw him clutch her hoodie in his fingers and into his breast like she would with a stuffed animal.
Oh gosh, she missed Love-a-Lot. Wait, she was an adult!
…Wait again, who gives a shit? Him?
Nerves up and down her neck tingled with longing, remembering the sensation of holding something soft to her chest. It was like looking at herself…a really tall, slimy version of herself. Admittedly, her first reaction to seeing Sammy hold her disgusting hoodie was that it was still hers!
Even though she had discarded it along with every liquid that crusted its surface like tattoos detailing a hero's journey- hers of horror-, it would always be against human nature to see someone hold one's own possessions with such intimacy.
He must have noticed this.
The corners of her lips pulled back as they stood in the corridor, her shirt dangling over the cup of his hands in an offering. She gazed down at it, seeing it was infected with black and its mahogany deepened here and there with her own fluids; then she gazed up at him without moving her head, pupils touching the line of her eyelids.
She had changed into her other shirt after all; it didn't cover her arms quite as nicely, but a few moments of cold were better than carrying that smell. Even if she had to duck back in the room where she left him behind, it was worth it.
…Did she really still want it?
What was the right word for how the man with no face looked in front of her like this, the emotion he conveyed even without one?
There was another bit of unescapable human nature that washed over her skin in lament- empathy.
"You…you need it-…more…" she stated with a squint. There were shallow depths to this kindness; it housed pity and mystification, and that was more audible than the generosity she had in this choice.
The cartoon head tilted, seeming unsure. Hesitantly, she was compelled to reach up to him and slowly pat her hoodie in goodbye affirmingly, trying to ignore the way it felt under her fingertips.
"…Ah," he exhaled quietly.
Maybe Sammy's actions had been misinterpreted, because he still seemed unsure. Maybe he didn't realize how he looked holding it? Well, at least this was better than whatever he was doing before; that sight led to a question: Was he always like this?
…Oh boy.
"I…"
Sammy's mask lay almost horizontally downward at the crusty fabric in his hands. He was overcome by…whatever that was earlier in the bathroom. She became impatient.
"Hm?" The woman could sense he had a thought; soon she would deliberate if she regretted drawing it out into the open.
"Forgive me," he started in an airy sigh, "It's been…so long since I've seen one of these garments," he finished wistfully. Such a simple admission filled her to the brim with a newfound understanding, of an overwhelming realization. He hardly ever saw a shirt.
"He really DOES need it more..." was what echoed through her body as she gestured him to the next room; there was no way to cease watching the way he stared at a small fade of color draping over his arms, like a treasure unburied in this black and white world. And then came the weight of recognizing this was the world was now hers, no shirts and all.
Why was it that their only distraction from agony was more agony?