A/N Pro Tip: Listen to Third Eye Blind when reading this fic. I've always imagined Sirius's voice as the British version of the lead singers.
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The sound of screaming.
That's all I know. The vibrations of despair are acrid and swallow me like polluted smoke. It's a sound that would rattle my bones if I had any sense of my body at the moment. I can feel, but not in any way I'm used to.
Usually, I'd have a chest that constricts, a heart that stutters at such a noise. In witness to such suffering, blood usually shifts from stone to magma to stone again, rushing throughout veins. And fingers, arms, toes, legs. Those exist too, that's right. I'm supposed to have limbs and extremities that tremble with emotion.
Anguish is careening in the air around me, and I desperately ache to make it stop, to soothe it. But is there air? Or is there only sound. Only the screaming, perhaps there has only ever been the screaming.
No, no, I'm right. Something is glaringly missing. Reality, is normally stitched to the senses, to eyes and ears, to an above and a below.
And yet--this ache.
Empathy--that's what it's called, right? But to have empathy, to feel it in a body, I'd have to have one.
And as suddenly as I realize this, I do. I am situated in time and space. Yes, time and space themselves exist, along with the screaming. After all, I distantly think, sound doesn't exist in a vacuum. There is nothing to bounce the waves off of.
The screaming. It won't stop.
And ... it is coming from a someone. It always has been.
I should be terrified, I realize. But I can't even open my eyes, let alone rationalize that danger usually accompanies the sound of someone being tortured.
Oh! Yes, that's why there is only darkness. My eyes are shut. And... someone is being tortured. And someones shouldn't be in such pain. Agony shouldn't exist in the world like that. I should help that someone.
Yes, help the someone. Because I'm a someone too, right? A person. That's what I'm called a person. A person with a body and eyes.
Yes, eyes. I was thinking about my eyes. Suddenly I know that opening them is the most important thing in the world right now. I do. And at first, confusingly, I think I haven't, because of the oppressive darkness before me. But no, I've succeeded.
Because the darkness is now suffused with a damp, sickly green.
Fear is starting to register now. Human instinct is flooding back into me, back into my brain and nerves.
Focus. Brains control the nerves control the bones and muscles and skin. And skin can feel.
Sharp. That's what's beneath me. Jaggedness pressing into my hip bones, my face, the flesh of my abdomen. I'm laying on my stomach, on what must be rocks. One is cutting into my temple, and a sickening damp warmth is dripping down my cheek.
I shift my face and yes, there is indeed a rocky ground beneath me, and a stripe of glowing green at the edge of my vision to my right. To my right and above me.
I'm sprawled on a rocky hill, and the screaming and glowing green are coming from its summit.
Get up. Stop the screaming. Help. Help the screamer.
I wish I was still without a body. It is so much more work to have a body.
It's very difficult to take stock of things when that screaming is all-encompassing.
I wrench myself up, at first only succeeding in slipping onto my back painfully, then onto my knees. Why won't my body work? Perhaps I'm in shock. That's it. That's why the question of how I got here, of where I am, hasn't come up.
Well, there's nothing for it, just keep moving. I begin to crawl up the hill, finding I can't stand.
The green light is growing brighter and brighter, until I see a pale boy with shaggy black hair at its center. He's holding a small goblet filled with sinister pearly green liquid in his left hand. His other is clawing at his face. He can't be more than sixteen.
Next to him is a podium with a great basin atop it. And I know an aversion to that basin like nothing I ever have before. The horridness of its darkness scorches the air, leeching life.
Behind the podium, for the first time, comes a new sound, a terrified raspy voice.
"Just two more, Master. Two more gulps."
In horror, I watch as the boy obeys and downs the goblet. Pure poison is in that cup. Only death could come from that basin.
As the boy dips his goblet back into the basin, I scramble desperately faster to reach him. He's downed the goblet again, retrieved something from the basin, and collapsed against the podium by the time my fingers barely reach his shoes.
No no no. He's being fed on. That green darkness is corroding him.
Bare skin. I need to reach bare skin, and everything will be alright. Never have I known something so odd to be so certain.
My fingers reach his bare ankle, and I barely have time to register surprised recognition in slate grey eyes before I feel as though I'm being sucked through a small tube, whirling in deep water.
And suddenly, everything is red and bright and burning.