Chapter Text
She exists out of time, empty.
Her insides feel hollow. Is this even a real thing? Is this existing? Does she breathe?
The memory of the experience of breathing - of her chest rising and falling, of air going in and out, of her heartbeat - fades with every minute? or hour? or day? that drifts by her in this lonely place. She doesn’t know if there are colors here, what she sees, she can’t remember what the world used to look like when there was a world around her.
It feels like forever, an eternity. Maybe it is. Maybe this is the end of everything, and she can only be in it, if this is being.
Maybe it is. She doesn’t remember enough to know the difference. Maybe this is the way it always was.
There’s no way to know how long she just is, out of time, disjointed. As the days? pass and the weeks? drag on she feels increasingly, feels increasingly listless, feels increasingly listless and angry, and remembers dimly the way all those things used to feel. She remembers the way she wants everyone else to feel the way she feels now.
Things prick at her, prick at her skin? and her insides, make her anxious. Flashes of a million things that exist all at once, together, but years and miles and worlds apart somehow.
”We won’t let you take them!” How obnoxious these children are, their crisp white uniforms stained like kaleidoscopes with their own blood and each others’ and the innards of countless horrifying things, and she has already taken them, don’t they know, but of course they don’t yet —
Some man, his hair cropped short but wavy all the same, terrified, “Just let me have her back, please, please give her back,” but she really had not done any favors for herself, giving that baby away like that. Again. She holds the word inside her and in spite of herself, eons of practice at shoving down the horror of a host, it makes her feel —
In the end, there are six of them, the last things left alive but for the witches, though there are two witches among their number all the same. The snot-nosed little demons in white are dead, or not really dead, or they stopped existing, or they won’t ever exist to begin with when she ends this. She can see that they already know this, or will know this soon, feels it in the whistle of sticks in the air and the crack of a whip and the sound of guns being cocked.
She feels it. She feels them all at once, all of them, every moment of their lives entwined with hers across weeks, centuries, eons condensed into a single pinprick of tight heat in the center of her chest, every instant but the last.
Their last.
It fills her finally, and she remembers it was not is not will not be the first time she wakes up screaming.