black open water comes curdling up like anger

by procrastinatingbookworm

Summary:

Ghost finds a bench in the Abyss.

Notes:

based on a cut abyss bench that feral eloquently dubbed the Dead Baby Bench, and that alone made me need to write a fic about it.

content warnings are what you'd expect: discussion of dead children, some description of injury and violence, and ghost's very unhappy internal monologue.

You think it’s pretty fair, actually, that your dead siblings beat the shit out of you. 

You are, more or less, the third-best representation of everything wrong with their lives. (First and second are the Hollow Knight and your bastard father, either respectively or in reverse order, depending on how literal you’re being.)

You lived when they didn’t, your fall cushioned by their broken bodies, and to add insult to injury, you got out, too—dragged yourself out of the pit and right out of Hallownest. You’ve seen the sun.

So you’re not mad, exactly, that the shades of your siblings pummeled you within an inch of your life and knocked you off the remains of the stairs leading up to the lighthouse. They’re well within their rights to do that. You’d be pissed off too.

But their righteous anger did force you to retreat back across the Abyss at a run, leaking void from a gash across your stomach, gripping your nail so tightly that the joints of your fingers ache.

The skulls of your siblings crunch under your feet.

The skulls of thousands of your fucking siblings—

You can’t think about it for too long or you’re just going to let them kill you and kick you back to the Stag Station bench, and if you’re thrown out of here you don’t know when you’re going to manage to force yourself to come back, and you’re kinda on a time limit here.

Your sibling is dying.

Fuck, your body count of specifically your siblings is getting pretty fucking high, especially if you count cutting down their shades. You hate that. You hate that more than you hate most of this, which is pretty fucking impressive, because you hate all of this so much.

A sibling-shade unfurls from the cracked skull under your feet, and you lash out blindly with your nail to get it away from you, and it’s so close to your face that you watch the void-shape of it tear and flake away and fucking gods you want to scream but you don’t have enough soul to heal yourself much less cast a spell, which is the only voice you have. You can’t even scream about the horrors around you without vomiting your soul through your eye sockets.

Instinct carries you through the throng of your siblings and into a corridor built of smooth, dark stone. You’ve been this way already—down this hallway is where you found the Abyss Shriek. 

You sheathe your nail. Your siblings don’t follow you in here—the only other creatures are the Shadow Creepers, their scuttling echoing in the empty corridor.

Keeping one hand clamped over your stomach, holding the voidstuff of your body together until you can heal, you press your other palm against the wall, keeping yourself upright as you struggle forward.

Halfway down the hallway, your clawtips catch on a crack in the wall, and you stop.

You missed this, the first time—the crumbled remains of a doorway, half-buried by rubble. You give the mess a few thwacks with your nail until it crumbles inward, leaving a gap just about the right height for you to sneak through.

For a moment, you aren’t entirely sure what you’re looking at. Your mind fills in blanks in the darkness—particles of soul dance around something vaguely bench-shaped, and you take a grateful step forward, eager to finally rest.

The light of your lumafly lantern illuminates what you thought was a pile of rubble, and you recoil so quickly you overbalance and drop to one knee, your nail skittering away from you as you lock both arms across your stomach.

You can’t be sick, of course—there’s nothing in you that you could expel other than your own voidstuff, but for a moment you’re certain you’re going to vomit.

The bench is. The bench.

The bench is bodies .

A huddle of dead children, all pressed together in the center of the room. Curved horns of different heights form the back and arms, empty-eyed heads form the seat.

It’s definitely a bench—you can feel the pull of it from where you’re kneeling, inviting you to rest. It’s a bench, seeping soul, and it’s also a pile of dead children .

You sit down. 

It heals you.

The masks of your long-dead siblings are smooth under your clawpads. Their horns encircle you like a shield.

You throw your head back and scream. No sound comes out—you don’t have the Old Light inside you like your sibling does—but for a long moment the noise in the room is swallowed by the force of your howling, all ambience reduced to a choking hush.

You don’t run out of breath so much as you run out of energy. You slump down on the bench, into the once-soft cloaks of your siblings, stiffened by death and time. You prop your back against one long, curved horn and bow your head.

You don’t know any prayers, and you don’t know any gods who would listen if you did.

But you hope your siblings found peace, wherever they are. So few of you ever will.