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Tell me how it is, being the sun.
You could walk into a room
and they’d all be watching you.
They’d all get down on their knees.
I ask you how it is, and you say,
“It hurts. It hurts.”— R. Wright, “Sunlit”
It hurts. It hurts, it hurts it hurts and there are no words for it because words are for little things and little pains, splinters and headaches and broken bones and beheadings. Cold, the wood is cold against your sparse-furred skin. Warm, She is so warm, fire-warm, you can’t breathe because She busies Herself stretching Her limbs, wrapping her teeth around your lungs, pulling each of the tendons in your legs, sliding your organs out of place.
“Guard,” you croak out. She curls around your tongue now, replaces the blood in your mouth with golden, aching light. Every breath you take tastes of smoke, scrapes down your throat that you know is not yours because nothing is yours anymore, not your claws or your teeth, nothing able to fight back with is yours.
You want to beg. You want to scream. You want Her to stay and you want Her gone and both wants are the same thing because either way you will die, either way you are already, already dying, all ready to die, you want to live, you don’t remember what your life was like before She found you.
She uncurls inside your neck. Your jaw jerks open, dislocating with a wet crack. Golden light spills from your mouth; or maybe it’s vomit, or maybe it’s blood. It is thick and viscous running down your furred chin. You fold in half again, noises like an animal caught in a trap, She’s here She’s here and you can feel Her choking on you, or you choking on Her. Blood pours from your nose in thick clots. Your right eye has gone blind, and your back legs stopped working long ago.
You can do nothing but whimper as your Guard trails down the splintering plank. Bloodshot eyes trail her figure.
“Suncat,” she calls, low. Her eyes are dim, but she is not pallid with grief, she is not weeping like a mother. Guards raise their Suncat from birth to death, as close to their biological mother as one can be. You should’ve known, really; every good Suncat trains for this, for their death. Yet you never expected the white-hot pain that it would bring.
Perhaps it’s a punishment.
She sits near you, disinterested if anything. Distant. The flies buzz around her for a moment, then retreat, sensing no food to be found.
You sob. Every inhale whistles as it cuts through your throat, every inhale tastes hotter than the last.
“Suncat,” she repeats, tired now. “Stop fighting Her.”
A shrill, bubbling shriek tears its way out. “SHE IS A PARASITE!” You convulse, head hitting the wood, it hurts it hurts “ALL— ALL SHE FEELS FOR US IS HUNGER!” You cough and cough and another piece of molten light threads itself into your crimson vomit.
Leaving is not emptying, not when you’re Suncat, not when it’s Her; leaving is tearing, leaving is a butcher’s work done from the inside out. Gold and blood spurts in ropes down your chin. You are rotting, rotting, the maggots are hatching, you watch them grow. You try to curl into yourself but there is no yourself anymore, there’s no safety in hiding.
Guard replies, but you do not hear it. Or you hear it and it enters one ear and then Her ear, and you serve only as a messenger, like you always have.
She is moving again, a predator breaking your ribs to gorge on your insides. You scream, yet the sound is too loud for a scream, it rips through you so hard your vision bursts apart into white static. Your spine bows, something snaps. Your forelegs claw useless ruts into the wooden planks as Her shape forces upward through your chest, dragging pieces of you with her, you can feel every wet strand tearing loose one by one by one and sticking to Her and one by one
Your body fails in sections. Your eye and back legs have already betrayed you, but now the rest is coming with. Your forepaws curl, dead, against your chest. Your lungs collapse around Her as She pulls free of them, and no air is enough, your mouth hangs open in hoarse gasps but you can’t get anything in.
Your screams warp halfway out of your mouth because She is following it, pouring through your throat in strands of liquid gold and sunlight. Pain, pain, you have known nothing else, you have always been a prey-animal in pain.
Sunlight, sunlight,
warm and hot and burning
and you know nothing else
because you are Her and She is you,
and you’ve known nothing else,
you’ve never known anything else.
And the pain
the pain
the —
yet you know no such thing as warmth anymore,
for She has left.
“Guard,” you rasp, hoarse, barely audible. “Pleeaaaase…”
She glances down at you.
“Please, Guard…” Scarlet drool spills from your mouth. “Hhnn… help—… help me…”
“Hush. Just rest.”
“I—… I don’t want to—” You suck in a lone, terrified breath. You don’t want to die. You don’t want to die.
Guard is silent, silent.
“C—” Your good eye slowly turns towards her. Her expression has not changed. “Cut… cchhh— cut Her out…” a breath, “—of me…”
“… Thank you for your sacrifice.”