(no subject)
Losing Alice felt like being plunged into cold water. All that optimism and love and cheer, that brightly burning child in his mind, gone. He barely noticed Stanley disappear with her, or the steady neutrality of Harriet. But his captor had taken Alice from him.
He doesn't know how long he'd been kept down here in the dark. But in that time, more than half of himself has been stripped away, by this laughing voice who treats him the way he once treated his own, nudging and tearing and binding. Killing him, strand by strand. She says he won't die, but he knows, he knows that blackness between his strands is death, has felt it so very many times now and knows it by name and it knows him, and it terrifies him.
No more.
He hoards himself, the small, central node of this fraying web, into a tiny compact ball of fear and anger and loss, and wraps in it everything he knows about what's happening to him. The needle in Benny's neck, the green suffocation, her voice, her all-powerful voice, and flings that in a surge down the few threads he has left. His message in a bottle.
He doesn't know how long he'd been kept down here in the dark. But in that time, more than half of himself has been stripped away, by this laughing voice who treats him the way he once treated his own, nudging and tearing and binding. Killing him, strand by strand. She says he won't die, but he knows, he knows that blackness between his strands is death, has felt it so very many times now and knows it by name and it knows him, and it terrifies him.
No more.
He hoards himself, the small, central node of this fraying web, into a tiny compact ball of fear and anger and loss, and wraps in it everything he knows about what's happening to him. The needle in Benny's neck, the green suffocation, her voice, her all-powerful voice, and flings that in a surge down the few threads he has left. His message in a bottle.