the web's of my own making
Last night, Light dreamed of spiders. He doesn't usually mind them: in fact, he likes them - the way they dance and trap and hunt, and scurry on too many legs: the way they spin and weave, calling form and structure out of their own being like prayer. The way most people fear them, when really, they're so insignificant.
Analytical, he'd brought a blanket to the room with the fish again, just to establish that the deep, dreamless sleep he'd had the previous night wasn't down to some quirk of the room: some innocent trick that his alternate - blithe, lying, desperate for control - had tried to claim credit for.
He'd lain down on one of the sofas, to try and sleep - though really, he didn't know how much chance he had of getting any sleep at all, when someone could walk in at any time - and had closed his eyes, only to open them again after a few minutes. He should have known better - there was no way he was going to be able to sleep here.
Except.
The fish are gone. And in their place, dangling from the ceiling on their strands of web, are spiders - mostly small, but some ... not so small. Jewel-coloured spiders. And the room is full of cast-off webs, thick, bristling like fibreglass: they surround him where he's lying on the sofa. He can't get off the sofa, or out of the room - not without carving his way through the sticky webbing, which is packed full of the invertebrates.
Or was. Because they're dropping to the floor, one after the other. All of them, moving.
Towards Light.
The tiny spiders - and the not-so-tiny ones - are swarming, now, up onto the sofa with him: not hundreds, not even thousands, but tens of thousands, at least. There are so very many of them that they aren't silent: they chatter against each other as they move, chitinous, clicking, and unspeakably, they're moving fast, like the ocean, onto him, over him, drowning him. He can feel their tiny legs and claws running over him, scratching, biting, beneath his clothes now, poking at his eyes, his nose, his ears-
-and it's not fear he's feeling, buried beneath the countless, tiny, teeming mass of carnivores, it's not fear at all - not even as they start to spin, wrapping him up in silk. It's loathing, sliding under his skin: a horror so deep he thinks he may never move again - so simple and straightforward, he should have known, he should have realised that those long, spindly legs just resting against you was the worst thing in the world. He wants to scream his disgust and denial, pleading - get me out of here - but he doesn't dare open his mouth, because what would they do, what could they do, once they got inside him?
Then, all of a sudden, they're gone. The silk is gone: the webbing in the room is gone. The friendly fish, that twisted and became the spiders, are also gone.
Light props himself up on one arm, reaching to take his blanket and get himself out of this room forever - but before he can drop from the sofa, he feels ... something. A brush, feather-soft, of something inside him. And he realises, horrified, full of shock - as if he's just been told he has forty seconds to live - where it is the spiders have gone.
And he can feel them, collapsing within him, into one much, much bigger spider, weaving and spinning lies across his thoughts, trailing its ugly, spined legs across his mind - it feels like the faintest touch of an inkbrush, dipping into his brain and writing secrets in his blood, like madness. He grabs his head, shakes it from side to side - he must be able to dislodge it, they got in somehow, he can get them out again - and tries not to think about how he'd rather the spiders had just eaten him, because his thoughts and his abilities and who he is are really all he has left.
His head's filling with the web, and every time the spider's legs contract around his brain he convulses, terrified now: please, please don't do this to me. He doesn't even realise he's begging to someone, anyone, to make this stop - but when the spider begins to pull, ever so gently, on the web it's constructed around his brain, he realises, tangled, lost, what it's doing - oh please, please no, it's calling something.
Something terrible, the worst thing in the world, coming to get him - and footsteps, outside the room, in the hallway - not the tiny shuffle of spider feet, but ordinary footsteps, walking. And through the crazed, ruined tangle that's all that's left of his sanity, he looks up, tendrils of web and chitin still trailing around and through all of his secrets, soiling them, making them somehow dirty-
-and sees himself looking back at him.
It's his own face, his own image, looking at him with an intense gaze and a cold little contemptuous smirk. Except that it's not him, can't possibly be, because the figure in the doorway has eyes that glow like lasers. And he's watching, all chill amusement, as Light tries to weave the remaining shreds of himself together into some kind of defence-
-but before he can do that, before he can pull everything he's lost up from the ground beneath him, he feels a pulling and tearing in his head, as if someone's ripping the lining of his brain right out through his ear: despite his best efforts, he chokes and sobs, because these things are so much easier to endure when he doesn't have an audience.
Then there's a brush across his face: legs, too many legs, spider legs walking - off the sofa, down to the floor on a strand of web, across and across the floor, until it reaches the feet of his alternate and scurries up to his shoulder. The other Light doesn't seem to mind the spider at all: in fact, his smirk widens, as he tilts his head to listen...
To listen to what the spider's telling him. To all the things it ripped out of Light's head.
That's when he falls off the cliff, unhinged, lost, and starts screaming. And wakes up.
Still screaming, too, in a public room.
And as he wakes up properly, under the blanket, out of the nightmare, one of the few things he can remember is thinking, Is that something he put there, or something that's my own?
Analytical, he'd brought a blanket to the room with the fish again, just to establish that the deep, dreamless sleep he'd had the previous night wasn't down to some quirk of the room: some innocent trick that his alternate - blithe, lying, desperate for control - had tried to claim credit for.
He'd lain down on one of the sofas, to try and sleep - though really, he didn't know how much chance he had of getting any sleep at all, when someone could walk in at any time - and had closed his eyes, only to open them again after a few minutes. He should have known better - there was no way he was going to be able to sleep here.
Except.
The fish are gone. And in their place, dangling from the ceiling on their strands of web, are spiders - mostly small, but some ... not so small. Jewel-coloured spiders. And the room is full of cast-off webs, thick, bristling like fibreglass: they surround him where he's lying on the sofa. He can't get off the sofa, or out of the room - not without carving his way through the sticky webbing, which is packed full of the invertebrates.
Or was. Because they're dropping to the floor, one after the other. All of them, moving.
Towards Light.
The tiny spiders - and the not-so-tiny ones - are swarming, now, up onto the sofa with him: not hundreds, not even thousands, but tens of thousands, at least. There are so very many of them that they aren't silent: they chatter against each other as they move, chitinous, clicking, and unspeakably, they're moving fast, like the ocean, onto him, over him, drowning him. He can feel their tiny legs and claws running over him, scratching, biting, beneath his clothes now, poking at his eyes, his nose, his ears-
-and it's not fear he's feeling, buried beneath the countless, tiny, teeming mass of carnivores, it's not fear at all - not even as they start to spin, wrapping him up in silk. It's loathing, sliding under his skin: a horror so deep he thinks he may never move again - so simple and straightforward, he should have known, he should have realised that those long, spindly legs just resting against you was the worst thing in the world. He wants to scream his disgust and denial, pleading - get me out of here - but he doesn't dare open his mouth, because what would they do, what could they do, once they got inside him?
Then, all of a sudden, they're gone. The silk is gone: the webbing in the room is gone. The friendly fish, that twisted and became the spiders, are also gone.
Light props himself up on one arm, reaching to take his blanket and get himself out of this room forever - but before he can drop from the sofa, he feels ... something. A brush, feather-soft, of something inside him. And he realises, horrified, full of shock - as if he's just been told he has forty seconds to live - where it is the spiders have gone.
And he can feel them, collapsing within him, into one much, much bigger spider, weaving and spinning lies across his thoughts, trailing its ugly, spined legs across his mind - it feels like the faintest touch of an inkbrush, dipping into his brain and writing secrets in his blood, like madness. He grabs his head, shakes it from side to side - he must be able to dislodge it, they got in somehow, he can get them out again - and tries not to think about how he'd rather the spiders had just eaten him, because his thoughts and his abilities and who he is are really all he has left.
His head's filling with the web, and every time the spider's legs contract around his brain he convulses, terrified now: please, please don't do this to me. He doesn't even realise he's begging to someone, anyone, to make this stop - but when the spider begins to pull, ever so gently, on the web it's constructed around his brain, he realises, tangled, lost, what it's doing - oh please, please no, it's calling something.
Something terrible, the worst thing in the world, coming to get him - and footsteps, outside the room, in the hallway - not the tiny shuffle of spider feet, but ordinary footsteps, walking. And through the crazed, ruined tangle that's all that's left of his sanity, he looks up, tendrils of web and chitin still trailing around and through all of his secrets, soiling them, making them somehow dirty-
-and sees himself looking back at him.
It's his own face, his own image, looking at him with an intense gaze and a cold little contemptuous smirk. Except that it's not him, can't possibly be, because the figure in the doorway has eyes that glow like lasers. And he's watching, all chill amusement, as Light tries to weave the remaining shreds of himself together into some kind of defence-
-but before he can do that, before he can pull everything he's lost up from the ground beneath him, he feels a pulling and tearing in his head, as if someone's ripping the lining of his brain right out through his ear: despite his best efforts, he chokes and sobs, because these things are so much easier to endure when he doesn't have an audience.
Then there's a brush across his face: legs, too many legs, spider legs walking - off the sofa, down to the floor on a strand of web, across and across the floor, until it reaches the feet of his alternate and scurries up to his shoulder. The other Light doesn't seem to mind the spider at all: in fact, his smirk widens, as he tilts his head to listen...
To listen to what the spider's telling him. To all the things it ripped out of Light's head.
That's when he falls off the cliff, unhinged, lost, and starts screaming. And wakes up.
Still screaming, too, in a public room.
And as he wakes up properly, under the blanket, out of the nightmare, one of the few things he can remember is thinking, Is that something he put there, or something that's my own?