Archive of Our Own ^beta

They couldn’t contain it.

They sat stock still as Hornet cleaned their wounds. Their insides writhed.

It had been quite some time since they had been freed from the Temple. Free from her. Their scars long since healed.

Today, out with their sister on one of her hunts, they sustained injuries. Fallen as they were climbing, scraping their arm across a sharp rock. The injuries were not serious. Not to a being such as them. They looked worse than they were.

Their sister insisted, though. And they let her.

They still couldn’t stop the thoughts. The memories. The…visions.

The force that they failed to contain within. The fear that their thoughts alone had the power to bring it back, even as they knew it was illogical. She was gone.

They watched Hornet, bandaging their arm. They watched her hands, so close to the trickles of void flowing from their chitin, soaking into the bandages.

They could almost see streaks of orange in it. Thoughts so vivid they bled into the real world.

They could imagine the boils on their chest, rotting away their flesh, leaving nothing of their other arm. Infectious liquid oozing from every point on their void body it could force itself from. Clouds of miasma rolling off of them.

They could not contain it. They could not contain it.

They were never able to contain their thoughts. Not enough. Not enough.

Not enough to stay pure.

Not enough to stop the infection.

Not enough to stop the vivid thoughts and memories all meshed together, to see Hornet in front of them, tending to them, and imagining the sickening orange spreading, spreading, spreading, rivers oozing out of their body, reaching hers, to drench her hands as she tried to help them. Infectious pus working its way into her, sinking into her, infecting her, until she was nothing, nothing but a zombie under her control, nothing behind her eyes but orange, everything taken away away away—

They tried to focus. Tried to calm down, do something to ease the racing thoughts.

They looked at Hornet’s hands. Her real hands. Dark chitin, as it should be, working to wrap silk around their arm. The silk, white with areas of black, pure black, void untainted by infection. They looked at her dress, vivid red, the color of her Deepnest heritage.

They heard the sound of the wind, rushing through the cliffs. They heard the rustling of crawlids, the beating of vengefly wings.

They felt their own body. As whole as it would ever be. Pain in their arm, but it would pass. Dirt beneath their feet.

They-

They smelled sweetness. Sweetness they could almost taste. Sweetness settling over everything like a humid fog, leaving them clammy and nauseated.

They had no mouth, they had no ability to detect smells, and yet they knew, they knew so well, they had become so familiar, stuck forever and ever and ever and ever in the horrid miasma, with a mind they had lost control of, sensations that were not their own, from her, from all the bugs—able to sense the world, able to see each and every one of them fall to the infection, able to feel each bug as it was reanimated under her power, between what was given to them by their father and her own power of dream, the sensations overwhelming them with sight they could not turn off—poisonous promises, burning burning sweetness seeping into every limb and organ for body parts they did not possess, bodies that were not their own, but felt so vividly—the squelching, the oozing, the pain, the distortion, deformations so extreme to incapacitate—the whole swaths of the world utterly taken over, devoid of normal life, all pulsating under the will of her her her her her—

They jerked as they felt pressure on their side. It was happening. They could not contain the thoughts. Everything would bubble out of them leaving nothing in its wake and—

They looked down. Their sister had her hands on their side, squeezing. Not so hard as to hurt. But firm enough to feel.

“Hollow?”

They stared down at her, an anchor to this world.

“Can you hear me, Hollow?”

They looked from her to their arm, turning it over, all bandaged up. When had she finished…?

They gave her a nod, burning with a feeling quite unlike that of the infection.

Why were they like this?

So weak, so weak, and the shame just made it worse.

Why couldn’t they just stop with such thoughts? Why did they still look at the world around them and think such things? Why did they allow themself to imagine what each bug they knew would look like under her power, rotting, dying, deforming?

“Hollow? Let’s go back home.”

…Their mind had wandered again.

They nodded, and the two of them descended the cliffs into Dirtmouth without further incident.

They tried to forget. They never could.