dr_riley (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dr_riley) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
revivalproject2021-10-16 03:33 pm
dr_riley) wrote in revivalproject2021-10-16 03:33 pm
The Lonely
Open to All
WARNINGS: None yet
Somewhere in the back of his mind, behind the cogs jamming with fevered panic and hidden within the terror scrambled maintenance and safety protocols that normally kept his heart and lungs and adrenal glands within normal parameters, Drake couldn't help but liken himself to a goldfish in a bowl: tiny and helpless, on display, nothing secret, nothing private, at the whim of an entity far more powerful than any he'd ever come across, and yet the tiniest bit...fascinated. The sudden BANG caused him to flinch and stumble backwards with his arms raised (To what? Protect himself? That's a good one.) and when he looked up again, everything was as it had been a moment ago.
But it also wasn't.
If he'd known right away exactly what happened, he'd have liked to have said that he felt very strange, but he didn't. What he felt was dreadfully familiar. It was something that, until recently, he felt all the time, waking and sleeping, accompanying him to work, meeting him for lunch, coming home and sitting at the dinner table, getting bigger and bigger until he couldn't breathe. He had learned how to live with this quiet terror and was still relearning how to live without it.
What was different was the...hunger? Desire? Biological urge? ...to feel others feeling it. That part was so new and so subtle that he didn't notice it at first. After all, Drake had often, perhaps selfishly, wished that his loved ones might have an inkling of the danger he put himself in every day, of how he felt, of how hard he tried. And sometimes...he wanted to get back at them. He never did, he never would, but the hurt and angry little thought sometimes niggled its way to the surface all the same.
And now it was there full time. It howled in his ears and it filled his lungs and it spoke through his lips:
"I will make you feel alone."
WARNINGS: None yet
Somewhere in the back of his mind, behind the cogs jamming with fevered panic and hidden within the terror scrambled maintenance and safety protocols that normally kept his heart and lungs and adrenal glands within normal parameters, Drake couldn't help but liken himself to a goldfish in a bowl: tiny and helpless, on display, nothing secret, nothing private, at the whim of an entity far more powerful than any he'd ever come across, and yet the tiniest bit...fascinated. The sudden BANG caused him to flinch and stumble backwards with his arms raised (To what? Protect himself? That's a good one.) and when he looked up again, everything was as it had been a moment ago.
But it also wasn't.
If he'd known right away exactly what happened, he'd have liked to have said that he felt very strange, but he didn't. What he felt was dreadfully familiar. It was something that, until recently, he felt all the time, waking and sleeping, accompanying him to work, meeting him for lunch, coming home and sitting at the dinner table, getting bigger and bigger until he couldn't breathe. He had learned how to live with this quiet terror and was still relearning how to live without it.
What was different was the...hunger? Desire? Biological urge? ...to feel others feeling it. That part was so new and so subtle that he didn't notice it at first. After all, Drake had often, perhaps selfishly, wished that his loved ones might have an inkling of the danger he put himself in every day, of how he felt, of how hard he tried. And sometimes...he wanted to get back at them. He never did, he never would, but the hurt and angry little thought sometimes niggled its way to the surface all the same.
And now it was there full time. It howled in his ears and it filled his lungs and it spoke through his lips:
"I will make you feel alone."