Prompt 348
(Been a bit since I did an Ennead AU or Prompt, huh)
They had been… Shattered, torn apart, barely developed cores ripped from still living bodies left spasming and rotting, consciousness frayed and trapped in the shards. Had been pulled apart further, warped until they could barely remember what they were before, flashes of separate memories coming together to form knowledge they did not like.
They had… found each other, less alive and dead than before, only continuing to exist from the saturation of the surrounding ecto. Had cobbled themselves together, nine becoming four then two, then one singular core.
One being of Nine, dripping blood, dripping gore and viscera of the living, hair still grasped in their claws as they dropped a head. They were many, yet one, all of them buzzing around each other like the circling of planets.
Hands flex, the movement, feeling of living flesh novel to their senses. Senses that confirmed what they had long dreaded. They were the last- the others gone, dead, shattered beyond hope. They hope it was painless, even as they knew it was not. The scientists never cared about how much pain they caused, only that they got results.
Where were their results now? Where were their weapons and torture that they were so proud of? It didn’t protect them, and the Nine that were One couldn’t help the laugh. What use was freedom when everyone was gone? When they could feel reality breaking apart from the unbalance that even their power was useless in correcting?
The dead and the living, the living and the dead, always chasing after the other in an endless cycle. Now broken, shattered like them, yet unable to be put back together.
They laughed, a broken, croaking, sobbing sound as they grieved for those whose names they could no longer remember. Who were now Nothing, no name to be whispered to the stars, no grave for a mutilated corpse to be lowered. Only chunks of gore tossed aside when their torturers were done, discarded like waste.
What else is there to do, but Wail, to let out their fury and grief and anguish into the void even as the world crumbles around them? What else is left but to drift as the abyss trails ever-hungry. There’s no more Ancients, no more Humans, nor more Life, and no Death to claim them.
So they are left adrift, tails lifeless, form shifting between Beast and Other as time escapes them. For there is no Time, no Space, not here, not in this emptiness where even the Infinite would not dare touch. How long they drifted, wandered, they did not, do not, know.
Yet they know the moment something disturbs their aimless wandering, the fuzzy, sputtering feeling trying to wrap around a wrist. They stare, even if they see nothing, heads tilting and twisting as they whisper amongst themselves. What is it, they wonder, the sensation something strange and unfamiliar compared to the ever-starving feeling that had long since become normal.
So they let it take hold, it would never have succeeded otherwise, and they open their eyes not in the Nothing, but to the Sun.
