"You may not rest now there are monsters nearby'. The message flashes in the corner of Pearl’s consciousness - far too bright, too much for pricking red rimmed eyes. The air around her is still. Silent. Empty. Tilly dozes, curled and oh so small. The earth and its shambling forms is far, far below. Pearl is alone. One explanation remains. Her throat is dry and she cannot stay her rabbiting heart.
The fear is ever present, thrumming through her code, tripping strings, sending false positives domino-ing through every skien of her being. The lines ensnare her, mind tangled in a trawlnet of commands. Pinning back her eyelids and jerking her arm away as her fingertips barely brush cotton as though scalded. Her eyelid twitches. Sleep is elusive.
As the nights pass her bags grow deeper, cheeks hollowing and sockets sinking ever more. The puddles at her feet are something to be feared, revealing fragments of a creature that follows her every move.
Phantoms gather around her. Drifting dust motes. Aimless and docile. Drawn but unable to attack one their own.
The air is thick. Thoughts flow like molasses, catching on the corners of her consciousness. The dust covered bed in the corner of the room draw her eyes like a magnet, inevitable, all consuming, the taunt of another, happier life, her feeble focus sharpened to a fine point, to her hopes her dreams everything she could never be encapsulated in untouched sheets and the fine freshly spun cotton. Her left eyelid will not stop twitching.
It's strange, she thinks in a sluggish sort of way, trying to pin down her gently roiling brain onto one topic, like attempting to catch a leaf skipping along the ground. The eddies of the wind catch it in its fingers and swing it into a flowing foxtrot, ghosting around her mind, diverging and converging and flowing and tumbling and landing and.
Those around her seem completely unaffected by her monstrous self.
The detail lodges in the back of her mind in an unconscious sort of way at first. Registered by a mindless datalogger. Uncomprehending. As she ghosts past Martyn, bathed in moonlight, fumbling brain feebly to string together some sort of comprehensible sentence. Fingers twitching. So close to contact. A millennia away.
She doesn’t quite remember what she said, mouth running unprompted, but it must’ve been wrong. All she is is wrong. He turns. Any camaraderie in shreds, the could’ve beens sliding across her inner sight, light polluted fragments of peace and belonging dissected and diagnosed for any possible mistake, incisions stitched and unstitched and sewn and shredded: jealousy and desperation and the ever present syrupy melancholy are a poor bonding agent. Who would entertain something less than human. Why let the monster in. He entombs himself in sheets to avoid her. Cocooned and held in a way she could never be. He sleeps.
Moonlight guides her to her fortification. Back. Home? Rough hewn fur that leans into her hand. Belonging despite the chasm between them. Warmth. Skin deep, but warmth all the same. The warmth leaves. Curls up. Sleeps. How could a monster ever perform such a painfully human act? Even without the- wait. he sleeps he sleeps he slee
