i think it's time to sleep
Simon's lungs ache, gone ragged with disuse, with deprivation, with blood rot. He breathes, yes, but pitifully, only just able to draw in, press out, meager profit for feeble effort. Air catches, blood curdles, and he coughs, body wracked with tremors.
He kneels broken before the control center, the chair overturned at his flank, warm, unforgiving metal against his forehead where he slumps toward anything that may keep him upright. The proximity meter's incessant beeping is nothing but an afterthought, a constant drone at the back of his mind - a brain already overflowing with static, with sound.
You yet live. Be grateful.
The voices writhe through the tangle of his gray matter, tangible, a slow-moving pressure, an ache, winding between coils of tissue, slipping smooth along the surface of bone. Simon winces, flinches at the invasion. His eyes remain closed, yet red flashes behind their lids.
"This isn't living," he murmurs, cracked lips stinging as he speaks for the first time in hours, days, weeks, years. "This isn't what I wanted."
We have left you with your pulse, have we not? Your kind call that living.
He scoffs, and his spine cracks when he straightens, pulling himself from his self-pitying slump with no small effort. The divot in his forehead, carved by red-rot acid, peels from the console with a slow sting. "I wanted to go home," he says, louder now, voice clear. "I want… to go home."
His rusted coffin quivers and groans; Simon does not need the cracked porthole to know flesh and scales are slithering in coils around the submarine, the behemoth outside having long since enveloped the Iron Lung in its grasp. Every now and then, something that sounds like fingernails tapping, scraping, gouging interrupts the creaking of the metal, and he is reminded of the glimpses of arms, of legs, of a single, melting face smearing along the glass.
Simon no longer looks outside.
He's seen enough corpses.
