#darcycoreverse

it’s been almost two months now, as far as you can tell.

keeping track of things is been hard, when you’re phasing in and out of consciousness with little warning, though your body keeps moving regardless. is this really your body, though? no, it’s been claimed by something else, something that is anything but you. it isn’t meant to be doing this with your body, though. bones crack when it moves too suddenly. tendons and ligaments tear under its strength. there’s no escape besides that darkness of your mind, flickering with messages from beyond. you feel it rifle through your memories, examining them, and you shy away. something tells you it doesn’t know you’re still awake, and that it wouldn’t want you to be. but nonetheless, a message comes through. a word. you attach it to yourself. it’s your name. you should’ve known that right away. why was there a delay? but no, it’s you.

marcy.

and you spill back into the place you once held in your body.

it hurts to see, to blink behind orange eyes. your own eyes are crusted with tears. you find a way to respond, though your fingers tremble from malnutrition and pain. you don’t remember it letting you eat. you shouldn’t be alive anymore, but it’s forcing you to stay moving, standing, even as your ribs become visible through the skin-tight bodysuit beneath your armor. you should’ve been left for dead that night in the throne room.

and oh how you wish you had died that nightafter it seizes control again.

you watch it drag you towards the chair in the basement, unable to resist or pull away as the cuffs lock you in place. and then it’s agony all over again.

you feel it retreat into the back of your head, perhaps so the pain won’t damage its own minds, and then you’re screaming the names of your friends. you know it will use that against you later, even through the haze of pain, but you don’t care. they’re the only ones you want to see right now. you cry, you scream, you try to reach out for the ones who will not come to save you. only it is there now. finally it stops, and with the agony fading in sparks of electricity back down the wires into the chair, you slip into true unconsciousness, your body pushed too far. you dream of them, but the peaceful fantasy shatters and it pulls you back to your feet. you can do nothing, this time.

it’s a long time before you resist again.

but you do, often unintentionally, and each time is met with that electricity once again. a towering figure, the very sight of him filling your chest with burning, heart-splintering phantom pain, (because you know what he did to you, hurt you so horribly and claimed he liked you throughout everything, but you know the truth, how he betrayed you ) barges into the chamber in the middle of one of these rounds, begging it to stop, that what it is doing will kill you eventually. it tells him to leave, taunting him as he turns to the stairs.

you reach a point when the core becomes tired of this cycle of control, rebellion, and torture. one night, it brings you to the basement again. at this point, you no longer care. it will hurt you until you give in, and then you will be back in that almost-blissful state of near-unconsciousness. but oh , it is far, far worse than any of the times before. it starts out like any of the times before, orange electricity jolting your nerves, tearing loose agonized screams from your throat, still raw from your pained cries last time . but that ends, and it moves on to greater pains. by the time it’s done, the body that is no longer yours is bleeding and broken. at least, you think it’s done then. but no, the wires reattach, and the electricity comes back all over again.

it’s enough pain to break the sanity of a full-grown, soldiered toad. it’s far more than enough to do the same to you. you aren’t built to endure this. if you won’t die from this, something has to give. cracks are forming in your mind, chipping away at your memories, your thoughts, your very consciousness. this time you don’t feel it end. the electricity is still there when you finally give in to the darkness, though the darkness feels so orange, illuminated by those blinding eyes . if your mind was a cracking window, it’s at that moment that the shards fall loose from the frame. you don’t get a chance to even have a last coherent thought before your mind breaks. glass shatters across the floor, and you are no more.

saying “everything went black” is cliche, because from the character’s point of view, everything should just fade to a stop, or flicker away like a dying candle. everything does not go black, because even to perceive a void, you would have to exist to see it. and you no longer exist. you no longer think.

this is the absence of being. you are not here.

you are simply gone.

you are gone , but one day, one day, the weakest call pulls a few shards of you back into place, broken pieces of a shattered mind reassembled in the corner of a frame. you are nowhere near complete. but the feeling feels familiar, something that might’ve been unleashed behind your back, but that you still should remember. you find something resembling thought, enough of it to know you’re waiting. you don’t know who you are, or what you’re waiting for, but wait you do nonetheless.

the waiting ends in a flicker of digits. you instinctively interpret them, but no, no, it can’t be. more shards fall into place, and you wish they’d topple loose again, because olmsthey carry too much pain to possibly bear. unexpectedly, you catch it by surprise, and sit in the forefront again. that energy crackles in the air again, thrumming in the branes that divide universes. you beg her to leave you behind. this piece of you is not worth it. your mind shakes, cannot fully function, with so much of what was once you destroyed. every second you tremble with the knowledge that when, not if, when it regains control, the consequences will be far worse than anything it’s put you through before. it starts to reach for control over you once more, but it hadn’t expected you to return in any semblance of who you’d once been after what it had done. you have time. you can say goodbye this time. not some broken apology from your dying lungs, though this will be no more coherent. it’s gradually regaining control of the body, and the slightest movement of your fingers is herculean. before long, you’re evenly matched, fighting for control, and in your determination to get them to leave you, to convince them you’re gone, a burst of green comes through, only for a moment. it weakens you further, which is surprising; you’d think that being any weaker than your current state could only mean dying. you tell her not to come, and that you love her, and then you’re gone again, broken fragments tossed back into the wind.

you were right.

it is worse this time.

you’ve been stabbed, tortured, puppeted, endured enough to break your mind.

this is far worse than everything it’s done to you before, combined .

somehow, the only thought that graces your consciousness, after it has finally finished and darkness is closing in once more, is that maybe, just maybe, it’s finally overestimated what you can endure. that it will leave you to die here , and you will be free from this pain. you’re not even in the chair this time, you’re just bleeding on the floor of the basement with what it’s done to you. maybe you are too lost . but that hope is ruined when you feel the solid thunks of tubes connecting to the ports implanted in your back, an earthy, herbal, but sterile smell mixing with the iron of the blood spilled across the brassy floor. it’s healing you. somehow that registers, your mind still able to put something together as thoughts. it smells like the tank, water infused with the essence of that captive mossman. finally, though, you do pass out, and the pain vanishes into empty bliss as you slip away.

you catch glimpses, this time. it isn’t a void like before, a blip of nothingness before you woke up again. at least you’re more numb to it, like before, farther away from that body. maybe you have some influence, you don’t know. you don’t know much, anymore. the core runs rampant on neural pathways that had once been your own. you’re confined to the corners and cracks where it doesn’t lurk. still, maybe.

maybe there’s hope.

but everything else is the same, only worse, riddled with greater despair.

moving hurts. rather, it hurts when it moves your body. it isn’t just the forced motions anymore. you catch sight of bandages, of the tall blue one looking concerned, maybe even afraid, but trying to hide it from the thing in your head.

it taunts him. it enjoys the pain of others, and perhaps that includes your own. every word that isn’t yours from your mouth makes your scarred heart ache.

those two who feel familiar to you are struggling with problems of their own. maybe that means they won’t have a chance to save you. you hope they don’t come. you don’t know who they are, but you know that nothing would be worse than them dying or being injured at your hand.

you let it use your body, and hope it never does anything like that to you again.

at least you’re not alone, you think madly.

but then again, you are. after all, the concept of you has been gone for two months. something broke the first time it tortured you, entering your pained mind, and then what was broken was shattered, and now those shards have been swept away into the corners.