My muse is being held in solitary confinement and hasn’t seen anyone for weeks. Send ⚠ to find them.

If only the darkness was a little more suffocating. If onlyit could stifle his heartbeat too. All chance of breath. If only it could weighheavier on his heart. Just enough to push beyond a simple hurt.

He couldn’t move. There was a word for it. French. Old.Outdated. Forgotten. Oh, that’s what it was. To forget. Oubliette. A dungeon ora well? What difference did it make? At least a well would have the possibilityof water drowning him.

Did his spine ache from his curled pose? Or did it only acheas a muscle memory? Numb. He hadn’t felt pain in… in what? Days? Weeks? Months?It had to be at least weeks by now. The darkness was unyielding. He measuredtime in breaths and heartbeats. In. Buh … bump. Buh … bump. Out. Buh .. . bump. Buh … bump. In. Buh … bump. Buh … bump.

Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. He’d tried beating his brains outagainst the stone. But it wasn’t stone. Foam padding covered the hardersubstance beneath. They knew enough about his mental patterns to be prepared.In. Buh … bump. Buh … bump.

Later he got more creative. Tore at his soft belly. Claweddeeply in the red mush reaching for those precious organs. Or whatever theywere now. They sent sparks through the foam until he stopped. Out. Buh …bump. Buh … bump.

He screamed then. Not in pain, but boredom. Something,anything, to pass the time. Screams turned to laughter as his voice echoedaround him. Soon joined by others. By his ghosts. By the nameless childrenreduced to numbers as they bled out into the grass, the slab tables, the arenaat his feet. By the bodies he mutilated. By their families. Or maybe he wasstill screaming. It was hard to tell anymore. Buh … bump.

He could hear it. That world beyond the darkness. It livedin his memories. In his programing. Do you remember? They found children. Guesswhat they did? You know what they did. Fight. Tear. Bone. Sweat. Flesh. Ash.Weeping. Blood. Betrayal. The darkness echoed his gleeful cackles.

Do you remember?

You are nothing.

He sang it. The words that defined his life. Nothing.Nothing. Nothing. His sweet hymn in his living tomb. Footsteps? He grinned.Someone to put flowers on his little grave.

A flower? No no no no. Buh bump. Buh bump. Buh bump! Thoughit might as well have been for the sentiment. So sweet. So romantic. His eyesgleamed in the dark. Ready for night vision. Excited for use after, after…

Look Up

William frowned. This was real. Communication. With theworld beyond. The light from the slits above his coffin where they dropped occasionalproteins, he had long stopped wanting to know just what it was. He fidgeted inorder to follow the instructions. Another paper hit him in the face.

ID code

His voice was rusty from disuse. His tongue was fat and dry.Thick. Stuck to the roof of his mouth. It cracked in a thousand places like anantique vase as the wind shook his tired vocal cords. “45”

Full code

“45-14-15-6-5-1-18”

And just like that the darkness stopped smothering him,replaced by the cool, impersonal glow of LED light. He winced, sensitiveprogramming in his eyes reeling from the sudden change. Yes, he could tell now.The ache in his muscles was real. Very real. A middle aged man stood nearly ontop of him. His eyes adjusted rapidly to the light. Wrinkles mapped soft skin. Whiskers bushed together to form a disheveled beard. Grey. Brown. Colors! He relaxed his face from the squint into a frown as an arm reached towards his own, inviting him to leave the darkness. Someone he barely recognized. Only seen in pictures and visions. Lies told to him by the darkness.

“You?”

–

repo! the genetic opera: the meme // accepting.

@hxpper

Nightmares were a common problem among the Warriors. More often than not one of them had to be woken by another that was near. Or one of them would get a text in the early morning hours. “Are you awake? Can we talk a minute?”. That wasn’t even code at this point…each one of them knew what it meant.

Yumi wasn’t usually privy to being woken up by another’s nightmares. It was one of the problems about being the only one in the group that wasn’t a day student. Well it wasn’t true any longer. Aelita wasn’t any longer either…not since her father was saved and brought back to then world once more.

The girls spent a lot of time together, perhaps even more than before. Though Franz claimed he was more than happy for Aelita’s friends to stay the night, to give the girl some familiar company, Yumi knew he was offering her a bit more; a chance to escape home. The others already had it, being borders and all. Not that her home life was the worse by any stretch of the imagination, but it was nice to have a second home.

She wasn’t sure what woke her in the middle of the night that night. At first she thought perhaps she had a night terror or something but…no. She wasn’t drenched in sweat of anything. Beside her Aelita was sleeping soundly. It wasn’t her.

That’s when she heard the noises coming from down the hall. Noises she knew well coming in the voice of someone she was coming to know pretty well in addition.

Ever so quietly she snuck from out of Aelita’s room, always having the best of practice from the Lyoko days. The girl was at Franz’s door before she even realized it. Apparently he was even quieter. She heard a rustle in the other room and moved over in that direction.

Though she tried to make a little noise so that she didn’t completely startle him, Yumi was still very quiet. He’d questioned what she was doing up in that hour after a few seconds.

“I heard you….” The girl replied. “You were having a nightmare. And don’t lie, all of us have dealt with enough to know what they sound - and look like.”

The man, who was still looked very distraught, couldn’t deny it. Yumi knew it and there was no denying it to her. He merely nodded his head and turned to the boiling water. “I’m making some tea. Would you like some?”

“Uh, sure.” Came her reply. There were a few seconds where neither of them said anything to one another.In fact it wasn’t until he handed Yumi a glass of the steaming liquid that she finally broke the silence. “You can tell me you know? What it was about. I’ve had my fair share of nasty ones. Not much fazes me any more.”