Work Text:
You feel the heartbeat of the earth as you lay splintered in the ground, soil for blankets and worms for bed mates.
They love you in all the ways he couldn’t, coiling around you, pressing against you, easing inside of you, until you are full of them, writhing in your belly and sleeping on your tongue. He is grateful they can fill the void, and sometimes he comes back just to see them, digs until he finds your face in the ground, your ears stuffed full of their eggs and your skin porous with their love bites.
He takes a handful home just to have, watches them wriggle across the floor glistening with your fluids, because they touched you and ate you and loved you, and it makes him feel as though you’re still there with him.
(If he closes his eyes, he can still hear you crying, still see you trembling as you shrink away from him begging for your life, still feel you beneath his hands as your skin parts under nail and knife and saw. It’s like you never left.
You are still dying in his dreams, over and over and over again. You are trying to breathe through a throat full of blood as it drips down into your lungs, fingers scrabbling over his floor and trying so hard to reach him, to dig into him, to ground you in the here and now as you slip away, to guide your eyes as the light fades from them so you can look up one last time and ask him “why?”
He would have no answer to give you. He thinks you should already know. He’s told you so much already, let you inside so deeply, where there are flowers growing that have never seen the sun and never felt the touch of a human hand before you.
(“There might be more after you,” he said, “but they won’t see what you’ve seen.”
His words were colored with pride as though you were meant to hold onto them as a consolation for what he was about to do.)
The leaves are changing color when he digs you up again, falling into the grave and framing your face like funeral flowers lining a casket.
(A grave some might say, but it is a womb to him, it is the place where life grows from the smallest of seeds and claws its way to the light, and he dreams that you are warm in the ground, loved and nourished and comfortable with the earth’s heartbeat reverberating through your body)
He finds you at your most beautiful, your eyelids eaten away, your cheeks hollow, sunlight falling on patches of your skull peeking through your scalp. You are limp and heavy, little creatures squirming beneath your skin, coiling around your bones. He sits with you, takes your hand in his, and feels the worms moving, rhythmically, like a dozen heartbeats.
He is able to look you in the eye without flinching. He is able to touch you, feel the expanse of your skin, bruised and bloody and riddled with seedlings growing through your flesh, without fear.
You have been made perfect and gentle by the womb of the earth, and he thinks, with a smile, that it’s finally time to bring you home.
(You weren’t facing him at the bar, but it still took nearly half an hour for him to work up the courage to tap you on the shoulder. The moment your eyes met, he forgot what he wanted to say and his gaze fell to the floor.
And you were so patient and kind, you said hello anyway and asked if he wanted to sit down. He knew you’d be warm, soft to the touch, beautiful inside.
You asked for his name and he told you with a bit of difficulty, because he was struggling to look at you and think about in the present tense, he was stuck in the future, and in it you were slumped motionless over the bar counter and flies were landing on your cheek, and there was nobody else in the world, just the two of you, just you dripping blood all over the floor and him reaching out, finally feeling it was safe to do so.
You introduced yourself and he gave a shy, little smile. You seemed happy to see it.
He wonders if you remember that now.)