For Promptober 2024. Prompts: Abduction/Stockholm – Cruel irony
CWs: Bondage, captivity, child abuse, underage sensuality (no sex), egregiously conceptual imagery
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Ira is 16. He’s staked out spread-eagle on the floor of his father’s workroom, body and soul spread wide for him to plunge into as Zion prowls the twisting, tangling threads of reality.
There is a thing that he is meeting with here. That he is arguing and negotiating with, flattering and coaxing and promising. Ira has no choice but to see it. Ira has no choice but to hear it. Everything about it is hypnotic. Coaxing. He wants to walk toward it. To sink into those streamers of seething, translucent flesh that undulate and glisten, tease the revelation of whatever lays beneath. They’re beautiful and they would embrace him. They would smother him. Suffocate him and draw him in and in and he would be held and cradled and made one and unable to ever—
Here, Ira is the gate. He knows vaguely that this would be death, and that a corner of what he is is terrified, repulsed to the point of madness. The Ira of that staid little pocket he calls Earth claws at the walls of his own mind, shredding bleeding ribbons from his own being. But the rest of him leans forward, lips parted and eyes shining at the horrible promise of this being before him.
The gate swamps him. It drowns him in sensation, in desire, in drunken wonder for the reeling petal-like sensuality that is reality. It is a thing of layers that press impossibly soft against his lips, peeling back endlessly from itself to reveal more of the same and yet, each one, exquisitely unique. Opening, endlessly, an infinite furl whose heart he could continue to fall into forever, one world after another licking across his mind and body as he passes them.
He can’t understand what they’re saying to each other, his father and this being. Their voices echo over themselves as if from a great distance, too far away to make out the words through the layers of sound. Or maybe it’s a language he doesn’t understand. Or maybe language is meaningless to what he is here. All he can see is the waving layers of the entity that promise to devour him, so sweetly. Promise to send him falling down into the bottomless well of the universe while all its horrors and glories wash over him infinitely, forever.
One with it.
The negotiation is done. Zion turns to Ira, ready to leave. Reaches out to his chest to push into him, through him, stepping as if he were a mirror or a pool. Squirming as if he were a grasping tunnel. Ira gasps and thrashes and moans as his father returns through him to the other side.
The entity tells Ira, “Wait.”
It doesn’t use the word. Ira simply knows.
He waits, panting against the breathless anticipation of its approach. It offers him freedom. It offers him death.
It touches him. He lifts his face to it like a flower seeking the sun as that slick touch strokes across his features—both the human ones and the others, the ones he can’t see and only feels. He closes his eyes—trusting, terrified—as it wraps itself over his face. He can’t see. He can’t breathe.
It slips into his mouth, drawing itself across the soft wet membranes of him, and where their bodies touch, they merge. For an awful, delirious instant they are one, and he knows this beast. He can feel. Everything it promises him. Every hidden thing it teases, the pit of reality it could plunge him down, where they could go if they were together, what they could be if they were together—it cradles him in its liquid flesh, he floats within the power and promise of it.
It releases him.
He sucks in a desperate, heaving breath and struggles with the crushing sensation of his own limited self.
“You are beautiful,” it tells him in a way that isn’t words. ‘Beautiful’ is ‘delightful.’ ‘Desirable.’ It’s ‘I want more of you’ and ‘I would devour you.’
‘Devour’ is not death. It isn’t oblivion. It’s…an end to self. Becoming a part of it, merged and unified and endless. Never to escape it. Never to exist alone again. Never free of it.
Ira shudders. The pocket of world they’re in, whose flesh he’s stitched through like a needle trailing its thread, shudders with him.
It lets him go as he retracts back into himself. Pulls himself inside out to return to the little flesh that is human. Tucks himself away, the gate that is the greater part of him, and is again a delicate, mortal little thing stretched tight in ropes on a cold floor.
Zion unties him. He sits Ira up, and removes the blindfold and the gag, and rubs at his arms and legs to help restore circulation while Ira remembers again what it is to be a blood-pumping, sweating, trembling little mammal and forgets again what it is to be a creature of light and air and gravity whose body slips between the walls of the worlds.
But he doesn’t forget the nightmare god-thing, or the seeds it fed him. Damning. Delicious.