(( CW: psychological horror, body horror, eye gore, mutilation, sexual assault imagery, brief mention of suicidal ideation; title comes from this song; relevant pages if you wanna read them, mind those cw's: 12 ))
You can't sleep.
That isn't anything new, by the feel of it; your body is heavy with the bone-deep exhaustion of a lack of sleep stretching out for...
How long has it been? You don't know. Every time you try to think about how long it's been since you slept, or ate, or much of anything other than managing your home, your thoughts seem to branch off and wander down another path. There are more and more intruders lately, always more to patch and reinforce and defend until your mind is buzzing with thought.
You can't actually keep working forever. So you're lying down now, the closest you can get to a moment's rest, with your love watching over you in silence.
But you aren't asleep.
You see the light shift, through closed eyes, when a shadow stretches over you. Your vision swims as you open your eyes to see the figure looming over you: A creature several times your size, with the head of a goat set on a muscular, humanoid body, its form covered in coarse fur from head to hoof.
"Goat...?" There's no twinge of alarm at the sight of the thing; it's simply there, a familiar fixture of the home built up around you.
It reaches down, picks you up in a hand larger than your torso. The goat snuffles at your chest before dragging its tongue up the front of your tunic. You still don't flinch.
Not until it bites in.
There's no blood, or tearing of flesh - the goat's muzzle simply sinks into your body as easily as into water, where its teeth and tongue find
something.
You don't know for sure what it is that the goat has found there in your chest - but every instinct you have is screaming that it's something that should never be touched.
You brace a hand on one of the goat's horns, cold sweat beading on your forehead as fear rises in your throat. "Wait-- what are you doing?"
It pushes in deeper, and a bolt of sickening wrongness rolls up your spine, some intangible loss worse than pain.
What were you doing here to begin with?
What had you wanted?
That hint of fear gives way to panic, and you push at its muzzle, thrash against its grip with what little strength you have left after how long has it been-- all the while, something is falling away, bit by bit, deep inside you. You want your love to help you, not to just watch without without so much of a ripple of their scaled coils, and then you don't care. You want to see the person they were made to resemble again, and then that thought fades with another snap of the goat's teeth. "Stop!"
Pieces of yourself, chewed up and swallowed one at a time. Lingering questions about your missing friends, the few plans you'd held onto for what you could do with this place once you figured out a better way to keep intruders out-- for a brief instant, you want to curse your family and superiors for putting you here, leading you to this thing to begin with. And then you don't.
"What-- what part of me are you eating?!"
Your struggling isn't enough to break free - not by a long shot. But it's enough for your attacker to adjust its hold. The "goat" pins you down to your own bed, one massive hand cradling your head, another gripping your thigh. Its hold could almost be mistaken as tender, if it weren't for how it drives a thumb thoughtlessly into your eye (a flare of physical agony that barely stands out against what you can feel yourself losing with each passing moment), if it weren't for how its other hand wrenches your body open, keeping what it's after open and exposed while you keep struggling and begging and screaming until you can't even hear yourself anymore.
At some point, pain shoots up your ears. At some point, something stings in your remaining eye. At some point, you stop caring what the goat is taking. You're just waiting for it to finish off whatever scraps of you are left behind, so this can all end.
That moment doesn't come.
You're alone just long enough to feel like an eternity, days or a lifetime of lying discarded in the ruins of what you thought you had built.
You eventually hear distant footsteps. The memory ends.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
TAKE MORE THAN YOU NEED; [SPOILERS]; CW's below because there's too many to list here
Date: 2023-10-19 10:55 pm (UTC)You can't sleep.
That isn't anything new, by the feel of it; your body is heavy with the bone-deep exhaustion of a lack of sleep stretching out for...
How long has it been? You don't know. Every time you try to think about how long it's been since you slept, or ate, or much of anything other than managing your home, your thoughts seem to branch off and wander down another path. There are more and more intruders lately, always more to patch and reinforce and defend until your mind is buzzing with thought.
You can't actually keep working forever. So you're lying down now, the closest you can get to a moment's rest, with your love watching over you in silence.
But you aren't asleep.
You see the light shift, through closed eyes, when a shadow stretches over you. Your vision swims as you open your eyes to see the figure looming over you: A creature several times your size, with the head of a goat set on a muscular, humanoid body, its form covered in coarse fur from head to hoof.
"Goat...?" There's no twinge of alarm at the sight of the thing; it's simply there, a familiar fixture of the home built up around you.
It reaches down, picks you up in a hand larger than your torso. The goat snuffles at your chest before dragging its tongue up the front of your tunic. You still don't flinch.
Not until it bites in.
There's no blood, or tearing of flesh - the goat's muzzle simply sinks into your body as easily as into water, where its teeth and tongue find
something.
You don't know for sure what it is that the goat has found there in your chest - but every instinct you have is screaming that it's something that should never be touched.
You brace a hand on one of the goat's horns, cold sweat beading on your forehead as fear rises in your throat. "Wait-- what are you doing?"
It pushes in deeper, and a bolt of sickening wrongness rolls up your spine, some intangible loss worse than pain.
What were you doing here to begin with?
What had you wanted?
That hint of fear gives way to panic, and you push at its muzzle, thrash against its grip with what little strength you have left after how long has it been-- all the while, something is falling away, bit by bit, deep inside you. You want your love to help you, not to just watch without without so much of a ripple of their scaled coils, and then you don't care. You want to see the person they were made to resemble again, and then that thought fades with another snap of the goat's teeth. "Stop!"
Pieces of yourself, chewed up and swallowed one at a time. Lingering questions about your missing friends, the few plans you'd held onto for what you could do with this place once you figured out a better way to keep intruders out-- for a brief instant, you want to curse your family and superiors for putting you here, leading you to this thing to begin with. And then you don't.
"What-- what part of me are you eating?!"
Your struggling isn't enough to break free - not by a long shot. But it's enough for your attacker to adjust its hold. The "goat" pins you down to your own bed, one massive hand cradling your head, another gripping your thigh. Its hold could almost be mistaken as tender, if it weren't for how it drives a thumb thoughtlessly into your eye (a flare of physical agony that barely stands out against what you can feel yourself losing with each passing moment), if it weren't for how its other hand wrenches your body open, keeping what it's after open and exposed while you keep struggling and begging and screaming until you can't even hear yourself anymore.
At some point, pain shoots up your ears. At some point, something stings in your remaining eye. At some point, you stop caring what the goat is taking. You're just waiting for it to finish off whatever scraps of you are left behind, so this can all end.
That moment doesn't come.
You're alone just long enough to feel like an eternity, days or a lifetime of lying discarded in the ruins of what you thought you had built.
You eventually hear distant footsteps. The memory ends.