Even in Death, I will Know Fear.

Alt title: You know how when you go to bed and dream that you died in your sleep ?

She calls me by name, and suddenly I am lucid. The obscurity of my dream fades away as my cognizance seeps in.

She knows me well and has known me all my life. When she speaks, her voice spills into the air like smoke, hissing into my ears and riding the electrical path of my spine. Clear, stern, and wanting. I divine her mien immediately.

What is left of the false reality tears away. No more obscurity to muddle through, no AU to be lost in. She summons me to a blackness I’ve never known. A darkness so palpable, I fear if I open my mouth, it will gush heavy and viscous into my lungs, suffocating me.

She puts me in this vacuum because I need to be ostracized. After all, fear grows like mold in our loneliest moments, and she knows all I need is an eternal night for my fungus to thrive.

Her voice is perpetual, a low hum of appetency that slithers into my pores.

I declare her as Death, the most formidable force on earth, and she laughs at me. I sense the mold spreading by her saturated sounds of cruelty. It manifests a dreadful realization.

The Reaper has no taste for torment. It only has one purpose–to transfer the soul.

Where have I been taken? To whom have I been given?

The mystery of her is enough to repulse me, but there is no relief in my resistance. She enters my compromised entity, and we connect in vain. We are neither equals nor complementary—just oil and water in a shaken bottle...

...No. We are unsullied predator and prey serving a higher purpose. The purity of our union substantiates a simple truth about humans.

I sense her infiltrating my past, triggering a visceral remembrance of the lowest moments in my life. They are all connected by a common silver thread endowed with my blood—fear. I see every chance I’ve avoided, every opportunity I’ve turned down, every decline to follow my dreams to continue a life of wallowing and wishing for everything to be easier. I determined that the weight of failure was too much to bear, so I wasted my time. I gave it willingly to Her. My allegiance was my greatest sin.

Now I reap my sowings in our companionship. Now I will learn what it means to be truly afraid. As her slave, her eternal meal, her unwilling life source, I will come to know an unending terror that was once beyond my comprehension. I will face an old evil that we only find in traces in our minuscule, finite world.

I will be an unadulterated force that exceeds nature, intertwined with the crudeness of infinity.

I will never be free of my regrets, but I will know a twisted liberation in Her predation.