post cheap comfort breakfast food

cw: spiraling depression, graphic depiction of death, cannibalism, zombies


Ignacio had been coaxed to bed that evening, morning, afternoon, time by a concerned Richard who had wanted nothing more than Ignacio to tune back in with the world and find himself on solid ground again, ground that was solid and not padded by high school sneakers with the cushioned bottoms that had been installed to help his legs and feet stay stable as he ran across the school's track and stood with Lucas, commenting on some of the ladies--and men, in his case--that walked by their vision. Perhaps it had been too early of an intercept, too late of an attempt to stop it, too rapid of swirling thoughts and images once everyone separated from their time at Waffle House and left Ignacio to go home with the other three. two. one? five. Numbers sure existed, as did the chalkboard on the wall, as he leaned toward Lucas and gossiped about the girl in front of them, or bumped shoulders with Grayson incidentally as he looked to the clock on the wall, or spoke with Melody about the exact measures of the choral song they were both planning to sing.

As he stared up to the ceiling, he could picture the promise of the school they had entered, a boarding school for teenagers--children--teenagers who showed promise in one field that they were particularly outstanding in. His had been the lack of a significant talent, the jack-of-all-trades role that he envied and desired and thrived in. Perhaps he wasn't quite a master, but he had been a master on his uptake, able to blend right in to whatever environment he wanted to be part of. Perhaps the acting destiny called him, perhaps it called him because he was no longer able to recapture the energy of his youth.

That had come to a careening and rough stop with that box. That box had kept him capture in his mind for years, in his heart for perhaps longer with how distant his mental acuity had become. When he felt that box reach him, claw at him, he tried desperately to claw himself from it before he felt the same thing every single time until the time he finally broke away from that box.

He felt his mind slipping, slipping, slipping, and then he grabbed onto the feeling of his comet and pulled, pulled, pulled, pulled-- and that box had shattered, and the gas that was filling his body and lungs finally left in a breath of fresh air he had never quite felt the same way again.

"I hope you're happy with yourself, Jigsaw."

A fit of curiosity had pulled him into looking up the symptoms of that original death when he finally escaped.

"It's linked up to sarin gas; a little painful, fairly quick."

A little painful, fairly quick had been, perhaps, making it seem like a soft death. It was one of the most toxic nerve agents known. Two to ten minutes after exposure via inhaling a fairly small dose had been the estimate he had seen, a fairly small dose that was enough to end the life of so many that it was a banned agent under several conventions. It was colorless and didn't taste like anything as it had flooded his chamber, didn't taste like anything as much as the emesis had, or the way his nose had run into his mouth. He had lost sight of the person he was facing, by the end; so much had blurred and narrowed to a dim point as his world began to spin. Perhaps it was the inability to control his body that hit the worst, though, frozen in place in feeling as much as his body had thudded against the box. Thudded, thudded, thudded, just as his heart in his chest against the fact that he could feel it as he...

drowned.

The transformative process had left him something else entirely. Perhaps the green skin he had seen when he looked down made sense from that perspective; how would he have been anything else considering the methodology? Ignacio had turned necrotic, perhaps, because he knew he had no longer counted himself among those living. His fingers had lengthened to the way he felt when he was as loose as he was stuck and unable to move, and his limbs had become how heavy he had felt when he couldn't even properly lift an arm. He hungered, in a way, perhaps to replenish what he had lost in the worst last couple minutes of a life he could no longer hope to touch.

The return to high school, graduation at nineteen, a year delayed, a joke as he saw himself in the mirror, detached from everything that called itself reality.

He chose the soy flavour ramen.

His lungs felt like they were swimming. How did Faustite feel at that moment, as his body burned him away? Was it like this -- was it like that, where he could tell the sensation of his bodily functions ceasing before he presumably finally seized and ceased until he didn't. Encke had seen the way he brushed off ash; was he feeling his body dust as he lost himself to the way his heart burned in a literal sense? Encke had seen the smoke; was it suffocating him? An idle fascination that was not truly one, an idle curiosity that fed back into its own loop, an idle need that came with its own intense memories that threatened to turn his stomach to liquid.

Ignacio stared at the ceiling.

He lifted his hand like it was a million pounds.

Still green, still long, as long as his fingers had been when he had stirred from the death that was suddenly no longer. All he knew was the gnawing hunger, and it ate at him as he tried his hardest to fight the temptation to consume. All he knew was that it grew worse, and worse, and worse, and he couldn't look at anyone who still counted themselves among the kind that weren't them--youma, zombies, dead, undead, tortured, pretend--without the intense desire to consume. He couldn't, he shouldn't, he needed, he wanted-- how would the one he had learned was Elex manage? Would his myriad husbands be another requirement to feed the unescapable maw?

Perhaps it had been for the best that he had run into those he had while stumbling and crawling and trying his hardest to make it back to that dorm room. That place that had burnt down, with so many still inside, so many he never saw alive again -- and perhaps that was for the best too, death by fire was better than death by him--

Ignacio's hand flopped against the sheets.

He felt -- didn't feel -- understood -- willed the feeling of him thudding against the wall of that box. He felt nothing, he saw nothing, he felt everything, he saw a swimming world of brown as his brain tried desperately to cling to limited oxygen reserves. Ignacio gasped.

He could claw back, could escape, could convince Grayson that he wanted to join them, could convince Pierrette that they were one and the same as much as he screamed internally to make that connection of teeth against flesh as much as it was against his own will. His will, which the Zodiac Court and her princess had capitalized on. A court that had been able to grab at the dregs of hope while Ignacio stood at the bleachers and hoped for a cure. He had received it. What of those who had drowned or remained or had been dusted or had been reformed for the Negaverse's sick desires or had been set aflame?

Was Faustite even safe when he had teleported away to presumably die on his own? Would he be given that permission, that space? Would they try to take that dignity away from him, watch the nerve gas overtake his body--the fire overtake his body--consuming him all entirely until the energy of Chaos overtook and consumed and created some new little obedient being? Would they simply let the fire bloom? Would he truly turn to ash, to never return to Earth or to any of his husbands? Would Negaspace have something to stabilize, to bring back to a net beginning while he sat nowhere else but the Negaverse, letting the flames come take him and take them home, to what his new home would be, to what his new impossible home would be, to what would blossom and overtake what he was and bring him back to something else of a completely different sort.

Would this blossom and overtake even...

the dead?

As he had been dead, and to death he would return. To death he would belong. To death he would go back to again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and--

again.

Ignacio stared up at the ceiling.

He gasped.