~Genderbent Dreamteam+Karl oneshots~

Immerensis

Just in case you don't wanna read the tags or anything,

cw//self-confidence issues, anxious thoughts

word count: 2,536

Immerensis
/ih-muhr-en-sis/ ~ noun

The maddening inability to understand why someone loves you. That although you hear their words and feel their emotions, you think about who you are and can't fathom the thought that people love you unconditionally. As if you are a con-artist whose days are numbered.

It's a made-up word, by the author and poet John Koenig, and it's in his book titled "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows". A book full of words that its title describes.

Dream had read that word and its definition over and over until it almost lost all meaning. Almost. It's a word that didn't truly exist in a real dictionary, but a word all the same that struck deep and hit fast. There was no build up to the cataclysmic pain that surges through your body when you identify with your own sorrow, there was no warning before the word was branded into her brain with red hot steel.

The word was pushed through her eyes and into her skull, a sharp headache behind green doe eyes from then on.

Immerensis. A word that means how she feels consistently and constantly when surrounded by others.

With past partners, she had always felt that budding flower in her stomach, those ivy vines that sprawled across her limbs and tied her to the bed with words of hate for her own self. With sentences stating that her partner couldn't love her, there was nothing to love. And it's easy, so so easy to succumb to your racing thoughts, drown in green leaves and weeds that eat you alive. Drown in the paragraphs you've written about what's wrong with you.

Breakups made sense to her, of course they did. Why would they stay when nothing is keeping them there? There was no spark to her, no shine to the garden covered corpse lying in a bed like it's a coffin. You could wax and wane over her body, and the moon would still fall and the sun would still rise with no issue because the Gods and Goddesses didn't stop for beings that couldn't love themselves and be loved by others. It was the selfish they stopped for, not the altruistic.

Dream never understood why others would fall for her, talk about how pretty she was and how she was anything but the thoughts in her mind. But she knew the truth, knew the word that describes it too. She was the thorns on a beautiful rose, soon to be cut off and thrown away while the flower was gifted to someone of a higher standing.

But, there was always one person that could see a word and say otherwise. Could see the definition clearly and choose to look over it, see the object that's showing the word to them and decide things for themselves. Labels put on an entity don't define what that entity is.

And Georgia was that person. The person to meticulously peel off an old sticker on a new book, rip away words that didn't make sense in her mind, when she could distinctly see the thing for herself.

She was always like that, always doing research into mundane things to find a deeper meaning, find out what was actually hidden behind a mask. Dream always put walls over herself, something to hide behind and stay safe away from everything else. Whereas Georgia would gladly take that wall apart, brick by brick, and find the person layering them, just to look inside the mind of the bricklayer.

When Dream had first seen the word, it was because of an impulsive Amazon shopping spree, seeing a book on the internet and buying that as well as other useless items. When it arrived a few days later, she remembered opening it up, looking through the pages and reading crafted definitions to words that tap tap tapped against her bones. But then the word found her, shattering through the ivory.