Deep Like Water (Yandere!BEN Drowned X GN!Reader)

Don't Eat Those Sweet Dreams

some fucker gave me covid so i spent a week in bed feeling like absolute shit and then another two weeks to get rid of the brain fog. never felt so exhausted and empty before. related way too much to 'chronic wasting disease' by riproducer. absolutely hated it. 0/10. im upgrading my face mask to a hazmat suit.

Following Iskra's directions was easier said than done. Theoretically, it should have been simple, but really, it felt like the weird domain was personally out to get you in order to fulfil a warped and sadistic fascination with watching you become frustrated.

It wasn't as bad as the kaleidoscopic corridor from before, but it still sucked. When you got to the instruction that told you to turn 'immediately left', you discovered that there was a wall in your way.

'Oh.' You stared at the wall for a moment, waiting for your brain to catch up with this sudden (and literal) roadblock. 'Well.' Now what do I do? Iskra had said nothing of a wall there, and there was no way for you to skip a step—there were no stairs nearby anyway.

You would have been stuck there for a while if you hadn't decided to lean against the wall, promptly falling back through it with a tiny yell. You collided with the ground, hissing in pain, and somewhere nearby, a disembodied voice laughed hysterically at your misery.

Prick. Pushing yourself to your feet with a glare at the wall and the space beyond, you opened the diary once again and walked on, searching for the staircase that would bring you closer to the jar that Iskra had mentioned.

As your footsteps echoed around you, you couldn't help but wonder what kind of jar was awaiting you. Was it a small vial, similar to the ones that held metal ions for GCSE chemistry students to burn? Or was it a life-sized coffin for a marionette, whose strings were wound tightly around her limbs while the glass prevented her from dancing? Perhaps it was a simple jar that you associated with storing pasta or rice, or maybe it was an antique jar that was covered in dust and fingerprints from all the people who had handled it over the centuries.

Sure, curiosity killed the cat, but the satisfaction of knowing brought it back. And that was exactly what was going to happen to you. In a way. You weren't going to die, but maybe an old version of you could finally be put to rest if nothing else.

After descending the stairs and searching for a fork in the hall, you found yourself in a passageway lined with doors (you stopped counting after the first three dozen). Each door had either a different sound or smell wafting through the gap between the door and the frame. One door that looked eerily like the front door to your deceased grandparent's bungalow filled your nostrils with the smell of acetone and nail varnish, making your eyes water from how pungent it was. The door just down the corridor, however, vibrated as a familiar song blared through speakers at a dangerously loud volume. (You were sure that you had heard BEN listen to it on more than one occasion? What was the band's name? ENHYPEN or something like that?)

The cacophony of sensations grew to be overwhelming, with the doors constantly switching between mildly comforting and an outright assault on your ears or nose. It was incredibly disorientating to walk past a door that sounded like it was hiding a pleasant beach, where the purl of the sea was eager to lull you to a calm sleep, only to smell what could have been rotting milk a second later. It was sickening.

You were glad to see the ladder mentioned by Iskra and even more glad to be able to breathe without the smell of decay lingering on your tongue. You gave yourself a minute to acclimatise to the odourless air before trapping the diary between the waistband of your trousers and your back and hoisting yourself up the ladder, one shaky rung at a time.

It was the kind of ladder that you would expect to see in an old farmhouse where the attic was basically falling apart from disuse. Dust covered both the rungs and the sliding rails, and the fourth rung that you grabbed crumbled under your fingertips, making you swear in a high-pitched whisper. ('Oh my fucking God, this can't be happening what the fuck is this.')