A Ballad of Snakes and Shadows // A Dark Sebastian Sallow Romance

Chapter Twenty Eight: Cirice

((TW/CW: Trauma, angst, trauma fucking, public (?) humiliation, voyeurism, hard CNC, mind break, mind manipulation - it's just messy))

It took a few blinks for me to realize it was not the inside of my own eyelids that I was seeing swirls of stars in. Rather, it was that of a dusk sky, one that was just being kissed by the darkness of night as the sun set somewhere far off.

There was some nagging in the back of my mind that I should've been concerned with the sight, given that I was also laying on the cold, hard ground as I took it in.

Yet this sight had been burned into the neurons of my brain like a brand, one that I would never be able to soothe over. It was made of the same dark, star-covered blanket that I had been forced to gaze at time, and time again in my nightmares.

In its weaving, I could make out each little ball of light and have no trouble reciting  its name, and what constellation that it belonged to. It would fall off the tongue as easily as breathing air, given how deeply that view had been imprinted.

I would no doubt earn extra credit with Professor Shah, given the proclivity I now seemed to have for such stargazing. Though I would never show it in her class, not when the thought of those constellations brought me so much pain.

Every corner of the sky had been ingrained deeply, and it was no surprise that my mind had once again chosen to find pleasure in tormenting me by subjecting me to relive the night Poppy was taken. The nightmares often lingered here, creeping back up just when I thought I could move on and let it go.

My subconscious was never too keen on allowing me to forget each of my shortcomings, not when it was so easy to stroke them back to life across every dream and nightmare I tried to hide in.

There was never going to be anywhere to hide, I realized, not when I had to pay for each and every sin I had committed. In each little hallucination of my mind, I would be doomed to relive the pain of my failures.

The pain of this night had been shelved between the death of my mentor, and Sebastian's betrayal. It always seemed to fall into my lap when I needed reminding of my shortcomings the most. 

"You really thought you could save her?"

Sebastian's voice drifted into my ears, just as it had many times before. I wished that the repetitiveness had done something to dull the feeling in my chest, as I remained locked into place on the ground, but it hadn't. Instead I was forced to remain in this little pocket of my memory's mind, a splintered consciousness that was detached from the scene around me, but was fully aware all the same.

It was damned to an eternity of picking apart each thought meticulously, like a ritual that couldn't be stopped when it began. As it progressed, it was forced to simmer in a boiling mixture of all of the little shreds of guilt, regret, and frustration that had been discovered in the incantations.

It was a useless thing, a potion made of my own negligent defeat. I couldn't drink it to gain the strength out of its anguish, nor throw it in the face of Sebastian's memory as it crouched a little closer to my frozen body.

Instead it would only leak into my head, as I laid there staring at those stars. The effects of it coaxed me into being compliant, to look up at that darkened sky to find some kind of comfort as the nightmarish memory played out for the millionth time.

In those stars, I'd found the resolve to simply pretend that I didn't ache to act out on every idea I'd thought of too late. I'd have to remain ignorant in that little world created by the stew of remorseful fury, so that I wouldn't over cook it and my brain with it.