breaking and entering (yandere! Kuroo x fem reader)

30 || maggots

TW: graphic body horror, implied necrophilic themes

The oppressive silence of the attic hummed like the low electric ache of static in your ears. The closed air was thick, pressing into your chest until breathing felt forced. You sat close to Iwaizumi, hands on your knees as your gaze traced the mottled map of his face; you didn't dare touch him. Your heart hammered each time your fingers hovered near his skin, as though the smallest contact might break what was left of him. 

He seemed larger than usual. His stomach had grotesquely ballooned out, strained to the point of bursting, as gasses shifted inside him.
You reached out anyway, hesitant, your fingers tapping against the distended flesh. It felt eerily tender under your touch, a dull echo returning each one of your taps.

A defeated sigh shivered down your lips, the need to cry burning behind your eyes, in vain. No tears followed.
Your body sagged under its own weight, making you sit in an unnatural position.

In situations like this, Iwa's faint cologne - mixed with the clean note of soap and sweat that meant home - would tether you to reality. Now, as your hair fell softly on his chest, and your face timidly sought refuge where his warmth should've been, the air betrayed you.
A sharp, vile odor struck first - an odor that you could only associate with the one of death.
Sweet rot, ammonia, sulfur: the cacophony clawed at your throat, a sickening contrast to the familiarity of his smell. You gagged, recoiling from the corpse that still wore his name.

Even that last trace of him was gone. That last anchor to the world you'd built together had been erased.
His face - his beautiful face, once sharp with pride - had begun to lose shape, with purple and grey patches spreading like spilled ink across his skin; his body was decaying right in front of your eyes, emitting smells and breaking into hues that disgusted you beyond comprehension. And you had to watch it, helpless.

Your heart and brain waged a quiet war: while your heart begged to reach him to find one more illusion of home, your brain recoiled, forcing your body to retch and tremble.

But beneath it all - beneath the nausea and the silence and the stench of loss - you still knew your tattered heart had overruled all logic. Faintly, wearily, but too stubborn to stop loving what death had already claimed.

Days blurred. The sun and moon chased each other through the cracks in the attic ceiling.
Eyelids heavy, you drifted in and out of a haze as the fuzzy image of Iwa's body faded in the background, until one day, something new caught the light:  a small white patch at the corner of his right eye. It pulsed faintly. You squinted, unable to tell what it was from where you sat.
You hesitantly crawled towards him, the now usual stench pressing against your face like a wet cloth.

The white patch shimmered, then buzzed - soft, electric, like the static of an old television. You stared, confused, then watched in slow horror as it began to crumble. Little flecks fell to the floor with faint, muffled thuds.
And then you understood.

A sound tore from your throat - part gasp, part scream - as your eyes focused. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of pale, milky bodies writhed over his eye. They rose and fell in waves, a frantic, almost cultic tide circling his fogged iris with religious devotion.

You clamped both hands over your mouth, trying not to breathe, as though you might inhale them, swallow them whole. The stench now had something new to it, new to that mingling rot of flesh, decay - it was now sentient in all of its foulness. You were completely powerless, only in the position to protect yourself from the creatures that had been leeching off of the death of your lover.

The attic quivered with quiet sounds: the soft squelch of larvae feeding, drowned out by the occasional pop of a gas bubble breaking loose beneath the skin. The smell shifted each time, sharper, wetter. Some of the maggots were tiny threads, translucent; others were swollen and slick, their plump white bodies smeared in liquefied bits of what used to be his eye.