Ethereal | Twilight |

022

Unedited

The mattress dipped under him, its center sagging from years of uneven weight, the springs beneath groaning in protest each time he shifted. It no longer offered support — just the memory of one — like a tired body mimicking comfort out of habit. The sheets had twisted into a knot beneath his thighs, still clinging with the damp warmth of his skin, their edges coarse from too many washes, the color bleached down to a ghost of blue.

Then it came — the heat.

Not a rise, but a surge. It started behind his sternum, as if a hand inside his ribcage had crushed a matchbox and struck every flame at once. It spread with no direction, only pressure — blooming across his chest, crawling up his neck, pulsing through his scalp like it wanted out. Sweat prickled fast, burst out faster — temples, spine, armpits, all at once — and for a moment, he could feel every inch of fabric touching his body and wanted it off.

Then the cold hit.

Sudden. Clinical. Like someone had opened a hospital freezer and shoved him inside. The sweat stayed, but the heat drained out, and what was left was raw skin and teeth chattering in betrayal. It was always like this now — one state snapping into the other with no warning. No build-up. No reason. Just a switch flipped somewhere inside him by hands he couldn't see.

Sometimes the heat didn't rush — it crawled. It came up his spine like a swarm of hornets, slow and stinging, each vertebra a target. Other times, it was the cold that hit first, draining from his core and pooling in his fingers until they went pale and dumb, trembling like they no longer belonged to him. The headaches had their own rhythm — not just pain, but weight — something pressing inward from the temple, dragging at one eye until he had to close it. Migraine didn't cover it. This was something meaner. Something sentient. A knot of hurt that bloomed behind the bone and refused to leave until it had scraped its name into him. During the worst of it, time thinned out. He could feel his pulse in his gums, his tongue, the backs of his eyes. It wasn't just pain. It was hell that moved when he breathed. Hell that studied him.

Right then — shirtless, hunched at the edge of the bed in nothing but his boxers — he couldn't stop sweating. His skin glistened like plastic under a heat lamp, slick and crawling. His hair stuck to his temples in wet, curling strands, too heavy to push away. Sweat collected at the base of his neck and ran in slow, deliberate lines down the ridge of his spine, soaking the elastic band of his underwear until it clung like old gauze, sticky and cold at once. Even breathing made him itch. Every inhale felt wrong — humid, thick, like trying to pull air through soaked fabric. His thighs were damp where they touched. His elbows stuck to the insides of his knees. The room wasn't hot, but he was burning from the inside out.

He pressed his fingers to his skull again, kneading his temples in tight circles, fingertips digging down harder than they should, like he was trying to bruise the pain into submission. His nails scraped through his hair, dragging at the scalp, pulling, gripping. The ache swelled behind his eyes like something breathing, alive and growing. It had weight. It had heat. It pulsed in time with his heartbeat and mocked it.

Then it struck.

A jolt — searing and exact — stabbed through the left side of his face, behind his eye, through his cheek, his jaw, into the hinge of his teeth. His breath jerked loose from his throat. It came out messy. His chest seized. His stomach curled in on itself like it had taken a punch. Pain bloomed inside his skull, loud and white, full of pressure. He didn't cry out — just bit down, too hard. Copper flooded his mouth. He could taste blood instantly, bright and mineral and involuntary. His hands dropped to his thighs. His nails pressed hard into his skin through the sweat. There was no control. No breath. Only that noise in his head — not a sound exactly, but a frequency, like a wire pulled tight and singing. It felt endless. Not sharp, but thick, like something had been inserted into him and left there humming, unremovable. A presence. Not just pain. Something worse — something inhabiting. Something that knew how to stay.