Trapped In Here, With You (Sebastian Solace X Reader)

I think therefore I am.

🩸🌀

They are Expendable.

They don't deserve a name, a face, or an identity. They show no emotions, they say nothing, and they taste death like a mortal angel: but they cannot beg for an end like a rabid dog. They are worth less than a dog. They spoke to nobody, and nobody spoke to them. Other prisoners avoided them like the plague, and perhaps they were the plague. They've never known freedom. Maybe their Revival gear was faulty, maybe the chip in their neck wasn't ever fully removed after they completed the mission, maybe they were born to suffer like a forgotten God, so forever and eternally eldritch in existence, eonian in birth.

They crave injury.

Death is nothing to them. If anything, it's become a forbidden fruit they can't help but indulge in. To bite like a maggot at the rotten flesh of a king — the crown means nothing to its teeth but it's the novelty that adds value. It. The soldiers called them it. They had no memories about who they were before this, if they had family, if they had a childhood. They were a numb husk that could do nothing but swim, run, hide and obey.

Blood is the only color they like. Or tolerate. Or became familiar with. Morbidity is the taste in their tongue instead of food. When last had they eaten? Did they need to? How old are they now, if the time loops are to be counted?

They don't matter.

Sometimes they deliberately burn their eyes to the Eyefestation, let the cornea fizzle and dry, feel the sizzle of blood vessels bursting beneath the accomodation, and the degradation of the optic nerve. The hum and ring in their brain was the only thing they'd call comfort, alongside the immeasurably delicious pain. Sick. Twisted. Raw.

Sometimes they'd purposefully enter a locker filled to the brim with Void Puddles. They liked to feel their clothes disintegrate and their skin bubble under acidic mucus, chunks teared and pulled off from suckers, the only touch felt before cold death was a rotten embrace of chilly tentacles. Darkly intimate, selfish, pointless. Suicidal.

Underwater mines just to feel their bones splint and ears destroy themselves.

Anglers so they could remember the psychopathic enjoyment of their own body being torn apart and smeared like red paint. DiVines because they liked feeling a broken skull, and punctured eyeballs, and shard teeth. Turrets to feel the unloading cartridge of bullets pierce through them like they were air. Chainsmoker's gas so that they can savour the choke in their lungs, their body's rejection of the foul chemical invading them. Slowly, painfully, it consumes their body and their blood clots and they collapse a faceless heap onto the floor. Being harvested by Abomination, blown up by landmines, sending themselves into lava, crushing their skull under Lucy, skewering themselves under Searchlights, finding the first gun in a drawer and blasting their brains out, walking into the same false door to feel their flesh sever from the hand of the Good People. Over. And over. And over.

And, their favourite: Sebastian's anger. Sebastian's claws. Maybe it comforted them to know they were punished for Painter. Of course they had no control. They wonder if Painter remembers.

Does he remember their blank face? Their empty eyes? Does he remember their soulless movements like a thing possessed? Does he remember a mouth that couldn't protest even if it wanted to tear at its own muscles just to utter a word?

Silence. A silence that shredded their throat and curdled the inner lining. They must look horrible, but they've not seen a mirror. They wouldn't care. The glass shouldn't have felt so satisfying under their knuckles, the bones white and exposed, bleeding, shaking. Could they feel sorry? Were emotions something they could feel?

Theirs. Solely and cruelly and bloody theirs. This pain, this thrill, this wrongness and disgust is theirs. They are nothing, yet everything. They have no past, and they will never see a future. They are a shadow given limbs; unimportant yet everlasting. Their existence cannot be denied, but it can never be named. They must remain nobody. Nameless. A stranger that can never be known.

Do they know about the black bar that corrupts the front of what should be their face? The disembodied and hollow eyes that shine a ghastly white?

Do they know about how dreadfully unhuman they look? Horrifyingly close, but missing something that should make them feel human. They feel like poison to be around. Maybe they are. Maybe they are already a corpse. They are cold, and unfeeling. They have no empathy. It has no capacity to be anything.

But aren't they the perfect Expendable? Clad in Urbanshade's first official uniform, useless and obedient, with no meaning. No ties, no home, nothing to live for and so they are kept alive. Despondent forever.

They have no being to pray to.

They are a being praised by their own deaths. They sacrifice themselves to themselves. They worship themselves when they are brittle bone and bathed in blood, they are holy in that they are filth, and every corner and every room will have or already has a part of them strewn across the walls. They drip from the pipes and leak in the grates. They wreak the air with the smell of copper. They are a singularity. An anomaly allowed to live for no reason other than sadistic nature. A sadistic God is a masochist for they loathe the flesh of the one they praise. If equated to a number, then they are infinity as well as zero, all as well as none, the dawn that sets in on itself. They are empty, but they are filled. They exist despite that they don't.

They will never know the feeling of life in their veins. Their heart is dead and pumps blood.

They have no limbs that are their own. No brain, no mind, no thoughts or personality.

They have no body.

They have no senses.

No feelings.

Not for them to feel cold water on a hot day. They started to Hate other's softness and viscera. Hate. Let them tell you what they think of it, they'd die of it, had they been human. There was enough skin, nerves and muscles to stretch an entire football field thin as wafer, and even then, it wouldn't amount to the hate they felt knowing they existed. They were jealous, they were envious, they seethed and sputtered smog in anger that they couldn't feel. They felt something darker, something beyond humane limits.

They can think.

Therefore they Are.

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"Subject Null_0 has gained a form of sentience. It named itself Are. Instructions to proceed?"