It's A Good Thing The Dark Lord Is A Shut-In!

Failure 1: Blackout

CW: anxiety/OCD/scrupulosity, sexuality, suicidal ideation, ableism

His stomach growled in his sleep.

His eyes opened unconsciously, and grey-blue afternoon light washed out the dream like a chemical spill. Eventually he looked up reflexively at the computer screen next to his head. It was unresponsively black, and gathering dust.

He pulled his arm tingling from under his stomach and waited for it to unfreeze to press the nearest key, squinting.

As the screen came on, his eye zoomed immediately in to the network connection indicator in the top corner.

Still empty.

Frantically toggling the connection off and on, he watched it stay the same as it had for three days now.

Three days they had mostly spent sleeping.

That was what they did, when there was no reason to be awake.

Madness, they had heard, was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But they kept clicking - on, off. Madness wasn't the worst thing in the world.

Going to sleep again - wouldn't that be just as mad? He'd done it what, six, seven times? Every time thinking, it doesn't really matter when I wake up as long as there's a reason to be awake.

But what if there never would be?

What if the world was trying to tell him to go to sleep and never wake up? Die, he subvocalized every time the little exclamation mark appeared in the indicator - it felt like getting waterboarded. Die. Die. Die.

He screwed up his eyes, gritted his teeth, scraped at the skin on his forehead and wrists and cheeks, trying to wake up from the dream.

Red-faced, he rolled over face up and stared into the milky light swimming around the bare ceiling. He wasn't going to be able to fall asleep like this, but his mind was at least refreshingly blank. It was sleep, just white instead of black. Frozen panic instead of melted peace. Faces taunted from the walls creeping up around them.

Maybe I just haven't appreciated what I have, he thought, rolling over into the bearded crotch of the scummy skumizu of Slina, the Magical Algae Girl, the poster peeling away from the plaster enticingly, their hand creeping below their waistband. It felt good like this against three layers of weight: the underwear, the pants, the blanket.

But every time he started to feel something, he'd start thinking again - what if I never get to see her in another position? The transparency of the image - the effort to maintain it - would become obvious and the energy would dissipate.

The feeling in his stomach, however, hadn't dulled in intensity or left his attention once since he'd been awake. It had more object permanence than some limbs.

Even more than anxiety, it was the incontrovertible difference between this state and sleep.

Normally, Luskonnig had groceries delivered. He only ate once a day, and sometimes skipped, so it was easy to live like that. Lately, planning several days' meals in advance had made them too anxious so they didn't even have anything in the fridge.

Of course, the app they used to order delivery ran on an internet connection.

How long does starvation normally take to set in? ...even an hour awake like this was looking intolerable.

When the emptiness swirled like this in his stomach it was like reality swirling inside him, a primordial nightmare. He dreaded standing up. But somehow he did.