Antisepticeye Oneshots

His Eternity

A/N: Here's my birthday gift to the three-year-old. Happy birthday, Anti!

———

Anti was surrounded in perpetual darkness, his vision simultaneously filled with splashes of colours and utterly empty at the same time. If he focused, sounds filled his ears, but he realized after a lifetime that the sounds were not real, but memories of a past life, of which he had never seen its end. He could not remember its beginning either, but everything in between stuck in his mind like glue, tormenting him, burning him from the inside out.

The memories were nearly all happy. If he focused hard enough, he could see trees, a forest. For a long time his existence was just a mere forest, but things changed when he met Sean Mcloughlin and his best friend, Chase Brody. He was playing with them, laughing, joking, being reckless like kids were without any supervision. This was the first time he had friends to call his own.

He sucked in a breath through his teeth and exhaled slowly, shivering with ever increasing emotion. Instead of the joyous, playful scene he saw in his mind, all he saw was red. Sharp wet steel, and thick crimson liquid flowing out of deep wounds. And screams, agonizing and feral and oh, so beautiful.

As he felt these memories feeding the flames in his chest, he realized they were not memories at all. They were fantasies.

The fire would grow hot beneath his ribs, burning deep. The sweltering flames continued to get hotter and hotter until it reached his lungs and suffocated him. The heat would melt his skin like ice, tearing through him and fuelling him until he couldn't bear the sensation anymore. He wanted to scream and claw at his chest, reach inside and kill the source of the scorching hot pain. He learned it was impossible. Impossible to stop the inevitable, and impossible to die.

And so he would lash out at the confines of his prison. There were walls, but they weren't physical, or so it seemed. He couldn't see them, but he could see himself. He was real. Or whatever that meant in this place. He would claw, and punch, and scream at the boundaries that trapped him here, using all his energy and hatred until every last remnant of the fire was extinguished. The wall stood as rigid and unmoving as it had been before, not affected by his anguish in the slightest.

He would collapse in a heap of cold desperation. He would make himself as small as possible to keep his fingers and toes from going numb. His chest was heavy and hollow where his heart was supposed to be, but it was gone. It was charred, turned to ash from the searing flames, and left him unable to feel anything at all. The only warmth he ever felt in this place was from the crackling fire.

For what felt like a lifetime, he had been stuck in a perpetual circle, going around over and over and ending up in the same spot every time. Laying on the ground like a doll that was abandoned and forgotten about. He didn't matter. In the end, his confines were standing strong and it made no difference whether he tried escaping or not. He would be in this hell for eternity.

One day... no, days didn't exist anymore. Before now, he thought time had stopped and nothing was changing. Only until now did he realize he was wrong. Only when he saw the crack in the wall, did he see he was actually making a difference. There it was, a tiny sliver of white light peeking into his small pocket of darkness. He did that. He made that. And once he realized that he had the power to escape, he knew that he absolutely had to, if it was the last thing he ever did. It was the only thing could do, after all.

No longer was he running around in circles, destined to repeat the cycle for eternity. He had a goal. An ending. Something he could strive for until the day he—

Until the day he died. But not yet. Ń̡́ever.

He needed this.