the house of lamentation.

.poisoned.

Today, Grub woke up with cyanide in their heart.

Lethal dosages don't come all at once. The world wouldn't let them be that lucky. Instead the injections came in increments. Milliliters at a time. A process so gradual that, before this, it was only a nasty taste in the back of their mouth. A cold chill and a churn in their stomach. Little things that one could only wish they had paid attention to when it was too late.

Even now the effects weren't obvious. All of the things out of the ordinary were so subtle that it only gave the feeling of something being slightly off. Of every piece of furniture in the room being moved an inch to the left. Unidentifiable nausea whenever they passed a mirror. Stumbles in their steps through what hardly felt like reality. Aggravation leaking from every word they spoke, so overwhelming that it couldn't even be played off as their usual behavior. They had people that cared about them. People that held their clammy hands and whispered things that couldn't reach them because all they could hear was their hollow breaths echoing inside of the empty chamber they couldn't escape from. But Grub hated to rely on people. They hated admitting they were vulnerable and weak even if it was just for a second. So despite the countless are you okay's and the concerned glances boring into their skin, the poison continued to seep into every orifice. Eating away at their sanity and making them feel like less and less of a human being.

Today, Grub couldn't stomach their arsenic.

Their limbs felt thick. Useless. Almost as useless as they were in every possible case scenario regardless of what they all said. Lucifer always made sure to remind them that. His words always made them want to vomit.

You're nothing compared to this world around you was the truth that rang ever present in their ears. No fucking shit. Grub had always been a fat load of nothing, but now? Now the power imbalance was insufferable and every single day they had to live with the fact that their existence didn't matter compared to everyone else around them. Grub had absolutely nothing that could make them a valuable asset to this exchange program and they, for the love of god, wished that something would just kill them already. Being alive made them want to vomit.

So many icky gooey feelings swarmed around their insides and feasted upon them; tearing every inch of flesh and every strand of tissue to bits. Tiny and useless. Just like them, right? That sticky sensation in their gut that made their skin itch so badly they wanted to cry and tear it off. A sickening stickiness that made them want to vomit.

Today, Grub just didn't drink enough pesticide.

Maggots were everywhere. Crawling in and out of their decaying body, spawning more and more of the wriggling masses until they couldn't breathe anymore. Grub was choking on the filth coming out of their own mouth. Choking on the bugs crawling out and making all seven brothers stare at them like they were out of their fucking mind. Lucifer's mouth was moving but nothing came clawing through from the depths of his throat. He wasn't gasping for air and tearing at his rib cage to try and rip out the pests flooding his lungs. Maybe if they had downed enough of the contents of those bottles in their bathroom the bugs wouldn't be so out of control.

When did they get outside? Grub was storming away from the only place they've ever been able to call home. Their conscious yearned to turn back around, to become the perfect "yes, sir" and "no ma'am" character that they needed to be just to survive, but they couldn't. Not unless they wanted to infest the House of Lamentation with their writhing, disgusting, scuttling bugs. As mad as they were at Lucifer they could never bear to wish for him to deal with their nasty fucking gunk.