You live in your own head. You've always lived in your own head. In quiet, meandering corridors of shadowy memory and half-imagined sensation. Carefully tending to your own private fantasies, your own little dreams. Fragile things that would wither and die by daylight but here, in the hush, in the quiet dark, might live if only for awhile. What is it you want? It's no great, grand thing: strong arms to hold you. Warm bodies beside you. Hands pressed to your legs, your chest, your arms; hands cradling your jaw, an unseen thumb brushing your cheek. You've had a taste of it before, but just a taste, only a taste and you-
You can't really win, can you? Hah. You finally get it now. You finally understand, a little at least.
You build a fortress in your mind and raise a seat in the center. A throne where you sit and peer out from behind your own eyes and watch the world turn. But those same layered curtain walls that protect you, that guard that last shred of self you have, steadily choke you. Smother you. Ensuring that you endure, that your existence persists. That you don't fully feel blows that split skin and water the drought-parched earth with your blood. That you don't entirely hear the things they say to you, the words the soldiers spit. That when you tilt your head up and look to the sky you don't see the monster that looms over you, the beast that's been there all your life, watching and waiting and licking gore-soaked lips; that you don't fully comprehend all that's happened to you, all that's going to happen. That you don't do the only rational thing anyone could do, the only sane thing, and scream and scream and scream until your throat tears and your voice goes slack.
And what kind of man can cross that gulf? What kind of man can scale those walls, meant to keep all of Creation at bay? This is the gift of Exaltation, it's given you the self-awareness, the vocabulary you need to describe what the City did. What it made you do to yourself. To understand that, if you could have, you would have made yourself an unthinking, unfeeling tool and been glad for it. That you would have murdered your own sapience, your own mind, to keep it safe from them forever. To finally be beyond the pain, beyond the two-fold hurt of your circumstances.
That all you wanted to be was meat.
Yes.
Yes. That's the best way to make sense of it. On some level your body was always just a thing to you. Just an armature of muscle and bone, pliable in some ways, pleasing in others: useful and of service (and oh you can still taste the City's words on your tongue, "of service", the highest praise Lookshy can bestow upon anything). The helot-who-sold-his-name made himself into an ambulatory castle; legs serving solely to carry the throne from place to place, arms to bring things before it. There was nothing especially romantic or sacred about any of it, there's no real regard to the way you treated it. The way you used it. And it's not that you've cruel or even unkind in that regard, it's just what connection is to you, intimacy and sex are to you. What they've always been. A way to feel something like tenderness, something like affection, something like wanted and make even one other person feel the same. Even if you don't even know their name; even as part of your brain scratches and scrambles, a panicked rat trying to chew its way out of a cage of bone because something inside you can't bear being touched even as you all but starve for it. All of it -all of it in service to your own survival, your own sanity; ensuring that you live, but that you do so fundamentally alone.
And you...you are so tired of being alone, aren't you?
You want to be wanted. You want to be needed. You crave something more than flickering, half-kindled scraps of desire, of passion, of satisfaction that never last. Can never last. Something more than connections that stretch out and suddenly snap, curling back upon themselves in mindless coils; the automatic contraction of cephalopod limbs, the sucker-baring curl of severed tentacles.
The figure is just standing over there. They could be a friend. They could care about you. They could even be something else. But you won't know if you just stay here beneath the limbs of the tree, feeling the rain strike your shoulders, droplets dripping from crystalline leaves. You should go talk to them, go do anything instead of-
Staring. Instead of staring. Which is what you're doing, all you're doing.
...It's somewhat rude you suppose, but admittedly they did do that smug here-all-along thing to get a rise out of you, so you can't honestly feel too bad when their plan implodes because you have the social skills of a rock. Really, you have to wonder what their plan was in the first place. They're standing over there tending to a potted plant in the middle of the night and pretending they don't know you're here and it's clearly some kind of multifaceted thing where you go approach them with curiosity and trepidation, maybe it escalates, turning into dramatic confrontation where they can show off. Make a first impression with that initial introduction right? Instead of this where you're just watching, wondering who decides to water plants in a rainstorm.
Oh, it probably has some nutrient solution dissolved in it, that would make sense.
The seconds drag on, the cowled figure's head twitching towards you discretely once or twice, still humming along to whatever song is stuck in their head. First cautious, a little unsure then exasperated when they realize you haven't actually moved. Quickly pretending they were doing no such thing and you find that, actually, you're enjoying this quite a bit. Moments into minutes, once-casual motion gradually slowing, slowing until it stops altogether and they seem to just...wilt.
"Are you really going to just sit there?" They ask.
