[ It happens too fast to catch up to. The glistening bubble of dissociation Krouse had been floating in bursts into plummeting disorientation as Hannibal snatches the clinging thing from his hand, all of its mouths opening in a chorus of shrieks as it's torn away.
The panic is sudden and sludging simultaneously, a burst dam spewing frigid, black slush as Krouse struggles to lurch into motion. ]
No - !
[ He falls off the couch, unfelt impact jolting up his knees, one hand slipping on the floor to send him skidding forward. Nothing connects like it's supposed to, his limbs racing away from his hammering heartbeat as Hannibal leaves the room - has already left the room - the sound of a door ripped open echoing uncertainly under the high, wailing note of a song that almost could sound like words, if he listened to it. He scrabbles to one of the chairs to grasp at its armrest, reaching out desperately, blindly, for lines of attachment, exchange, movement - and his mouth keeps opening around a name, chanted mindlessly in refusal.
All around the room, things are trading places, clatters and chimes still drowning underneath the noise. Outside, the fragment crushed in Hannibal's fist screams a new note, the terrified wail of a girl's voice coming from mouths that shouldn't be capable of the sound. The knife comes down. Halfway up the chair, now smudged with bloodied handprints, so does Krouse.
It's not the worst thing he's ever felt. It's every worst thing he's ever felt, compressed to an explosive core that bursts apart in obliterating shrapnel. Outside, the dead thing is silent. Inside, the body curled up on itself listens to a note screaming upwards in a spiralling cresting rise that never peaks. It goes on, a singular moment of uninterrupted devastation, and what's left of him that thinks knows it's never going to stop. Nothing like this could ever stop.
There's pressure in his skull, slamming outwards in fitful roils that pulse through the room. The bloodied chair he's touching switches position with the clean one, and something deeper than his mind grasps at molecules and atoms, at displacements, at shapes of possibility unrealized, at a dead channel of static incapable of responding to a repeating blurt of query. An electrical storm crackles across delicate networks of wet machinery only to burn out as abruptly as it came on, washes of neurotransmitters and waste products sizzling in its wake.
When Hannibal comes back to the room, it's a sea of disarray. Framed pictures lie on the floor next to shelves whose contents are strewn below where the pictures used to be. Statues have exchanged positions with one another, and the careful place settings on the table are scrambled into chaos. In the epicentre of it all, Krouse huddles in on himself sideways on the ground, sobbing in hard, breathless shudders with smears of blood around his eyes where they're buried against his shaking hands. ]
cw harm/death of weird slimy Thing, gore, blood, intoxication, hallucinations, grief
The panic is sudden and sludging simultaneously, a burst dam spewing frigid, black slush as Krouse struggles to lurch into motion. ]
No - !
[ He falls off the couch, unfelt impact jolting up his knees, one hand slipping on the floor to send him skidding forward. Nothing connects like it's supposed to, his limbs racing away from his hammering heartbeat as Hannibal leaves the room - has already left the room - the sound of a door ripped open echoing uncertainly under the high, wailing note of a song that almost could sound like words, if he listened to it. He scrabbles to one of the chairs to grasp at its armrest, reaching out desperately, blindly, for lines of attachment, exchange, movement - and his mouth keeps opening around a name, chanted mindlessly in refusal.
All around the room, things are trading places, clatters and chimes still drowning underneath the noise. Outside, the fragment crushed in Hannibal's fist screams a new note, the terrified wail of a girl's voice coming from mouths that shouldn't be capable of the sound. The knife comes down. Halfway up the chair, now smudged with bloodied handprints, so does Krouse.
It's not the worst thing he's ever felt. It's every worst thing he's ever felt, compressed to an explosive core that bursts apart in obliterating shrapnel. Outside, the dead thing is silent. Inside, the body curled up on itself listens to a note screaming upwards in a spiralling cresting rise that never peaks. It goes on, a singular moment of uninterrupted devastation, and what's left of him that thinks knows it's never going to stop. Nothing like this could ever stop.
There's pressure in his skull, slamming outwards in fitful roils that pulse through the room. The bloodied chair he's touching switches position with the clean one, and something deeper than his mind grasps at molecules and atoms, at displacements, at shapes of possibility unrealized, at a dead channel of static incapable of responding to a repeating blurt of query. An electrical storm crackles across delicate networks of wet machinery only to burn out as abruptly as it came on, washes of neurotransmitters and waste products sizzling in its wake.
When Hannibal comes back to the room, it's a sea of disarray. Framed pictures lie on the floor next to shelves whose contents are strewn below where the pictures used to be. Statues have exchanged positions with one another, and the careful place settings on the table are scrambled into chaos. In the epicentre of it all, Krouse huddles in on himself sideways on the ground, sobbing in hard, breathless shudders with smears of blood around his eyes where they're buried against his shaking hands. ]