Work Text:
Ike sighed, staring at his screen, the faint blue light seeping through his octagonal glasses.
“God fucking dammit- I need to edit this and post it soon-”
He slammed his head against the keyboard, half-asleep, half-procastinating. It had been at least three weeks of procrastinating before he decided to finally pull himself together and actually do his work, because he felt the constant burning of someone's eyes on him. An alarming feeling, because he lived alone. “I should call the police.. Or an exorcist.. Whatever.”
Ike knew he ought to tell someone about this, but he was scared that he might end up in the alleyways behind those shady Chinese restaurants in the city. The constant glare of the blue light from the computer was starting to make him lose his mind, his editing software was littered with sentences filled with nonsense, rambling on about ‘how the government is stealing our memories’, the ramblings of an insane old man.
~~~
Ike threw his fist against the window, screeching.
“Go away- Stop watching me-!”
He thought he saw a dark silhouette against his window- barely visible in the faint glow of the stars and moon. Its dulled, empty eyes flickered from the light of his computer. Ike heard voices in his ears; screams of agony, yelling in his ears, incoherent screeches, and broken wails of longing; rage; despair; all of his emotions bundled into one horrifying hallucination; a collection of his broken dreams and aspirations.
He screamed into his arms, trying to drown out the voices, to hear his own true thoughts.
Ike could slowly feel himself lose his mind, as he turned around, and saw things that surely couldn’t exist. A terrifying amygdalation of eyes, wings, tears, blood and flesh appeared before him, whispering in a ghostly, empty voice. “You. Are. Not. Enough.” over, and over, and over. His own sane thoughts drowned out by the voices of the lost. He threw his fists against the wall, raining punches on the hard brick wall, completely uncaring of the pain that came with his knuckles contacting the brick, splitting his skin apart, trying to get the voices out. Whenever he so much as glanced at something other than that wall, he would see horrifying beings, ghostly figures, and he would hear a cacophony of voices rushing past his ears, distorted combinations of so many voices he knew, the voices mixing into one, one deafening voice of doubt in his abilities.
Ike could feel his heart rate spiking. He could feel his mind turning against him. The voices became louder in all his moments of weakness. Well, basically all the time.
~~~
Ike shifted in his seat, trying to listen to the lecturer’s droning voice, past all of the screaming in his ears. He clutched his pen and paper, trying to ground himself past the voices, telling him he wasn’t good enough. The lecturer went on and on and on, not pausing, just speaking in a flat, monotone voice. Half of the class had already started sleeping. He placed his head on the desk, shutting his eyes to try and get more than three hours of sleep. It was a hellish task, as every single time he closed his eyes, between the veins and capillaries of his eyelids, he could see those beings again, and in his ears, he could feel the blood in his auricular veins carrying the whispers and wails of those voices again.
~~~
He was back in those dilapidated walls he had to call home. He rambled about all his empty delusions to those walls, like a church confessional, except this time it was an insane man going on and on to a wall. The sound of his broken speech filled the room, a noise of despair and longing to be saved, and the desperation for salvation.
Salvation. The thing he never got.