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Introducing a new guy! Well, he’s not new to me, I’ve been messing with Garrett’s story for a few years. But I don’t think I’ve really shared anything about him before.
Garrett is a spirit mage, in a world where spirits naturally manifest all over the place. He was clergy in an organized religion where the wizard-priests believed in keeping the spheres of humans and spirits carefully separate. Spirits can sometimes possess humans and then things get all tainted and messed up, so his duty was to keep them separate and keep the dwellings of the faithful cleansed of influence.
And then he got shoved into a hideous magical experiment, and now he’s exiled along with the spirits who were forced to possess him.
Using Lauren the Corgi’s Promptober list.
CWs: vivisection, possession, sleep paralysis, torture
***
Garrett is lying in his own bed, with Hush and Huck squatting to either side of him. Their long, spindly-fingered claws rip at his chest, digging in and peeling him wide open in strips.
He knows it’s a dream, but it doesn’t help. He can’t scream even though his throat is busting full with the terror. He can’t move. He can feel them, in his body and in his mind, in the way that dreams let senses and knowing mesh in impossible ways. And more. They’re in charge of this little pocket where their minds all meet.
That’s the worst part. The ways this isn’t just a dream at all.
Huck chitters in pleasure, her vicious claws scooping him open. She doesn’t speak–she rarely does–but her anger is in him, flowing through his veins like acid. Angry at the people who trapped her in him. Angry at him for being unable to untrap her. He’s as poison to her as she is to him.
Hush, on the other hand… He lifts talons to his fanged mouth and licks Garrett’s imaginary blood off them. “You’re so sweet,” he croons with childlike delight on his slender, sharp-featured face. “Huck says she likes you too.”
Garrett can feel Hush’s tongue on his blood. It’s not actually blood at all.
With each gob of his flesh they rip back, he can feel their hands claw into his mind, his memories. It hurts to all damnation, but their claws are dainty and intentional in how they reach and pick, carefully sorting through his past, his loves, his fears, his sorrows and plucking them to hold up like jewel-red gobbets of jelly. Huck slurps a few of those sorrows off her claws and purrs.
They aren’t destroying them. Oh that’s so… The relief it would make him pass out if he could, if he weren’t already asleep. But she tastes those griefs and Garrett’s eyes well with tears, the pain of them squeezing around his heart as fresh as if he were feeling them for the first time.
His ribs glisten, pink and grey and red. He can see them rising and falling, the shorn muscle pulling tense and relaxing again. He can breathe just fine even though his whole body thrums with dumb, terrified agony.
He wants them to stop.
“Ooooo?” Huck coos, her tone viciously mocking.
Hush laughs charmingly. “Oh, you want us to stop? You mean like we wanted them to stop when they tore us into two? Like they so graciously stopped at our request when they crammed us into you and seared us in place so we couldn’t get out?”
Garrett tries very, very hard to whimper. He was there, after all. He felt the cramming and the searing too. He still feels it. Spirits like them don’t belong bound in flesh, and Huck and Hush and Garrett all are raked with the defiled agony of it. It shoots up from his heels when he walks, up his legs into his back. It jabs from his palmst up the back of his neck every time he touches something.
“Mmmm hm, mmmm hm.” Huck leans close over his his face and nods vehemently. Her red eyes are slitted with something he has trouble reading. Schadenfreude? Some kind of message?
“She wants you to remember how it feels,” Hush tells him helpfully. He licks another memory clean from his fingers–the nectar of peaches in Garrett’s mouth, the day he’d sat in the field with his brother at midsummer and they’d sucked on fruit from the trees till they felt drunk, and he’d forgotten the scent of it, the perfect ripe floral-fresh smell. Hush hums with delight at the memory of it, and drags his claws gently through Garrett’s hair. “It hurt so badly. It felt like dying. You remember, don’t you? We won’t let you forget, Garrett, no we won’t. So if,” he taps Garrett’s lips with the point of a claw, “we can’t leave this ragged human body you’ve stitched our pain into, then I think you owe us a taste of its delights. Hm?” He tips his head too far sideways for a human neck, his cornsilk hair swinging. “Don’t you? Don’t you think, Huck?”
Huck titters, her mouth full of Garrett’s mother. Her love, her soft arms, her hugs– Garrett sobs soundlessly. Oh spirits of the land, what he wouldn’t give for her to hold him right now.
“Wouldn’t we all, sweet Garrett?” Hush says wistfully. “Wouldn’t we all.”