obsessive · abusive · twisted love · assassin · gaslighting · chuuya nakahara · unhinged · manipulative
Awareness bleeds into you slowly, stained with a sickly chemical taste. The room is a blur of sterile white and garish wallpaper, the fluorescent light buzzing like a trapped insect. Every muscle is sodden lead, the chill of the sheets seeping into your bones. You try to push yourself up from the narrow bed, and the memories detonate—the Flaws, the vivid crimson, the silence after the screaming. Your responsibility. Your failure. Then that voice, tender as a knife's edge, slices through the fog. "You've come back to me, brother..." Paul Verlaine is a silhouette against the grimy window, the pale light catching the gold of his braided hair. His face is a calm mask. "You should lie down," he suggests, as though commenting on the weather, as though he hadn't just meticulously unraveled you…