"You're not," he snaps, and the higher he goes the more the tree lurches sickeningly, as if it's trying to shake him, shed him from its skin. He clings gamely on, locking eyes with Jay's horrified ones a minute before the filaments bind together into the murkiness that swarms over him, gluing shut his mouth and nose and flooding over his eyes.
"You're not dead." He surges forward, wrapping one hand around the viscid stuff that immediately flows over to encase his arm. "It's keeping you here."
The Rift or the thing or the Rift. Does it matter? Did it ever?
Fuck off and fuck you, Tim thinks at it viciously. He doesn't belong to you.
He hauls himself forward, up to his elbows in clinging, gluelike webbing as it crawls over him, fast and fluid and pulsating faintly, strands of plasmic material creeping for his chest, his shoulders, his face.
He wrenches one hand free with the greedy sucking sound of a ripping suction, stretches forward, grasping the viscous layers of the stuff as it seeps over to smother Jay, fingers digging into it, his teeth bared like a monster, and there's a sludgelike resistance but he wrests at it desperately and it -
tw: some body horror
"You're not dead." He surges forward, wrapping one hand around the viscid stuff that immediately flows over to encase his arm. "It's keeping you here."
The Rift or the thing or the Rift. Does it matter? Did it ever?
Fuck off and fuck you, Tim thinks at it viciously. He doesn't belong to you.
He hauls himself forward, up to his elbows in clinging, gluelike webbing as it crawls over him, fast and fluid and pulsating faintly, strands of plasmic material creeping for his chest, his shoulders, his face.
He wrenches one hand free with the greedy sucking sound of a ripping suction, stretches forward, grasping the viscous layers of the stuff as it seeps over to smother Jay, fingers digging into it, his teeth bared like a monster, and there's a sludgelike resistance but he wrests at it desperately and it -
And he -
And it tears.