Chapter Text
You have sworn a vendetta against minimalist interior design.
Whoever decided they wanted to live in a scarcely decorated home with pale walls and nowhere to sit is now your enemy. Once you escape your prison of infinite nothingness you are going to make them regret willingly enduring this torture. You miss having stuff. Hell, you miss seeing stuff. Honestly, despite your new grudge, you’d give anything to see a neutral color wall and weirdly square couch with no pillows, or literally anything else. A speck of dirt. A bug. An off-shade of white. Anything to break up the expanse of nothingness that you’ve been surrounded by for who knows how long.
“Rebecca, it’s not what it looks like!” You turn your left hand to ‘stare’ at the right, flapping your hand as you speak, before switching to point finger guns. “I won’t hesitate, bitch." Wait, that’s not quite right. “Rebecca, it’s not what you think! Yeah, that’s it.”
You have never been more bored in your life. Left with nothing but yourself to occupy yourself with, you’re stuck miming old Vine videos with your hands. It’s the only thing keeping you from absolutely losing it. Unless you’ve already lost it... and frankly that would explain a lot.
You have no idea how to tell time in this place but you’ve been here a long while. You’ve managed to remember and replicate a few dozen Vines and repeat them all what feels like hundreds of times. That means it’s been at least a few hours since you started. Probably.
But the puppet show is only a recent hobby.
Sometimes you catch yourself just sitting and staring off into the distance without thinking about anything. You’ve slept some number of times, but you have no way of knowing how long each nap was. You haven’t felt hungry or thirsty, but if you walk too long you still get tired and need to rest.
All this to say you’ve been stuck for far too long and nobody is coming to save you. You gave up on that a long time ago.
Or just a few minutes ago. You have no idea.
You don’t even know how you got here, wherever ‘here’ happens to be. One minute you’re walking through town, minding your own business, and the next there’s some kind of commotion and you’re tripping and falling through the ground.
You’ve seen enough internet horror stories to know about the Backrooms, but you think at this point that would be preferable to this purgatory. You’d take infinite yellow walls and weird rooms over infinite white and nothing any day.
It’s really starting to get to you. Talking to yourself to fill the silence has helped, but there’s only so long you can do that before you start to question your sanity.
“I’ve already tried that.” You shake your head, trying to dismiss the static-y voice currently giving you a migraine. Just one of many, though ‘today’ they seem a bit quieter than usual. “I didn’t notice a portal or anything when I fell.”
You wince as the voices pick up and overlap as you’re given multiple suggestions for escape. None of them seem to make any sense to you and given your limited resources (ie, nothing) seem implausible. “Yeah sure, I’ll try that. Thanks.” You can’t help the sarcasm. You hope disembodied voices can’t get offended.
You ignore the next barrage of commentary and resume your hand puppets. Maybe it’s time to move onto remembering TikToks.
‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾ ☽༓･*˚⁺‧͙
Stretching your legs has become another hobby of yours. Going on semi-infinite walks is one of the few pleasures in your current life. It’s also a necessity. Early on you’d lied on the ground and moped for so long that, when you did finally stand up and try ‘exploring’ your legs were weak. You avoid lying down for too long now. You don’t want to get absorbed into the floor, or something.
Who knows if that can happen. Nobody does. Because there’s nobody around except you. Sometimes you wonder if you’re even real. Your surroundings certainly aren’t, since there’s nothing around you. But with nothing but yourself to act on you’re stuck wondering if you actually exist.
But if you don’t exist, then what are you? You can see yourself, your hands, your legs. You remember arriving and your absolutely mundane life before this. You’re experiencing your own concept of time- as well as you can, anyway. You feel like you walk distances despite having no proof of actually going anywhere.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If no one is around to perceive you... are you even there?
You’re so used to nothing, mindlessly wandering and babbling to the voices in an attempt to keep occupied, you almost miss when there’s something.
You can’t see it. There’s blank expanse around you as far as you can see.
But you can... feel it.
Like when you know for a fact a window is before you, but it’s covered with a curtain. You know it’s there, even if it’s hidden. You’re not sure how you know there’s a window (a gap. a door. a fissure. a something instead of nothing) but you don’t care.
You reach out.
You can’t feel it that way. Your hand goes through the space where you can sense the change. You grasp at nothing. You claw at nothing. You scream, swing your fists, and cry at nothing.
The voices are of no help to you.
The something stays there, static, the only sense of space you’ve experienced in so long.
You can’t bare to move away from it again. You’re unsure if what you’re sensing is even real, if it’s not just your brain desperately concocting a sensation to keep you grounded after so long.
And yet, if you reached out again, you know exactly where it would be located relative to you. You can’t touch it, but you know it’s there. You hope it’s there.
It’s there.
You stare at the spot. You put your hand just in front of it, focusing your vision on the nothing there. That feeling in your chest tightens, solidifies. Your hand fragments in your vision, spots appearing where you seem to break apart. For just a moment, you think you see a crack in the expanse just beyond your fingertips. Greenery and buildings and people. Just a glimpse.
There is something there.
There is something there.
You hold tight to that feeling, that certainty. The tightness in your chest. The desperation to escape.
Grounded for the first time in stars knows how long you reach out and
rip
reality
open.