InsaneJournal

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If he had a need for breath, Julian would have woken up gasping, heart-pounding, and fighting for breath while sweat poured off of him. His body had stopped functioning like that years ago though and instead Julian just shot upright into a sitting position in his bed. The heavyweight of dread pressed down on his shoulders, the nonexistent weight of it threatening to push him back down on the bed.

He wasn’t sure where it came from but it was a feeling he couldn’t shake. A feeling that something bad was about to happen. That something was about to change. It trembled along the weave of the web disturbing it as if something heavy had landed on it. The disturbance in the web, the vibrations sent throughout it, made everything even worse than it normally did. The whispers were louder than they had ever been, even after he had killed Rusty.

Julian threw his legs over the bed and sat on the edge of it, sliding his fingers through his hair as he held his head in his hands and tried to push it all out. “Please just stop,” he muttered.

Once he had seen a movie—or maybe it was on tv or had even been a book. It didn’t really matter which—where a man had been tortured by having rats placed under a metal bucket and when they started to heat the bucket up the rats started to try and get out the only way they could—clawing, ripping, and chewing their way into the man’s stomach. It’s how Julian’s mind felt right now with the overwhelming amount of whispers and information flooding into his mind.

The way that the web shook under the weight of what was happening made it hard for Julian to reach out and grab a hold of the one thread that helped to keep him grounded. Every time he tried to, it would slip through his fingers. It caused panic to rise up in Julian, not because he was becoming untethered under the onslaught of dread, but because he worried that maybe what he was feeling had to do with Leo.

It wasn’t until he was getting up out of bed that Julian felt the heavyweight of his limbs and realized that the sun was still up and trying to peek around the blackout curtains and that he shouldn’t even be awake. That caused the panic to claw its way up his throat even more as he made his way towards the other bedroom. It wasn’t until he opened the door and saw that Leo was in his bed and safe that he managed to gain any kind of clarity and wonder if not that then what was causing the problem? Why was the web so disturbed that it would wake him and leave him feeling such dread?

Sagging against the door framing, Julian couldn’t help but slide his fingers through his hair once more and pull, his eyes squeezing closed as he tried to think past the noise in his mind.

Murderer. Murderer.

He couldn’t be sure if those particular whispers were about him or someone else. When he opened his eyes again, he looked at Leo. The weight felt just the smallest bit lighter being in here with him. Julian didn’t want to wake him but he also didn’t want to leave.

It was more an unconscious movement on his part than it was any kind of actual decision that had Julian crossing the room and sliding into the space next to Leo. He was careful not to bump into him, keeping to the edge of the bed, as he grabbed a pillow and hugged it to his chest before curling around it. He didn’t even notice the small whimper he let out as all of sudden the whispers turned to screams that he couldn’t even make out the words of and then the echo of death shuddered through the threads of the web as one snapped.

It is done.

In that brief moment, everything went quiet.