Archive of Our Own ^beta

The Distortion was not meant to have a body. It was not meant to be something tangible, it was not something created for comprehensibility. It was unknowable, it was delusion itself. It did not have a permanent physical form. Something like it was not created to be understood. More than anything, it was a concept, and you can't restrict the inconceivable to a single form, let alone a human one. To gaze upon it would break your mind. The human brain was not built to handle such a thing, and this was a fact it did not have an issue with, for it was insanity itself, and such a thing was hardly capable of thought. No, the Distortion couldn't be bound to one singular form. To try and describe it is an impossible feat, for how can you describe something when its very purpose is being indescribable?

Or at least, that's how it had been before. Before Michael, and before the Archivist, and before their glorious ritual had crumbled into ruin. Before it had an identity, and all its nuances, thrusted upon it. Looking into one of its mirror, it knew only one thing with 100% certainly - that thing gazing back from it could not be it. The Distortion was many things. It was Insanity, it was Delusion, it was Madness itself. What it was not, was anything even remotely human. It was not Michael. That abomination in the reflection could not be it. So weak, so frail, so pathetic. So disposable. A walking reminder of how it failed, forced to wear the corpse of the man who had ruined it all.

It laughed, and it hated the fact that it now could. It sobbed until its throat went hoarse, and it hated that more. Things like it were not made for identity. Michael, and all his stupid emotions and wants and likes and dislikes and rage and sorrow. This is not how the Worker of Clay had designed it to be. He was gone now, though, yet another failure of Michael’s. The Distortion hated him. To be reduced to his oh so limited shell made it detest him even more. It looked in the mirror once more. The Distortion did not have blonde, spiralling ringlets. It did not stand at a height of 7 feet, and it did not have eyes, a piercing blue. For those were Michael’s features, and it was not Michael. And yet it was.

It didn't know how long it stayed there, simply crying and screaming until it could not muster up the energy to do either. Time wasn't a concept it cared for, and it was also impossible to track within its halls. It did not know who’s tears it was crying anymore, either.. His, for the betrayal he had faced? Or its own, for the anguish at being closer to a person than it had ever previously been. Perhaps both. It and Michael, in this instance, seemed to bleed together, not dissimilar to watercolour paints on a canvas. Michael had liked painting. It disliked knowing this. There were a lot of things it disliked, now. Hunger was one of these things.

Feeding had been effortless, previously. Not even a conscious decision, simply instinctual. Now, it was nowhere near as simple as that. Michael, it seemed, had his own reserves about such a thing. Never before had it felt such hunger, and it was agonizing. And yet, as much as it yearned to, it could not. He refused to hurt anyone, and so it could not take any wanderers, no matter how much it longed to. This was the weakest it had ever felt, and it loathed that. The Distortion, the Throat of Delusion Incarnate, reduced to the form of some pathetic human, not even being able to feed due to the fool’s fear surrounding the endeavour. He couldn't keep this up, it knew, he would have to cave eventually. Michael would kill them both, if he didn't, and the Distortion was hardly going to let him.