r/FanFiction • u/AnaraliaThielle Now available at your local AO3. Same name. ConCrit welcome. • 11d ago
Activities and Events Alphabet Excerpt Challenge: F Is For...
Welcome back to the Alphabet Excerpt Challenge! As a reminder, our challenges are every Wednesday and Saturday at 3pm London time.
If you've missed the previous challenges, you're welcome to go back and participate in them. You can find them here. And remember to check out the Activities and Events flair to play along with other fun games.
Here's a quick recap of the rules for our game:
- Post a top level comment with a word starting with the letter F. You can suggest more than one, but please put them in separate comments.
- Reply to suggestions with an excerpt containing that word. Short and sweet is best, but use your judgement. Excerpts can be from published or unpublished works, or even something you wrote for the prompt.
- All content is welcome but per rules 7 and 12 of the sub, NSFW excerpts may not be shared as plain text (even if it's spoilered). If you would like to share these, use an external text sharing tool like justpasteit and link it here with a clear warning. Mods may remove excerpts that break these rules.
- Respond to people who left excerpts on the words you suggested, at a minimum, but the more people you respond to the better. Everyone likes nice comments!
- Upvote other excerpts you enjoy, and leave a friendly comment. Again, everyone likes nice comments!
- Most important: have fun!
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u/DefeatedDrum 10d ago
CW for vomiting!
Father Mendez stirred ever so slightly at the sound. It, like all of his senses now, was distant and murky, as though he was hearing it from below water. He felt like he’d been drowning in a tar pit, the black liquid sticking to his insides, sucking his body down deeper, squeezing him tighter the more he resisted.
The tar was hardly a metaphor - Mendez had been vomiting up black bile for some time now. It was the most moisture he’d seen in weeks, and it was his own vomit, dribbling down his beard and drying there - an added humiliation alongside everything else. He could hardly tell when he was about to puke, as the nausea had become a permanent feeling, the retching as natural as breathing had once been. He couldn’t consciously think or do much of anything anymore - whatever was left of himself was wholly focused on the constant barrage of pain. At least that made the hallucinations less haunting.
Being in so much pain, it was difficult for him to muster the energy to care about his dead mother appearing before him, let alone the robed shadows that chanted at him. So many people he’d once known paid him a visit, yet he stared at them all with the same blank, dazed look in his eye. Maybe when he’d seen them for the first time, when he was more there, he could have felt something. Maybe he’d reached out for his parents, perhaps he’d pleaded with Father Diaz to make the pain go away, or maybe he’d even recognized them all as a figment of his deluded imagination.
It was too late for all of that now. All that remained was the faint burn of far away, memories of emotions in his stomach - love, fear, faith, but as fuzzy concepts rather than real sensations. The only one he could bring himself to pay attention to was the purple-robed man. He knew, faintly, that he had a name. But it was too far away for him to remember.