Pure of Mind and Sharp of Knife (Male Reader x Female Creepypasta)

Unbroken

The familiar sensation of entering my fleshy vessel returns to me. Once the weight stabilizes and the vertigo ends, my eye slides open. A hand leaves my right shoulder. Scarecrow's come alone. As promised, she's come to rescue me, or so she says.

"Still breathing?" she nudges my leg with her foot.

I lift my head up to her, having been roused from my coma-like slumber, and grunt in response. She sighs and walks over to Painter as I drop my head again. Someone took off my garb without me waking. Zalga, probably. My hair falls over my face and past my shoulders, greasy and dirtied with blood. I hold up my chained hands, regarding the dirt underneath my cracked nails with little reaction. Clumps of blood remain from when Scarecrow ripped them off. The chains have chaffed my wrists so badly that the skin has become completely raw.

The room is rank with the scent of rotting meat and pestilence. From the buckets of slime-slathered organs to the walls painted with an old coating of dried blood, the entire place is as much a slaughterhouse as it is a torture chamber.

Nightcrawlers scurry down my back and face. I ignore the cockroach climbing across my foot and grab the rat pawing at my ear. It writhes in my hand until I squeeze the life out of it and toss it aside.

As Scarecrow frees Painter, a sniff of my own body makes me conscious of my deathly odor. Not death, necessarily, but formaldehyde. Have I spent so much time away from my body that Zalga had to keep me from rotting with her sorcery?

Painter, having laid eyes on Scarecrow, begins to kick and scream, yelling that she told them everything already.

"Painter!" I bark, making her freeze.

She turns her head to me, a quizzical look in her wild eyes.

As Scarecrow unchains me, I explain what's going on with a hoarse voice, "We're being freed. Scarecrow is going to help us escape," my hands are unbound from the rusted chains, "We're going home."

Scarecrow stands me up against the wall, and I almost slide down it when my knees give out. Thankfully, she catches me. I hold onto her shoulders, trying to summon the strength in my legs to keep me standing.

Once I can at least lean onto the wall, Scarecrow lets me go to unchain Painter. When I lean my shoulder into the stone, I recoil in pain, noticing that there are four scratches on both of my shoulders. After pushing aside my oily hair, I come to the silent realization that the blood underneath my nails was from me scratching into my arms while I was removed from my body.

Painter stares at me as I stumble over to the table with my feathered garb on it, "Are you really the boy who walked into the mansion that day?"

After wordlessly pulling the garb over my body, I walk over to Painter and lend her my shoulder. With her broken leg, she'll be useless. Dead weight, even. I'll have to carry her on my back if I gain the strength to keep myself up first. The bone sticking out from her shin makes her cringe and hiss with pain, her suffering not yet concluded.

She holds herself up and keeps her bad leg between us. Painter turns her head to me, and I become stricken by her natural beauty. Without her mask, I can finally see what she looks like. Even with her face hollowed by hunger, her cerulean eyes look up to me longingly as if awaiting my command. Even with her frizzy and filthy hair, I can imagine what she may have looked like without months spent rotting in the Abyss.

"Scarecrow?" I snap back to the moment, knowing we don't have time to waste.

She puts her ear to the door, "I'll take you as far as the main door. You're on your own after that."

My body tenses up, "Is there not a secret way out of here? This is a castle, isn't it? Why would we risk the front door?"

"Blame Zalga," she hisses, "This castle was not built with escape in mind. It was made to let nothing in or out on her watch."