Dream effects: Melancholy leading up to euphoria, ending in calm, an almost satiated feeling.
Warnings: Gore in Vince’s thoughts, spoilers for recent PH chapters
The scissors feel lighter in his hands than they did as a child, though they have the same ornate handles, the same very sharp blades. He holds them more easily, fitting better in his palm, bounces them a little as he considers what he will cut with them, this time.
His eyes are slitted, nearly closed, and for a moment all that can be seen is darkness, but a rather textured darkness, not quite pure black, not quite still or unwavering. What is lacking in sight is made up for in sensation, as his fingers slip along the cool metal of one blade, and then brush against that textured curtain, revealing it to be course strands of hair that part under his fingertips almost reluctantly, clinging.
Then skin, warm and precious and thin, barely covering pulse and life and flow of blood, barely concealing everything that would flow out so easily. It’s so easy to trace the spine downward, to press fingers and the side of one wicked blade against the nape of the neck, to scrape with a nail as if considering what it would be like to cut.
"Vincent."
The voice is a warning, but it sounds as if it comes from far away, and it’s not in the voice of this person before him. It’s entirely the wrong voice, and Vincent frowns, as if something is broken by the wrongness of it, as if the fact that tone is indisctinct to the man himself destroys something.
"My apologies."
His own voice is wrong too, far too sincere, more sincere than it should ever be, open and revealing too much. The scissors are too light in his hand, lighter than when they first drew blood, lighter than when they pressed against eyeballs, squishing them deep into the sockets before they finally burst and crushed and became nothing but frail balloons spewing vile jellies. Lighter than when they rent flesh from flesh, failing to spill blood from corpses already cold.
They’re too light, and what he intends to cut with them is too light as well, the strands falling away so simply and without any real difficulty at all.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Dark hair littering the ground around his feet, and he keeps his eyes on the back of the boy’s neck, fixed on a collar that’s slightly crooked, half turned-up, messy. Messy like the hair that is clinging to Vincent’s shoes, messy like the turmoil of thoughts swirling in Vincent’s mind as he gets closer and closer to his goal.
Then there’s that second, that last moment where he steps around before the young man, where he snip-snip-snips those last few times and then he’s reaching one gloved hand out, he’s parting those last few strands in order to find...
Vision becomes nothing but a blur of brilliant white, and there’s a clatter as the scissors hit the ground. Did they fall? Or did his hands simply float away from them, light as he is light now, as if the weight gone were from his own head, not someone else’s. Light, everywhere, and a smile touching his own lips as he speaks, finally.
"There you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Master."