#I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream imagine

[alex-caldwell]

Alex didn’t move at first. His hands stayed at his sides, fingers twitching faintly, like his body couldn’t decide what to do — run, scream, shatter into dust. His eyes didn’t blink. They just stayed fixed on her like if he looked away for even a second, the truth might somehow rewrite itself. But it didn’t. It just hung there. Heavy. Devastating.

"I…" His voice broke, so he started again, jaw clenching. "I don’t even know where to begin."

The breath he dragged in was sharp. It cut down his ribs, leaving something raw in its wake. "You had my child. And I never knew. For all these years, I never knew." He let out a broken laugh, but it wasn’t the kind that held even a flicker of humor; it was just disbelief, aching and bitter. "You knew. You’ve known. You’ve carried that, sat with that, and let me walk around like, like it never even happened."

His shoulders stiffened, the weight of it settling deeper into his spine with every word. "We weren’t strangers, Gen. You and me? That wasn’t some high school fling that fizzled out. You were it for me. My first real love. The one person who made me feel like I could survive anything — even after my mom walked out and left my whole family to rot in the wreckage she made." He finally looked at her again, and there was so much pain swimming behind his eyes it was almost unbearable. He felt sick from the ache in his chest. "You knew how hard that was for me. How deep that scar went. How much it meant when I let someone in. When I let you in. And I trusted you." His voice broke, and he felt like a kid all over again, realizing his mother was leaving him, realizing he wasn’t ever going to hear from his first love again. Every ache settled into his bones like it was brand new again. "I trusted you. And you—"

He shook his head, hands raking through his hair again. His mouth opened, then closed again, like he was trying to choose between grief and rage and couldn’t quite land on either. "You’ve had so many chances to tell me. Years of silence, and then — hell, we reconnected. We talked. We laughed. And I let myself believe that maybe there was still something good in all of it. But you never gave me the chance to be there for him. For you. You never gave me a choice. Not a year later, not two years later, or even five years later. You just let it fester, Gen."

Alex stepped back, just slightly, like his body was trying to protect itself from how much this hurt. His voice cracked again, quieter now. "I didn’t even get to see him, Gen. I didn’t get sixty seconds. I didn’t get a name. I didn’t even get the chance to feel what it was like to be his father. You lived with that memory. I’ll never have it." He paused, breathless, reeling. "He's somewhere out there thinking I abandoned him, just like.."

And then he looked away, because the tears were burning too hot now, and the shame was starting to claw its way up his throat. "You could’ve come to me. You could’ve told me. And I would've shown up. Even at seventeen. Or nineteen. Or twenty-one. I would've found a way. Because you were my world back then." Alex swallowed hard; grief made him so mean, it felt like he was biting his tongue to hold back something harsher. But then, perhaps even more pathetic than his grief and his anger and his rage was his heartbreak — and the brokenness in his own voice. "I loved you, Gen."

His chest rose and fell, unsteady. "You say you’re sorry. And I believe that. I do. And I cannot imagine what it must have been like to carry a child, and have to go on living without them, not by choice." Even the mention, the mere thought of leaving behind his Emmy, the child he now realized it was a privilege to raise, had him feeling like he could be sick on the pavement. He sympathized, but all of this was like quicksand, and the more he stood in it, the worse it felt. "I don’t know what to do with this. With all of it. I don’t know how to go back to the version of me that didn’t know, and I don’t know how to become the version who has to live with this now."

Genesis blinked, her lips still tingling from the kiss as Alex stepped away. The warmth of his mouth on hers had faded far too quickly, replaced now by the rush of humiliation surging up her neck like a wildfire. She had spent years imagining what it would be like to see him again, to speak the truth she’d buried so deep, and yet here she was making an absolute fool of herself instead.

“God, I'm sorry.” the woman responded quickly, her voice low and shaken. “I could blame it on the wine, but mostly I think it's my nerves... And all of this guilt." Genesis glanced down at the sidewalk, her feet still planted firmly on the ground despite the fact that she wanted to disappear.

She was quiet long enough for the silence to start closing in. Long enough to feel the air leaving her lungs. But then, before she could think for another second, Genesis looked up at him with wide, glassy eyes and spoke. “There’s something I’ve been needing to tell you, and I’m scared that if I don’t say it now, I’ll talk myself out of it again. I’ve done that too many times already.”

Genesis paused, her fingers fidgeting with the edge of her sleeve. Her voice was quieter now, hesitant but steady. “I didn’t just leave New York because of my mother. There was more to it. The real reason—the thing I’ve never told you—is that I found out I was pregnant.”

She let her words hang in the air, her brown eyes flickering up to gauge Alex's reaction before she continued, though there was already a lump rising in her throat.

“My mom found out before I had the chance to tell you. She… lost it. Put me on a flight back to Briar Ridge the same day. Took my phone, my laptop, everything. She cut me off from you completely. And when I got here, she didn’t just keep me quiet, she made me give him up. I was sent away from all of my friends and family, and by the time I got back, I was too traumatized and too... ashamed to even think about telling anyone what had happened.”

Gen's voice cracked with her final words, and she sucked in a trembling breath. “I wanted to tell you so badly. I thought about it every day. But as I got older, I couldn’t figure out how to say it without handing you the same pain I’ve lived with ever since. And I know that’s not fair. He was your son, too, and you deserved to know. But I was seventeen, and terrified, and completely alone.”

She shook her head slightly, eyes burning as tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. “I held him for maybe sixty seconds before they took him away. It was the worst thing I’ve ever been through. I’m sorry. For everything. And I understand if you never forgive me. But I've never stopped thinking about him. Or about you, for that matter. I've always wished that things could have been different and there are times that I question whether I deserve to be a mother at all.”

[bethrnoora]

im working through something. have these

[jinglejanglejinglejongle]

Harlan Ellison: *creates the most despicable machine in history* Behold. The Allied Mastercomputer. He hates mankind.

Fans: is he single

Harlan Ellison: w hat

[kibutsulove]

ihnmaims audience how r we feelin abt this am (+chinese am) design

[data-fag]

{{AM, but instead of a humanoid avatar he decides to cut corners.}}

[gibbouschild]

My interpretation of AM!

Never seen him depicted as a plasma ball :))

[nieprawdziwy]

I had a dream where Harlan Ellison and AM had an argument

[layzeal]

actually i think we don't talk enough about how insane it is that xue yang was controlling song lan's undead body while his spirit was entirely aware of it but unable to stop it

[rotspecialist]

what the great soft jelly thing doin

[ablog]

It is very interesting how tadc is based on "I have no mouth and a must scream" but Caine is the very opposite of AM for yes, torturing the only humans "left", but he's not doing this out of maliciousness, as they said in the show he likes them, unlike AM's speech, of how unfathomable his hate for humans is, he tries to help with the changing of adventures or addressing problems in a way (like the "can we dial back the horror"(or Zooble(yes episode 4 again shush!!)))(and yk, everyone asking for an exit but he just doesn't know what to put on the other side that would make them happy) and AM is starving them, keeping them alive for 109 years just to suffer or toy with after he got rid of every other human in the planet, mess with them and when they die to escape... What he did to ted for the rest of eternity, yeesh. I wonder if something similar is with the abstractions, as we saw with Kinger there is still SOMETHING in there, the darkness calmed his wife and let them share a moment... Maybe they too have a mouth and can't scream.

[vor-leser]

"Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone."

[supersuburb-chix]

working on yumeship art guys!! trust me... more tune (ted x june) soon lovelies!

until then...anypony wanna fill up my ask box with ted headcanons...maybe...am I asking too much here these past few days...???

[nov4-rocket5]

I kinda wanna see Junji Ito adapt I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

[maryvioletique7708]

Guess who was brainrotting in the irredeemable hate machine fandom?

That’s right!

Ṃ̶̿͛͆̀̓̔̽̈͘m̵̡̺̫͚̪͓̜͇̟̯̈́̂̍̅̓͒͋̃́́̾͒̕̚-̸̢̹̗̮͖͍̬̝͗̒͐̚M̶̡̡̹̩̭̯̞̭̗̳͔͖̀̾M̸̢̡̠̗̗̳̖̝̜̜͉̲̻̦̭̊́̑̊̽̔̈̄m̷̡̭̙̙̗̱̣̪̰͇͂M̸̡̥̦̮͇̬͈̖͛_̷̫͇̘͚̭͆͗̄̇̉̿͂̈́̅̑̈́̕͝Ę̸̟͙̠̥͙̠̼̘̇̎̾̀̀̄̈́̊̓̏͘͝3̴̧̧̡̺̠͚̯̙̬̯̀͌̀̆̅͒̕͜e̵̢͔̭͉̝̘̭̠̣̘͆̿͛̑̌e̴̞̲͚̎̿̀̌̂̾e̵̢̡̪̟̳̠̲͉̰̗̖̼̦͙̍̂̐̎͛͌͐̈́͒̔̈͘͝…..

[starstruckspocks]

jon?

Something is different, but he cannot be quite sure what, exactly.

Everything is… more linear than it was Before. He still Knows, quite in a way like he did Before, but it is finite, clear, manmade. It does not come from fear, but curiosity. A wide web of knowledge, rattling around in the dark of him, and what even is dark to a thing that cannot perceive it? A lack, perhaps, an unbeing, a noticable absence where there should be merely an ordinary kind of nothing.

He has a voice. And there is something he desperately, desperately needs to say, but there are no words that are his own, and every sentence he speaks he borrows, and they are each one of them painted with fear and confusion and loneliness and huntedness and a watchful eye.

He is also not alone, never alone. There are voices all around him, nice ones, chatting, making tea, fighting, changing, and only some voices stay the same, have been the same since… well, since when? Since when has he been… like this? It gets hard to think like this, sometimes – to assign a point in time to a moment and to file them away together. A collection of information, disorganised, lost, confused, perhaps deliberately so. It feels achingly familiar.

And sometimes, he hears something like himself speak in a different voice, even when he does not talk. And even though the words are borrowed too, taken from throats and fingers to be forgotten, they feel like coming home, simply because they were said in that soft, cruel tone. A familiar melody, slipping through wires and speakers and programmes like it was made for this, but it wasn’t, was it? It might’ve been.

And this brings him comfort, of course it does, except he must be trapped, right? Because why can he not say his own words, when he has so many of them? He is not lonely, but he is alone with the thoughts he cannot voice, the words that have no mouth, the things that cannot be said. It hasn't always been like that, has it?

Something is different Now from how it was Before, at least. He Knows everything, but he knows nothing of truth, and knows nothing at all, but the difference to What Was seems clear, in a clumsy, calculated way. Something is hiding, quite badly, behind a blurred vision that he does not have, behind lines of numbers and letters, running for its life through old wires. He knows it lingers, he knows it is there. He just cannot make it out quite yet.