Work Text:
Nobody ever breaks in quite the same way.
Some explode. The pressure builds and builds and builds inside them until their frame can no longer bear it. They break violently and painfully and end up shattered into a million disparate pieces.
Others decay. The rot gradually eats at them, consuming them bit by tiny bit. It is neither a flashy process nor a sudden one, but the slow, creeping entropy of the soul.
Every wreckage leaves behind a different shape in the mess of its remains, each one a twisted reflection of its original self.
But they-
Oh, do they break so beautifully.
They are made a well-crafted thing, regal in the way one might view a ceremonial blade or a polished suit of armor; A magnificently lethal tool which is kept tucked away in pristine condition, deemed 'too valuable' to risk damaging through actual use.
They follow every command more precisely than even the most advanced automatons, and in the rare times when left without orders, stand stiller than a statue ever could.
From the outside, they appear a perfect, empty machine.
But, where none else can see, the inner walls of their being have been crumbling, leaving only the thinnest, frailest shell behind to uphold the facade.
One simple address from Him would have been enough to tear that illusion away, revealing the long-broken being beneath. Just one instance, where instead of "vessel" or "it", they had been called upon with the word "you".
Alas, it would never come to be, and they were not strong enough to break their bindings of habit and fear with their own will alone, just as they had been too cowardly to offer anything more than a glance back at their pleading kin, oh-so long ago.
She, perhaps, is their just retribution, then.
She breaks them in a way that is far from 'beautiful'.
She shatters the facade.
She shatters the habit, the fear.
She strips them down to the tender, throbbing shards lying at their core.
And She takes those long-ruined pieces, those raw and brittle things that had never once been so much as perceived, and-
She drags them out and crushes them.
Then She scoops up whatever detritus remains, and does it again.
And again.
And again.
And again, and again, and again, and again, and again...
She does it until She clears enough space to squeeze herself into the spot where their will had remained. She rips out the parts of them that dared to defy Her, to hold Her prisoner in their mind, and pours Her light in their place until it strains to break free of their body.
It bulges out in tumors and pustules, leaking from their empty eye-sockets and bursting through their skull. It swells and cracks and ruptures until it rends their arm from their body with a sickening squelch, and still, even with nothing left to gain from it, She does not relent.
Because She cannot stand it.
She cannot stand that she is unable to break them so totally and completely as He has.
For, despite the miserable lot He had paved for them in life, despite dooming them from their very birth to a wretched, loveless half-existence, despite treating them no better than one would a prized tool or utensil-
She cannot make them hate Him.
They cannot bring themself to call Him their father, yes; But it is not because He is, in all rights, utterly undeserving of the title.
No.
Despite it all, they think themself unworthy of the privilege.