ok, here's something i started a long time ago, but just recently finished as a gift for a friend's birthday. because Decimus of y!gallery rocks my casbah and back.

taphephobia, for those not in the know, is the fear of being buried alive. this was meant to be something stark and abruptly terrifying, but ended on a lighter note than i intended. :laughs: it's a disease, i swear it. and it's a one-shot, not to be continued, but i know someone's going to think otherwise. ha. shows how much they know. and yes, there is a somewhat-Fight-Club quote in this.

friday, 10 october, 2008. 2:34 am.

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He was scared of so many things. He knew this. He also knew that often, it was the stigma attached to the object of fear that terrified him the most. Spiders were worse in theory than in reality, really, so small and easily squished, but he could never bring himself close enough to kill one.

Oh, it was easy to excuse being a wuss with his vegetarianism, claiming he could never kill even so much as one tiny spider, but that wasn’t the truth.

He had become vegetarian because there were so many diseases in meat, and was it cooked well enough? Did the preparer wash their hands? The blades? Was it left out for a few days and then made into his meal, teeming with microscopic bacterium just waiting to invade his body and kill him?

Painful, agonizing death; stomach cramps and diarrhea, the worst!

So he gave up meat, and everyone said, “Oh, how clever, how proactive.”

Life is just that much less stressful without meat. But even vegetables had their downfall; he clearly remembers that spinach scare not so long ago, and the plant had yet to reintroduce itself to his diet.

So, yes, he was painfully aware of his fears, his phobias.

Heights, clowns, crowded rooms, tight, dark spaces. Spiders, wasps, snakes, rats. He was terrified of being mugged, of strangers, of the creepy old woman who sold newspapers by the bus stop every morning. He was terrified of young women, children, and most of all, men his own age.

He was paranoid of electrocuting himself in the bath, of being stricken blind, deaf, and dumb. Statues would turn their eyes to follow him as he walked past. The thought of zombies coming to eat on his flesh and infect him with their hideous virus was enough to keep him laying awake for hours with nothing but darkness and the slumbering sounds of his dorm mate across the room.

They’d been rooming together for nearly three years now, and yes, sometimes he was even afraid of Jason. He liked to think he hid it well.

But there was one phobia that he, while being terrified to the point of paralysis when he thought too long or hard on the subject, always knew was pointless and irrational.

-

Aiden came to in the dark. A darkness so complete that if not for the sickening sensation in his head and queasiness roiling about in his gut, he would have believed himself still asleep. The first clue he had that he was not deaf in accompaniment with being blind was the muffled panting of his own breath; the echo that came back alerted him that the space was small. Very small.

Claustrophobia made him thus panic, and that’s when he discovered he couldn’t move. On all sides, in all directions of this black abyss in which he resided, he encountered force. Molded to him, hard and unyielding.

Through the yellow-orange haze in his brain, through his shallow panting breaths, came the smell and taste of dirt. And Aiden knew, he knew.

The yellow-orange became a screaming fire engine red, DEFCON one.

There was no coffin separating him from the surrounding dirt, and somehow, that frightened him more. Miles of earth came between him and open spaces and fresh air, and how did he get down here? Logically, he knew that people don’t normally wake up one day and find themselves having been buried alive. Not in this day and age. Sure, people have been presumed dead and buried while still alive, but that was a long time ago, before the times of autopsies and morticians who embalmed and made your corpse beautiful before chunking it into the dirt.

Struggling made him hurt, the dirt oppressive upon his sanity as much as his body. Ragged whimpers slithered from his throat without permission, and he hated them, he hated their sound and power, but he was unable to stop them from coming.

The panic ebbed and surged back and forth with the pain in his head, warring with the nausea that seemed to rear up every few moments. As he stopped struggling, the knowledge of a diminishing supply of oxygen cut through his mind, replacing panic with clarity and a logic that subconsciously startled him.

Panic attacks usually caused him to shut down and tune out everything but the looping terror, the scatterings of his own thoughts. Not this time.

True fear, that which he’d never experienced, wiped that all away.

He was not going to die down here.

He kept his movements small, testing with elbows and knees the parameters of his prison, this hole in which he’d been shunted and buried alive. Buried alive…how long until he was buried dead?! Best not to think of it, not while this sharp clarity remained.

There was just enough space to bring his right forearm from his side up to his chest, face pulling into a grimace of pain at the unnatural twist he’d needed to accomplish the feat with his elbow trapped against his waist and the earth pressing in against him.

Fingers clawed, he began first on the opposite arm, using hand and elbow combined on the dirt to grant some space for both of his hands to be at his chest. Small wheezing gasps, chest falling and rising in shallow pulls of diminishing air--how long could a person live being buried? How long had he lain there unconscious--his head ached enough for him to figure that he’d been out maybe an hour. Perhaps even two.

He was done with this shit.

Dirt crumbled down onto his face and in his nose and mouth and it didn’t even matter that this sort of thing would have sent him straight into the shower to scrub himself head to foot no less than a dozen times. Dirt carried germs, disease, and Aiden swallowed it without caring, without even noticing the grit lining his throat and against his teeth.

Methodic scrabbling and bucking, squirming without gasping too deeply, his head already beginning to swim and blazing rust spots flaring against the backs of his eyelids. Suffocating, and more panic, renewed panic, panic with a purpose.

One arm stretched up, the other clawing, clambering to join its partner, it’s life’s lover, and the density of the dirt changed. Looser, less compact. Aiden’s fingers broke through to above, that vast clean-dirty space where he’d spent twenty-two years of his life. Spent twenty-two years up there, and only a scant few hours below, and he had the disorienting sensation that he’d fall off the world if he left this space for the one he once knew.

Mister bear, mister bear, are you awake-? Come out of your cave, mister bear, come out so you can soar. You can soar, and the sky shall catch your fall….

Aiden wiggled his fingers, and more crumbles fell, but with them came a sweeter taste, hot but sweet air. And smoke, the scent of thick vanilla that always pleasantly disguised that it was killing you from the inside.

He gasped, choking on muddy spit and vanilla oxygen, scrambling to widen that hole, smother himself with sexlove in his lungs. Head no longer spinning and eyes blinking at matte, low starlight, Aiden worked further at widening the hole, dropping whole clods of soil on his face but uncaring. Nothing mattered but up there.

Painstaking movement, every muscle straining in agony, dirt and rock collapsing down on top of him as he managed to throw off some of his obscene prison, breathing in vanilla mud oxygen, and it was good.

There was silence as he dug himself free of the three-foot hole he’d been buried in, kicking and crawling, and dirt was ground into his skin and clothes so deep he could feel it coursing his bloodstream and expelling through his pores again.

And finally, laying on the grassy dirt and whooping in vanilla-tinged air, he looked over and wasn’t surprised by the form sitting on the lowered tailgate of a familiar black Chevy truck. He only saw that truck every day, even if he refused to ride in it.

Jason finished off his vanilla cigarette, stubbing the end against the metal gate and tossing the excess out into the dark, still expelling a sweet cloud around his face.

“You made it.”

Gravelly voice, and Aiden wondered how many cigarettes he had to smoke to get it there.

“F-fucker.”

His roommate smirked, hopping with contemptuous grace from the truck and into the soft dirt below. A shovel rattled as he picked it up and stashed it in the truck bed, and then he was walking closer, shoes scuffing through the loose piles thrown up by Aiden’s ordeal. There was a faint clicking and brief flare, and another lit cigarette appeared in one dirt-stained hand as Jason crouched down next to the exhausted twenty-two-year-old.

An inhalation, exhalation, and Aiden again tasted cloying vanilla oxygen, eyes closing as smoke billowed into his face.

“You have no idea how lucky you are, Aid, how I envy you,” gravelly voice dipped low, soft, “You are the luckiest sumbitch on the planet. Tomorrow is going to be the best day of your life, Aiden. Your Raisin Bran breakfast the sweetest meal. …Tomorrow, you will be grateful to be alive.”

“F-fucker.”

But he was already grateful, already loving the fact that he was breathing. Dust-encrusted eyelids opened and saw the long face he knew so well, this man who’d drugged him and buried him just to prove a point. Prove some points. A lot of points.

Jason was always intense, and that used to frighten Aiden beyond words.

His dorm mate moved away, and he finally struggled up, clouds of dust falling away with his movements. And as he sat there, movement along the ground caught his attention, seeing a thin-legged creature moving near his hand. It took a moment, but he abruptly realized it was a spider, small and rather benign.

His eyes closed a moment and then reopened, his body drawing itself up to his feet and stumbling over the hole he once occupied. It seemed rather small and somewhat humongous, and he shuffled as far away from it as possible, heart beating rapidly until he was clinging to the side of that black truck.

And finally, finally, he slid along its side and found the passenger door, opening it just enough for him to crawl inside the cab and huddle up on the seat. The smell of vanilla was stronger than before, Jason smoking inside the closed vehicle and creating a vaporous atmosphere.

Aiden smelled dirt, and vanilla, and his own sweat.

He began to tremble, tremors shooting through his body, and they sat there in silence until Jason’s cigarette ember was flicked out the window. And then, only then, did Aiden quietly shift, sliding across the seat, head bowed with fear and exhaustion.

When there was no response, he shifted closer still, until his dirty body was pressed against Jason’s side, head leaning in and his eyes closing, somehow unsurprised when Jason’s arm went around his shoulders--protective.

“…I was about to get you up again.”

A gravelly murmur against the top of his gritty hair, and somewhere, relief went through him to hear it. His taut body went lax, relaxing fully.

A hand touched his face, lingering, and that same gravelly voice returned, “Happy birthday, Aiden.”

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a/n: el fin.