The Rhythm of Your Heart [Yan!DSMP x Reader]

CHAPTER XXXIII: Queen of Pentacles

The sky is dark, devoid of any stars or moonlight thanks to the clouds blocking the view. Honestly, as soon as Crimson turned their attention away from you, you felt like all the eyes of the other people shifted away from you as well, meaning that you had the opportunity to leave. Their insistence to go with you, walk you home or whatever, really didn't sit well with you, especially not considering you have a thing you want to do before doing so: a thing you'd like to pay a visit now that Sam is at the festival as well.

The night is quiet. Awfully quiet. The kind of silence that you'd only hear in horror movies. And as horrifying as it is, it makes you feel only less at ease.

Your own beating heart and soft, careful footsteps are the only things you hear. The least you'd expect, is for there to be some people still in their houses. Elderly, children, or maybe people who just didn't want to come, to be sitting in front of the television. But instead, the many houses you pass have just nothing in them. And the closer you get to the flower – with the more chest pains that come with it – the emptier the houses seem to grow.

Front porches with statues, flowers, or neat patterns in the ground become duller and greyer and emptier, turning into yellow grass. Living rooms closer to the plant have less and less furniture, going from a few photos to just grey walls with not even table. It's as if they evacuated immediately, and then not just the citizens. As if everything inside just stood up and walked away. Is this a reaction from the people or something that most would consider to be normal here?

However, the thing that keeps distracting you is the rhythm. You can recognize it easily: it reminds you of the sounds Sapnap introduced you to in the convenience store; the static rhythm when you were as close to the flower as you were. Only now, however, you realize that you're not just hearing the pattern of sounds, but feeling them. It's as if your heart is copying it, playing the drums as your brain plays the rest. The music makes you feel weak and as if you've lost control. Similar to what you had last time, you black out, the only thing that you're able to focus on being the symphony of the higher pitches and familiar frequencies.

But this doesn't stop you from getting closer, of course. And before you know it, you stand in front of it. The plant is a giant bush of chrysanthemums, with a singular, huge one in the middle. The flowers seem to be reaching further than they did last time you were here, but it's still not as big as you bet they could be. Taken over by confusion, however, you decide to focus on the sounds you hear. They overwhelm you, but there's one very noticeable part that plays very quietly in the background of all the loud and panicking sounds. A beeping noise. It's constant, the exact same noise after the exact same time with no difference in it. At least, that's what you think at first.

The screams and bangs that you hear inside your head, are on repeat. Sure, they seem to be random at first, but you quickly come to realize that they are just the same song repeating itself. The beeping, however, is not. The closer you come to the chrysanthemums, the quicker you come to realize that it's beeping more and more rapidly.

At this point, you're only around five metres away from the foot of the giant plant. Its beautiful colours are magnificent, but despite your strong desire to know more, you don't get closer. You stop and stare. With your eyes stuck on the pedestals that are falling off, you wonder what exactly this means. Nobody in the town seems to be able to explain this phenomenon, other than that it was here after Wilbur attempted to steal a bit of your blood. But you don't understand anything from it either, other than that it makes you feel weird.

You're not sure what kind of weird it is, either. It's like you feel empty. Dead inside, yet not. You already know that you're between a state of life and death, but this piece of nature actually makes you feel like you are. This green beauty is what makes you feel like a soulless corpse. It's dangerous, no matter what people would like to believe.