FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Come Again?

By Limewah

Inspired by UnmakeYourself

…Did she just say something?

You caught her lips moving somewhere in that blur behind the swinging watch. It’s so hard to look at anything else. By now your head’s been tilting with it too, and you’ve worked out so much tension in your neck from that motion. All of this increases the strangely pleasant vertigo that’s been building - steady at first, but logarithmic now, getting deeper and more profound with each second that passes.

How long has it been since this started…? At least a minute since you started following that watch in that dark nook of the metal bar’s smoking area..

Wait, no. There’s no more music. It’s a lot brighter. You’re not there anymore.

You recognise her shape, the night-purple fur. The dark jacket, unzipped to reveal a tight harness framing her body. The shock of pink hair poking from a grey beanie, shining quartz eyes behind thick glasses. the long sleeved black arm holding the watch.

She giggles as she notices you looking past the watch at her, trying and failing to look at those quartz gems. She’s still a blur otherwise.

You want to say ‘what did you say?’ but it comes out as a little groan.

“Don’t worry ‘bout it, cutie,” she says, her voice like silk soaked in nectar. “Just look at the watch.”

Yes, she asked you to look at the watch.

Yes, the pretty pocketwatch. Brass, weathered, but still so shiny.

There’s something engraved on it too, a word in cursive, moving too fast for you to make out.

You think there’s an S at the start…

Submit?

Swinging?

Sinking?

Seduced…

The world fades away again. It’s just you and the watch. Trying to read what it has to say, and to make sense of the strangely distant, dissociative state you’re in. You can’t look away. You… could. But you don’t. You don’t want to, but even if you could, it doesn’t feel like you’d have any reason to look away. So you stare. Your arms dangling. Your head melts as your eyes begin to droop, and then it half-solidifies again as you remember you should still be staring. But it stays soft, and gets softer each time it tries to reform. Your eyes open as wide as they can - not very wide, but wide enough.

You faintly notice saliva escaping your mouth, but it doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

You catch a smile in the black goat’s blurry face, a flash of white teeth. But the watch is still in pin-sharp focus.

It’s getting closer, too, and you feel your eyes strain and cross inward with each sweep just in front of your snout.

You might be able to read the word at last…

Submit?

Slave?

Subject?

Sinking?

Seduced?

Sleepy.

It doesn’t matter which one is the right one. You’re all of those things. The watch is telling you what you are, and you're not inclined to disagree. How could you? It’s so pretty. It’s making you feel so good, and you’re just on the edge of what feels like the deepest sleep of your life, and you…

…Did she just say something?