Chapter Text
He was blind.
He staggered backwards. The wind rushed into his chest, bitten still behind his gripped teeth. Blind, blind and cold.
Was he nowhere again?
There was a chill that needled at his ankles; which suggested that he was at least somewhere, though it was a somewhere that seemed uncannily like nowhere, what with the silence and the dark. Blinking fast, his arms moved as compass points, rotating around him in search of something to locate himself. The immense weight of raw atmosphere above him felt crushing, layered like silt, chilling like foreign hands. It closed him into himself.
“Hello?!” he called.
He could sense his hands now hunting for a blindfold on his face. A wan breeze stung the scrapes they left behind.
Slowly, the silence dissolved into a rippling, shuddering sound, a tuneless hum, like many people exhaling over and over again. It sounded muffled. Churning through his skull as if he had been lowered head-first into a river.
He sucked the shaky air in through his nose.
“Who- whoever-r-r the sh-shit put m- put- put me in here…” breathing still hurt somewhat. His throat ached from all the words he’d screamed through it recently. “You do- you don’t know who you’re fuck-ck-cking dealing with. I’ll rip y- your blood-dy lungs out.”
“Calm yourself.”
He snapped his head around, trying to trace a voice that had come from everywhere. When his dizzied fingers reached for a weapon, trying anxiously to summon something, it occurred to him that he was entirely unarmed.
“Leave m- l- leave me alon-ne!” he shouted, and the words felt weak in his mouth. The air shifted.
“We require your assistance,” they said. “Calm yourself.”
“Fuck-ck off!”
He scrunched his eyes closed. The voice was leaving no echo. It was clean and clear, if a little stilted near the end, peeling off into two sounds like it had been unzipped. The worn patience of it felt patronising. When the noise and the nothing refused to get out of his head, he pressed his palms up against his shut sockets and whined like a dog.
“You need help,” the voices said.
“Wh-Who ar-r-re you?!” Breathing was getting too easy. He was gnawing urgent chunks out of the dark, grating through thin oxygen.
“Stop asking questions.”
“SHUT UP!”
He crumbled to his knees. Exhaustion already tugged at his limbs; there was nothing to hold onto in here, nothing to focus on, and the thought panicked him. He clawed at his face again.
That noise from before, the thrumming, trembling noise, crawled up towards him and wrapped itself around his entire being, so close he could hear it in his chest. He identified it as the sound of many small wingbeats. Like those of bluebirds, a swarm he could not see. He began to swat around his head, but the air fell through his fingers and came away dead in his palms. No flesh, nothing breathing; nothing to wring the neck of.
He’d gone crazy. The invisible birds strung themselves gracefully between his temples, beautifully out of reach. He’d finally gone insane.
“You need help,” they repeated.
“I don’t n-need shit-t!” he choked back. Breaks were squirming their ways into his voice; he blamed it on the birds. The noise unnerved him. In such an open space it was so claustrophobically near, deafening in such a gentle way. “G-get me th- get me th-the fuck out-t of here. Get me- g-get me-”
“You want help.” A pause, full of his blurry muttering, then a question. “Don’t you?”
“No, n-no, I…”
He was tired. So tired. Tired of this impossible space. Tired of his own neuroticism.
The multiverse was going wrong, this was the proof of it. Nobody was acting the way they were supposed to. Nobody but him. It ached, ached to hold it all together.
“How… do y- do y-you know wh-what I want?”
“Because we know you.”
The constant pulsing of the wings swelled through his skull, throbbing like an open vein. He clamped his hands over where his ears should be. “You don’t… y-you have n- have no idea who I am-m-m.”
“Don’t argue.” Calm, calmer than he was. “This is what you were made for.”
“I…”
Can’t think.
“No, no, I-”
Can’t breathe.
“What d-do you want-t from me?” he stammered. His knees splayed further apart, his shoulders fell backwards, so that his wrists were draped like fabric across the floor. Chin angled upwards, he stared up at a heaven that did not exist, gasping. “What-t do you want from m-me?”
“Nothing from you,” they responded.
And the wingbeats dulled, just for a moment. The voices seeped through the massive atmosphere, so that they were pressed into him, the cool face of a branding iron.
“Only you,” they whispered. And it sounded like broken glass, and like fingers through windchimes. It sounded like something he had heard in dreams.
“Only you.”
And it sounded so endlessly wrong. Sickeningly romantic.
But in the midst of all of it, he found himself tempted.