Chapter Text
This world in which he lives is his home. Their home. Crumbling walls and decaying streets, a dying city in a dying realm.
It isn't a world he's allowed much access to, for his safety until he comes further into his abilities. His home is in the tower, away from the decay, the monsters, the suffering that spans their empire. The static buzzes at the back of his mind, soft and faint but aware as his mentor always has been. The tower is a great conundrum, a focal point for all that lives, and from within it, Mono has never ventured beyond.
His room is happiness and safety in a sea of danger, covered in soft carpet and clean walls, piles of toys and hats. The door is locked, has always been locked, but he knows the city outside that he has never seen, felt deep through the transmission as keenly as if he had been there himself. Violence, hatred, emptiness, things rotting through the floorboards and programs channeling the transmission into countless lives. It isn't a kind world.
Stuck there, in his room of safety, with only his mentor for company and the Tower at all sides, giving and feeding and showing, some days the cries of the world are all he knows.
He wants to leave.
The door is always locked. When he wakes up, there is food and drink and everything he could ever want, and no matter how much he stays awake, he can't find anything that tries to come in. Nothing at all that could ever warrant him stepping out of the confines.
All he has at his disposal is a single television, sitting in the corner of his room on a night stand. Always turned off, but for the occasion that his mentor comes to visit, and never a way to turn it on otherwise. More of a decoration than anything.
It's risky. To wait until his mentor has access in order to make the jump. He doesn't know if he can do it, although he's seen the other come through with no effort at all. Outside of their connection, his abilities are nonexistent.
There's a lot of things that can - that will - go wrong. Or maybe nothing will. Maybe he'll just look like an idiot, and he'll be stuck here forever. There's too many unknowns.
But he has to try.
So he'll wait. Bide his time. Act perfectly normal, to keep the other at bay, calm and content and aware. And when he finally visits - finally gives him an opening - Mono will take it, with all the force and fury of an animal, of a rat cornered and dying.
And his mind will scream as he pushes through the brink, too fast to think, to give himself time to adjust, mind and body dying with the pain but scrambling to focus with a wild fervor that he's never before felt in his life, pushing, forcing the transmission to his will, a hand beginning to reach for him just as his own hands sink through the glass, and--
He goes dark.