Chapter Text
36.00°: Garden of the Hesperides I
Reap what you sow.
The ache between her shoulders woke her. She lay upon her abdomen on something hard and heated, the roughened texture scraping abrasions into her cheek. When she breathed, she found herself suffocating: some kind of fabric pulled along her mouth that she spat out from her lips. Her lenses pressed against her skin. The blood pounded through her temples with a headache throbbing deep behind her eyes, as if the rubber band of pressure had mangled through skin and bone to squeeze the flesh of her brain directly. Sweat poured tacky streaks down her brow and her back. The heat would bake her alive into the very floor.
Her hands: numb, gone. No, neither. She lacked the normal weights of her gloves that gave her stock over her hands, but the gashes scored into her palms gave her a sense of her limbs' ends.
When she attempted to shift her arms, scrabbling against whatever she rested upon, the ground abraded her fingers to pain. Flattening her hands against the floor, she managed to lift herself to a kneel. The clothing she wore shifted uncomfortably, heavily, but at least she could rub the sleep-sand that had stickied her eyelids shut. She blinked the blurriness out of her vision. Her raw cheeks stung with every twitch of facial muscle. The visible scratches along her spectacles merely contributed to the dullness of the headache.
Where—!?
A wash of grey beneath a vacant sunset sky. A sparkling of colours in the no-man's-land between the heavens and earth. Banners, ads, signage. Lines of white spreading out from beneath her in so many paths.
She almost failed to recognise it, so ghostly and silent.
Scramble Crossing.
No: Scramble Crossing's inverted brethren, devoid entirely of people, still and pristine, the buildings polished to a shine, weathering—even of vandalism—reverted, the edges of signs sharpened into perfect angles. Shimmering like heat mirages. Too shiny to peer at for long. Taiseido, Justice Burger, Hachiko Café: the shops as empty as the streets.
Ah. This nightmare again?
No. Not quite. It had twisted, grown more grotesque. Else she would not kneel upon the asphalt of the crossing with such hot dampness percolated down her cheeks, a heavy violet hoodie weighing down her body, a red bandanna tied around the lower half of her face, long loose trousers that itched against her skin, some sort of chain jangling against the cement on her right side. The sound seared sharply into her eardrums. Grasping for the metal, she hissed at the sun-scorched metal. Her fingers welted. She tried again through the protection of the heavy sleeve and discovered that the chain disappeared into the trousers' hem and into the underside of the hoodie. She could not remove it without tearing the cloth apart.
Truthfully, the hoodie's thick, dark textile did her no favours in the oppressive heat. Yet she could tell her slumber had not graced her with anything underneath.
Dream or not, she would have to contend with her blood boiling for now.
She had worn hoodies before, yes. But she owned nothing like this, not with the collar and sleeves marked by white curves and spikes that ringed her neck and extended down the arms. It reminded her vaguely of Def Märch merchandise.
At least she had taken on fairly comfortable shoes. Red trainers of some sort, swallowed by the trousers' length. Walking would prove a challenge for her to not trip over the pant legs.
When she parted her lips, she tasted sand. "How detestable." Her throat ached as though she had rubbed the inside with a fistful of silica. "I rate this nightmare a -100/10." She swept her gaze about the Scramble. Nothing had changed. The hues remained lurid as ever. No monsters seeped forth from the floor to chew her into a visceral pulp, no sudden masses crowded about her until her flesh threatened to fall off of long strips from her raw meat, no visages of past monstrosities slithering inside her organs and threatening to bloodil burst free from her chest or her abdomen. Not even a parade of having to confront those she had wronged in the past, nor a glass door through which she could only desperately watch her own body inflicting violence upon the innocent.
As far as her nightmares went, this one weighed in on the balance of monotonous discomfort.
"'Tis nothing frightening, merely tedious." She raised her voice. Her exhalations tinged in iron. "I recognise it as the dreamland that it is. Now, as in nightmares past, harken to my demands! I request rousing from this slumber!"
Acutely agony stabbed between her shoulder blades. She gasped and tilted forward, palms on the cement. The ache that had pulsated there worsened. Spread. Just beneath each scapula, as though something had shanked rails directly through her flesh and run them up against the bone. No: as if her bones had carved her innards outwards, grotesque growths from the inside out, spines piercing the meat of her back. Her muscles tensed involuntarily around the siege from within, sharpening the pain to a point of reeling her back.
Acid flooded her mouth. She scarcely had time to pitch herself further forward when she retched upon the Scramble's steady lines of white and black.
Congealed brown vomit, gritty and dark, splattered the cement in globs so syrupy that she felt as if she were throwing up chunks of her stomach lining. Her lips twinged from the acridity; her throat burned; the stench in her nose threatened to bring up another round of wretched retching. She choked down a breath, and then another.
The muscles beneath her scapulae writhed. Tendons snapped and contorted just beneath her skin like worms feasting upon the malady that had long putrefied within her. Needles plunged into her flesh and dragged her veins out from the holes in her skin, knotting the vessels into agonising twisted spirals prior to forcing them back in. The meat bulged. Her back would break. Her shoulders would break. Her neck would break from the weight thrust upon her nape, the pain bleeding up her spine and reverberating in her screams.
It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt.
Her fingers flailed on cement in trails of dampness. Her limbs seized up. She rolled, jerked, thrashed. Inescapable, overwhelming, nails iron plunged directly through her skull, through the gristle at the backs of her eyes, every layer skin splitting from the deepest recesses along her spine to the surface. How could she abscond, how could she ever hope to free herself, when the mutilation came not from without, but from within—
Her flesh ruptured. Twin tumours erupted from her, horribly wet and horribly warm, plastered against her shoulders. When her muscles twitched the wetness and the warmth twitched with them.
Something had emerged—something had—emerged—from her—
Unpleasant wetness against her face. The stench of rot. Ah. She had gone horizontal again, face pressed right into what she had wrought herself, the illness she had failed to keep contained.
She lay upon the ground. The sunset sky simmered her in her own sweat. Her innards caked the cement, reeking as they cooked under the baleful heatwave. No matter how shallowly she breathed, the rail-wounds in her back inflamed her from the inside, the sweltering air scalding the meat exposed, a physical accounting of her sins, ragged and oozing against her scapulae, moving with her every time she moved, stinking of her sickness.
Detestable. Detestable. Detestable. -1000/10.
How her blood boiled.
"..."
A sound. Faint. Far, far away.
"...Boss?"
"Fret, wait!"
Not from within, but from without.
"Boss! There she is!"
"I don't think sh—you're right! Nagi!"
Close. Too close. Just above her.
"Boss, gimme me a sign: I don't wanna touch you if you're freaking out—Boss!"
She drew her head upwards from the cement, vomit dribbling from the corners of her lips and soaking into the bandanna that bunched uncomfortably around her chin. The silhouettes before her broke whatever little remained of her lucidity.
Like the Scramble, but twisted, grown more grotesque. Sir Tosai. Lady Tsugumi. Standing over her, the former panting and beaming, eyes brimming with tears, the latter gazing upon her in some mixture of pity and concern that drove the spines within her further into her flesh, both of them shattered behind themselves into long black fingers that spread out like bars of a cage. Spokes of darkness inked against the meat-red sky. Two pairs. A crown of thorns for each.
Reaper wings.