Chapter Text
It happens as he’s walking back to his dorm from the practice rooms one evening. He’s been there a lot recently — in the practice rooms, alone, working on exercises and drills for his new role, playing a new instrument. It’s exhausting, honestly, but he feels committed. He’s determined.
In the hallway, Dewdrop passes a sister of sin, walking alone. As she walks by, she glances up at him. Inadvertently, he makes eye contact with her.
Time stretches out into an infinite moment. Her eyes pull him in, her gaze pinning him like a bug against the foam board surface of suspended reality. It tears through his body, a spear gouging a ragged puncture into his flesh and penetrating him, exposing what’s inside, letting it fall to the floor. The line that separates him from the rest of the world is torn, and without it, he implodes.
His heart rises in his throat, pounding hard. He’s flayed open, rent to pieces, there in the hallway. He’s dangerously vulnerable, completely at her mercy. Without his most fundamental boundaries intact, has nothing of his own — he oozes out while the world rushes in, everything intermingling in a dizzying sludge of ambiguity. He is an empty, broken shell, a collapsed border with no interior.
She smiles — no, smirks.
In an act of impossible willpower, one that grinds the seized gears of reality, Dew pulls his eyes away from hers. Time moves again. He’s walking. He looks at the ground in front of him, shiny marble crisscrossed by dark, snaking veins. He walks faster. He can hear her footsteps behind him. They pause. He walks even faster.
When he rounds the corner there’s someone standing in the middle of the upcoming stretch of hallway, off to one side. Dew doesn’t look at them, just walks as fast as he can. He takes the stairs up to the ghoul dorm two at a time. He careens into the dorm and breaks into an all out run down the empty hallway until he reaches the door to his room. He fumbles with his key in the lock. Finally, he flings open the door and steps inside, then pulls it shut behind him.
He’s safe, sealed in, the walls and door a proxy for the outer barrier he now painfully lacks, keeping him intact, but only just, barely, precariously. He crumples into a ball on the floor at the foot of his bed, pressing himself into the side of the mattress. The corner of a blanket is draped there, askew on the unmade bed. He pulls it over himself, shrouding his shoulders. He tries to breathe, his heart still beating like hummingbird wings.
What happened? Events are disconnected, a surreal slideshow of jumbled, individual moments. It feels like if he were to examine them too closely, he could trip and fall inside. He pushes them away. He closes his eyes. He breathes.
His mind is inundated with strange, babbling thought streams, rushing in to fill any and all empty space there. Chains of nonsense phrases invite themselves into the gap left by an absence of active thought. They’re alien somehow, belonging to someone else, or to no one at all, crosstalk in his brain’s frequency band. It’s been like this — noisy — for some time now, but today, currently, in the present with its fuzzy delineation, the pressure is overpowering. It’s a physical pressure, too, each individual thought like a molecule in the overheated gaseous matter inside his skull, ricocheting against his meninges.
The words briefly coalesce into a coherent thought. “Go check that the door is locked,” it thinks.
He should check that the door is locked. He pulls himself up from the floor, but nothing happens. He’s still sitting there, tucked against the foot of his bed, smothered by a blanket. The impulses of his neurons are moving something else — his spirit, maybe — while his body remains disconnected. He’s unplugged, powered down.
He stands up again and he’s halfway to the door this time before he’s sitting down again, back in the same place. He looks at his hand. He moves it. It — his body’s hand — doesn’t move. He just sits there and thinks words. He lets them wash over him.
“The door,” it thinks.
The door. He stands up again. Two steps from the door he turns and checks the foot of his bed to see if his body is still sitting there. It’s not. His existence, his body and mind, his spirit, is a disjoint pile of parts that he cradles in his arms, carefully, individual pieces threatening to tumble to the floor and shatter into even more fragments.
He places his hand on the doorknob. His fingers feel numb, like there’s a thin layer of plastic between them and the metal. He knows it should feel cool and smooth. It feels like nothing in particular. When he turns it, the lock unlatches mechanically.
What is he doing? He locks the door and paces back to the other side of the room, putting as much space as possible between himself and the door. He presses himself into the corner.
If the door is unlocked, his mind is unlocked. His self is unlocked. He will be destroyed by anyone who enters. The locked door is the only thing that protects him from others.
Or is it to protect others from him? Both seem correct. Was that him in the hallway, with eyes like a weapon, sundering the being of an innocent sister? Or was it her?
Relationships are reversible — he is others, and others are him. Opposites draw together into a loop, a Möbius strip. He can fall forever along its length, inverting over and over. Truth will always slip away, omnipresent but unreachable.
His thoughts are unbearably loud, the pressure unrelenting. They reverberate, amplified by the stillness of the room. If his skull gave way they would fly in every direction like shrapnel, mutilating his surroundings.
He just needs to wait for this to stop, to stay safe in his room until it goes away. How long will that take? He pulls his phone from his pocket and turns on the screen to check the time. He stares at the numbers there. The rightmost digit increases by one.
There’s an unread text message under the time numbers. His phone is a portal to the world outside his room, a gaping, oozing wound in the capsule that surrounds him and holds his pieces together. He drops it onto the bed. He picks it back up and places it on the floor and scoots it underneath the bed, far enough that he can’t grab it easily. He stuffs a pillow over it, wedged under the bedframe. He goes back to the corner.
So he just has to wait. He looks at the digital clock on his dresser. There are more numbers there.
Is time moving at all? The numbers are irrelevant. In a completely isolated bubble, there is no time. There is no life, no being. There are only thoughts, piling higher and higher.
To escape this experience, he must make contact with the world, and therefore must put himself in an existentially dangerous position. To save himself, he must allow himself to be shattered. In order to regain the ability to contact others, he must annihilate them. It’s a sickening paradox, another example of the inevitable merge of opposites.
He can’t do it. He won’t.
He needs to. He stands and walks to the door.
He presses his ear against the wooden surface and listens. All he can hear is his own thoughts — or, rather, not his own thoughts, chattering away. He grips the doorknob with one hand and turns it slowly, carefully. He pulls the door open a crack and peeks through. The sliver of hallway he can see is unoccupied. He pulls the door open further.
Why is he doing this? He slams the door closed, turns around and presses his back to it, and slides down until he’s sitting, knees bent in front of his shoulders. His heart hammers in his chest. He could have pulled reality apart just then, doing that.
The sound of the slamming door echoes in his head, continuing on and on after the event itself. Surely, everyone heard that. Will they come and see what’s going on? It would be a disaster. He needs to fix this now.
He stands and grasps the doorknob again in a trembling hand. He has to do it fast, or he’ll change his mind. He twists the knob, swings the door open, steps into the hallway, and pulls it closed.
Now what? He’s walking down the empty hallway before he’s decided where he’s going.
What he needs is a connection, a single point of contact, nothing too overwhelming, but enough to pierce the delicate shell that surrounds him, gentle enough not to crack it, and let some life in.
The thought makes his blood run cold. He feels fragile, vulnerable, like all his joints are connected by gossamer. His psyche is a spider’s construction, viable to blow away in the wind. He wraps his arms around himself.
No, this is wrong. He turns and bolts back to his room, running the few paces it takes to reach his door.
Placing his hand on the doorknob strings a thread through time and pulls disparate moments together. He’s been here before. He made a decision about this.
His two choices are to stay in his room, isolated, insulated, with no outside input, or to let the outside in. To remain encapsulated is to drift aimlessly through eternity, suspended in a timeless sea like a mosquito in amber. To make contact is to allow himself to be destroyed, to crumble.
Both are a death, in a way. Does he want to fall into an abyss, an endless hole filled with radio noise and fear? Or does he want to disintegrate into a fine mist, returning himself to the universe in a cloud of molecules?
Right now, the prospect of returning to complete isolation, letting reality fray like a worn rope, its tendrils branching in every direction, is unbearable. It’s silly, really. Whatever he has, he wants the opposite. He squeezes the hard metal doorknob until his forearm shakes.
He already decided. He’s on a rail, bound to a predetermined path. He will touch the outside world. To dissipate instantaneously will be relatively painless, compared to the alternative. It will be over.
And maybe, just maybe, he can thread the needle and accomplish just enough contact to bring himself back into the world without falling to pieces. But he doesn’t want to get his hopes up.
He lets his hand fall from the doorknob. He turns and takes a few steps down the hallway, in the same direction as before. It should be a death march, but somehow it feels more like running away from a pursuing threat. He keeps going.
He stops in front of Rain’s door, compelled by an unknown force, some sort of magnetism pulling him there.
He twists the doorknob. It’s identical to the one that opens his own room, transforming the acts of entering and exiting, self and other, into another sort of inverted parallel. It barely turns before stopping, bumping into some internal mechanism. It’s locked. He needs to go in there. He twists it again. it stops again after the same amount of rotation.
He almost turns back around and runs to his room again. He’s trapped in the dorm’s interstitia, an unsafe no man’s land, neither isolated nor connected. He takes one step before he catches himself. No, he already decided — it was already decided.
He tries the doorknob again. It turns this time, the door seeming to swing open of its own accord. He enters the room.
Rain isn’t there, but his energy is everywhere, saturating the space and the objects in it. Yes, this will help. He needs a talisman, an object to focus this energy. Something small, innocuous, that he can slip through the membrane separating him from the world.
He looks around the room. Options abound, innumerable small objects across every surface like grains of sand. He starts with the desk. It’s a tiny fraction of the surface area of the room, but somehow isolating it doesn’t feel like it narrows things down at all. He surveys its contents.
Rain’s laptop? Its presence dominates the desk. It draws him in. No, too many outside connections, branching out into silicon and copper. The thrum of electricity inside it sterilizes the interpersonal potential.
A pad of sticky notes? Its right angles and monochrome color scheme are serene, sturdy. No, its empty, impersonal nature renders its energy level too low.
A pen — simple, barely mechanical, a conduit of thought. Its grip is worn, just the slightest divot, by Rain’s touch. Yes. He reaches out to it.
Before his fingers manage to bridge the gap, Rain himself appears in front of him, blocking his view of the desk.