Chapter Text
Nemo wasn't sure how he'd gotten home. Hell, he wasn't even sure when. Had he walked back here all on his own? Had he hailed a cab? Had Kennedy taken him? He couldn't remember.
Maybe he'd just… shown up. Kind of like how he showed up outside the tiny café. How did he get here? One minute he was staring daggers at his kitchen sink and the next he was here, hand on the door handle and already pulling.
Was he doing this? It didn't feel like he was, but then again it hadn't felt like he was ripping a hole through the entirety of reality either. Logic didn't work for him anymore. Maybe it never would again.
He didn't register his feet carrying him inside, nor the way he greeted the employee behind the counter and almost mechanically repeated his usual order. He barely recalled sitting down at all, a cup of piping hot coffee in his hands. He knew coffee was a bad idea, but this entire day had been nothing but bad ideas piled on top of each other, so why not add another one?
The wall twisted and bent when he looked at it, and he took a long sip. It was scalding and burned his tongue, but his mind was focused on something else. His eyes were trained on the upper corner of the shop, where his favorite color began to slowly drip. It was like it was bleeding. Maybe it was. Didn't matter. Either way, the blood (?) fell in impossible patterns, swirling around itself and constantly shifting. It was mesmerizing, almost hypnotic…
Nemo pulled his gaze away quickly, heart beating so loud he could hear it trying to escape his chest, feel his blood rushing behind his ears. It hurt to look away. An instant, flaring thing throughout his whole body. It had been beautiful, that wall, and he’d thrown it all away before the masterpiece could finish scrawling itself across its surface in twisting, nauseating patterns that made his head spin. Distantly, he wondered if that sick feeling that sunk into his bones and made his stomach churn like it would push its way up and out his throat if he let it had been there since the Lighthouse or if it was new.
Silently, Nemo finished his drink, a pumpkin spice latte, to be specific. He didn't savor it, didn't even register its flavor as he drank. When he was done, he threw it in the trash, went back to his table, and pulled out his phone.
Scarlet. The name rang clear on his screen as he tapped the familiar contact. His eyes scanned over the most recent message to her. 'I don't want to live like this.' He'd never gotten the chance to send it. A feeling similar to a blanket of dread settled over his shoulders and refused to be displaced. Slowly, numbly, he deleted the message and began to type a new one.
'Can I meet with you this evening? I know you're recovering, but I don't think I can be alone right now. It's not safe.' He stared down at it for far too long and the text began to twist itself at the edges. He bit his tongue to center himself and blinked. Hard. The distortion was gone, and he was left with only the plain text. He deleted it and tried again, repeating the process every time his vision went unfocused and whatever he'd become, whatever he was becoming, corrupted what he'd written.
In the end, he was left with a single message, read and reread a thousand times. 'Can I swing by your place this evening? I think we should talk.' His body thrummed with pain again, and he knew he'd done it right this time. With shaking fingers, he hit send.
It was much later when Nemo found himself outside her door. Again, he did not know how he got here. The last thing he remembered was reading her response and standing up. The café was almost empty anyways. Maybe people could feel his wrongness even through the glass windows. Maybe that's what made him so wrong. It didn't matter. He was here now, and he reached up to ring the doorbell.
The ringing didn't sound right. It reverberated through his skull like chiming church bells, like tinkling laughter, like maddening glee. He clamped his hands over his ears and shuddered from the pain. Good, at least he had something to ground himself. At least he knew he'd done something right. At least he wasn't "feeding."
She answered quickly, and he let himself be pulled inside. His hands twitched and scratched at themselves, desperate for something to do other than sit there, lifeless. They itched to make art, craft glorious paintings or tend to fractal plant life, to twist the world around them and rip it open, exposing the wonderful, beautiful hell beneath. But he didn't craft. He very distinctly did not craft. It hurt, to hold his hands so tightly. He could feel the laughter building in his throat.
Instead he bit his tongue and tried not to think about how sweet his blood tasted, like the crusted sugar of an old sweet. Stale. Perhaps he should have taken that as a sign that whatever he was doing wasn't good for him, but even if he took the hint, he really didn't care. It was better than giving up. If he only had so long left, he was going to spend every moment of that time trying to be better, to escape the cooing claws of the beast who owned his life.
Charlotte didn't comfort him like he'd thought she would, like she always had been in the past. She tried, of course, the same way she always did. She said all the right things to calm his restless mind and stilled his thoughts to a gentle roar, but her words rang wrong in his ears. She listened as he rattled off a drawn out, rambling recount of the most recent events, but her reassuring nods did very little to assuage his fears as he rocked back and forth on her couch. She smiled and patted him on the shoulder and said that he'd feel better in the morning. It did nothing to calm the fractals of his busy mind, nothing to slow his rapid heart rate or soothe the ache in the pit of his stomach.
Her smile felt wrong somehow, placating and empty. Nemo couldn't shake the feeling she was lying to him. That wasn't right. It wasn't right! It made him equal parts fearful and angry, though he couldn't place why. All he knew was that she was not meant to be lying to him, twisting falsehoods and half-truths with a mere fraction of the weight his had. Would have, if he let himself tell them. But that would mean falling into Amber, and he couldn't let himself do that. Not yet.
When she left him there on the couch with a blanket and pillow she knew full well he couldn't use, he almost felt relieved. That skin crawling feeling was dulled without her presence. Still, this place stank of something vaguely dusty, something like gossamer spider's silk and sawdust. It wasn't that he didn't miss her, he adored her like the savior she was! It was just… something didn't feel right here. He kept feeling his breath hitch in his throat, waiting for some terrible eventuality that never came.
He lay there all night, too afraid to leave. Something was wrong with Scarlet, even if it was just a product of his fear-addled mind (or what little was left of it), something that turned a former anchor into just another thread of fear. Why was he always the one getting trapped in something else's web? Why must he be the one to grit his teeth and bleed? Even with Amber, even in his own domain, he was something else's plaything.
The hollow cavern where his candy colored heart should have been ached at the thought. He should not be here, he should be a part of It, the core of something bigger and more beautiful than any he'd seen before. He was meant to be a puzzle piece, and someone cruel had plucked him up and torn him away, leaving him nothing but the fractured remains of something whole and the rest of the puzzle missing its most integral part. It wasn't fair and his body was broken. It wasn't fair, but at least it bought him time.
When Charlotte emerged from her room that morning, she found him laughing.