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Charlie is drowning. His chest feels too tight and his throat too thin. He doesn’t feel air hit the back of his throat when he gasps. His body weighs a thousand tons and moves all too slowly for his liking. His face tingles and it hurts. He claws at his throat and pulls on his hair. It doesn’t stop hurting. He scratches his legs and pulls them to his chest because maybe that’ll distract him. But now he can’t breathe again and he’s on his knees, one hand on his collarbone and the other running his nails up and down his legs.
It’s dark. He can’t see anything and his hands are blurry in front of his face. Something is dripping down his face and he doesn’t like it so he wipes it away quickly. He can’t breathe and he’s drowning. Everything is tingling and it hurts. A thousand pins and needles picking and prodding at his skin. Everything is hot and he can’t see anything.
Something is holding his wrists and he doesn’t like it. He tries to move but falls back on his butt and does his best to pull his knees to his chest. It’s cold and it’s different and it’s not okay. He wants to cry out and tell it to stop and let go but his tongue is heavy in his mouth. He shuffles back and the thump of his back against the wall is ever more present than it should be.
Everything is loud and yet it’s quiet. The words repeating themselves in his head like a mantra.
He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead .
He thinks he’s staring at his hands but everything is blurry and everything is red and green and black and everything hurts. He can’t tell if he’s stopped moving or if the world has as he briefly registers something moving. Whether it’s him or the cold shackles on his wrists. He doesn’t bother to find out.
Something changes. It takes him longer than he’d like to admit to notice. The cold and firm thing around his wrists are gone. Instead, the phantom feeling of something gone. And it stays like that for a while. He’s left to think and so he does. It’s jumbled and he struggles to make sense of any of it. Occasionally he’s able to pick out bits and pieces that do. He doesn’t think he likes them. It makes his arms – now free – return to his things, red and angry, gripping at them as if to pull himself out of his thoughts.
It didn’t work.
He was sitting there for a while, he thinks. A few hours. The tingling stops. He can feel the dried streaks along his face. Maybe of blood or of tears. Both are all too familiar to him now. His head hurts and there’s a pressure between his eyes. His hands hurt. What’s left of them. A black ink rides up both arms to about his elbow, splotches of what he remembers to be green numbers shifting and flipping about in a tornado. His face feels numb more than anything. His tongue is still a dumbbell in his mouth. Of which feels sewed shut.
“Slime?” Someone says. He thinks he might hear the distinct portuguese accent he’s grown so accustomed to. But no, they have no reason to be here. It’s over. He’s happy. He got what he wanted and all Charlie got was a-
“You with me, man?” And there’s the Mexican accent he dreaded. His body still feels a bit distant. Like he’s there but not. Perhaps it’s just the fact that now, becoming more aware, everything feels like it’s tied to one big weight. Holding him down with the weight of his sins.
He barely manages to make a noise, a low hum that scratches against his throat in the wrong way. He chokes down a cough and lifts his head to rest against the wall behind him. It goes a bit farther than he expected before hitting a cold surface. It is then that he registers the sound of running water.
“I need you to look at me, Slime.” Something in Charlie hates it. The way the nickname slips so seamlessly out of a mouth it doesn’t belong in. It sounds so wrong coming from someone that isn’t him. He hears a noise akin to surprise when he feels the pins and needles forever prodding at his arms stab a little deeper. Something grates against the back of his throat and he just swallows it back down.
He’s just so tired. Of everything. Of purgatory. Of Roier. Of Cellbit. And it’s the physical fatigue that leads him to closing his eyes, letting the weight pull him further down. But it’s the emotional fatigue that keeps him asleep.
“Maybe we should let him sleep?” One of them says and Charlie agrees but makes no effort to vocalize it. For once he just wants to sleep free of thought and his brain is too muddled to think.
And so, he falls asleep.
“It’s not your fault.” He says, hands cupping Charlie’s dirt covered face.
“You can’t- I can’t-” He chokes out through watery eyes. He refuses to break down in front of his wife.
“You’ll be okay. I promise.” He whispers with a sad smile. Charlie hates how easily Mariana has just accepted his fate. How easily he’s choosing to give up when they’re so close to a tie.
“No, no, no. We’ll be okay. We’ll be okay. You and me and Flippa!” He smiles and pulls Mariana ever so slightly closer.
“I’m sorry, Slime.” Mariana leans to kiss Charlie and Charlie quickly returns it. He wraps his arms tighter around Mariana’s waist. “Te amo, Slime.” He says, breathless, when he pulls away.
“I- I love you too, Mariana. I love you so much. I-” His voice is caught in his throat when the timer beeps. The communicator around Mariana’s wrist emitting a loud and annoying ringing as his eyes grow heavy.
Charlie tries to hold him up. He moves to put one arm around his neck but Mariana is taller than him and sends them both to the floor seconds later as he legs go limp. From under Mariana’s communicator, where it was fastened to his wrist, blood begins to leak. It seeps out in a line then another. Mariana’s silk toga soaking in the liquid. Charlie immediately tries to pry it off of Mariana’s wrists but nothing works. Through choked apologies and whispered reassurances he pulls and tugs but nothing. works.