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He’s lying inside the diamond bottle trying to catch whatever precious minutes of sleep he can when it happens:
One minute Floyd is drifting into uneasy unconsciousness and the next, he’s abruptly woken up by a sudden, piercing pain in his chest.
He hisses sharp through his teeth as he clutches at the spot, doubling over on himself as if trying to escape the sensation. What starts as a single sharp jab soon starts radiating out through his entire body, a deep, almost thrumming ache that pools into the backs of his eyes and makes his insides lurch. He tries to breathe through it, short panting gasps that echo horribly around him within the crystalline walls.
He’s been imprisoned in Mount Rageous for a month now and he can’t say this is exactly a new phenomenon. This is nothing compared to the skull-shattering agony of his essence being ripped away from him of course, but it’s not just that—it’s the pain that lingers afterward, a constant aching that persists for a while but goes away eventually, not that it can ever stay gone for long before Velvet and Veneer are slinking back into the room for another hit of Floyd’s talent and the whole sick song-and-dance starts all over again.
But this…. even through the pounding in his head Floyd can tell that this is different, somehow. It’s not just in his body, it’s…. it’s somewhere deeper than that, somewhere somehow more than that. There’s music in his head, if he strains to hear it. Jumbled, discordant notes that don’t make up any song he can recognize.
In and out, in and out, Floyd pulls in breaths until the pain finally starts to fade.
Slowly, Floyd pulls himself upright again, until he’s finally able to press his back against the cold wall behind him and slump there, letting out a groaning sigh that reverbs around him in much the same way his panicked gasps did earlier. He frowns. It’s not fair that this thing has such good acoustics.
He can still feel his heartbeat straining even if he can’t hear it in his head anymore. It’s uncomfortable, but compared to everything else he’s been through lately, he’ll take it. He sighs again, dejectedly, and he brings a hand up to press to his temple….
Floyd bolts upright again. His pulse spiking to a fever pitch.
His hand is grey.
No, scratch that—it’s not just his hand, his whole body is grey. Where once was that familiar soft blue is now stark, washed out grey, and it’s not just his body, either, it’s his hair, it’s his everything. Grey grey grey like something’s gone and sucked all the saturation clean out of him.
Floyd looks down at himself and feels his breath sticking in his throat. Or maybe it’s his pulse. It’s hard to tell anything anymore.
He’s been trapped here for a month. He knew he was losing parts of himself with every drain but this….
It happened so quickly, he thought…. he thought he’d have more time….
….And what’s going to happen when Velvet and Veneer find him like this?
Floyd clenches his hands into fists, hard enough to hurt.
No. No, I can’t let that happen.
He pulls himself to his feet, not caring when the sudden motion makes his head rush and almost topples him over—he just braces himself against the sides of the bottle and fights through the vertigo.
It gives him an idea.
The diamond bottle is sitting on a vanity in Velvet and Veneer’s dressing room. The two Mount Rageons are out somewhere in this studio, probably signing autographs and posing for pictures. They won’t be back for at least another hour; he has plenty of time.
Floyd takes as many steps back as he can, until he’s once again pressing his back against the wall with no room to go any further. He stares down the shiny purple wall in front of him, steels himself with a long, deep breath.
And he runs.
He slams shoulder-first into the opposite wall and at first only succeeds in knocking himself to the ground, the bottle hardly even rattling from the hit. His shoulder throbs—he grits his teeth and bears it, immediately leaping to his feet again and racing to the back to try it again. This time he tries to add as much speed as he’s able and this time when he hits the wall he manages to get the bottle to scoot forward—but only by a few centimeters. He bangs a fist on the ground. “Come on!”
One last time, Floyd gets up and runs to the back of the bottle. One last time, he breathes in deep, then one more time for good measure. Better make it count. He runs.
Again, Floyd slams hard into the bottle’s walls, but this time, the bottle doesn’t just scoot forward, it starts tipping over, straight for the vanity’s marble tabletop, and when it starts falling Floyd can’t help the triumphant whoop that escapes him. “Haha, YES! YES!”
But the excitement is short lived: soon enough the bottle slams into the vanity—or, from Floyd’s perspective, it feels like it slams into the vanity—and rattles him like he’s the seeds inside a maraca, every inch of him thumping against every inch of the bottle as the momentum sends it rolling forward. Frantically he throws out his limbs to stop himself from moving before he can suffer any more punishment.
Sprawled out inside his diamond prison, his skull ringing, Floyd groans long and low. Weeks of pent up frustration and despair.
But it’s the only moment of distress he allows himself—as quickly as he’s able, Floyd maneuvers himself into as much of a standing position as he can. The dimensions of the bottle have changed now that the walls are the floor, but he manages to get a grip on the diamond and, with a good, hard push, he gets it rolling again.
Later, he’ll blame blind determination for his decision making, but at the moment the only thought running through his head is GET OUT GET GET OUT BEFORE THEY FIND YOU, blocking out anything else, and later he’ll think that if he hadn’t been so impulsive then maybe he would have noticed the edge of the table coming up sooner, but as it actually happens, Floyd doesn’t notice the edge of the table until after he’s already plunged over it.
“GAAH NO NO NO NO—”
If he thought he was rattled before, well….
The bottle hits the ground, bounces, rolls a few more inches before finally coming to a stop with a faint tink. Floyd lies in the middle, curled in on himself to try to cushion as much of the blow as possible. Which…. isn’t much to be quite honest. He squeezes his eyes shut, hugs his knees to his chest and tries to will the hurt to go away.
Floyd has never been much of a crier. Maybe there was a time when he was but that was years ago, before his family started falling apart at the seams and he had to teach himself how to be strong enough to pull them all back together. But lying here now, grey, hurting, trapped inside cold crystal on the floor of an empty dressing room in a giant city miles above the clouds and away from everything he ever considered home….
Floyd allows himself a single, quiet sob.
Everything falls into still, aching silence.
“....Let me hear you sing….”
Floyd doesn’t realize he’s said anything at first. His voice comes out a whisper, tuneless.
“Sing it together, louder than ever….”
Wait. Floyd blinks his eyes open.
A song…. there’s a song in his head. Faint, just barely audible over his own rushing heartbeat but it’s there. Floyd doesn’t think he’s heard it before. Where is it coming from?
“Forget everything, just sing….”
Floyd shouldn’t know the words, but he mouths them along like an old favourite, feels them rolling around in his mind and mouth both. It’s…. it’s pretty, in its own strange way, and it gives Floyd something he hasn’t felt in a long time.
Comfort.
“....Like it’s what we’ve been missing, and they’re gonna listen, listen….”
A warmth that slowly spreads from Floyd’s chest to the rest of him as he drifts into unconsciousness. He doesn’t realize he’s doing so, just lets his eyes close again and hums along to the gentle melody, for a moment forgetting where he is and just letting himself get lost in the music.
Forget everything, just sing….
“....AUGH, it’s the stupid BOTTLE, I almost tripped over….”
Floyd is abruptly jolted awake by the feeling of someone snatching up the bottle to shake it.
“HELLO?? Anybody in there?? You’re not DEAD yet, are you?”
Floyd lets out a series of little meaningless noises as he tries to brace himself against the walls, finally squeaking out a skittery, affirmative, “GHYAH I’M ALIVE! I’m alive please stop—”
Velvet slams the bottle down on top of the vanity. Floyd’s head bonks painfully against the side—not that she seems to care. Floyd winces, a ginger hand to the back of his head, terribly disoriented from the bump and the rude awakening alike.
Velvet and Veneer are back, Veneer rifling through the dressing room’s mini fridge for a sparkling water while Velvet sits down at the vanity, looking bored even though she just came back from a smashingly successful press conference. She picks through the makeup brushes on the table, frowning disapprovingly at the selection.
“What…. what happened?” Floyd doesn’t know why he’s asking. His joints feel stiff. He can’t tell if it’s from the fall, the greyness, or both.
The greyness.
Floyd stifles his gasp before Velvet can hear it. She doesn’t seem to have noticed Floyd’s state yet, too busy blaming Crimp for letting her almost trip on the fallen bottle. It’s no relief—even through the bottle’s purple tinting she’s bound to notice Floyd’s colors soon, and even if she doesn’t it won’t be long before she and Veneer go to drain Floyd once again, and when they realize they can’t get what they need out of him anymore….
Slowly, shakingly, Floyd braves taking a look at himself….
He’s blue.
Floyd blinks his confusion, turning his hands over in front of him like that might provide some answers. He’s blue again, the same familiar shade of cerulean he’s been his entire life. The hair falling over his eyes is pink, that deep, rich shade that Grandma used to call him Rosebud for.
“What….” He whispers it, but Velvet catches it regardless.
“What?!” She demands, pausing mid-contour to glare impatiently down at the troll in the bottle. Floyd looks back up at her startled, gaping in a way he already knows isn’t doing him any favors.
“I—I didn’t—I wa—”
“UGH, you’re so annoying,” she swiftly interrupts before standing up from the vanity. Already she’s making some snappy remark to Veneer about him using up all the sparkling water, but Floyd doesn’t listen to any of it. He goes on staring at himself, his hands opening and closing as if wanting to verify that they’re actually real. That he’s actually seeing what he thinks he’s seeing.
Floyd is blue.
Like he’d never gone grey at all.
In the back of his mind, he remembers a song. Or maybe it’s the memory of a dream he once had. He can’t tell anything anymore.
Forget everything, just sing….
Floyd thinks he’s going to do exactly that.