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It’s an odd, uncomfortable feeling, sharing your body with someone. It feels like Hunter’s skin is stretched too tight across his bones. It’s claustrophobic and he wishes he could simply tear his skin off, if only to alleviate a little bit of the feeling.
But he can’t. He’s stuck this way, at least until they can fix the portal home.
The worst might just be that he doesn’t actually know what’s wrong with himself, just that he’s constantly teetering on the edge of having an overstimulated meltdown from the doubling of all his senses.
That’s a new word he’s learned since coming to the human realm; overstimulated. Gus had explained it to him after a panic attack that Hunter couldn’t come down from until someone had draped a blanket around him and turned the lights off.
Everything that would normally not bother him on its own is so much worse now. The lights are always too bright, no matter what, everyone’s chattering at the dinner table makes his ears ring, and even the softest blankets, which he used to love so much, are just too soft.
He spends so much time on the verge of crying, and he’s had to lock himself in the bathroom until he could get his breathing under control and slow the tears.
“I think something’s wrong with me,” he tells Gus one night, while they’re meant to be sleeping. “Like something came with me that isn’t supposed to be in me.”
“That’s just nerves, Hunter,” Gus replies. “You’re in a new place, it’s scary. I’m scared too.” But Hunter knows what it’s like to feel scared, he spends almost all his time being scared, and this is not that. There’s something else inside him that is not supposed to be.
He can see it best in the mirror. His eyes are wrong, somehow. They don’t look quite right, there’s just something a little off about them. He can’t place what, though. When he looks at himself, all he sees is a stranger.
Funnily enough, he seems to be the only one to notice something is off about him. Of course, none of his friends- and he’s only just tentatively started to refer to them as friends- don’t actually know him very well, but to him all these abnormalities seem obvious.
Luz’s mother, though, seems to see through him in a way he’s never known. She studies him with cautious, welcoming eyes. She offers him food, and tells him that cleaning the entire house on his own when she isn’t around is not his job. He loves her in a way he’s only felt towards Flapjack.
“Are you feeling alright, sweetheart?” she asks him while they’re finishing the dishes after dinner. In truth, the answer is no, because the water on his skin is slippery and uncomfortable, and his hair is swinging in his eyes.
“I think I’m just nervous,” he says. He knows that isn’t right, and it feels bad to lie, but this woman is a human and she would have no way of helping him, and because of that he knows that she’ll just worry. “You know, being so far from home, and all.”
“I understand that.” She smiles. He smiles back. “If you need anything at all, you can tell me. I’m always here for you if you just need someone to talk to.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Noceda,” says Hunter. “But I’m fine.” She nods, and they continue drying the dishes.
His reflection stares back at him. It looks distinctly more angry than his face ever has, but his expression hasn’t actually changed. He shudders. He hopes they can get back home soon.
Hunter can still see and hear. This is very obvious to him, though what he can see is very blurry, and whatever noise he hears is mostly drowned out by the ringing. He can still touch and smell and taste, but his body is no longer his own. His limbs are moving against his will, uncoordinatedly dragging him somewhere far from Luz’s house.
It may just be the worst thing Hunter’s had the displeasure of experiencing. He can feel every second of it, the agony of what will eventually be new scars stretching over his face, something breaking through his skull and sprouting on his head.
He can see, through his own eyes, Luz cowering beneath him, looking terrified. A voice that is not his own speaks to her, taunts her, and she does not try hard enough to stop Hunter- no, no, it’s not really Hunter anymore, is it? Belos, this is Belos’ doing. She does not try to stop him because at his core he may now be Belos, but his body is very much still her friend, and she doesn’t want to hurt him.
Fighting for control is harder than Hunter could have ever thought anything could be. Belos is and always will be so much stronger than him, even when the battlefield is not physical and is all in Hunter’s mind.
He wrestles for it anyway, because Flapjack is here, and so is Luz, and Gus, and Willow, and he doesn’t want to hurt them. He really, really, does not want to hurt them.
They all hold back as they fight. Belos hardly has to do anything to ward them off as they fly towards him, because they aren’t fighting to win. Hunter knows better than most that you have to fight dirty to have any sliver of a chance at beating Belos, and somehow he is not bound by the constraints of Hunter’s body. If anything, Hunter’s body is probably beneficial, as he’s younger and smaller and thus more maneuverable.
But then Belos has Flapjack in his grip, and his long, spindly fingers puncture into the tiny bird’s body. The fear from before feels small in comparison. Flapjack is going to die if he doesn’t do anything quickly.
It still doesn’t feel like it’s his own body when he regains control of one arm. He’s clumsy with it, weakly managing to grip his other arm and force it to release Flapjack. He flails, trying very hard to force Belos away. He grips the bottle of Titan blood, and rather ineffectively throws it into the water beside him. It sinks, a bright blue against the murky green of the water.
This enrages Belos enough to take control back. He roars angrily and throws Hunter’s body into the water, which, for some reason, exhausts him enough to give Hunter’s body back. But Hunter can’t regain control fast enough to lift his limbs and swim.
So he sinks, and everything goes dark as water fills his lungs.