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Two feet standing on solid ground, steady and firm, He looks death itself in the eye. Her embrace is warm, and yet unwelcome; she whispers in his ears and he does not want to go.
There is so much to love. Things he must get back to, Arlin, Gillion, Jay, Ollie. Ollie. His promise that he’d come back rings false in his mind, he has not heeded the boy's final warning of “don’t die!”. He’d said it lightheartedly, but he’d learnt to read the furrow in his brow and the tears threatening to fall and worry had been written all over his face. He’d known where they were going. Chip knows now that he may never see his smiling face again.
Death is.. Strange. He feels as though he’s stuck in a sand hourglass, particles rushing into his throat, but never quite filling his airway. The tiny pieces scrape his flesh and he cannot spit out the blood. And throughout it all, she is there. She is tall, posture clipping the sky itself, and shrouded in darkness. Whether that’s shadow or fabric it's impossible to tell, she blends into the surroundings too well, like a spectre. She swirls around his immobile body, murmuring and whispering anything to get him to let go. Stop clutching at a life that has left you for..well. Dead.
All at once, the sand rushing into his lungs stills, and rises. It is not quick, travelling at an excruciating pace, crawling inch by tortuous inch up his oesophagus. Then he feels it. There. A pulse. Onetwo. Onetwo. A pulse in the monster clawing up his throat? He could not feel his own heartbeat here, could not hear his breath. But this thing has a pulse?
In Onawa Country, Captain Widow smiles. Cackling with glee as her new pet convulses under her pull. His throat bulges wide, blood drips from his mouth and eyes, soaking his face in a cascade of crimson. There, in his throat, his heart beats. It forces more blood from his mouth and he hangs limply like a doll. He does not cough, he does not try and scream, not that he could.
His mouth fills, if his consciousness was present, he would’ve tasted flesh. The Riptide Pirates wince as Daphne Palace fills with the sound of snapping bone, grinding and popping like a malfunctioning machine. And then Chip is on the floor once more, and his heart is held by Widow.
In death, he feels every moment of it, but isn’t really present. In his ears, Death screams for him to Let Go! And yet he does not. He claws back to his body even as he feels his ghostly throat begin to rip and tear, allowing the cool sting of air to hit his soul; because why give mortality to a ghost? As his neck splits at the seams, Chip is forced to vacate even his otherworldly body, and yet that horrific crawling is still there. Death lunges at his spirit and passes through it, her clawed hands meeting nothing tangible. But as her venomous grip touches him to phase through, he does not see the shock on her face, for instead he sees the blood soaked tiles of the palace.
White tiles turned grey turn scarlet, and he feels.. Cold. so, so cold. He’d later learn that feeling will never leave, wrapped around him like a grandma wraps her shawl, and he will never be warm again. There is a hollowness that wasn’t there before, and it's still persistent, even as the Captain is stuck down, even as they debate what to do.
It’s only when the adrenaline wears off he thinks to look down.
His skin is grey and flaky, but each piece that falls feels like a pinprick. His veins run black up his arms as if blood is the Styx, as if flesh is the plains of Hell. it culminates in a crater where his heart should be, fraying and rotting beneath his touch, his breath does not shake it, but that is only because no air flows in his lungs anymore. He cannot gasp, for his lungs do not fill.
It’s only then that he realises just what the captain took from him, and that he will never get back. He’s young. So young. How can such a fate befall he who is still a child? It dawns on him that they will age. He will witness time stretch their features until time or bullets take them down, they will be in the ground, and he will not. Ollie will grow, he will die. And Chip will not. Forever 19. Forever a child.