Chapter Text
He wasn’t sure if he was grateful for the pain or hated it.
Pain was how you knew you were alive, they said, but he knew that he was no longer alive. He was something much worse than that. The saying was rather mocking now, said with a sneer by people that he knew didn’t exist.
At least, not for Seawatt.
It was there more than it wasn’t, like a reminder or perhaps a memory nagging, biting and telling him something was deeply wrong so he could correct it, change it, so he could fix it.
There were only two things that stopped it.
Healing it, poisoning his brain until it would be successfully tricked that the injury never happened in the first place.
Or, ignore it until it patches itself up.
……
The fighters’ legends were true.
The limbo was like a prison forged from a dream—or perhaps a nightmare.
The entire world around him resembled the inside of a massive geode, its surfaces tinted a deep, haunting violet. Dim, pinkish light filtered in from somewhere high above, though there was no discernible ceiling. It was as though the very sky had been swallowed whole, replaced by the shimmering, kaleidoscopic reflections of fractured mirrors. They caught and multiplied the faint light, scattering it across the jagged walls and floor. These mirrors reflected everything—every chain, every glint of light, the shadows cast by his restrained body—everything except Seawatt himself.
There were no potions or painkillers here except causing pain to other places on purpose that he normally fixed with jumps and more jumps. Everything out of sight but always in mind, ready to strike him as soon as any high he had had worn off.
Especially even clearer here if he didn’t want to feel the steadying and increasing pinch of gnawing metal around his wrist, another set of reminders piled on top of even more reminders. The chains that bound him were a cold, metallic blue. One looped around his left wrist, stretching high into the void above, its end disappearing into nothingness. Two more were locked tightly around his ankles, and others bolted his right arm and waist to the ground.
It reminded him of a subpar cake he couldn’t remember the flavour of and didn’t care to remember in fear of that pain hitting him all over again.
Vanilla? Spice? Cookie? Blood?
Blood.
Like those were things the people around… Those around him even knew about. A distraction he thought was just aimless layers, to the top, to the icing then back again when the pain vanished like he was only imagining it existed. That all that had happened on loop and made time not only a meaningless thing, but an abstract tool used to only torture him, but then again, even up above, time had always been a torturous thing to behold that not even god himself could toy with.
“HA!” He didn’t mean to laugh.
To let that wretched man cross his mind, but oh he did anyway.
His wrists, rubbed raw to the bone, screamed as he scraped the chain against the jagged ground. The shards of tinted glass and stone dug cruelly into the back of his hand, but he kept going.
“Ha… haha haha!”
His giggling echoed back to him.
Failing to echo, but he still heard it loud and clear for this place, made just for him and decorated in rather unpleasant garbage.
Another damn layer…
Somewhere deep inside, he knew he should feel numb. He was supposed to, wasn’t he? That’s how this kind of torment worked—eventually, the mind detached, and the body became a hollow shell. But Seawatt wasn’t numb. Every nerve was alive with suffering. And in some perverse way, that pain felt like salvation. At least it was real.
The air was frigid, yet the cold was almost something he should have been thankful for. He couldn’t stop shivering, his body betraying him as he knelt against the icy floor. Each movement sent fresh waves of agony rippling through him.
For his own reasons, he didn’t want to think about the blonde man that refused to leave his head. But with the torture of the frozen clock, thinking about him stuck harder than if he would have broken all his bones below. There was no painkiller in existence, no more mental blocks to help with this fresh of a wound, that would only reset wouldn’t it?
Like everything else here.
The threads of woven gold. The fluttering of fabric in the wind. The smile.
He yanked, hard on the chains and this time was welcomed to the sharp pain that nearly made him see white and green and white and black and wh-
It died down with his laughter, the withering and curling up of his throat.
It wouldn’t last forever but… He’d take it.
He’d take anything.
No… he was thankful for the pain after all.
He took it and held it close to him, like it was his own newborn infant wailing for care and attention. It came from him afterwards. For, born from him as it was and always would be, pain might as well be his child.
Reflecting him in every way because of things he had done, the cascade of multiple things all down to this moment. It wasn’t a pretty child if that was the case, yet moving on with it was all he could do with it now.
Moving was all he could do at this point besides hold it and try not to break down.
He missed the days when shadows were cast by sunlight instead of this hollow, alien glow. He missed the mornings of his youth, back in the Fighter Layer, when the sunrise painted the world in gold and warmth. Back when he’d wake to the sound of birds, when the days felt hopeful.
Half the people there had been spawned, the other half born. He was one of the latter, though he didn’t feel it now. His parents had insisted he had a destiny, even begrudgingly placing a ceremonial crown upon his head when he came of age, before urging him to leave his crumbling homeland.
And now he missed the crown on his head.
Moving on was getting progressively harder to do with every single time he fell and this… this repeated all over again.
Every time he broke the chains, he’d be sent to that wretched memory of him at age 16, ranking up for his life. Every time he did the course in the vast temple, he’d slip and fall to his painful death. Every time he woke up again, he’d appear back in this wretched mirror room with all the chains good as new.
Each time the pain started up at square one and there was no more thing to hold, no real distraction of the layers of cake being force-fed down his throat without them caring if he chewed or not.
Leaving only the feeling of constant strain down his throat as it constantly tensed up.
He honestly didn’t know how he hadn’t thrown up the layer cake with that.
Because not all of it had gotten down his sputtering throat?
Because he hadn’t even stomached those layers yet.
He hadn’t been able to for years in life, but now.. It was slowly becoming impossible to ignore. Every miss, the icing sliding down his throat, the taste of new layers coating his mouth. Almost as strong as the smell of his own blood and sweat then.. Even stronger.
He was growing nose blind to his own blood.
His body, used to the pain, the birthing of pain he had come to hold slipping from his grasp like everything else always did. He needed it to cling to, but his own mind was betraying him too many times at once.
Slipping away into an unseen place, his brain now more used to the pain unfoggy in places he would rather always be foggy.
Another scrape of the chain, another wave of searing pain. His vision blurred, the edges whitening as exhaustion threatened to claim him. But he couldn’t stop. The chains needed to break. He needed to reach the temple again, even if he knew, deep down, that the course would end the same way it always did.
67 misses
Slipping away like life had from him as he faded from this place. That layer tasted like herbs.
275 misses
Slipping away like… Evbo did.
The layer tasted of sweetness, warm and melting in his mouth. A wonderful taste, a spark that mingled and was gone now like everything else was gone.
STOP.
I DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT THIS
He wasn’t even jumping to get out anymore, he was jumping to jump.
He was jumping to run, try and run, but there was no running from your own feet.
There was no getting anywhere trapped in an endless spiral.
Spiral…
MISS
Were his eyes wet?
MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS-
He still couldn’t vomit.
There was one last layer that had been there for so long.
MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS-
Slipping away like-
I want to go home.
It wasn’t about the land of the living this time.
He didn’t mean to think it, but it was much too late to take something back like a thought. It tasted like…
Vanilla cake was what the flavour had been.
It tasted like vanilla cake with strawberry frosting, a little too sweet and dry for his taste, but his favourite thing to eat because… A ghost of long gone, arms around him.
Because….. Smiles of faces, so many faces (his friends?) with only their mouths, he couldn’t make out any of them and he hated himself for it.
Gone now.
Slipping away more than anything else ever had for him.
In ways no one knew.
In a way, that DIED with him hadn’t it?
He couldn’t stop a sob from breaking from his mouth.
HE wanted to go home.
He WANTED TO GO HOME.