Chapter Text
He wasn't sure if he actually passed out or simply was so out of it he fell to the floor and stayed there for several minutes, completely unaware of the passage of time.
He could hardly remember what had happened, he knew he looked at a projection of that phenomenon when he was trying to... he wasn't sure. He knew he didn't want to look, at least. This wasn't supposed to happen.
All he could think of was the intense flash of pain and disorientation that came with accidentally taking a small glance at the projection of that... that thing, the very thing he had spent months trying to avoid, asking -no, begging- his friends to stop trying to keep track of. They had already lost one person to it and he had been powerless to stop it from happening, someone else had already started changing from looking at it just once. And yet they. kept. insisting. in. thinking. about. it. In calling it, in drawing it closer, until it would inevitably consume everyone in it's madness.
Slowly forcing his mind to piece everything back together he managed to get something else. He was trying to take a photo of it. It was part of their research. The group's leader -his closest friend-, Jasper, had asked him to get one. He was unsure why. He hadn't bothered asking either.
His head felt like it was on fire, his brain felt like it could explode with such force it would crack his skull open, his nose was bleeding like it hadn't in months, his body felt unnaturally heavy, every single molecule in his body was screaming at him right now, what did he do, was there any way to undo this, to fix this, what did he do, what could he do now, what did he do, what did he do, what did he do...
There was nothing left to do now, right? There was no saving him, not after looking at it. He could only try once again to reason with them, to convince them to stop investigating it, stop thinking about it, maybe if they did it could lose interest in them and go away and spare the rest of the world, but was it even possible to stop thinking about it after having seen it? Would it be even possible to get them, get Jasper, to listen to him after months worth of failed attempts?
For now he would just lock it all away, try to rest and recover for the rest of the day while pushing what had just happened into the back of his mind, and then confront all of this with a clear head the next day. Jasper had managed to keep himself together by remaining calm, after all. It should go without saying that he needed to do the same if he wanted to keep his own changes at bay, continuing to think about this when in a bad place physically or mentally would only accelerate everything.
The next day wasn't any better.
The headache hadn't stopped. In fact, it had only gotten worse, his brain felt like it bounced inside his skull every time he moved, thinking was hard now, breathing was painful, and he still felt so heavy, so weak...
He could have easily blamed these symptoms on any of his many health problems, the ones he had accumulated over decades of neglecting his own body and had grown painfully accustomed to over the last few years. Low blood sugar, perhaps, or maybe hypertension.
He couldn't, though, precisely because he knew how these things felt. Whatever this was, it was so much worse. He wouldn't die, but something far more sinister was about to happen to him and there was no way to stop it, only to make it hit him slower.
Something as mild as what little sunlight could enter through his curtains hurt as much as directly staring into the Sun. He would need to board his windows, or invest into better curtains. That much light made him feel absurdly dizzy too, the sort of dizziness when he could lose his sense of position even when standing still. He looked at himself in a mirror and he presented no apparent changes, this offered him no comfort.
He could feel something watching him everywhere he went, he knew it was that thing, it had to be, even though it was still light years away from them. He could feel it's gaze coming from the windows, from the open doors, from the cracks on the walls, from the gap between the door to his apartment and the floor, from his own mirror. It was looking at him, following him, judging him. He was no longer safe, not even in his own home.
He couldn't face them like this.
He would destroy the negatives, everything related to that cursed photo, right away, then write Jasper as a last ditch attempt to get him to understand the gravity of the situation, if even indirect observation of the phenomenon could cause this, then the only safe course of action would be to stop everything related to this research, to dissolve the group, to let this die.
His letter never made it to the astronomers.