Work Text:
When you spend your whole life chasing something, you always imagine the feeling when you’ll finally get it.
The things that come to mind are always feelings like joy, relief, maybe fulfillment or satisfaction. Something that’d make you feel whole—like you’d found that final puzzle piece.
Then why…
Why did this feel so hollow?
Battat had spent days, weeks, months even, all to find out who Mike was. Honestly? He didn’t know how long it’d been. The days had started to blend together to the point where it felt like everything had just been one long stretch of time...where there was no such thing as Monday, five o’clock, or anything like that. It didn’t even cross his mind anymore, not with how absorbed he’d become in his obsession. He’d let it consume him, Mike, “Friend”, all his theories that were once just a passing interest—they’d become his entire sense of purpose.
The other “Mikes”—Pluey and Jongler— had been forced to watch him deteriorate. At first it was just a little nonsensical, a few sleepless nights, countless sheets of scrapped paper and use up pens, but that was the normal for Battat—it always had been, considering the post he set for himself as being Mike so that Tenna would never learn the truth. Battat had always been a workaholic.
So they didn’t think too much of it.
Not until it got out of hand.
It became the only thing Battat talked about at some point. He rarely set up the shows right anymore, he rarely left his room, he rarely abandoned that theory board of his. He rarely slept, and he talked to himself day and night—messily scrawling new feverish ideas in various different inks that scattered around the board. Torn ones were left forgotten at the foot of it, or they were left to pile up in the trash cans that Battat didn’t even bother to clean anymore. There was no more of that messy yet put-together nature that Battat had strained to maintain, instead, he let himself fall.
He didn’t spend time with the others anymore—didn’t take breaks. His eyes looked dead, and the few times his friends had tried to pull him out of the shadows he’d lash out at them, snapping, even yelling sometimes. In fact, it scared Pluey so badly that he wouldn’t even go into Battat's room anymore.
Jongler had stopped trying soon after that—even if they could restrain Battat, he wasn’t the same. He didn’t want to spend time with them and Pluey anymore, and that cut deep.
After all, their group was the anomaly—the workers who didn’t fit into Tenna’s repertoire, the weirdos.
And the weirdos were supposed to stick together.
Yet Jongler and Pluey felt as though they only had each other now—so they stopped coming. They stopped checking on him, stopped asking him to come and take a break with them.
And that—that exact point—was when the days had begun to blur.
Battat didn’t know what time it was—he felt like the walls were whispering, crawling, scratching—and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. His hands were gripping the edges of a hat given to him by Pluey—one with cat ears that he’d dubbed “stupid” when Pluey first gave it to him—that he hadn’t taken off in ages, not since they left.
It still smelled like Tenna’s awful and overwhelming air freshener—the same smell that Battat had tried to get out of the Mike room for weeks after Jongler had brought one of those air fresheners with them.
But now he clung to it.
He was gripping the hat so hard that his fingers were shaking. He had a wobbly smile as he stood before his theory board, again, and again, and again and again and again, but today was different.
He could hear giggling. He swore it was real. Just like the pink and yellow eyes that’d taken a liking to appearing on the walls recently—they followed his every move. And although he’d gotten used to the hallucinations that clawed at his mind, he couldn’t tell anything apart this time—everything was blurry. He could feel a tightness in his chest that wasn’t always there, and watched, frozen in place, as his board was consumed by a thick black ink that poured from the walls. In its place was a single note that drifted to Battat’s feet, leaving him staring in horror as he now stood in a room of black ink, a void, where pink and yellow eyes had begun to feverishly appear on the walls in rapid succession—all staring right at him as though he were the opening act for a circus.
He tried to scream, but nothing came out. He almost choked when he tried, stumbling before he fell to his knees, the ink coating them as one hand scratched as his throat as if that’d make it easier to breathe, while the other clung desperately to his hat.
This place smelled like nothing, all he could hear was giggling that slowly got louder, and louder, until it started to rattle his brain. It made him wince, the shaking going from just his smile and his hands to his whole body. When he finally looked down, he could see the note right in front of him, old, faded, almost unreadable, but slightly illuminated by an unseen light behind him—half yellow, half pink.
“It’s rude to talk about someone who’s listening.”
He felt a pit in the bottom of his stomach, the horror making him go entirely stiff—he looked like a puppet whose strings had been pulled, unable to tear his eyes from the note and its uncanny light, the eyes around him fading as he no longer registered anything around him. Nothing except the note.
He realized what he had found, and noticed the shadow of a smile, wide and unnerving, that bled into the light the note was cast in.
It wasn’t just light, it was a pair of eyes—squinted, paired with a wide, smug smirk that cast a shadow over Battat. He suddenly became hyper-aware of the cold breeze he’d felt from behind him—heavy, uneven, almost like panting.
Then he felt something start to drip. It slid down his back, uncomfortably cold, almost like freshly melted ice, and more of it continued to drip as the panting from behind him became heavier. Panic blossomed in his chest in a frenzy, but he couldn’t move.
No matter how close it got, even when he felt a weight begin to press on his back, he couldn’t move. He was stuck in place, staring at the note.
The weight became unbearably heavy, and he felt the breathing get incredibly close, right up against his neck, inches from it, centimeters even.
The light got brighter.
And he heard something, like the cracking of some kind of bone, something that was unnatural, and suddenly the hat was ripped from him—instead it fell at his side after a few seconds of dead silence that felt like hours.
It was covered in ink, it began to consume it, the last thing he had, but Battat was powerless to stop it.
Before the hat faded, he caught sight of marks on it, left by sharp teeth. The horror only spread further, now rooted in his heart, brain, and making his breathing deteriorate into hyperventilating.
Until a tail wrapped around his neck, and tugged.
It was so fast that Battat couldn’t even blink.
Now he was lying on his back, choking at his hands scratched desperately at the beaded tail that had now taken hold of his throat. It was no use, but he didn’t stop struggling.
It felt almost like being hung—wrung out like a towel, lungs squeezed as he desperately tried to breath, yet his throat wouldn’t open—the choking was horrible, dry, pained, and his wide, horrified eyes darted everywhere as he looked for a way out.
But the shadows kept swallowing him.
His struggling was forced to a fault as red thread suddenly bound his hands tightly, leaving him to gasp and choke.
But not before those pink yellow eyes would face him directly.
A large cat, its tail wrapped tight around Batta’s throat, with a grin so wide it should’ve split its face—was now on top of Battat.
Its claws pressed down while it purred. Cracks began to spread across Battat’s limbs, as though he were a piece of porcelain.
Its eyes stared intensely, almost through the pippin beneath it, Battat stared back like a helpless bug.
Battat knew what he’d found—he found what he’d been looking for, even in his haze, he knew. But it didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel rewarding. It felt—empty.
The cat leaned closer, and closer, inching forward before a whisper could be heard.
“Don’t forget.”
“Don’t forget.”
“Don’t forget.”
The last time however, became a scream so loud his head felt like it was splitting, leading him to hear a distant ringing as well as distorted screams that would haunt him until the day he died. It drowned out the sound of his choking as the cracks spread to his face.
“DONT FORGET.”
Multiple pairs of the eyes, dozens of the eldritch cats surrounded him, about to maul him beyond recognition.
Until he woke up screaming.
“BOSS!”
It was the first thing he heard—Jongler. As his eyes adjusted to the bright, aggressive light above him, and his breathing slowed to a tolerable pace, he looked up.
He’d fallen asleep in one of the awful folding chairs—plastic, stiff. All he could smell was ink, but the hat was still on his head when he looked up.
More importantly—Jongler and Pluey were standing in front of him, Jongler’s hands on Battat’s shoulders, slightly shaking, while Pluey’s ears remained flat against his head. They both looked horrified as Battat’s chest rapidly rose and fell, but eventually he sighed.
“Yeah?”
It was casual, too casual, both unlike him and ignorant of the situation. Both of his friends, who couldn’t stop themselves from checking on him again regardless of whether he cared, stared at him in utter horror. Jongler’s shifted to disbelief, then uncertainty.
“Youse…Youse okay?”
Battat stared at the two of them—then glanced at his board, which made Pluey step back slightly. Battat caught it, and it made an uncomfortable and guilty feeling spread through him, deep in his bones that felt uncomfortably personal.
But still, he had his wobbly smile.
Yet this time, with more clarity than he’d had in weeks, he mumbled a slow, cautious answer.
“…I am now.”
He slowly, after a long stretch of silence and contemplation, leaned forward to hug them. He wasn’t a hugger, but it was more for them than for him.
He felt Pluey’s fur as they both hugged him in return.
And Battat just let himself soak in the light for a moment.
But, in the back of his mind…
He wouldn’t forget.