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Lomedy watches with rapt attention and drawed breath as Flame, quick as a whip and just as dangerous, pulls a splash potion out of his bag.
Lomedy’s mind has gone long and winding in the forever-dark of the prison, twisting around and eating itself, again and again. Fear, like a mold, crawls all the way up his body. He will die here, to the Law, and if that doesn’t happen, he will die eventually in the wars that sweep the server, or if he goes back to Flame out of some strange sort of love, he will die as a result of Flame’s actions. There is no way out.
His vision has gone dark, too, and his heart thump-thumps in his chest, loud and harsh. His cell is cold, but Flame is as hot as the surface of the sun. Lomedy feels him approach, feels how the world goes sickly hot like a fever, like the lava in the corner of the cells in the Mafia. Lomedy never went to jail, he never got close to the lava, but he heard about it. Lomedy never jumped in the lava. Lomedy does not want to die.
He misses the cold of his cell already. Flame’s heat used to be warm and safe and comforting, but now he doesn’t—he wants it to be cold again. He doesn’t like this.
Flame asks Lomedy to come with him. Come home. It’s so hot, Lomedy thinks he might be dying. He thinks he wants to throw up. He thinks he’s getting heatstroke. He wants to go home, but he doesn’t know where home is. Has he ever been safe? Has he ever felt safe? Not at the farm, not when there was so much danger, always. Can you have a home on Unstable?
Lomedy says no to Flame. It’s sick. It’s sickening, the heat, the cold, the dampness in the air—and Flame might be crying, but Lomedy isn’t sure, because he’s clearly so freaked out his temperature is spiking and spiking and spiking, and so if there are tears, they are evaporating off of his face.
Lomedy wants to go home. But there has never been a home. He is not a child, he needs to act like an adult and do something. Do anything. He needs to take responsibility for his actions. No part of him wants to go with Flame.
And he says no. He knows he says no, even through the soup in his mind and the way that the fear twists him into knots. He knows he says no. He does all he can. What else can he do? Try and fight him, he who is in full netherite to Lomedy’s nothing, he who is “the strongest?” Yeah right. No, he’ll be right on that.
But Flame, beautiful, stupid, clever, conniving Flame, who Lomedy knew he shouldn’t have trusted in the first place, digs his fingers into his bag and pulls out a splash potion. It is a sickly brown-dark-grey and looks more viscous than it really should.
There is already so much fear that this extra level feels like nothing, another wave in the ocean, coasting over his body. What is on the other side of this event? What fresh hell will he be deposited into? Every time he falls to the rock-bottom of the well, somone comes down with a shovel to dig him one even deeper. Fake-floors, trapdoors. He keeps falling. Down and down and down until he—eventually he will find a place he will not be able to survive. Will there ever be a day when there is a home for Lomedy to go to? A safe home? Will he ever be safe? What is the point of all of this? Why is he fighting? Why does he try to be moral when it’s not going to save him? Why does he do anything when death is so close behind him that he can feel its breath on his back?
Flame says something about knowing the best for Lomedy, Lomedy isn’t listening. He never liked it when Flame got like this, never liked it when the heat spiked and spiked and spiked. Flame burned two footprints into the wooden floor of Lomedy’s house when they got into a fight about Flame’s tendencies to get into fights, once. Flame burned a handprint into a metal watering can he was holding when he was getting ragebaited by Spongs. Flame once almost burned Lomedy, in the midst of a heated discussion, and it left an angry red spot where Flame was gripping Lomedy’s arm to stop him from storming off to his room.
Lomedy doesn’t understand why Flame is still trying to keep this going. This isn’t good for either of them. There is no Lomedy & Flame. That’s not how any of this works. There is Lomedy. There is Flame. Across a barrier, on either side of the wall. Ideological, skill level. There are a thousand things that keep them apart, and two things that keep them together. Lomedy’s admiration of Flame. Flame’s admiration of Lomedy.
But the idea of admiring someone like Flame sends nausea straight to his gut; the idea of Flame admiring Lomedy sends more nausea than even that. He shouldn’t be anything to Flame, Flame is far to dangerous to make that worth it. Lomedy never wanted to be one of those “chungies” (as Flame would put it), those people that just follow a PVPer around aimlessly, like a little, yippy dog. He wants to have a life. He wants to be a person.
He’s been a PVPer’s little sidekick before, it’s not fun. He had no power, and maybe they loved him, but the power they held over him was strong enough that the love didn’t really matter. If someone doesn’t listen to you, then they don’t love you. If someone doesn’t respect you, then they don’t love you.
It was a risk getting in bed with Flame. It was a mistake getting in bed with Flame. He missed his old friend. His dead friend. Missed them enough to try to find something to fill the gap. He shouldn’t have—he would have been better off staying depressed, he thinks. He would have been better off killing himself in his grief.
This all was a mistake. But god, what the fuck is he going to do from here? Flame’s not going to take no for an answer. He’s holding a weakness potion. Every time Lomedy tries to set up a boundary, Flame is at it immediately, poking and prodding until it breaks. But there is nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. Not here, in the prison, not in death. Flame’s not going to let him die now. He shouldn’t be feeling like this, be thinking like this, but he feels like an animal trapped in a snare.
Like a rabbit, in a trap. Like a rabbit. Lomedy’s heart is like a rabbit, slamming itself against his ribcage. But there isn’t anything he can do about this, which makes it somehow better. He’s between a rock and a hard place, between Flame and this Prison, and neither of these choices require any input from him.
He looks up at Flame with his big doe eyes, round and full of water, and lets the weakness potion take him away.