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“Shh- shh, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Calloused fingers pushed against his face, reforming the feverish felt he called skin as it drooped and sagged. “S’okay, you’ll be okay. Stay okay.”
He watched as Sam’s ears drooped, little frustrated whines leaving his lips as he continued to push against his face, trying to put it back together.
“Suh-“ He tried to speak, to comfort Sam, but stops as his lips fall and his words fall with.
He feels Sam’s fingers against his face again, this time against his stubble - though actually just built up pilling of his felted face - as he tries to push them back up. Sam’s fingers stay there, pressed against his lips as he stares.
“How do- How do I fix you?” Sam’s voice cracked, it was an unusual sound in the way of the fact that he only let his voice shift because it was just the two of them - not in the way of it being just the two of them hiding from the outside world, but that there was no outside world, just them.
This was a loop that Sam had labeled to be one of “Cthulhu’s bitch fit loops”. Jerry wasn’t apart of every loop, stuck in a pit of nothingness until Cthulhu let him out, so usually, it’d be just Sam by himself. Sam must’ve done something in the last loop that annoyed Cthulhu enough to send him to this wasteland of a universe, but also made Cthulhu pity him enough to let Jerry keep him company. That, or Cthulhu was annoyed at Jerry for his actions in the last loop enough that he had decided to keep him here as well, acutely aware of the dry rot that had started to spread through his body.
He preferred the pit of nothing, time was more conceptual there - just a perpetual stasis until he was needed, these wasteland universes weren’t like that. Days passed, months, sometimes years or decades if Cthulhu was particularly mad at Sam, and he had to feel every second pass. Cthulhu had given Sam immortality years before their original universe - which was nothing more than a vague colour of memories to Jerry, and nothing more than Taurtis to Sam - had ended, which Sam had realised as he recalled every bullet wound and head injury and broken bone and overdose he had miraculously survived. When he finally confronted Cthulhu about it, he was told that ‘it wasn’t his time to die’, and Sam ripped Jerry apart with his overgrown nails as he screamed over his life and how it wasn’t ever his.
Then Cthulhu stitched him back up and handed him back Sam, like Jerry was the same level of sentience as that bear he carried around and like Cthulhu was soothing his fussy toddler by giving him a new toy.
Jerry wasn’t immortal, not like Sam was, he could be stitched and glued back up and he’d be alive for what he was needed, but Jerry wasn’t the chosen one so Cthulhu didn’t bother giving him immortality because to him, he was a pacifier that he had to wean Sam off of. He had accepted long ago that he was nothing but the sloppy remains of Sam’s last memory of Taurtis, kept by his side to keep him going and complete Cthulhu’s mission, a reminder of what Sam was agreeing to this for - to see Taurtis again.
Sam’s hands shook, clutching at Jerry’s head. “I- I need you.” His eyes were wide and wet, “You can’t- you can’t just go, I can’t be alone.”
Sam’s eyes clenched shut, tears falling from one eye while thick black sludge fell from the other - a side of effect of many affecting Sam’s body that stemmed from Cthulhu’s influence.
Jerry coughed, bits of cotton falling out of his mouth that Sam quickly pushed back in. He gasped, then coughed again, an awful hacking noise leaving his mouth and causing his stitching to pop as he tensed. His plastic hands reached for Sam’s shoulder, gripping onto him as he shook.
He was disintegrating, his very existence disintegrating. His head throbbed, he could feel his skin lose it’s stiffness, he felt like he was melting- the one eye he still had was starting to droop, mimicking the one that used to be attached to the right of his face. “How do I fix you? I don’t- I’ll get him to fix you, like last time-“.
Jerry shook his head weakly, glad they were already sitting down as he fell against Sam, chest heaving as he wheezed, the remains of his head resting on his lap.
“You can’t just- why are you- you can’t do this to me, why are you doing this to me?” Sam lifted him up by the armpits, moving Jerry to have his head resting against his chest and his arms to be wrapped around Sam’s body. “Don’t do this to me, Gord, don’t do this to me.”
He clutched Jerry weakly, resting his chin on top of his head as he breathes him in - not a scent of his own filling his nose, just the dust and sand of the wasteland.