Chapter Text
Caine gives you this look. It's close enough to normal, if not slightly surprised as his jaw hangs just a little lower than it usually would. It's easy for any bystander to miss, but his eyes bore straight through you with vitriol the likes of which you'd never seen before. Caine tended to wear his emotions on his sleeve, so to see him hide this rage so well was all the more terrifying.
The second he breaks eye contact he starts back up on his speech like nothing had happened, ignoring your pointed words. To everyone else, it really was nothing. He opens the portal into his next adventure as soon as he's done talking. You go to walk through it, only to find you suddenly can't move. You try again and feel an unseen force holding you back, tightening this time when you try again to move, it hurts, makes it hard to breath, since when could he do that?
The millisecond the last person is fully through the portal he shuts it and now his face reflects the emotions he was hiding earlier. In all the years you've known him Caine has never looked this pissed. He'd had temperament, had more than a few angry outbursts from time to time, you'd seen Caine mad before. But this wasn't just mad, this was pure fury, fire that could rival hell burning in his gaze. He squeezed tighter and you could swear you heard bones crack despite the impossibility of such injuries in this cartoonist world.
"Oh, Jax." The fact his voice comes out sounding so sweet in this moment is absolutely horrifying.
"My." You cant expand your chest for air anymore. "Little." You start to lose circulation, if you even still had it here. "Bunny." You feel your eyes bulging, dark spots form in your vision. "BRAT!" He finishes with an impossibly tighter squeeze that makes your body twist in all the wrong ways, every inch of your being inside and out is in pain. You can't even scream because there's nothing in your simulated lungs, it's agony, you're certain you know what hell feels like now. Actually, come to think of it, you're not sure hell would even be this cruel. Finally, with one last pull, you mercifully pass out.
When you wake up you're back in your bed. Your body aches. You can feel unseen eyes watching you and lift your arm to wave in the direction you think they're in, but as soon as you move the limb you realize the whole thing just feels all wrong. You try the other arm, with the same feeling, both legs too. It's disorienting, everything in you feels just slightly out of place, even your skin feels off, like loose wrapping paper.
You know what's going on now, this wasn't a reset like you'd originally thought. No. No, this was much more akin to a toddler crudely gluing they're shattered toy back together, with no real knowledge of where each peice went or how they all lined up. Of course Caine doesn't know how to play doctor, that's not what he's programmed for. Then again, was he programmed for violence? Had Caine himself glitched? Was this whole thing some shitty error or was it some bad coding in the machine? Either option would lead to an awful conclusion. On the one hand, maybe it had been some glitch or error or even a virus, but that meant Caine was breaking, any missing code or malware would basically mean the whole world was crumbling around you. On the other hand, if Caine did that to you while still being a perfectly functioning machine it means he always had the ability to do all this and has been lying about it from the very start, or worse he chose to ignore his own programing just to watch you suffer.
So either the entire world will fall apart soon, or you're stuck under the control of a computer that's fully sentient without any real ability to feel the way humans do.
You're all so fucked.