Chapter Text
The first thing you see is the terror in her bright, red eyes.
It’s also all that you can focus on, indeed, all that you can bear to focus on, as her arm lies elbow-deep in your chest— piercing through the flesh and painted an even darker, harsher shade. She gapes at you, her delicate silver features glinting soft and pretty in the moonlit vacuum, as your body convulses with a power it is not meant to contain, and you hear a low, enraged rumble from somewhere that feels close, but sounds so far away as the pain hits a certain level of excruciating that makes the brilliant stars fade; Dark spots meld together with your surroundings, the only sign of their presence a prevalent muddying of the glowing figure reaching past your guts and into a space that should not exist.
Her lips part to speak, but sound doesn’t travel without an atmosphere, and indeed, your throat is already raw from futile attempts of defiance against that law. How you haven’t combusted, indeed— or stopped breathing— one of those should’ve been your first question, but pain and panic are powerful. It’s all you can do just to take an impossible breath of stardust, to prevent your eyes from rolling back in your head (and you don’t do a very good job at this, to be honest— but for some unfortunate reason, your body also refuses to succumb to sleep in the face of the agony,) to simply exist as something starts to squirm, mutter, and breathe inside you.
You can’t feel the fur rub against your rib cage, nor the sudden, watery seal that forms quickly around it, shrinks, and rests against your heart, but you do feel the searing under your skin that travels down your arm and burns a smattering of small, black supernovas in a line down the back of your hand, spreading from a wobbly straight line and following the shape of your skeleton, the way a creeping vine clings to a trellis.
The feminine entity quickly, frantically pulls her arm out of the bloody cavity and reaches for your hand, her eyes blurring with apologetic tears as she tries to call to you, crimson-stained fingers slipping between yours and grasping for your knuckles as wisps of silvery light gather around the edges of the spreading field of burns, taming their spread and turning your boiling nerve endings to ice. You can’t read her lips— it might not have mattered either way, there’s no telling if she speaks the same language as you do— your eyes are full of matching gloss that start to trickle down the slopes of your cheeks before seeming to realize that you’re in space halfway down, rather than immediately, and the space between you sparkles with countless refractions through floating droplets that, impossibly, refuse to crystallize. Your blood does the same, you realize, but you’d hardly been able to tell it apart from the stars themselves, the critical liquid dark against the sky.
Her hand slips away, and so does she, and blinding colors blink in and out of focus. You’re finally starting to feel lightheaded in a particularly sleepy way, and when you try to reach out in search of the phantom of those fingers that gave you a grounded sensation for the fleeting moments that your limbs had stopped burning, you’re submerged.
You stay that way, and hardly think to hold your breath. It’s starting to get lighter, and you’re starting to see shapes on the other side of that wall in front of you.
You inhale, and the water gently licks at your cheeks as the air flows in, soft like the sunset reflected in it.
You’re looking through the other side of the wall, floating spread-eagle along its surface. Above you is the world, and you float on the cusp of an etheric sea.
Your guts don’t hurt so much anymore, and your muscles decide to unlock… so you decide to stop thinking.