Chapter Text
There was very little left to cling to, here in this darkness, but he still tried. It was easier now than it had been before, back when the passage of time still held meaning. When the bitter feelings of loneliness and fear crept in to fill the voids created as time ate away at him, bite by bite, year by year. But now the nibbles came slower—as if time was growing full and sated, and struggled to cram just one more bite, then another, then another, down its cruel, relentless maw. Or perhaps it was just that so much was already gone, so little was left, that time wanted to make sure it savored every last bit it tore from him before finally swallowing him whole—the same way he knew he used to savor foods. Foods like the… like the… the something. Something grown with pride, plucked from the vine just for him by… by… someone. Someone whose name and relation to him had already been lost to time, but someone he still knew he loved very, very much.
And that was… pretty much the extent of his knowledge now, really. That he was a he, that he had someone, somewhere, that he loved, and that the someone in question… wasn’t here now. Because now… he was alone, in a space that was both shrunken and endless in its darkness, with himself the only source of light. A single ball that shone in the center of the emptiness, almost like a… like a…
Like a spotlight.
Yeah! That was it exactly. Like a spotlight. But… but…. Why had that thought, the thought of spotlights…
Why had the thought of spotlights felt so familiar?
It was eerie… but it was also something to anchor himself with. Something different, something… new? But why would there be something new here now? How could there be something new here now? He wasn’t sure… but he grasped at it like the lifeline it was with everything he had left.
More thoughts, more little lifelines, trickled in over the minutes-hours-days-years-centuries that followed. Thoughts that were the same as always (Someone, someone he knew had promised to always be there for him, someone… He didn’t know where he was. Who he was… Had he been abandoned?), yet layered with something new and… different (Will you… will you come with me? Just for a little bit?... But why not for forever?... But at least I have you, right?...Who? Who was it?... The periods of intermittent nibbling and snacking only served to stave off the very worst of the hunger. … But what was hunger? Was that something… something he used to know?)
But the contrast in itself felt familiar—they layers of familiarity and differences blending together, and the process of deciphering them, felt like a balm to an ache he hadn’t known was in his soul. Deciphering the differences in key and pitch of each idea, seeing a balance of melody and harmony come together to create a beautiful symphony. A sad one, to be sure, but there could still be beauty found in pain. But this symphony… there seemed to be something missing. One little idea, one lifeline, one last thing to tie it all together…
He was lost… and scared… and alone.
…And there it was. The final thought, that was same, but not same. New, but not new. Familiar enough that he could grasp it easily and comfortably, and different enough that knew it would stay and help illuminate this place if he set it free. Which he did. And the music that was not music, a—
melody, sung not by words but by… feelings? Courage, dreams, and wishes, sympathy for his loneliness and a desire to—
—flowed freely throughout the space and made it both shrink and turn endless once more as his light grew and grew along with the melody until—
“Is that music coming from you?”
—A startled yelp (and since when could he do that?!) stopped it in its tracks, like the screech of a record, and he realized that the music wasn’t a solo, but a duet.
“No! Please don’t go! I want to hear more… please don’t leave me alone!”
He didn’t want to be alone, either. He wanted to hear more, too—and not just to hear it, but to create it, and share it, and… and… to maybe…
…soothe his pain, and have its own pain soothed in turn.
So, with something less knowledge and more instinct—as half-forgotten and atrophied as that instinct was—he reached out, beyond the void and inky blackness, towards the figure he could perceive-yet-not-perceive reaching back. He enveloped his light around them, and pulled them gently—so very, very gently, with all the fear of a novice despite somehow knowing deep down that he should be used to this already, that he’d done this many, many times before—towards him, ball of light that he was, and settling them down directly across from him in the center of this space. And then for the first time in a long time (though time was ultimately meaningless in this place) he used that sixth sense, those eyes that weren’t eyes, ears that weren’t ears, touch that wasn’t touch, to perceive his visitor.
“I didn’t think they’d be someone so young,” was the immediate thought that popped into his mind. But it was understandable, considering that the little boy before him was just that—a little boy, one who looked even younger than he probably already was, with how his clothes were torn and dirty, his feet were shoeless, his hands and mouth were stained with berry juice, and his eyes were rimmed red from crying.
“…Hello?” came a hesitant greeting, and the sound of it—and the realization that it was directed at him, that someone was actually, finally, acknowledging his existence, startled a greeting out of him in return.
“H-Hello!” he stammered. “Welcome! Sorry about how boring this place is. I, uh, usually don’t get many visitors.”
At that the boy frowned, looking all around himself, swaying to and fro a little. “…It looks okay to me,” he finally ventured. “Yeah, it’s kind of empty, but that can be nice, too! Especially ‘cause it can be really hard to find a place like that when everyone’s all together.”
“Who… who is ‘everyone’?” he asked, curiosity abounding along with a slight wariness at the possibility of having to host anyone else. It really was nice to finally have some company, but he was very out of practice when it came to hosting guests, and he didn’t want to get too overwhelmed.
But the boy, not privy to these thoughts, his frown deepening. “I don’t… I don’t know.”
“Hm,” he floated up, then down, considering the boy before him. Now that the child was stood in front of him, pulled into his mind, it was easier to puzzle out what was his, compared to what was the boy’s, as well as to realize that, now that he’d gotten to see those things, those feelings, from the outside, with a new perspective, and seen the effects they had on others… for all they were easy to cling to, he didn’t actually like those bitter feelings of loneliness and fear. Not when he was the one feeling them, and even less when someone else was.
“Well, don’t stress about it, kiddo!” he was quick to reassure. “Besides, it’s probably a good thing that not too many people are around right now. You never want too big a crowd when you’re just starting to workshop a song, anyways.”
“‘Workshop?’” the boy tilted his head, looking adorably confused.
“Mm hm, that’s right—like what we were doing together earlier. Composing that beautiful symphony!”
The boy’s eyes widened in wonder. “You mean I helped you make that beautiful music?”
“You sure did, little buddy!” He said, swirling a few circles around the boy’s head before nuzzling close, trying to make him laugh. And to his immense delight, he succeeded! The boy laughed and swatted playfully at him (and since when did he remember what laughter was? Or delight?), trying to fend off his gentle assault. “You were projecting your feelings so loudly that even I could feel them.”
At that the boy’s laughter died down, tapering off into small giggles before silencing completely. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.
The question gave the ball of light pause and he floated back a little, his brightness fluctuating as he tried to remember the correct terms and assemble them in an order where he could easily explain. Finally, he settled on “Psychics like us, sometimes when we feel things very strongly, we can sort of… push those feelings outwards for others to hear. Or even if there isn’t a push, sometimes a psychic is strong enough that they can read those feelings anyways. And with the two of us… well, we were feeling a lot of the same things, so it was easier for those feelings to resonate with each other.”
Based on the boy’s blank stare, he got the feeling that he hadn’t done the best job of explaining. But he didn’t think he’d done such a bad job as to warrant what the boy did next: His eyes suddenly widened and he scrambled a few steps back, a panicked expression on his face.
“Psychics?!” he demanded. “You mean like… like fortune tellers? Mentalists? But those are bad guys! I don’t want to be like them!”
Okay, well, that was unexpected. As well as a touch offensive. “Now, hold on, why would you think something like that?” the ball of light demanded, the newly-remembered emotion of righteous indignation creeping into his mental voice. “Who told you psychics are bad guys?”
“I… I don’t…” the boy paused mid-step, his face becoming terrifying blank and his shoulders slumping. “I can’t… remember. I just… I just know there was someone.” The boy’s hands started shaking and rising towards his face, and, to his horror, it looked like the kid was starting to cry. “There… I don’t remember what they said, exactly, but I know… when I did weird stuff like… like moving things without touching them, or—or staying in the air too long after a flip, there was… they were mad. Said it was a bad thing.”
“Hey. Hey, no. None of that,” he interjected, all feelings of offense gone. Because that, right there? A kid couldn’t have come up that sort of rhetoric on their own. And for them to have internalized those thoughts to this degree, to still feel this sort of fear and shame at who they were, what they could do, even when they couldn’t remember who’d instilled those feelings… well, it wasn’t a good notion to have about psychics in general, let alone to have it directed inwards, at the self. “I won’t lie—psychics have a lot of power, and some of what they can do is really scary, especially if they lack control. But… think about that music we made earlier! You thought that was beautiful, didn’t you?”
“…Yeah,” the boy said softly, his sniffles petering out. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. …Probably.”
He chuckled. “Eh, I’ll take it. But the point is—that sort of thing? We couldn’t have done that if we weren’t psychics.”
The boy blinked away the last of his tears and tilted his head, considering.
“And there are other things, too! Like…” he racked his mind, trying to dredge up a memory, any memory, of something wholly psychic and wholly good that he could use to reassure the child. “…Like floating. Like you said—staying up in the air a bit longer than normal so you don’t hit the ground too hard. Or even—” the memory hit him like a freight train.
The smell of petrichor wafting into a small tent, where they’d run after a sudden sun shower. Feeling the burn in his muscles from moving too fast, and in his gut from disappointment that the rain would wash away the beautiful smell of the flowers in his (whose?) garden. But, then, the feeling of surprise when the sweet scent of roses and the sharp scent of pine hit his nose, and he turned to see a branch from the pine tree behind him tapping his shoulder with a fresh-picked—if slightly damp—bouquet. And as he grasped the gift with one hand, he felt a gentle squeeze on his other, and the warmth of a smaller hand slipping into his own, and he turned back around to see him. His eternal love, his precious… his precious…
…Who? Who was it?
“—t-talking to… p-plants,” he finally gasped out, finishing his sentence before the boy could notice his distraction. “Sometimes… s-sometimes,” he cleared a nonexistent throat and continued, more smoothly, “sometimes psychics can have special, more unique abilities, like talking to plants, or to animals, or—”
“—Or to water?” the boy asked, excitement once more on his face, unaware that his words had shook loose another memory from time’s grasp.
She’d cheered the hardest when he first met the others, if only because he was too enthralled by the beauty and wonder of the performance to move, and yet his words didn’t seem to work now, when it mattered the most. And then the fangs of water—icy-cold, the serpents having been pulled from the very depths of the lake—pierced his wrists and flung him to the side. Clearing a path so they could lunge straight towards him. Towards, his love. And time slowed to a crawl and he wasn’t going to be fast enough and—
And he no longer wanted to cling to those lifelines the boy offered him, didn’t want to be tethered here, forced to remember these things… but the lifelines were just growing stronger and stronger and—and they were, actually, lifelines, weren’t they? Because in the boy’s exuberance and excitement he’d been unaware of his host’s emotional turmoil, and he’d continued to speak, to explain, “I think I did that earlier! My head was really hurting, and I was lonely, and I wanted it to stop, and then there was a hand! In the river! And it petted away the pain, and then it came with me when I asked it to when I had to leave the river to get food, and it gave me a thumbs up and—”
And that was true, wasn’t it, that hydrokinesis had brought him so much joy, once upon a time? Hadn’t he applauded, when she’d made the serpents of water dance in the deep tank below her as she walked on a thin tightrope high above? Hadn’t she frozen droplets of water at just the right height, adjusting them along with the progression of the sun and moon, so that they would throw rainbows on the ground wherever the two of them stepped, dancing through the day and night after they made their vows to always, always love each other, until… until death do us—
—He shook himself, light fluctuating again. “That sounds about right, kid,” he told his guest. “And that’s very impressive, that you were able to hold enough control that a hand could manifest for that long!” Because it was—it really, really was. But given how the boy shrunk back at his words and started sniffling again, it looked like he didn’t share his host’s opinion.
“Hey, hey, what’s the matter now?” he asked, floating closer to nuzzle the child’s cheek again, attempting to offer all the comfort he could.
“I couldn’t keep that control!” the boy wailed. “And—and I left my leaf when I ran from the bees, and I didn’t even think about it, and what if the river hates me now? What if it never wants to talk to me again, or… or hold my hand, or—”
“What? Someone not wanting to hold the hand of a sweet kid like you?” He floated so that he was in front of the boy, waiting until he was sure the child was focused solely on him before giving a sound of dismissal. “That’s impossible. Besides—I’m sure your friend was glad you thought of yourself first and got to safety. Water can’t get hurt by bee stings, you know. Not like little boys can. But,” he floated a bit away again, giving the boy some space and hoping to introduce a little levity to the situation, “if you’re really worried, then all you have to do is apologize next time you see some water. I’m sure it will forgive you—I know I would.”
The boy looked away, scrunching his nose and turning the idea over in his mind. “Okay, I’ll do that,” he said, nodding with resolve. “But… I don’t know how to leave here. Or even how I got in here in the first place.”
“Ah, that was me,” the ball of light said, dimming a bit at the thought of this bright child leaving, of being abandoned (again). But it wasn’t fair to try and keep him here just because he was lonely. The kid had an entire life ahead of him, after all, full of sights and sounds and smells and tastes. Things he couldn’t experience if he stayed separate from his body (like… like he was? Is that why he’d been stuck here for so long, in this place of darkness?). “Once I let you go, all you have to do to leave is follow the ties your mind has to your body, and then you’ll wake up back in the physical world.”
(And leave him here, alone, to try and cling to the memory of this meeting, the feelings and memories it reawakened, for as long as he could before they, too, were inevitably swallowed by the cruel jaws of time.)
“…But when I leave, what will you do? You’re just a brain in a jar—you don’t have a body to wake up in!”
He gave a bitter chuckle. “Well, kiddo, I’ll just stay here; same as before.”
“…Can’t you come with me?”
…Huh?
“Come with you, kiddo?” he repeated in confusion. “How would I do that? Like you said, I don’t have a body anymore.”
“But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t still come with me, right? Like… couldn’t you just… follow me? When I go back to my body?”
That… that was an interesting offer. And… that should be possible… right? Doors open both ways, don’t they? And if a lifeline is offered… then that means there must be something tied to the other end, to pull the victim up… right? Except…
“That’s a nice offer, kiddo, but then the both of us would just be stuck in your mind. And as interesting as I’m sure that would be, it won’t leave you any closer to being back in the physical world.”
“Oh. I guess so,” the boy frowned. “But… but what if you just didn’t follow me all the way?”
“Hm?”
“Yeah!” the kid exclaimed, bouncing up and down in happiness at his sudden idea. “You’d be following behind me, right? So as soon as you saw I was back in my body, you could just stop and stay where you were before you got pulled in, too! And then you’d be out of this place, right? Closer to the physical world?”
That was… was that really possible? It sounded absolutely wonderful, the thought of being able to leave this darkness behind, even without a body, but… could he really do it? But looking at the boy in front of all that was left of him, the expectation and hopefulness on his face, the desire (like his, so much so that it’s what had allowed him to compose that symphony, to even meet the boy in the first place) not to be alone…
…He had no choice but to try.
“Let’s do it!” he declared, the boy cheering in response. “I’ll let you go on three, okay?”
He waited for the nod, then “One… two… three!”
And the boy floated away, up above the darkness—except no, he wasn’t, because it was just getting darker and darker until…
Brightness that wasn’t brightness—that couldn’t be brightness, because he didn’t have eyes to perceive brightness with. And the sound, yet not sound, of leaves rustling in the night wind, a wind that was edging towards cold-but-not-cold, as it spent the last of the lingering warmth from a sun that had set hours ago.
And… he was out.
And there was the boy, yawning and rubbing sleepy eyes in front of him.
And neither of them was alone anymore.