Chapter Text
Like a real detective, your first impulse is to ask questions. Ring by ring, the coils of your delirium come apart. Slowly at first:
Am I dead?
Not yet. You’re drowning.
In opaque fumes, lost in a storm-haze; that is, a rich veil of ochre wound heavy and pulled taut as a sailor's noose around the spool of your mind.
How long have I been like this?
Time has lost rhythm.
In the haze, there are only *pockets*. Most empty. Some have little holes barely a finger’s width in size. All of them fuzzy and strange—immaterial material—you keep trying to rub lint from the threadbare lining between your finger and thumb—
What does that mean?
You’re grasping, Harrier.
Grasping at some sort of *something* that is simultaneously absolutely fucking *nothing* at all.
So what happened to me?
The discordant melodies.
They resonate through your floating semi-consciousness without pattern: concentric rings of ouroboroses, foaming bubbles in the runoff water, a gurgling—Oh
fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh shit oh—More coils,
unfurling faster. Faster, until:
FUCK!! Where’s Kim?!
You pry your eyes open with a gasp, unsticking the filmy crusts dried on your lids.
It’s pitch black.
You blink a few times. Faster. More and *faster* still, but you *still* can’t see a damn thing.
Visual snow creeps into the nothingness—static prancing around in that primordial darkness—taunting you as it dances to a cruel, unknown sermon.
The air… ‘s too damp… this— this isn’t Jamrock—
The air around you feels dense, muggy and sweltering. Atmosphere like firecrackers set ablaze in a tin can. Your skin is ice-cold in spite of it, newly awakened clamminess creeping in overtop the settled and still-sticky layers of sweat. And what is that *smell*—it stinks Oh it fucking *stinks* in here. Something coppery and foul; sour and crude.
And then sensation—a light touch. It’s warm. Viscous. A trickle that travels down your neck and pools in your shirt collar.
“Hngh…”
Coming from your left—a human noise. And it’s *familiar*. It's—
“Kim..!” you heave. Your breath hitches with a ragged echo.
He doesn’t respond.
“KIM!!” you try again. The sounds of your breathing ricochet off the reinforced walls like gunshots in a hollow cathedral: twisted and damned.
Suddenly, you're floating again. Only this time, it's your body. A force clears the air clean out of your raw and burning lungs. You kick at the damp, a frantic mass of flailing limbs.
Why is he here?! *Where* is here?!?!
Here is teetering, becoming something cyclic and dizzying. Jerking you along in a nauseating ebb and flow. But you can only keep on dangling, a white-knuckled grip to the hypnotist's watch. Clink-clink.
Clink-clink. Clink.
Your awareness grasps at the noise—a rattling noise—and no sooner does a burning white-hot pain strike from above. Every nerve-ending bites against the agonizing ripples and blasts. You’re shaking, spasming uncontrollably.
It’s your wrists: bound together by a chain sling, suspending your arms from the roof. The roof of the...
Box. The box. You're tied to a box and so you yank at the ties but it only dredges up more screams like anchors pulled from your depths, and your thrashing only lodges the chain-links deeper into your wrists, chewing at delicate flesh, exposing raw muscle and vein.
“Kim, fucking answer me!!” There’s more blood now. The trickling heat has quickly turned into a steady oozing flows from your gashes. It feels like a wash of hot battery acid.
“Please!” You tip your head back as you cry out, pleading for an answer.
You’re fucking begging. Begging that you’ll blink and wake up next to him in his matchbox apartment. Stupidly happy, groggy, disheveled. A tuft of hair slicked against his forehead from pomade he hadn’t wash out. A pout and a huff as he pulls the blanket back over the both of you—only for a moment, just until you get up to start the coffee pot—because he told you he isn’t actually a morning person and secretly hates waking up at the asscrack of dawn every day and—
“KIM!” Please. GOD PLEASE!
… Silence.
Stuck in this death trap grafted from six steel ridged panels where you are painfully aware of the dwindling oxygen supply, Kim’s name curves around your tongue again and again like a hopeless incantation; one spoken more feverishly than any prayer you’ve voiced to date.
Forty-eight hours ago, you wouldn’t recognize Kim Kitsuragi from any other RCM patrol officer. But now, it’s as if you’re staring down the pitch-black barrel of your own broken heart—the thought of him beside you, unconscious and who-knows-what-else inside this three by eight metre box of personal purgatory is sending your heart into your throat. Your aorta is threatening to snap and send that useless organ flying through your stupid fucking maw—AHH!
You thrash against the chains again, forcing another scream from your already frayed throat, and your eyes sting with fiery tears.
Like an instant photo, the ones he takes on that fucking Trigat—that's how your memory feels, except there's a dozen little fires set to it, eating away at the pieces, eroding them bit by bit.
There must be something I missed. Some clue. Some fucking—something! I can figure this out. I can save us. I can—
“H-Harry? Where are we?”
Kim!