It's downright freezing, and yet, he felt as if he had been sweating for days under an ending summer day.
So cold. And... so very dark.
His limbs wouldn't move. His eyes were open, but his windows to the world would not let him see anything.
A void swallowed his thoughts and words. The heat was as unbearable as the cold. A true absence of God. And yet... cold and warm, they could cancel each other out if he would just...
That's... so much better. Yes... so much better.
There's so much peace in darkness. In the absence of everything while in the presence of nothing. Like swimming in the warm pitch dark ocean during tepid summer nights. Naked. Alone, swimming amidst plastic cups and jars and bags and detritus.
Ifeelrightathome.
"Isn't it... lovely? Isn't it... peaceful? Isn't it magnificent? Everything is finally okay with the world."
Ah... a friend? In a place like this? I like friends. I was feeling lonely without friends. Who are you, friend?
"I'm just your friend, Krissy. I live in your spine. I live in your fingers. I live in your brain. I see through your eyes, I feel through your tongue, I steal with your fingers."
But... where am I, friend?
"We're together in the dark, Sweet Krissy. You wanted this."
Oh... oh yeah. The dark. An absence of feeling. An absence of time. An absence of pain. I kind of did ask for it.
"Yeeeesss... the dark, Krissy Boy. Never fear the dark. It's where you come back to when nothing works out for you. It's where you came from. It all returns to nothing."
I like dark. I like nothing.
"Let's... enjoy this nothing, shall we? And I know all your other friends are tired of you, too..."
Let's enjoy nothing, together. Forever.
"You won't have... to ever do anything anymore. It's all smooth sailing from here. You won't have to worry about the invasion in Bretonia, or your failing grades, or what you're going to eat for dinner. Ever. Again."
Never ever?
"Neeever ever ever."
I... kind of like this fathomless depth. It makes me forget about theorems, and lovers, and failures.
What could be wrong, Friend? There's nothing wrong with nothing.
"No... it's something in you. And you're in it... can you feel it...?"
This feeling... oh, God. No, please, take me back.
"What's this... Krissy, there's a pounding sensation... it's in your head. Can you feel the veins your head? Can you feel your heart?"
Take me back. There's a head, and I'm trapped in it. And it's pulsing and it's gross and it hurts.
"The blood swims through you. Your heart pumps, and your machine of shame and guilt is activating. It wants to drink, it wants to walk, it wants to touch things, it wants to sing to Old Sol music, while fiddling with unlicensed plasma bolter manifolds..."
No... Stop... stop! I don't want to hear anything about this feeling anymore! Take me back to...
"The salty gastropod inside your tongue is worming in your mouth... and that awful, rancid feeling in your esophagus is...!"
MY HEAD, M-MY THROAT... IT... BURNS...
SO MUCH...
SO BAD.
"Wakeup." "Wakeup." "Wakeup."
"I told you to wake up, kid. I'm closing down over here. Get your ass up now, or I'm calling the cops."
His eyes blurred, as a painful supernova burned brightly inside his pained pupils, like an operating table's neon lamp flashing his soul.
A somewhat elderly man in his late fifties was kneeled over him, glancing at the boy surrounded by pools of liquors, shards of glass, drops of blood and stains of rancid vomit.
"I told you, you had too much to drink already. Who's gonna pay for this mess, kid? I have to tell Robert, you know."
"Nnh... nnguh...?"
"Get up. Now I need to clean this total disaster you've caused, because Lara called in sick today. You're lucky I know your dad, or else I woulda have thrown your ass out hours ago."
"Nngh. Nugh. Unh."
"I've heard enough. Get out, now!"
The man clenched his robust fists around his puke stained arm, grappling Kristoff back onto his wobbling feet by force. He had no time to comprehend what was happening, before he was cast out of the door of the bar, closing instantly behind him.
"Nnh. Wait. Hnhh. Wa-wait... I..."
The freezing cold of Denver embraced him.
After staggering, and readjusting himself against the automated steel door of the locale he had just been in, memories began to trickle in, as he began to... remember.
Yes. This was Morgan Street. Almost near the end of it.
It's a tight urban road on a slope. The wintry snow froze it all over, making the stair pathway more dangerous than the asphalt road itself. Miles's, the locale behind him, had a blinking purple light irradiating his surroundings, occupied by tall warehouses and apartment buildings in his immediate surroundings, leaving little to no space for any intersections or pathways towards other streets, besides Morgan Street itself.
The cold creeped in, chilling the very marrow of his bones.
Kristoff sluggishly investigated himself as he shivered, his breath condensing in front of him. Touching, patting every pocket in his vomit-soaked clothing. His clothes felt... surprisingly empty. Devoid of anything. Devoid of anything... important?
"...M-my PDA. With-- ... "
Nothing. Not in his left pocket, not in the right pocket, not in the breast pocket. And without his NNID, returning home with a hovercar taxe was out of the question. Without the ability to contact anyone at all, he would simply have to traverse terrible streets in downtown Crichton on his lonesome. A dangerous task, especially without any identification on his person.
No amount of pounding on the icy door would let him in. Miles was entirely indifferent to his plight, and rightly so, after having thrashed and puked and bled over his locale's floor.
"Rrgh. My head... feels like it's gonna explode..."
As he vacated the street, being careful on the way down through small steps with his canvas shoes, he took a left turn, descending further in the dilapidated industrial harbor, as the final hours of daylight began to fade behind the thick curtain of clouds, far behind the ocean.
Behind the fenced area lied a graveyard of buildings, once belonging to disposable contractors at the beck and call for Interspace Commerce, now lying shattered and scattered across a confined, vast area in the depths of Crichton's downtown. A small blot on the city, one that he would have to force himself to trespass through.
"Dad's gonna murder me... nngh..."
The pain in his head throbbed. He tried to ignore it multiple times ever since he had left the bar, but it was too severe to ignore.
His weakened senses led him to a rusted catwalk, which led him atop a building, overlooking the lowest expanse of Crichton from a comfortable height.
But then... but then a word emerged from the depths of his burning skull. An anathema to his peace. The antithesis to his attempts at trying to forget. A thought, fleeting like a gust of wind.
"... as the board director of the University of Denver, we have determined that you should be expelled, effective immediately."
The word in his communique, virtually signed and virtually stamped by Ageira Technologies, was now seared in his mind, like cattle receiving laser branding. An entire year of promises, savings wasted, studies, and shared future dreams with his boyfriend, cast into the wind like a scrap of burnt paper. All because of a couple of adjustments he sought to fit with his projects without permission.
A successful internship at Ageira would have allowed him to finally attend all of his family gatherings with his head high up. Uncle Ronald wouldn't belittle him anymore, his cousin Randall would give him a chance and allow him to walk further up the corporate ladder, and he could have walked out of the entire ordeal with valuable knowledge, enough to last for a lifetime.
Kristoff felt the weight of the world suddenly dismember his entire being in an instant, shredding his sense of peace into little giblets. His pride led him to this point, and now that his wings had flown too close to the sun, he began to plummet in the ocean below.
His vision began to blur with tears, as he would lie down on the rooftop, glancing at the silver clouds, staring back at him like inert comm static. The fall never seemed to end.
"..."
The snow came in quietude. Nighttime began to approach, as the city's argon and neon and halogen lamps began to illuminate up the night. The road-bound cars in the distance by the harbor's road appeared far more visible compared to when they did during the scant remaining hours of the day, sporting their lit-up red and white lights, moving at a snail's pace down the distant road, replaced by more cars, sporting the same colors, in an endless succession, just like a colony of worker ants.
Then, there were the other ants in the sky. Rows of hover-vehicles roaming back and forth in their designated lanes, as they left downtown Crichton to fly over to the center of town and its immediate environs, turning left and right and up and down as they needed to. Ants that could just fly anywhere if they felt like it, but chose not to.
Ants. We are the ants. So many ants, all over Crichton, living, marching on, eating and breeding and dying. An endless cycle that people from forever ago loved so much, they even brought it far, far away from where they used to live originally.
What is so good about this continuum? What is the appeal? Are we slaves to the Friends in our brains that keep telling us to obey our organs? Or are we enslaved to the chemicals in our brain which compel us to ignore the chemicals in our brain? Are we completely chained to these sentiments? Our brains impose, our limbs obey, and we are forced to be unwilling spectators through social constructs which bind us to life.
Kristoff's thoughts sunk him in the thin blanket of snow around him. The feeling in his fingers disappeared, as did any sensation underneath his knees.
"Maybe... maybe this is it. This is how I die. It's finally happening."
A blurred, masked figure clad in an iris colored flightsuit glanced at him, as the full moon shone brightly behind him. A pilot...?
Male. Kusari. Tall, perhaps very tall, hard to tell from his position. Leather boots, a suit with several tools and trinkets he had seen Navy pilots use before while attending technician demonstrations at Pueblo, tools such as nanite dispenser adjusters, multitools for tweaking anti-grav manifolds on the fly, and one particular briefcase stood out to him. He looked like a right and proper pilot, only he would bear colors he had never even seen before, with a strange violet insignia on his neck. He looked like a cautious deer, glancing around himself, as if trying to avoid something. Or someone.
He was... doing things to him. It kneeled in front of him, it touched his neck, then ran his leathered fingers across his wrist. He studied him with delicate movements, as if conducting an autopsy over his dead corpse.
A gloved hand rummaged across his pockets, and upon discovering nothing to be found, it gently touched Kristoff's cold forehead, as if to say, "Goodbye, you poor bastard. They always die so young.".
No words could escape his mouth. His frozen eyelids allowed him to give the figure a cursory panicked glance, as it produced a shining needle.
