The explosion of wind from the feather as it disintegrates is more than enough to shove the other two away, far away from the unnatural brightness that surrounds him.
He doesn’t know if the other is already in his right state of mind, however if
Guillermo Marceliño’s fast enough to notice, he mouths these words, meant for him—and for him alone:
“I love you.”And then—
He’s
gone.
(TW: gore)
It’s like—it’s like that one series he’d binge-watched, long ago. Where the middle of nowhere is just a bright, white space. No ceiling, just a floor—
And then, he sees his counterpart across him. Noticeably, though, his doppelganger’s eyes are red, and not purple. Strange, isn’t it.
“You could’ve had it all, you know.”
He can’t believe that it’s the same voice, the same cadence, ringing out across the space—but somehow, there’s something wrong with it. Something he himself can’t place.
“I’d have taken your place, be fuckin’ normal, for once, not afraid of death—didn’t you like that? That feeling? Of forgetting everything that bothered you, and just going on ahead and crashing into shit without even giving the slightest fuck that you could die from that complication? That’s the one thing that sets you apart from me, you know. I’ve got the body—the one you so desperately wish, the normalcy you want, and yet you still refuse to give in, to just die and let me take your place instead.”
He just blinks for a few moments, staring at him—himself.
How… how could he sound so angry? Like that?
“The moment you lost your heart, I saw my chance. I know, just as much as you do, that you don’t keep your best memories in your brain. You keep them in your heart, the one I absorbed, while trying to take over you, watching you stumble out there like a blind little freak. How did you survive twenty-eight years wearing your heart on your sleeve? Giving yourself away so easily to the first person who bats their eyes at you? I resented that, you know. All. Of. That.”
He doesn’t realize the other is getting closer, becoming more and more real while his own form was slowly fading away into the whiteness, warping and glitching like code gone wrong.
“I should’ve taken your emotions too. How the fuck did I miss that.”
As the footsteps echo closer, the doppelganger begins to solidify more—almost becoming flesh and blood, but curious, curiously—one of the two hands of his double hadn’t fully materialized yet.
“Well I’m here to take everything away from you. And take your place out there.”
The last thing Alexei remembers of this white place is the menacing grin of his own double, far too close into his personal space before a burning pain spread through the gaping hole in his chest.
It felt like an eternity, floating in—floating somewhere.
Was he floating in space? In the clouds? The last thing he remembered before he blacked out (whited out? Was that even a thing?) was that his doppelganger had approached him and literally tried to rip out what remained of—of himself.
What the brain forgets, the heart remembers.
Maybe this was what it was like, to—to die? To return to stardust, to the particles that made up the existence of the universe?
The same hissing voice echoed in his ears, though.
“You left him. Don’t you remember that? You left him to die, you left the blue—”
“Stop,” he began quietly. “Stop that. I didn’t leave anyone.”
“Oh, but you did, you left your best friend of eleven years in the lurch—”
“Our paths diverged! How could you say that?”
“You left him, you let him die, he’s gone, gone, he’s never coming back—”
“We did go our separate ways, but I never meant to—”
“Stop making up excuses, you killed him! You killed @mattis!”
“I did not!”
“Then prove it!”
He swung his head around wildly, trying to find where the source of the hissing voice is coming from—but he can’t find his doppelganger in this aetherial space, he can only hear the other’s voice—
“See? You can’t even prove it, you’re such a coward! And now you’re running off with someone else and just—”
“Shut up,” he heard himself saying, closing his eyes and trying to pinpoint where the other voice was coming from—had his other!self hidden himself so well he couldn’t find—
“Lots of things happened. I told him—I already made my peace with Mattie.”
“Another Mattie, but not the one you know—”
“Shut. Up!”
Alexei figured, if they were still within the datascape, and if this operated on the same principles as that reverse-isekai series he’d watched, then he could manipulate the entirety of the realm within as long as he had the means to do such a thing—
“You can’t fight if you know what I said is right, can you?”
“You’re me. We are the—the same,” he growled, keeping his eyes closed and just attempting to zone in on the sound of his doppelganger’s voice.
“Liar.”
“I can prove it.”
“How?”
He doesn’t respond to his doppelganger’s voice—at least for a few moments. All it took was the courage—that very same courage he had when the train was screaming down upon them all—for him to take the first move, to take a step forward, as one of his exes had said.
To take one step forward…
“Because I’m you, and at the same time, you’re me.”
Taking another deep breath, he willed himself not to flinch or make a noise as he himself dug his fingers into the skin over his chest, never mind if the pain was absolutely terrible, he was fucking dead anyway—pushing bones apart and just watching as the white space was stained red, red, a deep dark crimson red because of what he was doing—
“You’re the coward.”
How is he even calm when he said those words as he pulled out his own fucking heart again, staring at it in his hands.
“How dare you fucking hide yourself… where it hurts.”
“If you do that you’re going to kill yourself! Aren’t you afraid of death?”
“What’s there to be afraid of? I’m already here. I’ve accepted the fact that this is it.”
Steeling his own nerves, he began to crush the organ in his hands, never mind if he had to swallow down an agonizing scream that was so painful it was ripping him apart, to be doing this, to actually eliminate the source of the—
“You dare?!”
“Yes. I fucking dare,” he hissed through gritted teeth, never mind that his hands were covered in so much blood it was making him absolutely queasy and wanted to faint on the spot.
If he had to do it, then he had to go through with it.
“Go back…to where you belong. In the nothingness.”
A hideous noise ripped through him after that last statement.The next thing he’s aware of is the fact that there’s something in the sky above him, and holy fucking shit, why does he feel like he’s been reamed through a particle disintegrator, each and every singular atom that comprised his entire being flattened, stretched out, and then flattened again before being violently ejected back into the throes of reality.
A faint, distant roaring noise—his Salamence—makes its presence known by landing in front of where he’d fallen. While he’d let Kaida pass, Memo, on the other hand, he would roar
very loudly at, exactly
once, before letting the other man run past him.
The Salamence then rolled his eyes at the cotton-candy unicorn and let out a huff. What the fuck had happened back there?!
The first thing that registered in his tired, absolutely piss-exhausted mind was a pair of arms hugging him, before suddenly backing away and he’s falling back into the sand once again.
The rest of the exchange is missed, but djinni he does
not want to open his eyes because he can feel the beginning of a migraine coming on—and then he feels a lighter touch on his shoulder, and then heard Memo’s voice—pained and destroyed because of something that was
clearly bothering him.
(He didn’t need to open his eyes to know that the other was in obvious distress.)
His first words—well, the first noise that he actually
makes is a coughing noise, and he feels a little trickle of something running down the side of his mouth, warm and wet and
definitely smelling of iron.
“I…I think…we need to go to the hospital,” he gasped, feeling something sticky bubbling up in his mouth before it popped quietly.
He was… absolutely sure it was
blood, the stench was something that had indelibly burned into his olfactories since time immemorial.
“N-n-now,” he continued, because ow, ow, ow, fucking shit, ow, ow,
ouch the pain his body was going through was now belatedly catching up to him and the sensory overload was starting to get to him again.
If Memo was quick on his feet, he’d recognize the
signs.
•
deleted, done and out• has a fight scene with his own doppelganger trying to destroy him not physically, but mentally and emotionally
•
guess how that went• next thing he remembers is appearing on the beach, lying in the sand and tilted on one side before Kaida finds him first and hugs him
• Alexei’s brain is making AOL dialup noises because he’s not fully there yet, at least mentally
• physically: there’s a new scar on his chest right where his heart is; mentally: anything that happened
after the train came screaming down at them is
not there up until the point before he got erased
• so yes he’s
not coming out of this 100% whole
