Chapter Text
The cold shocks him.
Not into clarity, no - only one thing can do that. He thinks. He's pretty sure there's just the one thing, though there could be more, there are many things after all, in general. But this isn't that thing, or any thing close to it.
This is cold.
It rockets up his body, from the base of his form to the top of his cross, and he yelps on instinct, voice muffled even to his own ears, which he doesn't have. His body thrashes, like a worm or perhaps a snake, neither of which are insects technically or at all but he does like them anyway, the way they flip and flop like a Kinger whom the ground has just dropped out from under.
He blinks a few times, eyes stinging, and realizes he's looking up, the sky rippling and crashing above him, a little circle of blurry and blue. It might be the moon, or maybe the sun, massive and jagged and flickering along the edges as it stares back down at him, the sky around it dark and flat, little fuzzy patches of color flitting about as cracks spread across it. Concern floods his body, or maybe that's the cold, and he reaches for the sun-moon, hands moving sluggishly forward until he can grab at the inside edge of it and pull it down, intending to inspect it, because the sun-moon should be circular, not all broken and shattered, spiderwebbing the sky around it.
Well, the spiderwebbing is not the problem. He quite likes spiders, with their so-many legs and their so-many eyes, blinking up at him cheerfully as they crawl and skitter over his hands, gentle and steady. His hands, that are… not moving closer, actually, but further away, as the sun-moon shrinks and the dark sky grows and he seems to get heavier. His robe might have turned to stone, squishy stone, with how heavy and dense it's become, the cold burrowing through the digital fabric like so many termites - except, termites eat wood, and isn't he made of wood? He does wonder what being eaten by termites would feel like, it sounds interesting! Would they appreciate it? Would it hurt? He doesn't particularly enjoy being hurt, but it never lasts for long anyway, so maybe he could let the termites have a bite. Does he have termites at home?
Something floats by his eye, drifting away into the distance, shiny and round and jovial in the way it bobs and bounces, and his mind latches onto it, chest tightening with excitement. Bubble! Bubble might know, he should ask! He opens his mouth, and nothing comes out because he doesn't have one, and more little Bubbles float away into the distance, a cheerful procession as they march along. He watches them go, blinking up at them, wondering where they're headed. Maybe back to Caine, to tell him about how much fun he and his friends are having on his adventures! That would explain why there are more than one. Sometimes Caine needs a little extra help, he thinks. Maybe he can talk to him when they get home from this one.
When are they going home, anyway? He's really not sure, but he thinks maybe it should be soon, because right now he's feeling kind of dizzy. His head is spinning, like he's been on a carousel for a little bit too long, maybe the one back at the Circus, sitting in the sun in the carnival outside. He hasn't been there in a while, but he bets it's warm and dry, and he wonders if his chest wouldn't hurt so much if he was on the carousel instead of here.
Here. Here. Where… where is here?
He blinks again. And again, and a few more times, his eyes burning and stinging with cold, vision blurry and dark, getting - darker? Something darts across his line of sight, and he slowly turns to look at it, and he's too slow to catch a proper glance but he thinks it might've been a fish.
Aren't those usually underwater?
He's pretty sure. He's… kind of sure? Things aren't very usual, in the Circus, and he's fairly certain he's seen fish outside of water before, fish that talked and wore clothes and gave side quests. This fish doesn't talk, though. Or maybe it does and he just can't hear it, can't hear much of anything beside a muffled sort of rushing, bubbling, crashing. His eyes dart back and forth, searching for something, maybe a fish, maybe a friend, maybe a termite or two, and he doesn't find any of those things, or any sort of thing other than dark and Bubbles and a bright little circle high high above, surrounded by blue sky.
Sky. Sky?
Something hits his back. Or, his back hits something, slowly bouncing once before settling against it, body stilling as little particles leap and scatter around him, like gnats, like dust, like sand. They make his eyes sting worse and so he squeezes them shut, and raises a hand to scrub at them, and nothing happens. His hands stay where they are - or, he thinks they do, because he can't feel them. They seem to just be gone, and they've always been detached from his body but now it's like they were never there in the first place, and he thinks that's probably happened before but he's not sure he can be sure about anything, right now.
His chest hurts.
Slowly, he squints his eyes back open.
It's… dark.
It's dark, and he's cold.
Colder than he can remember being in a long time. Cold in a way that seeps into his body, his bones, bringing a deep ache along with it. Cold in a way that rips into his chest, clawing out the breath from the lungs he doesn't have, fighting tooth and nail to make sure nothing gets back in.
His body twitches, the cold leaving him stiff, numb, even as he tries desperately to, to-
The darkness around him begins to recede, light creeping outwards, faint at first, before it starts to grow, chasing the shadows back, sending them skidding away across bumpy terrain and swishing stalks of feathery plant life, illuminating the swirling mites of dust and sand and flotsam around him, and it's here as his own little pocket of sunshine forms down in the deep that he realizes why his chest hurts, why his head is spinning.
He's not breathing.
He feels like that should be a big deal. He's not sure how long he hasn't been breathing, but it's a touch concerning regardless, right? Something must be preventing it. Is it him?
He attempts to take in a breath.
His body jolts, eyes shooting wide in muted fear as his chest stutters and heaves with nothing, nothing. It's like he's being suffocated, like someone vacuum-sealed his chest, like he's been steamrollered until every last gasp of air was forced from his spasming lungs, flattened and soldered shut and burning. It hurts, it hurts, and he squirms and thrashes, sluggish and weak, sending little swirls of dust and sand spiraling into the dark.
Yet breath refuses to come.
He can't keep it up for long - his body stills after a few seconds, twitching intermittently, even as a subdued sort of panic throbs against the back of his eyes, vision blurring no matter how many times he blinks, frantic and afraid. His chest aches, and for the life of him he can't figure out why, or where he is, or why he's so cold-
A muffled crash, a ripple in space, and he directs wide, bulging eyes toward the source, somewhere high above, blotting out the little circle of light against the deep, fractured sky.
A shape. A person, small and lanky and brightly colored, limbs and tail windmilling frantically as pinwheel pupils lock with his own, and he has just enough space left in his increasingly-fuzzy brain to recognize Pomni as she rights herself and begins to kick, cheeks puffed comically outward. Her outfit billows behind her, he thinks, more polygonal fabric than usual, flowy and thick and warm, and he can only half-hope that she's faring much better against the overwhelming cold like that than he is.
She's so small up there, growing gradually larger, even as her face begins to shift in color, blue and green and the rest of the rainbow cycling faster than his double-vision can process, and something fires off in the back of his mind - this feels almost familiar, the phantom grip of a hand clasped in his own, chest bubbling with an overflow of warm, fuzzy feelings that make his digital heart feel close to bursting.
And then-
And then she stops.
She stills, somewhere above him, outstretched hand faltering, eyes beginning to flutter, lips parting just enough for a flurry of little Bubbles to escape, fleeing for the sky, and even in this fuzzy, dizzy state he can't help but worry for her, body jolting weakly, wanting to reach for her and finding himself unable to, chest burning with overlapping aches.
And then he blinks, and she disappears, a blurry red stripe passing over the bright spot of sky above him, the ripples stilling.
His hands might not be the only part of him detached from his body, with how floaty his head is starting to feel.
Vaguely, he wonders if he comes apart, like Zooble. It hasn't happened before, but there's a first time for everything in the Circus, and right now it sure does feel like whatever counts as his head is all set to pluck itself off the rest of him and disappear aimlessly into the sky. The mental image pops into his mind, spotty and half-formed, and his eyes scrunch in woozy amusement at the thought of drifting away, leaving the cold far, far behind. He could catch up with Caine, up there, and they could float around together and laugh and maybe see some nice fluttering bugs, butterflies and bumblebees and dragonflies and oh dear he is very dizzy.
He blinks, one eye at a time, and it takes several seconds longer than it maybe probably should to pry them back open, and his chest doesn't hurt all that much anymore really, and he can barely even feel the cold, and so maybe it's not so bad down-up here as he thought.
His eyelids flutter, dark spots blocking out the glowing light at the edges of his vision, like a growing sort of mold overtaking his sight. Maybe it's a nice mold. Molds can be nice sometimes. He would be okay if it stuck around.
A muffled, rippling crash, high above, barely visible past the mold and the dark and the bright, and he wonders how he's still looking up if he's floating.
He wonders a lot of things, really. Rarely does he get answers. But that's okay.
The new shape is bigger, longer, pinker. Gangly limbs paddle furiously, blurry patches of yellow and purple, one hand clutching that same fuzzy red stripe. His head lulls, vision doubling, tripling, forming shakily back into one as the shape gets bigger, and he feels like he should recognize it but the mold is eating away at his brain, and so he doesn't. He only watches it grow, eyelids twitching, and doesn't think about the empty, aching space where his chest should be, or the limp numbness of his lack of hands, or how heavy his body feels compared to the floaty helium-light delirium of his mold-eaten brain.
His vision is darkening rapidly, blotting out the pink and the red as the shape drifts to a stop above him, square pupils pinprick as they dart over what may or may no longer be his body. One last thing pushes to the forefront of his mind, louder than the mold and the cold and the hurried, frantic whooshing as the shape reaches for him, turns him, red stripes winding around his form.
He feels safe, with this shape here. He doesn't fight the movements, doesn't react to the hand fisting in the back of his sodden robe, even as his sight blacks out completely and something begins to pull.
He just trusts.
And then he doesn't think about much of anything, after that.