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Something heavy as sin brews in the depths of Tatsuya’s body, borrowed though it is, swelling more and more greedily with leeched grief the longer his invading consciousness lingers on This Side.
Wiping strands of saliva away with his leather sleeve and stumbling away from the alley corner where he began vomiting, dark spots diffuse in his cloudy vision like festival fireworks, practically collapsing against a wall when his head floods with overwhelming static from how fast he hauled himself upright. What crawled up his throat with wheezing coughs moments ago leaves his tongue stained by unmistakable malice, an endless stream of tasteless thickness depositing far more pitch-black paste than a human stomach could ever store. Though the substance stretches itself into tiny half-formed fingers as inept feelers grasping for light, Tatsuya crushes them underneath desperate swallowing and the involuntary gnashing of his teeth, finally finding stability in the nearest solid surface he can reach without looking.
“You..!” Growling instinctively, his laboured breathing comes hot against the cool night air awash with the beating of soft rain and cars passing what seems like a thousand miles away. He refuses to actualize Nyarlathotep with a place on his bitten lips, refuses to recognize what churning mucous and chyme breed now on the asphalt amongst mankind’s filth of neon signs and drain pipes, refuses to award Him any satisfaction beyond a heartbeat’s hammering and simple venom spat through grit teeth. “What did you do?!”
The answer rolls in like summer thunderclouds overhead, riding the howling wind alongside fog off the mountains at sunset or mist on the harbour at dawn, a subtle rumbling and whistling winding through this concrete labyrinth towards the half-human trapped inside. Goosebumps prickle across Tatsuya’s arms when Apollo tenses with fear, prey attuned to the presence of predators, seeing vividly those familiar glowing eyes bearing into his hunched back despite Tatsuya keeping his own gaze on the pavement and Persona buried within. “Don’t tell me you’ve grown forgetful, Singularity.. or are you simply choosing not to remember?”
As if Nyarlathotep would ever let him forget. How could he even let himself forget, masochist that he is?
In the abandoned subway tunnels winding beneath Sumaru City, Tatsuya only half-consciously finds himself lagging behind the rest of the party. In the next moment, echoing the outcome of countless battles he adapted to navigating just fine alone, he finds himself in the company of a demon he's struck down and that aching, marrow-deep hunger growing harder to neglect.
Creamy off-white fat squeezes out from under Tatsuya’s chewed fingernails burrowing deep into the demon’s tender exposed underbelly, aching muscles imbued with the unmatched strength and unprecedented desperation of Nyarlathotep’s endless starvation writhing in the pit of his altered stomach like molten lead, slimy leech of a brand squirming on his arm as it burns. Even raw muscle smears over his wrists with the heat from bygone flames, strands of meat unwinding in thick threads from stony ribs draped around its abdominal cavity, precious sustenance that he can’t resist ripping chunks out of and raising to his bitten lips.
“Starving, weren’t you?” Nyarlathotep’s purring glides among the ringing in his ears like velvet, a hand that almost isn’t there settling between his shoulderblades to rub tight, soothing circles. As if forever drunk and only now aware, he chokes without warning on the stench of rust painting his gums and strips of flesh bound to his teeth, gagging up shredded bits mixed with stomach acid in shock. The monster simply snickers, every delighted syllable like cannon shots inside Tatsuya’s head. “Go on. Satisfy yourselves.”
A strained noise bubbles up through the bile in his throat, a fragmented stop or no or any of the other little useless prayers he hides under like bed covers, soaked hands trembling from adrenaline rising out of the mush he kneels before and smearing syrupy dark fluid on bright leathers. Squeezing deep breaths in and out of his throat, the gagging subsides faster than expected, that heavy mass settling in the pit of his stomach as he shifts. What disgusts him more than anything is just that, how instantly accustomed this nearly identical body to his own to an act so unthinkable, evil only possibly produced by an entity undeniably human but unburdened by humanity determined to learn how far a doll can stretch before breaking entirely. He shakes his hanging head weakly, only managing one word. “Leave..”
“Leave, Singularity?” Those thin fingers trail all the down his spine before departing, savouring every inch of their toy’s physical existence. For the first time, that revolting imitation enters Tatsuya’s field of vision from the waist down, gesturing broadly to the mess he’s made for emphasis. “In nature, the strong devour the weak. Surely it’s only proper for me to claim what’s mine as well.”
Struggling to stand by pushing off his knee, Tatsuya stumbles immediately, pins and needles rushing through his skull until he’s caught by a dozen dark hands and brought to rest against a wall where he coughs up phlegm and weak-willed resistance. “I’m not yours..!”
“You’re so confident merely because humans raised you?” Nyarlathotep’s sickening smile as if He’s already won meets Tatsuya’s determined eyes, hands stuffed in His pockets casually. “I can’t imagine what you’d consider that precious Jun of yours, then.”
With buckling knees from disorienting nausea, the weighted lumps in his stomach tie him to the ground pathetically, dripping blood mingling with moist, dark soil. Tears pricking at the edge of his burning eyes, he shouts aimlessly and pointlessly, barking when all hope for biting is lost. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
“Another contradiction. On your own, without connections, what difference is there between you and an animal?” Shadows encroach on the edges of his blurring vision, an endless impenetrable darkness swallowing even the gas lamps lining the unfinished subway walls. His locked muscles barely twitch, no longer obedient to anything living. “Relax. Stay where you belong, Singularity. Strays need owners, don’t you think?”
“Stop it..!” A useless plea slips out from Tatsuya’s collapsed lungs like a final gasp for air, every neuron buried under branded skin frothing with desperation to escape and finding no release as Nyarlathotep’s presence relentlessly pins him down. Lithe blackened hands, impossibly porcelain-smooth and deft with a million years of experience, creep out of the nearby void in confidence of its prey’s paralysis, a swarm of spiders curled around his ankles and crawling up his jacket sleeves, single-minded in their shared goal of swallowing him whole. Not a single muscle in Tatsuya’s body functions enough to do anything more than choke on underground miasma and childish terror. “Stop, no, I can’t- please not again- no no not again-”
A deafening shot rings out through the corridor, a revolver’s bullet meeting its match with something metal and disintegrating a mere meter from Tatsuya’s frantic glancing. All at once waking from a nightmare, both the darkness and its hands slink back into intangibility, his restored vision revealing the entire world bloated with still not enough light to feel truly safe in. Blinking after an eternity with stinging strain and unfurling sore, filthy fingers from the muddy clay upon which he sits, he’s so overwhelmed with the long-sought ability to finally move that only Apollo’s alertness at an approaching familiar resonance forces him back to reality. Dazed half-unconscious, still soaked with blood unfamiliar and gorged on flesh inhuman, only survival instinct manuevers his fatigued body to clumsily pry his sword from where it’s wedged between the demon’s ribs, unwilling to fight yet forever unable to refuse. Twirling lazily to meet the approaching footsteps of what he can only assume to be one of Tatsuzou’s footsoldiers, his eyes lock onto the distant figure with a flicker of withering determination but then suddenly widen, focus lost in his shock. “Niisan?”
“Tatsuya?” Katsuya’s response echoes down the hall, feverishly examining their dimly lit space for what he’s certain he saw the moment before he fired. Securing the area is the first step of any criminal investigation, he remembers, though something bitter lingers in his throat upon realizing he defaults to that above anything else. Confusion and worry pitches his voice high, as always terrorized by what he doesn’t understand. “This.. you were.. that was a demon just now, wasn’t it?!”
“Dealt with it..” Tatsuya’s typical dismissal comes on cue, ripping his head in the opposite direction as if the weight of a gaze would defile this brother no longer his own. The blood coating his clothing and little visible skin fades to the back of his mind, normalized by its excess and insignificant in the face of his family. “I’m.. ‘s fine..”
“W-what’s wrong? Are you hurt?” Quickly holstering his service weapon, Katsuya rushes over to his side, scanning his trembling frame for any signs of a wound yet unable to differentiate one mass of red from another. One unsteady hand hovers over Tatsuya’s shoulder, always seeming a little higher off the ground than last time, his instincts to protect and fix as he always has warring with a strange new gut sense of alienation and repulsion. He instead pivots to frantically searching his blazer pockets, including the secret ones he’s sewn in the inner lining. “Th-there’s- I’m not carrying anything, but Amano-kun has medicine..”
(what’s the matter? it’s not as if we haven’t done this before. aren’t you humans meant to be adaptable? rattling his eardrums at silky smooth frequencies audible only to inhumans alongside apollo’s quiet apologies to master for its capacity to listen)
“N-no, don’t-” Tatsuya lurches away in an unconscious, pathetic attempt to flee from the presence of her name, sword clatters on the ground. A dull pain begins building in the pit of his stomach like a wave rolling into harbour, both arms wrapped around his abdomen failing to keep himself from falling to his knees, half-collapsed against the nearest wall for support. He forces a pathetic plea out into the empty space ahead of him, one Katsuya isn’t sure is really meant for him at all. “Don’t look, please-”
(swearing to cut ties but scared of drawing their ire.. another contradiction one hand clamped so tight over his mouth his lungs fill with skin and a thousand more heavy on his limbs to stuff his pores with seeping filth piling secrets on secrets. how long do you intend to hide from yourself?)
Horrible confused grief churns in the pit of Katsuya’s soul, longing to reach out yet failing out of cowardice as he has so many times before. A changeling slipped into his brother’s place to leave a great gaping hole where all of what he knew Tatsuya as was, a gap of raw pulsing insides only identifiable by its outline in scarred skin and cooling gore and now heaving shoulders. Terror seizes him, knowing something of such profound depth and majesty without knowing what to do about it, and the winding catacombs grow nearly silent with his inability to speak or breathe or fix as he always should.
(if you’re too scared, i’ll just have to inform them myself! don’t you think they deserve to know the truth, at least? barbed teeth scraping against his carotid, boiled nerves screaming where the aorta branches out, deboned arms pinned like a mounted butterfly you wonder just as much as i do what they’d think if they saw you like this)
“Velvet Room.” Tatsuya manages with sudden, icy clarity, and within the next moment his entire world spirals down into everlasting darkness. This has nothing to do with the real world, and neither does he. Not anymore.
Tatsuya learned well from Kandori’s laboratory that Nyarlathotep’s pestilence would not obey human medicine. Igor agreed with the sentiment, or so he’s told upon awakening on a thin futon in Baofu-san’s lair. Confused, temporarily forgetful and ashamed, he ventures, “How much time do we have left?”
What might as well be his brother answers. “There will be enough.”
For a moment, the inevitability of falling on his sword, of reliable steel ravaging his soft underbelly, seems like a thing of the future his Other Side self thought he’d never reach. Only now the pain seems to slough off like rotten tissue, just as his warped countenance must return to dust after accomplishing its mission. If fate truly clamours for such an outcome, then he’d like nothing else more than to meet it halfway.