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You’ve never felt the transfer before. Until the Ninth dragged your consciousnesses forward, you were always too fuzzy to. It feels like…
Maybe it’s just the kind of thing your heart is looking for in this moment, but it reminds you of this thing Yoichi had once described from one of the Captain Hero series. The way a specific kind of alien teleportation tech works. It takes its characters and pulls their molecules out into long, thin streams, never ceasing to be what they are, but untangled and reformed, sent at speeds a whole body couldn’t withstand and then re-knit together. It feels kind of like that.
Back when you died, you wouldn’t say your entire life flashed before your eyes, you just were struck by things like that. The hand tightened around your neck and you lost air, and you just remembered other, kinder ways you’d once let your people steal your breath. You always do this, it looks like, approaching all your deaths.
You re-form in some kind of earthquake. In a stranger’s heart, with your thoughts warring and jostling against his. This, you do remember from other transfers. This is the same, if ten times more antagonistic. Neither you nor Tomura are ready for you to be here. Like you’re jostling for real estate, but he can’t unseat you.
The fight is going to be significantly harder to watch from in here than it was inside from the Ninth’s mind and body. You can tell that already. Yoichi had laid out the full landscape for all of you and chosen something no larger than a room, and that had worked well. This is scattered, scattered almost as badly as when Yoichi was first trying to reach out to the boy at all. The ground feels like it’s going to shift under your feet.
Sometimes, the landscape here lurches, and it must be something outside.
There is a hiss of breath to your side. You spin on your heel, preparing for a fight. It’s Hikage.
There’s a devastation in his eyes, before there’s even a hint of a question behind them. And then there’s distance— as he unfocuses from here and tries to refocus on what’s happening outside.
“It’s not over,” you find yourself saying quickly.
His jaw tightens, and he nods.
“You came over here alone,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Hide, then,” says Hikage, and his eyes dart around himself, around this melding of memories you’ve all found yourself between. Every time the space experiences a lurch or shudder, Hikage winces. Danger Sense, you recognize.
Briefly, you recognize one of the memories surrounding you as one of yours— the street you grew up on, and then it's gone, engulfed by city. Somewhere behind you, a flicker of lighting, a voice, there is briefly the day you met Bruce. It’s gone by the time you turn around, not sustained by the landscape here.
When you turn back around, you’re almost surprised to find Hikage still looking at you— some unconscious part of you must have expected him to have already taken his own advice and disappeared into the woodwork. Instead, he’s still here, and he says, “Are you going to be alright, Leader?”
A strange moment. You’ve heard that title out of that mouth before, but you were something too fuzzy, back then, to actually have a memory of it. It’s deja vu, something your ghost knows but you don’t. It’s that he used to call Bruce that.
You grin; small, not even wholly voluntary. Nice, though. “We’re already ghosts.”
“I know that,” he says, with a solemn smile of his own. “But our work isn’t done.”
“I’ll make myself scarce.”
“That’s good. All For One is here,” he warns. He does it without elaboration, a fact that all of you definitely already know and that there’s no way in hell he believes you’ve forgotten. You haven’t paid attention to the way Hikage looks at you until this moment— there’s been so much going on, and there hasn’t been any reason to. It’s essentially the same way he looks at Yoichi, though.
You might both already be dead, but he’s also right in front of you, and you’re reminded of how readily he did this once before. How abruptly. So you lay a hand on his shoulder.
He stops looking so young, when you do. You hadn’t even— hadn’t even noticed that, still don’t know whether you’re talking about the physical look of his ghost or the expression on his face. You should at least be able to ask yourself were the scars there, a moment ago? but everything is dreamlike here and you have better battle instincts than that (it’s not important right now).
He darts left. You go right.
LadyoftheNight Sun 18 Feb 2024 06:57PM UTC
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CompilingYesterdays Sun 18 Feb 2024 07:19PM UTC
Last Edited Sun 18 Feb 2024 07:20PM UTC
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