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The worst was the feeling.
It was in the gloom. In the ache eating it's way through his skin, his muscles, his bones. In the serrated chill living in his morrow. It was in the terrible knot in his gut that's been there since hands closed around his throat and a voice screamed Run.
The eerie crawling sense of familiarity, writhing just beneath the skin like an infection, threatening to rupture. It pulsed in his skull along with his blood, twinning in a nauseating tandem with the rocking and creaking of the ship.
He'd tried to keep track of time based on the muffled sounds of activity that carried from up deck, but the fog in his head mixed everything into an indistinct slurry. He didn't know anymore if it was due to the lack of food and sleep or a blow too many to the head. His tired eyes yearned to close, but he knew he couldn't let them. They might be back at any time, with their loud, mocking voices and their curling brands and the burning, ripping pain.
He'd been chained up here in the dark like he was just another one of Simon's acquisitions, waiting to be delivered to its master. The swaying row of lamps cast the hold in a murky, sallow light, turning the misshapen stacks of crates into eldritch figures of nightmare, looming over him darkly. In the guttering, dingy glow, shadows seemed to take on a life of their own, like restless souls bound to their tombstones, trashing in chains.
Among them, a single beating heart and sluggish panting breaths, he felt little more than a vengeful spirit himself, body both his tomb and his prison. All those months on the run, with not a moment of peace, all those gut-wrenching questions, churning in him unanswered. It was growing in him, something like helplessness, like fear, like anger, a deep feeling of suffocation, of being trapped, at the end of his road. Was this truly how it ended? Was there nothing else he could do? Were all of his efforts and pain worthless in the face of one man's power and wealth?
His thoughts kept slipping in and out of reality, jumping from the farthest edges of his body to the most obscure niches of his mind, like one fighting for air in raging waters. The relentless dizzy ebbing dredged the turbid depths to the surface while pulling his awareness underneath, until the flesh and the spirit were so tightly entangled, he could no longer tell which part of him felt.
And it was there that he could almost touch it, in the space between thought and sensation, something almost like memory, or like a dream he knew he'd had but couldn't grasp. It was a humming in the roots of his teeth, a ringing in his head, something seeping through his chest and pumping through his veins. It was an oozing, gaping wound, a pain so great his mind chased itself in circles to avoid it, darkness pressing in like a litany of silence in his ear. It was being utterly, completely, painfully alone.
Except he wasn't.
Because something was always there. Something has been there from the very beginning. Like a a heart beating alongside his own, or hearing his echo answer even though he hadn't spoken. Like something snagging onto a corner of his mind and wriggling its way in. It was the feeling of the wintry chill taking over in the wake of the sun fading, of ice coursing through the bed of a creak.
It wasn't ice, thought, it was colder than that. It was fire, fire so cold it burned. It was so close he could almost feel it licking at his gut. Could hear its whisper against the inside of his ribs. Could swallow around it, feeling it sputter in time with his breath and stoking its flame with each shuddering inhale.
And it, like him, wanted—
— wanted to get out.