The faint hiss of my breath through my clenched jaw was the only thing keeping me conscious.
It hurt.
My body was hurting, terribly. The pain was uncontrollable, and I could feel my blood boiling under my skin,
It hurts so bad.
my muscles screaming with every spasm,
It's too painful.
my joints and nerves all felt like they were about to break, to explode.
It was all I could think about, all I could feel, this pain.
I didn't know how much time had passed, my mind bathed in a blur of suffering, as if I were living in some kind of sick dream.
The man's cold voice sounded in his usual cold tone. It was blurred and distorted in my ears just as his body was in my eyes.
"Congratulations 37, you've passed the most sensitive part of the infusion" He stepped forward with his usual calm, hands behind his back, his voice sounding like a gentle slap but even that was torture for my senses.
He surely knew that but didn't care any more than that, so he resumed.
"Now let's begin the final phase." He had brought some kind of transfusion device out from behind his curtain and was bringing it closer to me as he went.
He grabbed violently at my still shackled hand. I tried to struggle, but he held it still with no problem.
He placed a treble into it, pushed it brutally in and connected it to a tube attached to a balloon full of a bright emerald-green liquid that began to flow towards my body.
He patted the device with false tenderness, his voice taking on a pained tone.
"This second injector will stabilize the essence and for that you need to go to sleep so see you in a few hours..." He headed for the door of the room and just before stepping out he added, "if you survive, of course."
He passed through the door, without further ado, leaving me alone with my thoughts... and the pain.
Then, slowly, I felt the liquid begin to diffuse through me. It wasn't fire like before. It was... something else.
An icy sensation. Visceral. A sweet poison.
And then, nothing.
No more burning, no more cold, no more pain.
My mind sank.
Into the void of a vast night sky, a void like the one in my dream.
But this void wasn't the same, it wasn't as terrifying, it felt liberating as when I/the man arrived there, after my/ his death.
It was a strange sensation, but I didn't hate it; it was a kind of familiarity, like being at home.
The silence didn't feel heavy, it was almost soothing.
The universe around me was an ocean of frozen stars, suspended in a motionless eternity. I floated in the middle, weightless, painless, fearless and sad. I just existed.
A movement caught my eye. In this frozen world, it was impossible - and yet. A tremor in the air, or in what took the place of air. Like an invisible breath wrinkling the surface of the void around me.
Then a light appeared, over there, on the horizon. Tiny at first, like a solitary star. Then it slowly grew into a silhouette.
It moved forward unhurriedly, bathed in a pale halo that faded as it progressed. In the end, all that remained was a faint glimmer. A child.
He looked to be eight or nine years old. His skin was matte, and his light-brown hair fell in messy locks over his shoulders. He walked with unearthly ease across this groundless nothingness. His features were disturbingly beautiful: too pure, almost unreal. Feminine. Untouchable.
But what struck me were her eyes. Amber eyes with fine pupils, cutting through the half-light like those of a feline. They glowed faintly, as if catching the light of an invisible world.
A scar crossed his left eyebrow, barely concealed by his bangs. He wore a long, simple white shirt, floating around his legs. And he had...
He had my face.
The more I looked at him, the more obvious it became. This being looked exactly like me. But it wasn't me. There was... something else. An infinite distance in his eyes. A wisdom that wasn't human.
I froze. My body - no, my consciousness - instinctively tensed. He hadn't done anything aggressive. He hadn't said anything. But I was wary of him. I knew him. He was acting as if... in my dream.
When he was a few meters away from me - or at least what seemed like a distance in this void - his voice rose. Soft. Grave. Without echo, yet everywhere at once.
[You're here at last.]
My heart missed a beat. That voice... It wasn't human. It vibrated inside me, resonated in my bones, in my memory, in something older than myself.
I shouldn't stay here. I've got to get away.
I wanted to step back, to speak, to scream. But I had no mouth. I had no legs. I was just a suspended spirit, offered up.
[It's strange,] he continued with almost divine gentleness. [There seems to have been a problem with the descent of your soul.]
He smiled slightly, and that expression filled me with terror. It wasn't a human smile. It was a smile of cold understanding. Detachment.
[How are you, *****?]
He said a name. A forgotten name. Torn from reality. My stomach knotted. That word... That name... It didn't belong to me. And yet it vibrated inside me like a truth denied.
I felt a dull anger come over me, without knowing why. A deep anger, born of an ancient place.
My mouth suddenly formed, in this dream or mental space. And the words came out without me even thinking them:
"How can you ask me that?! It's your fault!"
My voice trembled. Broken. Foreign. The words weren't really mine.
"Why?! Why didn't you just leave me alone?!"
He looked at me blankly. Then he tilted his head slightly, as if contemplating a child throwing a tantrum.
I continued, panting:
"If you're powerful enough to bring me back to life..." My voice was both pleading and accusatory. "Why didn't you bring me back to the past? I could have saved them..."
There was a long silence.
Her eyes darkened for a moment, as if a mist passed through them.
[I have no authority over time.]
He said these words with such simplicity... As if it were just a fact, a detail.
[And even if I'd had it, that's not how the story was supposed to go.]
I wanted to scream. To hit him. Run away. But I was frozen in space, trapped by his words, by that light, by... him.
I don't get it.
I don't understand anything.
My mind was shattered into fragments. Like a shattered mirror whose reflections showed me things I'd never experienced. Or never remembered. Nameless faces, muffled screams in the night, the smell of ashes and blood.
And him... this double, this thing, this me from somewhere else, talking as if it were all normal. As if I was supposed to know. As if it all made sense.
But I didn't know. I was lost.
"I... I don't understand," I whispered. My voice was hoarse, uncertain. "Why do you have my face? What are you?"
He stared at me for a long time, without blinking. His head tilted slightly to one side, his gaze filled with a mixture of amusement and... sadness?
[I'm you, of course] he replied calmly.
"That's not true."
My answer came. It was a lie. An instinct. I knew it was a lie. I knew it wasn't true. He wore my looks, but he wasn't me.
"You're something else."
A silence. Then a smile. A smile so calm it sent a chill down my spine.
[You're not ready, Abel.]
"Not ready for what?!" My voice broke again. I could feel the tears welling up without being able to cry them.
"Why is everything so... fuzzy? Why am I feeling things that don't belong to me? Why do I feel like I've been here before? To have seen you before?!"
Him, still. Silent. Like a divine statue in an abandoned temple.
[Because that's how it is, I'm sorry].
"It was you who brought me here, it was you who did everything and now you say that ?!"
I felt a pain, a hatred I couldn't even hope to understand, and the next thing I knew, I was back in the room, the bed, the chains and the empty balloon.