Damon was still sitting in the dark bathroom. Light reflected through the glass of the room's window, but Damon only sat with his head buried in his forearms and his legs pulled up tight to his chest.
He sighed once and rested the back of his head on the door, looking up at the royal ceiling.
His muscles twitched, still burning from the aftershocks of his purge, but the silence in the room felt achier than the pain. Damon finally forced himself to stand and came out of the bathroom, walking slowly. He opened the creakless door and saw Daichi still sleeping soundly, almost snoring.
He proceeded to use his warm duvet to cover the dog. With a slouched posture and a hollow expression, he took two pillows and placed them on opposite ends of Daichi, like two pillars preventing him from rolling over. He also put one beneath the hound's head, though his arms still hesitated in movement.
He didn't know his own body had shifted as he reluctantly sat down on the edge of his bed, and his face fell into his hands with his eyes sealed tightly as he squeezed them shut.
He almost gritted his teeth, but he released a tight sigh instead and looked up with slightly watery eyes with a sniff. The Chosen One could use a hug right now, but the only one he got was the tightness around his neck, like innocent heavy razors hugging his throat.
Damon wiped his eyes and walked slowly to flick the switch reluctantly. He walked calmly to the windows but looked out from his balcony slightly longer at the lights outside, shortly noticing the silence that accompanied them. He looked down and gently closed them shut, as if in fear of slamming them.
He then went to his royal couch and wrapped some sheets around himself as he slept on his side, leaving the bed for his sleepy bond.
His phone lay under him; he shifted and took it, bringing it up to his face and seeing his own reflection inside it slightly. Within that minute, he shortly remembered looking into a school mirror a day after his mother faked her death. His face looked completely blank, stripped of any colour, with heavy dark circles under his eyes.
Then… his memory warped, shifting from the mirror as if bleeding into another day.
The Dawn of the Eight remembered staring into a puddle beneath him. He remembered sitting under a red-petalled tree when Natsuki visited him in concern. He remembered the twist of her face when he confessed to his mother's passing. He remembered handing her an umbrella and remembered rejecting her request to walk home with him.
The memory flicked in his mind, then dissolved, leaving him staring right back at the dark glass of his phone. The heavy silence of the palace pressed down on him again, but he just watched his own reflection in the dim light.
The heaviness of her presence in his mind was like a heavy blanket, but the absence of her in the present was an open wound.
Damon closed his eyes, and a slow, involuntary thought surfaced:
'I'd pushed her away back then. But... right now... I'd give anything... just to hear her tell me it's okay. Yet… I'm the one failing her. I'm the one... making her wait.'
The tear he wiped from his face slid down from a single eye.
He opened his eyes now and stared at his reflection in the phone screen. The layout of his room was entirely silent, caught in an absolute stillness. Then the realization dropped like a lead weight.
'To make matters worse… I've got a body that—' he scoffed and shifted, so he lay on his other side. 'I've got a body that grows.'
He breathed a shaky breath, and his mind moved to a different memory, the aftermath of his first purge.
How he sat up on the hospital bed and watched his sister, his mother, and Daichi hold heavy, grim looks of worry for him on their faces. He remembered as if he could see his own face, the way his mouth was left sadly agape when he heard the words Tolrex hesitated to speak. Even his own brain struggled to form them, but somehow... he heard the words, the sentence that didn't just change his life but now controlled it:
"You're growing, Prince Damon. That's the problem."
He heard another of Dr Tolrex's words like a flash of thunder: "Your body is a cup, but your growth is an ocean."
And Damon, as if wanting to block the thoughts quickly, turned on his phone and put his earpods into his ears. The song "505 by Arctic Monkeys" loomed in front of him, and his finger was an inch from clicking it, yet a thought remained:
'Don't think much about it... It's just growth.'
And he clicked it. He gently put down his phone beside him and embraced the warmth of the music.
Then, he imagined Natsuki sleeping right beside him soundly with her mouth slightly open, and her head on the couch's armrest, and slowly, the imagination calmed his mind as he gently closed his eyes.
MULTIVERSE: EARTH
Natsuki lay on her bed in her room as she slept on her side, with an unfinished painting standing in the far corner. In her mind, her head was warped by a dream.
She was practicing basketball shots in the school gym, and Damon stood beside her, counting her goals and misses. Like a sped-up video, her eyes, which were fixed on his side profile in admiration, shifted to her gaze dropping to raw marks on his arms, and the irritation her face once held vanished.
"Has he been hitting you?" she asked.
"Yeah… but I'm fine," the skinnier Damon replied, the version of him that was always a prince but had never known it.
"You're not fine." Natsuki stepped closer, looking straight at him as she grabbed his arm to get a better look. "Huh... You've been dull in class, eating lunch alone on the roof. At least that's what you've been telling me, 'cause you don't look like you eat well. I'm trying to help you."
"I said I'm fine," he said, pulling his arm away.
"No." She stepped closer with a trembling voice, "You don't get to give me attitude. It's been six months since the funeral, Damon. I've been there, even while losing someone too."
His breath caught, "What do you mean?" he asked quietly.
She swallowed hard, turned her face, and scoffed lightly.
"What do I mean...? My dad's got Alzheimer's," she said, her voice breaking. "You'd have known if you'd been there… You barely even look at me sometimes. I'm your best friend."
"Natsuki, I'm so—"
"Don't bother." She swung her bag over her shoulder but turned to look at him over the same shoulder, "You'd rather bury it than talk about it. I'm not even talking to you about my problems. I'm trying to get you to talk to me, and you still won't."
She walked off, and Damon stood alone in the gym, staring at the floor.
Her eyes opened from the dream, and she paused for a second. At the realisation that the dream was a year-old memory, her face darkened sadly, and she gently pulled her sheets to herself as she remembered her own words: "Kinda used to your crappy apologies," the words she said to Damon as they walked from her front door a year ago, and he apologised to her.
'He probably doesn't even remember. Maybe he does, but he probably remembers me walking away… when I should have stayed.'
The thought of it still made her heart ache like the pinching pain of after-burns, somehow matching the cold silence of her room. A form of sharp worry gripped her chest out of nowhere as a terrifying thought dropped into her mind:
'I should have asked him. It's been a few days since his last purge. Does that mean... he's having one... right now?'
She paused for a while and looked at the moon outside her window, then she gently pulled her pillow closer to herself.
"Being afraid of something you don't know... the fear itself is so scary. But, I hope I'm wrong. I really do hope I'm wrong."
She remembered walking out of the gym again.
"Still, I should have stayed with him when it happened... He's okay though... Damon is okay. If he's not..."
She remembered holding him in her arms on her birthday, the absolute terror of plummeting through the freezing air after the purge tore through his body mid-flight. She remembered him crashing face-first into the snow, his blood splattering her sleeves as her tears fell onto his glowing, convulsing face to heal his wounds, and the way her embrace seemed to soothe the ache.
She could still feel the soft weight of his head resting on her lap on that park bench, her hand desperately threading through his hair to calm him while he gasped for air in the quiet snow.
'I promised us that I'd protect his heart, but if something's wrong with him right now... how am I supposed to do that when I can't even see him?'
She paused for a while; the only response to her question was the creak of her door and the rustle of her curtains.
'Be okay, Damon. Please,' she thought, her eyes squeezed shut in a tight squeeze. 'I'm sorry I can't be there.'
Then the AI Damon had given her warped right in front of her, but Natsuki remained unfazed. Luma (HOSHI—3) noticed Natsuki's eyes and tilted its head to the left. Then slowly... it floated upwards gently.
The optical lens made a faint digital hum, and a projection of Damon sleeping on his side formed right next to Natsuki. It was a fabricated projection, a fake projection, and a bitter imitation of the true person she adored. Yet, it was the closest to Damon she could have.
Natsuki's breath hitched softly at the projection of Damon, and she looked at his face, a generated projection of him sleeping peacefully. She tried to touch it, but her fingers slipped through like an attempt to catch air.
She tried again, this time hovering her hand right over Damon's cheek, and she swallowed as a single tear gathered at the corner of her eye.
She looked up to Luma, the AI, and asked, "Luma... what are the chances he's having a purge?"
The floating AI paused for a moment, then beside it, a number hurriedly sped up from -1 to 0. It climbed to 32%, and Natsuki's heartbeat thumped as if in hope that it would stop. It kept on climbing till it reached 81% and Natsuki's breath hitched, then the climbing of numbers slowed, and it reached 86%... and at a time Natsuki thought it'd paused, it turned 87%.
Natsuki's eyes turned hopeless, and she shifted closer so that her pillow was in the very projection, and she hugged the pillow. From above, it would look like she was hugging a pillow, but around that pillow, there was a projection of Damon.
"He's fine," she whispered into the pillow helplessly. "He's fine."