A/N: This is a TUE canon divergent fic I've had on the brain for actual years now, but I only sat down to work on it for the July '16 Camp NaNo. There's quite a bit roughed out but due to the nature of time travel fic updates will still be fickle. Warning for body horror, but that's the norm for my stuff haha. Title comes from Nine Inch Nails' "While I'm Still Here."
There's pain- hot and sharp, white hot metal burning a hole through the most intimate parts of him. A grilled meat smell. A coppery citrus smell. Dirt and concrete dust and sweat slicking down his skin in gray smears, stinging in shallow scrapes from when he'd been tossed like a dirty rag.
There's horror- his own face leering down at him, twisted by death and insanity, the features just warped enough to catch a glimpse of his future self's other half. Red eyes blazing with hatred and an awful, ugly satisfaction. A fist punched clean through his chest. Blinding green light. Sharp, cruel fingers digging past his ribs, scrabbling and shoving into his heart, his core, into the very things that make him him.
There's fear- not for himself, no, he's got a bad habit of thoughtless self-sacrifice and he knows it. He fears for his friends, his family, for every human out there now, in a future some version of him never got to see, and then, in his present. If he fails here, if he dies- what happens to them?
There's himself- hanging bonelessly from the huge, hard hand of his future. It's him on either side of this hopelessly one-sided fight, it's just little human him staring blearily across ten years and seeing a monster wearing his colors and a rot-green mask of his face. He doesn't have teeth like a snarling baboon though, or a voice that can tear down the only home he's ever known, reduce it to so much rubble. Not yet, anyway.
It is so hard to breathe.
His future self's grin peels wider. There's too many teeth sprouting from wax-white gums, the long tongue obscenely red. Monstrous, that's the only word for this thing rummaging through his organs. That wide mouth moves. Words trickle to his ears from a long way off, a threat that can't touch him so far down. His vision is starting to fade. Hearing's nearly gone too. He's passing out, an all too familiar occurrence in his life. It's happened plenty of times before, but not… nothing quite like this. There'd been no gristle crunch of bone, no bright spurt of blood or ectoplasm, no brutal punch or landing that filled his eyes with stars and painted his skin black and blue. Even still, he thinks-
The ghost's bloody eyes widen in unmistakable shock. He's falling? No, dropped. The hand in his chest catches on something inside him with a nauseating tug before popping free. He hits the asphalt, the impact jarring but painless, or at least it doesn't hurt any more than the inferno eating up his chest. Somehow, that's getting worse, and he can't muster the air to scream again. He thinks-
Pain.
Twitching. Scrabbling against the asphalt, against the monster's shins, all of his muscles trying to crawl off of his bones and away from the medallion burning up his core, his heart.
He thinks-
A weight in his chest, an incredible pressure. Cracking noises, like broken pencils, or bubble wrap. His ribs. His ribs are yawning wide, ripping muscle and splitting skin, he can feel it, oh god he can feel it. Dirty wind rushing through unspeakable places inside of him. The song of a vast, lonely bell. Cold.
He thinks something has gone very wrong.