Prompt: "No squealing, remember that it's all in your head."
There was something decidedly wrong about the ease with which he felt himself slipping under, but he couldn't bring himself to care; the water was cool, passing through his fingers quickly, pulling and pushing to create a fantastically wrong pressure in the back of his brain.
Ah, there it was. The reason he should be worrying. Cleansing, clinging, choking – warm sky replaced by cool, bitter ocean. Sky to ocean, tower to island, windmill to submarine.
Bright and fierce and warm to dull, cold, alone. He noticed a lot of things - more than anyone would have given him credit for. There was a crack now, a rip; they lost a ghost, a girl, a grown man. The demon and the dazed one remain; back to the beginning, except wrong, different. One trapped, the other dissatisfied.
Something dark, darker than the surrounding abyss, filtered into his poor vision and the burn in his throat was joined by a feral, fearful cry that begged for air. A monstrous beast made of teeth and tail sped toward him after months of lying in wait. His lips contorted into a wry, gap-toothed grin; he really was dead weight. His brain pulsed in his skull, his train of thought more skewed and rapid than ever before thanks to an utter lack of everything.
And then it all came rushing back. The calloused hands of his jailor brought him up with a splash, tossed him away with a snarl, locked him in with a scowl. The curtain was gone and the eye stared inward, unrelenting; somehow, he found himself glaring back, only slightly less perturbed than before, but with more understanding that he couldn't quite explain.
After all, he always had a knack for mucking things up just before they got brilliant.
