Author's Note: This idea had been floating around in my mind, bugging the hell out of me, until I've decided to posted it up in FF. It's posted in dA, where the sucky and unrevised version is, so the good one is here. I hope you guys enjoy it; it's taken me a long time to get back to this one.

Disclaimer: I do not own Dead Space; copyright goes to Visceral Games.

Dead Space: Dementia

I

Dead or Alive?

Whether he was dead or alive... he didn't know.

What he did know was that he'd gotten out of there, that his head was still on his shoulders, that it was all over. He was still breathing; that was all he cared about. No Markers to give importance to, no necromorphs, no Unitology, no hallucinations or visions... nothing. Isaac didn't even care about his own mind in fact, having stopped for a moment to think and let it all go. His sanity had been an unwitting accomplice of all the memories and sensations he was trying to forget. It wasn't on his side anymore. Rationality didn't accompany insane men, no matter how sane they thought themselves to be.

Exhausted, with the low rumble of the shuttle in the background, Isaac fell back against the pilot's seat, finding solace in the functionality of the shuttle's controls. He hadn't even set a course yet. As long as the shuttle drifted away from Aegis7, it was all right; space had been his home almost all his life. And though he'd lived through a blood-filled macabre hell in the pitch-black dark, he had never enjoyed darkness as much as now. Little could he see of the rest of the shuttle, but that didn't matter: what he really wanted to see was space, its stars and galaxies and nebulae; many of its infinite inventory of gems.

All of a sudden a holographic display came up from the projector on his chest, showing him Nicole's weary visage as she started speaking. How many times had he already watched her recording? How many times had he already heard her trembling voice, looked into her lackluster and darkened eyes? For a moment, Isaac wished she was there. Her ultimate fate was unknown to Isaac so far and one part of his mind theorized she could've very well become a necromorph... or was there an even worse fate than that? What fate worse than that one could befall someone? Death, perhaps? Or maybe insanity? They were all of the same magnitude.

Before Nicole's message could replay, Isaac stopped the recording and hid the holographic panels from view, leaving himself to ponder in the dark. For the umpteenth time he tried to cope with all that had transpired: the Ishimura, Hammond, Mercer, Kyne, the Hive Mind, Kendra... Nicole. His instincts told him to let go of her and her memory, that Nicole Brennan was no more; the other part, his subconscious, that which had believed Nicole had been alive all along, refused to comply. He could thank fate for leaving him alive; too bad Isaac didn't hold fate on a very high regard.

Silence kept ringing in his ears as light suddenly came; with it, came sound. In fact, just around the moment when Isaac was about to let sleep take him, a noise caught his attention. Apprehension came: what or who could be there with him? In mere milliseconds he discarded the first alternative. Slowly, with hesitation, Isaac looked to his right, discerning a small something or someone crouching behind the other seat. For a brief moment he became paralyzed as an alarm went off in his head. It was both a something and someone.

It didn't take him long to scream.

He screamed almost at the top of his lungs at the same time a high-pitched wail came from the creature as it leaped towards him. Out of sheer horror and shock, Isaac shielded his face with his arms, expecting to feel the weight of the creature upon him and send him down Death's lane. The creature kept wailing, threatening to leave him deaf, but how Isaac was left was far from deaf: he was speechless. His body and the creature's never made contact but in just a few seconds, Isaac would see what- no, who that monster was. With wide eyes, Isaac focused on its graying face and blank eyes that seemed to look nowhere.

That monster was Nicole.

Then, signs, echoes, cacophonies, roars, yells, calls, despair... and pain.

Isaac suddenly found himself on the floor, lying upside down with no deformed Nicole trying to kill him, no last slivers of his life flashing before his eyes, no whispers or voices telling him about death and its inevitability. Nevertheless he remained unmoving, his gaze wide beyond its limit. Icy sweat trickled down his face, his ragged breathing became harsher; even forcing his chest to rise was agonizing. The hallucination remained burned into his mind like a mark inflicted with a red-hot coal, it kept flashing before his eyes with no reason and no coherence, hearing the unrelenting wails become stronger and stronger by the minute.

With faltering willpower, Isaac crawled away from the control panels as well as he could, his limbs trembling and his muscles feeling like rusty cogs that didn't turn properly because of their lack of oil. He'd worked with machines his whole life, so he knew very well when to compare himself with one. This was one of those moments when he saw himself like an old robot which was unable to make its body work because of non-turning cogs and processor failure.

A processor, a mind: mind failure, insanity, insanity, madness, irrationality-

A hard throbbing in the back of his head told him he hadn't come unscathed, especially the metallic taste in his mouth and a warm something making its way down his nape and seeping through the fabric of his engineer suit. Not only the taste made his current headache get worse, but it also caused his stomach to wretch violently, so much it forced Isaac to make way to nothing more than bile, saliva and blood. Isaac couldn't hold himself any longer; painful shivers wracked his body as he attempted to wipe his cracked lips, but not even his fingers would keep stable. In the end the shivers transformed into convulsions so intense he found himself holding onto dear life... and that those attempts would prove futile. He'd eventually die being unable to do anything against it.

You're insane, Isaac.

As one last cough tortured Isaac's throat, he pulled himself up onto his elbows and lifted his head with unimaginable difficulty. He needed to see something now, something, someone; his mind screamed at him to see something else than darkness and hear more than the ship's low rumble, but what could he do against that? Locked up in a shuttle and going insane were two situations that came hand in hand: fighting against one would only nurture the other. Isaac felt as if a hand was literally twisting his stomach and lungs around, leaving him in a pitiful and lamentable state. But at last, the pain went away.

Still shaking, he brought himself up to his feet and leaned against the wall to find support. His heavy breathing echoed throughout the shuttle, an echo that left Isaac horrified and with a rather uncomfortable sensation of paranoia. The echo only seemed to transform into a cacophony of voices that spoke phrases he didn't understand but was still familiar with. Isaac madly scanned the ship in search of the slightest of vibrations, finding himself tightly clutching the handle of his cutter, so much he was sure his palm would bleed. Paranoia made him even sicker to his stomach, but there was nothing else to let out. He remained tense for an unknown period of time, the tension bringing back the agony he'd somehow thought extinct, but he didn't care.

What only mattered to him now was his own survival.

Keep calm, Clarke, keep calm...

His nature as an engineer required he had a cool head in no matter what kind of situation. But right now, that nature was gone, extinguished, dead. Isaac couldn't find his strength to think, calm down and deduce a solution. He slid down onto the floor, his shoulders drooping. He felt hot tears down his face. He'd survived countless hordes of creatures that had ignored all natural law and had brought Hell upon space, and just thinking about it again made him cringe and shake his head in an attempt to erase the images from his mind: images of blood, carnage, despair, fear and death; every single emotion manifested through many forms. The necromorphs' wails, screeches and roars rang in his ears once more all at the same time as a blood-curdling and harmonious cacophony. Isaac couldn't make sane sense of anything.

The tears he cried were not just of sorrow but of indomitable rage and desperation that continuously bloomed inside him, and he held nothing back. After a while, he lost track of time. Isaac then brought his knees up to his chest and gradually calmed down with silence as his always-present companion, silence that was akin to a song that almost achieved to drive him down sleep lane. He knew what it meant to be alone; he just hadn't imagined it'd be so hard to cope with, never imagined its taste would be so bitter, so pleasant. Sorrow lingered, but what was the most frightening thing was how heavy his mind felt, as if something was filling his skull and applying an unthinkable pressure on his brain till there would be nothing more than pain to focus on.

Keep us whole.

Not those phrases again, no, no, no, n-

Death is only the beginning.

No, please, just let it all die away, take it, take it, take it away-

He couldn't line up his incoherent thoughts, which ran with the speed of a train about to derail, yet he couldn't do anything in his growing state of apathy.

The phrases of Unitology seized his mind. They were like the webs of insanity's astoundingly marvelous spider. Every time one of the web's strings seemed to vibrate, voices came back and slung a blindfold over his eyes. Blind... being blind meant being vulnerable, easily influenced and easily manipulated. His conscience came knocking: hadn't the Marker been left in Aegis7 so that it met its destruction? What about the voices then? He'd accepted them already but why not wonder where they came from? They were threads that stretched infinitely, never to let him go.

Consequently and inevitably, Isaac was being pulled along deeper into the sea of madness which had currents too strong to fight against and in which it was too easy to drown.

"If only I could've seen you once more, Nicole..." he breathed out. "It's all just... because of that fucking piece of rock!"

A fucking piece of rock I was manipulated into bringing back to the Colony... Insane Unitologist shit-

'And who's the insane one now? Hallucinations, paranoia, and now this. Wonderful.'

As much as he dreaded it, Isaac had to agree his own mind was right about itself. He'd already assumed he'd left most of his sanity scattered around the Ishimura and Aegis7 after escaping from death itself, which had morphed into many forms so that it haunted him even in his dreams... if he were to have them again. Strangely enough, that hunch that struck him made him smile a dark grin of amusement, all because of his not-so-intensive thinking. With the same grin across his blanched features, Isaac took his hands to his head, shedding more tears as at the same time he laughed. Between chuckles, he said,

"You should see me right now, Nicki; it's just unbelievable..." As he talked, Isaac noticed the floor gleaming faintly with a deep shade of red. He waited, curious, and then watched as symbols revealed themselves to be all over the shuttle, symbols that proved to be familiar and drew him deeper into curiousness and fear. They looked finely carved into the surfaces of the transport, as if it had taken years to carve till they were a work of fine art.

The perfect façade to hide shit and lies from view.

They were Unitologist symbols: the Marker's.

Yet another piece of evidence of its everlasting fondness for me. Sarcasm was something never to be ignored.

Once more mesmerized like the first time, Isaac ardently tried to decipher their meaning despite not having been in much contact with Unitology. He thought and pondered and reasoned, drawn into a world where nothing else but the symbols existed, a world where the symbols were its only component and where order didn't matter. Isaac knew he was unable to read what words the symbols were pieced up into; however, he continued to glance in all directions and admired their eerie majesty with piqued interest and something akin to hysteria.

Altman Be Praised.

We Shall Ascend.

Make Us Whole.

Amongst the endless sea of signs, he could make out those all-too familiar and repetitive phrases of Michael Altman's religion, one Isaac knew had sent countless people to die but one he felt obliged to follow. Why so if he disliked Unitology so much, hated it with all his might after it had taken his family away? Despite that intense hatred, despite Unitology being twisted and loathsome, Isaac came to think it was anything but. Maybe a path to follow so understanding came to him, maybe a path formed by steps that could lead him to enlightenment... Then he read the phrase and understood its meaning, which mesmerized him the most... in a rather macabre way, as if he were an infant admiring the world for the first time after his birth.

The nightmare is over but it will not end.

His heart beating quickly, Isaac laughed at the foolishness of the phrase that transformed into a constant, resonating thought with its own voice. It was all so ironic: he was becoming what he had always fought against, what he had always directed his hatred towards... But still, he had to admit it felt good, strangely good even, yet all that triumph and moments of macabre joy would be short-lived.

"Isaac, it's me... and now I can talk to you."

With a deep gasp, Isaac perked up his head, staring into the black nothingness whilst at the same time trying to digest what he'd just heard. Nicole... again? Alive? No, she couldn't be; Isaac had understood and finally accepted she had been an illusion created by the Marker all along... The eerie silence made Isaac hold his breath, keeping an eye out for any movement or source of sound. Tense, he sprung to his feet, glanced at the front of the flight deck, then the back, then the front again-

-only to find Nicole occupying one of the two seats, a gentle smile upon her weary, pale features.

Making no sounds or saying no words, Isaac, who didn't feel any surprise at the sight, stared at Nicole with noticeable and intense apathy. No words came from Nicole either and she held his stare with a cold one of her own. Eventually, she tilted her head like a curious young child staring at its parent, making him aware of the message she was trying to send him. Isaac just closed his eyes and shook his head with disappointment, disappointment not directed towards Nicole but towards himself. He scolded himself due to his foolishness; how could he still believe she was alive?

What's happening to me?

His vision was suddenly fogged by a crimson mist that felt cool and moist against his skin as if he were standing right under a blood rain. Isaac tried to move his head away from Nicole and with sudden, morbid dread he realized he was frozen, rooted to the spot. The wave of sounds that came next was disgusting: flesh being ripped open with wet snaps, dripping blood, a heart beating faintly, more and more by the second... It reminded him of convulsing bodies about to transform into a necromorph.

Only that the convulsing body was his.

Death is a necessary step into Ascension.

Let us be One.

Voices... the Marker's!

Convergence is nigh!

His gaze still fixed on Nicole, Isaac tried to speak and ask Nicole what -the hell!- was going on, but not even air climbed up his trachea: he couldn't breathe. All main functions had stopped save for heartbeat and brain activity; if not, how could he still be conscious? How could he still be alive?

"That's not a question that depends on your conscious state, Isaac, but a question you should ask yourself."

That voice was Nicole's. Agony came back, this time blooming from inside his chest and spreading throughout his body with the speed of lightning.

Life to death to life eternal.

Does that mean... I'm dying? Just like that? With no explanation whatsoever?

Dread finally put a stop to the wild goose-chase it'd kept up against his sanity; as expected, it won, it destroyed it till there was nothing left. Isaac witnessed how Nicole's smiled widened. She hadn't blinked a single time, something quite unnerving and disturbing, but the smile had never left her face.

"Do you think it was because of your skill? Because of your luck? Think again," Nicole was telling him, her lips unmoving, her expression blank. "I never left your side. Of course, that you made it this far might've been because of your instincts, your intuition, but who laid out the path for you to follow?"

Just when he thought he'd suffocate, Isaac snapped out of his momentary deadly paralysis and breathed in again, taking in much needed oxygen that set everything into motion again. It took him a few moments to regain his composure and be able to move, and when he perked up his head, Nicole was gone, so were the symbols and the red mist, the fear and the suffocating tension. In a daze, Isaac once again looked around the deck, searching for Nicole with a feeling of urgency and alert so intense he thought it'd mess up his mind even more than how it already was.

Then, a furious roar of rage.

It was instinctive: Isaac downloaded a stasis blast upon whatever was lurking in the shadows and saw the same monster he'd seen at the beginning: a deformed Nicole transformed into a Slasher making a mad dash towards him, blades raised high ready to impale him. During a brief instant that seemed like aeons, Isaac stared at the creature with as much surprise as the first time, witnessing how the effects of the stasis quickly wore off. The Slasher was already starting to move according to its frenzied speed and it was then and only then that Isaac reacted: turning on the balls of his feet, he swivelled to his right and reached out his arm towards the holographic control panel. By rough chance he grazed it with his fingertips before he fell to his knees; he was so close!

The Slasher was near; he could feel its presence looming over him, he could see its shadow cast over his own figure as the claws got ready to attack him. Isaac scrambled upwards, panting and holding on to the consoles for support and dear life. He caught sight of communications panel; he reached for it, only to withdraw his hands seconds later before one of the claws fell mere inches away from his fingers. As his mind unconsciously screamed at him to watch out, panicking at how furiously the voices returned to him, Isaac turned around just in time to avoid the Slasher's -Nicole!- second attempt at sending him to Death's arms. With a yelp, Isaac rammed his boot into its abdomen, sending it a scant distance away from him. It was right then that he noticed his plasma cutter at his waist; he took aim as well as he could, the laser dots pointing directly at its arm, and Isaac fired.

Nothing happened.

The plasma rounds just went past the Slasher's arm and instead hit bullseye on the panel next to the door. The Slasher sprung to its feet as Isaac did nothing more than stare at it, the cutter trembling in his hands whilst his will to keep fighting vanished all of a sudden. Was it a hallucination? Was it real? He didn't know and he didn't care anymore. Out of instinct he tried to download another charge of stasis upon the monster yet a dull clicking told him he was out of it; what else was there left to do?

Moving.

Isaac glanced to his right, to the Slasher and then to his right again: the communications panel. Without another single bit of attention directed towards the creature, Isaac pushed the button and started transmitting his message.

Please, somebody find this...

"Shuttle USG-09 transmitting, this is a distress message. If anyone receives this..." Isaac fell silent, hearing the Slasher's -Nicole!- snarls behind him, seeing how the claw's shadow cast itself upon him. When the holographic displays came up once more, he could see them all flashing red and crowded with symbols... the Marker's symbols. Isaac put two and two together before he could even think with logic: the last traces of the Marker's influence on him.

"...I'm still alive."

Another roar, and this time fiercer.

Isaac left the beacon active... then turned to face his opponent.

Make us whole again.

There was no noticeable transition between awareness and unconsciousness; one moment there was one, the next was the other: no signs of pain or any stimulant that made him relinquish his grip on reality.

Finally, peacefully, the world went black.

A/N: So, how was that for a start? There will be two more chapters and then it's over; I've decided to keep this as a three-shot. Any continuity errors or any other mistakes, you just tell me.

Reviews are appreciated!^^