Broderick Strider hated himself.

He was losing touch with everything: the feeling in his fingertips and the sky looming, inky and imposing, above him. The pain in his back was dribbling away from his consciousness with the distilled sensation of winter air against his skin, and the very black night was crashing downward. Slender slivers of blinding white stars were plummeting toward him, curtains of black falling upon his ember-alive eyes and snuffing out the world around him with a swift and painless woosh.

It was impenetrable. Asphyxiating and so implausibly dark – tactile and gelid across his wide awake, and wide open eyes. Everything was morphing into eclipsed numbness, and everything that had turned into nothing was weighing down on his chest with the weight of the universe shrouded in slick blackness.

Dave was afraid of the dark.

Predictably and thoroughly he had denied it as he grew older; as his shoulders broadened and as the muscles in his legs grew longer, he would bark steadfast and venomous "NO!"s and "Fuck you"s whenever Bro would bring up the very obvious fear. The phobia was bleedingly prominent and undeniable: Dave would go as far as leaving his bedroom light on every night to escape the gnarled tendrils reaching toward him in the dark.

Bro knew this; he knew Dave was afraid.

And Bro was suddenly afraid of something else.

He was leaving Dave in the dark.

Dulling around him was the sure beat of Davesprite's tangerine and prodigious wings. He tried to turn his head, to look through black glasses obscuring his pitifully tearing eyes, toward the boy he'd raised. The air around him was Siberian, the ground beneath his cratered and impaled back stiff and alien.

He couldn't see, and he couldn't hear.

But he could feel.

Nimble fingers – fitted around the handles of cheap swords and peaking from perpetually-adorned gloves – tiptoed across lifeless ground, and he felt his breath wane from him in frosted wisps of pale life. He failed to whimper, to instrument his indefinable pain into words. Blood – metallic and warm against his lips – dribbled down his chin in slender, concentrated veins, from his ragged and punctured lip.

Dave would not hear him die.

Death was normal.

Murder was a coveted exploit full of acridity – there was nothing wrong whatsoever with what he did. The blood caking his hands and strewn carnally across the computer lab was respected.

The voice that kept him up at night, however, was nothing of the sort.

It was a voice vacant of bubbles and one that washed across him like tidal-waves; the voice bright as the tinkle of bells and light as well-churned sea foam. It pawed gently at him with extended claws, ripping his soul to bits with the most tender of tones.

Don't beeee like that, Eri-poo!

He cringed against the cool, disgusting texture of his slime. No, not again.

You know I miss you! And you miss meeee, right?

He swallowed down the guilt.

"Of course I fuckin' miss you."

Oh, Eeeeeridan!

He jolted in his near-slumber.

Oh cod. Oh cod.

I know it was a mistake, deeeear! You're my Moirail!

He closed naked eyes. Cod, no. He wouldn't admit it – in no way would she make him say it. There wasn't a possible way in all the universes for him to say it, to instrument the pain he was guising daily.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERI! Talk back!

Like a thin sheet of wood beneath a gavel, he broke. He splintered into ragged fragments and collapsed: out of him poured the instrumented misery and pain he had been housing for months.

"It wasn't a mistake." The sobs were quick and slick as they road up his throat. He shook his head, letting out a pitiful croaking. "I-I meant to do it! There!"

Her voice fell silent for the first time in weeks.

"I-I couldn't lose like I was losing you, Fef."