A/N: Angsty writing exercise. Please enjoy! I do not own The Avengers.
He's going insane.
He's known madness before, in another life almost, so he recognizes the signs. At other times, though, there was someone to pull him out. Now, there's no one.
Probably. Maybe.
There are voices, occasionally. Pieces of something not human. Pieces of human not something. Faces breaking and breaking face. People he (maybe?) knows missing things, like a puzzle was started then put back in the box.
People he thinks shouldn't be here trying to grab his hand. Trying to talk to him. Laughing at him. Crying over him. He ignores them.
It's getting harder to ignore them.
On a particularly sane bout, he rigs a communication device and sends a message.
He tries to tell her what happened. He tries to say that they (who's they? Isn't it only him?) left Titan eight days ago. He tries to say that only one day into the journey, the water supply was found to have a leak. That only four days into the journey, all the water had leaked out. Only five days into their journey, the ship, already traveling at a crawl, broke down—and with it, the air filter. That they are living on emergency oxygen. That unless he or she (wait—she?) manages to repair the ship, the oxygen will run out tomorrow.
But he doesn't say that. Probably. Maybe. More importantly, he tells her he loves her. He promises to think of her when the madness leaves. When he finally sleeps.
Every word he says echoes around his head and distorts. He stops recording the message and tries to figure out how he was planning on making sense of the strange words he was about to say.
As he forgets what he's spoken into the helmet, he wonders at the words spinning in his head, like a whirlpool is gathering phrases in the calm waters of his mind and spitting them, battered, into his mouth. He doesn't know what they mean. He doesn't know why he says them.
"There was no other way," he says, feeling the strange way the words fly from his tongue and bounce off his teeth before hanging, dripping, in the air. In time they completely melt away, and he says the next phrase the whirlpool has brought to his lips.
"I don't wanna go." The words are sharp and small and blacker than the sky outside the window. He realizes that, while never having said them, the words are his. As he stares at them, they take a slightly red sheen, and he says them again, wondering if the red will tingle on his tongue like it looks like it will.
"I don't wanna go."
The phrase is spicy, and smarts his eyes, and burns his nose, and he wonders how those four words—first person pronoun, contraction, improper contraction, verb—could elicit so much pain.
So, yeah. There will maybe be a second chapter. Thank you for reading!