"Get back here you little freak!"

The grey blur trips, falls out of Temrash's sight before springing up again and scrambling to the side of the car parked in front of the minivan. The boy in the grey hoodie, blond strands whipping around, looks back as he disappears past the car.

Temrash is already out of the minivan, stepping past the fender as two other boys come running up. They nearly crash into Arress who curls up tight against the side of the vehicle to avoid them as they race past. Both of their expressions are overcome with rage, but one boy has several jagged red lines marking his face.

"You're going to pay for that!" The boy screams, his voice cracking as Temrash stares at the back of his head.

The scratches across the boy's face are too thin. Temrash stills, the odd confidence with which he makes that observation is far too certain for a situation he knows nothing about. Of course those scratches would be thin; they were made by Tobias's human fingernails…Why is he so sure that they were made…Why does it seem plausible that Tobias, for that is who the boy was now trapped in a memory of running past where Temrash sits, again and again and again the boy looks up and away before fading into the background while he sits and watches Jake—he's always watching, always looking down on them al—

Tom surges out and the hand that rests by Temrash's side rises up and slams into Arress's face. Tom raises his other hand before he's even done burying his knuckles into Arress's cheek, grabbing the controller's shirt collar and pulling him back up to—Temrash tears through the desperate, shuddering relief at finally being able to move and rips past the burning rage at these slugs, these things, how dare they, how dare they—No, NO, NO, GET OUT, STOP.

Muscles spasm down Tom's arm as Temrash wrestles back control. The face is twitching, but that doesn't matter because the host's scream is shoved back down in a groan that's too quiet for anyone else to notice. Except for Arress, who pushes Temrash away.

Both controllers stagger away from each other. One still twitching as he roots himself to the spot; the other hunched half over, his body trembling from pain but his gaze riveted to every little movement of Temrash's fight with his host.

Unlike the subordinate stupor of before, Tom thrashes against Temrash's control. The voiceless scream of everything the boy is surging forward again and again, trying to control just one limb, something, anything, so that he can hurt them, fight them instead of sitting encased in the cage of his own body.

Even when the twitches still and the only movements Temrash makes is to breath hard and fast, Arress keeps staring while one of his eyes tears up over the swelling mark on his face. Why was Arress in front of him? There shouldn't have been time for him to even get up, let alone move around the van… Wait, time must have slipped past Temrash again when those memories of Tobias…

No, no, they were nothing like normal memories. Something was wrong with them, a reverberation that loosened the boundaries between them and—What? There were emotions that didn't belong to those moments. Threads of feeling that thickened and frayed in pulses when Temrash tried to peer closer.

He finds himself teetering again. The edge of those fragmented images pulling him down into—NO.

Temrash staggers until he slips past the hood of the car. Tom's knees folding as he hits the ground. Asphalt digs into his palms as he stops himself from falling over completely to the side. The solidity of the ground under his hands is wrong under the unravelling pieces in his mind that are shredding his grip on the outside world.

Arress is too close to him; his red hair aglow under the light of the morning sun. Even hunched, he towers over Temrash's place on the ground. Temrash's hand twitches as Tom tries to throw himself up to attack again, but even the boy stops and stills as the maelstrom of fragments tear into him too.

The other controller stares at Temrash with the same shrewdness that he had before getting bowled over by the human child. And then the words that make so little but too much sense reach through.

"When was the last time you fed?"