The Black Ledger spoke.
"Now..." His voice was calm, measured, absolute. He raised one finger toward Davina Jones toward the daughter of Davy Jones who swung a dead pirate's body like a club, who fought with the desperation of a cornered animal, who refused to fall. "...a coordinated strike."
Darlington looked at his face. At the way the muscles in his cheeks were about to tense. At the cold certainty in his eyes. Even he Gideon Crowe, the man who dissected human anatomy like a scholar dissecting a poem even he knew what Davina Jones was about to do.
But unlike a normal, rational person leading a crew of men...
He wanted her to take that action.
Darlington itched his left ear.
The gesture was absent automatic, habitual, human. His fingers traced the curve of his earlobe, feeling the warmth of his own skin, the proof that he was still alive despite everything.
Whether it is in the present...
He itched his right ear.
...or in the past...
He lowered his hand.
Scientists will always be perverts. His inner voice was flat, almost resigned. Men who constantly go to great beyonds to test out something. Even if it leads to their death.
He shook his head.
What a bunch of stupid people.
He closed his eyes.
For a moment, there was nothing just darkness, just silence, just the absence of the chaos that surrounded him. The battles on the Infinite Sea faded. The cries of dying men faded. The weight of everything he had seen and done faded.
He opened them again.
He felt a light relaxation a loosening of the tension that had been coiling in his chest since the moment he arrived in this world, since the park, since the pops, since the white void.
"What's this?" His voice was quiet, almost confused. "What was that now?"
His breath was a bit heavy.
Sweat dropped from his face trickling down his temples, his cheeks, his chin. His heart rate spiked, pounding in his chest like a drum, like a warning, like something he could not control.
He said to himself, his inner voice sharp with realization.
These signs are only when a man is in fear... or something is going on.
Then a racking headache came.
It was like the banging of a gong not in any literal sense, but he could hear it actively. The sound was not sound. It was pressure. It was presence. It was something inside his skull, pushing against the walls of his mind, demanding to be recognized.
He grabbed his head.
His fingers dug into his scalp pulling at his curly hair, pressing against his temples, trying to hold himself together. The world spun around him the void, the grey, the nothing all of it twisting, turning, falling.
He fell.
His body crumpled collapsing onto the invisible floor, curling in on itself, shaking with the force of whatever was happening inside him.
His eyes began to close.
It was like a heavy haze a fog that rolled over his consciousness, dulling his thoughts, blurring his vision, pulling him toward something he could not name.
He said to himself, his voice barely a whisper.
"Is this normal?"
He paused.
"Well... I can't say my biological functions are normal."
He thought of the ink the living ink that had poured from the golden mask's hand, that had seeped into his skin, that had changed him at a level deeper than flesh and bone.
Could it be? His mind raced. Could it be?
He remembered.
The immortality that was given to him.
It was the only thing that raced through his mind the gift, the curse, the weight of living forever in a world that wanted him dead.
As he remembered it, it was just as if the event replayed itself.
Over and over again.
The golden mask. The silver mask. The living ink. The cold, dismissive voices of the gods who had granted him a gift he never asked for.
He screamed.
The sound tore from his throat raw, primal, agonized as if he was being ripped to pieces. As if his mind was going in different directions at once. As if the immortality that had been forced upon him was eating him from the inside.
"AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!"
The void swallowed his scream.
It did not echo. Did not reverberate. Did not care.
Then he heard a voice in his head.
Slow and steady. Deep and old. It echoed through the chambers of his mind like a bell tolling in an empty cathedral.
A child who should not have been chosen... has been chosen.
The voice paused.
Tell me, Darlington...
A chill ran down his spine.
...do you like my gift to you?
Darlington could not even respond.
His body was frozen. His mind was shattered. His will the will that had carried him through the park, through the white void, through the hell of watching everyone he loved die was breaking.
He gathered what remained of his strength.
And he shouted out loud.
"I REJECT YOU!"
His voice was raw, desperate, defiant.
"I REJECT YOU!"
Blood tears poured from his eyes thick, dark, real tracing paths down his cheeks, dripping onto the invisible floor, mixing with the sweat and the grief that covered his face.
"I REJECT YOU, DAMMIT!"
The voice did not respond.
The void did not answer.
But something shifted.
Something changed.
And Darlington the observer, the false god, the broken child who had been dragged into a war he never asked for lay on the floor, bleeding from his eyes, and waited.
in the space between the rejection and the silence, between the gift that had been forced upon him and the will that refused to accept it.
Darlington bled.
The void watched.
And the voice waited.