[ The question loops around once or twice as his addled mind tries to grasp for it. He feels for a snatch of maybe a second the warmth of her skin on the undamaged parts of his hand and then it's too late.
The connection is weak but not so weak as to spare her the soft-edged rendition of all that he's feeling: the cloying dread, panic held only barely at bay by a mind too stubborn to be entirely overcome in the presence of others, intense claustrophobia, stress, pain and of steady decline, exhaustion, confusion, all of it a mess and hardly processed for how indecipherable one intolerable sensation is from the next. A few things take on different color: guilt, regret, impotence, shock. Grief is a strange beast all of its own and lurks somehow apart.
There isn't long to spend with it. Even this weak link is enough to tear them out of the old world and back to the new. He's looking up. There's light, daylight, bright sky peeking between dense branches. A breeze. Grass between his fingers.
His mind has just a moment after that to register a capacity to clear and then he's gone, back into the thick of it, submerged with devastating swiftness into the clog of everything that came before.
Stephen heaves in a breath that leaves in a helpless sob as his body burns anew with its slow death. He begins to hyperventilate, staring through dreary torchlight in search of comfort and finding only the silhouettes of things that could be bodies or could be rockfall. But he's done this before. It was hard then and it's hard now but this time he isn't alone. His hand slips from any lingering grip to seek purchase somewhere less dangerous, a forearm or a shoulder or whatever there is to find, some proof of company, and in turn some unspoken assurance that he's present and he's finding his way back. It just might take him a moment. ]
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The connection is weak but not so weak as to spare her the soft-edged rendition of all that he's feeling: the cloying dread, panic held only barely at bay by a mind too stubborn to be entirely overcome in the presence of others, intense claustrophobia, stress, pain and of steady decline, exhaustion, confusion, all of it a mess and hardly processed for how indecipherable one intolerable sensation is from the next. A few things take on different color: guilt, regret, impotence, shock. Grief is a strange beast all of its own and lurks somehow apart.
There isn't long to spend with it. Even this weak link is enough to tear them out of the old world and back to the new. He's looking up. There's light, daylight, bright sky peeking between dense branches. A breeze. Grass between his fingers.
His mind has just a moment after that to register a capacity to clear and then he's gone, back into the thick of it, submerged with devastating swiftness into the clog of everything that came before.
Stephen heaves in a breath that leaves in a helpless sob as his body burns anew with its slow death. He begins to hyperventilate, staring through dreary torchlight in search of comfort and finding only the silhouettes of things that could be bodies or could be rockfall. But he's done this before. It was hard then and it's hard now but this time he isn't alone. His hand slips from any lingering grip to seek purchase somewhere less dangerous, a forearm or a shoulder or whatever there is to find, some proof of company, and in turn some unspoken assurance that he's present and he's finding his way back. It just might take him a moment. ]