Agent 38: In The Making

Chapter 42: Fantasyland

*Just to be completely clear, I have absolutely NO IDEA what a coma is like. This is a fictional story, too, so if nothing sounds realistic... sorry.*
     Darkness. Cold. Black.
     Those were the first things that registered with him. A cold, eerie sense of nothingness. A soft, faint, muffled noise that raised and lowered in pitch that sounded maybe like very far away voices.
     Everything came rushing back.
     It all came back, all at once, like a sudden wave of memories cascading over him. Out of nowhere, the darkness he floated in gently pulsed. Once, twice, and then brightness glimmered in little spots all around him. Those bright spots shifted, contorted, twisted around, and quietly melted into scenes of his life.
     He viewed them all with a light sense of curiosity. It felt like he was kind of discovering his life again. He saw the first few thousand of his childhood, all the way into adolescence. He saw Mother and Father, Callie and Marie and Cuttlefish, Aaron and Gabriel, and the light of his life, Eight.
     The scenes faded to black after a long, long time.
     It ocurred to Alexander, somewhere deep in the void, that he should probably be dead.
     It also ocurred to him that he most likely was dead. He turned around. Still, nothing but darkness. Alex reached out with both hands, waving them around to see if there was anything there. But there wasn't. It was just a deep, bottomless void that he would most likely be spending the rest of eternity in.
     A sudden flare of panic rose in his chest. The rest of eternity? With nothing to do but look at all of his memories? All of his mistakes and shortcomings? Three shivered. What would happen to the Splatoon? To Eight? What would happen when they died?
     Was he all alone, forever?
     Three sighed and closed his eyes, imagining himself in a better place. Perhaps his imagination would keep him sane.
     With a sudden rush of adrenaline, he felt the floaty feeling dissipate, and then he was falling. Three let out a scream, but no noise came out of his mouth. The world shifted and changed around him, and the darkness faded into light. He looked down and saw himself dropping into a collosal dome that widened and spread out the more he looked at it.
     Three smashed into the ground (Which, surprisingly, didn't hurt at all), and then the floor decided to dip in from his weight and throw him right out. He flew through the air and landed neatly on his heels. Three sat down and blew out a breath.
     How did that not hurt me? I fell at least 200 feet. He thought. Wait... does anything hurt me in the afterlife?
     Three raised his arm and pinched it hard, expecting to feel that little needle of pain. Instead, he felt nothing.
     Interesting.
     Three opened his mouth, took a deep breath, and screamed as loud as possible, but heard absolutely nothing.
     He lifted his head and studied the world around him with amazement. It looked as though one half of it was a frozen timeline of his life, while the other was just purely imagination. Three glanced at each side, then took a step into the timeline. Everything blurred slightly, then sharpened into focus so clearly it made his eyes hurt. Every detail, every line, every single tiny itty bitty feature was outlined with extreme clarity.
     It was fascinating to see, but also made him feel... squashed. It was like having all Alecander's mistakes thrown back into his face all over again.
     The memories near the front seemed the most recent. The very first one was him being beaten to death by the bullies. In the corner of the alleyway, he thought he saw a flicker of pink and yellow-orange, similar to Callie's hair and eye color, but when he got close, it vanished. Three shrugged and moved on.
     Then it was him attacking Eight, radiating menace from every cell. He saw the pure fear and fury in her face, which broke his hearts all over again. Three slashed one hand through the memory, and it dissipated into thin air. He continued on and on, traveling silently through the realm of dreams and memories. Three followed the timeline all the way back to the first ever scene of his life- his birth. The first mistake he ever made.
     He sat down and stared at it for a long, long time. Mother looked so happy, more happy than he'd ever seen her. Father looked ecstatic, a look of heartsbreaking joy printed on his face. Three smiled slightly. He didn't get to see his father very much while he was still alive, since Father had passed long before Three did.
     He headed into the Imagination. It was odd, like an ever-shifting plain of his thoughts. Currently, the Nation was a dark, edgy-looking area, where it was nothing but dark alleys and splotches of ink everywhere. He shivered. It looked more like a freaky dream than an imaginative realm.
     Three took a small step forward, remembering the time he had a fever and had probably the worst nightmare he'd had in a while. Suddenly, the world around him shifted and grew, and the nightmare replayed all over again, but worse. This time, instead of mirrors, the hands that had pulled him under showed their owners. They were all sanitized, but... their faces all looked like his.
     They're my worst fears, Three realized. Wait... if this is my imagination, then...
     He closed his eyes and pictured a sunny day down by the beach, where little tufts of grass peeked through the sand and the waves pounded ahead.
     And suddenly, he was there, in that exact beach he'd pictured. Alone, but happy.
     Alone.
     Empty.
     How the shell would he ever live without his friends? Without Eight? Three felt a stab of regret, one for not proposing to her while he still had the chance, and another for never apologizing to Mother for how much pain he'd caused her as a child.
     She probably doesn't miss me, anyway. He thought. None of them do, probably...
     I really miss them, though.
     Three heard a lurch in the sand and swiveled toward the noise. The Splatoon stood there, glaring at him with fierce eyes. Eight turned towards Three. Her beautiful opal eyes glimmered in the sun, and tears were slowly rolling down her cheeks.
     "You left us," She whispered, her voice echoing in his ears. "You left me, and for that, I'll never forgive you, never."
     She moved a step closer. "You left us all, like we were nothing, just a minor piece of garbage in your life. Do you even care about us? Do you even-"
     Three turned away and cleared his mind, instantly silencing the turmoil. The beach dropped away beneath him, and everything faded to black again.
     I have to be careful here, Three's thought's whispered. My imagination becoming reality would be... catastrophic.
     He curled into himself, huddling into the warmth and protection of the dark, and then suddenly he dropped onto ice cold ground. Three jumped up from the shock with a silent gasp, and glared at the world that enfolded in front of him for the third time today (Does death have days? How do I even know how long I've been dead for? He thought).
     The cold ground expanded around him into an icy plain of glaciers and icebergs. The fjords glimmered with an icy sheen, and a fresh gust of cold wind stabbed through the air like a knife. Three shivered.
     He glanced upward toward the light, hoping the warmth of the sun would heat him up, but was surprised to see there was no sun. It was simply a light blue expanse of nothing. Three looked back down at the ground, stood up, and watched as his breath crystalized in the air and clinked to the ground.
     Another violent gust of wind ripped through the air again, threatening to pull him off his feet. Three took a cautionary step forward, then another. When nothing alarming happened, he started running through the frozen landscape, shivering.
     A sudden rush of wild freedom and adrenaline flooded through his veins. He smiled, running faster and faster through the vast expanse. Alone, but free. Freer than he'd ever felt. It felt as though all his worries, fears, everything just melted away. His mind cleared, his body relaxed, it simply felt like a pure, clear sense of freedom. Nothing weighed him down anymore. He felt lighter than air, as if he could just float into the sky right then and there.
     Everything seemed so... quiet, peaceful, calm.
     And yet... a sense of unease still crept up on him, a sense of fear and doom. It slowly crawled up his back like a cold, thin trail of water. A sense of despair.
     A sense of death and destruction.

I cannot describe how sorry I am for the delay on this chapter! I'm also sorry for how short it is... I'm going to try and make the chapters longer, don't worry. Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holiday!
Word count: 1537