Shadow Rift (A Hat in Time)

Turmoil

And we're back! Hope y'all had a lovely time during the hiatus!

I took an extra week because this is a chapter I wanted to get right. Took a bit more rewriting than usual, but I think it's satisfactory now.

Anyway! Enjoy, and thanks to my beta reader!

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It wasn't glass, but to his hands, raw now from pounding fruitlessly against it for the past several minutes, it sure felt like it. Still, he clawed at it, desperately trying to break through.

Everything happened too quickly. Even if he'd been in a normal state, the girls had been moving too fast for him to process. Hat Kid and the girl with the mustache had started fighting at inhuman speeds, leaving him lost in the dust. How could he hope to stop it if he couldn't even decide who he was?

And then- the details were still hazy for him- others had gathered, all angry at the mustached girl. There was a lot of yelling and fury against her and support for Hat Kid. Something about getting lost.

He didn't see what the girl with the mustache had done, but now everything was... too much. The noise levels and the fight had been overwhelming before, but now he was faced with bright, swirling colors. He pressed his eyes closed, but the starry blue arena lingered in his mind, the afterimage burned into him.

The attacks were loud, everything was too bright, and his head was already full to bursting with two minds of thoughts.

A pained noise escaped him, barely perceptible over the din outside and inside. With fingers still gripping the magical barrier, the one thing separating himself from the fighting girls, he sank to his knees.

He wanted to help. He really did. But there was no way to get to them. He was useless, as usual. The helplessness left a void filled by the struggle of two sets of memories. They were trying to pull apart from each other, to be different, to tell who was who, but they just fit together too well.

There was one point where they were exactly the same. His life. The prince's life, Elliot's life. Both remembered that. But only one remembered his death and afterlife, and both had separate accounts of what came after. Where one set of memories ended, affected by the crown being worn or not, another seamlessly picked them up. The two minds were like puzzle pieces clicking easily together, and the perfect fit only made it harder for the two to agree on what was what.

One was Snatcher, and one was Elliot. That was the only thing easy to discern from the turmoil. But the struggle to gain some sort of identity, to choose one name to go by, to define who he was, was a battle. It had to be one over the other, but none could come out on top.

And it only made things harder that he kept getting distracted by the filled-in pieces of his memories.

Did I die? Elliot's hands slid from the wall and rested uselessly in his lap. The memories were clear now, though they'd been missing before. He knew about the flowers, Vanessa, and the dungeon, but knowing what happened after that...

Stop getting distracted! Snatcher's hands curled into fists. It's so hard to concentrate! Everything is loud, and it doesn't help that I- no, you, it's your fault- you keep trying to figure out your own death!

The emotions, responsive to the self-insult, were varied and came from multiple places. He squeezed his eyes shut, hands pressing against each other, head bowed, as a strange mixture of lashing anger, shame, and sorrow swirled through him.

Some king of Subcon I am. Snatcher- Elliot- both- had never felt more worthless.

That was the part one half of him, easily definable as Elliot, was confused about. He was newly grappling with his death and the what-came-next. A ghost? Really? And he'd taken over Subcon? Ate souls? Killed so many? Was that really worthy of the title of king?