Innerworks

1. Have I a Choice?

It's been a week since the incident.

An entire week, Logic was likely still mad at him. It was only one week after all.

A week since he left his room, a week since he visited Thomas and a week since he'd slept or eaten anything.

Funny how he was still shaken up about it, maybe Thomas was too, he doubted it though, Logic and the others were working overtime to fix his mistake.

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The sound, the screaming and the screeching- they almost died.

The "incident" kept replaying over and over in his mind and as always it was vivid enough to cause him to shake.

Sighing, Anxiety slowly uncurled, letting go of his knees so they could stretch out, bones, joints, muscles and all that popping in relief, he'd been in that position since the incident.

Stuck replaying and reliving the moment, and unfortunately, him being the embodiment of anxiety, he was stuck watching all the ways things could go worse.

He was always made out to be the bad guy, and honestly he'd come to accept that, he knew what he was, the others could say whatever.

He protected Thomas from the worst of things, the things he knew were out there, the things the boy buried in the back of his mind, the things the Anxiety made sure stayed there.

Sure he got a kick out of teasing the boy a bit, but now... the incident-

There was nothing fun in seeing that much blood, especially his blood-

Anxiety growled at himself, and uncurled his legs from his chest, this was no time for PTSD, he needed to move and his stomach reminded him why.

Being a personality, hell even being an emotion required some sort of energy or sustenance, if he wanted to describe it, they were practically feeding off their, for lack of a better term, host.

Whatever prominent emotion Thomas was feeling was "summoned" to the forefront, they would provide the necessary ideas or feelings they were supposed to and in return they'd take his energy.

Of course emotions and personalities were two different things, unlike emotions, you can't get rid of a personality.

Change it? Maybe, bury it deep in your mind? Probably, destroy it? Not gonna happen, but weaken it? Definitely.

Without sufficient energy from the host the personalities tend to weaken, they become ill, so much so they become transparent and if summoned in that state they latch onto their host, take a hold of them and drain them to their grave- or at least that's what Anxiety heard.

Apparently depression was one of those, go figure, feeding off their host wasn't the only thing they could use as an energy source though, all the personalities could drink, eat and sleep.

Technically the drinking and eating were imagined so they were still kinda feeding off Thomas' mental energy, it was probably why humans like him got tired easily.

There were very few humans that were able to physically manifest their personalities as their own personas, much less all the prominent ones at the same time.

Then again there were humans in which their personalities' personas would be all be present in their own right but couldn't be physically manifested, they could only take over the host in a "partial manifestation".

Multiple personality disorder it was called, when he first heard it Anxiety scoffed, of course society would call it a disorder, humans able to manifest their pure thoughts into beings, Nope! You got a disorder! Thanks society.

There were other people too, these were the people who could see the manifestations and even the incomplete manifestations aswell, (though they were few and far between), their personalities had no persona but they were able to see and even interact with a manifested personality.

These "viewers" were the select few who could actually see Thomas' videos, Anxiety had noticed it himself once, when reading the hate comments on YouTube, not everyone can see them.

"Why is the camera panning around when there was only him there?" Or "nobody's there, is he crazy?" He almost laughed when reading them, these poor "normals" were missing out on good content.