Paradise Lost (JSAB)

Close to Me

Fun fact, the doctor who treated Tetra's wounds is called Raymond. He's 43, unmarried, working as a trauma surgeon. He likes dogs but can't adopt one due to his allergies. The shape on the sides of his headphones was a red + health sign, as becoming a doctor was his childhood dream. After he treated Tetra, he "mysteriously disappeared".

0320 hours, The Industry

Tetra should be angry. Tetra should be raving and pissed and cursing Close and Fresh and themselves and basically everything that dared to exist, they should be groaning, at a victory so close yet so far, denied to them by cruel fate.

Yet, they weren't. They were just... Sad. Tired. They didn't have the mental energy to do anything except sigh and sag their shoulders, quickly tucking the leaf back into their pocket before the Boss managed to take a good look at it. Close was still as a machine, staring at them from behind his opaque goggles. He was just a stone-cold statue made from steel. Not human. A monster.

Surrounding the two not-humans, were a pair of deep grey concrete walls, smooth and cold like the moon. Perpendicular were a pair of walls manufactured from pure corruption, trapping the two in a half-pure half-corrupt enclosure.

Close robotically reached out his hands, and a thick pink chain appeared in them, long and heavy. He made a gesture that Tetra interpreted as "come here." They realised he was giving them a choice. They could do this the easy way, where they would go with him like a domesticated animal without having to fight, or they could do this the hard way, where Close would force them into those very chains.

"So it's down to this, huh?" Tetra sighed melancholically. "Again? I really didn't want this to happen. I really don't want to fight you, you know that, right?"

Close did not respond.

"But I'm not gonna just go with you on a leash either. What am I, some kind of spoiled pet on death row? So just- please. You don't want to fight me, I don't want to fight you. Neither of us want to fight each other, so let's just... Not. Get rid of these corrupted walls, let me go, walk away, and pretend this never happened."

Close did not take Tetra's offer. Instead, he just lowered his hands, the chains dissipating into thin air. He shook his head. His intended message: "That was your last chance, which you refused. What follows is entirely your fault."

Tetra had been in enough street fights to be able to tell when a brawl was mere seconds away from happening. It was a shift in the air, not necessarily changing temperatures but most definitely pressure. Everything turns tense. Not this, however, though they knew that they technically should feel that pre-battle tension on their skin. Instead, they just felt... Sad. Despite the silent of the air, music started to ring in their ears. A song. A level. An awoken boss. It sounded like singing in the distance, though it was not Trist's voice. A woman's. It sang something- it was singing his name. The static of the music sounded almost mechanical, chaotic, yet orderly and deliberate.

Tetra didn't want to fight Trist. They didn't want Trist to fight them. Though- A) this was not Trist and B) Close to Me had other ideas.

Close tensed up his legs, and leapt across the air, disappearing into a pure pink blur that seemed to fade into thin mist. Tetra dodged this effortlessly, dashing to the left, feeling the wind in their hair— only to smash face first against the concrete wall. At least it wasn't one of the corrupted ones... But Tetra almost knocked themselves out as the world spun around them, the dull throbbing pain echoing through their skull.

Damnit, this place was too cramped, Tetra had to be extra careful. They peeled themselves back off the wall just in time to an array of buzzsaws slicing through the air towards their body. Dashing out of the way, they phased through the formation of blades by turning intangible, but once they returned to the material world they were met with a bright pink claw resembling pure metal extended like a talon coming towards their face. They narrowly ducked out of the way of Close's mechanical arm, watching in awe and amazement as it shifted between forms, morph larger and flatter until it was no longer a hand but rather a long, sharp buzzsaw.