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He had been so close. His hands had been right there, able to feel the skin on each of their faces. Serpentine could have saved them from the fire... and yet it had seemed they did not want to be rescued. His mother, his best friend, had each bitten at his fingertips anytime they came close, their teeth inflicting pain that shot like fire up his arms. Every time he thought he had a grip, that he would be able to reach them... the biting only got worse.

Voices had assailed him. His father, yes, and Daran each reminding him of how he had failed those caught up in the flame once, how he would continue to do so now. Then, right towards the end… even the one voice who had up to that point been notably absent, appeared to berate him. Brahma. Gentle, loving little brother with whom he had maintained communication for years, his only family now that both of his parents were dead. Brahma, telling him that their father had been right to keep them apart, that he would never come home… never speak with his big brother again. It was too much, on top of all the other assaults, and even as the voices and the faces began to fade... the general’s eyes watered even more than it had against the smoke.

Suddenly, the fire disappeared from around him. He was left in chilling darkness. In the corners of his eyes, the now shadowy heads of those he loved swelled and split like over-roasted sausages, warping now into large, shapeless creature akin to the ever-shifting darkness in the Rift. These creature… larger than any youma he had encountered, though not as aggressive...could they truly be some form of new torment, crafted by the Negaverse to punish him? Unfamiliar dread and anxiety flooded his veins, making any act of defiance difficult.

Krishna Dhawan was a strong man. He worked hard, was of serious nature. As General Serpentine, he was no different. But the transition from one form of mental attack to the other was too much even for him to overcome. Reality and madness swirled in a mobius strip, and he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. All he knew was that he could hear Richard’s voice coming out of one of those ghoulish things, and he would not stand for it.

’I will free you. I will… save you.’

Serpentine threw a wild punch towards the monster, too far gone to even think of using his whip. Speed and certainty were all that mattered now.

When the swinging punch failed to meet its mark, Serpentine growled and tried to build up the strength to try again. The creature loomed over him, and the sweat on his skin chilled him to the bone. The greatest horror of all was that his friend sounded perfectly normal. His tone, timbre, cadence... all read as Richard, as though nothing were wrong at all. Asking for the fight to end, reassuring that he would not hurt him... and yet, how could he say that, when he had become that thing?! The second strike was going to be a kick, but the General was so lost in the darkness that he did not see the rock that he tripped over until he wasy already falling.

Now on the ground, Serpentine slammed his eyes shut in an effort to control the waves of nausea that crashed against his belly and his skull. He shivered in this additional layer of darkness, but even his eyelids could not block out the knowledge that the thing was still out there. Hotter than the bile on his tongue or the fire he had just left was the shame that overswept him. Why could he not stand up... and fight?! How had he become this crumpled, pathetic mess, to the point that he could not even stand on his feet and do what must be done.

The florist began to dry heave, but three cracked words escaped his lips, "I'm sorry, Richard..." Sorry for getting his partner punished in the first place. Sorry for his becoming a monstrosity. Sorry that he could not stand and at least release him from that torment. Just... sorry.

The moment those tendrils shot towards him and grabbed him, the rainbow-haired General began to struggle. He did not want to die, much less at the appendages of one of the very few people in this world about which he truly cared. But there was no way for him to get free. Between the shivers that racked his form, the pain rising from his hands, the crippling nausea, all he could do was allow the physically stronger of the two to pull him still…. and listen to him speak.

Only when he heard a desperate, genuine plea did he respond wearily, “I know.” Richard had never liked the silence, not even on the first night when he drunkenly approached Zinkenite and a newly corrupted Serpentine. Yet surely he had learned by now that silence was his partner’s natural frame of mind, his buffer between himself and those unworthy of his attentions, his shield to protect the more tender parts of his nature. “As you know I cannot fill it.” A charred hand rose, trembling from pain and effort, to reach and touch this monster, to show that nothing could separate them now. The chill, the panic, the dread… they were fading quickly, partially due to the emotion he heard in Richard’s voice, but mostly because the magic had simply run its course and was fading away. Grasping fingers found uniform cloth, not squishy creature flesh... and with that touch the fear and image of his friend as monster left his mind in one, relieved instant.

His struggles ceased. He easily leaned against the offered shoulder, struggling to regain the decorum he had lost. “Must I say it?” It was hard to speak. Hard to speak physically, when his throat burned from smoke and his dry tongue brushed roughly against the roof of his mouth. Hard to speak emotionally because he had already been stripped bare and he despised vulnerability. Yet, speak he did. He owed that much. “You know what you have. My aid, my pride, my love. You must… know that I am never sorry… that you have stayed with me.”

The remaining waves of nausea forced him to close his eyes, and coughs threatened to destroy the last words he had to speak. They were no less genuine for their roughness as he said one thing that Buddingtonite had never heard from him before, “Richard… thank you... friend.”