He liked the other doors, but this one leaves a bad taste in Austin's mouth, makes his stomach churn and his head spin as he takes in the shape emblazoned in its green surface. He's chosen a sword; he's chosen a throne; now he stands before a chalice with his heart pounding and he finds that he absolutely cannot look away. He has come to a place in his destiny where there is no choice, where there is only one direction, and that is forward. It's not a familiar sensation, and as Austin watches his hand, unbidden, reach out to touch the doorknob, he finds that he very much doesn't like it.
But it is too late. Fingers brush against cool metal and memories flood up his arm, through his system, to rattle around in the back of his mind. Days spent lounging around the frat house, laughing with buddies, melting to a tryst in the stacks on the third floor of the library. An attack, excitement; love for a car that now is long gone and mostly forgotten, rotting down to bare bones where he left it parked. A month of deprivation, of misery, of living with people he barely saw because why would he bother, and then days of struggle simply to stay alive as the small world they'd built started to crumble around him.
Faces lost in the fog, and perhaps he is, as well: a sickness that creeps up through his bones, that steals away the last of his humanity.
Austin as a young man was always told he was special. Richer, smarter, more attractive; capable and strong, with a safety net a mile wide if he needed it. He was one of a kind, not valued but reassured, certain that he would stand on his own two feet because his own two feet were blessed.
Now that certainty is smashed as he becomes not he, but they: one piece of something greater, swallowed up to become nothing more but one appendage of a virus that has dozens, or hundreds, or perhaps even more. An entire city that has been transformed into the eyes and arms and legs, fingers and toes of something bigger than them. Austin is nothing but a memory in the virus's mind, nothing but a jumble of vines and --
and --
He is a memory that rebels. Austin has never been something so small as a cog in a machine, has never given his will over to anyone this way. He is not a worker drone, destined to follow the directions of something greater. He is not the hands, or the fingers, or the toes, or the arms or the eyes. He is the head. He is the brain. And it is this thought that wrenches him free from the collective, that makes him his own man once more.
Kind of.
His limbs move wrong, his center of balance is off. His height remains but his posture is crooked, loping as he works to drag himself along on tendril-like fingers, tries to find a pace that makes sense. A hand comes down and a foot beside it and he knows that is wrong but it works and so he allows it to happen. He touches a face in the greenery, a body that feels human, and hauls himself into intense focus on it, breathlessly hoping that it might be his own body, the one he has loved so dearly until now.
Instead he is greeted by a crooked nose, pale face, a loose tumble of near-white hair. He can't frown but vines writhe and shift around him in disgust and annoyance, clearing away to get a better view. His rescuer, complete with white coat and looping [if frayed, now] green scarf. This is the man who watched over his body while he fled it, who worked to pour water down his throat when he was thirsty, who fended off a monster in his defense. Austin might be selfish, but he can hardly, in this moment, refuse to help the one who helped him. Vines pull away, and then wrap the scrawny body in a gentle way, hauling it into a nest-like cluster on one shoulder.
Together, they will escape. The thought fills him, steels his spine and sharpens his focus. Austin moves down the corridor with his charge in tow, and as he does, he begins to fray. The farther he moves from the center of the tower the more he loses shape, melts from something near-human to something else entirely. He unravels, unwinds: can see the exit and he leans in toward it, close, so close, close enough that he could cry, that he can feel the mist rise up around his shape and just about taste the fresh air beyond --
But he cannot make it. He drops his charge, exhausted and frustrated, and shadows come out of the fog to gather him up and pull him free. Austin is left alone, trapped in a tower that seems to be his future.
He lingers, just a few looping green vines, staring toward the exit, for a very long time. Then, with a force of will he's not at all surprised to find is contained within him, Austin begins to gather himself up. Fresh vines form a roughly human shape, and this time he gives it two hands, two feet, the normal number. Something approximating hair, as he gets closer to the tower's heart. Something more him.
There is no hope, but that doesn't mean he'll give in. If he is here, perhaps others are, as well. And if they are, he will find them.
