#devotedharlequin

The ground rushes up to meet you. You close your eyes. You are accustomed, but it still makes you flinch. You are falling down, chest first, but also skimming as though going down a slide, but also when you land, you are upright, as though you were never falling at all.

Space. Cold, frigid, empty, wide, enormous space. You cannot see anything, and for a moment, you think you are still in the portal, and something has happened to the traversal. Then, you look around you, at the warped forms of your siblings, and realize that you are exactly where you should be. When you told Ringleader that your brother was a black hole, you were being lighthearted as you could in the moment. You have no memory of Hunger, but as you zoom out and look at what you're dealing with, you realize out right you were, and how familiar your brother really is to you.

The truth is: Hunger has stood at your side for your entire life. Looking up into the event horizon of infinity, you see nothing but the void. With dry mouth and ichor icy and still, you slowly turn your head to a smaller, still hulking, identical form that stands behind you in open space. The Universe, as you have always called it, is much bigger than you remember it. In the presence of Its Self, it towers over you, enveloping you from the other side. Hunger at your front, and The Universe, his other aspect, at your back.

Your mind races. Why has Hunger been the Thing you have negotiated your freedom with all of your life? Why does he take and take from you, and not from your siblings? Why are you so especially awful that your brother has seen fit to monitor and control you for all eternity? The contracts, the laws, the pain!! What was the fucking point!?

The scraping of a scabbard brings you back to yourself. Your eyes fall on Fear, whose blade just keeps coming, and coming, and coming. You do contracts, and you spread your power unto your Domain, where it is nice to look at; Fear stores his, and has practiced being regular-size, in order to spend time with their siblings. As he draws, he grows larger, and larger, and larger still. You remain still, being pushed away as they take up more and more space, while your siblings dart off. You should be getting into position, but your focus only allows you to take in your brother, growing so large that soon you can't see all of him at once, and still he is nothing compared to Hunger. He outstrips all of you, even ass your siblings engage their powers. Finally, as the scrape becomes less a sound and more a feeling that shakes your whole body at a sub-sound level, you remember your Place in this. You zoom off to try and get under him.

The fight is tremendous - each of your siblings outstrip you in size, some of them solar systems away and yet most of them plainly visible, but you? You can't access your powers, still. No matter how you push, how you strain, how reality warps around you as Panic and Devotion and Supplication all do their part, you remained hindered, silenced.

It makes you so angry. You're so devastated, enraged, betrayed that you can't even help here, at the crux of the issue. Teeth gritted to crack, hands clenched to bleed, you turn on the terrible void of The Universe, on your brother who has bled you and abused you for time uncountable, and you lunge for it, for Him. The Universe, usually so passive, flinches as you launch yourself at it in this void. Your hands close around where its neck should be, though it is bigger than you've been even for Arlequin, and your hands can't possibly touch around it, and it's hard to look at so you don't even know if you have it by the neck. When did you last touch it? Why doesn't it kill you? Why does it feel like anything, but more importantly, why does it feel like clay?

Burning heat sears across your back. When you howl into the silence of the void, it finally fights back. It grabs you around your middle with one hand, and it flings you toward Its Self - Hunger. Your Eyes catch on golden ichor as you tumble ass over teakettle through open space. You think you see the tip of Fear's hard-won sword leaving Hunger's body. You think it whizzes by you, you think it just misses.