#issb

“No,” he answers himself decisively. He’s alone. But that doesn’t make sense, because Barry didn’t escape, and Kravitz didn’t leave, he’s sure. So then…

He looks down at his hands. His viewpoint is too far from the ground, but he’s not floating. And his hands are… there are four of them. Okay.

“Ohh,” he says faintly, “Oh, the possession did work, I think? This doesn’t make any sense!” He begins to pace back and forth, agitated. He’s Barry, but he’s not. He’s Kravitz, but he’s not. Barry possessed Kravitz, or tried to, and then this happened. Whatever this is. Whatever he is.

“I’m both of us,” he says quietly to a dumpster, and it’s the first thing he’s said that feels right. But as soon as he voices the thought, everything feels terribly wrong.

He leaves the alley, keeping just enough presence of mind to cast Disguise Self. It hides his lower pair of arms and creates an opaque shadow in his hood, hiding his skull face. He gets some weird looks, but at least he looks like a suspicious goliath instead of a weird monster.

“The Raven Queen could fix this,” he mumbles to himself, arms crossed and back hunched as though trying to reattain a normal human height. “But then--no, I-I’d die. Or Barry would? But Barry’s a part of whatever I… we… are, right now, so that’s a big part of me that’d get killed.

“Seems bad to get so attached to my own existence w-when I shouldn’t exist,” he adds with a grim hint of a laugh. His pace speeds up, and people jump out of his way even as he does his best to maneuver around everyone he overtakes on the sidewalk.

He catches sight of a cafe across the street and decides to duck in. Good place to think, maybe.

He says, “I’d like to order a coffee,” and the barista says, “What kind,” and the next three minutes are an excruciatingly awkward standoff where he politely asks about every item on the menu before settling on a small black coffee.

“And what’s your name?” asks the barista with a pained smile, as though she expects him to struggle with this too.

Terrified of taking any longer than he already has, he lets the first sounds on his mind tumble out of his mouth. “Bar… itz.”

She puts a marker to the cup. “B-A-R-I-T...S?”

“Uh, Z.”

“Okay,” she says sweetly. “I’ll call your name when it’s ready, Baritz.”

“Thank you,” he says, extremely glad for the illusory shadow hiding his face. He squeezes himself into a seat in the corner, ignoring the many glances from other patrons in favor of staring down at the center of the square table he’s sitting at.

His lower pair of hands, still invisible, grip the edge of the table. He drums his fingers against the underside of the table and plants his upper hands on the sides of his face, elbows on the table. The wavy patterns in the wood take all his focus, as the least difficult thing to think about at the moment.

“Some upsides,” he whispers, carefully quiet enough to keep anyone else from overhearing, “This is… groundbreaking magic, absolutely unheard of. Could be revolutionary. An interplanar mashup of undead arcana--who could have guessed it would mix so perfectly into… well, me?”

He blinks and turns his gaze to the window. “Interplanar…?”

Something about the word hurts his head. Something he doesn’t want to think about, something he shouldn’t know. His hands clasp together and shake.

“Black coffee for Baritz,” says a voice that’s too nearby to still be behind the counter. He looks up the see the barista setting the cup directly down on his table. “You just seem like you’re having a… day. And it’s not too busy right now, so I figured I’d just make this easier for you.”

“Th-Thanks--Thank you,” he says unsteadily as she returns to the counter. He stares at the cup. Black coffee… he doesn’t want this. He doesn’t even like this.

He doesn’t like any of this. He shouldn’t be one person. He shouldn’t even… they shouldn’t…

“What if I succeeded?” The cup dents in his grip. “What would you do?”

As he stares at the cup, waiting for an answer he doesn’t have, the conversations of other patrons slowly filter into his hearing.

“That’s illegal, dude.”

“Seats are so easy to get, though.”

“That’s not the only--how are you even gonna get there?”

“What? There’s a train line that runs right through there. It’s a big station.”

“Yeah, and all the tickets are gonna be overpriced, with crowded trains. Tons of people go to Goldcliff, and they don’t exactly draw the most savory crowd…”

Baritz frowns. “Goldcliff…?”

Coffee leaks onto his hand from the top of the crushed cup, and the lid pops off the top. He can tell that the liquid is hot, but it doesn’t actually hurt his semi-corporeal hand.

He wipes it all up using napkins from the table’s dispenser, and then quickly stands up and walks out the door, dropping the still-mostly-full coffee cup and wad of wet napkins in the trash on his way out.

Goldcliff. He walks briskly down the street, paying slightly less attention to the people he’s nearly barrelling over. He shouldn’t go to Goldcliff. Barry had meant to go there, there’s something there, someone--no, no, no, he shouldn’t think about it, he can’t think about it.

His legs take him all the way out to the edge of town as his thoughts conflict with one another. He can’t go there; he doesn’t even know if his magic will work like normal, and trying to teleport would be dangerous. And he just--he shouldn’t. No matter how much he wants to know, how much he feels like the answers to all of his questions are just on the tip of his--

“I don’t want to fight!” he shouts into the open air. His disguise dissipates with it. He’s already walked far past the edge of town, beyond where anyone will notice him.

“Please,” he says, and knocks his head against a tree. Then he sits down against the trunk, lower arms crossed and upper hands clasped together. “Let’s just--I don’t want this any more than you.”

He shakes his head and stares at the sky. “How are we gonna get out of this one?” The clouds just drift lazily. He sighs. He has to stop being, so that Barry and Kravitz can keep going.

But what are they even going to do? The same thing as always? The same stupid, silly game. They both know it, and they both keep playing.

“It’s nothing against you personally,” he says. “I know you know that. I… I can’t apologize.” He leans back against the tree. “I have to do this, you know? It’s everything to me. I don’t think you’d understand.”

He closes his eyes. “Or maybe I do.”

Something feels nauseating, and he just shuts his eyes tighter. It feels like his heart dropping through his stomach, leaving an empty space in his chest, hollow and painful. He feels like so much less, now. Small, but not so small that the hole in his chest completely disappears.

His hands--just two-- drag their fingers through the grass and dirt. He opens his eyes.

Next to him, draped in a familiar bright red, a figure sits just shy of leaning on his shoulder, hands covering his face. Kravitz blanks. “Barry…?”

Barry lowers his hands, trembling. There are tears in his eyes when he turns to face Kravitz. “W-Well, that was…”

“Yeah.”

“F-Forget about everything I--We thought a-about,” Barry says, “T-Towards the end, th-there. Just s-some nonsense anxiety. D-Don’t worry about it.”

“I don’t have any bounties recently sighted near Goldcliff,” Kravitz shrugs. “Just get out of here before it’s been too long to justify not getting out my scythe.”

“R-Right, yeah,” Barry says quickly. He stands up and reaches behind his shoulder, snapping his fingers. A portal manifests behind him and he hesitates briefly. Then he gives Kravitz a tiny smile and says, “W-Well, nice to meet us.”