@lifewish
No one's here this time, when Ritsu wakes up. They dreamed again, of a stretching eternity beyond space and time. It's never exactly the same every time they end up here. Sometimes the chunks of rubble have grass trying to grow on them, sometimes the stars wheel in different colours. Sometimes the rubble is that of pristine white instead, smooth marble of throne rooms among the manmade material of Chaldea's sundered walls.
Again, they had walked for an eternity, and no one was there. They called, and nothing answered. The command seals on their arms were a dull scarring they've never become in life, and no one answered.
Maybe it was... indeed, a dream. Otherwise, when they returned to Chaldea, how would it be empty? If this here is a dream, or was the rest of it—? No one is there when Ritsu wakes up, which should never be the case if their survival was real. Ergo. They gab Beast's command seal on their forearm, fingers digging crescents into their skin, without realizing the seal burns underneath. That, too, has to be a dream. It doesn't wake them up.
Is Chaldea empty? They have to find out, they have to keep walking through eternity until their weary legs bring them to a place with nothing to carry. Ritsu moves by habit, opening the door with too much force. (Where is Count? Where's Beast? They're dead, of course, because that much was a dream.) Mouth moves in the shape of a wordless prayer that is and isn't a summons, though with no magic behind it. Nothing will be called forth.
What is there is, instead: Goetia. (Ritsu's worst fear was always this, not that they are alone in the end, but that in being alone there is no one to prove 'you are real. You survived that trial,' and without proof there is not reality.) Ritsu's expression snaps from cloudy to fixed in an instant and they haul themselves back. "I won't." Their voice is hoarse, the rasp of panic and only moments having spent awake. "Let you take it from me." The reality, the 'something' to carry, the other person at the end of the road.
It's fear and anger of something that isn't real any more that makes Ritsu force themselves forward, lash out with a raised fist for Goetia's sternum, almost crying. They don't want to be left back here, where there's only eternity and silence.
