The hangar doors had barely sealed behind him when the weight of everything hit. Graft stumbled down the hallways mindlessly, the flickering lights overhead stuttering like broken memories. Every step felt wrong—like his legs were moving on borrowed rhythm, too slow to be real, too fast to stop. His coat hung in tatters, crusted with soot and someone else’s blood. His own pain was indistinct now, drowned beneath the agony he’d siphoned off others like poison from a wound. His boots dragged more than stepped, the soles slick with either blood, oil, or maybe both—he couldn’t tell anymore. If it was blood. Maybe it had been his, at some point.
His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Each tremor sent sharp, electric pulses through nerves stretched too thin. His palms twitched with the threat of movement, of something else waking up beneath the surface of his skin. The tendrils—those cursed, hungry things—itched to crawl out, to latch on, to anchor. 'Not here. Not now. Keep it together.' His hands curled in on themselves like he could will the tremors to stop. He couldn’t. Pain throbbed through every line of his body, radiating from frayed nerves that weren’t his to begin with. Hours of transference. Screams he'd absorbed still rang in the marrow of his bones.
A trickle of blood slid down from his nose. He sniffed, and blinked rapidly to clear the static swarming his vision. That’s when he noticed the agent. Standing just ahead. Watching. He wiped the blood from under his nose with the back of his wrist, the copper scent sharp and humiliating. When he looked up, an agent was standing at the end of the corridor, half-lit by the strobes. Graft’s gaze locked unintentionally.
“…Sorry.” The word left him in a rasp, barely audible.
He flinched as he said it, like even the sound of his own voice was too much. Arms wrapped tightly around his chest, bracing himself—not against another attack, but against himself. The twitch in his back, that flutter beneath the skin… he could feel the tendrils coil, eager, instinctual. Predatory.
Stop.
The fear sparked sharp in his throat. “I—I’m good,” he added quickly, a lie smeared across a raw and bleeding mouth. “Just—needed a sec.” The other agent didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Maybe they didn’t believe him. Graft’s shoulders hunched. His voice sank lower. His skin still hummed with the agony of fifteen other people—and ghosts he couldn’t name. "All... good... yeah..."
