servitude.

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For a moment, everything is nothing.

The darkness that is nothing mills about like a suffocating fog. You fear it won't ever disappear, that the cloud overcoming you will linger forever. It is almost as though you know the cloud won't be there forever, but in those moments, it feels like it will be.

That is, until a sharp pain radiates through your neck. You roll over and grunt in an effort to get more comfortable. Rocks crunch and shift beneath your arm, biting at your skin like little mites. A bit of your shirt shifts over your neck, tickling your collar bone.

You realize then that you're rolling over, and in an instant, it clicks.

You are alive.

Your eyes shoot open, and every muscle in your body freezes. You can feel. You can feel the rocks against your skin, the warmth of a hot breeze kissing your cheek.

For a moment, you lay just like that, hunched in a half-ball on your side, entirely motionless. A burgundy sky illuminates scratchy, oily pavement just beneath your face. Two buildings loom on either side of you, made of dark brick, casting shadows over the alley you lie in. Beyond the alley lies a sidewalk and a road with more buildings on the other side of it.

You remain still. This alley way is not one of the many alleys in your home city. This sky is not Earth's sky. But, upon raising a hand to your face, then sitting up and touching your chin, lips, eyes, hair, you acknowledge that this body is yours, aside from the fact that the skin on your palms appears starkly pale — almost purple. And your mind, your thoughts, are absolutely your own. You know your name, (Y/N) (L/N), you know you were forced to take a large cocktail of drugs, you know you are a murderer, you know...

Oh God, Jake. You had been so high, and Marco had given you a knife. Marco told you to kill Jake, that you had to kill Jake, or Marco would kill you instead. You were so out of your own mind that you did not realize that Marco would kill you either way, and that he would have killed Jake himself, had you not followed Marco's orders.

Jake was dead.

And what were you? That last line of drugs you inhaled, which remained a barely retrievable memory that felt like it occurred years ago, must have killed you. But here you are, alive. Breathing. Seeing. Thinking.

Perhaps Marco spared you, dumped you in some alley far away. But why would he do that? After the 48 hours you spent in his basement (or something like that... he forced so many drugs into you that time hadn't felt measurable), you knew too much about him, and you knew what had happened in that basement. He would have no choice but to kill you. So, perhaps it's possible that you are dead, and that this is all a hallucination occurring in the brief moments before death, those moments where everything lies in a nonexistent limbo. However, if this were a moment occurring in limbo, why would everything be so vivid? At least five minutes have passed now, and everything you have observed looks so... real.

Maybe you're just insanely high. So high that you've entered some alternate plane of existence in your mind and think that you've died, so high that you don't feel high anymore (you certainly don't feel high right now). You're not a drug addict of any particular sort; hard drugs were never your forte, so how would you know what cocktail of drugs might make you hallucinate this hard?

Just then, two figures walk down the sidewalk in front of you, swiftly passing your alley. They don't look at you. In the brief moment that they are in your field of vision, you notice that they are shaped like humans, but that they don't look human. They look... different.

You stand up and try to run after them, to get a better look at them and ask them where you are, but suddenly, every muscle in your body desires to fail, so you stumble, just barely catching yourself on the wall. You huff several breaths and try to regain balance.