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Sebastian Solace woke up in pain. It wasn’t a new pain, but the dull ache radiating through his body irritated him nonetheless. His ratty bed consisted of a couple mattresses he found and pushed together, but he could only rest his upper body on it, leaving his tail coiled around.
He cringed when he got up. Half-dried body slime from his tail stuck to the mattress protectors. He’d have to replace them soon. Maybe sheets of plastic would work when he ran low? He stretched esca to tailfin best he could in the small space he called his bedroom. It was just the back room of his shop, big enough to store things not out on the shelves and for a space to sleep and eat.He opened a tiny fridge shoved in the corner and his snout wrinkled at the smell. Whatever food he had left was expiring. He wasn’t hungry, anyways. The thought of eating made his stomach cramp. He had a tap in an old water pipe, which was probably safe, where he got his water from. Water, at least, was never an issue. Maybe if he drank less water his body would stop producing so much mucus membrane.Despite the morning weariness, if it was even morning, Sebastian got ready for his day without complaint. Yesterday was a good day for foraging and no doubt the first wave of expendables would be eager to peruse his wares. As he fastened his straps to his tail, he noticed how flaky and dry the scales were underneath. He picked at a loose scale so it wouldn’t snag on his gear and pressed gauze over the resulting raw skin. While he was at it, he even redid the bandaging on his third arm.With that said and done, he slithered to his shop, goods in tow, and set up. He leaned back against his usual corner and sighed. He rubbed his primary eyes. Even with those closed, he still made out shapes and light with his third eye fine, if fuzzy. He felt it move in its socket, rotating to follow the shape of his shop, which felt weird as all hell. He closed that eye and kneaded it with a knuckle to ease some nerve pain. Asymmetrical skull and eyes meant random headaches. Who would’ve guessed? What remained of his lips curled in disgust when he felt his greasy, thinning hair. Maybe he’d put an offer out to trade a flashlight for some damn shampoo.After a couple hours, the first wave of expendables started coming in, weary and haggard. “Aw, what’s got you all down?” he asked them. “Chin up! You’re out bright and early!”One of the expendables murmured something about Pandemonium. Sad! He didn’t particularly care, because someone else was very interested in the medkits, and he was only one shopkeeper.The day went like every other day: Slow.And at the end of it, when the last round of expendables was sent through, Sebastian went back to scavenging around the area. The Blacksite seemed to change every day. Maybe he let something out that fucked with geometry, and couldn’t remember? None of his damn business. It meant there was always a wealth of corpses and cabinets to loot.By the time he was back at his backroom sleeping spot, he was exhausted. He shed his gear and laid in his awful bed and stared at the ceiling until it was time for the next day to begin.Life went on.The pain started to bother him more as days ticked by. He scratched idly at old vivisection scarring that his clothes sometimes irritated. His gills became dry and itchy, even when he reluctantly drank enough water to encourage gross mucus secretion, and the pain only ebbed when he dove underwater to explore flooded portions of the site.One day Sebastian woke up and knew something was wrong. He wasn’t sure what, but something didn’t look right. Not in his room—the thought frightened him. But in his very vision. He pulled himself out of bed. Urbanshade never ceased throwing expendables into the Hadal Blacksite, so he didn’t get any break days, even when the headaches got bad or pain in his bones made the idea of sleeping all day very appealing. He didn’t need another damn problem on top of his pre-existing ones.Where did he put that old mirror? He didn’t like looking at his reflection, but it was hard to see some parts of himself he sort of had to see, that got irritated and needed bandaging. He tugged the cloth he kept over it most of the time, propped in a corner where he didn’t have to acknowledge it until he needed it. Even then, bending down to look into his own eyes stung all up and down his spine. Focusing made his head hurt, but it wasn’t like he had a choice.Sebastian raised a claw and pulled his hair back. The bluish hue of his skin was pallor with exhaustion. Bags softened the skin under his eyes. As he examined his features, he noticed what had changed. He shut his primary eyes to prove it. His third eye’s glow dimmed. It rotated in its socket fine, perfectly capable of moving and staring into its reflection, but color and shape fuzzed.He blinked hard. He gingerly waved a hand in front of the eye and pulled its lids further open to get a better look at himself.Foggy white clouded the eye. It followed the focus of the rest of his eyes, but only presented as a blur at the top edge of his vision.Well, what was he supposed to do about that? Was he sick? He—well, he didn’t feel fine. In fact, the ache in all his muscles was getting worse, but it was a slow increase. Stress and, if he had to guess, hunger. Blacksite-typical struggles he simply adjusted to. Now, if it was a sharp increase in pain, that’d be an issue. He was just stressed.Two days later, Sebastian went blind in one eye.One of the expendables noticed, miraculously, and asked why it wasn’t glowing, if he got hurt. He laughed in their face and asked if anyone ever told them it was rude to stare.A week after that, Sebastian started to accept that he'd gotten himself sick, and bad. That was the last thing he needed. A tiny failure in the messy machinery of his physiology was one thing, but more widespread issues were a problem. A couple of the expendables were getting good, visibly haggard from revives but with a hard look in their eyes. They were getting far. More importantly, their research was rare and rather damning, and Sebastian hoarded it like a dragon. If his health got worse, he’d gather less useful goods for sale. Things were good.
Friction tears in his scales from his equipment stopped healing. He generously padded the wounds with gauze, held firm by his usual gear, but those got him questioned. The expendables knew, and the fuckers gossipped, and he hated the looks he got. Fear turned to pity.
Every medkit he found went back to himself. He stopped strapping things to his tail for the shop. He stitched his sick skin together with thread. The sores never healed.He wore looser clothes, just in case. If anything irritated his vivisection scars and opened them, he didn’t want to know what disgusting infection would eat him from the inside out.The loser clothes would hide how thin he’d gotten, anyways, so it wasn’t all bad. He curled over himself to examine himself, chest to tail. His torso ribs protruded, but a shirt hid that fine. However, the sharp angle of his tail spine couldn’t be so easily hidden. When he ran his hand along it, he felt every single vertebrae. His stomach growled at the thought of food.He slipped a claw along the edge of a ventral scale. Movement hurt. But what could he do? He had the day ahead of him. He was making good progress in his research collection. So he sucked it up and went to his shop.The day after, he found a freshly-dead expendable, couldn’t have been more than a few minutes old, fresh off the tail of Pinkie. He couldn’t keep any of the meat down. He slept fitfully.Days passed. His condition worsened.Sebastian had a seizure. In the middle of the day, in his shop, while people were in it.He didn’t remember people leaving, but he found himself alone, head pounding, spit drying on his lip, and blood in his mouth. He pulled himself up, locked up shop early, and laid on his tattered mattresses until he stopped feeling nauseous.A catalog of the items sold and inventory on display left told him he’d been robbed of a few things. There was enough blood around the exit vent that he wondered if he’d bitten something other than his own tongue; maybe an expendable got too close. He was too shaky to care about any of it.Something was wrong with him.He pulled his remaining shop items into the back room. The shelves were a bit barren. When was the last time he dug up a lantern or code breacher? Or put a blacklight on the shelves? He blinked hard to clear his head. He had to get his shit together. There was one of him, and a functionally infinite Blacksite’s worth of goodies to steal—Something caught his eye behind one of his last hand-crank lights. His esca’s pale light bounced off the shiny metal of a perithesene syringe.He wrapped his claws around it gingerly and examined it. Dusty, but full. He looked around. Him, or an expendable’s life? They paid good money for the drug. Hell, he could upcharge it, say they were buying out his stock faster than he could replenish it, which was technically true.He hiked his shirt up and his third arm, numb with pins and needles, probed his side and stomach. He pinched the thin skin and jabbed the syringe into thin, clammy skin. Its tiny hooks activated and sank into his flesh while the drug emptied itself into his overclocked system.The relief was immediate. A warmth spread throughout his body. The syringe emptied and he lazily set it back on the shelf. Pleasant, painless fog settled over his mind. That was the good shit. When was the last time he used one of those? Needed to?Okay, maybe he wasn’t in a state to run his shop without the little bastards raising his blood pressure, but he could still go out and get things done. So that was what he did. No slumping against a wall procrastinating, lost in the murky depths of a migraine, or taking just five more minutes to prepare. No, he threw on a satchel to carry in lieu of his body harness, hung a sign with “ closed ” in curly font over his shop entrance, and left.Twenty minutes into his excursion, pain crept back into his periphery. It started at his tail-tip, first a tingling pain, then a numbness that stretched along his dorsal side. Then it rolled up his middle and into his skull.
His balance failed and he lurched, suddenly unable to control his own movement, as a spasm wracked him. He leaned against a wall, throat filled with cotton. Heat flushed his head. His stomach hurt.The satchel brushed against his side where he injected the perithesene and the pain stole the breath from his lungs. Irritated, humiliated, he lifted his coat and shirt enough to see dark, velvety bruising. The injection site was tender to the touch. Oh, come on. Not even a miracle drug worked?Forty-five minutes into his outing, Sebastian found a hole in the infrastructure to empty his stomach into. It was mostly spit, stomach acid, and syrupy blood. He slithered away dizzy. Chills and fever melted into a nauseating state of living.He didn’t remember going back to his hideout.Or laying down.How embarrassing it was for him to be in such a state. He was Sebastian Solace, the saboteur, the shopkeeper who kept Urbanshade’s sorry souls alive just a few minutes longer. Now, he was a pitiful thing, laying in his own stuffy mucus membrane and sweat, listening to his heart race. He caused the Hadal Blacksite Lockdown. He stole the Mask of Sadness, released the Void Mass, connected Painter to the mainframe, and freed Eyefestation. He did all that, as a strong person who withstood Urbanshade playing god with his DNA, and now he couldn’t handle a little pain? A little stomach ache?Footsteps.His mouth was dry. “What do you want?”Black shoes crossed his field of view. Sebastian had enough strength to turn his head up at Mr. Lopee. What was he doing there? The man rarely visited, and when he did, he merely watched from afar. A chill unrelated to his affliction passed through him.“I’m busy.”Lopee took his sweet time stepping back to a shelf. “Just… looking,” he said in that slow, dead man’s drawl he had. Admittedly Sebastian wouldn’t have been surprised if Lopee said nothing, which meant he wasn’t there for watching.Sebastian tried to prop himself up on one arm and ignored how the vertigo made his vision swim. “Listen, I… I’ve just been sick, or something. I’ll go back out and… I don’t know. Find some more perithesene, ha.” He ran his sore tongue over his dry lips. He tasted stomach acid. “This line of work isn’t easy.”“You… do not need to talk.”“Then why else are you bothering me? Fuck off.”Slowly, painfully slowly, Lopee sat cross-legged against a shelf. He placed his cane across his lap.“Oh, don’t sit down, dude. I’m not helping you up,” Sebastian spat. “Is this funny to you?”His tired eyes stared through him. “No.”“Get out of here,” he muttered, trying to stand. His stomach lurched and he crumpled back down, short of breath. “You’ve got bad timing.”“You are… worse than sick,” Lopee observed. “...unfortunate.” Sebastian could almost describe his expression as somber.“Hey, hey, what’s wrong, old man? I’ll bounce back. I’m not dying.”Lopee averted his eyes.Sebastian’s breathing quickened. “Oh. You can’t be serious.”So that was it.
“Why?” Sebastian spat. “After all this—my body just… gives up? All of this, and for what—”He choked on his words. He closed his eyes and panted. Urbanshade killed him. Hurrah for them. What broke the camel’s back, he wondered in his delirium. Was it the shrimp DNA? Or the whale? The stress? His body unraveled on the inside. Systems lagged and broke down and seized.It made sense, he supposed.When he next opened his eyes, he expected Lopee to be gone. “Why are you still here?” he rasped.
Lopee over-enunciated every word slowly and deliberately. “Can I not… watch you go? Say goodbye to a friend?”“Oh, is that what we are?” he asked dryly. “Not co-workers? Manager and subordinate? I…” He shut his eyes. The room spun. “I don’t want to die.”“It happens to all of us.”“Yeah, yeah.”
Every breath stung his gills.
“Sorry for leaving you alone. You know where all the research is. You’ll—” He dared to look Lopee in the eyes. The man, decades older than he was, who saw so much bullshit from Urbanshade, looked sad. “You’ll find another saboteur.”Lopee said nothing.Sebastian’s chest hurt. His breathing became shallow and rapid and his lungs refused to fill. His head hurt. He tasted blood.Lopee bowed his head, removed his hat, and held it in his hands. Sebastian’s eyes fluttered open and shut, looking at nothing, seeing nothing, and his mouth moved but no words came out. Maybe to himself, he was talking about his will, what he was leaving behind, his goodbyes to Lopee and all of the Blacksite, if any. His soft organs quietly failed. His fever burned. He never stopped shivering.Until, finally, he sighed his final breath, and Sebastian Solace’s pain ended.