[It's uncanny. It doesn't feel like it should be real but it is because it's as real as anything else here is. Dreams, memories, fragments of pieces of copies of things dumped into his head and splintering his sanity and then he's here and he's not panicking. He's gritting his teeth. He's looking down at the chain stretched out between them, eyeballs it.]
[Maybe a foot or so of distance between them.]
[He can still speak. How early is...?]
[Do not look up at him, do not startle, do not signal in any way that this is shocking or surprising or even unnerving, that he can still speak. There's a heaviness wrapped around his throat, like a hand choking him out.]
[He talks around it.]
Don't suppose you found a key anywhere. [Levity, right? What a younger, saner version of him would've once bothered with.]
FUCK
[Maybe a foot or so of distance between them.]
[He can still speak. How early is...?]
[Do not look up at him, do not startle, do not signal in any way that this is shocking or surprising or even unnerving, that he can still speak. There's a heaviness wrapped around his throat, like a hand choking him out.]
[He talks around it.]
Don't suppose you found a key anywhere. [Levity, right? What a younger, saner version of him would've once bothered with.]
[Should he be pretending that he's who he was?]