Lucifer’s locket, (locket),
We’ll give you the key and you won’t say a thing—

Vincent could feel the Earth crumbling beneath his sanity like sand slipping through his fingers. Whatever vestiges of gold he’d been so desperately searching for amidst the bombs of light flickering in his periphery had faded to dark. This was not— could not be — his Ophelia, and yet a chord of resonance had struck. Something, or someone, who yet knew him perhaps? (A thought that in any other moment might have made him snap out of whatever insanity plagued him by sheer force of will, but alas…)

Riddles are but windows into the true meaning of life, he thought to himself acerbically. If only she knew how these voices, these beings, haunted his mind! It would be suicide to admit as much, but he certainly felt it. Still, that thought rang a little too loudly for his liking upon reflection. The vestiges of someone else’s mind brushed just slightly against his, a feeling that he was intimately familiar with given the circumstances. A violation, really.

(And it was a violation, thrusting forward into her head like that unwanted, uncalled for, and washing his pain and grief over that man and his curse into her unsuspecting mind, however briefly.)

Blinking through the chaos then, just long enough to hear her verbal response, Vince slackened his grip a little. It was said in such a calming voice, a voice with a distinctly nonchalant tenor, that he made to anchor himself to it. He didn’t care where she took him. He hadn’t a way to protest even if he did. Save me.

The blink of apparition then did nothing to his mind, only his stomach.

Keeling over, still huddled close to the ground but now settled on the floor of some apartment, Vincent felt his every last morsel of the day bubble up and out. On second thought— maybe aparating in this state had been a bad idea.

Pinky promise, (promise)…

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