Chapter Text
One of Sam's limb squirmed uncomfortably at the table. Was he... meant to position it in the chair? That felt really weird at his scale, would it also seem weird to them at theirs? Sam would really just prefer to hover it there... Everything felt so unnatural, what the hell was Sam doing? This was something so normal and human he felt out-of-touch interacting with it. Why was this so hard for him to--
"Sam," Hellen spoke up first, voice stiff and arms crossed. She wasn't looking at Sam. Standing, she grabbed a notebook set on another counter and a pencil, setting it before Sam as she returned to her seat, "This was Joel's idea. Try and write what you can. We want to try and communicate with you, like- This."
"Oh, strange Observer. We have brought a manuscript describing your form! We seek to understand you! Commune with you!" One of the astronomers shouted hopefully into the thick opaque clouds above, holding a stack of papers before whatever might be above.
"About me...? I don't understand"
"We want to communicate with you." Sam said quietly into the black pupil centered in an incomprehensible cacophony of swirling, bursting, yet not clashing, colors. The eye of the storm.
"You... communicate with me."
"Are we different? Sam?"
Joel gurgled and grinded his teeth as Sam gave no response, "Maybe we should-- hhh --be asking him something. I don't think he-- hhhh --knows what to say..."
In a curiously panicked fashion, Sam jolted to swirl a thin red strand of himself around the pencil offered to him. Right. Focus, Sam.
This delayed reaction was enough to settle Joel. A few teeth shed from his mouth from the way they'd been grinding against eachother.
"Hehehe... Can we fight?" Leigh... Sam didn't need to write an answer to that, he shook the offshoot of himself in the apartment side to side: No.
For a moment, there was a short exchange between Leigh and Hellen, composed of decelerations that it had been a stupid question and that Leigh would lose anyways, quite obviously. This was countered by the point that it would probably still be fun. Every word was silenced as a strange staggered whistling sound echoed loudly from everywhere outside. Was Sam... laughing?
Hellen, still glaring daggers at Leigh through her crumpled paper mask furtively, returned most of her focus to Sam. "Hm. What's it like?" The question was simple, something obvious to ask. Yet...
Sam struggled to condense so much thought, experience, sensation, emotion, into something coherent and able to be written. 'Weird.' that was all he could will himself to write, surprised partially by the fact he could write anything. 'Everything feels very small.' that was barely enough to satisfy Sam's massive fractaline feelings, but it would have to do. They would ask more questions. Give them time.
"...maybe it is too much for you."
Sophie, one of the ones closer to Sam, had the courtesy of turning the paper around so it could actually be read. "Oooohhh, heheh, I get that..." Leigh again... "You all feel soooo small and weak when I'm all-"
'No. You don't. That is not the same.' Sam wrote under the original words.
Leigh was, surprisingly, silenced by this, sitting back down with her unerving laugh still undertoning the act.
With another thread-thin appendage that spilled from Sam, he turned to a different page to write more.
"What-- hhh --do you mean?"
'You are very small. Everything is very small.' Pain. These were thoughts that hurt to think. This was the first time Sam had felt pain for so long, was this even pain? The feeling was foreign. This was new. 'The world feels like it's held in my hands. I am everywhere. Everyone knows what I am. It's familiar. Known.'
Maybe, this wasn't a good idea. Joel should have never thought of it. Sam should've never let them know what he was.
"Uhh... Ooh, I got one, do you, like, regret any of this? I mean, I definitely wouldn't like being all... Y'know." Ah... Another question. Who had asked that? Xaria? Did Sam not remember their voices? Yes. Xaria was leaning forward so that she could be seen, she was further down the table. She had asked.
But... That question itself. Sam answered it easily, but hesitated to make that answer known. 'Yes.' He wrote small on the paper.
No one gave a response. Had Sam done something wrong? No, no, he just... needed to explain himself. 'I know how much good I have done. That is not what I regret. I should have never become this. I miss you all.'
Xaria laughed awkwardly, with squinted, averted eyes, Monty copied a little less awkwardly "We're still here though. Actually, you're the one avoiding us"
She was right. Why had Sam been avoiding this? His friends? He was everywhere, he could see them however much he wanted, and now he could communicate with them properly! Why...
"You miss us... What else do you miss?"
Oh.
Sam knew the answer to that one. There were a lot of answers.
Too many.
They burst and bloomed in his mind, things he missed, things he lost, humanity, love, fear, the ability to hide, awe, an equal, curiously, pity, too many, .too many.
Shivers ran down a spine far too long, his breath whistled out in a terrible hurricane. And eyes kept closed opened.
Sam could see so much.
There was a voice again. And again and again over and over thousands of voices spoke to him. Battering an unknowable amount of ear drums, electric signals tore through nerves and swarmed in his mind to report their hearings.
The seas grew tumultuous, the small ship threatened to capsize.
The image shifts again, the scale grows. There is more. More eyes budded and opened to experience the world. Mouths gasped to taste the air. Skin rippled with senses. His mind drunk it all in. It cannot stop, no matter how full.
Snow, somewhere, surrounding another and another of his limbs, melted against his skin from the warmth of his embrace of the Earth. And elsewhere wind scattered autumn leaves over his body. And elsewhere again he heard new flowers growing for spring. The first birds awaking with song in where the morning was, goodbyes as the day ended under the gold of a sunset, sunlight and moonlight blanketed him all the same, all at the same time, at once, all together. The sun never set on Sam.
His arms swung and curled out to find purchase on anything, no, no, arms, don't think about how they don't have hands or joints or weren't arms, they are, they are.
Breathe, in, out, in, out, ignore the wind, ignore the sound of whistling, ignore everything.
Close
your
eyes.
All of them.
No matter how beautiful the sight.