...

Days marched on.
 
Tonight the monsters in my head
Are screaming so damn loud
But I built walls so high
So they never even make a sound
 
It's a mask, it's a lie
It's the only home I've ever known
'Cause being who I really am
Has only left me more alone
 
He could feel more and more of himself slipping away under the... presence... of the thing. It didn't have a name, not really. If it did, the closest would've been Victor, after all. But in a way, he was used to wearing his ... life... as Victor as a mask. For the longest time, perhaps even since his birth, he hadn't been Victor... not really, anyways. Not in the ways that mattered. Victor was the young man who lost his mother. Victor was the young man with the distant father. The young man who hadn't been in time to save his sister.
 
He just never had a name. Not until Vodacce. Not until the masks. And then he'd found a name - a way - a purpose.
 
I am not okay
And I need you to see it
I have so much to say
And no one to hear it
The reason I keep quiet
With so much at stake
I always feel like a burden, let it silence me
You'll never understand
Why it's so hard to say
I'm not okay
 
He couldn't control the thing, not really. Not in any large or obvious manner - but the connection between them was just that - a connection. A word here. A word there. A psychic foot out to trip the thing at just the right time. Anything he could do to fight it, subvert it, and hang on.
 
For once, it was not his mother that drove him, but the image of his friends and loved ones - seen through eyes like a window. Distant and just out-of-reach. They needed him. And not, some errant remnant of his thoughts mused, for what he could do but who he was.
 
Maelie needed him to feel safe and Cardinal to feel seen. Arinelle needed him to smile and Kevan needed him to be able to trust the darkness inside the other man wouldn't swallow him. Alex needed him to see herself as more than a courtesan and Peg needed another person to walk in dark shadows with. Nel needed him to be her hope - that things would be better, and above all, as he fixed her face in his mind, Miranda needed him.
 
As the being lept from his mind, leaving a strange and echoing hollowness in him, he fixed himself upon one single, simple, idea. Whatever gods might come, he knew one thing for certain.
 
She needed her big brother. He'd failed her once.
 
He would not fail her again.