Isolated Pawn

[SOTF_Help]

((Gervais Frans Lambotte continued from Gimme, Gimme Shelter, or I'm Gonna Fade Away))

Gervais’s time since leaving the temple was full of empty space. The emptiness around him was almost as distressing as the blank spots in his memory, empty stretches in between moving from one place to another. He suspected that it was getting worse as time went on, but time was a slippery thing, and he couldn’t even be sure how much of it had passed in any way except for the sky growing brighter or darker. The only constants were his aches and pains, always reminding him that he had to move carefully.

He wasn’t sure if he encountered anyone else since the group at the temple abandoned him still in need of help. He thought not since if he had, surely someone would have helped him, or perhaps tried to hurt him, and as far as he could tell whenever he came back to himself, neither thing had happened. He wasn’t even sure why he thought anyone would hurt him. Then again, he wasn’t sure why he would expect them to help either; the people at the temple certainly hadn’t bothered. He heard voices or saw vaguely familiar people in the distance every now and then, or thought that he did, but whenever he tried to catch up to them, he got turned around and confused. He always ended up alone again.

Well, fine. Gervais could be alone. He would find his own way around, figure out his own way to survive. He’d been doing just fine so far. Whatever he’d been doing.

Perhaps he should spend some time being someone other than Gervais, as had occurred to him back when he was being held at the business end of a shovel. A William, maybe, or a John, or something like a Salazar. He felt confident that he knew what each of these names was like, and none seemed to be him, but that was the idea.

He thought that he was just on the cusp of figuring out the perfect name when thinking proved to be too much, and his mind blanked out again. When he came back to himself once more, he was on a beach.

He was kneeling on his hands and knees, head down. There was blood spotting the sand beneath him. Presumably his own; he didn’t see anyone else around, as usual. His head was heavy, and the blood pounding through it with each beat of his straining heart was like a hammer to a nail. He had been determined, not so long ago- well, was it not so long ago? He didn’t know. But at a point that felt not so long ago, he had decided that he couldn’t close his eyes and fall asleep, for fear that he’d never wake up. Right now, he would have preferred to go unconscious again until his wretched headache passed.

Gervais, or whoever, tried to stand, and found that he could not, so instead he gave up on being upright at all and let himself sink onto the sand. He only lasted a few minutes with his face pressed into it before that became too uncomfortable to bear, so he slowly and painfully turned himself onto his back. The sky was dark, but getting lighter. The rain had stopped.

He closed his eyes.

He never opened them again.

A voice came to him from far away, but Gervais couldn’t understand what it was saying. It must have been urging him to get up and start his day. It must have been, because it was followed by an escalating series of beeps, and he reached out groggily to feel for an alarm clock. But wherever he reached, his fingers found only sand.

B048 - Lambotte, Gervais Frans: Deceased