The air inside Deathscythe was stale, dry as bone dust. Old. It smelled like parchment and something slightly sweet.
There was a reason for that.
Duo froze very still. His muscles locked, his breath stopped, caught tightly within his chest. In the sudden lead silence his heartbeat was a sickening hemorrhage of sound.
The corpse was desiccated. Without air it hadn’t decayed, it had simply... withered. Skin had browned far darker then any human shade, tinged with a dull dead-flower yellow. Cracked lips had drawn back in a grin far more brittle then any Duo had ever shown the world.
Duo didn’t have the air to scream. He didn’t have the will to, either. His back hit sharp-edged consoles with a flare of pain that fell so low on the scale of things that mattered he barely noticed.
Him, the other him, was older. Taller, broader, longer legs. Longer hair still bound in a braid that curled into his lap, held tightly in one hand. A cross hung around his neck, nestled in the sunken hollow of his throat, bracketed by the sharp lines of stiff tendons.