[ For reference. ]

When John gets his bearings again, it takes everything in him not to moan in soul-deep dismay at what he sees. What he feels.

And what he doesn't feel.

The delicious freedom and the comfort that was his new body, his own physical form to inhabit in the world-gone in the blink of an eye. Some part of him wonders if it always felt this cramped, this stifling, this incomplete as it does now, an entire phantom existence stinging and tingling except for his arm and the toes.

The fucking toes.

All the senses that humans had no words for, all the senses they did beyond sight and hearing... gone. All those limbs, his tentacles, all gone, all ripped away from him to make room to shove him in the tiniest crevice in someone else.

In-

"Arthur..."

Oh the mourning in that single name, for both of them.