Beyond the Wall

"You okay there kiddo?" The question was gentle, full of parental worry. If Kennedy was capable of sounding any way but parental, no one had ever lived to tell the tale. At least, that's what Tillman told himself.

"Ffffucking shit Loser, shut up and get back to work." Tillman didn't need parental right now. What he needed was himself. What he needed was for his plans to be complete, too many irons in the fire. What he really needed was for all of this to be pointless and for life to go on happy as can be.

He hissed as the crude bundle of needles bit into his flesh again, a rhythmic tapping driving them and their payload of ink beneath his flesh. He could feel the worry from the team's dad, but it was fine. As long as he did his job and followed the pattern, it would be fine. The needles shift and stab and shift and stab again. He couldn't reach his own back. He wouldn't have had anyone else do it if he could, but of all the rest only Kennedy could be trusted. After all, Kennedy trusted him.

Simple annoyances and worries were driven from his mind with the tapping of the crude chitin instrument. Kennedy would probably insist that it was 'traditional'. As far as Tillman was concerned, 'traditional' was just a different way of saying 'shit'. As the work surfaces moves to the delicate flesh over his ribs, Tillman's eyes widen as the blossoming pain swallows more and more of his conscious thought.

Tillman was a bitch about pain. He knew that. Couldn't stand it.

That made it useful.

Pain was a tool that could be used to transcend human limitations. It was dangerous magic. It was nearly uncontrollable. It was Edgy. But that fit Tillman just fine.

Originally, it was something his father drove him to. Not simply hurting himself. No, that was too sad and mundane of a story for their family after all. Hendersons were different. The needles bit and drove his mind deeper as the rest of his body tenses around them, sweat forming on his brow. The Hendersons were more. It had started young. The first time Tillman had found himself staring down the wall, he had been convinced it was something that would make his daddy love him.

The second time he was still convinced. The third time he knew this would be the one. The fourth was harder because of how scared he was. The fifth and the sixth and the seventh...

Humanity coped with pain in many ways. Simply shutting down and failing to register it was common enough, but with the proper rites, a practiced magician could slip the bonds material and drag themselves into the Astral by force. No one did this any more of course. There was almost nothing of note there, and the methodology was, at best, barbaric. Most anyone who practiced this way had a chance of breaking.

The Hendersons were better. They knew what the Astral could be used for. Or, more accurately, what it could be a gateway to. Thrillman Henderson had used it to amass his fortune, and he knew his son would prove himself to be just as good.

He Knew. And so Tillman drove himself past the boundaries of traditional human consciousness time and time again. Each failure seemed to drive the wedge between him and his father that much deeper. Pain loosened the boundaries, but there was a barrier that needed to be shattered in order to go beyond. And Tillman was weak. He knew this because each time he failed, he was told this.

The needles move. Balled fists draw blood from palms. Clenched eyes see lights dancing in the absence of sight.

This had been before the shame. Before the Crabs. Before Her. He had thought it was the only way to be accepted. His life was in ruins in his adolescence, not because of some outside source but because he had driven it there willingly. It was a different kind of pain, the wrong kind of pain. He told himself it was just trying to pass the wall in a different way, but the truth was that Tillman had become lost and confused, chasing the love of a father he only saw on TV and the checks that came every month.

When they had first found Tillman, he was drunk in a batting cage taking pitches to the gut while the rest of his drunken friends cheered and made bets about how many he could take before puking.

It was two.

Combs was the one who stopped the pitching machine, sending a ball directly back to the pitching machine and breaking it. Drunken hangers-on scattered, not wanting to be questioned about their exact age, and Tillman had been picked up out of his own pile of puke. As first introductions to the team went, it wasn't the best. But with them, Tillman found the first of what he had been chasing since the first time he had met that terrible wall deep inside of his own mind. No matter how much he cursed and lashed out, the Crabs sat with him, speaking and joking.

Nowadays the scene would look like a bad afterschool cartoon. But it was something he needed. Stability. Friendliness. A Family. Tillman would joke later that any stupid cult could have probably picked him up and brainwashed his stupid ass, but the first time he followed the team into the Oldest Bay, he knew. In the place beneath the murk, within Her Domain, innumerable eyes opened and looked upon the ruined tatters of his soul, dashed time and time again against the wall.

And She made him whole again. She accepted him not for a dying kind of magic that he didn't have talent for, but as a person willing to stand in Her darkness and embrace life, and it's twists and turns.

Carcinization wasn't a purely physical process. Tillman was the proof of that. His body mostly unchanged, but his soul repaired, stitched and reformed and regrown with Her love.

Which raised the question. Why was he now looking at the same wall. The one he had conquered by leaving it behind. It had been hard to convince Kennedy. But this wasn't for him. It wasn't for his biological father. Or his forgotten mother. A teardrop falls onto the comb clutched in one hand.

The Astral was unbound, and could be used to view points in the past, or the future. The Blaseball Gods had it locked down to stop interlopers from stealing information from these points, warding away lesser mortals and keeping the secrets of the rules safe.

The Hendersons were different. The Hendersons were more. The Hendersons were better.

Kennedy straightens his back and taps Tillman's shoulder, letting him know the session was done. Tillman lets out a deep sigh, and sticks the comb back into his hair where it belonged. A nodded thanks to Kennedy, a refusal to do anything more than let the closest thing he accepted to his father wrap his torso with plastic, and Tillman was walking the streets back to his apartment.

In his mind, the scene plays out, and he counts the number of Crabs who disappear under the red light.