He tenses his eyes shut, then flies them open, forehead wrinkled, a strand of dark--always dark--hair straying. The ceiling. He’s lost. The ceiling is white, but if he looks at it, and he does, then it’s almost blue in this light, or lack thereof, in this cursed darkness. He looks to his right, at the black edges of a table, which he can’t remember, for the sanity of him, where he got it, and at the dark shapes on the walls (always dark). He looks at the ceiling and he tenses his eyes shut, no, gently lets them ease the muscles apart from where they cling to each other, in the entirety of the workings of sparks and impulse that is the human eye, and Will Z. Mundi drifts his eyes shut. 

Shut. 

And it is dark behind his eyes. 

It is nasty there, a nasty nasty place that he flees, that he actively avoids. A plane’s drone swoops low over the city and plows its fingernails through Mundi’s roof, yawning so wide it might black out of existence and take everything with it. Pipes, they bulge along the walls and hurl their insides, to and fro, about and gone, thank you very much would the neighbors shut up? What are they doing, holding a concert in their backyard? Why is there so much screaming? At least it isn’t a Thursday. Will they shut up soon, or is this the kind of shindig that wires into the tiny hours that disappear if you don’t break into a sprint and catch them and pin them down even as they claw up your arms and your face and your chest, you just squeeze the very despicable life from them until they finally start to 

“Stop gawping like that, it’s only internuclear rhetorical algebra.” 

“It’s you.” Mundi is sitting in an empty highschool classroom, almost like his old highschool. The chalkboard is the glass screen of a fishtank, and goldfish meander lazily behind it, giving him a slightly disappointed side-eye. The desks are very little, and Mundi is surprised that there is room for all of his matter. The woman, seconds ago pointing insistently at the board with a wooden stick, now folds her arms and scrutinizes him. 

“What about u? It’s equal to the seconds you fall asleep subtracted from everything else in reality.” 

Mundi can’t stop gawping at her, even though she told him not to. She resembles a strawberry shortcake. Her ears are pink, and her nose, and Mundi wonders if it’s perpetually cold. 

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard all day,” she retorts. Mundi squints. 

“Who are you?” 

She smiles. “If u is set equal to the moments before you awake, then I is equal to…” 

He jumps up from his seat. “Beta!” 

“You can be quite lucid when you bother to pay attention. The algebra isn’t the difficult part, it’s just parsing the equation that--” 

Will rushes to the front of the classroom and spins her around in a merry-go-round hug before she can finish, then clasps her by the shoulders and holds her away to check all over her face, to make sure she is truly there. 

“Will,” she says, laughing. 

“Let’s dance. Let’s walk the cosmos. Let’s run through a pasture of sheep.” 

“No. Sheep? Will, you’re dreaming.” 

“I’m not dreaming.” Mundi steps back as if the air in him mutinied. Behind Beta, the goldfish swell, change from amber to red. “No. I’m not dreaming.” 

“You’re dreaming, Will, but it’s alright. Look at my fish, they’ll be almost ready soon.” She turns to the red goldfish, now fat as basketballs. The fish turn their globe-like heads to stare at him with their beady, dark eyes. 

“No, Beta, I’m fine, I’m not drea--”