"Sometimes, we know the price of our actions." I started. "Sometimes we act knowing full well what could happen when we do. But other times, we don't even know that those actions could have consequences, let alone what they might be." I continued. "In the case of the parasite, the action I took that granted him access to my body was not one I was aware could have ramifications," I confessed to my lacking knowledge.

"I knew of the beings that lived between the mind and reality, but I had not imagined any capable of ousting me from mine own form. I thought of them as harmless insects compared to the magnitude of maintaining the shredded ego I cobbled together. And without my hubris, they would have remained as such. Even the most persistent of them stood no chance against me. The self it crafted from the shredded bits of my insanity… no more than a spec compared to a natural born mind. But I took a risk I did not know was a risk. I made a gamble without knowing I was putting anything up to lose. I took an action that I did not know could even bear the possibility of consequences, and I paid a price beyond any I'd ever thought possible."

"I knew you could handle it. So strong, so powerful, so reliable." It used my voice, one I could no longer produce, to mock me.

"..."

"Oh, don't be like that." He pouted using a face I hadn't seen in centuries. "You got your body back; what's a little killing to do that?" He mocked me.

"......" I had no eyes, even here, so I could not glare at him. But I felt he still understood my desire to do so.

"Man, you are no fun." He pouted again. "Fine. What do you want to say?" He finally gave up his show of false emotions, letting his rendition of my face fall to a blank stare.

"How?" One word with so much anger left my body.

"That's it?" He asked incredulously. "That's what you want to know?" He sounded upset. "You don't want to know why I'm here or what I want? You have so many things you could ask, and you choose to ask me HOW I took over your body?" He sounded genuinely hurt, but I didn't care. "You are absolutely boring." He said.

"..." I didn't reply.

"Fine." He grumbled through gritted teeth. "You technically did it to yourself." He started. "As things stood, I would have never stood a chance against you. No matter how strong my ego became, you would always win and maintain control of yourself," he confessed. "Most I could do was poke at you from just beyond the curtain. The thoughts were yours, but the timing was always mine. If you'd continued to do what you'd been doing." He started to sound gleeful. "But you went and did something new. You over-exerted your mind to hold that crumbling body together. You went to sleep, and your body rebuilt itself as usual. But you weren't there to stop me as you have been." He sounded ecstatic. "Now, look at me. A few years outside of this formless realm and I'm no longer just a parasite. I'm not some bug snuggled into the maddened ravings you push into the dark. I'm as real as you, and now I've got a claim to the physical realm." His expression twisted into a dark smile, his mouth filled with far too many teeth.

"Why?" I asked, the anger turning toward myself.

"Isn't it obvious?" He cooed. "I've spent so long just building an ego from your abandoned thoughts, and I wanted a chance at living. I could build from your madness all I wanted, but I'd only ever be a shadow of you. I WANTED MORE." He bellowed, and in his eyes, I saw rage. "But as you saw, my playtime got a little out of hand, and I couldn't handle what that entailed." His anger turned to resignation.

"What now then?" I asked.

"‘Now?’" He mimicked. "What do you mean now? Isn't this the part where you rip me to shreds and leave me to rot?" He asked curiously. "Isn’t this the part where you dismantle my mind like a broken tool, take the valuable features for yourself, and blend the rest into voided thoughts? Now should be the end of my game, the end of my journey, the end of me, at your hand. So why don't you get to it?" He sounded accepting of the idea, but I felt waves of untamed anger coming from him.

"I can't," I said sincerely.

"What do you mean? Of course you can. You're recovered, you're still far stronger than I am, you can still batter me blue like you did every other time you were forced back here." He openly confessed to his own weakness. "You are more than capable of dissecting me like a scientific anomaly. GET TO IT." He let his anger resurface at the idea that I was drawing out his demise.

"If it were still an option, I'd have done it already," I confessed. "But you stole something when you lived in my body, and if I kill you here, I'll lose it forever." I continued.

The look of shock on his face was a mirror image of one I'd seen on mine years ago. So too was the look of glee as he came to understand what my inability to end him implied.

"I get to live?" He asked, ecstatic. "I get to live, and you can't stop me?" His cheery tone turned mocking. "OH, that's rich." He twisted on his metaphorical spot. "You, the domineering mind, the cultivated insanity, the beast from the deep, CAN'T KILL LITTLE OL’ ME?" His derision referred to me in ways I'd never heard before. "SO tell me, what did I take? I hope it's useful or fun, whatever it is." He refused to look at me, and I felt I knew why. He had obtained a face in taking my body, but his expressions were learned things, not something that came to him naturally.

"It will be as useless to you as it has been to me," I replied with more honesty.

"What do you mean?' He finally returned to looking at me, confusion washing across his rendition of my face.

"You stole half of an idea—a concept of something long broken." I started. "The thing is long gone, scattered to time and shredded further by the passage of life. What you took was half the memory of it. It was no more than the idea of what to look for in the vast expanse of reality." I continued. "You took half the diagram needed to find my soul." I finished.

For a moment, he was silent. I didn't need to know what he was thinking at the time. I didn't care. He could be looking for that diagram in himself, or simply trying to digest what I'd told him. It didn't make a difference to me. But when he spoke, he said something I didn't expect.

"I'm sorry." He said with as much genuine concern as he could muster. "I wish I could give it back. I'm so sorry." He said again.