Serious: Deja Vu on the rue Beautreillis (Closed, Exposition, Character Death)

Inside his apartment, Jim put his face down to the glass again. It stung, this time, when he pulled it back up, more than he expected. There was none of the usual numbness, the drip was missing. Something wasn't right about it.

Still, he felt better than he had a some ways ago. Traveling with the crazy scythe lady and her blushing beau had been fun for a time, but it had lost it's lustre soon enough. If he wasn't riding the storm, he didn't feel comfortable. As silently as he'd ridden the ship, in his own crazy green room beyond the doors of perception, he departed it. A half-empty bottle of rum and a few beli were all that remained to prove he'd ever even been there.

Here, by himself in the apartment, he rode another storm. His body slowed down, his brain mellowed out. A moment later he felt something warm in his throat; giving a cough to relieve himself of it, Jim found his hand coated in red.

"It's like...deja vu..."

Making his way to the bathroom, Jim stripped off his clothes one article at a time. As he removed his boots, he gave a silent and final thanks to the marine that had so graciously donated them back on that cold winter island. When at last he was as he had come into the world, he laid himself down in the bathtub. Closing his eyes, he opened the spigot. Once or twice more Jim coughed, tiny droplets of red swirling to pink and then vanishing in the steaming water that rose to fill the space around him. A new weakness took his body, the cursed fruit that had given him so many fun times sapping away the last of his strength as it's cursed nemesis filled the bath, submerging him to the neck.

"Can you picture what will be?~
So limitless and free...~
Desperately in need...~"

Jim's left hand reached out of the water and into the air, the glass bead at his palm's center sparkling to life with colours for just a moment, before fading to a hollow black colour. No light would come from it again.

"...Of some...stranger's hand.~
Lost in some...desperate land.~"

The feeling of weakness became stronger yet, and his hand fell back into the tub. After a moment, as his breathing slowed, he sang the final seronade to the who's outrageous whims and storms he'd ridden for a short twenty-some-odd years.

"This is the end,~
My beautiful friend,~
This is the end,~
My only friend, the end,~
Of all our elaborate plans, the end,~
Of everything that stands, the end.~"

The last words were barely a whisper. Jim's cybernetic core beat steadily, the growing silence of the apartment magnifying the sound, until it was the last drumming of a tune that nobody would ever hear again. After some minutes, it stopped abruptly; even the cold, unfeeling metal of his fake heart knew it.

This is the end.

[[OCC: James "The Lizard King" Morse - Deceased (Again)]]