[As Paimon already knows -- from years and years of experience -- there are few people easier to overpower in this exact way than a traumatized child. Will recoils instinctively, arms going up to protect himself, but there's no way to stop this. Paimon is reacting out of fear and anger and inhuman force, and there's no stopping the sudden invasion of unseen limbs and claws, digging into the very core of Will.
The memory surrounding them suddenly warps and shifts, steering away from the image of the exorcism, from the screaming and burning and violence of it, though that emotion permeates and persists. What shows instead is that stormy, dark, Upside-Down version of the field behind the house, and Will tiny and teary and screaming at the enormous monster to go away, to leave him alone.
It didn't work then. It doesn't work now.
There are old scars all over Will's mind, his soul, footholds for anyone or anything to cling onto, places where the Mind Flayer had gouged out a place for itself, where it's claws had dug in deep and brutal and careless. If Paimon can find them -- and whose to say he can't? -- it's more than enough for him to cling on and hold on and stay.
Even when the memory stops. Even when Will -- the real Will, the one after the monsters and after Deerington, the Will who should be stronger than this, but who gives in almost immediately to the horrifically familiar sensation of his very being invaded by an alien force -- goes silent and still.]
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The memory surrounding them suddenly warps and shifts, steering away from the image of the exorcism, from the screaming and burning and violence of it, though that emotion permeates and persists. What shows instead is that stormy, dark, Upside-Down version of the field behind the house, and Will tiny and teary and screaming at the enormous monster to go away, to leave him alone.
It didn't work then. It doesn't work now.
There are old scars all over Will's mind, his soul, footholds for anyone or anything to cling onto, places where the Mind Flayer had gouged out a place for itself, where it's claws had dug in deep and brutal and careless. If Paimon can find them -- and whose to say he can't? -- it's more than enough for him to cling on and hold on and stay.
Even when the memory stops. Even when Will -- the real Will, the one after the monsters and after Deerington, the Will who should be stronger than this, but who gives in almost immediately to the horrifically familiar sensation of his very being invaded by an alien force -- goes silent and still.]