Chapter Text
*
says butterfly to beast – my friend, we both can cause calamities
our impact on the world’s the same, our sizes just formalities
says beast – it’s true enough, but see, the devil’s in the details
you flap without a care and never think of what your act entails
with butterfly’s chaos and beast’s cold destruction
the death of their world is a grim co-production
*
The lecture is... a lecture. Definitely not one of Benny’s best. Most certainly not one of her worst. It’s in the grey sort of in-between area where the hall isn’t full enough and not attentive enough for her to be giving her full enthusiasm to the topic she’s talking about – landscape theory as related to asteroid tombs – but where she does care about it enough to not just end the class for the day an hour and a half early.
She’s midway into discussing the finer points of the theory when there’s a knock at the door, and when talking about this in retrospect Bernice will probably say that this was the point where she felt a sense of sudden and impending doom, but that’s a complete lie. At the time, she feels nothing at all apart from faint curiosity.
“Professor Summerfield?” says the man at the door. His face says nothing about him. His uniform and earpiece say quite a lot of things, ‘Dellah law enforcement’ included. Benny resists the urge to groan out loud. Nothing good can come of this.
“Well, class is dismissed early today,” she says to her students with an air of resignation. “If I’m arrested for horrible crimes that I probably haven’t committed... I’m sure Braxiatel will take you lot for a week or two, he owes me. And also tell them I didn’t do whatever it is. Just for the record. Because I didn’t.” She waves a hand at them. “Okay, that’s it; get out of here.”
They do, and the law enforcement officer comes up to join her at the lecturer’s podium as she tidies away her scattered notes and tries to get everything into some semblance of order for whoever’s got to use this lecture hall after her. “All right, out with it – what have I done this time?”
“Nothing whatsoever,” he says with a sort of air of detached amusement, although his expression remains completely professional. “There’s a matter I was hoping to discuss with you – ”
According to him, this morning they received a tip from an anonymous source about the discovery of a body on the St Oscar’s campus. Murder, apparently,
“Oh,” says Benny, “oh, brilliant, so I wasn’t wrong about the ‘horrible crimes’ bit. Why do you need me?”
“We were hoping that you might be available to consult,” says the officer. “You’d be fairly compensated for your time and effort – there’s several aspects to it that we believe you’d be able to shed some light on.”
*
Benny says yes, of course, because saying no to a request like that just isn’t the sort of thing she does. One short trip later and she’s standing outside the mortuary. She hadn’t even been aware there was a mortuary on Dellah, but in retrospect it does make some amount of sense.
Disposable medi-gloves have been thoughtfully provided. She slips them on, then goes into the room.
It’s a sobering sight. Benny actually has to stop and take a few deep breaths. No matter how many dead bodies she sees, no matter how mutilated or bent or miserable they appear, she hasn’t stopped feeling that twist of sadness in her chest at the sight of them. She hopes that never changes; doesn’t know what will become of her once it does.
“More murder?” says a smooth, quietly amused voice from across the room, by the door.
“Apparently,” Benny says. Stops. Processes the fact that there’s someone else here, now. Frowns. Looks up. “Ah. Hello, you.”
Irving Braxiatel, in the flesh. Angular features and dark intelligent eyes and a perfectly tailored suit, because he never seems to be without one of them, in any of those muted fashionable color schemes that he seems to pride himself on. She wonders briefly who his tailor is and if they live on Dellah. No, probably not, she dismisses almost instantly, because it’s far more likely that they live in the far-flung future or distant past or in the present, but light years away and on a world beyond comprehension.
She then wonders if he’d be willing to hook her up with a suit or two, because she has the distinct impression that she’d be able to pull it off rather fabulously. Then she abruptly remembers that she’s in a morgue and there is, in fact, a body. Fashion tips will have to wait.
“And what might you be doing here on this fine morning, in the middle of an empty morgue?” she asks with a raised eyebrow and a quizzical look.
“Much the same as you, I suspect,” he says dryly. “Consultation. Although...” He hmms lightly. “This really does seem more your area than mine. I haven’t the faintest clue why they would need my... ah, particular brand of expertise.”
He comes to stand besides her. Once again, she is reminded of the fact that Brax could probably use her head as an armrest if he wanted to. He most likely wouldn’t, because doing so would be completely undignified and god forbid Irving Braxiatel be anything but perfectly composed at all times, but the option is definitely there for him. What she wouldn’t give to be just a bit taller.
Together, they survey the body – the dirt it had been covered in neatly cleared away by law enforcement hours ago. The arms are still neatly folded over the chest. The strange bruises and blisters all over the hands, but nowhere else. The mouth half-open, revealing the telltale shiny glint of a coin. Human, or humanoid at the very least, but the methodology is unmistakable.
“Martian funeral rites,” says Brax, and sighs. “Most definitely your territory.”
“Not usually the sort of thing you perform on a human, though,” Benny points out. “I’d even go as far to say that most Ice Warriors would be flat-out disgusted at even the idea of it.”
“Saurians do not typically bury their dead,” Brax says. “And certainly not in any sort of Terran earth, with nothing even resembling a burial chamber or coffin.”
“Mm.” Benny takes a step back, peels off the plastic medi-gloves, and rakes her fingers roughly through her messy hair. It’s been dishevelled all day and is only getting worse the later the hour gets. She is in desperate need of a hairbrush, and also a nap. She fumbles for her satchel, and the copy of the notes she’d been given on this case. “This is... his name’s Zachary McCarthy. Human-hybrid, late forties, runs – sorry, ran – a bar down in lower town. I think I’ve even been there.”
“Not surprising,” he says lightly.
“Yes, I’m a raging alcoholic who’s charted ever bar on the planet and then some. Let’s put a pin in that and maybe confront my issues when we don’t have a body in front of us.” Benny flips through pages in the case file. “Nice bloke, by all accounts. Didn’t have anything like this coming, according to... literally anyone you’d care to ask. He ran student housing above the bar, for criminally low fees.”
“No connection to Martians or Martian funerals, I take it?”
“None at all.” Benny frowns down at the page. “I don’t know what they expect us to find here, but... we can give it our best shot, I suppose.”
“That’s all we can ever hope to do,” he agrees.
They leave the morgue to go to a spare, empty conference room. For the next few hours, they go over the files, and compile a report together with mutual grumbling and commiserating over bureaucratic procedure, and send it off, but ultimately they don’t find anything of use.
“Well, that was a useless waste of a day,” yawns Benny as she walks with Braxiatel to the entrance of the university. “Let’s be honest; whoever did the whole Martian burial murder is probably long gone by now.”
A noncommittal sort of mm from Brax, and then, “You really think that’s the case?”
“Well, I know I wouldn’t stick around if I’d done something like that,” Benny says. “Like I said in the report – best thing they can do to catch whoever-it-was is check the lists of people shuttling off-planet for someone who fits the vague demographic of ‘psychotic archaeology killer. I’m telling you, long gone.”
“Unless they had something else to accomplish here on Dellah,” Brax points out.
“Like more murder?” Benny says, laughing, and then sobers slightly. “I hope not.”
“So do I, but it’s always a possibility,” Brax says, and then, as they reach the gates, “ah, here we are – this is where we part ways, I think. Good night, Bernice. Pleasant dreams,” he adds, with a hint of sardonicism.
“I’m sure my dreams will be delightful, and this will have no lasting psychological damage whatsoever,” Benny sighs, and waves him off.
*
, the earth, it hungers;
*
The next day, there’s another anonymous tip and another unearthed body. And another case of Dellah law enforcement completely and utterly failing to do their damn job, because they’re called in to consult once more. Benny’s regretting her flippant remarks from last night, because it’s also somewhat of a grim realization for her that they most certainly have a serial killer on their hands. This one had been buried, somewhat shallowly, as well. There’s the strange blisters and bruises all over the hands.
The only thing that’s different is the lack of coin in the mouth. There’s no coin here. Instead, the skin of the poor young woman’s corpse has been slashed, very carefully. Criss-crosses all over the arms and stomach, careful tessellating X-marks running all the way down to the thighs. All done post-death, apparently.
“Niv'ellian funeral rites,” Braxiatel says. His brow is slightly creased, just slightly. “Laceration of the body to release the soul back into the communal consciousness.”
“Not the sort of thing you usually see being performed on humans, I take it,” Benny says.
“No, it’s a very species-specific ritual.”
The grime and dirt all over the girl has soaked into her many wounds. And there’s something vaguely familiar about her face, but when Benny checks the name and background, nothing rings a bell.
Benny cancels her evening lecture, and spends another frustrating night trying to puzzle things out with Brax. It’s ridiculous, because it’s not even her problem to deal with and she could easily just walk away at any time, but... no. It’s grimly fascinating and she’s invested and she wants to see this through to the end even though she knows that realistically there may be no end in sight.
*
Over the course of the next week, three new bodies are discovered. The rituals seem to be drawn from a seemingly random variety of death rituals from across the universe – Ogri, Usurian, late-sixth-dynasty Sontaran. All buried, all discovered from anonymous tips that can’t seem to be tracked or traced, no matter how hard anyone tries. And all with those same wounds on the hands. There’s seemingly no pattern to who they are or where they’re buried. All camera footage seems to die or corrupt at any time or place it would be useful to track them. It’s like they’re chasing a ghost.
The sixth body is what changes everything.
“Why are we even here?” Benny says, as they stand over the body of a fractured, broken man, recently unearthed. A hint of horrified anger bubbles up in her. “I know I have a reputation for getting involved in gruesome murders and unlikely events, and I guess you have a reputation for... ah...” She hesitates, unsure. The Collection hasn’t happened yet for him, and although trouble steadfastly remains his honorary middle name, she’s not entirely sure if that actually applies here.
“Getting involved in gruesome murders and unlikely events that you’ve already got yourself embroiled in?” Brax suggests.
Relieved, she nods. “Exactly. But it’s almost like everyone who’d usually be investigating this sort of thing has buggered off completely, leaving the two of us in charge.”
“Yes.” Brax’s gaze drifts across the empty morgue, flitting over the rows of shiny chrome cabinets. “I’ll have to speak with someone about this. If nothing else, we should be getting compensated properly for all this trouble.”
“I’d rather we just stopped looking at bodies,” says Benny, but looks at the one in front of her anyway. She tries not to gag. It’s definitely messier and bloodier than any of the other ones, but there’s something else there. She can’t quite put her finger on it... “Who is this?”
“Corbenton Tizz – an Argolin. Serial arsonist,” Brax says, without even having to consult the files or notes. His hands are tucked neatly behind his back, and he reviews the body with a dispassionate glance.
“...I remember him, actually,” realizes Benny, going to run a hand through her hair and just barely managing to stop herself when she remembers she’s wearing gloves. “We’ve had a couple of arson-obsessed students, so I’m not sure, but – tried to burn down the science department in May, right?”
“And the fine arts building the month before that,” Brax says. “A sequel, of sorts, to his previous attempts to set the theatre department, psychology, journalism, and administrations buildings alight.”
Benny considers this. Recalls the many, many, extremely annoying fire alarms and fire drills over the last year. Looks at the body with its sides carved up like roast beef and eyes plucked out. “If this is about that, it seems disproportionate. And... not quite right, somehow. Where did the hand wounds go?”
“Mm,” says Brax noncommittally, and this time he does look down to check the file. “They caught him just last week; he was set to be transferred off-world, but he vanished from containment last night and...” A wordless little gesture to the tableau in front of them.
“Turned up buried in the middle of a half-abandoned construction site,” Benny finishes. “You know, I don’t think this is the same killer.”
“Oh?”
“It’s a similar M.O., but... no. There’s something off about it. I think we’ve got a copycat.” She grimaces. “Okay, this place is making me ridiculously uneasy. We’ve seen the body, let’s get out of here.”
And they do.
“It’s strange,” says Benny, as they’re walking out to the main street, “because, the marks on their hands... they’ve been consistent with every one of them up to now – ” She finally makes the connection, and stops dead in her tracks. “Oh. No. Oh, dear Goddess, no. Okay.”
“Benny?” Brax stops as well, looking up from his datapad. “Is everything all right?”
“He’s making them dig their own graves,” she says. “It... it fits. The variation in grave depth, it’s because not all of them were strong enough to dig to the full classic six-feet-under. The wounds on the hand, they’re shovel blisters. This one didn’t have the hand-markings because the copycat didn’t make them dig – they just pushed him into a pre-existing one.” She grinds the heels of her palms into her eyes, horrified and frustrated. “I can’t believe I didn’t see that until now. I can’t believe nobody noticed this until now. What’s wrong with law enforcement on this planet?”
“I’m sure they would’ve got there eventually,” Brax says solicitously.
“Forget law enforcement, what’s wrong with me?” Benny shakes her head. “I couldn’t see it, I had to have a murderer point it out for me through another gruesome crime scene.”
“Point it out?” Brax says. Playing the companion. Asking the obvious questions. He can be a really good sport like that sometimes. She’s sure he’s going to complain about it incessantly later, though. Well, she’ll take what she can get.
“It’s like they had to show me a negative so I could see the positive,” she tries to explain, and then just sighs. “I don’t know, it was like that whole thing was... gift-wrapped for us. A poke in the right direction.”
“A murderer trying to help catch a murderer,” says Brax. “How very novel.”
“I’m glad you think so, because all I can currently think about is how we’ve apparently got two psychopathic killers running around the planet, shelling out justice or hints or whatever they think they’re doing.” She grimaces. “Let’s just focus on the first one, though, the original. He’s probably the most dangerous.”
“Danger is relative,” says Brax. “Would you say that the killer who kills with reckless artistic abandon is the more dangerous of the two? Or the killer who kills with precise, uncanny knowledge of how his killings will affect the world around him?”
“I think the artistic one will kill more,” replies Benny. “Which makes him the one we need to set our sights on. Hopefully the precision-strike guy will keep his serrated knife in check until we have our hands free to get at him.”
“I’ll call him up tonight, let him know he should put tomorrow’s elaborately planned gruesome murder on hold,” Brax says with a nod.
“I’d appreciate it,” says Benny, giving herself over to morbid, slightly inappropriate humour. And then sighs. “I need this to be over and done with, I need a full class of attentive students who don’t keep disappearing on me, and I need a drink.”
“I don’t know about ending this, and I don’t know about your class,” Brax says. “But I can certainly arrange for one of those things.”
*
It’s getting late, excruciatingly late, so they head back to his office. Brax pours the wine and they drink a sardonic, irreverent toast to ongoing murder investigations, long may they last. And then they drink, and drink some more It’s very, very good wine. Too good to be wasting on her, most definitely, but if he’s not complaining, she’s certainly not going to point it out.
Everyone needs a friend like Brax, honestly. Someone who’s willing to share ridiculously expensive alcohol in the dead of night with their fellow colleagues because the situation just calls for it. The whole serial-killer thing is getting to her, and she has a feeling it’s getting to him too. Not that he’d ever admit it.
Time Lords generally can’t get drunk off alcohol the way humans do, but either Brax has slipped some ginger into his drink, or he’s letting his guard down because she herself is ridiculously tispy at this point. Either way, an hour into this and his jacket is off and his shirtsleeves are actually rolled up, and he’s leaning back in his chair in something that just might be possibly considered lounging.
They’re no longer talking about buried, bloated corpses and cannibals and the heavy, strange weight of being the ones that have to deal with these strangest of circumstances. They haven’t been talking about that for a long time, now. They’re talking about – what are they talking about, again?
“Fucking – Orpheus,” Benny spits with conviction, gesticulating wildly with her mostly-empty wine glass. “Goddamn fool, idiot – what a moron. What a complete imbecile.”
Oh, right. That. (She can’t quite remember how they got to the topic of old-old-Earth mythology, but it probably seemed very important and reasonable at the time. She’ll try to piece together the sequence of events later, if she remembers to.)
“Not that I don’t agree with you,” Brax says, and he’s actually got his feet propped up on his desk, how about that? When had that happened? And how is he still managing to look infuriatingly dignified despite that? “But I really must ask – what especially do you find so imbecilic about this particular tragic Greek protagonist? That oeuvre of mythology has quite the range of them to choose from.”
“Fucking – all right, listen,” Benny says, trying to shake the fuzz from her head, and failing miserably. “Tale as old as time. Man’s wife dies in tragic snake-related accident, check – “
“Check,” he agrees, solemn as anything.
“Good ol’ Orpheus picks up his lyre, goes trotting off down into hell to get her back – why ‘m I recapping all this, Goddess I’m drunk, what am I even say – saying, hmm, okay. He goes and plays his, bloody,” she mimes strumming a guitar or lyre or something, “pretty music thing. You’re... you’re fancy. You know the opera, probably.”
He hums a distant, sad-sounding snatch of music, which she takes to mean yes and also I’m showing off now.
“Hades goes sure thing Orpheus, that was a real pretty song so off you pop with your wife but then he’s all, but wait! There’s more!, and – ” There is wine in her glass that she hadn’t noticed. She makes a particularly furious gesture. It goes slopping across the carpet, “and – whoops, sorry ‘bout that – why am I even explaining this to you, you know all of this – ”
“Not to worry, this office has had far worse.”
“ – I’m on too much of a roll to stop. Hades says, if you look back you lose her, Orpheus goes fine, and then he immediately looks back the moment he’s even slightly scared she isn’t right behind him anymore. Her – I can’t even remember her name, Eurie – Eury-something.”
“Eurydice,” Brax suggests.
“That’s the bitch!” she exclaims a bit too loudly, slamming her fist down on the desk. “Ow,” she says, and then slumps back angrily into her chair. “I just – just wouldn’t have looked back,” she mutters at the desk. “Moron. Idiot. What did it even accomplish for him, the neurotic bastard – ”
“I think you’ll find that Orpheus’s inadvisable life choices are rather the point of the entire legend,” Brax says. “It’s set up to be a tragedy from the very beginning. And what’s a tragedy without an unhappy ending?”
“Hrrng,” Benny says eloquently, and downs the rest of her wine. It’s starting to lose its distinctiveness in her mouth. All she can taste is bitter, fruity tartness – numbing her lips, her throat. It’s nice, in a I can’t feel my tongue sort of way. “‘M starting to get sick of tragedies, t’be honest.”
“Orpheus starts to think his wife might not, in fact, be following in his wake,” Braxiatel says. Quiet, measured. He’s got a very good storytelling voice, she should let him know that sometime. Maybe she can get him to read her some of those boring-as-all-hell academic papers she’s been meaning to get around it, it might liven them up. Is that a weird thing to request? She’s not sure. What’s he talking about again. “He knows that looking back, should she be there, is as good as a death sentence to her. So what are his options?”
Benny lifts a hand and points at him, not bothering to raise her head from where it’s fallen to her chest. “That’s – yes. Exactly, you’ve... exactly. That’s it. The options. If he looks back, he loses. Doesn’t matter if she’s even, even... there, anyway. Looking inside Sch – Schro – fuck.”
“Schrodinger’s box,” Brax says. He makes it sound remarkably non-condescending. Which she appreciates.
“That. Yes. Dead either way. Or, or, he keeps on – keeps on going anyway, makes it up to the surface, and if it turns out she really is there, good for him, but if she’s dead, well it was going to be like this either way, so what can you do?”
“Push on, don’t look back,” Brax murmurs, and she sees him slowly raise his glass to toast the ceiling from out of the corner of her eye. Weird thing to do. Maybe he’s more drunk than she’d thought.
“Don’t make this into a deep thing,” she tells him, as sternly as she can. “‘M absolutely sloshed. Wasted. This isn’t meaningful, I just, I really... Orpheus annoys me. No metaphors here.”
Her eyes slip closed and the last thing she hears is him chuckling dryly and saying, “I wouldn’t dream of doing anything of the sort,” and then there’s something soft and heavy being tucked around her and she’s gone.
*
a feast a tribute a sacrifice, for we are hungry and we must feed; a knife a kiss another one for the slaughter, for we were friends once but certain prices must always be paid – pay in blood or pay in bone or pay in tears but pay as quick as you can for you suffer from a chronic case of no time left and my darling i’m afraid it’s terminal
a shovel a grave a grimness to all you do, for you are nothing to us and you know it; take up the task and take up your time and commit them all to the endless earth, for only through this will you ever be free. put on your little shows and perform your quaint rituals if you wish, they are nothing to us. only what you hope will be the faintest memory of a fraction of your peace of mind, stolen from the peace of dozens of dozens of other worlds
crown of ivory crown of thorns crown of sorrow; this is what you have wrought to stop us
will it ever be worth it
*
Eyes open suddenly. A groan. Bernice Summerfield is hungover and is aware that it’s far too early to be awake, but there’s something she has to do, what is it, what’s going on –
She’s in Brax’s office with a soft, dark quilt draped loosely around her. Her neck is extremely sore, but she’s been sleeping upright in her chair so... understandable, really. It’s morning, very early morning, and she can tell that by the dim, thready light creeping through the window and pooling on Brax’s back. Because he’s asleep at his desk, head cradled in his arms. This is enough of a strange sight to give her pause for a moment or two, because... huh. Brax, asleep? What universe is this?
But then her brain comes online enough that she realizes there’s probably more important things she should be wondering about.
She’s awake, she thinks. Why is she awake? It doesn’t seem likely that she woke for no reason. There’s no noise, the light hasn’t reached her face, the office is quiet and undisturbed. Calm restfulness hangs over the everything of it like a light, pleasant shroud.
She can’t remember what they’d been talking about last night. Can’t remember much of anything past the second glass of wine, and good grief, she thought she could hold her liquor better than that. She tries to recall her dreams, but can only conjure up the faintest recollection of the smell of wet soil and the lightning scent of ozone right before a storm.
She stares at the thin strip of light determinedly creeping closer and closer to her and thinks absently that she’s come to a realization. Some sort of extremely important realization that she needs to follow up on immediately.
And then it strikes her, so suddenly and overwhelmingly that she just sits there for a minute, eyes wide. Oh. Oh, of course.
She’s mid-motion to shaking Brax’s shoulder when she hesitates. He looks... ridiculously peaceful. She doesn’t think he gets all that much sleep, all things considered. It must run in the family. And it’s not like she needs him for this, anyway. She’s faced much worse than a crazed serial killer with inscrutable issues without backup, and look – here she is, still alive and kicking, and absolutely ready to make more poor life choice at the drop of a hat.
She scribbles out the quickest of explanations on a spare sheet of notepaper, and slides it carefully under his nose, where she figures he’ll see it first, and then clumsily swipes her jacket off the back of her chair, pulling it on.
Benny slips out of the office door, closing it quietly behind her with a faint click, and then she’s off through the hallways of the university. The lights are off, which is fine, because the morning light is more than enough to see by. She doesn’t pass a single person the entire way, probably because they’re all asleep like regular, well-adjusted people.
She unlocks the back entrance from the inside, and then she’s off, heading across the stone-paved St Oscar’s campus with purpose. The morning air does quite a lot to clear the headache and the hangover and the everything from last night. She still feels like shit, but at least it’s a focused, purposeful kind of shit. She knows what the killer’s name is and what he looks like, and – most importantly, she knows exactly where to find him.
The Sable Sun is in the lower town, small and nondescript as far as bars go. What makes it important is this: the owner of it had been the very first victim in this string of horribly macabre incidents. Further important fact: the rooms right above the bar had been leased out to various Dellah residents. Mostly university students. She knows this because one of her students lives there, and she knows that because the student in question, Eddison Bright, had always stood out in her mind as having an overtly morbid obsession with Martian burial rituals.
The connections are obvious, and so is the conclusion.
Maybe he’s not the killer. There’s always a chance that this is just a strange coincidence. But either way, she want to talk to Eddison. Wants to see what he’s got to say for himself.
Benny knows where to go. She’s been there before. Only the once, because... well, it wasn’t actually a very good bar. But she’s not the sort of person who goes around forgetting the locations of bars or getting lost on a planet she’s lived on for months now, so it only takes her maybe fifteen minutes, tops, to get to where she needs to go.
The door is open, the bar is empty. Dusty countertops that haven’t been wiped for over a week, if not longer. The bottles lined up behind the bar have all been broken or stolen or emptied, and the lights aren’t on. The regular patrons of the Sable Sun apparently wasted no time whatsoever once they realized the owner was gone. Which leaves the question – what happened to the tenants upstairs?
“Hello?” she calls out into the faintly musty darkness. She is immediately regretting not bringing some sort of weapon along with her, but, well. Hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that. There’s no response.
This was a bad idea. She’s seriously considering leaving, but then there’s a rustle, a noise of someone moving and she swings around wildly, looking for its source. She can’t pinpoint it, but she notices the stairwell. Upstairs seems like a good enough place to start looking. Maybe the noise was just a rat. She makes for the stairwell, wishing she’d thought to bring at least a flashlight, come on, what sort of archaeologist is she –
And then she stops abruptly.
“Oh, bugger,” she says.
Bernice Summerfield is intimately familiar with the feeling of a laser rifle pressed to the small of her back. This is really quite depressing, now that she thinks about it, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Being familiar with it doesn’t mean that the cold chill of realization that creeps through her entire being isn’t just as terrifying, though.
The bar counter, he was just behind the bar counter, how could I be so stupid, she’s thinking, and she wants to blame it on the hangover but she’s pretty sure that even if she’d been stone-cold sober she still wouldn’t have noticed him.
She doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe. Neither does he. There’s a moment or so where they’re locked in a silent, eye contact-less standoff.
“I take it I’m speaking to Dellah’s latest serial killer, then,” she says. Evenly, calmly. “Hello, Eddison.”
He’d always been a bit off. Tried to burn down the music department a few months ago, because of some petty sort of squabble with his girlfriend, although it obviously hadn’t been a serious enough attempt to actually get him in trouble.
“Professor Summerfield.” His voice is higher than she remembers. Maybe he’s afraid. Maybe she’d just been mentally assigning a grizzly old killer voice to him and it’s throwing her off. “I didn’t want to kill you. Should’ve kept your nose out of this.”
“Story of my life,” she mutters, thinking about how this would’ve all gone down so very differently if she’d just woken Brax up and brought him along with her. Maybe he’d be the one at gunpoint, not her.
A firm jab to her back with the rifle. “You’re gonna start walking, and you’re not gonna yell or scream for help or anything. Is that clear?”
“Crystal clear,” she murmurs.
They start walking. Out the back door, into the alleyway, down the street.
“I would like to know why, though,” she says, careful to keep her voice casual, nonthreatening.
“Why what?”
She blinks, her face twisting into outright disbelief even though she knows he can’t see it. “Er – why the burial-themed murders? I... just don’t understand, to be perfectly honest. I get how and maybe sort of why you’re picking the people, but the actual reason you’re doing it? I’m completely stumped.”
It takes him nearly a full minute to respond.
“Have you ever seen something,” he says, “and, no, seen isn’t the word, but – realized, maybe, that something exists and that your entire existence, everything you’ve ever been, pales in comparison to it? And all you can do in response is just... give it what you can. Feed it and try to show it that yes, you’re there, and hope that’s enough. Hope that what you’re doing is enough that it’s even aware of you in some vague, distant way, even if everything that you’re sacrificing to it doesn’t even feed it in the slightest?”
“No,” says Benny. Goosebumps are rising on her skin, and it’s not because of the cold morning air. “No, I can’t say I have. Is... that what you were doing to all those people? Feeding them to whatever this was? Your landlord, your ex-girlfriend, your study partner... all sacrifices? Why?”
“I didn’t know what sort of god it was,” he says. “Wasn’t sure what sort of ritual I needed to do to make it happy. So I tried them all, and nothing changed but... now, now I think I have it. I think I know what I need to do.”
“I think you’re insane,” says Benny simply.
He grunts, and pokes her in the back again. “Keep walking,” is all he says, and he refuses to talk again.
*
They walk for what feels like forever but is probably closer to half an hour. Through the back streets of the city, out into the more uninhabited hills beyond. Benny is mildly surprised they don’t bump into anyone, but then again – early morning, and nobody ever goes out east from the city. There’s nothing to find there, and she knows that for a fact.
Eddison gestures for her to stop when they’ve gone far enough that the city’s not visible and the faint wavering line of the planet-wide ocean can be seen in the far distance. He doesn’t say a word as she eyes him up with some trepidation – just pushes a shovel that he’s apparently been carrying all this time into Benny’s hands. She stares down at it with a blank sort of incomprehension. She’s used to smaller, more precise digging instruments, she thinks, somewhat absurdly, before she remembers. Bruises and blisters on the hands. Digging their own graves. They’re out in a field in the middle of nowhere, as far away from Dellah’s main city as you can get, and he’s holding a gun on her.
Oh, Goddess.
“What were you thinking for me, then?” she says, airy and cheerful in the face of her own imminent demise. Because of course she is. Because it’s the only thing she has left. “Corvidian? Killoran? Martian, again? Because if I get any input, I’ve been thinking actually, maybe a good old-fashioned Viking funeral’s the way to go – I mean, we’re right next to the ocean, all we really need’s a boat. And a matchbox. Send me off to Valhalla in flames – I feel like I deserve it at this point.”
“No ritual. Just start digging,” he says, apparently not in the mood for her particular brand of irreverent bullshittery-in-the-face-of-danger, and gestures right at her feet with the gun. His voice doesn’t even shake. There’s no remorse in his eyes. She looks at him in the dim morning light and he looks just like he always has, sitting in the back of her lectures. Incongruous, casually eager to learn. He’s almost boyishly handsome. He has killed and buried at least five people, if not more, and she is about to be the next.
“Or what? You’ll shoot me in the back?” she says. “You’re going to kill me either way, you know. If you shoot me now, I’ll be dead and you’ll have to dig this grave all by yourself. If I’m going to die, I might as well inconvenience you in the pettiest damn way possible. You know what? I don’t think I will.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” he says. “At least not right away. Not if you shut up, anyway. Dig.”
Getting shot is a painful way to go. She’ll bleed out slowly, most likely. If she listens to what he’s saying, she might end up having a chance to overpower him. Maybe she can bonk him over the head with the shovel while his back is turned.
She takes a deep, deep breath in through her nose. Pitches the end of the shovel into the dewy, loamy earth.
Begins to dig.
The ground is soft but it’s still excruciatingly slow work. Digging is always slow – she knows this as an archaeologist – and she’s digging a grave. It takes an hour for her to make a knee-deep dent in the earth and by then the sun is creeping over the horizon and she’s panting and sweating. Eddison still has his gun trained firmly on her, and she hasn’t seen him blink once. There’s no openings, no opportunities to escape, nothing.
Two hours. Three. She’s waist-deep and her knuckles feel swollen and tight. She’s sure several splinters have worked their way into her skin and she wants nothing more than to cast the shovel aside and try to work them out with her fingernails, but her hands feel welded in place around the wood of the handle. She doesn’t think she could pull them away from it if she tried. She knows it’d hurt like a bitch if she did. She doesn’t try.
Four hours.
She wonders what Brax is doing. He’s almost certainly noted her absence by now, and if he’s seen the note he’ll have also twigged to the fact that tracking down the killer did not go as simply and easily as she’d planned. He’s probably looking for her right now. She hopes he’s looking for her right now. Her head hurts.
She’s so very thirsty.
As the sun begins to rise to its absolute zenith in the unhappy grey-yellow Dellah sky, Benny’s head is only just poking over the edge of the hole in the ground. Eddison says, “Stop,” and she does, after a second. She’s numb and miserable and cold and hot at the same time. Sweat is pouring down her back. Her face and hands and arms are stained with dirt. She stands in the hole and stares up at her former student and doesn’t even try to stop him as he leans down to take the shovel from her, gun never wavering.
“Lay down,” he says.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she says.
“Down,” he repeats, and flicks off the safety of his laser rifle. Benny thinks about last night, drinking wine in Brax’s office and talking about nothing of importance whatsoever. Surrounded by a warm glow and good company. She could practically feel the affection bubbling up between them. She tries to remember what that warm feeling felt like, but all that’s left is the cold.
She lies down. It’s an awkward fit, because she hadn’t dug the hole to be wide, just deep. Her legs are curled up beneath her and she has to fold her arms across her chest. Her neck is bent at a horribly painful angle. None of that is going to matter in a minute. She knows exactly what’s coming next.
And if she starts crying at this point, that’s her business and no-one else’s.
The dirt scatters across her face, damp and warm. The thin sliver of sunlight that hits her from outside of the hole is quickly eclipsed by Eddison’s stocky form, standing right in front of it as he solemnly and silently heaves dirt onto her body.
Incidentally, the third shovelful of dirt is the worst. It’s not the first or the second or the fourth, oh no, it’s the third one out of all of them that scares her the most because that’s when it really does sink in that she’s being buried alive.
“You really don’t want to do this,” says Benny, voice hoarse and strained. He just shrugs; throws another heap of dirt down onto her. It’s not even particularly heavy, but she can feel her chest tightening in premature panic anyway. “Come on, this is – this is just overkill, you don’t – you don’t – don’t -”
He keeps not-talking and keeps shovelling, and soon she gives up trying to reason with him, because all of her energy’s going into not suffocating. She struggles and squirms for as long as she can, trying frantically to keep her head above the slowly accumulating earth, but eventually she can’t do it any longer. Eventually there’s just so much of it and her arms and legs and body are being pinned down by the gradually increasing weight, and the faint watery light from above just disappears, and now she’s alone in the dark.
There's a particular peculiar feeling that envelops you the moment you become aware that your own imminent mortality is about to be fulfilled. It feels like realizing your own potential for the first time in life. It feels like horror because you know you'll never get to embrace that potential because the next few minutes you have aren't nearly enough to do so. It feels like breathing water. It feels like breathing dirt. It feels like the absence of air. It feels like choking on sand and feeling the grit creep up your throat and feeling it strangle you apart from the inside. It feels like it feels like it feels. It feels like she is afraid to die, she has always been afraid to die, but she is only realizing it right now and why did she not realize this sooner? It feels like no stop it please stop it stop shovelling the dirt onto me I am still alive this is not meant to happen to people who are still alive. It feels like a horror movie. It feels like something that should never happen in real life. It feels like drowning on land, it feels like being packed in clay, it feels like worms. It feels like why are there so many worms, there's shouldn't be this amount of worms in this amount of dirt. It feels like worms but I think I am imagining the worms but goddess do they feel real. It feels like stop this please stop this now stop stop stop I am not ready for this oh no oh no oh no. It feels like human cruelty for no reason. It feels like get off me. It feels like I can't breathe. It feels like dirt feels like worm feels like earth drowning earth worm dirt hunger silence silence black black drowned –
He can’t see her anymore, she thinks – hopes – so she tries to claw at the dirt above her, to try to hollow out some semblance of a space where she can at least pretend to hope to try to breathe, but it’s so much heavier than she remembers and all she can do is squirm. She manages to get an arm up, worm it all the way through the dirt until it’s sticking right up above her, but she can’t feel any difference in the soil above. Can’t get any purchase on it, can’t claw it away from her even though she can feel her lungs closing up and stuttering with the effort. She knows she can’t be all that deep, not really, she hadn’t been digging for all that long, but it feels like she’s a million miles below Dellah’s surface, drowning in wet warm-cool blackness.
Benny knows that she’s going to die here.
She is there for an hour, a day, a thousand years, and she can feel herself rotting apart. She must be more dirt and bone than flesh and blood at this point, she thinks. It’s all she can taste. She can’t breathe, has never been able to breathe. The press of natural, unrelenting absolution from above is almost comforting. She fits here, cocooned in her little pocket of darkness that moulds to engulf her form exactly and entirely.
There is something beneath her. Something vast and hungry with jaws like a horizon being split wide open and tendrils like insidious roots, worming their inevitable way through the dark. She can feel them, vibrating as they squirm towards her from below. Thin and sinewy and impossibly strong, they loop around her wrists and chest and begin the slow, tortuous process of dragging her deeper. She is so impossibly deep in the earth already.
Claws, through the darkness. Not below, above. Bright, flashing. There is something monstrous roaring her name. She shies away from them – the claws, the voice, the brightness of it all – instinctively and the under-roots pull her close, whispering, yes, come away, come away to us, and she feels a particularly twisted one hook all the way around her neck. There are worms beneath her skin and there is dirt in her lungs and the song of beneath is so beautifully tempting that for a long, long moment she almost wants to give into it.
The monstrous thing above her roars her name again, and twisted angry fingers swipe through the earth above her, passing over her buried, rotting head and missing her entirely. Her hand twitches upwards to meet it, and her lips form a name. No sound comes out, but the earth creeps in and now she is choking on it. Her arm twitches out again, and she’s not sure how much of it is her and how much of it is a reflex.
Fingers through the earth again. This time, they catch her hand and hold on tight and don’t let go. Even when she starts to squirm and fight against the contact. Even when she realizes that grabbing the hand was a mistake and it’s so much safer down here, down below. She matches the roar of above, calls back her own protest, just leave me here.
“Bernice!” comes the cry once more; the growl, the unearthly rasp from above. The earth cracks open and the light seeps in, razor-hot and burning into her. Claws dig into her arms, piercing all the way through her cracked decaying skin and cutting through the rotted worm-eaten bones and out the other side. There is no blood, because she’s been in here far too long to bleed anymore. She is being dragged upwards, away from the growing, loving embrace of the beneath. She screams, and she doesn’t even recognize herself.
The roots under her skin snap and tear in a symphony of agony, and with every connection severed she fights even more fiercely, desperate to be buried again. The monster is unrelentless. It tugs and heaves and drags her up, up, up. The brightness is both unimaginable and unimaginably painful. The light breeze is like acid against her raw, filthy skin. She remembers what eyes are and squeezes her shut tight, and then lashes out, clawing for the monster’s own. She wants to go back. She thinks she can hear herself begging to go back.
“No, don’t, here – come here,” says the monster, and she is drawn into soft, scented darkness. She clings to and scratches at its arms, protesting and sobbing. Its claws are here at her back, smoothing along her spine. A devil’s song right in in her ear. “I’ve got you. Here.” It scares her, it disgusts her, she wants to pull away; it won’t let her. “Bernice, Benny, you’re out, you’re fine, it’s okay – he’s dead, he’s gone, you’re going to be fine, shh...”
The lies taste so sweet to her tired mind. She refuses to be placated so easily. She beats angrily at its horrible spiny back, tries to get a purchase on its jagged ragged horns and push it back and away from her. Nothing works. Nothing will ever work, it’s got such a horribly tight grip on her and it’s never going to let her go. Finally she stops, exhausted, and allows herself to cling to it.
“I hate you,” she mourns, arms tightening around its back. “I hate you, I hate you – ”
“I know,” it says, “oh, Benny, I know. I’m sorry.”
And then the rest is darkness.
*
When Benny wakes, she’s in her apartment. The lights are dim, the curtains drawn. There’s a dim echo of panic ringing through her entire body, and she feels like absolute shit.
Her bedroom door is open, just a crack, and there’s quite a bit of noise coming from the kitchen. Clattering, clanging, the sound of water boiling. Some sort of delicious smell, too; it makes her stomach cramp up a bit with anticipation. She’s very hungry.
“Hello?” she calls, and is surprised to realize how croaky and rough her voice is. And then she tenses as she remembers. The grave. The dirt. The monster. Although... no, there hadn’t been a monster, had there?
The clattering and clanging ceases, there’s a distant mutter, and then Brax’s voice rings out through the apartment. “I’d advise upon taking a shower, or at least washing up somewhat. There should be clean towels in the en-suite, if I’m not mistaken.”
Braxiatel is here. It all fills her with a certain amount of deja-vu. Waking up after not expecting to ever wake up again, an unexpected Time Lord in her apartment, Joseph... where is Joseph, anyway? She would have expected him to be getting everywhere by now with his boring unpleasant semi-bureaucratic robot-ness. It’s not like she minds, she’s not really in the mood to be bothered by him right now, but it is strange.
She files that all away to deal with later, because a shower does actually sound rather good right now. She carefully swings herself out of bed, wincing as her bare feet hit the carpet. She’s filthy, head-to-toe. Still in the clothes she’d been buried in, because apparently Brax hadn’t changed her out of them, out of courtesy or awkwardness or... something. She isn’t sure if she would have minded if he had. Either way, her sheets and her room are going to need some serious spring-cleaning to get the grime out.
The lights in the bathroom are already on, and the promised towels are there, too. Benny starts up the shower and sets it running to hot. She doesn’t get in, though. Instead, she stands at the sink and regards herself in the mirror.
Most of the dirt has been wiped carefully from Benny’s face and exposed bare skin, but it’s still there. She’s still in the same clothes. She stares at herself blankly, traces along the teartracks still visible on her cheeks. She lifts up her shirt and tries to find where the under-roots had pierced her flesh and where the worms had eaten their way through her, but can’t find anything but smooth, unblemished skin.
She undresses, gets into the shower. Shuts her eyes, sighs as she scrubs the last traces of an early grave from her body until her skin’s just short of being red and raw. Stands there, feels the steam curling up around her and the water hitting her back and head like nails.
Gets out. Redresses. Move on. Compartmentalize. Get over it, Summerfield, get on with living your life.
She comes into the kitchen, towel still draped around her shoulders. Her hair is damp and clings to the back of her neck. There’s Brax at the stove, and he’s managed to unearth an apron, and he’s cooking. Cooking. Not baking croissants, but actually properly cooking on a stove that hasn’t seen any use since she moved in apart from heating up canned food.
She stands and watches him for a while, revelling in the strangeness of it. Feeling an unexpected warmth well up in her chest as he hums lost little snatches from The Marriage Of Figaro. She can tell he hasn’t noticed her yet, because if he had, he’d be putting effort into getting the tune exactly right and hitting all the right notes.
When he pauses and starts whistling something that sounds a lot like Offenbach, she knows he’s noticed her, and she clears her throat.
“Hi,” she says, a bit croakily.
He turns. “Benny,” he says, eyes crinkling up at the corners. He takes a step forward, like he’s about to embrace her but stops as she flinches slightly, an entirely involuntary movement that nonetheless chills the room ever-so-slightly. “Sit down,” he invites instead, nudging a chair out from the kitchen table with an elegant little flick of one foot. “It should be ready soon.”
She brushes away the immediate uneasiness and grins. It makes her face ache and her eyes hurt like she’s about to start crying but she grins anyway. “You’re making me breakfast,” she says simply.
“You’re stating the obvious,” he rejoins, smiling back. There’s so much warmth there. How could she ever have thought of his hands as claws; horns crawling up from the base of his skull into a jagged, fractured crown wreathing his head – no.
“Are we going domestic?” she asks as she sits down. “Is that what’s happening?”
“Domesticity sounds simultaneously distinctly unpleasant in its dullness, and the greatest honour in the world to share with you,” he tells her, and scrapes the spatula he’s holding speculatively across the pan held in his other hand. “But, no. I rather thought you’d appreciate some form of sustenance after all that you’ve been through today.”
For a second, she’d almost managed to forget it all. “Ah,” she says. “Mm. Yeah, that.” She squints over at the windows. The sky outside is dark, but it’s impossible to work out what time of night it is. “Was that really this morning?”
“Afternoon, technically,” says Brax. He flips something. His body’s shielding it from view, but it does smell excellent. “You’ve been sleeping for hours. It’s just turned thirteen-thirty.”
Nearly midnight. And yet here he is, cooking for her. She wonders if he’d spent the entire time here. Wonders... about a lot of things. There’s a lot to wonder about.
“So,” she says, as conversationally as she can. “I got buried alive. That’s a fun thing.”
“Fun being a relative term, of course.”
“How long was I-?” Benny says, unsure if she really wants the answer or not.
A sigh. His back is still turned to her as he fiddles with the stove. She can tell he’s not actually doing anything important with it, because she knows for a fact that he’d finished cooking the food nearly a minute ago. He’s stalling. She doesn’t blame him. “I believe... you had been under for approximately a minute when I arrived,” he says eventually, reluctantly.
“Oh,” she says. And now she doesn’t know what to think.
“He’d only just finished filling in the... grave.” Brax turns, and places a plate, in front of her. Nothing complicated, just mashed potatoes and sausages. Bangers and mash. Gravy on the side. She almost wants to laugh at the blatant absurdity of it all, but his words keep her expression frozen and her mind reeling with the possibilities. “I took care of him, and then pulled you out.”
It’s such a simple way of phrasing it. Took care of him. Pulled her out. As if he hadn’t killed one of her former students in what she can only assume to have been a moment of extreme, pure rage. As if she hadn’t been kicking and screaming and sobbing the entire time.
“Something was eating me,” she says. “When I was down there.” Waits for the reaction.
His poker face is, as always, impressively impasssive. It doesn’t hurt that his back’s to her, so she can’t really see what he’s thinking. “Literally eating you?”
“Pulling me down. Working its way into my body.” She shudders reflexively, the aftershocks of the memory still tingling unpleasantly beneath her skin. “A few minutes isn’t nearly long enough to start hallucinating like that, is it?”
“Perhaps not,” he says.
“And it felt like longer.” She stares at the table, at the swirling, grainy patterns melting through the fake wood. She’s not mentioning the whole horrible-monster-thing to him. It’d feel... insulting, after he’d pulled her out like that, to say the least. “Maybe I’m losing my mind. It would explain why I went off on my own like that, at least.”
“I’d advise you to be a bit kinder to yourself,” he says, eyes dark with concern and sympathy. “Keep in mind that you had been out in that field for hours before the... ah, burial even began to take place. That would be concerning to anyone at all, I believe. And for all we know, the late Mr Bright drugged you at some point during the proceedings.”
“Don’t know when he would’ve,” mutters Benny, but... yes. She does feel a bit better. “Well, thank you,” she says eventually. She toys with her fork. “Really, thank you. Not just the meaningless sort of thank-yous we sometimes do, this is... I can’t even start to try to properly thank you for this.”
He freezes, and it would be imperceptible but she knows him, knows how Time Lords show their emotions all over their face in the subtlest of ways and all over their bodies where they think nobody can see.
“Don’t,” he says, eventually. “Please. Don’t. Benny...”
She can’t hide the faint flinch when he goes to stand behind her, but that’s just her brain being stupid. She doesn’t flinch when he takes the shower towel still around her shoulders, and adjusts it. Pulling it taut, pressing it firmly around her. It’s like he’s trying to hug her without touching her. It’s remarkably endearing, in an awkward Brax sort of way.
“It was the right thing to do,” he says. “No – it was – more than that, it was the only thing to do. Don’t you dare thank me for doing the bare minimum. What sort of friend would I have been if I’d left you down there? It’s a dreadful way to go, if nothing else. You deserve so much better.”
“I deserve a better death?” she says, with a choked little laugh, and then grabs at his hand, squeezing at it tight. “Oh, you’re dreadful. You’re so bad at this. Thank you, thank you so much.”
He lets out a little offended-sounding chuckle, and squeezes it back. Cold and slightly clammy. His hand’s bigger than hers, but the fingers are long and thin; pianist’s fingers. She wonders if he plays.
“So we are BFFs?” she says as she releases his hand, with a quirk of her mouth and an ironic little wriggle of her pinkie finger.
“Forever and ever and ever,” Brax deadpans. His tiny smile matches hers perfectly. “And if you really feel the need to thank me...” He sits down across from her, and pushes the plate of food towards her. “You could make a start with eating this.”
Functionally, mechanically, she is hungry. In practice, she feels like she’d never be able to eat again. Forcing food past her lips, down her throat – but. “I’ll try,” she says. “No promises, though.”
“Just do your best,” he tells her.
“It’s all I ever do,” she says, spearing a chunk of sausage with her fork, and saluting him lazily with it.
And, well. The breakfast is rather delicious.
*
The next day, they receive word that Eddison Bright’s body has gone mysteriously missing – in fact, had disappeared almost the minute it had been left alone.
“I mean,” says Benny – still wrapped up tightly in a blanket on the couch with Brax right next to her. “It’s not as if he’s going to do anything else. He’s dead.”
“Yes,” says Brax absently, returning to the book he had been reading before the message came in. “That’s true. But...?”
He’s giving her space. She appreciates it, appreciates the sentiment behind it, but wishes that he’d stop sitting on the other end of the couch. It almost feels pointed. His skin is cold and his angles are sharp but having another living, breathing person right next to her would be the most perfect thing in the world right now. She also wishes there was an easy way to ask for this which didn’t make her feel like tearing her own hair out.
“But...” She grimaces. “Look, I can’t imagine any reason someone might want to steal a murderer’s body that would be a good sort of reason. Or at the very least, I can’t imagine one that helps me sleep better at night.”
“Revenge, perhaps,” Brax offers, and turns a page. “Or closure. I can easily imagine the families of one of his victims wanting to exact some kind of inscrutable retaliation on his remains. I can almost respect it.”
“Mm,” she says, and curls the edges of the blanket tighter around herself. “It’s almost... I don’t know. There’s a word here that I’m looking for, and I can’t place it. Sinister, maybe? I can’t stop thinking about the copycat murderer. We never found them, and my gut tells me that whoever they were, they might have something to do with this.”
Brax lowers the book slowly, looking right at her. Those piercing grey eyes of his. He looks, and the corners of his mouth tighten, and he sighs. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, Benny.”
“I suppose not.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see what comes next,” he says.
Benny breathes out. Looks to the window, and sees mist and watery morning sunlight filtering through.
“Yes,” she says. “Wait and see.”
*