Work Text:
No one can unring this bell
Unsound this alarm
Unbreak my heart new
- Mercury, Sleeping At Last
In the aftermath of everything, you look for her. It can’t be helped, at this point; the rest of the room is distracted, watching She Who Swore You The Oath dragging He Who Doomed The World down to hell. You are not watching. You gave the order, and that was enough. You look for her, and you find her, lying very still on the floor.
There is nothing left to keep her pinned to this plane now, or very little. Apopneumatism is taking place, her soul fleeing from her corpse in increments, and when it is over, she will disappear. The revenant will be unbound, her soul distant and foreign, and her body will at last be offered the mercy of decomposing.
You do not wish to extend to her that same mercy.
Unnoticed by the mayhem around you, you step towards her, fingers twitching as if just by sensing the shift within her you will be able to hold her soul in place. It will not be that easy, and you know it. It could not be done by a god, and his effort will not be bested by you. But you cannot help but come closer.
She looks the same way that she has for what feels like forever now, with her ashy corpse skin and her clouded-over eyes. She takes longer to focus on you than usual, her control beginning to slip, and it takes her until you’ve lowered into sitting atop her waist to get out, “What do you want now?”
You only say, “Let me.”
Your hand hovers over her sternum, just above the gaping maw that God left in her chest. You search for her soul, the soul thrashing like a fish pulled from the sea; it doesn’t know if it wants to be returned home or offered the relief of death. All it knows is that it cannot remain the way it is.
It takes her an awfully long time to make her mouth reply to you. She is trying to write with a pen void of ink. “You -”
“Let me,” you say again. And you will not take no for an answer, not when time is so precious. You do not give her the valuable seconds necessary to form a response; you pull up your sleeve, modestly, and plunge the whole of your hand into that raw, sick wound in her chest.
It is no wound you have known the likes of before; lined by teeth like sharpened ends of a ribcage, hollow and dark. But you have seldom known fear, not in the important moments, and all you feel is a sort of curiosity with a fierce hope that you are going to do this, impossibilities be damned. It does not matter that God could not, because you have what he has always lacked.
The inside of the wound is slick and cold, and the girl lying prone beneath you lets out an inhuman sound, her torso shuddering with a sudden violence. But this is not the sound of her soul leaving her body; it is a warning, courtesy of the teeth in her chest, which snap shut around your wrist and cleave through flesh, blood and bone.
You do not cry out. You don’t even flinch. You pull what remains of your arm away from her, gushing blood the way your eyes once did tears, and don’t concern yourself with whether or not it knits itself back together. The corpse thrashes slightly beneath you, perhaps involuntary and perhaps out of horror. You wiggle your fingers within her chest, feeling the inside of the wound again. Her chest is closed, stitched up with canines like a malformed zipper, but your hand is inside her, and you still have control.
She makes a choked noise on the ground, and it might be dread, or fear, or revulsion. You have never excelled at the nuances of emotions, and that ability will not be constructive to you now. For this, you must ignore her, her feelings and her resentment and even her pain, and stitch her back together. For this, she will not thank you. But so long as she lives, you will not need her to.
You understand the molecular composition of your hand better than you might have in the past. You can see beyond the phalanges and the metacarpals, the hypothenar and the palmar nerves, right through to the dermis and epidermis and the keratin of your fingernails. You know it as intimately as a lover, and can feel every inch of it as it moves through the cavern of her chest. You know what every part of it is made up of, and more importantly, you know what each piece should be instead.
Fumbling blind through a darkness lit only by your proximity to her, you find the space where her heart used to be. No shred of it remains, not even punctured or burst inside her ribs; it is simply empty, as if it never was. Your hand curls into a fist, excruciatingly, and the girl makes another agonised sound underneath you. You aren’t sure if she can simply feel it, or if it hurts her, but you don’t stop to ask. Your hand is in place - you check two more times to be certain - and then it bursts into blood and open vessels.
Brittle bones shift and twist into endocardium, muscles morph into myocardium, skin bends and bubbles into epicardium. The girl lets out a sound that might be a gasp and might be a scream, and might be too far gone to qualify for either now - you need to continue. Your vision goes pink with the sweat beading down your forehead, but you need to continue.
Your fingers are transformed to atriums and ventricles, your thumb becoming aorta and artery. There is another sound of agony, drawn out and desperate, and this time it is not hers but yours. You are braced against her shoulders, teeth gritted and back tensed, and you are trying with everything you have. You are trying to give her this back before you lose her for the last time.
Your hand is no longer a hand, but a heart, and it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It sits perfectly in her chest, the cells that are yours tucked amongst the cells that are hers. Blood sweat is running down your cheeks and down your chin, dripping onto the stitched-up wound under her sternum. The edges of your vision go briefly black.
You cling to enough awareness to connect the veins and arteries you have created inside her, sewing everything into her body the way that it should be. Her heart is tucked aside of her lungs, stitched back into her veins, and her soul is fluttering on its last tether between here and next.
You tell her, “This will hurt.”
You hurt her, and she howls.
You squeeze your hand into a fist, but your hand is not a hand, it is her heart. Like squeezing a fist, you pump it, teach it again how to move the blood through her body. There should be more of it, you want there to be more, but there is blood running down from your face from every pore and opening, falling into her chest like water being sucked down a drain. It’s seeping into her, becoming part of her, and her colour is ever so slowly coming back.
She cries with a volume that she has seldom cried before, but you are merciless, and her heart is beating, again, again, again, until her lungs spasm and gasp for air that she has not taken in months.
There is still a tear in her throat, but after this, stitching that up is child’s play. A brush of your knuckles over the dried-up slit and the skin reforms like new, leaving a jagged but whole line where the gap used to be. She sucks in air like she has never had the chance to before.
By the time you move to correct the wound in her abdomen, her skin is turning brown, nearly golden, the way it was when you knew her living. She is warming up gradually beneath you, and it hits you with a sudden wobbling clarity that she is alive . She was dead and has been gone for years, but you are here with her now and you have brought her back to life.
You are heaving for breath, and so is she. Your face is running with blood sweat, hers with tears, and your hair is too long and limp around your face as you stare down at her unabashed. But she is looking up at you too, and her eyes are not cloudy now, but a clear, crisp gold. Just like you remembered it. Your throat threatens to close in on itself.
You know when she looks at you like that that she cannot be angry with you much longer. You have hurt her, again and again, but you have hauled her back from the edge of death and sealed her trembling soul back into her body. For the first time, one of you has saved the other without giving up yourself to do it, and that is the marker of a beginning. She might not forgive you now, but you know that she will listen. You know that there is time left for you both to fix this and fall back together.
Your hands are sweaty and bloody, both the old one and the regrown one, but they thread their way into her vibrant hair without protest from either one of you. You cradle her head in your hands, and look upon her with everything you have, and you say -
“Welcome home, Griddle.”