Work Text:
The day you die is just a day like any other day.
It’s a chilly day in April and you’ve celebrated your birthday only a week ago. Nice and quiet. Just you, your sister, Con Air and no cake. You know, the only right way to celebrate a birthday. Because cake is evil and Con Air is totally the best movie ever.
School’s out and kids are galumphing out of the building, occasionally jostling you as they all make a desperate bid for freedom. It’s a short lived sprint, everybody coming up short at the gates, a collective leash jerking them to their senses. It’s not safe out there. Not for kids. Not for anybody under their twenties. People mill about, tiptoeing and casting about for familiar faces of family, friends. Most of them are picked up and stuffed into a car right away by parents, others have to wait. At which point they resign themselves to doing pretty much the same thing you are: try not to freeze any appendages off.
By the time your sister arrives you’ve been having a real riot exhaling hot and heavy onto the edge of your scarf, watching how little beads of condensation catch and form on the fabric. As usual, you’re the only one left. That’s okay, you always make sure to stand within line of sight of a public place.
“John”, she says, bike screeching to halt. She’s breathing hard and her bangs are cowlicked back from the wind. Her glasses fog up instantly. “I’m so sorry. I was about to leave, but then this asshole came in and ordered like a million roses— yeah okay, no, more like fifty, but-“
The scarf sticks damp against the underside of your chin. Pretty sure it counts as spit. Yum. “That’s okay,” you assure her. “I’m only like, half frozen, so.”
Jade makes a face at you and clambers off her bike. Tugs her skirt down from where it was rucked up around her knees. You don’t tell her about the way her bangs are sticking up all funny, kind of like in There’s Something About Mary. Pfffeheh. And hey, it’s been a while since you saw that one, maybe she’ll want to watch it with you after your finish your homework.
“Oh, were you the only one left?” she goes, voice doing this crestfallen swoop as she looks around for more stragglers.
“Hey, that’s totally okay,” you assure her, sticking your cold fingers out of your sleeve to take her bike from her and steer it out onto the street. “I can take care of myself.”
Jade frowns, not at you really, but it still makes you feel bad. “Please wait inside next time, John.”
You breathe in deeply. “Yeah, okay,” you agree, simply because it’s easier to.
Home really isn’t all that far from where you go to school. Maybe a ten, fifteen minute walk? One you could easily do all by yourself, but, yeah. Going anywhere alone these days is not really an option anymore, is it? Usually the two of you take the long way through the park, but it’s cold and getting late. You can tell Jade wants to go home. It’s probably been a rough day.
The silence isn’t really awkward, because Jade’s your sister and it’s not necessary to babble the gaps in your conversation full with unnecessary trivia to make it easier. But you don’t like her doing the— the droopy thing. It reminds you of the way a dog will let its head sink and its ears go flat all sad-like, tail tucking against the rump. Not that Jade has dog ears or a tail, that’d be silly.
“So how was work?” you say, probably a little too loudly. “Sell any flowers to cute guys?” -you leave a pointed pause- “Or girls?”
Nudge nudge. Wink. You nearly trip over the pedal of the bike as you do so.
“Yeah, one of them was real cute,” she says, grinning her overbite bare. “Wanted a bouquet of sunflowers because his girl was the” —air quotes— ”light of his life.”
“Puke, puke,” you say obligingly.
“Hurl,” Jade adds.
“Gross,” you finish together.
Jade cracks up, just a little, but it’s enough, she’s left with a tiny smile tucked into the corner of her mouth. Who’s the man? It’s you. You’re the man.
“How was school?” your sister asks. She finally notices how her bangs are sticking up and is trying to flatten them in vain. Her woollen gloves make the effect only staticy and twice as hilarious.
“The usual.”
“A bottomless pit of despair, rampant hormones and stinky gym socks?”
“The very same.”
“Nice.”
You stick out your tongue.
Just as the two of you reach the crosswalk, your phone vibrates in your pocket so you hand the bike to Jade. It’s hiding somewhere underneath a fuckzillion wrappers (oops) and about half of them pop out and flutter to the ground as soon as yank your hand free. After hurriedly picking them up (Jade would kick your ass for littering) you jog after her to catch up.
You drag your finger across the screen and tap the little envelope.
“Did you get much homework?” Jade asks, just as your breath stutters to a stop in shock. You stop mid-step. “John?”
“Jade,” you manage, voice choked with wonder and excitement. “Jade, it’s from Rose.” You haven’t heard from Rose in years. Gone. Missing, like so many others. The message is from Rose.
Rose.
“What?!” Jade squawks, nearly careening bike and all into the brick wall as she misses the corner of the block. “Let me see!”
“No way, it’s mine!” you hold it out of reach and open the message with fingers that tremble.
TT: Run.
“Uh?” You go, frowning at the screen and smoothing the pad of your thumb over the single word. “Ooo-kay, that’s wei-“
“John,” your sister says. Her voice is tight with fear. She grabs your arm.
You raise your eyes from the screen slowly. There is only one of them. Tall, impeccably dressed. Classy hat sitting at just the right angle on his head. Long, serious face cast in shadow. You may have never seen them, but you know who that is.
The Midnight Crew.
“John,” Jade says again, her fingers clutching you hard enough to bruise. Your name rolls into the air on a white cloud. “John, run.”
Jade throws the bike away from her and it clatter-bounces in an unpredictable whirl of wheels and handles as it catches against the walls of the narrow alley. It’ll never hit him, but it’ll slow him down. She shoves you away, behind her, back to where you came from. You go, stumbling, heart gripped with pure terror —and screech to a stop. A sleek black car is blocking your exit. A positively huge man is leaning on the open door. Muscles roll under the tailored sleeves of his suit, straining the seams as he flexes. All brawny and blocky power. You back against your sister, putting yourself between her and this new threat.
“I’m sorry to inform you, wee miss, that you won’t be going anywhere,” the first one says. “Except to where we are taking you, of course.”
“One wrong step and we pound you into submission,” the big guy adds. To his partner he adds: “I though it said one brat, not two.”
You grab Jade’s hand, eyes swivelling between the both of them. The fingers of your free hand curl, catching cold air. You hold it in your palm and know it won’t ever be enough to save you. Behind you prickly, furry heat crawls up your spine as Jade flexes her power.
“Don’t even think about it,” the first one says again, mouth grim. “You’ll both be coming.”
He raises a long fingered, elegant hand. Points, and mimics pulling the trigger.
It feels like someone yanks at a pull chain in the back of your skull. A sharp tug. Then darkness.
*
When you come to there’s grimy concrete under your cheek. You head hurts. Jade is next to you, eyes fluttering open before grimacing convulsively.
That is all you are able to take in before Jade is yanked to her feet, arm bending at a painful angle. She howls, or at least she tries to, but whatever spell he hit you with has left her weak and unable to do much more but produce this heart wrenching yip of pain. Instinctively you try to scramble after her and find that you can only lift your head a mere inch.
“Jade,” you scream. Or you try. It’s a feeble exhale, barely audible even to your own ears. One of your hands twitches and you claw your fingers to drag it towards her. Why can’t you move? Your limbs are heavy and when you roll your eyes to follow their movements the whole worlds swirls a little too easily. The ground rolls. Sweat slides out of your hairline and into your eye. It stings. Your lids refuse to blink. The walls pulse all around you. Your bones shake.
“Pretty sure it meant this one,” it’s the big guy. In his meaty paws Jade looks like little ghost. Her face is pale enough to match. “That one doesn’t have enough juice.”
“Quite right,” the other agrees, nodding easily as he scrolls through something on a sleek tablet.
He slings Jade over his shoulder as though she weighs nothing. She’s utterly limp. Her long hair streams like a dark river towards the ground and her glasses slip from her face, hit the floor with a sharp ping of breaking glass.
They’re taking your sister away. You don’t know where. You don’t know for what. All you know is that kids who get taken away by the Midnight Crew never come back.
“No,” you say and this time you can actually produce some sound. “No!”
The second one is even louder, even though it wobbles horribly. And then you actually get an elbow under yourself.
“Hey now,” tall and sleek says with mild curiosity. He peers down at you with the air of someone who just swatted a mosquito out of the air and is surprised to still see it spiral in pathetic wounded circles across the ground —‘should I crush it or-?’.
You’re going to be sick, you can feel it, the aftermath of the spell tells you to stay down, stay down, god, idiot, stay the hell down and no more moving but they’re taking Jade away and you know, know that if you let them she’ll never come back.
“Take me,” you say.
Both men look at you, expression betraying nothing. Jade makes a noise.
“Take me,” you repeat, voice growing stronger and dammit, you might not even have half the magic potential Jade has but you refuse to stay down like a useless lump of flesh while they’re whisking your sister away. “I’ll do whatever it is you want, j-just, please take me and let my sister go.”
“Go?”
“Yes,” you implore.
Jade makes a soft, broken sound that might have been your name.
“Please,” you press on. They’re listening, you think, even though their faces are cold, void of expression. “I’ll do anything, I promise. Anything anything anything you want, just please let my sister go, please, please take me please, please please please-“
Your face is wet and you’re pretty sure there’s spittle running down you bottom lip and you stink of fear. Sweat slicks your shirt wet in your armpits and you can smell vomit on your breath even though you don’t remember throwing up. You can’t stop shaking, but you’re propped up on both arms and looking at them willing them to look at me, look at me, you hideous fuckers, look at me and please. Just.
Please.
And then they just —
turn away.
You scream, voice slurred and thick and unrecognisable. “PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE-“ and on and on and on raw and sobbing and yeah, you’re definitely drooling and they can’t. They can’t, they can’t and you drag yourself -body useless and disgusting- after them as best as you can.
“Shut up!” the big one barks and you hiccup to a pathetic stop.
“Please,” you repeat and cringe when he takes an angry step towards you. Cringe and tuck in your head protectively and go on: “Please, take me, just take me, I’ll do anything, anything you ask, just let her go, please-“
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” we get it, the other snaps, tucking his tablet in the crook of his arm. “You’re eager to please.”
“Please,” you plead, sobbing miserably.
“John,” Jade moans softly.
“Fine,” he nods towards his partner. Who, after a moment’s hesitation sets Jade back on the ground. She crumples in a heap, facing you.
“Thank you,” you say. And, hah. Oh geez, really? Did you just thank them? You laugh and sink towards the ground again. Yeah, you did. That’s okay.
“John, no,” Jade sighs. Her face is bathed in tears.
You quirk your lips at her. I’m fine. I can take care of myself. Her shoulder begin to shake.
When the huge man lifts you up from the floor like a rag doll you actually do throw up a little. With your head limp on your neck it goes half into your ear, hair and neck. Jade is a blur on the ground, hand a pale starfish reaching after you.
You black out.
*
They’re washing you.
You’re naked and the room is a drab white.
Whatever is under your back is cushy, but plastic slick. They pour water over you and rub you down with cloths that smell of roses, maybe lilies, working it into your skin. You yelp when they go between your legs, scrubbing your penis and testicles—actually, actually holding you in their hands and moving around there— further back -your ass. You panic and scrabble upright. Someone pushes your shoulders down -and after some squirming you go, feeling bile rise again, belly weak and cold-hot.
There’s a crack in the ceiling. A single lightbulb dangles from the ceiling. You wonder if Jade is okay, if she’s hurt, whether they just left her there. You wonder if she will be able to find her way home. It’s late, right? Must be dark out.
The people are efficient, dressed in practical clothes, but not in uniform, really. All of them are wearing a knee-length lab coat and a mouth mask. They handle you like you’re a thing, lifting arms and legs and feet and hands as they need to. You try to catch their eyes but find none that will meet you.
“Drink this,” one of them says. Can’t tell by the voice alone whether it is a man or a woman. The solution is thick, chalky. There’s half-liquid clots inside and you heave in disgust as you feel them slithering down your throat in starts and stops. Tastes cloyingly sweet, like something that’s gone just a little rotten.
They wash your hair, fingers scrubbing circles into your scalp even as others work something slick over you body —oil? It makes your skin shine and glow. The scent of lilies —no, no roses— rises in the stale air. Fingers swirl in hypnotising patterns over your temples. They say something and you blink and try to follow the conversation. They say it again, fingers digging in, hurting. You start and flail -they grab your wrists, your ankles.
Hold you down.
That’s when the person with the scalpel comes.
It looks just like in the movies, even. A tiny metal rod with a sharp little blade on the end. They lower it towards your chest -the left side. Where your heart is. You moan, struggle, limbs tensing, head shaking.
They push down, cutting into the flesh of your body and you wail, this high, warbling noise that doesn’t sound like you at all. It doesn’t stop. They make a precise incision in your bucking, heaving body -a diagonal slice. The tip of the little blade catching on things in your body you don’t even know the name of, catch and nick, sometimes severe. Grate and destroy.
There’s no blood.
It’s burning hot agony and you think you bite your tongue screaming and choking on the air you can’t gulp down because of the pain, eyes rolling as you try to see how these strangers are cutting you open and there’s no blood. Whatever it is you drank roils within your body but stays down.
You’re going to turn inside out with howling from the agony. It’s this sickening, pestilential pain, rotten and wrong and speaking of slick oozing wounds gone bad.
They stop, but your screaming doesn’t, even if it dissolves into shaking bursts of sobbing noise. Your cheeks are wet and your eyes are bulging and your head pounds. The glimpse you get when you loll your head chestwards shows a gaping slice with wet-pink-white-yellow-gray slick things twitching inside. Your teeth begin to pulse and ache as though they are going to come loose and fall out.
Warm, crawling energy moves under your skin.
The person who was washing (not washing, not washing at all) your hair still has their fingers at your temples as though they are glued there, saying the same thing over and over. A word, one single word. Over and over, crashing into your mind like frozen needles going hot into acrid, burning fury.
There’s a crack in the ceiling. The lamp hangs there, heavy with light -all swirly drab yellow in the bulb. Tiny white moths dance around it. No, butterflies. Birds. Dragons.
Tears slide salty hot out of the corners of your eyes and into your hair.
When the saw comes in you begin to shake your head. Left-right-left-righ-left fingers ice-cold at your temples like fat leeches sucking at your head all hungry.
What is that word? You hear the sound, but it goes slippery-swift out of your brain, like water through a sieve.
All at once they all lean down on your limbs, your pelvis, the crown of your head. You keen in panic, high like a wounded animal as they jiggle the tip of the blade into the slice, making sure to settle nice and right against the inside of the wound, the thick slices of severed flesh and muscle and tendon settling sticky raw against the blade at either side, toothed blade pricking.
Keen, gasp, gurgle.
“No,” you moan. And then: “Dad.”
They begin to saw. The toothed blade goes srrrrrlllicK cccrrslick against you, into you.
“JADE!” you cry. “JadejadejadejadejadejadejadejadejadejadejadejadejadejadejadejadejAAADE- ah!”
The lightbulb sways.
Something cracks, squelches wetly.
Ping! The bulb shatters and light falls int o yo u r
e y e s
*
You wake up dead.
Pros? You’re weirdly okay with this. Not like you’re going to get any deader. Cons? You’re not going to get any deader.
Damn it.
It’s the weirdest thing, being dead. The eerie calm, the slight all-permeating cold like the onset of a wet dawn. The fact that you can see your poor body hang slack like the lifeless slab of meat it now is slightly below you. Yeah, wow, that sure is a thing. It’s dangling from the ceiling, wrists caught in shackles. There’s a hole in your chest, a gaping diagonal slash with three delicate lines of blood streaking artfully down your chest (someone sure has a sense of drama, geez!). Your heart is on a pedestal, in the middle of an intricately drawn circle on the ground. In what, wild guess, might be your blood.
…this is totally a ritual sacrifice and you’re the slaughtered lamb.
Rude.
There’s no need for you to turn around to take in the whole scene, you just sort of… see everything, left and right or up and down are inconsequential. You guess you are in soul-mode or whatever. Kind of hoping that this isn’t it, you forever chilling out in the creepy room stuck near the ceiling with only your decomposing body as company. That would suck. Aren’t you supposed to go somewhere? Like the afterlife? Or a big recycling bin for souls who got punk’d? Then why can’t you or why isn’t anybody coming to get you? An angel or someone you loved or a grim reaper or something?
The room gets colder, and darker, and you find that you’re weirdly aware of the cold abandoned thing that was your body, like it’s trying to suck you down. The whole atmosphere tilts from ‘okay this is weird’ straight to nopesville fucktown smackdab on the continent of nothanks.
You’re no longer alone.
Something sits at the edges, brooding.
Not in the room, nor beyond it, but there all the same. Close enough the blood-drawn pattern crawls and sizzles with it, plumes of acrid smoke curling upwards as your blood tries to burn itself out. Something is pacing along the border of the aether, something unwilling and angry and almost sullen.
You totally take that thought about the grim reaper back.
You are dead. They cannot hurt you any more than they have, but the eerie calm that came with the inevitability of death dissipates. Because you’re not gone, and you’re not alone, and you can’t leave, they killed you and somehow that wasn’t enough.
It does cross, dragging its feet all the way it seems, reluctantly oozing around (or through or over or in god you don’t know) the final corner and into your reality. Everything goes wrong, you’d be sick if you could, but you can’t, can only try not to crumble to screaming, gibbering fragments of your self in the presence of something your feeble human psyche was never equipped to understand.
Your world is not equipped to hold it. It’s there, gone, everywhere and nowhere; a massive shrieking horror of snapping beaks and rotating jaws and rotting arms slithering over the floor, eyes rolling around in sockets too loose to hold them as fat, red tears are wept into existence. It’s white wings and white light and the sun held in the palm of the universe as all the stars in paradox space go supernova. It’s everything you’ve ever seen, smelled, tasted, touched, heard, felt and it’s nothing like that at all. If you had been alive, you’d have gone blind and deaf and mad from looking upon it.
It’s not a fae or a demon or an elemental.
It’s one of the Absent Gods.
You are so screwed.
Somehow it compacts itself, simultaneously shrinking into itself and folding around and through and elsewhere. Extra dimensions, you think. You hope. It’s a god, do dimensions even apply to it?
What is left is worse, somehow. A shortcut through spacetime to hold itself. Stays there, very still, concentrating. The twilit darkness is drawn towards it, before suddenly expanding as it snaps into a shape you can comprehend.
“Well. This fucking sucks,” it grits out.
Uh. What?
“Incompetent, bulge blowing jelly-eyed bleaters,” it goes on, rippling around the edges as it compacts further, less larger than life, more vaguely human. In the sense that it is now possessing of two legs, two arm-like appendages and a head. With a torso bit to connect it all.
And then it crosses into the circle.
He… she… it? He, you’re thinking he, and then suddenly he is, what with your mind still frantically trying to find a compartment where it will fit, where it will make sense, and it. he. the god is fluent enough for you to focus on certain aspects. It’s a he because that’s what you understand best.
He crosses into the circle, snorts distain at the blood drawn pattern. “Amateurs,” he scoffs.
Wow, what an asshole. They kind of killed you to draw that and all. It was painful. You were scared.
You want to go home.
And then, suddenly, like a light going on, you remember.
Jade.
On the pedestal your hearts squelches around a contraction, squirting a jet of clotted blood at the god’s feet.
Jade, Jade, your sister.
Your heart is pumping now, a purple blue knot of meat and muscle and arteries pulsing on nothing but air and the memory of your sister. The god reaches out, scoops it off its pedestal and brings it to its mouth. You kind of saw that one coming, but that doesn’t make it any less horrifying (and gross) when he begins eating it. Holding it like an apple, he takes a bite from it. Only instead of a crisp crunch there’s tendons and fibres stretching away from the needle sharp teeth until they fray apart. He swallows, and the walls begin to bleed. That’s when you know.
Four bleeds Blood, all our prayers unleashed like a flood.
…or was it their prayers? You don’t remember.
The reciting of the rhyme -be it in any way whatsoever; spoken, written, signs or imagery- is punishable by death, and it’s been so very long since you heard the whole of it. Not since your dad. Oh, dad. Dad, daddy, you want to be five again, small enough to sit on his knee, the comforting weight of his arm around your shoulders. His kindly face is blurred by time, but you think… you think he told you: Twelve times two, makes…? Twenty four; very good, John. And then? First came Time, fear their— go on, say it. Chime, yes bravo. Two breathes Breath, without them only—
“Still here, huh?” the god announces to the room at large.
There’s no one you can see, seeing as your body is about as articulate as a prime cut of venison, ready to be smoked. Your heart is beating so strongly it bulges out through the gaps between those cruel, clutching fingers. Blood and spittle froths down his chin as he chews laboriously on a second mouthful of flesh and sinew. An arm comes up to catch it before it dribbles down his chest. Licks his lips, and then the smear on his arm, lapping like a cat.
“Got nothing to say? This is your god speaking, you pretentious space monkey, answer me.” That last comes with such a slap of power, of pure, white-hot energy you can feel it, like a fishing hook snagging at your will.
He’s talking to you, you realize.
“No shit.”
…and he can totally do crazy mind-reading shenanigans. (But wait, do you technically still posses a mind? This is some heavy existential bullshit right here and you’re so not in the mood. Being dead and all.)
Okay. Fine. It’s not speaking. You’re not even sure you’re thinking, it’s almost like writing on a fogged pane of glass, shaping each and every letter painstakingly with the tip of your finger.
//what do you want from me? i’m already dead.//
“You sure are. Maybe I’ll go and find your” -thoughtful blink, lips parting to better taste your essence on the air- “sister. Your lifeblood is as feeble as pint of piss in the ocean, I don’t know why they even bothered to dice you up. No power at all.”
You’re vaguely affronted, but something he says nags at you. Your… sister?
Jade. Jade! You totally forgot about Jade!
Why does she keep slipping away from you? You have a sister, her name is Jade, she’s four years older than you and she likes… she likes… no, fuck no, no. You have a sister, her name is… is… J—
“You’re dead, kid. Dissolving. Just move along already.” He’s watching you this time, almost thoughtfully. Not your body, but you, where you’re pinned against the ceiling, incorporeal and utterly bereft. “There’s nothing left for you here.”
There is. You’re pretty sure there is. Something you need to find. If only you could remember.
Somehow, impossibly, your heart is still beating, gnawed off rubbery tube of the aorta twitching uselessly.
“You’re stubborn, I’ll give you that,” he grunts, almost but not quite admiring. It smacks of idiot, though.
You are, in fact, very stubborn. You always won the staring contests you did with— oh, who… you can’t. You. You have a… a sister. You have a sister, and she’s…. she’s… you can’t. Her name! Her name is—
JADE.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” the god hisses.
//jade. jade. jade jadejadejade.//
“Finish dissipating already so I can finish my inadequate meal in silence,” the growls. “That’s a command by the way. Your god has spoken. Shoo, you little shit.” He deigns to flap his hand at you, like you’re a fart he’s trying to waft towards someone else’s breathing space.
Uh-huh, yeah, whatever. You’re pretty sure that mister eldritch horrorterror over there can do jackshit to you, seeing as he’s trapped in a summoning circle. Okay, jackshit, besides eating your heart. Well, he can have it. You hope he chokes on it. You are on a mission. As soon as you remember what it was.
“Shoo!” he says again, emphatically.
//yeah you know what? i don’t think so. i think i am going to stay right here and figure out this floaty thing i got going on. maybe i’ll haunt you.//
“You can’t haunt me. I’m a god, you imbecile.”
//says who? you? mister high and mighty? what will you do about it? who you gonna call?//
He flashes you a look dripping with scorn. “I am familiar with your pop-culture references, human.”
//wait. you’re telling me the absent gods watch ghostbusters?//
He flinches at “Absent”. You’re not sure why, but GOOD. He should totally be sorry. You hum the theme song to yourself, trying to remember the very important thing you’re forgetting.
And then you forget to remember. Instead it suddenly occurs to you that mister god looks a lot like… well. Like a naked dude. Granted, a naked dude with skin the color of wet ashes and not rocking much by the way of genitals (HA-haw), but yeah. No boobs. Sort of stocky, with the musculature approximately in all the correct places. He’s crowned by a mop of messy black hair and right there between the curls are nubby orange…uh, yeah you’re gonna go with head nipples here.
“Horns. They’re horns, you blithering idiot.”
//they look like lollipops// you point out skeptically. //if you plan on rocking the emo demon look at least put some effort into it.//
“I am beginning to see why they killed you first,” he snarls at you, muscles bulging with tension. You wonder if he’ll try beaning you with your own heart. You bet the three second rule won’t count for ectoplasm, you’re going to make sure your ghostly boogers are all over it. It. Your heart. Okay suddenly this plan is a lot less appealing.
Wait. If he says they killed you first, then who’s second? You feel like you’re supposed to know this.
But you don’t.
It’s important, suddenly convinced of this, it’s awful that you cannot remember. The insidious erasure of that particular facet of knowledge leaves you crippled. With it, you are less. Then, between the space of one breath and another, you finally forget you have forgotten. You are no longer John Egbert, eighteen years old, any more.
Instead, you are ready.
It’s all one bright impulse, something beyond instinct. It is the only thing you are meant to do. You need to go. You have to go. All that is left for you is to move on, a whole new purpose kindling in the ashes of your old life.
Below, the god has only the smallest glob of flesh left between his claws. His irises are bright red. He blinks, lids fringed with preposterously long lashes sliding shut. There’s flickering afterimages of those eyes, still watching.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he says, voice low. You think he might have wings and a million eyes.
You believe him. It won’t hurt.
The feeling of suspension increases, as though you’re moving, drifting upwards without leaving the room. The god casts his eyes up at you, face devoid of any expression as he pops the last bit of heart between his black lips like a kernel of popcorn. Swallows.
There’s a beat, an actual, audible beat, like the dull thud before erupting fire. Both of you scream. The god clutches frantically at his chest as you come crashing down into your memories.
“Oh shit,” he groans. His appearance ripples through several dimensions without becoming full-out horrorterror until he’s larger, darker and yet somehow more human than before. There’s an arrow imbedded in his side, and he’s bleeding. He looks like death. He looks like he might tear down the skies with those hands. And then he laughs, a crazed and joyful sound that’s somehow unbearably beautiful. “You brilliant bastard. You sacrificed yourself.” The word sacrificed rattles around the room like a living thing.
//jade.//
“That’s right,” he snarls in savage pleasure. “They lied. You stupid, poor clod. They lied. They took what they wanted all along and they took you, and you hurt and bled and suffered and it was all for nothing. Your sacrifice. For nothing.”
Did you? Sacrifice yourself? All you wanted was to save Jade.
You remember the taste of chalk in your mouth and salt on your skin and the light dropping into your sightless eyes. The rasp of your bones as they pulled open and touched that what nobody should ever even see, your flesh and muscles and organs and blood, the most vulnerable parts of you. They broke you.
“Aren’t you angry?” he demands, avid. “Don’t you hate them?”
Hate.
That’s… a strong word. Angry though… yeah, you’re angry. You really thought they’d take you, you thought you’d been able to make a bargain, you instead of her. They’d put her down again, hadn’t they? Took you instead.
//jade’s here?//
He bares his fangs. “Of course she fucking is. Who do you think the main course is going to be?”
Jade. Your sister. In that white room. While they- they do to her what they did to you. Lay her open. And then they’ll call that, and have it eat her.
Something savage and ugly unfurls in you, a formless need to hurt. It’s delicious. The god watches you with an keen, almost hungry expression. Your blood is still across his lips.
“I can help,” the god offers.
That’s when you realize you’re sinking towards him, a magnet drawn to the miasma of rancor, the promise of a fight to the struggling, bloody death. Revenge. For what they did, for what they will do, for taking you and Jade and lying and hurting and laughing, you realize, at the kid on the ground begging and crying and saying thank you.
The god’s eyes are the color of spilled blood and there’s nothing, nothing in his gaze that you can hope to comprehend. Nothing but for an answering, thwarted fury. A frozen scream of I tried, I tried and I bled (underneath that: I failed). And now I am really. fucking. ANGRY.
“I can help,” the god repeats. “They lied to me, too.”
It’s one of the Absent Gods. It could crush you, obliterate you, own you, if it wanted. You have no idea why it doesn’t.
“Look at me,” the god says. “I am trapped in a goddamn circle scrawled on a fucking floor in the blood of some complete and utter moron who allowed himself to get hunted down like a dog in the street. They are using me like a fucking puppet because they have my Name. All they have to do is catch one of you sorry bastards to give me enough power to do whatever fucking shit it is they want from me.”
Yeah, kind of hard to feel sorry for him when he just ate your heart. //that’s rough, buddy.//
He makes a glorious sneer of distain. “Fucking hilarious. But hey, you know what you sarcastic little pain in the shitter? You’re dead. Really, totally and utterly dead. If you could deign to suck up your miserable attitude for a single damn moment I might be able to do something about that.”
//really. you just ate the thing i really need to be alive, how do you plan on fixing that?//
His chin comes up. “Easy. I’ll give you half of mine.”
Easy, he says. No problem, he says. I’ll just give you half of mine, he says. Hah. He’s just going to up and-
“Do you want to save Jade?” he rasps. Of course. It’s obvious enough he doesn’t even wait for a reply. “Excellent. Half my heart for yours. You can run off and save your sister and I will finally be free.”
You’re being tricked. You’re pretty sure you’re being tricked. That is way too simple and easy, no way that isn’t riddled with a million caveats, but you’re running out of time and Jade is running out of time and really, you’re dead anyway. What’s the worst that could happen?
You can refuse and stay dead and Jade will be just as dead. Or. You could save Jade.
“Do we have a deal?” he asks.
You hesitate.
“DO WE HAVE A FUCKING DEAL?”
You really hope he’s not going to destroy the world or play sinister overlord. You hope he won’t do worse after he brings you back to life. This is a mistake. Welp! You’re kind of prone to stupid ideas, so why not go out with a bang? You’re dead and jade doesn’t have to be.
//alright. we have a nefarious blood pact or whatever.//
For the first time, you see something very human and surprisingly almost awkwardly vulnerable on his face, something not hunger or aimless frustration. Surprise. Surprise and… relief? It’s so stark you’d avert your eyes if you had any.
“Good,” he says, shoulders relaxing. Nods. “That’s good. I’m sorry not sorry, but—“ his eyes meet yours “—this will hurt.” He stretches a finger out.
All of a sudden, you feel what is like a human finger touch your chest. You are incorporeal but that, you feel. He pushes, there’s resistance. It aches without really hurting, it’s driving you backwards, towards your dead body and you’re not exactly digging this new development.
Nothing could have ever prepared you for what happens next. You’re shoved into your own corpse.
It doesn’t just hurt.
It’s wrong. Instantly, you know that this is wrong, wrong, wrong wrong wrong, wrong on a level that leaves no words for your horror. It’s just flesh. It’s dead. Void. Decaying. It’s a thing that no longer belongs to you. It’s like dying all over again.
You scream or at least your body screams, in this godawful moist way that gurgles through the room.
And as if that is not enough, the god kisses you. If that is what it can even be called. There’s a mouth on yours, hot as fever, and something is on fire in your chest. The two events seem to be connected in an extremely alarming way. The world is red, red, red fury and acid regret.
Thank god you are dead.
Only you are not.
In fact you are very much alive and your heart is trying to hammer its way out through your ribs. The throbbing seems excessively pronounced, leaving you aware of every single contraction. Your teeth resonate with it. The tips of your fingers tingle with it. The blood in your ears screams with the voice of crashing waves. Your veins are lit up, screaming: alive alive alive.
Time passes. Could be seconds, could be hours, years, a lifetime.
You are not quite awake, just intensely alive and aching with it. Your heart continues to kick your chest in outrage. It hurts more than it should, like it’s just a little bit too big for you.
Actual awareness comes slower. The itchy sensation of something tacky drying on your skin, pulling it tight. The disgusting taste of stale blood in your mouth. The scent of cinders and metal. That innate sense of defencelessness that comes from being completely naked coupled with the luxurious texture of velvety warmth cradling one side. Breathing. In. Out. Your own and an echo.
You are pins and needles all over.
“Right,” a voice rumbles under your cheek. “If you think you’re about ready to extract your head out of that sack of cock you are gobbling long enough to stand on your own two legs that would be wonderful.” The tone is not nearly as hard as the words, hushed, and you think he might bow his head against your hair.
You know his Name.
K a r k a t
It goes through your skull and down your spine like an incoming lightning strike.
Your heart is thunder in the burned clean hollow of your chest. When his beats, your does, too. Not just synchronised; it beats because his does, when his does, and exactly the way his does. Loud, relentless and always a little angry.
You open your eyes. Oh good, you’re still in the room of death. Lovely. Then, slowly, you look down.
There, on your chest towards the left is a weal of scar tissue. A swirl of disfigured skin like molten candle wax, thick enough to pull the skin awry. You no longer have symmetrical nipples.
“You—” you begin and stop because your voice cracks. It’s firm under you fingers, harder than you expected, like a knot. You can’t believe there’s someone else’s heart pumping your blood through your body. Licking your lips, you try again: “I thought you meant, like, symbolically.”
He scoffs. “You’d still be dead with a symbolic heart.”
You wonder how half of one could be any better, but then again he’s a god and you said yes. It’s too weird. The idea of that inhuman thing within you (all eyes and teeth and wings rolling through and over dimensions, its voice the fabric of reality; an Absent God), is too real, too strange. You died. And now you aren’t.
Also you are sitting in his lap, naked, while he is naked. Yeah. How did this get so very gay, all of a sudden?
Painstakingly, you sit up straighter.
Part of you wants to panic, to leap out and shriek no homo seriously you did not sign up for any homo only for a 1-up from a deity with an attitude problem. You don’t leap away. In fact, just that, the slight separating, seems wrong, like picking at a scab that’s not quite healed. And that’s exactly why you force yourself upright, upright and away. John -you, the person- would not want to stay, to press closer. That’s not you.
Karkat remains seated, body still curled around your absent form. Watches you go with a sharp line between his eyebrows. Without turning, you step away, backwards, the soles of your bare feet smudging the charcoal lines of the summing circle into blurry streaks, its power burned away.
It is possible to walk away, perfectly fine to take two, three steps. But four feels heavier, more difficult somehow. Like holding your breath, you manage five, even six, and at eight your back hits the wall even though you desperately want—no, need, the strain is bearing down on you, you need to-to oh god it hurts so much wrong, so wrong and you know it, feel it—get back and press close and no fucking way.
“Fuck,” Karkat says. His voice is so ravaged it takes all your willpower to stay put and not run back to him. Your shoulder blades grind into the wall. “I did not expect that.”
The effort (wanting, needing, right there) is such that you hardly find your words. “This better be temporary.”
“—I,” —grimace— “probably.” It sounds like a question.
“PROBABLY?” It just explodes out of you.
Karkat’s face closes off. “Aren’t you an ungrateful runt, huh. I don’t exactly share my fucking organs on a daily basis.”
“I feel very special,” you assure him acidly because he needed you to say yes just as much as you needed a second chance. “Fine. You’ll just have to come with me to save Jade.”
“What? I don’t have the fucking time for your inconsequential dalliances, I—“
You walk towards the door. The ache increases tenfold as the distance increases, enough for your eyes to grow hot with the weight of tears. You bite your lip and think of your sister, and hope you’re not too late.
Screw this asshole, you never were religious anyway.
The door isn’t locked. Why would it? You dead, the god trapped in a circle, placated by a snack. Please, you think, please come after me follow me stay with me, but know he probably isn’t made to care. You definitely know you’re not supposed to care. Screw him. Seriously, screw him.
The weight of your hand releases the bolt. Before the door can swing open he’s at your back.
“God damn you,” he hisses. His palm slips briefly around your ribs to press over your heartbeat, like he’s going to wrap his fist around your heart and pull it out. You’d be okay with that. You’d love that.
“Likewise,” you whisper and exit the room where you died.
The hallway is white, stark, not unlike an hospital. The faint tang of something rotten coats the back of your tongue, and you almost retch. How many have died here, or are dying right now. The air is thick with it. Yet there’s not a single soul in sight.
“Amateurs,” is Karkat’s succinct opinion on the matter.
You’re just relieved. “Alright. Let’s do this. I need pants. If you see any pants let me know”
The almighty and all powerful entity which just snatched you back from the jaws of death looks miserably confused. “Why do you need pants to save your sister?”
You du’h at him. “Because I’m naked.”
“I don’t give a single fuck that you’re naked.”
“I don’t care if you don’t care that I’m naked, I care that I am naked and I want pants.” Being an almighty god probably renders him above such worldly things as a snazzy pair of pants, but you really want something to cover your dangly bits.
Not that you’re going to waste time looking for them, but you’d be really happy to conveniently stumble across a pair as you go looking for Jade. Somehow, perhaps because of Karkat’s omniscient godly shenanigans, you’re aware of the flickering candlelick of her presence, somewhere in this building. Still alive.
It’s right about then that Karkat points out “Pants.” kind of lazily. Like there’s no need to panic when the other person takes one good look at them -you, bare and blooded and not even twenty; him, furious and dark and immortal- and draws a gun.
Pulls the trigger.
You don’t even think.
Your hand comes up, your fingers fling outwards. The man is tossed backwards by a sudden howling gale, swept away and flung into a wall. There’s a sharp crack, you snatch your hand back, leaving your would-be assailant slack on the ground.
Karkat tsks. “He’s not dead.”
A shiver leaves you. Thank god (hah!). Now you can think huzzah, pants! without feeling guilty. They are too big for you. As you fold the cuffs you wonder about the aggression of that gust, the raw power. Your magic has never been very impressive. Better than most, maybe, but nothing compared to Jade’s or Rose’s. Even Dave’s had been more useful, especially when your neatest trick was levitation and scattering Jade’s homework when you were cross.
“Not half bad though,” Karkat concedes. “Might not be completely useless after all.”
It’s his power, of course.
This is going to come in handy. And it’s right there, you can feel it, something as vast and raw as the cosmos right under your skin. You want to fling it, flex it, crumble stones and uproot buildings. “Neat,” you say, and grin.
Karkat stares down at you baffled, a head and shoulders taller than you with hair like a bird’s nest and eyes that might kill. And then he smiles -awkwardly- back. It’s not even his mouth so much, but a light that jumps into his eyes—and, oh, okay, uhm—that— you look away.
You clear your throat.
Karkat blinks, and goes sullen again, thoroughly annoyed with you.
You clap your hands. “Right. Let’s go save Jade.”
“Yay.”
When you have the heart of a god, it turns out you’re pretty much invincible. You’re smug off the sheer power and you’re looking forward to blasting open Jade’s cell, tearing her restrains away with a curl of air like a total hero.
…you totally should’ve known Jade would rescue herself and is already on her way to rescue you.
“John!” she cries, snatching you close and squeezing until your ribs pop. Then she sees Karkat, frowns, smothers you into her bosom protectively. “And who are you?”
“Uhm,” you go, muffled.
“Well,” Karkat says.
It’s not easy to explain to your big sister that you made a deal with the devil, but really, you made it with the best intentions!
She grounds you anyway.
-fin-
You turn it into your own
So tie me back to my bones
Collect your love and mend my heart
But you’re fearless, you’re fearless
—Oscar and the Wolf, “Strange Entity”