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Alcor has known grief well. As an enemy, an old hat, swapped into when what was blue and white became black and gold. Since then, he has always known he would outlive what he loves.
And outlive he has.
It’s paralysing, the feeling. But his body is not flesh, his body is not bone. And muscles that would freeze up if he were so are simply theoretical—it’s the suggestion of such things, because how else would anatomy work? But there is only colour on his canvas, and his inner workings are left up to assumption. It is the only lie a dealing demon can tell.
Beings like him are pure energy. Alcor’s body is not physical, a human cut out adrift in an abstract realm.
But he can make it so. Anchor himself to reality in a human suit for a grieving demon. It is a great ruse indeed, this body. Never quite so human as he once was, but it has the parts, each component carefully constructed by the very magic that had ripped away what he now strives to fake. The very humanity he seeks after long gone, and yet he can pretend. Surround himself with people he holds dear in hopes that drowning in humanity could drown out the demon.
But demons do not die.
People do.
And so he sits there and lays. In the wake of death, grief in his heart as another Mizar has been laid down in eternal rest. Marley had been her name, one of the many names Alcor keeps in his hat.
He doesn’t know how much more he can do this. Live in wait for Mizar to only lose. There are always more to lose.
It’s a tedious cycle. It’s all he can do. Waiting, and waiting. Staving off boredom, every prank, every summons. He’s tired.
So very, very tired.
But demons do not dream, do not rest as people do. Dreams are devoured, nightmares hoarded for power and prestige until slaughter. It’s too human to dream. He has to make a body for that, one strong with enchantments crisscrossing the bones.
And in that body, he sleeps, undisturbed by summons, allowed to drift in dreams. Alcor lets death come for it, the cold hilariously unbearable, pins and needles of morning frost and snow chilling him blue. The body starves and joints go rigid. It’s agony, it’s exhilarating, it’s pain, and he soaks in it. Death comes, but his soul still stays, as it always has. It’s a pretence of impermanence, that he knows, and if he were to return to the mindscape now, nothing would have changed.
He would be alive. And she would not be.
No. He ignores mindscape’s tug, stays on the ground. As dead as Dipper’s been since twelve. As alive as he’s been since twelve.
He is neither and both.
Alcor lets disposable flesh rot away by the earth’s demand, as natural as he isn’t. It fills time as rainwater fills his lungs, and mould and moss clump in the dampest recesses of his throat. Flowers choke his chest, roots and petals burrying him in a floral funeral, but hanahaki does not harm the already dead.
Greenery consumes him, growing like spinach in his teeth.
No one tells him he’s got a little something there. Alcor doubts he would hear it, anyway. His ears failed long ago, deafness in decay. The twitter of birds is lost on him.
The body withers, and he becomes bone. A scaffold human with ribs home to rot and decay. Home to life, to the bugs that crawl and scuttle. Worms writhe in eye sockets, phantom blood vessels haunting his skull. At some point, a dog comes for his leg, a game of fetch reaping a much greater reward. It’s not like he’s using it, anyway.
He doesn’t see the owner.
Well. He doesn’t see much at all. It’s all feeling, and blurples and groranges, and fordtramarine, everything you see with more than your eyes. His own eyes had stared skyward at meandering clouds until blood had stagnated in his veins.
Alcor just stares up, seeing too much for a sightless corpse. An ever changing sky cries earth. And he is buried by time.
Perhaps there could be peace in this sham of a death, and he can waste away until nothing remains.
It’s better this way.
Mizar won’t get hurt.
(She won’t be a target, will not be burdened. Not by him, not by the demon over her shoulder, always with the expectation that she won’t leave him, that there will be a flicker of Mabel to latch on to.)
He won’t get hurt.
(He is a demon, immortal, powerful. But human emotions from a once human soul leave him with a centre that will break, that will pull away to forget. Away from the souls that always leave him, and from those that chose to reject him.
It always ends in carnage.)
No one
Will
Be
Hurt.
There is cold—or its absense, and there is nothing.
It lasts as long as it does until it doesn’t last at all.
The world is ever changing, ever moving. Nonstop.
The souls that walk it do not cease. They live to create, to explore, their constant curiosity something omniscience has since drained from him.
And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise when dirt eventually shifts, and a living skeleton is dug from the earth, the silent screams of archaeologists welcoming him back into the world.
(No peace lasts.)