Chapter Text
Amanda thought death would fix her.
But when she woke, and her chest rose and then fell – habitually, a steady, instinctual rhythm that immediately felt wrong, hollow – Amanda knew that she was wrong.
Rust. Iron. Mould.
There was little room for her existence. Such little space had been carved for her in the sterilised medical room nestled deep in the abandoned factory, hardly enough for the faint, phantom breaths she still performed.
Every motion felt off, a faux imitation of something she couldn’t recognise anymore. It was the first thing that Amanda noticed, just how… fucking wrong it all was.
It took Amanda time.
Time that eluded her—for her to realise that one of the reasons everything felt like that was because the air she breathed no longer passed through her lungs. Each inhale was a memory, drawn from decaying, rotting muscles that remembered working with an effort they no longer possessed.
Stretching. Unmeasurable. Uncountable.
Her chest rose, then fell, slowing. Pausing. Forgetting the rhythm.
But when it stumbled, kicking back into overdrive as she remembered what panic felt like, she felt it, phantom lungs straining, ribs pressing against nothing, a hollowness twisting in her torso. Spectred bones flexed beneath her, the ache of missing joints and teeth jabbing at her mind.
Each exhale was an ache, bitter and sharp. Muted and distant, like smoke in her veins, sour-smelling reminders that her chest had once been alive. Her shoulders lifted and dropped as though her body still demanded something of them, as if they remembered work, effort, life—she hadn’t moved once since she had awoken.
Her arms twitched. Phantom jerks. Fingers curling and uncurling, tiny spasms in smooth, uncalloused digits, sprouts of herself that left her ghostly form shivering.
She didn’t look. She didn’t want to see the slack, hollow shape beneath her, pale and broken.
Muscles and tendons turned to nothing but pitting sacks of meat. She felt it anyway, because fuck—fuck—
Not even death could be kind to Amanda Young.
Pulp where muscles had been. Tendons slack.
—the weight of a skull that no longer existed, the ragged ache where her heart had pumped, the top of her crown, the right side of her face, the missing teeth in the echoes of her jaw. Phantom veins throbbed with the memory of blood rushing through them, a cheap pulse taunting her, boiling something Amanda couldn’t rely on anymore.
She didn’t know how long she stayed like that. She couldn’t keep track of time – time.
Time, Amanda repeated, flipping the word around in a space where words didn't exist—didn’t exist. Days collapsed into breaths; breaths stretched into weeks. She didn’t count, and she didn’t measure. She just was, floating, waiting, existing in a quietly numb and fucked-up limbo.
Amanda’s fluttering existence hooked on the idea. Something in her snagging against the notion, dragging something more out of her. She hadn’t felt something so raw, so tangible in what felt like her entire life.
Logically—logically—
Amanda had reckoned that she couldn't feel anything anymore, especially not something as hot and jagged as her anger always was—but—
White-hot. Ripping through emptied cavities. Pulling fragmented pieces back into place. Curling around phantom ribs, igniting twitching muscles, forcing her chest to rise, fall, falter, and rise again.
Amanda trudged through her mind, desperate to make herself appear, desperate to keep the hauntingly warm phantasm memory of her rage licking at her ghostly skin even just a second longer.
She tried to focus, tried to dredge up the fucking guts to feel again. Every pulse of rage sent sparks across spectred nerve endings, twitching her shoulders, curling her fingers, and tightening shadowy jaw muscles that remembered clenching. Ghostly, emptied veins throbbed; blood remembered rushing through them, but nothing could ignite her anymore.
There was this… sapping, devastating chill that refused to leave Amanda.
Death had stripped her of sensation, of her anger, and yet.
She was flooded with the ice of the room, the constant cold that refused to lift from her dappled, ghostly skin. Anger tried to spark her, desperately, clawing, like it had before, but it fizzled, too cold, too distant. Her mind tugged at the edge of herself, pulling fragments into place, but without heat, without warmth, nothing sparked.
She could think. She could remember, and ache, and fuck, fuck she did—but she couldn’t feel.
Light pooled at the corners of her vision, thick and viscous, unspooling around rusted steel walls, medical-grade titanium glinting and fracturing as she forced her head to turn to finally, finally, take in her surroundings. Her muscles twitched in protest at the motion, ribs burning from remembered effort, jaw aching from the ghostly tension, but Amanda could feel herself edging at the staple of her being, lacerating, wretched and mad and willing herself to be allowed to exist again.
The resounding blast that had blown the top of her head clean off, jagged and immediate, reverberated through her skull.
Amanda’s form flinched, a bodily reaction that she immediately, greedily licked at, the sharp, prodding pain that was there and then gone again making her sensations positively fucking spin. Her ears rang, teeth aching. The sting of it, though vivid, left her colder than usual.
Death hadn’t fixed anything for Amanda Young.
But eventually, after her rotting teeth had ached for the hundredth time, the memory of her death blowing through her, she sunk her existence into a feeling, a drifting, reeking waft of decay that had caught on the stilled air of the room, and she let herself float with it—letting her form be lifted away from her corpse.
She felt almost… there.
Tangible.
As if the physical separation of… this… this state of her from her physical, rotting and softening meat had shifted something into place.
And then—
The heavy, industrial-grade, factory doors screeched open. A sound that resounded numbly against her emptied skull, but one that Amanda had heard enough times to know was real.
For a few harrowing moments, she could finally—finally—feel. The passing of time, tangible heat moving closer, filling the frozen hollows of her chest—and Amanda—
Fuck.
Amanda felt alive. Ghostly limbs jerked and twitched without thought. Dead, rotted tendons flexed, puppeteering her up, upright, striding across the factory floor. Stale air stumbled from her hollowed chest, dragging a real, tangible sensation behind it.
Her form shivered violently, a live wire running through every makeshift nerve. She didn’t know who—or what—had come, but the intrusion ripped through her numb insides, splitting her open and leaving her gutted remains spilling out and replacing her senses with sheer, screaming heat, alive and flickering, clogging her sinuses.
And Amanda—fuck—Amanda was impossibly, overwhelmingly excited. Something was happening, something spasming in her chest like a tidal wave of fever, of living energy, spilling in as the yellowed, grime-streaked plastic curtains flipped open.
A body stepped through. So full of fire, so impossibly fucking alive—
Metal screamed. Industrial-grade fans whirring to life, pronged teeth grinding against stale air. The room pulsed, animated with vibration and life for the first time in what could have been years for all Amanda knew – and Amanda greedily, wolfishly, soaked it in. Let each last grimy drop of life seep into her rotting soul; let the warmth flood through her until she realises just what exactly had walked into her tomb.
Dead, muted eyes ran up the length of long legs, following the familiar silhouette until her head was being split open again, the gaping cartridge wound resounding through her body with a spark so hot Amanda had to bite back a sound at the feeling.
Amanda felt drunk off the pain, the sensation so strong, so new that despite the grievous way it wracked its way through her body, she craved it immediately.
The lively and infectious heat seeped out of the other woman, and Amanda froze, every ghostly limb suspended as a gasp tore through the air, invading her hollow skull. The emptiness she had worn like armour cracked instantly, filling instead with a pulsing, living need, one that snapped at her cracking limbs, forcing them forward in a way that had her stumbling closer, instinctively, mouth opening and closing dumbly, unable to stop herself.
Amanda wanted to scream. Wanted to claw at the air and whine and stomp her feet like the child she never was, wanted to carve her way back into her pants, aching, itching for an outlet for emotions she hadn’t felt in so long.
Amanda Young watched as Lynn Denlon froze in front of her rotting corpse, and she wanted to kill herself all over again.
But she couldn't look away.
Because Lynn—Lynn was there.
Scanning—cautious and gagging, and Amanda feels so many things, then, so reminiscent of her old self, back when she was alive. Hot, wiry emotions tangling together until she can only make out a blistering anger because Lynn wasn’t ever supposed to come back here—she was supposed to make it out of this fucking meat factory alive and never, ever fucking come back—
But Amanda’s body betrays her. Limbs twitch toward the woman, reaching out despite every pang of frustration and disappointment that burns in her hollow chest. Heat, and life, all pulsing, throbbing energy—everything she’s been starved of pours off Lynn like sunlight through decaying, bloated clouds.
And—fuck—Amanda guesses it’s her fault. She was defenceless, even in life, to the other woman. So she can’t really blame herself now, with dead and rotting limbs desperate and burning with a heat that only intensifies the closer Amanda moves towards her.
And Lynn–
Oh–
Lynn–
Amanda still wants to be angry, wants to let her ability to finally feel the emotion again take control, but the heat, the life that soaks into her pale, transient skin at the woman’s presence, stops her.
She feels twenty again, with a junkie’s craving, all-encompassing, dictating her every move.
She reaches for the woman, a selfish, worming greed demanding more of Lynn’s heat, more of that saccharine sweetness that's radiating off of the older woman with a vengeance that Amanda is all too happy to lick up.
But when her fingers graze the woman’s clothed arm, an electrifying heat rocks through the tips of her fingers and settles into the very marrow of Amanda’s bones. She reels, her stomach twisting itself in knots and her knees – her knees weaken, and her intangible body crumbles to the ground, kneeling in a tangled mess of limbs before the other woman.
Amanda doesn’t realise until after that there must have been a smell, a reeking, decaying stench that filled the air of that room.
Because Lynn’s torso heaves, so suddenly, so abruptly, her chest constricting and spasming.
Amanda is so distracted by the snippets of Lynn’s voice that break through the gagging, cracked and pained little noises that she doesn’t even think to move. Not even as vomit poured from the gaps of Lynn’s fingers, solid bits sliding through and landing with splattered thuds against the linoleum flooring. Falling right through Amanda’s kneeling form.
She shivers, caught between disgust, rage, and the addictive draw of Lynn’s warmth as the grossly pleasant chunks of heat cake against her ghostly spine.
And then Lynn is gone.
Yellowing and filthy plastic curtains flapping behind her—and Amanda…
Amanda, unable to do anything else, feels a whine break through the pounding of her skull, her body slumping forward as her mind turns to a melting slush, the blinding hot life suddenly syphoned out of her.
It wastes no time in sucking every last bit of warmth from Amanda’s transient form, leaving her forehead falling roughly against the ground, limbs convulsing against the wet, quickly cooling remains of Lynn’s lunch and bits of Amanda’s brain matter, as she scrambles to make sense of what just happened.
She gasps, squirming as her body rapidly chills once again. Her brain is beneath her, and briefly—before the ghostly fog moves back into place, clouding her mind once more—she thinks there’s a joke there, splattered somewhere in the remains of her fucking brain spread under her.
Amanda shudders, the action leaving her ghostly form almost wet. Sticky with living condensation.