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The wall parts under his fingertips like water; a close, icy chill leeches into his skin as his legs give out and he falls through. There’s no strength left in him to stay standing. Nothing left but pain, broken bones and blind determination to make it to whatever exit is hidden inside of the manor, even if he has to drag himself to it by his cracked, bleeding fingertips.
(Even in the heart of the nightmare, he has to believe he can still escape it. He has to believe it, because the alternative will break him before anything else can have the chance.)
Light fades, the breathing fades, the feverish prickling along his skin that had gone from curious to itchy to something trying to peel his skin away and crawl inside him each time the clones had all been…dispatched, it quiets to nothing as he falls. The hum of a light. Each foggy breath against his mask. A panicked cry, shoes scuffling against tile, a single, squelching footstep. A snap. The sounds are swallowed whole into the dark, alongside everything and everyone else.
The pain alone is how he knows he is still alive, once the sound fades, once all sight and sensation vanishes into the endless black.
He is alive, barely. He is awake, barely. His breathing rasps through his dry throat and fogs up the green, stained visor still strapped to his face – he considers taking it off, but his hands are too weak to even reach his face. He is falling, but he is alive, and he is awake.
(Maybe he’ll wake up in the regulation bunk in a moment, ribs alight with the pain of his heaving, panicked breaths. Maybe he’ll wake up in his bed at home, and this will all have been a dream.)
The darkness stretches on for what looks like forever – not that he can really tell through the mask – but it soon fills with the sound of distant, hurried whispering, loud enough to overpower the whistle of air past his ears as he falls, growing closer with every passing second like the slow, unhurried predator’s stalk of Janine and the Prince and-
Father.
It hurts. It hurts because he can feel it under his skin, crawling along the shattered pieces of his spine in feverish spikes of sensation, something that doesn’t belong, something that isn’t him, something that knows little but how to work itself into should have no no no killed you-
father
demon
The cellar is cold and quiet and dark beyond the green hue of the visor, and it is all he has ever known because demon child hissed and snarled and screamed and shattered in sharp green fragments all along the cold walls, because belinda is gone and it’s this little bastard’s fault. Because it’s his fault. Because he should’ve been more attentive, hired better doctors, taken better care of her; because she’s gone forever and it hurts like all the fires of hell burning inside his iced-over heart. Because Matthew isn’t good enough, and someone is keeping this demon alive to face its due punishment.
And then Theo is father and he is child and the cellar is silent if not for the screams and the crack of wood against bone, and he is so very very afraid because father is pain but this is worse than what father does and he doesn’t know he doesn’t know anymore and the child is afraid
(breathe)
(His father was an accountant. He had told Theo once that it felt like magic, making the numbers all fall into place just right on his reports. Then he had ruffled Theo’s hair (still messy and young and sticking up in every direction) and told him to go back out to play with the other boys, told him he probably had something better to do than hang out with his old man.)
This man with his red face and snarling voice in a stranger, Theo knows, but there is a part of him (a part of him?) that is screaming out in a voice that has never known words, and it is screaming father why, because in its tiny world there is father and there is pain and they are one and the same now because demon because demon child because-
I saved him. The quiet voice that is not father is quieter still, but it is fine because demon the dirt swallows everything. Waste and blood and spit and anger and pain. The world is silent and calm beside a single set of raspy, desperate breaths, because demon child it has no more need for breath, because there is no more pain beyond what it has already learned, because there is no more father and there is no more darkness.
And it really is fine, isn’t it, because there is I brought him no more pain and no more darkness the light is back shining down from the top of the stairs and father no is it hurts dead and-
demon
A heartbeat’s breath, recognition. A faceless sheet staring at him, blood still spattered on the featureless skin like misplaced paint, hands a dripping, gruesome scarlet where they hang at its sides. A creature that Theo can see and know with absolute certainty what it is called because the word that rises to his aching throat at the sight of it is-
Demon. Man in black with his stick and he demon is not cruel he does not hurt the pain cannot hurt any worse demon but he makes him strong he lets him take the blade he lets him raise it up and swing it down and should have swing it down and swing killed you it down-
(wake up, dacabe)
the arrogant man he is screaming and chzo has him and galdn is running coward no help me don’t let him take the guide the toy is still damp and he stands there eyes cold lets the boy fade into the back of his own skull because he has to its necessary and he cannot let it hurt anyone else what now the bar fades away and he knows sees hears tastes he isn’t alone know the name burn of alcohol in her throat and the knife sinking in feels like nothing at all feels like the rain pounding against her skull feels like hot afternoons feels like I killed-
(breathe)
help me
i didn’t
i’m not
head above water he is awake he is alive for a single breath then again he is falling falling falling-
your fault you weren’t there you should’ve been there she would be alive if you had (he would be alive if you hadn’t) it hurts metal around a broken body he is blood he is brain he is broken bones in a sack of torn skin it hurts it hurts it hurts he doesn’t remember this he is glad he doesn’t remember this go into space it wasn’t he didn’t adam did it he only hurt
A woman in a chair, clothes loose and hair sprawled. The arrogant man. Her eyes roll into the back of her head, speaker, soothsayer, oracle, apostate. Father. Glimpse of a world beneath the world, sealed away from her and now dragged into sight once again. The floating man. The man in red. The-
kill me his eyes they took his eyes and he has been alone for so long but he knows that voice and it doesn’t matter if it hurts him now because know the name his knees hit the floor and wilbur’s body is still cooling over the instrument as he swears himself away no he didn’t want to hurt them but he had to and it took his eyes and john is speaking and the blood is still tacky and cold under his nails
the king is pain made flesh made form made a floating pile of gristle he can’t survive here they are wrong they are all wrong and theo is-
it hurts
he isn’t-
your fault
janine. pain in his hips as she straddles him. pain in his chest as she kisses him. pain in his soul as she. as her waist. as her voice. as her eyes her mouth her hands her nails clawing into his back as she
hold me
disappears
the bridgekeeper hissing fighting burning dying you hurt me father brother stranger i’ll hurt you back i’m not small anymore i’m not in the dark anymore and i am everywhere and nowhere and behind your eyes and most of all i am inside falling hurting dying seeing the new prince
(theo)
He opens his eyes, finally, heart pounding out a nightmarish beat from somewhere inside his broken ribs. Everything hurts. Everything has hurt for the past few days, but it hurts a little more than usual right now.
Broken ribs. Broken neck. Broken arm. Broken heart. His one working hand reaches out into the darkness in a feeble, uncoordinated smack.
To his surprise he feels his fingertips actually hit something – half of him surprised at the contact, the other half surprised that he can still feel his fingers – something cold, flat, metallic. It stinks of something burnt and left to rot, something old and angry and bitter as a burnt-up forest. Something that smells like a motorway and like rotten meat.
He pushes up at the surface again with all his strength, and this time it moves, white-hot fluorescent light pouring in through a crack in the coffin that he forces wider and wider. It comes in filtered green through the lenses of the mask, but that doesn’t matter anymore. The door rises, inch by stubborn inch against the bare scraps of strength he can still bring to bear, creaking out a furious, neglected cry that echoes like a gunshot in the space outside, but eventually there is enough of a gap for him to fit his head through.
Outside is a cargo bay. A cargo bay for a spacebound shuttle, sleek and white and completely insane, because even through whatever mystical, pain-fuelled mind blender he just went through he can remember what reality looks like, and that this doesn’t connect with the Hub or with… anything, really.
He sucks in as deep a breath as his broken ribs will allow, and then squeezes his eyes shut.
(Focus, Dacabe. This isn’t real. He no longer knows if it’s his voice or a stranger’s, but he clings to it all the same.)
When he opens them he is once again somewhere else, another room in John DeFoe’s memories of his home – dark, cold, with damp earth packed tight under his body. He’s sprawled out on a cellar floor, lit by a lone, flickering lantern by the door.
This isn’t right, but a part of him knows it’s as real as he can hope for. Every second of uncurling himself from the floor is agony, broken pieces scraping against muscle and fat and nerves with every heartbeat, but he needs to move, and the brief glimpse of the Prince hunched over at the foot of the stairs is enough reason why.
The Prince disappears before Theo can make as much as a halfhearted lunge away, not that there’d be any point in it when the only exit is up the stairs to the kitchen (how does he know it leads to the kitchen?), but leaves behind a trunk of some kind under a canvas. It’s heavy and solid under Theo’s hands when he manages to limp over to it, cold under the canvas. Colder even than his blood runs when he takes the canvas off and sees what lies underneath it.
He’s never seen one in person before, but everyone’s seen a nanobomb in films, and he remembers at least vaguely what one looks like from the course on “recognising terrorist threats” everyone had to take when the new prime minister got sworn in.
More importantly, everyone knows the kind of damage they can do. Everyone knows how unstable they can be. One wrong move, one accidental knock, even the barest whisper of a flame and it’s all over.
It’s in the basement of the pain cult that held him and two others prisoner for a week. The cult that shoved him down a lift shaft when he came to check if they had an unregistered extension. The cult that have zero issue with following a faceless, distorted monster that’s done nothing but horrifically murder everyone he’s seen it come across.
There’s only one choice, and it’s to try anything he can to take the bomb out of their hands. Answers can wait, John DeFoe can wait, escaping can wait – either he wracks his fractured skull for what little he can remember on bomb defusal, or the blood they’ll spill with it is on his hands.
Theo knows he’ll have barely any idea of what to make of the mess of wires within, but tries to remember of what he can as he lowers himself down towards the panel. Forces out a breath, ignores the pain, gets on his last working knee despite the spike of pins-and-needles from heel to joint. Red car comes first, green car comes fourth, blue comes third, orange comes…he’ll get there eventually, the first steps he can do. The panel on the front clicks open with almost comical ease.
… The wires underneath are a mess, but not in the way he was expecting. All a shredded, unusuable mess of colourful TPE and frayed wires.
If it could still go off, he would’ve been charred atoms before he had so much as opened the front panel. It’s…defused. It was defused before he pulled off the canvas. Something settles in Theo’s shattered chest at the realisation, a sudden tension that he hadn’t noticed arriving, and the brief pulse of pain as it leaves is almost gentle in comparison.
He gets to his feet slowly, hand braced on the bomb’s cold, safe-as-it-can-get metal shell, and limps his way over to the stairs – limps up them too, shoulder braced against the bricks of the wall with every slow, aching, exhausted step. Whatever energy had propelled him through the Hub – through DeFoe Manor – is leaving him with every pulse of his heart, and whatever’s left is dreaming of little besides painkillers and a long, long sleep in a comfortable bed.
Canning said there was an exit in here somewhere. The mask can [it hurts] stay, at least until he finds the way out. There’ll be one. Haunted manors may not pass a safety inspection, but anyone building a facility to contain anything leaves a back exit somewhere.
There’s an uncanny warmth to the cellar bricks, one that feels almost alive as it scrapes rough white lines into the skin of his shoulder, like the body of an animal pressed against him. If DeFoe manor is a body, then its cellar has to be its heart, he supposes: it only makes sense to be able to feel the grim, vengeful unlife of its mind pressing out from within its surfaces like mould, warm and alive and so fierce as to be almost scorching, burning at his skin as he-
(No, no no no wait-)
The wave of fire washes over him like it wants to swallow him whole, blasting him away to land in a broken, agonised heap on the cellar floor with all the grace of an unwanted doll. When he forces his head back up (snap crackle pop numbness spreading down his limbs) a moment later he sees it, blooming in bright, feverish flowers all over the stairs, growing in from the house upstairs.
In front of them, the bomb
(wait)
sits just in front of the stairs, the flames sending bright streaks of colour dancing across what little of the metal lies exposed from under the canvas. Enough nanoexplosive is in there to level the county, Theo knows, but suddenly whether it can level the county is far less important than the fact that it can atomise everything in this room, brick and dirt and lantern and bright, leaping fire and all.
He watches for a heartbeat of silence as every lick of flame twists and shifts, sparks flying out like confetti tossed at a parade, like the trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras he had on his bucket list, like snow falling on his ninth birthday when snow was still something exciting rather than an inconvenience. He and his friends made a snowman, he remembers, It was so cold out that his hands started to hurt, then they went numb, and then his dad came out to give him his gloves before hustling him back inside.
(WAIT)
Everything hurts, but he is not cold. The fire moves, and he hurts, watching the sparks fall for one last moment that seems like it lasts forever, but he is not cold.
A stray spark lands on the cool, shining metal surface of the bomb just as he curls up, and then the light devours everything.
(I don’t want to die. Despite everything, despite the pain ripping white-hot through his body, despite the hell on earth that the final days of his life have been, that is the last thought to cross Theodore DaCabe’s mind. I don’t want to die.)
Bones under his skin. Vague awareness lingers at the edges of his mind, a wet, giving texture under his skin. A texture that might be his muscles underneath, or twisted flaps of skin pressed against that muscle, or severed muscle pressed against the skin. It is wet, and it gives under his weight, unable to do more than exist and, if only vaguely, feel.
There is pain. There is pain, and that’s how we know we’re still alive, isn’t it? He is alive, so alive in fact that he doesn’t think his nervous system is still capable of processing it anymore.
Pain, and the floor. All of existence, summarised wholly into two extant things and him. Pain, and the floor. Pain, and the floor, and his fluttering heart. Pain, and the stink of fetid air on his exposed flesh, and the taste of blood in his throat. Pain, and light, and the sensation of a gaze scraping along his broken limbs like a dull razor against his jaw, and the soundless cry of a stranger, and the fact that [he] is no longer he-
Light. Awareness. Pain. Purpose.
[the new prince] sees, and [the new prince] feels. He flexes his burning, static-filled limbs, finds them wrapped in cloth like a corpse’s bindings. His face is covered; his only clothing besides the swathe of mottled white [the bridgekeeper’s] apron, cleaned of all stains and mended of all tears.
[my king’s] mercy is a strange thing to feel, and yet it is all that he has ever felt. the only thing that has ever animated his hands, the only thing that has had his heart beat in its cage of broken bone, the only thing that has given [purpose] to his being.
Because that is [my king] and his [purpose] is now sweetly distilled like crude oil into kerosene, warm and certain and dancing along his pins-and-needles-filled arms in little shocks and taps of pain, because his [purpose] is [protect him always] and he could no more raise a hand against [him] than he could shed his vestments or [his] will.
There is only one more thing to do before [my king] can hold his court once more.
The walls of [my king's] court shift and move with every breath, pulsing and alive with [his] will, animate, excited at its plans come to fruition. Its [new prince] floats almost gently through the audience chamber, ignoring the slow creaks and wheezes as easily as the mottled red fluid that sometimes drops, pitter-pat, onto his shoulders.
([my king] is a being of life itself, for [his] mercy is how we know we all still live. And [he] is alive like no other, for no other knows [his] mercy like [he] does.)
A man in a centuries-old waistcoat and slacks cowers against the wall, curled up and shaking with with his arms wrapped around his knees like a terrified child. He looks up as [the new prince] passes by, sinks away like the walls of [my king] will shield him from his sight, will ever shield anyone from him again, like [he] could not find him by the stink of the petrol and ash on his hands alone.
[the guide] is not his problem to solve right now. His problem is [it hurts] his problem is [it hurts] his problem is [take his place] the flayed hands still clinging helplessly to a ledge of the king’s flesh. Bone sinking through the semi-rotten tissue of his fingertips to claw into [my king] like nails.
[take his place]. [take] up his weapon, lift it in your warm heavy numb painful [my king’s] hands, watch the end gleam in the greasy yellow light. [it hurts] to think. [it hurts] to move. [it hurts] to breathe.
He stabs down.
His eyes catch on his grip as [the arrogant man] falls, on the cloth wrapped around his hands, at once both clumsy and a second skin. Threads and ribbons of the cloth hang off of his forearms, shifting like hair underwater with every breath the king takes. Even through the mummifying sheets of white, his hands ache. Even through the cloth, his fingers are long, delicate, dextrous. Slender, careful. Even mittened together under layers of tight fabric, thick and clumsy, hiding the bare flesh and bone within from sight, they are careful.
His mother always said he had the hands of a pianist.
[the arrogant man] falls, and [the new prince] stands in his place. And though Theo DaCabe is no more, and what has been made from his remains like skin into sun-cracked leather knows nothing but, he knows truly the name of the King.