Work Text:
The first thing, crucially, is that you are miserable.
The other kids in your platoon (and what a joke of a statement that is) at least liked to talk about their early lives, the very apexes of their happiness, bond that way while you sat on the fringe edges of the camp, poking the dirt with sticks and grinding your teeth to stubs. You never had much of a mind to join in because you knew that you’d ruin the mood with your own rotting foundation, and you are quick to learn that morale is too often the difference between a barrel shoved down your throat and making it out to the next day.
Your memories are steeped in all sorts of wry miseries. You’re practically drenched in them. It’s either home, or the frontlines, or St. Domek’s, depending on convenience, and you’ve tried just about every drug that circles around the Eastern Union just to get away from them. Begs the question as to why you’d come back to a shithole like Prehevil when anyone else with half a brain to them would stay far away, but —
— your mother loved you, and she loved this city, so fine, you think that maybe you’re too young to understand why she loved this place when it’s the same place that built your shithead father and fine, you look at the gallows in the schoolyard from time to time and you picture being strung up there for fun, and sure, so you think that maybe if you can’t make an honest living as a human being then at least you can crawl back to the orphanage and kill yourself and then you’ll have done one thing right in all your miserable life.
No. The truth is that there is no magic explanation that will make this just. You may as well not even try.
You don’t know why you’re coming back here, to a place that is home in nothing more than name, when you know that the Eastern Union will probably put you down like the dog you are if they find you. You’re not so upset about being considered scum by your peers, since it is not something that is particularly new to you, but maybe your heart aches a little bit because the army was the closest you’ve ever gotten to belonging anywhere, and you excised all of that shit with the ease of dissecting an open wound.
Perhaps what bothers you the most is your own complacency. It bothered everyone else around you too, though it was perversely what your field officers wanted out of both you and everyone under them, though the dumb cunts would never actually just say that they wanted someone to deepthroat their shoes. Instead they’d say, “You could at least pretend not to like the taste of bootrubber, faggot,” or “The Union’s fucked ‘cause of pussies like you,” and you’d just stare up at them all lachrymose and mute, nothing, nothing at all, because if you return to yourself for too long you’ll recognize the person underneath all the skin the officers wear and freak the fuck out.
It is easier to think of your father as dead. Some vestigial limb of your former self (which is another joke of a statement — if you weren’t so good at it, you’d consider stand-up as a legitimate alternative to baby murder) that is better severed, discarded, forgotten. It is easiest not to think of anything at all, but it’s so hard to divorce yourself from your own anguish without dope in your veins, and whatever avenue of bliss you’d managed to procure for yourself had been sealed firmly shut the moment you’d ran off in the middle of the night like some sort of human-shaped scar. The Union’s got drugs, but not for pathetic fuckups like you.
Your body aches, and you are miserable.
The first time you see her is on the train, when you’re too busy trying to keep your impending panic attack to a minimum around the other men and women in the cabin. You think you can remember that she was reading some shitty gothic novel, which registered some sort of vague petulance in your mind because you wanted to be reading a shitty gothic novel, but you had used the last of your shillings on the train ticket and so you had nothing but yourself for entertainment.
And after that, things went to shit — beyond the scope of your addiction sticking ugly fingers between your ribs, that is — and you forgot all about the train and its occupants. You notice her, but you’re more preoccupied with the Bremen uniform a couple seats in front of you, so you slip away first, unaware of the fact that the lack of heroin in your body will be the least of your problems.
The first time that she sees you is when you’re huddling in the corner of some dark kitchen that smells like rotting food and sour wine, but it beats the lingering scent of gore out on the streets. You tried to convince yourself about twenty minutes earlier that maybe the smell of rot could keep you grounded through your sobriety, but in all honesty, you’re about to add vomit to the list of unpleasant smells in the room.
“Oh,” she says, sotto voce, like she’d just come across some box of abandoned kittens on the street and felt the sudden compulsion to smuggle them back to her apartment, “Oh, All-mer, you look terrible.”
And yeah, so she’s right, you’ve never been particularly picturesque, all boney limbs and a fuck-ugly face, but it somehow manages to cut you through the haze of nerves that are curled around your throat. You curl into yourself, because cruelty is best dealt with abstraction, and you’re too much of a pussy to ever throw back a retort. (You watched some kid, maybe twelve, try to pull that trick on Sarge once. Poor whelp couldn’t see straight for half a week afterwards, and he still had to put up with cleaning the outhouses — this time, with his face beaten so swollen he looked like a beehive.)
“Tilt your head back.”
You register the feeling of cold metal against your bottom lip and for a half-second you think, this is it, I may as well offer to cut myself into slivers for your ease of devourment, but it’s not a gun. It’s a flask. Poison? No, the gun would be easier. Yours is strapped to your back, you could —
You look at her, see concern, and though you’ve never known what to do with yourself, always deferring to the voices of authority in the Union, now you don’t know what to do with yourself in another way. Imperceptibly different. What can you say? You are a man of nuance.
So you tilt your head back, and you drink whatever you can. Distantly, you register how dry your lips are, and you’re pretty sure that they’ve cracked open and you’re bleeding all over her flask and that it truly is a testament to humanity’s patience that she hasn’t gotten sick of your shit yet and just domed you. You’re twitchy and you feel like you’ve just volunteered for the unwanted task of sticking your hand in a spider’s nest.
“There you are,” she says, and smiles. “Better?”
Cruelty and kindness are perpendicular to one another; destined to touch at some juncture. Whatever is given must be paid for in some sort of favor, but you never asked for any of this. Better? You feel like you are dying. You are nothing, so you say nothing. Even the water was too much of a kindness to bear. She kneels down on the floor with you, her skirt billowing around her.
“I recognize you,” you say, sudden and hoarse, and you outwardly cringe at how thin and awful your voice sounds. You’ve used it maybe twice since you left the Union, and you detest the rasp of metal on metal. “You’re the priest’s kid.”
She flinches, and you decide then and there that you hate her just on general principle. You hate her because she at least has a home to return to, and your fear of the Father extends to the fear of his Flesh. And maybe, tucked away at the corner of your heart, you’re just a bit jealous. Jealous because you’ve never seen her at the school any time that wasn’t outside the gate, waiting for Father Domek to finish his sermons, and because you were stuck in there. Like every other kid in that place, you were just a body waiting to be shaped into something more than yourself.
Once upon a time, you saw conscription as a form of mercy.
“Here,” she says by way of apology, and digs around in her pack. She offers you a syringe, all demure and sorry for herself and you really do despise her for it. “You should take it. Really.”
You’ve handled cruelty all your life; no sense in denying yourself just a little more. You take the syringe from her, mute and placid, and stare headlong into her eyes as you shoot yourself up. By way of thanks (which is not and will never be the same as amicability), you give her your name.
You had a friend, or something resembling such back when you were holed up in the orphanage. Companionship is a viable means of survival if you manage to get the right sort, and you were too young, far too young to know anything else. So you had a friend, though his name has fallen something by the wayside (you think it started with a V or something) and you don’t remember if you were a good friend, but it was something that stuck out to you. Like thorns of a nettle that prickle the skin if you shove your hand in a bush, stuck and itching.
So the orphanage is cruel, its headmaster even crueler, and you see Father Domek in the halls and you follow the lead of the other children who give him a wide berth. You’re on your best behavior because it is the best way, so you are told, to avoid the ire of the adults who surround you. There’s a noose in the schoolyard and you picture yourself swinging from it like a pendulum, like a clock, like the metronome your mother was fond of until you found the pieces of it broken on the floor after a particularly nasty argument.
Your friend (Vernon? It had to have been Vernon — you remember scrunching your face and calling him weird for having a weird name, and then he called you weird because who gives a rat’s ass about names, and your name is Levi, freaking weirdo) isn’t as much of a walking punching bag as you are. Yes, he’s not particularly misbehaved, not the way some of the older bullies were, but he’s not a doormat the way that you are. You think you admired that part of him for a bit, up until he disappeared one day like a leaf blown into the next yard over. Just totally, completely gone.
The nurse says he was adopted into a loving family who took him to Vinland overseas. You don’t believe her.
Friendship does not subsist on memory alone, lest the building that houses it falls apart. Your friend was taken by some nebulous thing in the shadows (maybe Hugo, maybe a monster, or maybe he had the good sense to run but you don’t pursue that avenue of thought for long because it means that if he ran he did so without you) and you are left alone, with the cruelty of the school and its people.
Heartbreak is a word that if said aloud, could bring a monster into the world. Like the older kids huddled around the bathroom mirror chanting Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary! Like an alarm going off in the museum, and you’re being held down by the cops that roam the streets outside and getting beat for the moral taboo of sentimentality. You had a friend, and now he’s gone, and though you’re not heartbroken (‘that’s pussy shit!’) you consciously decide that friendship is too much work to nurture and so you draw further into yourself.
Then Marina shoves a book against your chest and gives you a conspiratorial little gaze from under her eyelashes, smiling in spite of all the bullshit that’s been unfurling around the two of you, and maybe you feel a bit like a Eudoxian parody of yourself. You gaze at Marina and decide that the rest of the universe spans out from her. You’ll spend the rest of your days groveling at Alll-mer’s feet for the categoric sin of misjudging her.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she says, voice brought low like she’s whispering something particularly scandalous, “but when I was fifteen, I used to have a horrible little crush on the Count. I know, I know! Vile, eh?”
“Truly! No way,” you reply, voice equally exuberant, like you’ve discovered some ruinous little secret that delights you to no end, and she squeals in glee.
Under normal circumstances, you don’t like leading people to their deaths. You wouldn’t be here otherwise if you did, right?
This does not constitute normal circumstances.
You like the other participants well enough, you suppose. The ones that have shown their faces to you, anyhow. Karin pinches your ear when she notices you drifting off in the middle of one of her rants about criminal theory. Olivia chatters about practical uses for colchicum and how the alkaloid can be used to treat gout, which you thought was endearing but a bit macabre. O’saa likes to meet your gaze and make a swift jerkoff motion whenever Daan pointedly explains that just because he’s a talented doctor doesn’t mean everyone should go and get shot all willy-nilly, and Abella laughs and bellows, “But I look so handsome with these scars, doctor!” and then he groans and everything seems a bit lighter.
Caught unawares by the end of a good joke, you even give a laugh or two. It sounds horrible and screechy from disuse, but Marina fawns all over you for it so it makes you less ashamed.
Despite it all, however, you still aren’t able to find any easy amount of sleep. This is a death game, after all, and you imagine that someone is bound to crack one way or another. Every errant sound made in the middle of the night causes you to check over your shoulder in the chance that there’s a contestant poised with a knife meant for your neck. It is a wonder that your body has not merely given up and died from exhaustion.
You think that maybe the only one you trust is Marina.
You’ll never tell anyone. And you certainly won’t let her catch on. They already know about your little drug problem — you don’t need a girl problem compounding it, painting an even bigger target on your back. Not that you think the others would pick on you for it, if you were candid about your feelings, but there’s always that little voice in the bag of your head that makes you wonder what if? If it was anyone else, you could probably handle it, but from them, from these people? You’d choke on your own anguish and sign a warrant for your own cannibalization, just to prove once and for all that you truly are a beaten doormat.
Vaguely, you wonder if it means anything, that you’d happily lay your life down for these people when you’ve been begging to be killed all this time. Some sort of private second-hand death.
No, you muse. Probably not.
“Do you play? Oh, please tell me that you do.”
You hate to be the bearer of bad news, especially not when she looks like — that. (Like what, you ask yourself, and then you promptly tell yourself to fuck off because it’s such a stupid thing to think of Marina this way at all.) You tap an awkward few notes on the keyboard, as though by some miracle of Alll-mer you’ll suddenly develop latent musical ability, but there is nothing; just dissonance. You concede with a shake of the head.
“I mean, I’ve always wanted to,” you admit, almost wishing you had just kept your mouth shut, but Marina looks so invested in whatever precious little you have to say that you keep going anyway, “We had an old piano, some residual hand-me-down from whoever previously owned the place. I think she taught herself, I don’t know. The piano was out of tune. She wanted to teach me.”
But is the prefix to something horrible and dying, so you catch it with your teeth before you can wax maudlin to Marina about your dead mommy and your daddy who hated her for the extant sin of birthing you.
Marina beams.
“Ah! Me too. My mother —” she begins, and then there is a small, barely-perceptible lapse in her speech where she takes on the appearance of a kicked puppy, “— she used to be an organist for the church. Father thought I ought to round myself out a bit, so he had a pianist come in and teach me a few basics, while my mother filled in the rest. I was just a kid though, so I haven’t practiced in years.”
“Still a kid,” calls a very monotone Daan from the counter, which is indicative of both the fact that he has been eavesdropping, and that he is a total douchebag.
Marina makes an exaggerated show of rolling her eyes.
“Anyways,” she punctuates, loud enough to inform Daan that her attention is reserved solely for you, “Maybe when we get out of here, I’ll take you back to my place in the Vatican City and I’ll teach you.”
And Gods, you think, she really is just the kind of person with enough hope in her heart to say when instead of if. Like people haven’t been dying left and right, like there isn’t a god in your ear telling you that children aren’t the only thing you’re good at killing. For the nth time that day, you consider the merits of walking out of the PRHVL BOP and goring yourself on the streets.
She blushes at your silence, mistaking guilt for judgment. “I mean — if you still wanted to learn. You don’t have to.”
Normal protocol for someone like you is to decline on its face. Maybe you could go through the motions of complacency, crawl right back into the hole where you’re the most comfortable. Sure, you’d say, and then you’ll walk out of Prehevil and go somewhere far, far away. Maybe the Eastern Sanctuaries, if you’re not dead by then. Running from your problems is becoming something of a talent now.
Vatican City is allied with Bremen, isn’t it? Gods, you really are a traitorous little dog.
“I’ve never been to Vatican City,” you find yourself saying, despite the fact that the wonder you hear in your own tone makes you want to beat your fists against the wood of the grand, slice your fingers on the hammer strings, “If it was with you, I wouldn’t mind.”
She looks positively delighted, and it feels a little bit like glass in your palms. You picture your skin growing around the tiny shards, glinting like stars in the low light of your mind. You beat your hand against the glass and it shatters in your palm. Marina preens over herself, cheeks as full as the roundest bulb of a penny bun.
It is almost imperceptible, but you do smile back.
Maybe if the Union wanted you to fight harder, they’d have made you give a shit about the country they wanted you to die over.
You’ve got something that you’re willing to die over, and now you finally understand — you understand your mom who died protecting you, your platoon who fought because they respected you, and you understand Marina. Enough to know that she’d hate you for the stupid shit you’re about to do, so when you lie to her, you do so with a silent prayer in the hopes that your meandering works and that you’ll give her a reason to forgive you later.
“I’m just gonna patrol the street for a bit,” you say, slinging a gun over your shoulder, refusing to look back at her because if you look back, you think you might just crack. Turn away from the steps. Run your fingers through her hair. Do something stupid, because you want to stretch this small moment of levity into something that approaches forever. You’re not a stupid kid anymore, you know that good things don’t last unless you work for them. Sometimes not even then.
“‘Kay,” she says, sleepy and happy. Because it’s you, you realize, a reflection that catches you by the teeth. “Be careful, yeah?”
“… ‘Course.”
You wish things could have been different.
Yeah.
There is nothing else to say.
IN ALL MY INFINITE VASTNESS I FIND THAT IT IS DIFFICULT TO REMEMBER THE NAME BY WHICH I ONCE FOLDED INTO MYSELF FOLDING FOREVER INTO NOTHING NOTHING AT ALL
IT WAS A SONOROUS THING IF ONLY BECAUSE IT PASSED THROUGH YOUR LIPS ALTHOUGH NOW OUR LANGUAGE WHICH WAS ONCE SHARED HAS GROWN INCOMPATIBLE LIKE WE CLIMB THE TOWER OF BABEL UNKNOWING BUT LOVING AND ONLY A BIT ARROGANT AS IS THE NATURE OF HUMAN-BORN GODS
She wakes up in the middle of the train, which immediately strikes her as strange because she is almost certain that she had been curled up on the top bunk of one of the beds in the speakeasy. Then, in her sleep-addled state comes another realization — that she had not dreamt at all. Under normal circumstances, she would consider this a blessing, but this does not constitute normal circumstance.
Marina shoots out of her seat with all the fervor of someone who’d just realized they’d left the oven on, and she comes to realize that everyone else has made it to the train too. Not a speck of flesh on them where it oughtn’t be either, which is probably about the most benevolent observation she’s made in the past thirty seconds. Had she been carried out of the club then?
Abella smiles from the seat next to her, eyes as sunken as polished obsidian.
“Hey,” she says, unusually reserved. Probably just tired, which is fair given the fact that they have been doing practically nothing aside from running marathons around the various inhabitants of Prehevil for the past three days, but she speaks so gently.
“Is it over?”
Out the window. The forest is silent, but furthermore, it is still. Like a raging child finally able to rest. “It is,” says Abella. “We can leave whenever we want.”
Her apartment in Vatican City is the exact same way that she’d left it. There’s a note underneath the door that informs her that her rent will be increasing next month. The same peeling stretch of paint on the wall continues to flicker from the draft coming in from the window. There are three beers in the icebox, lukewarm from neglect and slick with condensation from the melted ice in the drip pan. She takes one immediately.
Marina is home, and she is so tired.
She supposes that she must begin documenting her stay in Prehevil while the memories are still fresh. Her professors would be interested in the personal encounter she had with Rher, to say the least — assuming they did not, on principle, think of her as a loon. She could corroborate with Abella and Olivia, both of whom she promised to continue to write after they’d gotten off to their respective locations.
There is something missing.
Like a word at the tip of her tongue, vaguely out of reach. The more she thinks about it, the more it annoys her. A constantly-tongued wound will only heal slower, Daan had quipped with annoyance when Marina had admitted that she used to lick her own scrapes because of a book she read when she was seven. Also, not that it’s any of my business, but you’re not a dog, so stop it.
There’d been thirteen contestants in the festival. Only eleven had made it out, but — it was a death game. All things considered, eleven out of thirteen is a very enviable number.
But there’s something else. Marina goes through a checklist of names and faces in her mind. The only other person in Prehevil who had meant any sort of anything to her after that was her father, whose corpse was probably leaking pus and rotting in the basement of the church anyway.
The person, of course, that she is trying to remember is you.
You feel a bit cruel for ending it this way, but you had figured that it would have been kinder for everyone involved if you were to be unwritten within the fabric of time. You had begged the collective consciousness for this kindness, the only selfish task you would ever perform as a god, and they had been magnanimous enough to grant you to it. (The irony of ascending to godhood and still feeling the need to bend your knees to others is not lost on you, believe me.)
It might still be selfishness that you followed her here, to this place. Maybe you cannot help it — you grew a taste for self-indulgence, and now you cannot stop it. You miss her. You wish more than anything that you could reach out, tell her that you’re okay, that it might be hard to get used to like this but you’ll be happier for it generations down the line. You miss her.
Marina pops open the cap on the beer and takes a swig. It tastes like shit because it’s lukewarm, of course, but she is home and she is tired and she does not want to go to the iceman and refill the icebox. She will eat whatever canned non-perishables remain in her pantry. Then she will sleep for the next twelve hours or so, and during that time, she will dream.
You prepare yourself to meet her.
I WANT THE MUSIC TO GO THROUGH MY BODY I WANT YOUR HANDS ON MY CONSCIOUSNESS AND YOUR SONG IN MY HEART AND I WANT TO GO TO MONUMENTS OF HUMANITY AND BE TAUGHT HUMAN THINGS THAT GODS CANNOT COMPREHEND
THEY SAY OUR EXISTENCE IS ELEVATED BUT I HAVE NOT YET ASCENDED TO SUCH HEIGHTS PERHAPS BECAUSE I AM A SIMPLER CREATURE
THE TRUTH OF OUR EXISTENCE MAY BE LONELY BUT AT THE VERY LEAST I HAVE YOU
PLEASE, STAY.