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centtaura · 7 years ago

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Day Fifteen (In His Image)

The last thing he remembered was twisted metal and smoke, a gray haze that clouded his vision, and a eerie muteness that surrounded the scene, where all he actually heard was muffled yelling behind an all-encompassing ringing in his ears. Like tinnitus, only he thought his ears might actually be bleeding. Later, he'd learn that they probably were.

But that was not where he stood now. His eyes fell shut like steel traps when the fire reached him, opened again to see people hovering -very- close to his face, then rolled back once more into darkness and silence.

And then he was in a cave.

Sure, that made sense, he figured, as much sense as anything else that had happened that day. He took a tentative step forward, and found the ground solid beneath his feet, and even though he couldn't see a damn thing in front of him, he decided there was no reason to -not- keep walking. He moved simply because he could, and because his steps echoed satisfyingly, and because he -swore- he heard a rasping whisper somewhere deep within this system.

The first steps were the easiest.

Over the course of a year, Ash would be thrust back into this domain, again and again, in the name of recovery, or so he was told. He was already a miracle case, a medical marvel, and he still didn't understand -why-. No one told him what happened until they were certain he'd live, or so he deduced, and only then did he realize the severity of his situation.

No wonder his head hurt. His brain swelled and ached, his skin cracked and bled, and the migraines became unbearable until the doctors discovered just how badly his eyes degraded from the damage they'd sustained and started leaving the lights on a dim setting. He couldn't move his left arm more than a few inches, but he was supposed to believe that just the fact he could tap a finger was a sign of miraculous improvement. Sure. Good thing he was right-handed, because his left was basically useless to him now.

But when he fell asleep and dreamed of the cave, all the pain vanished. A hip that had been shattered carried him with ease, as if it -wasn't- held together by pins and rods. He used his left arm to run a hand along a damp wall, jerking it back when he felt something squishy and slimy wriggle beneath his fingers. He still couldn't see, but not because his eyes were sore. Every now and again he caught a glimpse of a dim light somewhere in the distance, the impossible distance, and he walked forever toward it.

The rasping grew louder.

His room in the hospital never felt any warmer. There were no flowers, no cards, no sympathy. Sometimes, he had visitors. They were always his family, and 90% of the time it was his mother and his oldest brother. The one that put him in the hospital did not come by so often. Io said it was because Loki was wracked with guilt every time he witnessed what he'd done, but Ash didn't really believe that. It was all for the best, anyway. Ash did not wish to see -anyone-, particularly not his brother, and he knew he had no friends, he'd made sure of it his entire school career. Still, it would have been nice to see a color other than sterile white in all directions. He only found solace in sleep, and dreams.

To think that a musty, creepy cave in his unconscious brain would feel more welcoming than his hospital room. Figured.

They brought him his laptop, and for a while he entertained himself alone in his room, just like he'd done at home anyway. Turned out that typing was a little harder when you only have one usable hand, and soon Ash grew too frustrated and angry to keep trying, every moment spent on his previous favorite platform serving as a grim reminder that he was broken.

Sometimes, to keep his limbs from deteriorating, the nurses tried to help him talk a walk down the hall and back. It was hard, and distressing, and his legs only ever wanted to shuffle painfully while he leaned with his good arm on another human, and he knew he'd have to live the rest of his pathetic life relying on other people from here on out.

Until he was in the caves, alone, on his own, capable and tireless and determined to get to the end of it, or out of it, or at least to that faded light that never seemed to get any closer.

He heard his name in the whispers.

They toyed with the idea of letting him go home for short bursts before being carted back to the hospital, in an attempt to help him feel more comfortable and independent. This ended up causing too much hassle for everyone involved, and thus Ash was right back to being bound to a stiff bed 24/7, though at least here the IV and other garbage he was stuck with on a regular basis wasn't in the way or awkwardly placed around his bedroom. His notebooks gathered dust. He wanted to write.

Almost a year passed in a torturously slow crawl, his waking moments filled with despair and pain and a lot of medical babbling that he didn't understand nor had any desire to learn, while his sleeping life gave him a strange sense of purpose that he never questioned. Did he ever wake up feeling rested? He didn't know. He'd forgotten what it felt like to be well-rested, and even if he didn't spend his induced comas walking endlessly toward some unreachable goal, being awake was to taxing that it wouldn't have lasted anyway.

The winding system of narrow halls carved through rock and densely packed dirt opened into a clearing, a room wide enough that he could stretch both arms out to his sides and still not touch the walls. The light that always felt so far away, so small and distant that he wasn't sure if it was just his busted eyes playing tricks on him even in his sleep, suddenly washed over him, and cast an eerie glow around the room. It looked just like he'd expected it to - glistening walls and an uneven ground and plenty of weird and unnatural creatures writhing around and in between cracks. There seemed to be a heap of something against a rock pillar in the center of the room, a heap that had attracted a lot of...bugs, he thought they probably were. Worms and millipedes and spiders and other revolting things that even he, king of the unpleasant, found himself recoiling from.

The heap stared at him, and he realized the source of the light was somewhere far beyond its hollow eye sockets. A body leaned against the stone, evacuated of its organs and entrails, viscera piled at its side on the ground. Leathery skin stretched and pulled back across dry bones. It was motionless, but he could sense a soul somewhere inside of it, and just as he was trying to come to terms with what he was seeing, the corpse rasped his name.

"Ah, so we finally meet, eh Sonny Jim?"

Ash sneered, already more annoyed than afraid of the literal talking carcass. "My name isn't Jim."

"Right, right...Ashley. Isn't that a girl's name?"

"Hey, fuck you?"

Ash was met with laughter, though the skull didn't move or show any signs of possession, even its jaw remaining frozen in its silent grin. The sound came from somewhere deep within it. He wished it would shut up.

It did not shut up, though, and instead informed him that he was in the presence of a god. Well, weirder shit has happened, why the fuck not, right? He was already a repeat coma patient, dead once for several minutes, suffering from so much physical and mental damage that he really should have just stayed dead. And if there was a god, or gods, it was not a benevolent entity. It was unsurprising, to say the least, to come face to face with a god of death in the form of a talking goddamn cadaver.

Mictlantecuhtli made Ash an offer that day, one that he snapped up readily as soon as he heard the magic word: power. Work for him, this god of death and decay, do his bidding, and receive untold power in return. Ash would have had a hard time declining even before he was bedridden, but now, with his broken body struggling to regain even a fraction of its strength, there was no other choice. The god even informed the teenager that he was of divine lineage to begin with - but like everyone else in his life, his true father abandoned hoim as soon as he stopped being useful to him. When he died, that was it. Worthless, as usual. Story of Ash's life. But now another deity had come before him, offering to fill that void and awaken his ichor once and for all. He'd just have to deal with the catch.

As his father now, by divine adoption, not bonded by blood but by Fate itself, Mictlantecuhtli had the power to restore Ash's strength to full and beyond, but he was not willing to restore Ash's -appearance-, no. His children were not to be beautiful, as Ash once was, as he'd taken after his true divine father before this. He was to remain ugly, disfigured, ruined. Not all of his ails were to be healed. He was to suffer for his gifts.

It was better than being a cripple for the rest of his life.

When he woke up, he didn't hesitate. He slid out of bed, stood straight-backed and stretched, lifting his left arm above his head casually, like nothing had ever happened. He climbed on a chair to reach his relics, mysteriously hidden inside a ceiling tile, proving that his dreams were never just dreams after all, and that the gods were real, and that he was chosen by them, and by Fate. He always knew he was better than everyone else, he just had to die to prove it.

The light still bothered his eyes. The headaches and the nightmares never really ceased, though they became less frequent; they remained as a reminder of to whom he was bound and to whom he owed his life and power. His hair never grew back. His skin never fused back together until it hardened and left deep scars where the heat had cracked and split his flesh. He thinned, parts of his body growing sharp and long and unnatural. As the years marched on, and he distanced himself from his father, he became more grotesque, with an emotional state to match.

No matter how much space he put between himself and Mictlantecuhtli, Ash could never escape their bond. He would always be immediately associated with that god of the Aztec underworld. He would always be the son of Santa Muerte.

Like father, like son - in body, and in mind, and in spirit. He didn't regret it, though. After all, he had power. And more than power...he had control over his own life.

And that was totally worth it.

#centext

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