#febuwhump29

[flailingfrog]

Febuwhump Day 29: Woofwoofverse: Not Allowed to Die

TW: Graphic? Character death (he gets better) (that might make it worse), implied abuse?

-

One second, Honest is edging away, safe behind his handler’s body as he tries to peer past at the fight, and the next he’s falling.

The last thing he hears is his name, a scream like the world’s ending, and then he’s underwater, going somewhere very far away very, very fast.

No one would ever accuse him of being smart, but at least he can say of himself that he’s smart enough not to gasp in. He pushes towards the surface, more clawing at the water than cupping it, but he only sinks. It’s not that he can’t swim—he can—he’s just never been in something moving this fast, something desperate to drag him down and not let him up. A part of him hopes none of his handlers try to save him. The rest of him knows that of course they will—it’s how they’re made.

His vision begins to tunnel, and swampy water and streaks of sun blend to nothingness, his head tight, his lungs shrinking. His body, dizzy with the lack of air, gasps in, and it burns sucking down his throat.

The clawing weakens, and it occurs to him that this–this is really it. There’s nothing after this. It’s… sad.

It’s with that thought things fade away, tunneling into blackness.

Then it’s no longer dark, only dim. The kind of dim other folk claim doesn’t exist, that only exists back home—back in the caverns. But it only takes a moment to recognize this isn’t his cavern, isn't any cavern he's ever called home or even stayed a time in, and one of the privileges of being consort is he's seen them all, in one way or another.

As he drags the tips of his fingers against the wall, looks from the walls pressed tight to him to the ceiling high above him with a tightness in his very fingers, it occurs to him he’s never seen a corridor like this in his life. The dark stone’s carved into halls by water and hand and magic, which is normal enough, but the halls are too narrow to be anything other than a building's hall, and there's no doorways, the walls instead lined with glyphs, only some of them even vaguely familiar, the kind of thing he’d sneak glances at in the books Faithful brought home from the nunnery. Their glow’s distinct from any color he’s ever known, disparate from even the glow of the lichen in the caverns.

A low hum of dread starts in Honest's stomach, and it pushes against him that something’s happened, something he can guess, if he's brave enough, but he isn’t today, even as it blares bold and crisp in the back of his mind.

With nothing else to do, he starts to walk, following the hall. Carvings paint the wall, just like the inner halls of the Goddess's temples’, ornate pictures of people Honest can’t recognize, stories Dwellers don’t tell, cutting more and more into the hallway until he’s sideways to keep going, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. He’s used to this kind of squeeze, Dwellers are good at this kind of squeeze, and he’s missed it.

Eventually, it widens again, just as some part of him was sure it would, and the compulsion to keep walking leads him to a pitchfork in the path. He stands there, thinking, sure he’s waiting for… something. Or maybe someone.

Sand digs into his back as the sun sears into his face, too bright even in the shade he can barely grasp comes from the trees above him. Water burns as he coughs it up, then swallows it back down as he tries to gasp in a breath. A hand slams into the ground, trying to grab at something, anything, to get him moving, but the coughs rattle him hard enough it’s difficult to move. For a second, all he can do is fear he’s going back to where he came from, the place he refuses to name quite yet. The place that, were he proper, he’d never have need to think to, because good Dwellers don’t think of the after.

But he manages to vault onto his side and half-near hack up his lungs, burning alongside his throat and nose. His eyes sting, and it takes him a moment to realize it’s from tears. He’s cold, and itchy from the sand, and he still half-feels he’s going to rattle out of his body. He gasps in again, then again, and he trembles with it.

And then he vomits.

Then he vomits again, for good measure.

The third time he’s about to fall off that cliff, he manages to stay where he is, instead gasping in breaths. His body doesn’t feel strong enough to stand, so he allows himself a few more moments of trembling on the beach before he forces himself to pull it together.

The facts are this: he is alone, on the surface, isolated from his handlers and still very much on the run, the absence of their protection be damned, a man with few survival skills and none of the charm to compensate for it, and, because he’s going through the facts, not his feelings, he shoves all emotion down his throat and lives by his name long enough to admit to himself he’s pretty sure he just died and then came back.

It could, if he lets it, end his world, but his world’s ended before, in ways he prays no one will ever know weigh heavier on him than this rebirth, so if he can keep on living when the rest of his brothers, the ones that matter, are dead, he can damned well keep going once he has finally failed to live and, in one last act of compulsive rebellion and dishonor, Returned. Finally, he looks up, well and truly looks up, and takes in what he has to work with.

The river’s slowed here, thick on either side, long trees with green leaves turning gold, painted pink in the light of the setting sun. He hopes it’s the same day he fell into the river. He can’t fathom what it’d mean if it were any longer, instead focusing on the fact it’ll be dark soon, an ease to his eyes, even if still far too bright.

It hits him, belated though it is, that everything is bright enough to burn, a white tint to it. It’s the moment he realizes the weight of glasses he’s grown so used to that he takes it for granted has gone missing, the world around him no longer painted rosy and dim.

His clothes are wet and heavy and cold, and he doesn’t want to think about the various things dirtying them at the moment—he’s next to a river, he’s not so reliant he can’t clean his own clothing.

Least worrying for the moment is his veil’s come loose, too, though it isn’t gone—it’d be a different matter if it were—instead just hanging, half-undone and weighing oddly on his head. He doesn’t want to know what’s become of his hair underneath it. 

It’s currently the least worrying matter of the affair because if where he’d been before was sparsely populated, where he’s washed up—and he doesn’t think of great halls, of silk beyond life that isn’t meant to be known by the living, that’s impossible to be known by the living, because souls don’t come back to bodies, doesn’t think of the myths, of those rare few that crawl out of the proper rest of the worm farms, grievous injuries repaired or half-rotted or a million other things varying based on who’s telling the story, the one thing the same the truth that whatever has risen is not what it says and can only bring ill to the cavern the body once called home, the house that laid claim, because that’s not productive right now—is desolate. He listens to every rustle of leaves, every bird call and twig snap, further than most folk could dream, and he hears no folk like him.

This is all made up for by the simple fact that missing from his side is the bauble he keeps tied to him at all times, come loose in the current. It means that, for the first time in several decades, She can actually see him. And for the first time in his life, he is alone–truly alone, no brothers, no handlers, not even the wayward, estranged, half-feral ward he shared a house and the Goddess’s attention with several lifetimes ago.

He cleans his clothes tactically, getting rid of the worse things that happen to a body when one dies with nimble hands uncaring of what they hit. The water freezes his hands, but he welcomes the cold–it drowns out the emptiness, brings to mind new questions. He needs something to keep him alive.

Down below, the cold felt different. If you asked him to explain it, he couldn’t, but the water here seeps into his bones and makes them slow in a way foreign to him. It’s too cold for him to keep his hands in long, and he can only wash so much without entirely stripping. Afterward, his clothes are even wetter, but he doubts he’d be any warmer without them.

He trails up the shore after that, up to where it becomes less sand and more grass, and he begins to walk.

This is the state of things: the last place he saw his handlers is upstream. The best course of action is to return to his handlers, and fast. Therefore, the best course of action is to walk upstream. He doesn’t let himself think about how long it’ll take, or how long has already passed, because if he does he just might give into despair and try to wither in this wood. Right now, for this moment, what he needs is the idea that he has someone who will protect him from Her if She finds him and keep him safe. Currently, the only advantage is She knows where he is just as well as he does, but that could change at any moment.

His shoes squelch, and his legs protest they’re still weak, but he stumbles up into the forest praying his feet will stop sinking into the soft, powder-like dirt. He’s not used to navigating roots and bushes and things that live, and it slows him down, trips his legs, forces him to remember a time where he walked as much as he pleased, constantly. He can’t tell you when the cage he’d locked himself in happily made itself known, but he dwells, even if it isn’t the time. He deserves a good dwell every now and then, and it’s not like there’s anything better to do. Certainly he’d rather focus on how unfair being the consort of the Goddess Below is than how cold he is, how She can see him again.

No one ever taught him how to start a fire. It never mattered before.

He thinks Endurant would probably know. Endurant knows most things worth knowing, would probably know which of these red and purple and blue fruits you pass are edible and which will harm, or at least know some way of finding out. Ezi knows the prayer for surface food, too, the prayer that makes it the kind of thing that won’t leave you curled in on yourself for hours.

Folk like him aren’t meant to be alone.

The sun dips down, and his eyes burn less as the light turns first rose gold and then black, lit up in a way totally unlike the caverns and the sounds change with the coming of night. Somewhere, there’s something very big moving through the forest, leaves crunching under it. He’s lucky enough it isn’t near the river, though if it was he could probably find his way back. Hopefully.

With the sun dipped, he gets colder, colder than he thought possible. He curls into himself as pins and needles shoot through him, and, as the night stretches on, his clothes still clinging damp to his skin, he starts to grow warm.

By then he can’t find it in himself to worry, even though if it were anyone else he would, can’t even think about the way his stomach has been eyeing the fruit, the fish he catches sight of in the river. For a brief second, he considers stripping, but no matter the ways he’s distanced himself from Her, he can’t, not when he can’t be sure what his creator would think. He can practically feel Her eyes on him, and then, for half a second, he remembers that She could look out his eyes now, if She wanted to, and he wouldn’t know unless She announced Herself. She’d be disappointed in him, if She saw him now. Despite everything, the thought of disappointing Her still sends a minute jolt of cold up his spine, even through the warmth of his body.

Sometimes, it’s better not to think.

Everything’s flat by the time he finally settles on the floor. He can hear Her cooing when he slips away.

It’s only when he finds himself back in that web of halls, spider’s silk clinging and shaping the corridors, that he can think clearly again, can process that he was unwell, that, now, he’s in the place past living.

He doesn’t think he likes it.

He screams, screams long enough to go senseless, keeps screaming.

He’s still screaming when he wakes up, freezing and hungry. He cuts off.

The first time he nearly died, not died-died, but nearly died, is a soupy spot about two centuries ago, when he was on a boat and sure he wasn’t ending up off it. The way She gripped him afterward, like he could in any reality be one of Her worlds, Her grasp holding, possessing, claiming and reclaiming as it dug into his skin, kept him tied to Her for fifty more years.

He’d curled up against Her, and he hadn’t thought twice as his Goddess, his creator, said, as slow and cool as a glacier, “That will never happen again.”

Her touch had burned with it.

But the sun is up. His clothes are dry.

It’s not enough, still several minutes before he comes to terms with the fact he is alive and will continue to be, odds be damned, several minutes to stop himself from tearing at grass, shredding both the ground and his hands.

His fists are still in it when he stops, when it occurs to him, a blunt strike into his skull, that his hair must still be a mess under his veil—that it isn’t the type of thing meant for sleeping in. The styling was already at the end of its term. It’s going to be hell for Responsibility to fix. His handler’s going to chide him the entire time ezi does it, soft, with hands untangling it more delicately than the others are capable of.

He wonders what they’re having for breakfast so he doesn’t think about how, this time, there might be no fixing it at all, and his hunger worsens.

He knows better when he starts walking, knows better still as the idea starts forming, as he gazes at mushrooms and berries and other things that might, key word might, be safe to eat.

But at the same time reality’s setting in, the idea something’s very wrong, yes, but he can use it. If it hurts him, he might just come back. And even if he doesn’t… would that really be the worst thing? When faced with the reality he’s lived through the past two days? He shouldn’t be alive. She can see him now.

And hunger… hunger’s a powerful thing, even more powerful for someone who’s never been hungry, never missed a meal or a snack, for hundreds of years. Now, it claws at his stomach, makes it shrink into itself. His body trembles with it, leaves him dizzy. It’s as close as it can come to begging him.

Whatever he eats, he wishes he hadn’t. He’s still sick from it when he comes back, and the filth’s enough for him to try and bear the river. His hands burn when he’s done, and all he can do is pray.

It’s easy to lose track after that. He eats when he has to, sleeps when he has to, cleans when he has to. It’s night, then day, then day again, and he couldn’t tell you if it’s minutes or hours or days or weeks, has no one around to tell him—he’s almost sure the loneliness, the touch-starvation, kills him at one point. He’s not built to be alone. He’s not built for the sun. He is built for the terror, the weight of Her probability pressed against him.

He gets sicker, sees no one. The only thing he can rely on is this damnable river, and eventually he’s moving uphill. The burn becomes familiar, and, after enough time, if he waits for night and shuts his eyes, he can almost pretend he’s back home.

His shoes begin to fall apart from the wear, and with no way to repair them, his feet tear. Something infects them, and he could swear it at some point kills him, but in the string of hunger and giving in and the occasional freeze it’s hard to tell what or when.

He comes to a conclusion, though: whatever he is, it isn’t what lives in the tales. It’s undoubtedly worse.

You can’t go forever without running into other folk. He hears their voice first, and he’s almost too scared to approach, too scared of the things folk do to each other, but desperation leads him to at least hedge past them.

They’re fishing.

They don’t speak Port, and no one from the surface knows his mother tongue, and he can tell from the grip on the pole, the twitch of their mustache, that they’re thinking, though he never knows what surface folk are thinking. He almost edges away, but they reach out their hand the way he would to one of his brother’s dogs when he first met them, still unconvinced they wouldn’t bite, and he’s starving, so desperate for a way to fill any of his needs, that he takes it.

It helps that it’s the most gravely a stranger’s ever treated him when he was alone.

They guide him to their home, and he’s corrected on what a small community looks like—this one doesn’t even have a proper railway to link the worn stone to the trains he’s used to traveling, something older in its place.

The pair of them weave through the buildings, a weight of age to everything he’s only ever encountered anything similar to down in the caverns, the kind of thing he thinks can only be built when you stay somewhere for several eras. Eventually, the Human he’s with peeks into a building, the kind that’s loud with the act of creation, calls someone, and out comes someone with hair longer than his. His chest hurts with the tightness. Their face wrinkles up when they look at him, and he itches. It could be annoyance. It could be anything—he doesn’t know the faces of surface-folk well, and he’s made stupid mistakes before. Never stupid enough to be one of the times he’s nearly–only ever nearly before this–gotten himself killed, but there’s always a first. A Dweller would be so much easier to deal with, the connectivity of his own keying him in more easily than a face ever could.

Then again, a Dweller might know who he was, so small blessings.

They talk to each other, and he can’t tell if they’re fighting or if this is just a language that sounds angry. But the hand on his stays loose, and then it’s goading him forward with the long-haired one still speaking.

They get food in him.

It makes him sick, but at this point he’ll take the sickness of a meal eaten without prayer over the emptiness he’s been courting long enough time’s begun to bleed. They’re soft with him. Gentle. He can only just try to accept it. But he stays the night. Because he’s not dying. Because so far nothing bad is happening.

He doesn’t stop thinking about his handlers. How could he when they’re the only true siblings he has left?

In the morning he discovers the days are best described as ‘bleak’ here. They make him breakfast, and he’s sure for a moment it’ll kill him, but it doesn’t. They talk to each other more, and then they call someone on the old phone.

Even through the wire and muffled against an ear, he recognizes Composed’s voice.

He practically snatches the phone away, but they let him.

“Hey,” it says, and if he didn’t know it so well, he might believe that the lack of a snag was anything other than their curse of a name.

So he says back, “Are you coming for me?”

“Yeah.”

The relief hits him like the rail. He only has to worry about a Dweller with red gloves showing up and taking him away so much longer, and then he’ll be safe and hidden and with his handlers and the baubles again. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

A moment of silence stretches on, but he knows it. He knows that’s not the end of it.

He’s rewarded. Clipped in the familiar way it has, in a way others might believe the coolness it has, it says, “I thought you’d died.”

And Composed is just a name, a name that’s had its power broken, but it still cooler and calmer than most of them can manage, and he needs to bare the secret to someone, so he says, “I did.”

Silence plays between them all, buzzing on his skin.

It isn’t fair how calm it answers, “What?”

-

A break in our regularly scheduled programming! The girls are coming back soon prommy (I've got things Plotted. I've got Hard Deadlines for it. The WorksTM) but I really wanted to do this prompt and I had a setting and AU that just works you know?

I've tried to make my dear woofwoofs comprehensible without any prior knowledge and the reviews say I've done pretty well, so hopefully, if you read this, you can enjoy it! (This was... an issue in earlier drafts 🤦)

Happy Leap Day!!!