#ive had this done for 3 days i just forgot 2 copy oaste it

[eyelessfog]

Red Cookie King

Red king fic for my silly swap au :] take all the double life soulmates and swap them with themselves in every other season of the life series and you have the swaps!

———

“Cleo,” BigB says seriously, voice heavy.

“BigB,” Cleo responds, matching his tone mockingly.

“No, no, no, Cleo, serious. We’re being serious now.”

Cleo squints at him. “Now I’m less sure about if I’m supposed to be serious or not.”

“Serious,” BigB says again.

“Oh,” Cleo says. “Alright!” Then they make their face grave and dark and say, sombrely, “BigB.”

“Cleo,” BigB says again. He places his hands on her shoulders, and Cleo blinks at the intensity of his gaze. “I need you to do something for me.”

“Uh. Alright? What’s up?”

“Serious!” BigB reminds.

Cleo bristles. “I’m being serious! What’s up?!”

“Cleo,” BigB says, again. “I need you to kill me.”

And Cleo stops.

“…What?”

BigB steps back, an axe appearing in his hands. He offers it out to them.

“I need you to kill me. You’re still green, because you’re… You’re better at this than I am.”

Cleo waves her hand in a so-so motion, trying to ignore the heaviness in her stomach. “I just wasn’t close to the explosion when Tango set it off. It’s not your fault.”

BigB pushes the axe further towards them, and Cleo takes it, unsure.

“But we can use this, right?” BigB seems almost excited at the prospect, and Cleo’s brows furrow. “Grian’s on red, but because he’s been telling Scar to fight, Scar has been fighting! We can do that too! We don’t have to wait for them to come to us, we can-“

“BigB, you’re going to be red,” Cleo reminds softly. “Is that okay with you?”

BigB shrugs, but she can see the shake in his arms, and the tension in his jaw. “I’m going to die again soon, I know. There are reds. There are yellows that are almost there. I’m one of them, but we can make this tactical! We can use it to win! There’s two of them. We can have an army.”

Cleo tilts her head at him, feeling a burn of grief for a death that hasn’t even happened yet. She tries for a smile. “You’ve been talking to me too much. You didn’t used to think about stuff like this. That was my job.”

BigB manages a small laugh. “I think it’s worth it. If it means we get to be partners.”

Cleo nods slowly, assuring both him and themself. The axe weighs heavy in their hands. They run their hands up it’s wooden handle, and feel the notch of a name in the wood.

“…Why me?” Cleo asks. She laughs, sounding a little bitter. “I can’t tell if you’re making me do this because I’m too loyal or not loyal enough. Is this a test?”

“I’m asking you to do this because I know you’ll understand why you have to.” BigB smiles. “Like you said. I’ve been spending all this time with you. This is the kind of plan you would make.”

Cleo shuts her mouth, grinding her teeth together. She doesn’t like this plan. She doesn’t like that it is more like something that she would think of than something that he would.

“But you wouldn’t ask me to give up my life for you like this,” BigB says. “So I’ll do it for you.”

He throws his hands out wide, smiling and open and neck bared, and Cleo hates this.

“You can do it, Cleo. You don’t have to be loyal. You don’t have to be a traitor. This doesn’t say anything about you but that I trust you enough to do this for me. And that you trust me enough to let me die.”

Cleo laughs. It’s wet sounding with tears she hasn’t cried, but that’s alright. “That’s not how that works, B,” they say through the wheezing. “We trust each other, but that has nothing to do with you dying.”

BigB starts laughing too.

It dies down slowly, and the weight of the world falls back onto their shoulders.

BigB pauses. “Cleo, is this the right thing to do?”

Cleo sighs. “I don’t know.”

And then she swings the axe.

BigB tenses on the first swing, choking on his own blood as the axe imbeds itself in his neck.

Cleo feels sick.

They pull the axe back and swing again. It hits. He’s not dead yet. They have to swing the axe just one more time.

It goes straight through his neck and Cleo feels a bit like she’s going to throw up. His head falls and rolls, and she hates the thump. It’s awful.

bigbst4tz2 was slain by ZombieCleo using ***the red king rises***

The words flash across Cleo’s vision, a blessed break from the red on the floor and on their hands and the guilt rolling in their stomach.

And then the white fades from their vision, and the scene they’re presented with might be worse.

BigB is standing, but he doesn’t have a head. Blood is dripping from the stump of his neck and onto his shirt and it’s staining far too bright of a red to be natural. The blood on the floor is moving, gathering together under his feet. He reaches down for his head (wrong, wrong, wrong,) hands stiff and face still blank and dead.

He is alive and dead all at once, and Cleo wonders absently if this is what it would have been like to watch her come back to life the first time she was ever Zombie Cleo.

The blood rises up his back - and they’re noticing that there is too much of it, more than there should be, as if the blood is stretching or multiplying or some other strange and impossible feat. He pulls his head up, up, up, rising above his head. There’s weight in the action, unlike when Cleo pops her stitches just to joke about throwing her head around. BigB is still dead, and it shows on his face, as though he isn’t aware that he’s moving at all - and maybe he doesn’t know!

Maybe it’s all part of his respawn. Some awful twist that forces them to watch as he puts himself back together and turn red slowly, slowly, slowly.

BigB places his head atop his neck. Cleo thinks she can see the exact second everything lines up, like it’s a click or flinch as some sort of life comes back to his face. His eyes flutter closed, the dull gold-brown disappearing and leaving him looking almost like himself.

And then he opens his eyes again, and they are bright, bright red.

Cleo has seen reds before.

Grian, their enemy, is red. His clothes look like they were dipped in dried blood, but it wasn’t all that big of a change considering he always wore red anyway. Tango, from the flower valley, is red too, but his eyes have been red from the moment they’d met him, and his outfit hadn’t changed at all. Even Scott, who was generally a very blue themed person, wore red like a well fitting costume.

This isn’t the case for BigB. BigB is blue. He just is. But he isn’t now.

He has red eyes instead of brown, and red blood rolling down his neck, and a cape made of blood hanging from his shoulders, and his sweater is a deep maroon.

BigB is blue.

The Red King is red.

BigB shifts uncomfortably, touching at his neck.

“Ow,” he says. His voice is so comfortingly his.

Cleo laughs. “Sorry, B, but you asked for it.”

BigB laughs too. “I did do that! Still.” He rubs his neck. “Ow.”

Cleo pauses. Belatedly, they say, “Sorry.”

“It’s fine! It’s fine. It worked! I want to see what everyone is saying!” BigB pulls out his comm, a small smile on his face.

Cleo walks over, dropping the axe with a clatter. It’s so much easier to pretend that they’re just two friends making a joke for everyone else to react to. It’s easier to drop the axe and the blood at their feet and look over BigB’s shoulder as people type in their confusion and horror. It’s easier to look at the comm and not at him.

BigB laughs and Cleo snorts when Grian types in WHAT??? They can almost hear his shriek.

And then people stop typing, and the little bit of almost normalcy that they gained disappears, and BigB puts his comm down.

“Cleo,” BigB says seriously, voice heavy.

“BigB,” Cleo responds, matching his tone.

“Did I do the right thing?” BigB asks.

Cleo doesn’t look at him. They look off at the rising sun, chasing away the dark and beginning a new day.

New day. New fight.

New plan on the table.

“I don’t know,” Cleo says honestly. “I don’t know anymore.”