Chapter Text
There is nothing.
No heat. No cold.
Empty nothingness.
Perhaps possibility, perhaps inevitability.
There is nothing, and then there is pain.
It begins like a sunburn. Light and present. Reminiscent of a constant energy and power.
Like lounging in the sand, hearing the waves crest and whisper back out.
Then it begins to ache.
It starts in the teeth. Root by root it grabs hold and trembles.
Spreading out across the jaw, like being butted with the end of a gun.
It Burns .
Deep burning, aching and wrenching.
Every muscle twitches and spasms. The skin is roiling to get away from the current of electricity slowly poisoning the meat and bones.
The darkness of nothing is being ripped apart as something crackles and pops. Ripping apart the seams and shoving inside something writhing and obscene.
There’s a sea-bunny in his veins. It contorts and writhes and forcible pushes through his arteries and the thin thin blood vessels of his skin.
It crawls and moves until it’s lodged in his throat, and it sucks out every breath he tries to take.
He’s choking on the creature in his lungs. The disease spreading through his blood.
When he was eight, he had drowned.
A loose bit of anchor line had wrapped around his ankle and dragged him down into the water.
He wasn’t afraid of dying then.
He was amazed that you could see a rainbow underwater.
Drowning was nothing like this.
He sees the starbursts. The tiny hemorrhage splitting apart above his irises. Like a nebula suddenly manifesting in the pitch black din of space. Tiny white flares of new-born stars leaving behind the blue-black supernovas. His head is filling up and the thing suffocating him is heaving.
He can’t feel the pain though. It’s like looking at a bacteria or virus writhing under the intense eye of a microscope. He’s been thrown out of his body and can only feel it with numb unseeing hands.
But at the same time, he knows exactly where the circuits connect.
It’s like looking into the breaker box. Tucked behind the rack of nice church clothes in the side-house. Old wood creaking beneath his feet as he pulls and pushes apart the old boxes and screeching wheels.
He rips open the door, thin metal flimsy and rusted tightly to the wall. A ring of rust welding the machinery together. His nails turn red with his attempts to scrape and dig away the metal. Blood drip-drip-dripping to the sea burnt wood beneath his feet.
The door gives with a squeal.
The squeal becomes sharp cries and whimpers.
He is kneeling, blind and deaf.
Salt digs into his knees, and the dry wind of the Badwater Basin scraping across his skin and sending tiny shards of glass down his throat.
There’s still a current...
It’s blinding, pain and crippling fear wrapping around his fingers and squelching against his palms as he digs into the delicate machine housing such pesky hardware.
He finds a wire and rips at it, and the machine jerks and cries out in childlike fear.
“It’s okay…” his mouth parts and closes but what comes out is the clatter of teeth and chalk.
“Once it’s out...you’ll feel better…” He’s wheezing and choking on his own tongue but the words rush out like a hurricane.
He doesn’t remember being one to talk to mechanical objects like pets, to treat machines like children.
He rips and rends. The cries are loud and piercing and come to him in the rumble of thunderclaps against the dry salt flats. He feels tears pouring down his face, because it begins to rain and the rain soaks through his clothes.
Then, once he’s pushed and tore through enough viscera, he feels the pulsating creature that emits the volcanic burst of static and doubt.
It wriggles and beats. It feels like it tries to match with the hammering pulse in his fingers, but each time it syncs he is wrenched with pain and sorrow.
Then, with a great shout- he rips the motherboard out of the machine.
His eyes open all at once. Like they were ripped apart by unseen hands.
Its bright light, piercing and rupturing the sensitive tissue of his retina.
It makes his skitter away and hide like a street cat in the beam of a flashlight.
He blinks, and the starburst novas return in vengeance.
His palms skid against the salt, and the sting is hardly anything compared to the relief of being free from the static and electricity that had been frying his insides.
He falters, gasps like a tuna on the wharfing. Sucking in air but not being able to taste the loam of surf he knows he should be sinking into.
It’s rust. Cooper and tang and it sticks to his teeth like a blade against bone.
His vision clears. And the salt is stained bright bright crimson.
Like a strawberry, dipped in sugar.
The world is white. End to end its white. The sky and the earth have blended together and become a solid pulsing plane of white. And right at its center He kneels in a slowly radiating halo of blood and oil.
He stares, in horror. The first emotion to properly connect with the sights he feel.
Before him, only a foot or two away, lays his own body.
But it’s not Him. It’s a him before.
Before water and ice. Before sky and fire. Before the mechanical purrs and soft prosthetic whirrs.
It’s him, but younger. Naive and gentle and joyful. Not scarred with the gaping gorge of war and loss.
Not a scar, not a blemish. Just the even touch of sun and heritage stretched across the shattered rib cage. His chest is pried open like a music box, and out spills wires and coils drenched in blood and oil. The wires are still twitching, little jolts of electricity still forcing movement through the body.
Lungs exposed to the salt begin to wither and shrink.
And He feels the clamp in his chest and he gasps as his back bows out and his blood-soaked hands dig into his throat uselessly.
The body is shuddering. Sobbing. Thrumming with current and fire.
The heart, a half mutilated lump of coal and sand-glass. It thump-thump-thumps away between their hands. There’s an ooze of dark purple oil that shines like the feathers of a peacock in the bright light.
His body, both of them, are writhing against the salt and the skin is stretching farther and farther to fit the ever-growing collapse of his lungs. His lips parted but only clicks and screams come out.
He knows that he has to kill it.
The boy.
The boy is not him.
He repeats it, in screams and the morse code of his nails clacking against the dry compounded soil.
He has to kill it...and he will because it is not him.
He is not there, he is not here.
He died.
He remembers dying. Like trees remember how to grow when they burst from the pod.
Like trying to wade through the surf on weak current addled legs.
The sword appears in his hand. It’s bright red and clean sterilized white and he grips it like a scalpel between his palms. He drags his knees across the salt and it rips away the black under armor of his flight suit.
There’s a rumble. Like the roar of thunder on the other side of the horizon.
He stumbles and falls and he’s looking face to face with the boy.
Lance looks at him, tears streaming down his too-dry cheeks. He’s begging but the thunder is deafening in His ears. The weakest pleas and begging sobs.
Even while dead, he still knows compassion.
He sees a flash, a shooting comet across his eyelids- of a woman gently touching his face and coaxing the air back through his lungs.
He presses his forehead to Lance’s. He whispers, “It’s okay...you can’t let go now...I’m going to help you...”
The heart is hammering away in the heaving maw of the open wound. Thunderous and sparking out like a ruptured node. The thunder is resonating from within and without.
The sword pierces through and drags like walking through wet sand.
All at once the heat and swell of the salt vanishes. The sky screeches open and reveals the undulating mass of the universe.
The earth cracks open and out pours the cleanest water. Bright blue and shimmering with the cosmos reflecting from above. Galaxies pooling like milk and oil and washing away the blood-soaked salt until it swirls and becomes the precarious patterns of solar systems.
He’s hunched over the delicate frame of a little boy.No more than five. The sword is his own hand, plunged deep into the earth through the body.
Dull, space-blue eyes look unseeingly at the sky. Little flashes of far away light reflect back from the glassy irises. The stars above dropping out and crashing into the water like pebbles.
He looks at the tiny body, and a low mourning sound rips apart his throat.
All the air that had been trapped in his chest, that cracked his ribs and splintered his sternum- came rushing out in a desperate wail.
He wrenched his arm away, and only a second later the hole welled up with the clearest water. Bright and twinkling and dancing in the light. A spring came rushing out the little boy’s chest, pouring out and across the unmarred skin like raindrops.
It dissolved into the water, and little minnows writhed away from the drops out into the vast emptiness of the plane of water.
He sobs. Wails and screams.
He buries his face into damp hair, so carefully he cradles the body to his chest and weeps.
Minnows and guppies spill out across his arms and become whales and sharks, leaping out of the shin-deep water and crashing back down miles away.
He feels no pain. The constant aching has vanished and left him hollowed out like the hole in the child’s chest.
Then, there are hands grasping his shoulders.
Calloused and rough and desperately yanking him away from the body.
They reach across and wrap around his chest, and if he weren’t sobbing with grief, he would feel the warmth breaths against his ear.
It’s trying to pull him away. But if he leaves, then he will collapse into sea-foam.
He can’t leave this little boy to die alone. Not when such tiny hands reach out to him.
His arms reach out, clutching at the water and pulling out jellyfish and crabs as he tries to swim back to the boy.
The water churns. A whale comes crashing out and the surf rises up in a mighty whitecap.
The foam and surf becomes stiff tuff and sand. It rises up as the singular point of land in an endless sea.
He sees the boy standing there. Wide-eyed and blank-faced. A gaping hole pouring out endless water and the essence of life.
From the hole, falls out a large seed. It plops into the water and foam froths around it.
A thing begins to grow. Limbs snapping together and expanding.
A heart and lungs piecing together with rock shards and seaweed. Limpets and barnacles for eyes and ears.
It clings to the rocks, claws leaving gouges in the soft stone.
Then it hauls itself up, and sloughs off the foam to leave behind a clear coat of soft soft fur and muscle.
A lion comes forth. Shaking itself off and splattering starlight across the rocks.
It looks like Mother of Pearl, tinkling away into the water with gentle plops.
The pair watch as he is dragged away into the crashing sea. The little boy’s hand clutching at the lions scruff. The Lion leans and gently, tenderly, presses it’s forehead to the boys.
There is a burst of light, like the fresh spark of a fire or the sudden catch of ions in the sky. Then they both shimmer out, like sunlight on the water.
Lance is blinded as he sinks into the water.
He feels the icy water itching against his chest.
He feels the deep, deep ache of a spark in his heart.
He wakes up.