Chapter Text
But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we, / Half dust, half deity, alike unfit / To sink or soar, with our mix'd essence make / A conflict of its elements -Byron “Manfred” (1817) Act I, Scene II.
She used to dance. Sing occasionally, too. She used to enjoy it.
She had been known to hum fairly often, once upon a time. Back when she had still been allowed music.
Before she had become this. A creature reshaped; made to be small and quiet.
That… had been a long time ago. She wasn’t sure how long, exactly. Time went funny when a room replaced the sky, when a window became her only freedom.
The walls of the room were the same as they had always been. Four of them made up the canvas of her world, crowding in tight on all sides.
White paint peeled in sagging waves at a topmost corner where the roof had once sprung a leak, long since dried and left that way.
A small window cut high against one wall, the blinds dropped to the sill and folded flat, the curtains drawn to block out the glare of the yellowed streetlight on the corner just beyond its frame.
She knew the tall lamp was there, just beyond the neighbor’s decayed fence, because she had lifted the edge of the curtain before.
To see.
Only for a moment.
She didn’t linger.
She made sure no one saw.
She was careful.
The bedroom door loomed on the opposite wall, an imposing prison guard in its old, battered frame; dark wood showing its age with years of scarring.
The handle was probably unlocked, but she didn’t dare touch it.
It was safer here, within these familiar four walls. The nights she spent quietly counting cracks in the drywall and splinters in the parquet flooring were restful ones.
The house wasn’t really as isolating as it seemed. As she sometimes secretly thought it might be.
She wasn't ungrateful for the space she was given. For being allowed to stay.
She even owned a radio… kind of.
It wasn’t actually hers. Not… not really.
It belonged to her dad.
Even now, after all this time.
It would always be her dad’s radio.
It dwelled, dusty but never forgotten, on the hardwood floor of the room; in the dark space beneath the bed, behind the drape of a casually misplaced top sheet.
She wasn’t actually sure if it turned on anymore. It wasn’t even plugged in.
A thing kept safe while it remained quiet. Whole and undamaged as long as it stayed forgotten by the other occupant of the home.
The only sound that filled this particular night was the occasional passing of cars: tires running across wet concrete, and the soft hush of rain as it puddled in the gutters and gently tapped against her windowpane. The curtains and blinds obscured passing headlights, but she could still hear them going by.
It was comforting, in its own way.
To know that the world beyond her four walls would keep going, even when she couldn’t.
The weight pinning her down was a mountainous, unyielding force.
Cigarette smoke and cheap liquor filled her nose, astringent and burning; it crawled down the back of her throat, searing the tender inner membrane until all she felt was raw.
The old parquet flooring felt gritty and dry against her arms and the exposed stretch of her calves where her limbs lay pliant and unmoving.
The back of her head throbbed where she’d crashed to the floor.
Clumsy. She was so clumsy.
“I’m sorry,” familiar words, distant and fuzzy, wheezed in a choked voice that might have been her own. It was hard to tell. “Please, I can be good,” the sound dissolved, a phrase repeated until broken, skipping like a record through her days, the needle finally removed from the loop.
She wondered where she’d gone wrong. What she’d done to upset him this time. What cost she would have to pay to prove she wasn’t ungrateful.
The heavy pressure around her throat grew unbearable; not in slow increments, but all at once. The entirety of the oppressive weight shifting from her chest to thrust down on the soft inner shell of her neck.
It was then that something crunched, collapsing with the wet give of delicate cartilage.
An inevitable consequence. One she had contemplated on countless occasions, but upon its arrival she found there was little left to consider. It just… was what it was.
Her mouth filled with the tang of copper, layered over the bitter, ashy residue of secondhand smoke.
It didn’t hurt. She didn’t even startle.
She didn’t feel anything at all.
She was fine.
She just needed to be still.
Silent.
Small.
It would be over soon.
It would be okay.
Everything would be okay.
She wasn’t sure what ‘okay’ looked like yet, but she was certain she would know it as soon as it arrived.
It would be over soon; it never lasted long. It always happened like this, like a lightning strike. Fast, without warning, devastating.
This wasn’t even that bad, comparatively.
It could have hurt more.
It had, in the past. When he wanted it to.
There was an agonizing kind of mercy in the thought, and she grasped it like a lifeline, like a habit, like the kind of suffering that hurt less because it wasn’t senseless.
He was always trying to do what was best for her. Even now he was still trying, and she was so grateful for all the effort he kept giving her.
She just… messed everything up.
She wasn’t actually all that good for much, to tell the truth.
No one else wanted to put up with her. When all else had fallen away, when the walls had been forced between her and the world at large, he was always there to remind her why she had to stay behind them. Not with a locked door, but with a lesson.
A lesson that would correct her mistakes, if only she could just try hard enough. He would fix her. Make her better. Make her good for something.
The walls of the little room remained the same.
Even as the details grew hazy and dark, she was sure everything was as inescapably unchanged as it had always been.
For a few more sluggish heartbeats, the girl on the floor stared absently up at the broken ceiling fan as it turned in yet another endless, lazy circle against the backdrop of dusty drywall directly above her. She watched its slow rotation, pulled helplessly along by the weight of its own unbalanced, warped blades.
The dark of her pupils slowly released their constricted shape as she watched, pinpricks that had tightened with fear now expanding out like a drop of liquid landing on a flat surface.
The fan’s lackluster movement did nothing to ease the trapped breath burning stagnant and poisonous in her chest. Even when the weight lifted, the crush remained.
Consequences arrived at long, long last.
Her eyes fluttered shut with the soft drop of tired lashes.
A curtain drawn to close out the world. A silent radio, dreaming of songs it had played long ago.
A boundary she couldn’t cross, a time she couldn’t return to.
Everything was the same as it had ever been.
She should probably feel something about that.
She didn’t.
There was just… nothing.
It found her in the space between life and death. A thing existing in a way it was never meant to. Unnatural. Monstrous in a way she was unfamiliar with, and so for her it just… wasn’t. There was no comparison.
In the intangible non-existence beyond the sun-drenched plains and rain-soothed valleys of life, but before the first breath of what lay beyond the pale, something vast and eternal slipped into the hollowed-out shape of a dying girl.
It wasn’t mortal; it never had been. It wasn’t even a creature that could be described as held within the constraints of understandable reality.
It was an ancient, endless expanse of nothing at all and within a single drop of this unfathomable nothing, it cradled everything. Between every star and looming behind all of time, it was more than the mathematics of mortals could calculate, beyond what the language of Angels and Gods could describe.
An omnipotent absence that narrowed its attention down to an incomprehensibly small scale, an impossible coincidence, an unfathomable chance. A black hole growing sentience and taking note of a single atom of dust would have been more likely.
And yet.
As she traveled the path well worn by countless souls before her, in a moment between time when nothing and everything existed all at once, it found her.
Perhaps lonely in its own, unfathomable way. It had contemplated the concept of mortality within the eternity that had been before even the first light had glimmered, and now it was ready for birth and the rapturous baptism of holding physical shape. Ready at last to experience the unbearable light of being. A glimpse through a window that was too incomprehensibly small for its current non-existence, and perhaps, to experience the shape and feel of the world beyond it.
From its place among the weave of space-time, it identified this impossibly kindred desire in her.
She couldn’t say the same of it; too much of everything and too much of nothing at all left her with only the teetering edge of madness at the attempt to even look.
But she didn’t need to comprehend its existence to understand what it wanted. To drown in empathy for the shape of an infantile desire, newly born, confused and overwhelmed with existence and reality as a mortal understood it. Even in this place, in the nothingness between life and death. The path of an immortal soul too tangible a plane compared to its unlife within non-existence.
And so she consented to it for no more complicated a reason than memories of a heavy window drape peeled away in sneaking glances.
And, even more than that, it was a choice freely given. Autonomy returned, just beyond the edge of annihilation.
In tandem, it consented to her; a mirrored surrender, their reflections reversed, the shape of a desire shared; impossibly, inexplicably compatible enough for It and Her to become Them.
Their melding birthed a new quintessence, unknown and uncategorisable.
Untouched by the crafting hand of God.
A soul unable to be defined by its mortal actions. The shape of a spirit in name only, unstable and shuddering at every edge; undulating within the limits of its new confines; thrashing with the first taste of sensation as it learned how to exist on the same plane of reality as her.
They arrived Together at the crossroads and received their due judgement.
The incorporeal hand of Heaven didn’t hesitate.
It didn’t know how.
Since time immemorial, it had fulfilled its core function: all was righteous or debauched. There was nothing else. It was ruthless in its passing of judgement, always, for all time.
Heaven turned its infallible, all-seeing, sightless gaze toward the fractalizing shape of Them, Together, and in Them it saw an abomination masquerading as a soul of God’s creation.
And if it was not of God, then there was only one other path on the road. There had only ever been one other path.
There was no unique distinction in its sight, no third, heretofore unknown option to contemplate.
An abomination the same as any other, for it had no concept with which to weigh something so Other.
It mattered not that the soul shuttered and warped, breaking beyond its own confines at every edge, indecipherable and unknowing of its own dimensions or outline in its sudden creation.
All that mattered was judgement.
And so, Together, as One, they were cast into Hell.