une † oh glorious apostle st jude

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une † oh glorious apostle st jude

day 3 } spam & voice

[She wakes in darkness. This does not, in itself, surprise her, because she is dead. She imagines that Dr. Pryce never saw a thing quite as dead as her, once all was said and done, but then - maybe her imagination just doesn't stretch far enough.]

[Against the darkness, she blinks. It has no effect. Stands, hitting her head on the ceiling. With nothing better to do and cramping calves - a strange side effect of dying, or totally unrelated - she walks in a half-crouch with her hands running along the wall, fingers occasionally brushing something smooth, cool, dry. With sockets.]

[She tries not to think about it, but after failing to find anything with which to make a fire, ends up thinking about it anyway in the unending dark.]

[The communicator in her pocket is a puzzle, but eventually she figures out which button turns it on by trial and error. Then she uses the static to her advantage, flicks it on and off three times quick, three slow, three quick: dit dit dit; dah, dah, dah; dit dit dit.]

[Then, quietly:] Won't [bzzt] beat me th--[bzzt]--sy.

day 4 } spam

[The pads of her fingers feel impossibly rough against the mushroom caps. She imagines spores crawling under her skin, although she knows that spores move on wind that doesn't exist down here, and are not sentient or independent enough to crawl anywhere. She is hungry, and licks her fingers despite her best judgment. Her tongue tingles.]

[She moves away. In the depths of the caves now, and beginning to hear things she had not heard before. Movements of people or things in groups. Friend or foe, she has no idea, but frankly, the latter's more likely. She doesn't think she has many friends left anywhere, and statistically, most of them are probably not underground.]

[She finds two femurs - identifying them by shape - lying together in the configuration of a cross. She considers this a sign, and is also appalled that she hasn't made herself a weapon yet. Sharpening them against each other is slow going and makes a sharp, dusty sound, but it's something to do. That's right. Something to do.]

day 5 } spam & voice

[This was not the right choice of cave to sleep in. She knows this somehow instinctively, but can't say what exactly about it was wrong. Only that she wakes with whispers ringing in her ears and is too afraid, too swallowed by darkness to hold her weapons right. Her fingers shake unnaturally for someone as fearless as her.]

[Is this what it's like to walk in darkness forever? How long has it been? She's hungry again, but there is nothing to eat, not even wrong mushrooms. Her stomach will claw its way out of her mouth. She thinks she sees the light of God, only maybe it's the reflection of her own eye in the eye of some predator, jaws held frozen in faux-rictus just above and below her head, waiting to clamp down. Maybe she is looking down its throat. Maybe walking in darkness forever is the same thing as being swallowed alive.]

[The light is gone. She is not screaming yet, but she can feel the scream bubbling up in her throat. Clawing the walls before she realizes it, noticing only when she feels blood, her own blood, welling from broken fingernails. Stop, in Michael's voice, but she isn't afraid of him and doesn't trust him anymore. He isn't here to help anyway.]

[The screaming comes later, and by accident or on purpose (even she doesn't know; is this a distress call or a violent dirge?), it goes out.]

This your motherfuc--[bzzt]--help? Is this w--[bzzt]n answer? [bzzt] dark like a wor--[bzzt]--a beast? Fuck you! I never want--[bzzt]--ou anyway!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Here is the trick: accept that you are in Hell, and you are not escaping Hell, on every level and in every way, and it becomes something you can ignore.

Dean learned this quickly, though not quickly enough, once upon a time. There were other things he couldn't ignore, of course, and the human soul can only ignore being unable to escape for so long before it begins to look for any means possible anyway, begins imagining any end available, but he pulled himself out of his grave and with him he learned the true meaning of perseverance, among other things less savory. He knows how to put his head down, shut his mouth, and keep putting one foot in front of the other possibly more than any other man alive.

So he is in Hell again, or something aspiring to be Hell; it is dark, it is full of enemies, it is full of terrors, and it is inescapable. He accepts it, he accepts all of it, and he puts one foot in front of the other even though his skin is burning with violence and his vision is darker than the caverns around him, and he has lost track of where he's going or where he's come from or why, how long he's been going.

His shoulder and side ache abominably and there is blood streaked down over his skin, flaking from his palm where he's still holding onto his pickaxe; there is a gun in his thigh holster, much smaller than the one it was made for but serviceable with modification, and he still has his pack. And he is attracted by the screaming, drawn through the blackness like a hellhound on a damned soul, picking up to a jog despite being unable to see his feet until he can fall upon whoever - not whatever, none of the creatures here speak in words - is shrieking like she could fight her way free of Hell by only being vicious enough.]

Shhhhhh.... [It is not a soothing sound, but a harsh, wordless warning. There is nothing in his hands now, but she'll draw everything within hearing down on them and he may not know where or when or who he is right now, but he knows that much and she will not get there by fighting like this, aimless and wild.] They'll hear you.

[He says shh and she hears threat, the whispering of rushes when there is no wind, the rustle of leaves in a dead tree, the hiss of a snake in the Arctic Circle. Whips around and presses the femur, sharp though never sharp enough, to his throat. Through it, she can feel a pulse. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.]

[She can tell just from his height that he was not born here. He is not adapted to living in these stunted caves, too big, too wide, too tall. But she can't see his face. The only things she knows about him are that he is tall and broad, with a mouth to speak and legs to walk, and that he is about the same body temperature as the average human being.]

You could be they. [Never mind that this is a lie at least in spirit. She is pretty sure he's not.] Don't move. You might get a bone splinter in your throat.

[Her own is hoarse from screaming, though strangely the urge is quashed now. For now. It will come back, like malaria. Like herpes.]

[Many would be threatened, cowed, nonplussed to find themselves suddenly at the opposite end of a makeshift stake, but Dean accepts the terms of the negotiation: he grunts when his shoulder is jarred sending fresh, hot pain radiating down his arm and across his chest, past his temples, but he can ignore that and he does. That's the easy part.

There's another movement in the dark and if they had light, if they could see, maybe he would've been less willing from his current position, but they can't and he is. Something hard and cold is there a moment later, digging into the space just under the edge of her ribcage, angled up tight between them and the unmistakable, mechanical crank of a hammer cocking rebounds off the ceiling far above them.]

But will it happen before we find out how tolerant you are to hot lead? [It's not, really, a threat: it is the counter to her offer, the other foot brought up to meet the first. A greeting and a handwave and a promise that he won't be as easy as all of that.]

We need to go. Now. You were far too loud.

[It's not, really, a threat; it's just talking. Clementine knows this language, and it makes her smile even though she doesn't realize she's smiling, teeth in the dark where no one can see them, be intimidated or intrigued by them. She can't put anyone at ease down here, can't put anyone on edge.]

Do you have eyes? [The question emerges entirely out of her control. It's something she's been wondering, to be sure. She can't see his eyes, so how can she know he has them? And if he doesn't, he's something other, something wrong. She shouldn't go with him.]

[At the same time she reasons all of this out, she realizes it is not reasonable. The cock of a muzzle against her chest, that is pure logic. She should follow it.]

[She taps the side of the bone against his throat, contemplative, then lowers it.]

Lay on, Macduff.

[It is, when considered from the proper angle, a reasonable question; or if not a reasonable question, then at least part and parcel to a reasonable litmus test for their current environ. Still he waits to see what she'll do and if he's breathing harshly, it's because he's on day God knows what of swimming through timeless darkness with hungry mouths at his heels.

It's almost like home.

When she lowers the stake, there's one thing he takes the time to do before he bothers moving: his free hand reaches, made stiff and clumsy by the torn muscles controlling it but steady nonetheless, to catch her wrist. He is not gentle but neither is his grip any tighter than necessary, and he raises her fingertips to brush across the soft, blood-flaked skin of his eyelids, the feather touch of his eyelashes closing beneath the contact, and then he lets go again.]

Stay close. [He backtracks three, four steps until the toe of his boot hits his fallen pickaxe and he stoops in one easy motion to pick it back up as he holsters the gun; the lighter comes out next, a flicker in the darkness to get his bearings, only a stillframe of the world around them in which he marks the safe passages and the death traps, and then he strikes out confidently just to the left of the way he came.

There is comfort in madness; this is the other trick of surviving Hell.]

[She does not start at his touch on her hand. Somehow, it's expected. Neither tender nor friendly, but crisply economical. There is a purpose to all of his movements; nothing he does is extraneous. This much she knows from forty-five seconds of knowing him, as well as you can know someone in a pitch black world.]

[She has never realized before how much she depended on sight. Unusual, given how bad her eyesight really is compared to, say, a hawk's. Pathetic. But helpful for context.]

[What does make her start, paradoxically, is the softness of his lashes against the curl of her pinkie while her fore- and middle fingers touch dried blood. But she doesn't start much, and she stills before seconds have passed.]

[He has eyes. This stills her heart and starts her feet up. He backtracks, she follows after, one sharp bone in each hand, a comforting weight. Where is he going? She doesn't know. Does she trust him? No. Does she distrust him? No, sir.]

[But goddamn if he doesn't seem adapted to this place, she thinks; the way she could be if she lived down here for another twenty years. It's in this moment that she thinks to wonder how long he's been down here - days, weeks, years - and if it matters. If she gives a shit.]

[She doesn't say a word. Just rides his heels to whatever corner of damnation he's aiming for.]

[He wouldn't answer if she asked; not even if he could, would he answer. It's for him to know, for him to keep and remember, and maybe he's talking about now and maybe he's not. He's not talking at all. It's a moot point.

The most important way to decide who stays and who goes, Dean has also learned, is to let them try and see who falls behind. He's not attached to her, not any more than he's attached to anyone that isn't actively trying to kill him, but she's someone else trapped here and that gives them an unwilling kinship that stands in for whatever it is that would have made him help her before. He decides when he walks away that he's done all he can and it's up to her now: either she'll keep up or she'll fall behind.

She keeps up and when, two lighter flames later, he pauses just to the safe side of a long, slick slide down heaving and roiling rock into blackness, she's still there; it's enough, for now. The hunter stops, the gravel he kicks ahead of them underfoot spraying out into nothing and bouncing down and down and down and that's when he knows they can't go any further in that direction. He'll find another, in a moment, or she will. Maybe they'll find two. He drops his pack to the ground and, a moment later, hits his knees beside it with a harsh exhale that nonetheless goes unacknowledged.]

Why were you screaming? [He doesn't ask it like he truly believes there's an answer for it. It's more a just in case, a maybe, a nod to the fact that there's enough real threat down here to be afraid of as much as the rest of it.]

[It's a strange sort of trust, or maybe it's not trust at all - a simple understanding, instead, that if she keeps close behind him, he'll only lead her into death by leading himself into it, too. Which helps not at all if he is, say, suicidal, or terminally stupid. But she's not a psychologist. It's not her job to determine these things.]

[It's not even her job to stay alive anymore, she supposes. She was let go, as it were, from that particular career. They just didn't have space for her anymore, in the world of the living.]

[He stops, and she stops after him, her fingers curling into loose fists around the bones. When she crouches beside him, it's quieter, and far enough away that no part of them will touch, but she can still hear him breathing.]

I wasn't screaming. [She speaks precisely but quietly into the darkness.] I was having a conversation.

[He's still listening, she thinks but doesn't say. Or he never was.]

Hn.

[Dean is more than familiar with these sorts of conversations; he's yelled himself hoarse having his own versions, off and on throughout his life. It's done him about as much good as it's done her in the end, but it tells him more than she probably realizes. She's here from the ship, too, not a lost native from the surface; she's dead. She's desperate, possibly more than she knows.

More involuntary kinship. This makes him anything but happy, though there is a grim kind of comfort in the familiar discomfort. In the darkness his jaw tightens and he digs deeper into his pack until his fingers brush his canteen; he yanks it out and shoves it at her. Their surroundings are not the only details he's been taking in along the way, and irritation seeps into his voice to mask the deeper rooted annoyance.]

Where'd you lose your pack?

Pack?

[She searches her memory. Pack, pack. The last thing she had like a pack was in her truck, but that's long gone now. Along with Peter. Peter got away.]

[One small good thing. Peter ran. Does that mean she broke her oath? Is that why she's here? She's not fool enough to believe that's why she died, no, she died because she stuck her nose into the wrong family's business. But she never did kill Peter.]

[Poor baby.]

You must have me mistaken for somebody else. [Offhand, casual. The incongruous question does not make her afraid. She may have lost her capacity for fear in madness, at least for the moment.]

For somebody smart enough to grab it, then.

[What this means in theory is that he should leave her here; she's loud, she's panicking, she's either lost her pack or never had it. He'd be better off alone.

What this means in practice is he shoves a loaf of bread at her, too. He's not sure how long it's been specifically, but he knows it's been long enough that she's likely gotten desperate enough to try to eat something she shouldn't, or she could do with fuel to keep her mind straight.

Not that there's much hope of that down here. Not that there's much hope in general.]

You'll have to eat that in the dark, but if you feel wet spots, tear it off until it's dry again. [It's damp down here and he's not sure it hasn't started to mold, but it's the quickest fix he has.] Eat the whole thing. Then we have to move again.

[She snorts, sneers in the dark where he can't see her. It's a stab at her pride, and weirdly, it takes. She would not be foolish enough to leave a pack behind if she'd been provided one. Semper paratus. Fuck that shit.]

[At least she can see it for what it is. A dig. Her head hurts, though, so much that she's so startled by the food shoved her way, she almost slaps it out of his hand.]

[Deep breaths. She takes the bread, feels it all over, rips off a few moist places. Then she pulls it apart into big chunks and eats them without tasting them, quickly and efficiently but not fast enough to give herself a stomachache.]

[Eating in the dark is not a challenge. Doing it silently is, but she manages. It takes her five minutes, then she stands, wiping her hands on her pants and reaching blindly in the dark to help Dean up.]

Lead on, Virgil.

[Dean would be unimpressed with her insult; it's nearly impossible to have pride when he's seen the things he's seen, done the things he's done, and honestly maintaining it is more trouble than it's worth. He hasn't so much let it fall by the wayside as it was ripped from him but he thinks, sometimes, that maybe it's better this way.

He's quiet and still while she eats, taking the time to listen, to stare with absolute, dizzying blindness into the dark. He wonders, idly, how long it will take him to adapt like the natives have. If he will. He's already started, he thinks, but then he had a pretty good headstart on those around him. It's almost novel, having the opportunity to adapt more or less at his own pace, barring the bloodthirsty people trying to claim this cavern as their own. But then, they're not peculiar to these caves and this world, wherever that is.

By the time he hears her shifting, feels her fingers brush his shoulder, he does take the hand up to stand out of his crouch and shoulders his pack again - he's confused by the name but that's less important, right now, than keeping on the move. Just one last thing to attend to:]

If you've eaten anything that makes you start hallucinating, and you try to kill me, I'll put you down without even hesitating. Clear?

[Actually if she tries to kill him at all, but some people think that being crazy grants them clemency, and that's what he's looking to avoid. It's not a threat, the way he says it. It's just the way it is, like the question he asks next without the routine kind of judgment others would append to it.] You run into the locals yet, or are you just paranoid?

[ Day Five ]

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