Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“I think, despite everything, you’re still that little kid that I love. I see them everyday, and I see you now.”

You shifted on the stiff mattress. The grey rough blanket haphazardly tossed over the bed did nothing to stifle the chill of the cell. The cold concrete blocks covered in cracks and browning water stains dod nothing but prompt the shadows to wriggle in the night. They added to the awful darkness you sit in while you chewed at your nails all night. You never used to do that.

Your mother would murder you for such a childish habit. It grew on you while you were stuck behind bars for a weeks. Barely anyone visited you; you were under strict surveillance and although they tried to keep quiet, the Apostles would murmur of angry mobs outside the building at all times of the day. You imagined they all had pitchforks and torches at the ready. 

You pleaded for a while to allow some people in, and it took much convincing. The Apostles figured you’d be dead within the next week, so they allowed five people. You only let two visit. 

And he sat opposite you with a hand through the bars, reaching for your bruised and bitten hands for comfort. To this day, you don’t know if it was for his or your consolation. He had known you for the longest time, possibly longer than anyone else, even your own mother when she wasn’t able to watch over you and invade your space. 

“I’m scared.” Your voice was hoarse. You hadn’t used it in ages it seemed. Gravelly and much unlike how you usually sounded, he winced. This isn’t the kid he knew for all these years; so miserable and splintered. He knew you better than anyone else. 

“I am too,” he admitted. 

He sat back behind the bars again, defeated. There was no point in fighting everyone. To keep you hidden from the Apostles for years possibly was a difficult task in itself, disregarding the regular folk. 

He had seen the mobs outside. 

You chewed your thumbnail again. His hand petted your arm through the bars, sneaking beneath your white sleeve to feel the warm feverish skin. The clothes you wore were thick enough to trap your heat in thankfully. 

It was freezing in the cellars. 

The old man leaned against the iron. “I’ll bring the kid next time I visit.” 

“I don’t want him to see me like this,” you murmured. You picked at the hangnails around your fingers nervously. Back to chewing. Back to shivering. 

“You’ve seen him at his worst.” 

“It’s not fair on him.” 

“It’s not fair on him if he doesn’t see you one last time either.” 

The smell hits you before anything else.  

Stiffness grates your bones, and the ache extends to the edges of your fingers, through every crevice of skin it falters, and it worsens when you finally manage to open your eyes. 

The moment you inhale you ignore the screaming in your bones to puke over the side of a heap you lay on. You inhale for air but you find there’s none. Nothing good comes from your desperation. The smell is abhorrent. It’s something you can’t even describe. Like rot and burnt hair and mould and it burns your insides like the air flashes hot before it becomes solid. It weighs heavily in your lungs and it remains and cycles horribly and ignites the branches.  

You recognise the smell of rot. You’ve smelled it on your own mother. You understand how horrific it is. Not like this. 

Because this isn’t decaying human flesh. Not entirely. It’s food amongst carcass, amongst old fabric, used rusted metals and other rotting wood. It’s sludge and slime and–

You gag again violently, losing your footing on whatever you’re standing on. 

Your stomach turns. 

You shut your eyes tight before you topple over the heap further into bags of trash. You shouldn’t be stumbling. Not deeper into the pit. You frantically make your way back up. You try to avoid touching anything, holding your dirtied sleeve over your nose. It barely helps. 

You blindly navigate through a heap, further up to the top of wherever you are. 

You peer through your lashes before you’re forced to shut your eyes again. You try to stay standing. You stumble and fall. Fuck. You stammer a cry when your hand presses against something wet and warm for leverage. 

You try looking around. Nobody. Nothing alive moves. 

Why couldn’t you have just died? That’s what they all wanted anyway. It would’ve done you a favour. You stumble again. You almost topple. Your boot squelches over something damp; you don’t even look at what it could be.

Your pants are soaked. You feel blindly for your bag. Thankfully, by some miracle, the strap stayed secure around your body the entire descent. You try not to cry. The panicked inhaling only pulls you further towards the ground. Your foot sinks. You lose a boot. 

Your sock lands on something squishy before a sharp nick slices against your skin. 

Fuck.

You wedge your nose further into your sleeve. You smell something flowery for a moment. You think it’s your mother’s perfume. You usually hated the smell; typical old lady smell, a bit overbearingly floral, too much alcohol, but you consider it your saving grace. It quickly fades, turning into a smell akin to mildew. Still, your sleeve smells better than what lingers in the air. 

You shoulder on. 

Your free hand stays locked around your satchel. It’s still pinned together with barely any tears. You hadn’t seemed to land on anything sharp. You’d been lucky in that regard. You’re sure you could treat yourself enough, but that requires two clean hands, and your environment isn’t sterile in the slightest. The cuts on your hands and legs and your face are concerning you. They’re small, but they have the potential to worsen.

You trudge over more rotting food, scraps of fabric, the remnants of a broken piano—you didn’t even recognise it until you hiked over it and it made a horrible out of tune clang! when your boot stepped on the broken keys—and overflowing trash bags that spill with the pressure of your weight, toys, everything. It’s an endless surmount of trash, human waste, and my God the smell is indescribable. 

Your lungs heave. 

Your eye still feels swollen. 

You tumble into somewhat of a clearing. It’s a series of maybe three mattresses. One is lying down flat, and it seems the other two are pressed together standing upward. You don't find the strength to push them over and provide yourself more space to at least get off the trash and have a proper look around. 

Maybe they’ll be a giant building about half a mile away with big flashing lights that says: HOT SHOWERS HERE—and an incinerator to torch your clothes!

Wishful thinking. 

You’ve lost your fucking shoe. 

You bring your knees up to the mattress. It’s covered in dirt, but not too much. It seems like a fresh drop of sorts. You figure it would be. They drop trash a few minutes after they drop people. You pull your ankles close to assess the damage. 

You pluck your remaining shoe off. Your foot looks largely normal. Probably the cleanest part of your entire body right now. You wedge it back in to keep it untouched. You painstakingly peel your sock from your other foot. 

It’s covered in sludge and there’s a gorgeous red cut around your ankle. 

You unclip your bag from your torso before you slide it onto your lap. It’s covered in some sort of tar. It’s completely destroyed, but thankfully there’s no holes in it. You unclip the flaps and pull it open. Pill bottles have been jostled but most have remained intact. The few emergency syringes are shattered, so any impending tetanus infections will probably take you down if you don't find a way out within a day or so. 

You glance up.

The horizon is busy with bags and waste. 

You bury your nose in your shirt. It’s damp and it smells like sweat and rot, but it’s better than outside. Anything is better than outside. You wish you had the willpower to lay down and die. There’s a voice screaming to not do that, despite how much you want to. 

You think it’s your mother. You’re not quite sure. The voice in your head always sounded like her, not so much you.  

Calm, calm. 

You sift through your bag. 

You realise there’s something missing. 

You unfurl the entire bag until it unrolls completely, revealing everything inside. Pockets of pens, medicines, bandages, supplies, perfect for now, mostly still together. Bottles, glass, sterile clean water in small pouches, tubes and tools. Even your mother’s glasses with their attachable magnifying loupes managed to survive the fall. 

The book that old man gave to you is missing. 

He’s still up there. They’re all still up there. You’re buried below your own mother, or wherever she had ended up. You wonder, briefly, if everyone else had the same fate as you. Maybe the drop isn’t as far as it seems. 

Maybe everyone dies soon after landing. 

There’s a strike of ice that rattles beneath your ribs. 

You meekly search around for it. You don’t think you’ll find it in the heap. It’s not exactly the most important thing to have, but he had given it to you. The piece of him still remains in the dump where everything goes to die. 

Thankfully, the photo of you and him and your mother is folded nearly in half and then in quarters in a small pocket in your bag. You don’t open it. You find if you stare back at your mother she may yell. 

The book is gone. 

The oxygen mask in your bag is useless. There’s no tank to hook it to. Desperately you press it to your nose anyway. It has a small filter you can at least try. It does little, but it’s better than breathing the air outside. 

You keep it tight on your face before shifting through your bag some more. Yep. The book probably fell out, though even that seems largely unlikely. Your bag was fully buckled and rolled tight. None of your other supplies slipped out from what you can decipher. 

You keep looking. 

There’s an ache of disappointment in the pit of your stomach. Painful and pounding, like a blunt knife pressing down into your flesh. 

A pang of guilt settles lower, aching, gnawing, like you’ve swallowed one hundred small disgusting wriggling insects alive. 

You try desperately to stomach down the bile threatening to raise from the back of your throat. You can’t afford to waste your breath; not here. Certainly not now when tetanus threatens every second you continue to inhale.

The air isn’t sterile, but you’ll have to make do. You shakily fill the plastic syringe with clean water from small packets in your bag. Your fingers tremble as you pipe it through. You hesitantly clean the wound, gritting your teeth as you do so. The water is cold and gentle. 

You snap your mother’s glasses over your nose. No cracks, but the lenses are smudged with dirt. You flip down one of the magnifiers to take a closer look. 

Thankfully, it’s no longer bleeding. It’s not too deep to warrant any concern—and you don’t think you’re in the right state of mind to try and stitch it closed. 

You dab at the wound with a clean rag before you reach for the isopropyl tucked away in a small bottle. 

You grit your teeth and grab the gauze as well. 

Your jaw is tight when you wet the rag with the alcohol, hands shaking as it approaches the edge of the wound. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit–

Your foot tenses when it begins to burn. White-hot blistering shoots up your ankle and you retract the rag almost instantly. You bite your tongue before you can scream. You exhale so sharply you’re afraid you’d pop a lung in the process. 

You can’t do this. 

Your hands freeze over the gaping wound. 

Your breathing stutters. 

So you fix your leg. 

Then what? 

You sit here and wait for some man in a cape to come rescue you? You hope by some miracle that old geezer came down with a harness and some rope to pull you back up to the surface? You bury yourself in the trash and find hundreds of corpses? You dig yourself a hole and just inhale the air until you suffocate? You wait to die?

That seems plausible. It would be the smart thing to do: die. 

Tears prick at your lash line. 

You continue, grunting at the burning as you work through it. You try your very best to control your breathing, but every inhale hurts. 

You breathe into your  sleeve, trembling. You fight the hold as you clean the wound. Your teeth hurt from how they clench together, threatening to crack. 

Hurts, hurts, hurts–

You force the alcohol down directly on the wound. 

And then you scream. 

It’s guttural.

From the depths of your throat that haven’t been used a shriek tears itself and it echoes. Your voice travels far, further enough to be heard by anyone, if there even was anyone like a beacon signaling your location. 

You scream and scream until you haphazardly drop the bottle into the trash. You can’t even begin to care; a deep inkling of rot settles into your ankle, biting biting biting until you can barely muster the strength to wriggle your toes. 

You sob until you can’t find the strength to continue. Your throat rubs raw. Burning. 

Burning. 

You frantically bandage around your ankle tightly, holding the gauze flat with a finger until you’ve wrapped the entire thing. 

Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it, ignore it, ignore it, ignorant, ignore it. 

Then, your eyes fill with tears. This time the salt dribbles down your face. You mop them away with your filthy sleeve, but more continue to fall. 

You place your glasses back in their case.

“Hello?!” 

Your voice echoes across the dump. It follows the still silence and the awful hot breeze that carries your tone. It eventually disappears, unheard, useless. 

You inhale to scream louder before you tire into a fit of choking. 

“Is anyone out there?!” You scramble to stand on top of the mattress, pulling your weight off of your burning ankle. “Hello?” 

You roll your bag back up tightly. You hope the bandages hold out. They’re going to get dirty, but you hope to some sort of miracle somebody finds you before infection decides to sink its dirty claws into your flesh. 

You wipe at your eyes again. It’s not doing you any well. 

“Fucking… somebody help me!” 

You wave your arms as if trying to grab the attention of anything that moves. 

You wave until your arms get tired. 

Nothing. 

You collapse on the mattress. What wind howls here carries it away. 

Nobody’s here. 

You worry your lip between your teeth. You taste copper and soil. 

Nobody’s here. 

You sling your bag around your shoulder and clip it tight around your torso. 

Your breathing becomes laboured, shaky, muffled by your sleeve as you skid down a row of overfilled trash bags wrapped tightly in knots by their handles. Your ankle shrieks in protest, but you refuse to stay here. Not when tetanus is practically offering its rusted hand to you in a warm welcome. You wobble, arms poised out and away from your nose as your hold your breath, navigating piles of garbage just to steer closer to a patch of solid ground you think you can see. 

It looks like soil; yellowish rocks and small pebbles. Not comfortable enough to sit on, but much better than the piles of garbage. Much better than sitting on a throne of rust and rot. You move as fast as your leg lets you, trying not to stumble and wedge yourself between more bugs and viruses that waft the area.

If the tetanus won’t kill you, you’re sure some new undiscovered microbe will.

Solid ground. 

You stumble on soil. Real soil. Your fingers feel for it. 

Wow. 

Never have you been so excited to lay on dirt. It still reeks, but it’s a start. Patches of soil means this place eventually ends. Maybe it’s soil for miles, but you’d rather that than weaving through rot and ruin. You don’t have food; or anything, really. You have ginger in your bag, though not enough to stave hunger for longer than a few days. Saline solution isn’t exactly pure water, but it’ll have to make do. 

You’ll have to ration. 

Which should be fine for the first few days. 

You don’t feel like eating right now. Your mouth tastes horrible. Your stomach twists at the thought of chewing and swallowing anything. Like sinking your teeth into brown rotten fruit and feeling gritty and awfully soft sludge settle on your tongue. 

You stomach down your nausea.  

Smears of slime remain on the pebbles. You steer clear of the greenish patches. It looks like thick mucus, like the type you’d see from an egregiously sick patient with a head flu. Too big to be human snot, though. 

Otherwise you’d be worried they were shedding their entire mucus lining, which was another problem entirely. 

There’s a patch of the same thick gunk on your shoulder. It’s wet and warm, shining proudly in the light. 

You gag. You refuse to wipe it away with your bare hands. You do your best to ignore it. 

Then another patch drops on your other shoulder. 

You freeze. 

There’s a low growl from above you. 

You slowly look up. 

You don’t even know what sort of creature it is. Another thick green lining of drool pools next to your foot. 

You can’t even scream. 

You take off. 

You stumble through a row of garbage, taking cover beneath the remnants of an old couch as the giant creature swipes at you with its claws. Claws made of old metal, knives and rusted forks and scraps. It tears through the leather of the sofa, pulling its claws from the fluff as you move again. 

This time you creep over to what looks like a discarded wardrobe of sorts. An older one, though some of it looks really brand new considering its environment. Curls of intricate wooden carvings lay at its corners. You slip behind it and watch. 

The creature sits and surveys. 

It doesn’t see you. 

You get a good look at it. 

It’s not so much a living giant animal that you’ve seen photos of then it is an amalgamation of parts and debris. Fragmented metals, sharp and orange. How it drools you’re not sure; it doesn’t seem to have any sort of dietary track unless the garbage has some biological prowess that allows it to morph into a fully functioning organism.

It clearly has half a mind to chase down anything that moves. Some sort of brain must exist, or some poor attempt at a replica.  

And considering what you’re witnessing, that very well may be the case. 

But it’s nothing you’ve ever encountered before. 

You’ve never really encountered a dump either, but nobody has. Nobody that you know of.

The creature turns its head and you cower behind the wardrobe. Its vision must be awful. It should’ve spotted you gawking by now. You keep as quiet as you can.

The other side of the Wall was more or less considered a wasteland to your peers, but it wasn’t anywhere nearly as disgusting. Maybe browner, more rot, less green, more rust and ruin, but the streets weren’t soiled with filth. You could walk down the familiar routes with relative ease and as little nose scrunching as possible. 

All to visit that old man and play cards. 

When your mother wasn’t around, of course. 

You reach in your pocket for the black glasses case once again, opening it as quietly as you could before slipping the red frames over your face. It’s too far away for the magnifying loupes to showcase any up close skin or flesh or whatever this thing is made of. 

You flip down the furthest magnifier. 

You get a close look at what seems to be an eye, or a hole where an eye should be. Black and gaping, seemingly endless. 

The creature turns its head in your direction. 

You press yourself against the wardrobe. You watch it as it decides to raise a giant foot and trudge directly onto a pile of garbage, flattening it completely. The area shakes and you grip harder onto the wood, hoping it’ll provide you enough cover to stay hidden.

Another step. Closer. 

Your nails tear into the wood. 

You ignore the squelching of blood. 

The beast lowers its head for a moment. 

You inhale poison sharply. Your heart hammers in your ribs, threatening to shatter the bones. You hear nothing but the roar of blood in your ears and a high pitched drone that emits from the creature. 

Its mouth opens wide, too wide to be normal, wide enough that you think it’ll engulf the entire area you’re surrounded by and swallow it whole. 

It clicks. 

It clicks again. 

Click, click, click.

The sound washes over your skin like a wave. It repeats again and again, a boorish dull pop in your ears that echoes through the entire dump. Again and again and again and again– 

It’s listening. 

Your breath hitches. 

The creature’s head snaps up. 

Holy shit. 

You back away from the wardrobe. 

The creature lunges for the wood. Teeth of blades crunch down and crack and pop under the pressure. You steer away before a board flies for your face. You duck down as the creature bites down harder. 

You startle when the beast drops the wardrobe and stares at you with its hollow eyes. 

Mucus goops from its jaw into a puddle directly in front of you. 

The creature opens its giant mouth. A tongue made of an old running carpet with an ugly washed out red pattern lashes out like a whip.

You fall backwards. 

The creature then stops. Its head turns to the left. 

It clicks again. 

You furrow your brows. You refuse to move. You can’t even muster the courage to breathe. 

“Fire in the hole!” 

Oh. 

You blink.

A giant stream of water crashes into the side of the beast’s face. A hole embeds itself further and further through the layers of debris and trash that makes up the creature. The water slashes through its head to the other side, almost in one ear and out the other. 

You crawl back, palms poised onto the fields of garbage. 

The beast topples over onto its side.

It begins to expand like a balloon. 

“Oh, you stupid–”

And then it explodes. 

A flood of water takes you backwards across the sea of trash and you struggle for the surface. You kick your feet out in protest against the water. You’re sure you swallow a mouthful, and inhale a lot more. 

Your ankle aches. You feel like your entire foot is about to fall off. 

Your head thwacks into some sort of metal pipe buried sturdily into the ground. 

Your lungs burn as you hoist up onto some sort of beam that sticks out. You cough and hack up what seems like buckets of salt and trash and whatever else flew into your mouth. Your arm hooks weakly around the beam as the water continues to drown out the ocean of filth around you.

You hunch over on your knees. 

You feel light headed. You hold on as best you can.

You wipe your eyes. 

The entire place is flooded. 

You search around silently, panting, ignoring the burning in your chest. 

There’s no movement except for two figures just standing over the water as it rushes down. 

A spidery blue net engrosses across the sky, wrapping deftly over every piece of debris it could reach, knotting around each surface it finds to settle stately, expanding over the entire area. It’s tightened in diamonds, almost like a covering of sorts. 

Two blurry figures trudge along it.

It’s tight enough that they walk upon it like it’s a flat surface. It barely shifts under their weight. 

Two arms, two legs.

People. 

You stumble as another rush of water encompasses over your ankles. Your hands tighten around the metal beam. It shifts and groans beneath your arm. You can’t imagine letting go, but your strength is slipping away with every rush of water.

The pain in your leg pounds harder than your heart. 

You drop to your knees. 

“If I fish a dead Spherite from the water, boss won’t be pleased when we come back with a corpse.”  

“Nonsense! I only aimed at the beast!” 

“And if the Spherite can’t swim?” 

“Ah.” 

You try to yell for help. 

It only results in hacking up more water. 

The world spins.

You reach up for the net, utterly dazed. You weave your fingers between the knotted diamonds and yank at it with all your might. It barely budges. 

You hold onto the net with all your might to remain above the water but your arm falls lax. 

Your head throbs. 

You shiver. The water is freezing. You hope it’s clean. You don’t have the strength to puke anymore. 

You fall face down onto the oncoming stream.

The splash of water alerts one of them.