Chapter Text
Five days before the world ends, Cleo is redrafting the outer parapets with graphite staining her fingers into an unflattering shade of grey, and Joe is reading the Odyssey aloud. His own translation, he says, except he explicitly and self-admittedly doesn’t speak a word of Greek, ancient or otherwise. Early into this process, Cleo makes the mistake of asking him how he intends to perform a full translation of a work in a dead language that he doesn’t know, and is promptly treated to a high-octane jlecture about the nature of the translation and the translated.
He calls it a riotous conglomeration of disparate translations all merging into one, or perhaps a fusion of sorts, a gestalt entity that contains more than the sum of its carefully-translated parts. Every translator who’s ever set sights on the Odyssey, he says, has cared about the text in a markedly different way. Every translator cares about something that the others don’t, and it’s in that particular care that a different aspect of the text shines through. Joe says he’s read twenty translations so far and figures he has a pretty good grasp on everything that’s there, even the bits that most translators don’t bother to say out loud. He says he wants to synthesize them into the ultimate Odyssey, or at the very least what he considers to be the Odyssey’s ultimate form, and who can say if that really is the true and correct final evolution of such a foundational ancient text. Perhaps one day some renegade translator who actually knows Greek will stumble upon his translation and complete the transformation sensus plenior, as intended. (Joe knows a little Latin. Knowing Latin is helpful when you want to play Jenga with the English language. Joe is pretty good at Language Jenga.)
Cleo says, all right, Joe; all right, because really, what else is there to say? They keep working on the outer parapets. The spiky bits aren’t… well… spiky enough. There’s something wrong with the positioning of the walls. They erase and redraw and erase and sit against the castle wall, frowning up at the sky. Joe smiles at nothing and keeps reading to them.
Five days before the world ends, Joe is testing out epithets on them. Epithets, he says, are key to his über-Odyssey. A central component of works such as Homer’s that are meant to be read and performed and spun into wordly and worldly existence in the late hours of the evening when everyone’s barely paying attention at first are the phrases that recur. You give a name to someone, and it gains a rhythm in your mind. You repeat it over and over, and soon enough the name gains a nostalgic familiarity, so every time bright-eyed Athena or cunning Odysseus comes up you can’t help but nod and wave. It’s as much a description as a nickname, and as much a nickname as description. Long-suffering Cleo, he calls them, in example. I sure am, Joe, they say. I sure am.
Green-eyed Joe, they suggest in response. Well, that just makes me sound like a jealous monster, he replies, and I try not to be jealous if I can help it, but it can’t be denied, Cleo: my eyes are very green. So I’ll take it. Thanks, Cleo, I’ll take it.
Every character in the Odyssey has a laundry list of epithets, from silver-footed to man-slaughtering to breaker-of-horses. They tell you a lot about a person, epithets. Man-slaughtering says that the person bestowed with such an epithet is habitually inclined towards the unlawful killing of a human being without the malice aforethought required for murder, or maybe it just says that they just kill a lot of people because the ancient Greeks didn’t really have homicide culpability laws back then. Odysseus, who once went down to the shops to buy his wife two cartons of lactose-free skim milk and came back with three dogs instead, much to her exasperation, also says a lot, but is more than a bit of a mouthful.
Joe is concocting a whole new laundry list of epithets for the sake of modernization and clarification and, most importantly, for teaching a whole new generation of potential readers an exciting array of new words. Cynegetic Artemis, he proposes. Nobody knows what that means, Joe, Cleo replies. They’ll get it through context clues, and then everyone will be a little more language-informed, and isn’t that what storytelling is all about? Joe replies, before adding, Crepescular Odysseus, the man standing unvanquished at day’s end. Cleo says, Sure, Joe. Makes sense, and keeps on drafting walls, drawing them higher and higher then ripping out pages and starting all over again.
Five days before the world ends, Joe is describing the island of Polyphemus in lurid detail, getting sidetracked at every second sheep, and Cleo is invested despite herself—even though the outer walls of the castle still don’t look right and at this rate they’d never finish their refurbishment roadmap on time for the funding to actually come through—but it’s okay because there’s a roof over their heads and intermittent lamplight flickering over their faces. Between Joe putting Nobody loves me jokes in a cyclops’ mouth and introducing hefty amounts of what he’s calling necessary Homer-eroticism to the text, he’s also put a large pot of stew on the kitchen burner and the half-repaired castle halls are starting to smell of smoke and herbs. It’s not exactly where Cleo figured she’d find herself, nearly a year ago, but she can’t deny that even though it’s a weird sort of home to exist in. it’s a home nonetheless.
*
*
Four days before the world ends, Cleo dies.
*
Shortly after that, the world goes and actually ends, but they’re a bit too dead at that point to appreciate the intricacies of total screaming apocalypse as they occur, so let’s just go back to the dying bit.
*
There are many dangers to keep in mind when undertaking a two-person complete renovation of a castle in the absolute middle of nowhere. It’s not like Joe and Cleo are doing it totally alone, they have contractors and specialists and the occasional drop-in friend who’s willing to lend a hand and pitch in, but for the last few weeks it’s been quiet and secluded, and when it’s just the two of them—well, those dangers. They’ve got to be kept in mind. Like unfinished floors and gaps in the walls and keeping the insects out so they don’t skitter their way into the food supplies. Like randomly collapsing walls. On account of poor internal supporting structure caused by decades of slow decay.
They’ve had accidents before. Joe sprains his ankle on the uneven stairs so often they now have a dedicated Joe Ankle Salvation First-Aid Box propped against the central staircase. They’ve both become pretty adept at disinfecting and bandaging scrapes and bumps. Which means absolutely nothing when the eastmost wall collapses entirely right on top of Cleo’s head, sending over six hundred kilograms of crumbling ancient stone and sandstone crushing directly into her body and knocking her consciousness from reality in less than a split second.
When their eyes blink open, there is no awareness of time having passed. Their face feels—oddly crunchy? And wet? It’s the crunchy bit that’s actually bothering them. Faces aren’t meant to feel crunchy, and it’s difficult to actually put a qualifier on what that even means. There’s not a mirror so they can’t see what’s wrong with it, but they know their arm—most of that half of their body, definitely a leg also—are fully pinned and pretty much immobile. The leg also feels. Crunchy. Squishy, too. There’s a feeling of stretch-and-squish to it when they try to strain against the pressure that they're really not liking.
Cleo is aware there is pain. She can feel the pain, but at the same time it’s not—really?—painful? There’s an awareness of agony there, in her head and her arm and her leg and chest, a knowledge that this is the most awful agonizing experience of her life bar none; but at the same time when she thinks about crying or screaming about it, she can’t see the point of it. She could scream. If she wanted.
But there’s no reason to. They can just lie here and be crunchy and weird and wet in peace. They're not necessarily opposed to something happening to change that, but if something does change they're sure as hell not going to be the one making it happen. The world just. Kind of. Happens around them now. That’s okay. They're okay with that.
Joe’s face is suddenly up next to hers. It’s way too close, way too fast. She wants to shove him gently back and remind him of the definition of personal space, but the impulse that travels from her brain to her free arm only succeeds in making her fingers twitch a little bit. His face is smeared inelegantly with grime and yellowish dust. Behind his horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes are wide and bright and terrified. Green-eyed Joe. “Cleo,” he says. “Cleocleocleo. Talk to me? I really need you to talk to me. Say something grievously insulting about my fashion sense, if you must.”
They make some kind of noise, maybe. There is an honest attempt to utilize their vocal chords to convey their equally honest feelings about chroma green fishnet gloves, but—just like their fingers—the signals don’t go fully through. They distantly count themself lucky that any sound made it out of their throat at all, considering how it also feels. Well. Crunchy.
He says, “Okay. Okay!” and disappears from view. There is pressure they can barely feel, like someone poking at their side through bubblewrap. There is strained breathing that they don’t think is their own. There is the oddest sound of something bubbling, like stew left on the burner for several days too long, except the kitchen workbench is nowhere near by so it can’t possibly be. The rubble closest to their face shifts and crumbles a bit, and then there’s a breathless shaky strained exhale like someone’s punched Joe clean in the stomach with zero warning. An eternity passes, and then Joe skitters back into Cleo’s field of vision. “I need to leave now,” he says. “Can you hear me? I’m going to need to leave you now, and you’re going to need to be okay with that for me because I don’t think I’m capable of being okay with it myself.”
Joe is frantic, Cleo notes with almost clinical detachment. Joe is almost never not frantic, but it’s usually a controlled sort of frantic. It’s the sort of frantic you can watch at a distance and be reasonably certain that everything will turn out all right, regardless of how many cliffsides he trips and flails his way off of in the process. The sort of frantic where he’ll make interesting squeaky noises and come up with sixteen new ways of eloquently describing his exact state of distress out loud before he gets around to stumbling into a solution, but where you never doubt that he will find that solution, eventually. This. Is not that. This is Joe so frantic that he’s trembling all over, tongue darting out to wet his lips. An awful bleeding gash trickling blood over his eyes that splits his face in two. He’s not smiling, not even a nervous strained sort of smile. It makes her heart do something strange and possibly unhealthy.
“And I’m also going to need you to be okay,” he continues, moving jerkily forward—close, too close—blood-stained hands bracketing their face in a shaky finger-frame. Soft callused skin at their jaw. The corner of their unblinking eye. The half of their face where sensation has already faded and it starts to get wet and crunchy. “Just, like, in general? I need you to be okay.” His fingers press into their skin momentarily, and for a second there’s a sensation that pushes past the strange numbness, as if they're finally actually feeling him there for the first time. Then he recedes, and adds, “I’m going to get help, if—if, like, help is still a thing that’s possible to get? I’m going to get it. The phones. Cleo, there’s no service here. The service is not providing its service. It is doing us a disservice. We should see about servicing that. I’m talking too much. I know. I know. I need to go. I really don’t want to go, though.”
Cleo makes another noise, but this time there’s no intention behind it. It just sort of comes out. It’s funny how the world is so fuzzy and distorted and all-shades-of-color nightmarish around them, but Joe’s face is perfectly clear. It means they get to see the awful agonized expression that twists across his features, followed by the mulish expression of total and unstoppable resolve.
That’s familiar, at least. That’s the look that they know well from such notable situations as her saying, no, Joe, we don’t need to totally restructure the planned composition of the new outer walls or no, Joe, we’re not paying extra to bring your entire pinball machine collection along with us to a remote island on the outskirts of civilization or even, Joe, I can’t believe I have to be the one telling you that teabags are not an appropriate pie filling material (they’d been admittedly incorrect on the final count, but they’re not going to tell him that).
When her eyes focus again, Joe has leaned forwards over her, hovering in trembling shades of green. There’s a sudden searing sting of sensation on the non-crunchy half of her face, and it takes her a moment to realize he’s put his lips to her temple, pressing a kiss into her skin. It’s a terribly sentimental thing to do. It’s a terribly Joe thing to do. It lingers even when he draws back. It lingers terribly. He says, “I’m going now. Don’t die before I get back? Don’t die, Cleo.”
It’s the last thing he ever says to her.
Cleo has never once listened to anything Joe has ever told them to do, and lives most of their life functioning in pure spite of everything Joe stands for. So maybe that’s why, only minutes after Joe’s stumbling, staggering departure, when the echoes of his footsteps have faded away into the crumbling corridor, they stop staring at the sliver of visible remaining ceiling in a blurry pink-stained haze, close their eyes, and think, Right. I’m going to die now. It’s a very businesslike thought, no grief or regret tied to it. Cleo is not scared of dying, in that moment. It is simply something they need to get on with. Something that needs to be done. It’s not pleasant work, but it’s time for all of this to be over and done with, and that’s that.
In defiance of Joe Hills’ last heartfelt wish—in defiance of the kiss still lingering like a brand on her upper temple—Cleo’s weakening heart stops pumping. Her tenuous grip on reality loosens, and then disintegrates like a sandcastle at high tide. Her gaze goes from hazy to blank—and her consciousness cuts out for good.
Four days before the world ends, totally alone and with not a soul to witness—Cleo dies.
*