Archive of Our Own ^beta

No one ever thinks about it once it's happened.

The battle, clashing sword-to-blade-to-scythe, wooden imprints on hands and bruises atop pallid skin, sweat-sticky armour and dried blood. The adrenalin, the burn of it and the way it curls like bitter thickness with each word, each taunt; it spurs things, spurs things that would never come to light without the smell of iron like breath in the air, be it anger or fear or biting resentment. It spurs pulling muscle and tissue shorn, spurs bloodshed.

But Rat--

Rat's never thought about it, outside of the rectangle-cutout of walking back to his base on aching knees, using his scythe as a crutch with each shuddering breath. Tail between his legs or no, he's simply never taken it past the drawn-line he's already made for himself: he gets home. He patches himself up. He plans, or rests, or simply exists in that span of silence like a buffer.

He's killed before.

Nearly everyone has, at some point-- he watched the Maison go, for better or for worse, and it was by his hand that the act was complete in its one-track eventuality. But that wasn't--

Sure, he'd felt... something. Guilt, maybe, in all of its blurry edges and splinter-sharp attachment to sticking around. Resentment, for whomever might have been at the end of the mirror, or maybe simple painful-numb apathy prickling up the tip of his nose. He'd killed a man, even-- truly-- unknowingly. He was dead, and the day went on despite it.

But he'd never gotten it. He'd never thought about what happened, after. After he left the Maison's body in the shell of their former home, rib-out and bones exposed in cobble, paint-splatter like blood-like-tears all up the walls.

Rat stares down at Lux, and unseeingly they stare right back up at him, pushing through his gaze with an empty intensity. He'd-- he'd tried, he thinks weakly, but her eyes just wouldn't close. It felt accusatory, almost, the blank shine-fold staring unblinking up at him, two pin-point stars strewn across her face; there's a trail of blood that pills from the edges of her bottom lip, and near-absently he tries to wipe it off, but she shows no reaction and it's dried anyways.

The after had never occurred to him. But it did, now, and it came with lens-pull clarity, and he knows now that he knew it the whole time: there was always going to be an after, no matter if he was there to see it.

Lux had been in the after. Lux-- She had never been it, though. The after. The outcome, the crossfire.

The casualty.

He sobs, at that. It tastes like bile and blood, pouring acid-thin down the back column of his throat, and ink. Stinging, bitter-thick ink, down his face, in his hair. In her hair, staining the white of it. On her clothes, her eyelids. He sobs again. It comes out in a mockery of her name, twisting on the syllables and weak-shaking. Lux, he wants to say, Lux. There will be no waking up, but he wishes for it anyway.

There is an after. There is nothing else to do, now. No fixing this. It's happened, now, and the only thing he can do--

Is go on.

He thinks it in Lux's voice, for whatever that may mean.

So, he picks her up. Her body up. It's empty, limp. Somehow, she feels lighter-- as if there's something missing from inside of her, now that she's dead. He pulls her close to his chest, tries to balance them in bridal position across the plane of his arms, tries to keep them still so that he doesn't have to look at the mix of black and gold splattered across her stomach. It pulls like a smile, a thin slash; so simple, and yet.

"Don't worry," Rat says, and it comes out quiet and thin-shattered, and he sniffles in the middle of it, tries to bite back a hiccup. Fails. "I'm-- I'll take you home, now. Don't worry."

They don't say anything back, just stare.

So, the moon begins to break line, pulls the stars up with it on its trek above, and it stares at him like Lux does. Did. Is. It glows, as he rocks them in his arms, draped in the cloak he'd unclipped with trembling fingers to drape over her lower half. It's stained with ink too, with blood, but the fabric's black so all that shows is a dull reflectiveness that makes him wince a little. That'll be a bitch to clean, he thinks, and then Luxintrus is dead.

Rat knows this already, but it doesn't leave his mind, just spins in lazy circles and drags him with it in stumbling footfalls. He takes them through the nether, processes nothing but the way her eyes meet his unfailingly and the way her mouth is half-parted, and he can see where she chipped a tooth somehow. Maybe during her stand against Nox. He hopes Nox has a chipped tooth, now, too.

It's an incisor, and the chip is a sizeable half-triangle. He feels like he's being stabbed, again and again, but it's the nether so every tear that pulls away from his lashes evaporates immediately with a hissing sizzle.

This is the after, he tells himself, and then he hiccups like a prayer.

He hadn't cried in... a while. Doesn't remember it, at least, so each breath in feels new and raw and unexplored. Like his lungs are trying to fold up, stomach cold on the inside, both shaking. The spread of his face, nose-cheeks-lips, all of it burns shame-hot even after he's pulled from the portal's swirling-stinging pull, the particles of glowing purple that try to tug him back in. They're still in his arms, not that he'd expect them not to be; he thinks, rather distantly, that he might have some of their blood drying on his hands.

Astron meets him on the pathway in, gravel under heavy boot-falls. Rat cries some more, and doesn't even care that it's in front of them, only tries with numb-trembling fingers to wipe the teardrops off of where they fall onto Lux's face. They watch with something that feels like pity.

In the end, they take her to the garden.

Rat finds a coffin. Astron takes her, gently, from him; it takes a rather unfortunate amount of time to get his hands from where they're knotted and caught tight into the cloak he'd given her, to pull them away. He doesn't-- want the cloak back, he thinks, and it shifts half-desperate. She can have it. She deserves it.

It's cold.

It's cold without her, and he looks up, and it's a full moon. It's judging him, he's sure. Astron closes the coffin with a dull thud and then a series of clicking, and he looks down in a sharp half-arc to see if he's got Lux put away, and he has. All Rat can see, in the four-wall pit, is the lid of the coffin, smooth wood grain-steady, the default. Perfect, but not-- not her, really. What is he to do, though?

They bury the coffin in silence. They bury Lux in silence, and Rat cries the whole way through, and somewhere about halfway in Astron starts too. They're a hell of a lot quieter than he is, though, with all of the sniffling and squeaking and cries of her name. Honestly, it's a miracle they're putting up with it.

So, Rat thinks once they're done, as he stares at the packed dirt that was once his closest friend, his-- child. So, this is what after feels like.

The dirt-that-was-his-child says nothing, and with time he turns. Looks back, turns again. Walks inside, like shutter-click camera angles, throwing sharp contrast, black-on-black. Astron's gone already, and Rat doesn't think past that. There's still blood on his couch cushions, from when Lux had lost her arm so far-close in his memory, though now it's splatter-dried into a dark orangish, rusted.

He sits down next to it, and with empty hands he takes a stick from beside the fireplace, pushes it through a marshmallow. Holds it over the flames. Cries a little more, though he feels rather like an empty juice box, void of any more tears to give.

It browns, soon enough. Rat keeps it on longer.

He burns the marshmallow, just the way she'd liked it.