Work Text:
~Megido and Nitram~
Tavros Nitram decorated his desk a lot like anybody else might’ve, he thought – there were some rare Fiduspawn cards pinned up by a “Ridiculously Cute Animals” calendar, where all the aforementioned Cute Animals had photoshopped-on pixie wings. He had a bunch of crusty coffee cups floating around, too, which had mostly held different flavors of hot cocoa. Marshmallow gunk was hardened along the cup bottoms in chalky pastel rainbows. The desk was almost homey enough to have belonged somewhere other than his and Aradia’s mobile treasure hunting archeology lab, where they didn’t have a “Swear Jar,” or sing “Happy Birthday” halfheartedly for random acquaintances, or most of that other traditional office stuff. They did have an “Almost Gave Up” jar, and orders from their financier to bring back some expensive shit. Heh. Tavros said things like that, now, too – “Expensive Shit.”
Not to brag or anything, but they hadn’t really let Ms. Peixes down before, either. Who had ventured into Gallows Wood, crawling with dragons that could smell your fear and taste your lies, only to bring back the fabled Eyes of Redglare? (Some fancy eye-shaped rubies worked into a tiara – it was said they were haunted by the soul of a knight killed unjustly, or something. Don’t worry about it.) Who had braved the mechanical Caves of Darkleer, churning with gears that could crush your skull right open, squish, just like a grape under a boot? Who’d fought half-horse automatons and crept through museums of mysterious, ever-watching nude sculptures, all to bring Ms. Peixes back the schematics she’d wanted to build her own stupid robot mountain? Megido and Nitram, that’s who. Megido and Nitram, Explorers for Hire. They’d risk death so Meenah Peixes didn’t have to.
(That really was uncomfortably close to the slogan Aradia came up with for their business when she’d first convinced Tavros to take their show on the road… Only minus the specific mention of Ms. Peixes. Hmm. He still had mixed feelings about it, honestly.)
At the moment, Tavros and Aradia were at sea, and the waves were grey and furious all around them. The fog was so thick it trapped their ship’s light and spat it right back, as if they were being held tight by something solid – trying to sail through some sort of layered, choking gauze, maybe. They hadn’t seen anything living for hours. All the birds had spun, screaming, away into the mist… Everything that could manage it dove down to a quieter deep. They had all known the storm was coming, probably. Aradia had known too, Tavros was sure, but she’d sailed them straight into the heart of it.
Aradia was perched at the front of their ship, just then, her wild tangle of curls only barely held back by a cheerful red scrunchie with strawberries on it. She had weapons strung around her waist, and what she called a “proper explorer’s hat” tucked under her arm so it didn’t get thrown overboard. The pair of them had been sent to an island drawn on no maps, an island that got whispered about around sketchier ports, by sketchier people with a lot of irons in their respective fires. Some said the island wasn’t listed anywhere because it had never existed, so just shut up about it. Others said it had been struck from all records because of what awfulness had gone down there, because of something the rest of the world would do better to forget. Ms. Peixes said to grab what they could sell and make it out alive, but of course she’d say that.
When she felt Tavros staring, Aradia turned around and grinned, the reflection of their ship’s lamps against the fog painting her in gold and blue light – wavering light, ghost light. Like she wasn’t really there. Aradia had soft cheeks, and dimples when she smiled. She was scanning the empty water all around them for something unusual, for something to sail towards. They’d left the charted world behind a long ways back.
“I’m gonna, um, heat up soup, I think,” Tavros offered. His words got nice and swallowed by the winds, by the storm. It was alright, because Aradia just nodded and shrugged, turning back to her work, to the device in her hands. That was what mattered now, of course. They were on the hunt. Aradia was tasting salt wind and distance, lost in a corner of the world where no one went. She was at home.
Tavros gathered himself, took a long sip of lukewarm cocoa. He scooted aside some of his folklore research tomes – pockmarked with page markers and sticky notes and his own shaky yet methodical handwriting – and started looking for the right kind of soup to keep the cold off his bones.
The next time he glanced up to the front of the ship, Tavros had an Oreo balanced in his mouth and Aradia was gone.
…
Some soup definitely got sloshed all over Tavros’s latest notes, as he threw himself towards the front of the boat, towards where his best friend should have been. Aradia had giggled about the world getting more and more dangerous around this island that had been erased from maps, scratched out of memory. She’d been almost electric, just like she always was when they got to examine bones and figure out how something ancient died, when they got to go places it was really, really unwise to go. She’d kept Tavros awake in their bunks deep within the ship, propping herself up on her arms and rambling about the different awful things it was said might have happened on this island that the world had decided shouldn’t exist. And they had been awful things. Tavros had felt safe, though, because Aradia was there and smiling like she didn’t know how to be afraid.
Now, fast forward away from cruise ships meandering by and beach fronts with crushed soda cans sticking out of the sand and only pretending to gleam like treasure… Fast forward to Tavros bellowing Aradia’s name into the wind, into a deep grey sea that couldn’t have possibly heard him. She wasn’t clinging to the side of their boat, or bobbing out in the waves – none of the mini-subs or life rafts were missing. Tavros ran a hand along the shaved sides of his scalp, his breath burning and heavy, scraping at his throat. He paced, staring around at the maps on their wall, at his “Ridiculously Cute Animals” calendar, without seeing anything. He had a life preserver under his arm, just then, the same way Aradia had carried her favorite hat.
It took Tavros a while to notice what was moving out in the ocean. He was so focused on searching for Aradia’s dark curls, her red hoodie, her tattered jeans, he almost missed the curling back of something enormous until it was too late. Each white scale was opaque, more like polished bone than anything living – each scale was huge, the size of Tavros’s own head or larger still. White fur grew between those scales as if through cracks in concrete, drifting like water weeds. The creature wound through the ocean, circling Tavros’s boat – Tavros and Aradia’s home. A lower note on the wind – a sorrowful, hungry note – might’ve been its voice. A deep, deep moan, like singing without song.
The creature lifted its head from the grey emptiness beneath Tavros’s ship, leaning in close to him. It looked as though it was smiling, with the face of a goat and a goat’s own glassy, unreadable eyes. Its fangs were crooked and bright, reflecting back the ship lights, wavering just the way Aradia had. And then it drew the massive coils of its body in closer, and Tavros had only a second to throw himself below deck and into a mini-sub before his home got crunched up like one of those cans on the beach. He managed it. Just barely, but he managed it.
The sound of everything familiar breaking, everything sinking, was loud as anything – Tavros felt the force of it like a visceral shudder through the whole grey sea. He brushed Oreo crumbs from his shirt and piloted himself down.
~A Circus Underwater~
Tavros Nitram was always thankful for Aradia. She’d helped show him life outside of old fairy books, outside of their swashbuckling, anonymous roleplay games… She’d summoned restless ghosts to mess with his childhood bullies. (Yeah, she was always hunting down the crooked and long-dead stuff, even before people were offering to pay her for it. That high school ghost situation had been really something. Terrifying, but great. In a way.) It was Aradia who styled Tavros’s hair, trying to duel him with the electric razor and putting on goofy movie hero voices. It was Aradia who had insisted Ms. Peixes take Tavros seriously, or at least pretend to, even if he did mostly deal with the “research” side of all their adventures.
It’s possible Tavros had never been as thankful for Aradia as he was right then, though, taking stock of what all she’d packed in the mini-subs. Non-perishable food, water, burner phones, fake passports. Two tasers, a switchblade, one of those whips Tavros had no idea how to actually use. Guns, with ammo. It was kind of amazing the sub could move as smoothly as it did. Aradia’d thought of everything, right? Except even as Tavros was grateful for her, his lip twitching up in a half-smile despite himself, despite everything, she was still gone. Maybe he’d never been as thankful for Aradia as he was just then, sure. But he’d also never wanted her to do that thing where she sprung up from behind him smiling far too wide and making him flail around and break stuff as much as he did then, too.
Tavros breathed in salt, muttered to himself, shifted in his seat so he could see bits of his and Aradia’s lives floating down past him like dead things. There was a slice of their ship’s hull he had to scoot away from so he didn’t get the poor mini-sub smashed, too – there was one of Aradia’s battle axes she’d gotten at a Renaissance Festival before any of their treasure hunting really began. As soon as Tavros found Aradia, they could harvest the wreck of their home just the way they’d scavenged through shipwrecks, before. Impersonal, faraway shipwrecks that had never felt completely real before, Tavros was realizing, now that he had to watch friendly mugs with Tinkerbell on them that he’d had since forever drift by his window in pieces. Shipwrecks that probably hadn’t involved sinuous, winding goat-fish monsters smiling up from the deep.
Yeah, Tavros was keeping his eye out for the goat-fish thingy, once he got far enough away to try looking back up at what had just recently been his ship. (“Thingy” was too cute a word for something like that, right?) Whatever it was, the goat-fish had vanished, and the ocean above seemed almost unnaturally still. Hadn’t it been raging just a minute ago? They’d been sailing through a storm, and Tavros’s clothes were still stiff with salt water all through. But now, now the ocean was crypt-still and dark all around him. The mini-sub’s light struggled against all that dark, catching flecks like dust motes in a window back in the living world. No fish swam here. Tavros felt sure, somehow, nothing crawled on the sea floor below. Nothing grew, either, and probably for good reason.
This was a swallowing sort of emptiness. An emptiness that stretched in all directions, and made Tavros feel smaller than he had since before he met Aradia.
It wasn’t long before he saw the ruins. They drifted out of that emptiness like a screen smoothing from static to image – they were huge, and lopsided, and for a moment Tavros thought he heard carnival music distorted by the ocean, drifting from far away like whale song. But he didn’t, not really. He heard his own choking breath, and his heartbeat in his head, and the whir of his mini-sub which could sometime all too soon run out of power. The ruins were grey, hollow things, just like the sea all around. They were a castle, sort of, piled up and up out of what looked like separate circus tents, strung together with looping spiral staircases that dangled way too high over what would have been the streets below. Their cloth skins must have been playful, once, but the ocean dark seemed to turn even garish orange and green stripes muted. All the doors were open, and their entryways seemed dark and starving.
Banners hung limp, as though waiting to rot, or waiting for movement. Whichever came first. Tunnels ran beneath the ramshackle circus tent castle – they criss-crossed each other seemingly at random, and had arched, pointed windows worked into them like in a cathedral. The window-glass was all shattered across the ocean floor, though. Those glass flecks caught Tavros’s mini-sub’s light, beautiful although they were dim, although they were violent.
Tavros lifted one of Aradia’s burner phones and snapped a picture, but all he ended up getting was the sub’s own window, with nothing but blurry grey beyond it. A trick of the glass, he told himself. And then he saw her.
Aradia was climbing one of the ruin’s many spiral staircases, arms loose at her sides, hair finally free of her strawberry-print scrunchie and drifting slowly around her like a mermaid’s, or a drowned girl’s. Her expression was too far away to read, but Tavros thought her eyes might have been closed. She climbed as though above water, as though gravity somehow kept its familiar grip on her. She was a smudge of color in that drained-dead world.
Of course Tavros took the mini-sub towards her as quickly as possible, though by the time he got close Aradia had already made it into one of the waiting circus tents. What choice did Tavros have, by that point? He angled the sub up close to the door, and panned his lights all through that waiting space beyond. There was no one there. Tavros held his breath, scanning the emptiness, but it was the same as before – maybe those were juggling clubs scattered over the floor, maybe that was a rusted unicycle, maybe there was a warped funhouse mirror over in the corner catching his sub’s light and sending it back stranger.
Tavros glanced away, hissing out some very vanilla curses, feeling tears pricking behind his eyes. This place had Aradia. Usually if something got someone, it got Tavros, and then Aradia was ready to save the day. That’s how they’d done this. That’s what he’d been expecting, what would’ve been in the advertisement brochure if they’d ever got around to printing something like that. It was possible the mini-sub could fit through the circus tent’s open doorway, but once inside Tavros would be a sitting duck, just waiting for the goat-fish to come back… Just waiting to be gotten, too. A choice would have to be made, Tavros knew. He’d have to call the shots himself, this go round.
When he looked back up into the room where Aradia had disappeared, though, Tavros saw him. He was sitting in the center of the tent, chin propped on his palm. He toyed with his lip, sleepily, and offered a little wave with his free hand. Tavros may have screamed, and not just because the man had appeared where Aradia was supposed to be. The guy’s skin was loose and strange, like a dead man’s, and his eyes were gummy and grey. It didn’t seem like they should have been able to see at all, though he definitely saw Tavros – his wide smile made that clear enough. He wore the flaking remains of clown paint, eaten away by the ocean – it must’ve been applied recently, for so much to have stayed stuck on. His hair was all dizzy curls, strangely like Aradia’s there in the mini-sub’s light.
Tavros’s first impulse was to back the sub the hell away, to go look for Aradia on the other stairways, in the other tents. But then he cleared his throat and summoned whatever courage he had left. He raised a hand up to the guy, in turn. A wave. A peace offering. Maybe this smile wasn’t a trick – maybe this man, this being, would tell Tavros where his partner had gone.
“You’re not supposed to be here, motherfucker,” the guy said, and before Tavros realized it he was sitting in the mini-sub beside him, crammed against the wall, against the fake passports and burner phones. His foot was propped against the dashboard – it was bare and dripping, colder than even a natural corpse’s would be.
“Oh, oh really?” Tavros choked out. “Well, I’m sorry, if this is your turf. But I, um, I have business here, too.” It wasn’t a witty one-liner, the way he’d heard it in his head. This was going all wrong. He sounded like a sulking child, didn’t he? Tavros had to remember he and Aradia had dealt with the dead before. They’d dealt with worse than this guy, hadn’t they? The circus-ruin’s man hadn’t even touched Tavros yet, and his voice sounded sing-song. Pleasant, for something coughed up without the help of lungs, of pumping blood. Almost worried. Tavros thought maybe he could give this guy a little, but not too much. He’d try and be honest, though. Most ghosts hated getting lied to, even more than they would have in life. It was something to do with their occasionally tenuous grip on identity, Aradia said. “My partner disappeared. If you can help me find her, I swear we’ll leave.”
“You swear? Messiahs, bro, you don’t have to convince me. I wouldn’t mind if you stayed, under different, y’know, circumstances.” Sometimes, when Tavros looked at him, it seemed as though the man was whole and almost steady. Steady as an especially drunk guy in one of the bars they’d searched finding info on this latest job, anyway. Other times, though, it seemed as if there were barnacles crusted in the guy’s sticky-wet hair, and bits of his skin that had been eaten away by tiny, persistent fish as he slept. Not that there was anything around that could have nibbled at him, was there? There was nothing living in this whole haunted place. “It’s just he’ll care. If my brother gets ahold of you, fuck… I’m saying you’re not ‘supposed’ to be here like it’s just not a smart motherfucking move. Not like I’m giving you an order or some shit. Whoa, haha… Wasn’t very clear, was I?”
“I know it’s not smart, but, but now I don’t have a choice,” Tavros said. Okay, maybe this was getting too honest, even for dealing with a ghost. It’s just the tears were pressing harder at the back of his eyes, and this was all very ominous, and his home had just been crushed by a sea monster and Aradia was still missing. She had only Tavros to get her back, to bring her home. Only Tavros in all the world. “I can’t leave without Aradia – a goat-fish thing crushed our boat, and I saw her come in here, and…” Okay. Too honest, too honest. Back up. Tavros sniffled, and stared the dead man straight in the eyes. “I can’t leave without Aradia. Can you tell me what might have happened to her? What will I have to do to get her back?”
“Aw, fuck it. Aw. I’m not sure you can even –”
“What will I have to do?” Tavros felt his jaw set, felt his teeth grind. He had to wear a night-guard, he ground his teeth so much – or he’d used to, before it sank with the rest of his stuff. He hoped the action looked determined instead of just incredibly anxious.
The dead man laughed, choking out some bloody salt water that dribbled down his chin. “You’re a good friend, aren’t you? Nah, don’t answer, man. I can tell you are.” And then the corpse seemed to calculate, tilting his head to watch Tavros through gummy, emotionless eyes. Those eyes couldn’t shift in their sockets, Tavros didn’t think. “If our, uh ‘goat-fish’ got your ship, that means everything’s starting again. He listens to my brother. Shit. Just, follow me, I guess. Haven’t had guests since the place sank! Don’t blame me if shit’s kind of messy. Ahaha. Least of your worries, right?”
And then the corpse reached up and cranked Tavros’s mini-sub door wide open. Water flooded in as if the sub had gasped, as if it had tried to scream underwater and suddenly found itself drowning. The controls were flashing like crazy, buzzing alerts no one took the time to read while fake passports floated away with the rest of everything Tavros had owned. The corpse was drifting off, too, reaching for a spiral staircase – Tavros watched him leave through the flood of bubbles, through the grey water, through the dashboard mini-sub alarms.
Follow me, he’d said.
Tavros was going to have to find and set up an air tank somehow, and he was going to have to be so fast.
~Nothing Living~
Or, you know, he should've been "so fast." Tavros knew exactly the spin he'd have to do to grab the air tank from behind him in the mini-sub - he knew just how he'd have to swallow a sudden gulp of burning sea water when he got the mouth piece on. He'd push himself out of the sub, and anchor it somehow before doing most anything else. Couldn't be stuck in the thing if it crashed against a stone staircase or whatever. Hey, maybe this'd finally be a chance for him to use one of Aradia's Indiana Jones whips! Tie the drifting mini-sub down as well as he could while he drained it of water, scold the corpse in an affable way that probably wouldn't make enemies but would still get the point across... Yeah.
Tavros didn't get to do any of that.
He definitely got his head thwacked on the dashboard when he tried to do his fancy spin around to grab the air tank. It's just the unmoored mini-sub was suddenly twisting up. Drifting.
Tavros woke up on a sticky polka-dot floor very much unlike anything he'd expected, listening to the drip-drip of water on plastic. He was lying by a damp and useless fire pit, and the whole ceiling above him was spinning with elaborate finger paint murals. There were some snatches of folklore he recognized - a god with two faces, for instance. Janus, maybe? That didn't feel right, but maybe something tied back there, to pathways and choices, to change so consuming it could have... Tavros didn't know. Sunk an unnamed, mysterious island, maybe? There was the city itself painted on the ceiling, too, swallowed by golden sunlight, with all its circus tents smiling out at the world. The open doors looked inviting, in the picture, with light and music coming from inside, painted as if a child might have dreamt it up, have wished for it. There was something so earnest about the painting that Tavros woke up feeling sad, feeling almost nostalgic for something he'd never known.
And then he remembered exactly where he was, and what he was supposed to be feeling... The last way he'd seen Aradia. He jolted up into sitting, and leaned down into his spinning head. There was stiff, salty fabric from one of the circus tent flaps tied around his scalp - he must've been bleeding a lot. The cloth was warm and crusty, like a scab.
"Oh no. Oh no. Aradia," Tavros murmured. He glanced around, panic like bile already in his throat, and at first it was like he was alone. Some of his and Aradia's non perishable food was stacked carefully by where he'd been passed out. The whole room was dripping wet, but not, you know, submerged. The tent itself had been sealed up tight. Reinforced, somehow, like with a metal shell inside layers of carnival fabrics?
Yes, at first Tavros was alone, and then the corpse was there, crouching over the non-perishable food pile and trying to wrestle a package open with his swollen, long-dead fingers. Tavros scooted towards him and helped pry the thing open. On instinct, maybe. Oh, definitely he was mad at the corpse. He'd just opened the mini-sub and almost cracked Tavros's skull open with it. But he also had a bit of his grey, salt-stiff tongue sticking out through his teeth, trying to win against the package… He also looked a little like just some guy, right then.
"Thanks, man," the corpse said. Smiles came so easily to him, didn't they? Not like with most of the dead. "And I’m sorry, you know? I thought you'd just follow me. Get in here, and I'd drain the motherfucking water, let you in on what all your Alayna's mixed up with."
"Aradia," Tavros corrected. Not aggressively, no. Just searching the corpse's face for any trace of a lie, any sliver of malice. Sometimes the dead did try to kill, you know. And some of them must have done it with a smile.
"I forget what it's fucking like, talking with other people,” the dead man explained.
Tavros glanced up to be crowds painted along the streets in the murals above him - staring, smiling faces. Sea monster tamers and trapeze acts out over the crisp blue waves. "Did you wanna eat that, or was it for me, or something?" he asked, instead of any of his calm, affable scolding... Instead of anything he should've said, or would've planned. He gestured to the bag held so limp in the corpse’s hands.
"I won't, if you want it," the corpse said, sheepish. Tavros could've sworn that his tone meant "sheepish," even through the raw way death twisted anyone’s voice.
Tavros shook his head, and tried to prop himself up on his feet. The corpse had dragged his mini-sub into the tent, too - it fit leaning awkwardly against the wall, airing out. A few lights blinked, almost nervously, along the dashboard.
The corpse had chosen a bag of astronaut ice cream, sweet but chalky, breaking off in dusty clumps and getting itself ground into his clumsy, death-stiff fingers.
"It's like motherfucking cotton candy," the corpse said, chewing slowly. "Melts in your mouth. Like cotton candy, if you squished it into fucking bar or some shit...”
“Huh. I guess.”
“I'm Gamzee."
Tavros smiled despite himself. "Who – I dunno, um… Who were you, here, Gamzee?" he tried, in what he hoped was a gentle voice. An understanding voice, like what Aradia used with some of the unfinished dead. It had always been easy for Tavros to work with stories, with animals - two of the most living things above the deep, if you asked him. Aradia had always known what to do with the dead.
"I am one of this temple's twofold High Priests," Gamzee said, sounding like he was being careful, too. "'S why I can't really die. 'S why I can't really leave here... Or do what you have to do to save Alayna. Ah, shit. Aradia. My bad."
"And what's that?"
"You're gonna need to kill a piece of my god, and I'm gonna have to try and stop you."
...
Tavros found that Gamzee definitely didn't want to talk about why there was a piece of his god trapped beneath the ocean, in the ruins of a once mirthful, gibbering temple. He just offered a few different variations of, "We fucked up, brother. I'm paying for my mistakes," a handful of times. Enough times for it to stop sounding creepy, and start sounding kind of sad.
"How long have you been here?" Tavros asked once, and Gamzee just shot him with wide, empty eyes... Watched him for what felt like a long, wondering time.
However long it would take the maps to forget. However long it would take for a cult to become the stuff of fantasy. However long, however long. Wouldn’t that have to be it, motherfucker?
Gamzee drew Tavros a map of the castle in the sandy, bloody ocean slime at their feet. He drew him a path, down winding staircases and through hollowed-out, lonely circus tents, down to the veins beneath the castle. To the inner sanctum, to the temple itself, where a piece of rotten divinity waited to bring another double-death, to bring another part of itself into the world.
"So it's hungry?" Tavros started. "So it needs to feed off living things, and that's why Aradia and I shouldn't have come here?"
"We fucked up, brother," Gamzee said, looking away, looking down at his crooked toes. “Told you.”
"But I can do this! It sounds like I can do this," Tavros said, injecting his voice with some of that fire he knew he needed. Aradia's fire. The fire that had gotten them through Gallows Wood, despite waking up with nooses already around their necks, hanging from a tree the size of a city. The fire that had let them run through the mazes in Darkleer's Mountain, ducking through some passages just seconds before the gears squished them to a smeary pulp.
"Hope so, motherfucker," said Gamzee. He'd pried open another bag of astronaut ice cream, by that point. How much astronaut ice cream had Aradia even packed?
Some of Tavros's natural cautiousness was sneaking back, by this point. He tried, hesitantly, voice kind of stuttering out like it used to all the time when he was a kid – "It wouldn't work if I just asked you whether this was a trap, right?"
"Even if it was a motherfucking trap, you'd do what you needed to do to get your friend back." It wasn't a question. Gamzee was looking at Tavros with something like envy in his slack, dead face. Something like admiration.
"I would," Tavros said slowly.
"Then I hope I don't kill you," Gamzee said, and Tavros really believed he meant it.
Gamzee watched as Tavros checked on his scuba diving equipment, crammed in the back of the mini-sub and coming along with a helpful instruction sheet Aradia had typed up and laminated - "How to Not Die Wearing this Scuba Gear, TAVROS." It wasn't that Tavros needed the guide by that point, honestly. He and Aradia had dove to pirate ruins before, had dove to Ms. Peixes’s eccentric underwater base. But it was nice to read Aradia's voice, just then, all warm and full of maniacally grinning smilies.
Gamzee watched, and brushed astronaut ice cream flecks from his slack, dead cheek with awkward, swiping movements. It looked almost like he was trying to swipe his own expression away. He heaved himself up to help Tavros tighten the straps on his air tank, though. Did it gingerly, without looking Tavros in the eye.
When Tavros was all set - wearing a brown-and-red Megido and Nitram, Explorers for Hire wetsuit Aradia had designed, with flippers on and his air tank nice and tight - he said, "I guess I gotta... Uh. I guess this is goodbye?"
Gamzee smiled at him, but shook his head, too. "I'm gonna lock the motherfucking tent up behind you, man. It'll buy you a little time, but not much. Fuck, maybe you should look at the map again. I know I'D have forgotten it by now."
So Tavros studied the map drawn in the ocean-y floor goo again. When Gamzee seemed to relax, like it had been enough time, then, he made his way towards the door. Maybe he could have pressed the point, could've explained how he'd always been good at judging distance, good at remembering where he was in the world and where he had left to go. But that wouldn't have helped anyone, really. Gamzee seemed worried, and guilty, and when he unhooked the door for Tavros all the water flooded back in. It swallowed him up even as he was shoving Tavros out into the deep, on to his new path. It made his face a ghostly smear, hardly Gamzee’s, a person’s, at all.
~Twofold High Priests~
There was a horrible sense of waiting during Tavros’s first time alone in the ruins, without even a blinking mini-sub for company. Gamzee was behind him, sealed up in a circus tent like some other restless dead could be in a tomb, but who knew when he would stir again… Who knew what he would even be like, when he did come for Tavros. It had seemed as though Gamzee were preparing to lose himself. More than that, it had seemed as though he’d lost himself before, like that was all part of a priest’s job description in whatever this temple used to be. Didn’t help Tavros to worry about him, just then – a near stranger, a dangerous cultist, a ghost worn away by the ocean same as everything else in that place – but he worried all the same. Aradia had always said he was the more sentimental, of the pair of them. That corpse guy’s beseeching, apologetic smiles, though. His awkward, jerking movements, as though he was only barely in control of his own bones. Maybe he was dangerous, yeah. For sure. But he was also kind of tragic, kind of vulnerable.
At that point, though, all Tavros could do was follow the path, drifting through the hollow space between the circus tents, panning his underwater flashlight across the deep. It was such a small, fragile light. Barely made any dent at all in that vast cold, vast dark. There were the stone staircases, just as he’d left them, spinning dizzily up and up or deep down depending on your point of view. It was down that interested Tavros just then. He grabbed on to a staircase and pulled himself ever closer to the ocean floor, ever closer to the temple’s inner sanctum. It worked pretty okay to use the flaky, ruined steps to push himself along. Even that was slow going, though. Tavros pumped his legs about as fast as they could go while still keeping a good lookout at the emptiness, but... Not much luck. A sad, low moan-song was drifting in all distorted, too, like whale song. No – like the goat-fish coming from far away. Sometimes it seemed close, right above Tavros, even, but the next moment it was in the distance again. He had to keep a lookout. He had to be prepared.
Tavros knew something was going to happen, sooner or later, but he was still scared silly when the goat-fish swooped in towards him from the grey dark above. The creature’s fangs were as long as his own arms, after all – the thing moved elegantly and far too fast. It had goat legs tucked up against its chest, Tavros could see, now. Those legs were limp and shriveled, as if maybe they wouldn’t work on land, anymore, if they ever actually had. The creature wasn’t smiling by this point, and its jaws nearly closed all the way around Tavros before he managed to dart away and into one of the smaller circus tents. He was panting out a flurry of bubbles, watching his oxygen meter plummet – he stared, helpless, as the enormous goat-fish circled his circus tent thoughtfully, peeking in with an eye so still and blank it reminded Tavros of Gamzee’s.
The goat-fish tried to force its head into the tent door, of course, but that strained the fabric, ripping it slowly – it was thick, time-tested stuff, meant to stand against everything the wind had to offer. Mr. Goat-Fish would get through, of course, but it might take a minute. Tavros backed up, thinking, shivering through his wetsuit. Such deep cold pressed in closely, whatever a person did to keep it out. Um. What would Aradia have done, in a situation like this?
Tavros swam back until he found himself pressed against the circus tent wall – he slipped the knife off his belt, keeping his eye on the goat-fish. Aradia had outfitted each of their wetsuits with handy toolbelts, sort of like Batman-belts but specifically for treasure hunting adventure. It took a bit of intense backwards-sawing for Tavros to slice even a tiny hole in the circus tent’s fabric, but eventually he did get through. Just a little. Just enough. He giggled, then, desperately, which was something underwater. Laughter trapped in bubbles, clouding his already terrible vision… Heh.
It took a little too much time for Tavros to prep a slow-release flare and slip it out the hole in the tent, but he managed it. The creature was almost inside, by that point – Tavros could feel its breath through the water. But then the flare crackled off, in Aradia’s very own red. It would be shockingly bright, in a world as colorless, as empty as this one. The creature pulled back, curious, a little smile toying at its lips, again. “What are you up to, little one?” it seemed to say. “And what’s this trick, now?”
If the goat-fish hadn’t turned, snakelike and smirking, down to investigate Tavros’s flare, he might have been eaten just then. He got lucky. It was the still ocean that had done it for him, probably – it was centuries alone, with nothing changing except the stairways steadily crumbling, except even more color draining away. Nothing changing, even for a creature so huge and so strange.
Tavros swam as quickly as he could back to the path, then. When he glanced back up to where his flare had been – where the goat-fish should’ve been rounding about and ready to get him – there wasn’t anything there. Just stillness, all those centuries of stillness pressing in nice and tight again.
It wasn’t until Tavros was ducking through a broken glass window near the bottom of the ruins that he heard the sickening tear of something that had been Gamzee getting through the sealed-off tent up above. Laughter shook through the temple, then – it was warped, of course, as laughter without breath or even humor would have to be. It came from anywhere, from everywhere – from the tunnel-veins, from the far away, impossible sky. That laughter was Gamzee’s, just a little. But not completely. It was his voice, but layered with something else.
Gamzee must’ve sealed that tent really well, Tavros thought, for him to have taken so long to get free. Fabric and the tent’s own metal shell, sure, but the dead had their tricks… He must’ve barricaded himself in with a grim, knowing purpose. It must’ve really mattered to him, just like he’d said. Was that sweet, or sort of terrifying?
Tavros couldn’t stop and wonder too long about what was coming for him. At first, he thought if he could wriggle into the window completely he might be able to slip out of sight before he got caught. Would’ve worked with something ancient and curious as the goat-fish, probably… Something that could be distracted by flares and thwarted by circus tent doorways.
But this being that was sort of Gamzee would be different. Tavros wasn’t fast enough, not for him – one of his flippered feet was still sticking out into the grey ocean when Gamzee appeared beside him.
If Gamzee’s motions had seemed awkward before, stiff and mostly dead, that was nothing compared to now. Now each movement was jerking through space, first here and then just somewhere else – each movement was like a painful rigor mortis spasm, as if it wasn’t on purpose. Gamzee’s flesh dragged him along behind it.
“You got pretty far,” the thing that was almost Gamzee said, without moving its lips, without letting its not-smile twitch even a little. “Don’t feel bad.” The voices layered beneath Gamzee’s own were screaming, were in a kind of pain Tavros had never heard before. If this was the voice of a god, it wasn’t exactly the sort of god Tavros would have associated with something cheerful as a carnival. It wasn’t the sort of god Tavros would have expected a person as floppy and sheepish as Gamzee to worship, not at all.
The thing that was Gamzee grabbed Tavros’s foot and dragged his leg all along the window glass – he pressed hard enough to rip through the wetsuit easily, tattering Tavros’s skin, grinding glass flecks deep inside it like crystal worked into a gory cliff face. Blood blossomed in the dark water around them, just more salt to feed the ocean. Tavros struggled, thrashing, as Gamzee – not Gamzee, no – plucked off one of his flippers. Tavros’s heel connected with the corpse’s jaw with a heavy crunch.
The thing that was Gamzee shifted, and flickered back a pace or so to reset those bones in his skull, in his neck. It was so his jaw wouldn’t hang distended, probably – it was so he wouldn’t lose the use of his bottom teeth. The skin of his neck fit strangely, then, flapping open with the flow of the ocean… Like the gaping cloth mouth of a circus tent, sort of, though the muscles inside were discolored and still.
Gamzee didn’t seem upset that Tavros managed to hurry into the tunnel, then. He just watched, chewing on his lip a little. He would have to strike again.
…
Even though Gamzee had drawn Tavros a map of these tunnels, before, they were such a tangled mess he hadn’t been able to scribble in every single pathway. Wouldn’t have been time for something like that. The tunnels were like a jumble of knotted yarn, deep inside, with three or four ways to turn left at any given intersection. Up-left, down-left, you know the drill… It was a maze, and almost definitely on purpose. Tavros had to be sure of his path before he turned, or he knew he’d get ridiculously lost. He had to swim without any flippers, now, too, having transferred the bandage cloth from his head to his foot and screaming leg. He’d do what he could not to leave a trail for the goat-fish… There wasn’t so much blood in the water, now. Everything hurt, but Tavros had to keep going.
There were ruined paintings along some of the tunnel walls, too – like more professional versions of the mural on Gamzee’s ceiling. The paint had faded, had flecked away into the darkness, but Tavros could tell there had been something colorful scribbled all around him, once. He didn’t slow to look at any of the painting-remains, though the folklore scholar in him absolutely wanted to. Aradia was worth it. Making it through this place alive was worth leaving more and more things to the past, offered up to the unknown.
Tavros did wonder if Gamzee had painted here, though, in the temple proper. If he had painted here when there were still people to see, people there for worship. Would it have mattered? Would Gamzee even remember to feel sad about all of it, now, after it had been so long?
Sometimes Tavros thought he was completely turned around, just wandering the guts of that temple… Swooshing rotten books out of his way, maneuvering over the remnants of long-ago circus acts. There’d be a canon drifting from one side of the hall to the other, for instance – a canon like for shooting people into the sky. There’d be a magician’s box meant for sawing somebody in half, only not really, and its saw would be jutting out dangerously sharp into the passageway. All of it was crammed in unceremoniously here, in the guts of the temple, as if it knew it was never going to get used again.
But each of those times Tavros thought he was hopelessly lost, he found the right path again. And then, almost not daring to believe it, he was almost there – he remembered what Gamzee had said about “walking into the god’s mouth” and found himself facing a doorway made to look like an enormous ventriloquist dummy’s face. There were swirls on the things cheeks, and hollow pits where its eyes should have been. Tavros swam through. Gamzee must have forgotten that the whole place was sunken, now, and there would be no “walking” here.
Just a little bit farther, and there not-Gamzee was, waiting almost as promised, flopped against the wall in front of the final sanctum’s door. He held two faded juggling clubs at his sides. He seemed limp, at first, like a dropped ragdoll. Tavros waited, and then took a few hesitant underwater steps forward. He didn’t have that much air left, honestly. He couldn’t wait forever.
So Gamzee was limp against the wall one second, yes, but then he was right beside Tavros, raising a juggling club and thwacking it down hard, hard at the base of Tavros’s skull. He fell drifting in the water, of course, and everything crackled into blackness for a second. That could have been the end of things, too. Eaten by a goat-fish, or pummeled into a stone tunnel floor, just inches from the final doorway… That could’ve been the end for Tavros, it was true.
Not-Gamzee raised the second juggling club and brought it down again, harder this time, but Tavros just wasn’t there anymore. He’d rolled away, dizzy and coughing bile into his mouthpiece. The ocean was cloudy with his dim red blood again, but not enough to keep Tavros from dragging himself forward. He remembered having to remind Aradia to swab her cuts with antiseptic, even if she had had worse before. He remembered how Aradia’d refused to be embarrassed, even when he didn’t think and gave her the Fiduspawn bandages he’d bought, and stuck them really obvious places, too. She’d walked around with cutesy band-aids on her cheeks, even back in high school. Aradia just pushed on and did what needed to get done.
Not-Gamzee got one more good hit in, nearly crushing something in Tavros’s arm. He’d heard the crack, he felt the ripping, clutching pain, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. He pushed into the inner sanctum just barely and slammed a huge, solid stone door shut.
The sunken clown temple’s inner sanctum was colder than death, and impossibly dark – there were no windows to shatter, here, and Tavros knew without looking that there would have been no colorful paintings to lighten the place up. If he hadn’t had an extra, smaller underwater flashlight on his belt he would have been going the next part blind. That’s another reason to be grateful to Aradia, right?
For the moment, though – for a long, unwise moment – Tavros caught his breath against the stone door. He breathed in smoothly, steadily, until he could calm his painful heartbeats. He felt his arm, to test if it was broken. He listened to the stillness in the room all around him, and for any signs of not-Gamzee trying to get through and have a shot at the rest of his bones. He floated, shuddering, honestly amazed to still find himself alive.
“Thank you,” Gamzee said, from a world away. From behind the door. “Oh, fuck this. Fuck this. Thank you.”
Tavros put his goggled face in one of his shaking hands, for just a moment. He took another slow breath, and flipped his backup flashlight on.
~The God of Double-Death~
Tavros tried to assess the temple’s inner sanctum with Aradia’s eyes. The place was very bare, all circular, and a lot smaller than he’d expected. There weren’t gems or gold designs worked into the wall or anything – nothing that could be pried out or taken back to Ms. Peixes. There weren’t any fancy sculptures, like there’d been in the halls outside, hanging out with all the circus stuff. Sculptures of clowns performing, mostly. Sculptures of that ventriloquist dummy’s face, over and over and over, always with the eyes just… Gone.
The place had a patchwork floor, though, all red and green tile pieces. Maybe a few of those could be pried up and sold to Ms. Peixes, if they managed to get a picture of the place, managed to get together a convincing story. That’s where Aradia’s mind would be, Tavros was pretty sure. If she were here. If they were safe. There was also a domed roof, all of cracked and flaking mirror. Tavros’s own face stared back at him from beneath gory scabs, when he looked up. He waved a little at himself as if he were in a hotel elevator. Aradia would’ve snickered, watching him do that. She would’ve elbowed him in the ribs like, “Nice one. Now be serious.” What was he, now? Hysterical?
Most important, though, definitely… And also most inherently frightening, because Tavros had no idea how he was supposed to do this, and what would happen if he actually managed to do anything… Was the tiny child’s size sarcophagus right in the middle of the sanctum. It was faded grey, same as the temple itself. It was the logical place where a piece of ruinous god might be sleeping. All Tavros had to do was go right up to the thing and open it.
The creature waiting inside the sarcophagus looked like a doll, at first, with swirls panted on its cheeks and a grimace of unbearable pain. It was the ventriloquist dummy from the gateway, of course. It had been carved smiling in all the sculptures, outside, though… It had seemed like a playful, maybe tricksy god. This was something far different. This was a skeletal thing, its limbs jutting in impossible, broken-bone poses. It almost hurt to look at it, honestly. This was the voice soaked in with Gamzee’s, before, overriding his own. This was the puppet that had made a puppet of its priests.
Tavros braced himself against the edge of the sarcophagus, looking at the doll in its empty eyes. He raised his backup flashlight in a clamped-tight fist, thinking to crush the thing’s plastic skull.
No dice, though. The doll disappeared just before Tavros’s fist dropped down. He looked around for it, sort of desperate, now – he searched the high up corners of the room, scanning the mirror for its reflection… Nothing. He shouldn’t have bothered. Turning directly around, next, he found the ventriloquist dummy god draped in Aradia’s arms. Weird – she hadn’t had a reflection up above them both, or anything.
Aradia. Her head was lolling, her eyes dead closed. Tavros didn’t think he’d ever seen an expression like this one on Aradia’s face, before. She looked so serene, beatific. This was the face of a worshipper, he realized. This was Aradia’s skin, but she must have been far away. Tavros’s stomach turned. It hurt, gagging with an airtank mouthpiece on.
When Aradia opened her eyes, they were full of a dim purple light, pulsing from behind the meat of her.
“My brother failed to stop you. Too bad – I always did have to work to keep him on the holy path.” This was Aradia’s voice, but buried, the same way Gamzee’s had been. There was something crooked and screaming overwhelming it. Aradia was usually giddy with adventure – ecstatic, or furious, or too exhausted to think straight. She was usually fire, charging forth to all those places Tavros hadn’t thought he’d be able to go without her. She wasn’t supposed to sound so impossibly, inhumanly calm; she wasn’t supposed to smile so gently. “He was right to thank you, though. We couldn’t do what must be done without living things like you.”
...
When Tavros had been younger, he’d had one main bully… One girl pretty intent on making him ashamed of everything he was. Maybe she hadn’t meant everything the way it seemed, but Tavros had been terrified of her. She’d saunter by, tangled ponytail swaying against her back, glasses catching the watery hall light, and he’d just flinch away. She’d drawl out some tired insult or another – he was a weakling, he was disappointing, he could be so much more than he was. And Tavros would just believe her. It got ground so deep into his own self-image that everything she said almost became true… Maybe, if she’d kept at it, she could have made him weak forever. She could have crushed him down until he became exactly what she saw.
This same bully hurt Tavros – forced him to climb stairs with broken legs. Beat him with his own crutches. Her name had been Vriska. Well, it probably was still Vriska, but who cared about her now, right? After Aradia conjured spirits to punish her, things had gotten a little bit better – if only because Tavros knew there was someone who would stand up for him despite everything. But things hadn’t really been fixed until he got away from Vriska, himself, shaking off all those webs she’d spun out of expectations for him and his eternal, crushing failures. He had to get beyond her of his own free will.
If Tavros hadn’t shaken Vriska off, he probably wouldn’t have been able to push himself towards a possessed shell of Aradia just then. Beneath the world. In a sunken place, ruined and full of so much pain. He probably wouldn’t have been able to take a swipe at the doll draped in her arms. After their ship got crushed, after smashing his face on the mini-sub dashboard, after losing first Aradia and then his new, very dead ally, after getting torn up practically all over his body… Vriska’s Tavros might have given up. But not then. Not ever, it felt like.
Not even when Tavros felt himself draining away.
It was surreal. There was no better word for it. Tavros felt himself pulled forward first, pulled towards the god’s pain, towards its empty eyes. And then there was a rip all through him, far more painful than the rip of the circus tent as a Gamzee that wasn’t really Gamzee anymore came to kill him, more painful than the crush of his skull beneath a worshipful juggling club. What was Tavros – the bravery, the friendship, the fear and the lifelong infatuation with the Fiduspawn franchise, all of it – was drawn towards the puppet. Drawn inside the puppet, to join all the others gathered there, too. All those other screaming voices, fed to a god. Building a god from double-death.
For a moment, Tavros thought the last thing he’d ever really see would be Aradia’s face, possessed and strange, twisted into a tender smile she never would have worn. And then her eyes cleared, or seemed to clear – warm and brown and bloodshot from far too much salt water. And then she gripped the puppet with a newfound, panicky strength, and threw the thing down. Smashed it beneath one of her well-worn sailing boots. She ground that thing – that god – into the tiles of its own sanctum, and Tavros felt himself stretch back out inside his own skin.
Later, Tavros would ask Aradia how she broke through an ancient priest’s possession at just the right moment. It was a ridiculous question, he knew, but it tasted like so much of the rest of their lives: Are we really going to sell Ms. Peixes a haunted tiara? Why does mad inventor Darkleer have such a weird fascination with naked horse-men?
“I had him just where I wanted him,” Aradia would say, laughing – she’d look away, and spin a frizzy black curl between her fingers. Tavros would point out that didn’t make any sense. Aradia wouldn’t really have wanted the thing to eat his soul at all, right? It would’ve been a pretty crappy plan, if she had. And then she’d sigh, hunch forward, fold a hand over her mouth. She’d say, “Would you rather I talk about how it was fighting against him for hours, playing tug-of-war with my own mind? No. From the minute he reached inside me, got me to throw myself off the boat and down there, I thought I was dead. I knew it was only a matter of time, for me. And was I going to kill you, too? Ha!”
“No, I mean, uh… No,” Tavros would say. He’d feel cornered. He’d shrink back a little, unsure where to put his hands.
Aradia would shake her head, then. She’d say, “Ah, oh my God – sorry. No, I’m not mad at you.”
At that point, though – still beneath the world, still trapped in a sanctum and running out of air quickly, Tavros offered her his scuba tank mouth piece. She nodded, and smiled – smiled far too enthusiastically for where they were, for what they were doing. She bent and gathered the shattered pieces of that doll, shoved some of them into her pockets, and Tavros knew it was for study. Typical Aradia and her dead things. Dead gods counted, too, obviously.
It was alright for Tavros not to understand everything, then, which was something he felt Gamzee would have wanted for him. After hearing all those too-many worshipful cultist souls screaming, after hearing them extinguished like a flame in the ocean… The fuck-ups Gamzee’d talked about had left their stains, here.
Tavros gripped Aradia, or she gripped Tavros, and they swam back up together.
~Megido, Nitram, and Makara~
The ruins looked different, now that the god of that place was dead. Color seemed to be drifting slowly back into the ocean – the water breathed, again, and Tavros thought he saw crabs in the sand, seaweeds and moss climbing their way up the stone stairways. Tiny fish flitted in and out of the circus tents, colorful and alive. Some of them were probably clownfish, even. Nice and appropriate.
The temple might have been a creative fish tank ornament, just then… It seemed peaceful, as if it were sleeping. Soon, it would be drifting so far away.
Tavros led Aradia back to the mini-sub – they fixed up each other’s wounds a little, and marveled at the torn apart metal door, at the ruined barricades. They each just got little slivers of their stories out – had to get hooked up to fresh air, first, of course. Had to drain the sub, and see if it could be salvaged. (It could, but only because Aradia was – in her words – “A Savior.”)
“What do you say we grab some stuff to sell and get the hell out of here, Mr. Nitram?” Aradia tried, once they got the sub a little drier. “We can probably make it back to shore, somewhere – and if not, somebody’s boat…? We’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah, yeah absolutely,” Tavros said. And then he shuffled his bandaged foot against the sub floor, remembering someone else’s feet propped, dripping, on the dashboard. Remembering someone else thanking him just for staying alive. “There’s something I’ve got to do first, though.”
“You were talking about that dead guy a lot,” Aradia agreed. “It was really only a matter of time before one of our jobs left us feeling like this.” She fluttered her eyelashes up at Tavros, teasing and exhausted. “Heroes do usually meet ‘special someones,’ in the movies. Are you a movie hero now, Tavros?”
“Shut up,” Tavros snickered.
But then he did go search those ruins for Gamzee, sure enough. It took another whole tank of air and another set of flashlight batteries, which was probably kind of unwise – no telling when they’d actually run into a boat, out in that abandoned part of the sea. But Tavros used that air up, anyway. He found one of Gamzee’s juggling clubs drifting in the sand outside the tunnels, a tiny red crab scurrying across it… He found a tooth in that sand, too, that he’d definitely kicked out trying to get Gamzee off him. Gamzee when he wasn’t himself, of course. Gamzee when he’d been partway his own hateful god. But he wouldn’t be, anymore. Couldn’t be, right?
It was around that time, finding the tooth, that Tavros realized Gamzee might not even exist anymore. The god was gone, and his priests with him, as likely as not. That puppet-god was why Gamzee hadn’t been able to die, why he hadn’t been able to leave. Tavros kept on searching, but by then he was really scolding himself. Mini-subs could only carry so many air tanks, after all.
The pit in Tavros’s stomach felt like loss, at that point. Like he’d just watched a life – a death? – fizzle out after centuries of guilt, after centuries of stillness. Whatever Gamzee had been before, it seemed like his possession was a punishment – his temple home was a punishment, the unfeeling ocean all around was just so much more punishment. His brother, too, keeping him on the “holy path” by force… But that wasn’t the way it had to be, right? Tavros reminded himself that an ancient priest’s corpse disappearing could be a good thing. He could be at peace. His penance could finally be over.
If Tavros really believed that, though, he might have been able to stop swimming around, peeking in crumbling corners and disrupting poor innocent fishes’ lives. He didn’t, and eventually Gamzee was there, slouched in the back of the sanctum, rubbing his jaw where Tavros had hit it. Must’ve been the second, third time Tavros checked there… Figures.
Tavros expected Gamzee to look up when the flashlight beam coursed over him. He expected a goofy smile, probably missing one of the canine teeth. Definitely didn’t get either of those things. Gamzee wouldn’t even look at him, at first. He just muttered, “Hey, I warned you, motherfucker,” and then, “I’m so sorry. This is a bad place, you know? You shouldn’t still be here.”
Tavros might’ve said something like, “The fish have come back,” just then, or “I think everything could be over, now, if we want it to be.” But he couldn’t really say anything, could he? Not with the scuba mask on. He just drifted forward, pushing himself off the god’s empty sarcophagus. He tried to settle in next to Gamzee against the wall, but he kept floating away. They were underwater, after all. Gravity had to work differently for the ancient dead.
“Is your friend okay? Uh, Aradia, right?” Gamzee clicked his jaw one last time – it still wasn’t sitting right, apparently – and folded his arms around himself. His movements seemed so slow, so sticky, after Tavros had seen him be fast, and cruel, and terrifying.
Tavros nodded, and shrugged, then nodded again. He pointed to Gamzee, raised his eyebrows. He was thinking something like, I didn’t think I’d be able to mess up a dead guy’s mouth like that. I’d feel so bad, under normal circumstances.
“Me? Shit, motherfucker. Me and my brother got what we paid for, when we sold ourselves to this particular ‘god.’ You know, I’m not sure he even was a…” Gamzee trailed off, tried to run a hand through his hair. Couldn’t get the fingers to go right, though. Dead stiff. Dead tired. Shaking. When Gamzee spoke next, his voice was very, very quiet. “I thought I’d disappear, when he was gone. I’m still here. Why the fuck am I still here?”
Tavros tried to help him up, then. It took a couple tries for Gamzee to actually look at him – for Gamzee to figure out what all he was doing. Then he laughed, and heaved himself to his feet. Spread his hands out, as if saying ta-da.
Tavros pulled him towards the tunnels, then… Towards the broken glass windows, towards the sky, and Gamzee said, “Aradia’s lucky, to have a friend like you.” He said it simply, like a goodbye. He said it like he was going to turn away, back to his stone stairways and his waiting to disappear.
That only made Tavros pull at him more insistently, of course. Aradia said he was the softer of the pair of them, sure, but she also kept reminding him he was the most stubborn, too. He furrowed his brows, and started swimming back up to Aradia and their mini-sub, to whatever home they were going to make next. After a few long seconds, Gamzee followed.
…
Tavros decorated his new desk a lot like the old one, honestly. It had been hard to replace a lot of the rarer Fiduspawn cards he’d had on display before, of course, and only a few of his folklore texts had been salvageable from the wreck of his and Aradia’s last mobile laboratory. That meant some of the books were new, and some of them were printed out copies of scans he’d made – all the better to scribble notes on, in the end. So that was fine. Disappointing, stupidly expensive… But fine.
New hot chocolate mugs were scattered all over the place again, though, with marshmallow goo congealed along the bottoms. Tavros’d gotten a new calendar, too. This one had “Ridiculously Adorable Animals” wearing people clothes on it.
They didn’t sell any pieces of the god of double-death to Ms. Peixes, in the end – Gamzee hated sharing a mini-sub with them, so they’d ended up scattered somewhere along the sea floor, one piece at a time. Aradia made a joke about how hard it was to share a mini-sub with three people, nevermind a whole dead god… But she punched Gamzee’s arm lightly, as she said it.
If this particular corpse priest guy was okay with Tavros, after all they’d been through, he sort of had to be okay with Aradia. She tried to make that clear from the get-go, even if she had also asked really nicely if she could study bits of his tissue and blood and stuff. Gamzee’d said sure, knock yourself out, sister. What did he have to lose? So that was a victory for the undead sciences, even if piloting a mini-sub was kind of hard with three, still, and Tavros definitely fell asleep with his scabbed-up head squished into a corpse’s shoulder.
Gamzee froze up, the first time they’d brought him into an actual crowd – and that was just at port, trying to sneak to a rental car place so Aradia could get them all back on track. He’d stared around with those grey, unblinking eyes of his, leaning into Tavros as if trying to decide whether he should throw himself back off a pier and into the deep. Tavros had grabbed his arm, almost on impulse, then. Gamzee’s steps got easier and easier the further they walked together, and people stared a whole lot less once they got him less priestly clothes and a pair of sunglasses.
There was plenty of other stuff to sell to Ms. Peixes, anyway. It wasn’t like they needed the broken shell of a soul-eating god. Statues harvested from the tunnels, photographs taken once the ruins lost their ghostly stillness… There wasn’t enough gold to satisfy Ms. Peixes, honestly, but it still turned out to be enough. Enough that she’d financed another job as soon as Tavros and Aradia got back properly on their feet. They hadn’t told her about Gamzee, though Tavros had brought up adding his name to the business card one or two times. Turns out his last name was “Makara,” which Aradia said was surprisingly pretty. Three names were a little much for any business, but hey, they weren’t a law firm or deli or anything “respectable” like that. Why the hell not?
Their new mobile laboratory was airborne, just then, and the wind was in Tavros’s hair. They’d flown through a cloud a few hours back, which had been kind of exciting – Gamzee’d never been on anything like a plane before, so he’d been all gasps and wide eyes, reaching out to cup the mist in his hands. Now, he was curled up in a chair pushed close to Tavros, his feet propped on the desk. There was a blanket wrapped around him and folded thoughtfully over his face, so that probably meant he was sleeping. He said he knew how it probably looked, for him to sleep with his “spooky motherfucking zombie eyes” wide open and staring at everybody. Tavros had said he didn’t know the dead could sleep, not really, not like the living did… Which gave Aradia something exciting to talk about for, oh, the next twenty or so minutes.
Speaking of Aradia, she was back at the helm. Random possession by clown priests couldn’t scare her away from her post there at the edge of their home – she was taking pictures of the mountains passing beneath them, just then, zooming the camera image in like a makeshift telescope. She’d gotten some pretty dramatic shots so far, but what they were actually looking for was a meteor, supposedly carved in half as it fell by a nameless hero called only “Our Brother.” Whose brother, nobody could really say. Yet. Ms. Peixes wanted the sword and both pieces of the meteor, if possible, for a display in her nearly-completed robotic mountain palace. Say what you will about Ms. Peixes, but that woman definitely knew what she was about.
Aradia’s hair was back in a scrunchie – this one red and grey stripes, in a long braid that whipped across her back like a fish tail. She smiled down at her camera and shook her head, studying something Tavros couldn’t see.
The mountain air tasted crisp and new, like the idea of morning might have. Tavros glanced down at his notes – tracing back the family trees of villages around those parts, trying to determine if there were any brothers who could’ve somehow made themselves into the stuff of fiery, meteor-related legends. He took in a deep breath, smelling ocean salt – Gamzee always smelled like ocean salt, which was probably better than a lot of things a corpse could have smelled like – and faint exhaust from their mobile laboratory as it flew.