Work Text:
Techno was an old god.
He didn’t know how long he had existed. He could’ve been around since the very beginning, for all he knew. There were gaps in his memories that would never be recovered, moments that had never been documented that he had no way of getting back. Sometimes, he would get a flash, like a dream you couldn’t remember, but then it was gone just as quickly, and he was left with nothing but a vague sense of disappointment, maybe a color, maybe a shape. He wishes he could remember some of the faces that shaped who he is now.
Time didn’t like Techno and Techno didn’t like time.
Seconds would drag on for impossibly long. Everything would move in slow motion, sounds amplified, colors blurring together until he could barely make out his hand right in front of his face. He wouldn’t even be able to close his eyes. Everything would burn and chill and warp and still. He’d feel so impossibly human that it made him want to do nothing more than curl up into a tiny little ball in the corner and fade into the stone.
Years would pass by in an instant. One minute, he would be sitting with his family, with whatever new human or demigod Phil had picked up and taken in, telling himself that he couldn’t get attached but feeling the familial love bubble up in his chest anyhow- And then he’d blink and it would all be gone. He’d be watching the body be lowered into the ground, watching the ashes drift away in the wind, watching the flames drift out into the lake. It would hurt. His skin would crawl and his skin would feel too tight and he would just want out out out out OUT of the suffocating reality that was mortality.
Sometimes Techno was too much. Sometimes he wasn’t enough.
He was the god of power. That was a given. He would do anything out of spite. The god of harvest had been on his ass about his potato farming techniques for so goddamn long that Techno had finally just snapped and went all out. He beat the god of the grain, of the ground and of food and of sustaining everything at his own game, and it still wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He was the god of power and he was the god of bloodlust.
He didn’t like humans, he always told himself. They were too weak, too little, too restricting, too smart for their own damn good. They were small and they were pathetic. They were powerful and they were strong. They only thought of things as tight little boxes you could control and manipulate, confined to the same laws as them. They thought of things Techno had never even considered, never even stopped to contemplate, saying such minuscule things that would stun him into silence. (
They reminded him of himself.
)
Techno was an old god.
//
Wilbur was a new god, he had been told.
He didn’t think of himself as new. He was a few centuries old, not quite a millennium but making his way there. He was much older than any human or demigod, so surely that counted for something, right? He might have been new in terms of godhood, but he wasn’t a new god. He wasn’t like the eldest ones, the ones who would suddenly freeze up and leave their current bodies and drift through the nothingness for a few moments before jerking back into place. He still knew how to keep himself tethered.
Wilbur felt safe in his knowledge of time, and time treated him well in return.
He didn’t use to be immortal. He was a human in his old life, he was pretty sure, or perhaps a demigod. Something normal like that. He could still get hurt and he could still die. It would’ve been laughably easy for him to do so, in fact, a grimy little boy in tattered rags stumbling from group to group in hopes that someone would be able to help him last to the next week. He could remember some of the people’s names, the way their voices felt, the things they did for him and the places they lived. Faces didn’t matter, nor did the exact words they spoke. He had enough of them to get by and let them live on through him.
He could feel the passage of time flow among and between him like sand through a loose fist. It was there, easy to find if he focused, brittle and easy to scatter if he wasn’t careful, but easy to get lost in and forget about if he just stopped paying attention for long enough. He could very well slip into it like the others had, get out of his body and unlock the rest of the whole godly package, become something greater than himself, perhaps gain a standing amongst the others as something worth respecting, but he wouldn’t. He liked the little moments. He liked getting attached to mortals. It was like they did with their pets, he thought. You knew it would leave very quickly, but the bond still felt good.
Wilbur thought he was just enough, despite what some of the other immortals had to say.
They thought he was an excuse, really. The god of unity and family couldn’t find his token music man, so he just made one instead, took the first random rat off the streets with a good voice and slapped some nice clothes on it and called it a day. They didn’t quite consider him a god, even though he had the immortality and the rank and the ruling power. He hasn’t ever let go of his form, he keeps bonds with humans even after death, he wanders from town to town in dirty rags and plays songs in the nasty parts of them to try and make people feel better. That’s not what a god would do, they say.
Wilbur didn’t blame Phil for taking him in. The man had a habit of trying to make new families out of outcast mortals. Quite like a foster system, Wilbur thought. He’d piece them together and send them off better than new over and over and over again. That’s what he had tried to do with Wilbur, but then Wilbur wouldn’t leave, and then he had gotten stabbed that one time and bled gold all over the nice carpet Phil had and still managed to take charge of the panicking demigods around the house and corral them into sensibility. Wilbur usually said that that was when he was made immortal, though he knew that it had to have been for longer. (
Maybe he was just lying to himself and he had never been human in the first place. Maybe he needed to let go.
)
...Wilbur was a new god.
//
Schlatt knew he was a new god.
He hadn’t ever been human, that was for sure. He didn’t have any memories of anything before being a scrawny horned kid in a little village where people would pull his ears and hit him with bottles and turn his white fur gold with his own blood. They never questioned any of it, so he didn’t either. He just accepted that as his fate until he fell off that cliff and cracked his spine and tore his neck in half and bled out again and again and again until the rivers were shining and the king was called and his broken body was found and retrieved. They tried to burn him for a funeral, but he jumped up with a gasp and choked and screamed until they knocked him back out again to get him to shut up.
Schlatt didn’t know how to feel about time and time didn’t know how to feel about him.
He had a pretty close relationship with death. He had died and he would stay dead until he would wake up like it never even happened, and time would have passed with or without him. He couldn’t ever tell how much time had passed when he died. Years were easy, sure, people would be older, kids would grow up, the elderly would fester and rot away, but no-one figured it would be good to keep track of it until a good while into his existence, so he had no true measure.
Time was flighty. Death was flighty. Schlatt was not. He would take and he would take and he would use any of it that was available to him. No-one would willingly give it up, so he would take. Nobody would miss stolen time or an occasional death if it was from such a reserved man. They wouldn’t even notice. He could take it as he damn well pleased and no-one could stop him. They tried, sometimes, but even the god of death couldn’t keep a hold on him for very long. He was a god too, after all.
Schlatt was a lot, he knew, and he was proud of it.
Back in the first few years of his existence, he tried to stay small, stay hidden, stay away from everything that would give him any more hurt. Some good that did him, he would think. He knew better now, he knew he needed to be loud and he needed to be large and he knew he needed to be . No-one else seemed to be doing his job when he got it, so may as well take up the mantle, yeah?
He would be there . Not a thing on this plane would be able to stop him. Not death, not life, not time, and certainly not those tiny little bastards who thought themselves something special just because they couldn’t die either. He wanted the void filled, sure, but not by someone who got the title of god just because he could strum a guitar or because he could get a little lucky or because he had a little crown. They weren’t like him, not really. Maybe he could find himself some new partners if he got rid of the current name holders. Maybe he’d just kill some gods and be alone in his longevity for eternity. Both sounded just fine to him.
Schlatt was a new god.