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The timeline is dead.
Brook refreshes Twitter once. Twice. Three times. Nothing. The world is asleep.
He shifts his weight on the couch, rolling one shoulder first and then the other, and stretches his legs out, out, out …. He groans. He sighs. The cushions beneath him are firm and uncomfortable, and the fake leather creaks with his every little movement.
"Christ…"
He holds his phone against his chest, screen down, and lifts his other lanky arm, reaching out as far as he can. His eyes strain and adjust until the outlines of his fanned out fingers against the ceiling come into focus, one by one.
In the darkness of Chase's living room, he lies awake. He's always awake.
Nights are difficult.
He could fight whole teams of police-- them and all their guns and choppers and tanks too. He’d punched his way out of several ambushes while he worked for the Red Spades, and hell, he’d do it again. He could probably go toe to toe with angels too, should he be so inclined… But boredom?
There's a challenge.
Brook clenches his hand, still holding it up towards the ceiling, and opens it again. Close. Open. Close. Open.
He might as well be watching mold grow in the shower.
He could go out and find a sinner maybe. Get a head start on his daily quota and free up the rest of his schedule. Plus it would be really funny to see Scarlet bitch about how they should've gone together.
"Why?" He would say, face and voice ever even.
"Because it's unfair!" She'd snap back. Not exactly the brightest star in the sky, especially not when she's pissy.
"How is it unfair?" He'd ask.
"Because we didn't have time to find me a sinner!"
And Brook would then take no small pleasure in pointing out the five hours she wasted on Fatecraft. She could have found one then and saved them for later, but noo…
Just thinking about this scenario makes Brook grin to himself in triumph, but almost instantly his lips seal themselves back together in a… Well, if anyone else were to see it, they'd call the expression he's making a pout .
The argument would fall apart then, because he knows Scarlet would debate, almost irrelevantly, that they were supposed to wait for Chase to find their marks for them.
And that's exactly what Scarlet is doing right now.
She's waiting for Chase, somewhere in the bedroom. She’d given up on video games for the night and without a word sometime around two, she slipped off to be with him. Maybe she's posted against the door or seated dramatically at the windowsill, watching the traffic outside. Maybe she's in the bed with him, eyes trained on his sleeping face intently.
She's waiting for him to wake up.
The idea annoys the hell out of Brook for no reason.
Maybe there is a reason. Who cares.
Brook certainly doesn’t.
His fingers flex and wave. The silhouette of each digit is misshapen and wrinkled on the edges.
He always wondered: Why the gloves?
At first– at the very beginning of it all, at the end of that very long walk– he peeled the gloves off his hands and checked for paw pads. Rabbits have paw pads, right? He wouldn’t have been surprised if that weird winged fuck gave him paw pads for fun.
But no. No paws.
Thank fuck for that.
A car honks outside. Several cars, actually. Brook wonders where they’re going at this hour. Maybe they’re all making an emergency run to the grocery store?
Maybe they have the right idea. He could go for a snack.
There's a cafe just around the corner that makes good hot chocolate. It pairs really well with donuts, the old-fashioned kinds that nearly choke you as it squeezes down your throat.
...of course the cafe's closed though.
It's almost 4 in the morning. Everything is closed.
In any case the couch is growing on him-- or rather, it's growing around him. The cushion is giving way to his weight, and the leather rises up to meet his outline. If he got up now, he's pretty sure there'd be a crater shaped exactly like him in the upholstery. He's kind of curious just how deep he can get it.
His arm finally falls back down, coming to rest at his side.
A strange sensation radiates up from his fingertips. It's almost itchy, but not in the way that an itch physically crawls across skin, though it's just as irritating. His mind was expecting something but didn't know what. Something is missing.
A flash of a memory dances across Brook's mind-- right there, just behind his eyes where he can't quite grasp it. It's a memory of when he was alive. He gets fewer and fewer of these the older he gets, and they're growing fainter and fainter, like a figure marching far off into the distance. Details of his life have started to fade and blur and mix together, until the whole thing just becomes more of a feeling than a memory. An emotion, rather than a thought.
His life on earth has morphed into an abstract concept.
"Huh."
The reaper scoffs to himself, and the sound is swallowed up by the night. He massages his shoulder.
His body remembers.
It remembers snow. Or at least the idea of it. The streaming quiet of it all as it falls to the ground, small and always faster than what cartoons nowadays make it out to look like. Thick and white like the sheets of a bed much too large for the one little body inhabiting it.
There's a canopy hanging over this bed. Tall, rich and mahogany, with velvet lining the underside. A little hand reaches for it.
It reaches and reaches and reaches, locked in place by the joints of a too-skinny arm. There’s no reason why. It just does. Maybe if it stretches enough the little boy it’s attached to will be able to touch it. Brush against the velvet and draw circles into it.
It can't, of course. Not even if he stood and jumped.
So he puts his arm back down.
The blood rushes back into the arm, flooding it with warmth. A pulse pounds so strongly in his fingertips, right beneath each perfect nail bed, he could easily count each beat. One, two, three…. By ten, the pulse slows. By twenty he's asleep.
And the little boy dreams.
This is where the memory stops. Where it abstracts and dissolves into shapes without dimension or time, intangible and incomprehensible. It stops abruptly, like it had collided into a brick wall and shattered into countless particles.
Brook isn't that little boy anymore. He doesn't sleep. He doesn't dream. He doesn't know how, maybe. He squeezes his shoulder, digging his nails into his skin to pull any real feeling he can from this… meat puppet he's trapped in.
There is no warmth in his arm. No buzz as his nerves scramble to wake back up. No surprise there. It's dead.
He's dead.
He has been for a very long time.
Brook digs.
He digs his nails into his skin and dives back into his head, back to the spot just behind his eyes where that huge dusty pile now lies, now no longer either a memory nor an emotion. Just useless rubbish. The pile sits like a useless lump in his head, and he feels it pressing on his tongue. It moves.
He whispers to himself, "Раз... два... три…."
The lump diffuses to the rest of his body. It weighs down his eyelids. Compresses his chest.
He has so much to do tomorrow.
“ Четыре… пять… шесть....”
By ten, the count slows.
He has to find a sinner. He has to train Scarlet… He has to find time to grab that donut…. He has to go to the opera house–
By twenty–
He has… to….
Alexander learns a new word in his lessons to describe the Chykov family home. The word is actually used mostly to describe hospitals or operating rooms, but it fits nonetheless.
He scrunches his nose up, scuffing his shoe against the freshly polished floor. Sterile, he mumbles. The word fits awkwardly in his mouth, and it tumbles off his tongue sloppily. It doesn’t match the preciseness of his teacher’s pronunciation. His vowels are too simple and the consonants catch on his teeth like taffy.
But he likes the word. Sterile, he says again slowly.
It’s a word that is used to describe things that are clean, specifically so clean it’s free from bacteria or other living things.
That is what this home is. It is sterile. Void of any sign of life– so empty he barely considers it a home. It is a house. A building.
It is a building, furnished and painted in all black and white, from the gleaming tiled floors to the high ornate ceilings, and outside the landscape around is no different, blanketed in thick, seemingly permanent layers of snow and accentuated with the corpses of trees that claw their way towards the blank white sky.
Sterile.
Very good, young master, the tutor praises him. His English intonation is crisp and precise and monotonous, just like everything else in this house.
Alexander nods. He glances at the grandfather clock, standing tall against the wall. It’s time for his meeting with his father. He excuses himself before sliding out of his chair.
These hallways are long and… sterile, he rehearses to himself as he marches along to the study. Carefully, he steps along, placing the balls of his feet neatly on every tile.
“What are you saying?” comes a voice from behind. It’s his sister, and she’s speaking in Russian.
“I learned a new word from my lessons today,” he tells her so she understands. His head cocks to one side. “What is that you're holding?”
His sister grins proudly as she holds up her quarry. "A rabbit!"
It is indeed a rabbit, lifeless and soggy in her fingers. Its fur was once white, but now it's muddy and stained in blood.
The color makes Alexander's insides squeeze, but more than that it makes his eyes hurt. It's so stark against the… sterile-ness of the foyer. He’ll have to ask what the noun form of the word is tomorrow.
"What are we going to do with it?" He asks.
"Well." She clicks her tongue and re-shoulders her rifle. " I killed it so I'm gonna eat it."
"...oh." He tears his eyes away from the dead rodent. "I have to meet with Father."
"Have fun," Natasha says. He knows he won't, but he also knows she doesn't really mean it when she tells him to have fun. There was something harsh and sharp in her voice when she said it.
Father waits for him in his office. He’s a tall man, always dressed cleanly and in perfectly tailored suits. All black and white, of course.
“My son,” he calls to him. In his hands, he’s holding a piece of cloth, one end in each hand. He presents it to him. “Come look at this.”
“What is that?” Alexander asks as he cautiously approaches.
“It is an heirloom,” his father says. “A scarf that is passed down between each head of the Chykov family. It was once your great-grandfather’s and then your grandfather’s… Now it is mine, and soon…”
“...That will look very good on Natasha.”
The man laughs. The sound is crackly and hollow, like wind or static. It’s not a very human sound. “It is for you, my son. Once you turn eighteen, that is. Would you like to hold it?”
His face is obscured by the light spilling in through the tall windows behind his desk. No matter which way Alexander turns his head, he can't find a shadow to define his face, but it doesn't matter because Alexander is not interested in his face. Once it is handed to him, he is looking at the scarf. The color.
His stomach squeezes. His eyes hurt.
He thinks about the rabbit hanging limp in his sister's grip.
The color bleeds.
It seeps into his hands, bright and pulsing, a dangerous, dangerous color.
“Brook?” Father says expectantly. The name sounds tinged with worry when it comes from his lips.
The little boy looks up in shock. That is not his name. “Who–”
“Brook?” He says again, more urgently.
“That’s not…” Alexander steps away. One step. Two steps–
And then he falls. He falls down, down, down the monochrome rabbit hole….
“Brook?”
He jolts awake at the touch on his shoulder.
Chase’s face hovering over him is a veritable rainbow.
The reaper hisses something– the first thing that comes to his head, but it’s not in English.
“Excuse me?”
“ Fuck– ” Brook brings his palms up to cover his face, shielding it from the sunlight and all the pink undertones in Chase’s skin and his obnoxiously yellow hair and the blue in his glasses and whatever other colors that aren’t black and white. His eyes hurt. His back hurts. “Fuck this couch.”
“You okay?”
“I broke my back on this damn couch,” he complains. “Can you give me some space for Christ’s sake?”
“Had I known you were going to fall asleep I would have brought out the extra futon.” Chase rolls his eyes and walks away. Lightie follows at his feet, ready for her breakfast. “Is there some sort of… special cycle you guys are on?”
“What– are you asking me if we get periods?”
“No!” Chase looks irritably over his shoulder at him. “I found Scarlet sleeping in my bed. I figured maybe every once in a while you had to take some… Satan-mandated nap.”
“Huh.” Brook rises to sit, and his phone falls into his lap. His bones protest and creak and pop at a concerning volume. He stretches, pulling his arms high over his head. “No… I dunno. I just… felt like sleeping. Reapers don’t have to sleep, but I… I guess I was bored.”
Scarlet must have been bored too, waiting for Chase to wake up.
The human vocally shrugs. “Did you sleep well?”
“I… I don’t know.” At this point, Brook had forgotten about sleeping to the point where he has no idea where the baseline would be for what constitutes as “good” sleep. “I had a dream though. I… learned a few things.”
“Like what?”
Brook doesn’t watch as Chase goes around his kitchen, scavenging for food. He can hear him rummage through the empty cabinets, opening and closing each of them one by one. Lightie gives a croaky, impatient meow. There’s so much life in this apartment. So many colors and smells. He looks down at the indent he made in the couch cushions with his body.
It’s dirty, but that just means it’s lived in.
"Rabbits don't have paw pads."
Chase’s nose scrunches up in distaste. “...okay?” He says, though it kind of sounds like, “... Who gives a shit? ”
Brook blinks. “I don’t have paw pads. And I’m pink.”
The ex detective doesn’t say anything to that. He just heaves a heavy sigh and shrugs on his coat. “Good for you, Brook.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get coffee from the cafe down the street.”
“Will you get me a donut and a large hot chocolate?”
“Why can’t you get it yourself?”
“I have to update my blog before I forget my dream.”