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Scarlet doesn’t know how she ended up in Chase’s bed.
There’s a broken panel in the blinds on the window, and through the slats streams a perfect slice of winter sun. It lands directly in her eyes. It’s not the light that wakes her, however. It’s a smell, unpleasant and sour and all around her.
With a protesting grumble, she wakes alone, tucked into a blanket. Well… not really tucked in. It seems as if the blanket was awkwardly thrown on top of her, and it limply falls off her frame as she sits up.
"What's that smell?"
She gives the blanket a whiff and holds back a gag. Did Chase not shower last night?
Oh god.
Chase.
She looks around frantically, but to her horror, she finds herself alone.
She has no idea how she got here.
There’s a burning sensation spreading all throughout her body. It started in her face– specifically her ears– and diffused to her cheeks. She didn’t even notice she was hot until she felt it all the way down her back, from the nape of her neck to her stupid wild tail. It thrashes about, thump-thump-thumping against the mattress. She grabs it, and it fights her but she holds firm.
“Okay, Scarlet.” She swallows. Her throat is dry. “Get a grip.”
One hesitant leg after the other, she slides out of bed. She pats herself down. Every square inch of her skin is red and prickles like it had broken out into a rash.
Hair? Could be worse. Her best was never really any good to begin with.
Face? Clean...ish. Clean enough.
Clothes? On. Thank god for that.
She runs through her mental checklist of things and at the bottom of it she semi-confidently checks off the box that reads: did not do anything I will regret in three weeks.
Relieved, Scarlet takes a deep, steadying breath.
The full length mirror hanging on the closet door stares back at her. She approaches, a hand to her cheek, and inspects her face, tilting it this way and that.
Reapers don’t really need showers, what with Satan taking real good care of all his little dolls, but maybe she should take one. She has the feeling that she’d enjoy a hot bath, though there’s no such luxury as a tub in the apartment.
She rakes her fingers through her hair, and they catch and pull on thick tangles until they come undone. The repetitive motion of brushing her hair out is such a chore, awkward and surprisingly tough, but she feels better once it's semi-neat. Usually it's not a problem– bedhead, that is. She doesn't sleep.
Her hand hangs on a knot, and she stares at herself in the mirror. At her arm dangling limply in the air and her head and neck following the curve of the weight pulling her towards the floor.
Has her body always been this heavy?
Her lips purse into a thin line, displeased, and she watches as that X-shaped scar is swallowed up. This way she could pretend it was never there.
Was she cleaner back then? Neater? Less carved out? Less marked up with lines and scars?
“You know who else is marked up with lines and scars?” The reaper mumbles to her reflection.
Her reflection blinks back slowly. What?
“Cows before they’re carved up for steaks.”
The reflection isn’t amused. Its face is unmoving.
Scarlet squints at herself. The mirror squints back. Her image in the glass is almost too sharp to be just an image, and the colors begin to sear into her corneas, bright red against white against black.
At this moment, there emerges a clarity that hadn't been there before. At this moment, all the puzzle pieces fit together. Sort of. The corners and edges are all lined up, and the middle pieces are sorted by color. The whole picture is on the cusp of being realized.
She sniffs. The smell from before still lingers. It's in her clothes. What is it?
The clarity fractures. It cracks clean down the middle.
This isn’t her body, and these aren’t her scars. Scars are stories, and Scarlet knows none of them.
The smell burrows into the back of her head and yanks her attention back to reality. It starts as a tickle between her ears. She thinks maybe she's about to remember something, but if anything it just feels like deja vu. All her memories feel like deja vu.
She wants to ignore it. She wants to stew in this moment of clarity and watch the puzzle pieces slot into each other’s notched sides, but the feeling worms its way around her skull, wriggling and digging and… eating . If she turns her back to it now, who knows what parts of her brain it'll devour– which precious few memories it'll run off with and turn to shit.
So Scarlet follows it.
It leaves a trail, and it smells chemical, sharp and unpleasant and unnatural.
What is it?
The smell began in her clothes. And her clothes should have been magically replaced after hunting down last night's sinner, so it must be in the sheets.
Her fist finally unfurls and falls at her side. For however long that moment of almost clarity lasted, she'd been holding onto her hair the entire time, and it left her feeling kind of silly.
She sniffs the air once. In a second her brain is flooded with a million scents-- a cocktail of dirt and dust and smog and blood and cat litter and Chase's 2-in-1 strawberry shampoo-conditioner-- and in that same second they're all sorted out, efficiently picked through, all but rocks in a tumbler.
Formaldehyde.
There's something else mixed in too. Something putrid and organic.
What is it?
What is it?
Scarlet turns back to the bed and grabs the sheets. She presses it to her nose and inhales--
"Chase is asking if you want a donut from--"
"Uh--" Her voice is muffled by the blanket in her face. It’s too late to put it down now. He’s already seen her.
Brook pivots cleanly back into the living room. "Nevermind."
There are times when Scarlet wonders if Satan actually put her in the 9th circle without her knowing. Like that time Lightie took a drippy anxiety shit in her boots. Or that time she didn’t save in Fatecraft before the servers went into emergency maintenance.
Or like right now.
The silence between her and Brook is pretty much the same as it was in Hell-- suffocating, all-encompassing, and as dark as it is bleak.
Without a word, Brook returned to his seat on the couch, and she followed, hanging back by the doorway and gripping the frame like the apartment building was collapsing around her. She stares dumbly at him as he updates his blog. Nothing happened. He saw nothing.
Scarlet's face manages to unscrew itself from the mortified expression it had frozen in and she mumbles, "It wasn't what it looked like."
"Oh yeah? Because it looked like you were sniffing his bedsheets."
"I WASN'T--" A pause. Her face contorts back into its previous pained expression. "I was sniffing his bedsheets," she whispers. Then, louder, "It was for a good reason!"
"Uh huh." Brook nods quietly, and the room is plunged back into that hellish silence, save for the steady tap of his fingers against his phone like a hammer against nails in her coffin. He's probably making fun of her online, and you know what? She deserves it.
Scarlet can't read his expression. She never could. With a mutter, she takes a seat next to the other reaper, who makes room without even sparing a glance. She sits. Then she shifts. Then she readjusts and leans back. Leans forward again.
"...this couch sucks."
"You're telling me, I slept here."
Scarlet makes a short huffing noise through her nose. Somehow she isn't surprised that they both slept through the night. "How was it?"
Brook shrugs. "I was awake. And then… I was dreaming. And then I was awake again."
“Wait, you dreamt?” Sleeping, although weird, is nothing special to Scarlet. One moment, she was awake, and she blinked, and then she was awake again.
But the idea of dreaming?
She and Chase once watched a late night documentary about shrimp that could perceive colors people couldn’t. This is the same thing. The same feeling. The same excitement and wonder. She wants to know. She wants to know how it feels.
Scarlet leans in and shakes him by the shoulders. “What did you dream about? What was it like?”
Brook makes a face. His brow comes down over his bright eyes and his lips pucker into that infamous pout. “I dreamt about when I was alive.”
"Okay, but what was it like?" She asks again, shaking him harder. "Could you feel things? Smell? Was it colorful?"
"It was stupid!" He tsks in frustration and shrugs her off.
She clicks her tongue back at him, throwing herself back down onto the horrible cheap couch. Her horns poke his thighs and he scoots away, pressing himself into the arm of the seat.
She stares him down expectantly with her arms crossed over her chest, about to start begging kid-in-a-toy-store style. She doesn't have to though.
Brook has never been talkative per se, but it's clear there's more he wants to share. She catches him glancing between her and his phone.
Being a fellow reaper, she understands. There's a unique camaraderie between the two of them that they don't share with Chase; for all his smarts, he probably couldn't even begin to grasp the importance of the small things that keep them human.
Small things, like dreams and memories.
Up close, she can see him pretend to breathe. His mouth opens, and closes. Opens and closes. He's debating on what to say. Each time his chest expands and his shoulders raise, mimicking hesitant little breaths.
"It was like…" He begins to say. "It was like I was in a movie and watching the movie all at the same time. I had no control over it-- where I went or what I said. I… I was in my old house,” he says haltingly, every other word punctuated by a pause. He’s hesitant, picking out the details he wants to omit. His eyes are distant and blank, like a horizon swallowed up by snow. “My father was there. And my sister... Natasha.”
There’s something odd about the way he says that last part. He spit it out, and Scarlet could almost taste the bitterness it left in his mouth. She expected that. There’s almost always something snarky or irritable in Brook’s voice, but this is different, particularly the way he said Natasha. The vowels in his sister’s name are even and sharp.
“You have an accent,” Scarlet points out. She’d never noticed it before.
The frost in his eyes whips up into an instant blizzard. He shoots a murderous glare down at her. It’s the first time he’s looked at her since… Earlier. “I do not have an accent,” he tells her.
“You do–”
“I do not,” he says, so sharply and distinctly void of an accent Scarlet lets it drop.
Brook tears his piercing gaze away from her and the silence descends upon them once more.
She stares up at the ceiling, back tense against the stiff cushions.
“...sorry,” she says, though she’s unsure what she’s apologizing for. She just says it because she doesn’t like the quiet.
There's an empty beat.
“No, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m mad.” Brook sets his phone down on the arm of the couch with a sigh. “I think it hurt my pride or something, and I just reacted." Brook’s nose scrunches up. “There's a reason for it, probably, but… It’s like my body remembers things, but my brain doesn’t, you know?”
She does know.
Scarlet remembers the mirror. She remembers thinking about the mental puzzle pieces with its perimeter fitted together and all of the middle sorted out in tall piles, ready to be finished. A creeping itch that started deep in her tissue but had nowhere to go.
She nods. “I get that feeling sometimes too.”
“So I’m sorry for snapping at you. I guess we both saw something embarrassing today, so we're even.”
This might be the first time Scarlet has ever heard Brook apologize, and regret starts to stir in her stomach. She sits up and pulls her legs close.
Across from them is a window that overlooks the traffic below. Dirty as it is, Scarlet can still make out their reflections: two reapers sitting side by side on a cramped couch. Though the picture lacks that clarity from earlier, she feels it again, stronger now. The pieces are coming together.
The eyes of a stranger watching her back.
A body that isn’t hers, copying her every move.
“Chase's blanket… smelled familiar,” she tells him.
Brook raises an eyebrow at her. “...Like… Chase?”
She shakes her head. The reflection does the same. “Like something from when I was alive. Like formaldehyde.”
“I don't know what that is.”
“It’s…” She pauses to think. She remembers– no. She feels it, right there on the bridge of her nose. The chemical structure of it. The smell. The sting it throws in her eyes. “It’s used to preserve dead organisms. It got all over Chase’s clothes yesterday.”
They had hunted down a pair of nurses.
They were easy to spot, two bright white uniforms in a dark alley and glass jars in gloved hands. One ran, tossing a jar in their direction, and it shattered at Chase’s feet, spilling its gory contents on the concrete. While Brook pursued, the other nurse froze, trembling. She began to beg for her life, stammering useless excuses– how she needed the money and the guy wasn’t using his organs anyways and she’d never do it again, she swore, and she didn’t want to die. Oh god, she didn’t want to die… Then she gagged, hunched forward, and vomited. Some of it got on Chase’s shoes.
That was the second smell Scarlet couldn’t place earlier. Formaldehyde and puke.
And then she finds it. A missing piece in her puzzle.
"Did you know," she says, "that a human's heart is about the same size as their fist?"
She watches her reflection. Its hands come together, cupping the air in front of its chest. It's holding something.
"Isn't that a little small?" Brook asks.
The reflection nods. "It is."
The human heart is a tiny, complicated thing.
It fits in her palms. She feels its soggy weight, limp and useless in her grasp. It's darker than she thought it would be. Colder too. What did she expect? It's been sitting in a jar for who knows how long. The only thing it's been pumping as of late is preservative.
She turns it over, holding her thumb against its lopsided curvature. She cradles it, gently, as one holds a baby bird or cherishes an heirloom.
She loves it.
She's in love with its purpose. Its structure.
When she takes her scalpel to it, it gives way, splitting open like a hungry maw into its atrium. She follows the veins and arteries with the blade, and it welcomes her. Directs her like a well-built house. Room to hallway to room.
When she applies pressure to it, liquid rushes out from the severed pulmonary artery and spills sluggishly onto the dissection tray.
Behind her, a useless white-jacketed blob shudders in feverish disgust. It turns its blank face away and empties itself onto the floor.
Formaldehyde and vomit.
She never did learn her lab partner's name. He dropped out of the program a day or two later. He never learned how to cut a person open. Never learned how to sew them back up.
But Scarlet did.
"Scarlet?"
Scarlet blinks. The reflection does the same, suddenly back in sync. When did they fall out of sync? "What?" She mumbles blearily.
"You good?"
She looks down at her empty hands. They feel heavy and wet. "Yeah."
"You started daydreaming."
Scarlet turns to Brook, eyes wide. "I did, didn't I?"
With a frown, he asks again, "You good?"
There's a pause as she waits for the bloody weight in her hands to melt away. It doesn't, and the tickle in the back of her brain says it never will.
At length, she nods.
"I'm good."
The front door opens and Scarlet is greeted by another smell. It’s sweet and rich and warm, like coffee and donuts, and familiar, like Chase.