Chapter Text
“I- I- I- I, staying alive, staying alive.”
Caitlyn’s clasped hands pump on Jayce’s chest. She throws her whole body weight into each push. Crack ribs if she has to, that’s what she learned in her first aid course. Too bad it was seven years ago. Too bad Jayce has been dead for twenty minutes now.
Propping open his mouth, she blows in. Her tears drip onto his bloodless cheeks. Once, twice. Then back to the chest compressions.
If she had known there were snakes in these woods, she would have suggested they stay at a hotel. They were hiking from their camping spot up the side of the nearby mountain to catch a glimpse of the sunrise. The snake was so quick that Jayce didn’t realize what happened until the cardiac arrest set in. At least Caitlyn said all the things she wanted to say to her best friend as he died in her arms. She saved the screaming and sobbing herself raw for after his heart stopped beating.
She tried everything she knows. She tried to suck out the venom, she tried to tie off the limb to save the rest of him. But it was all too little too late.
Now she’s on the rocky outcrop overlooking the forested valley, doing chest compressions on a long-dead body, with no service and no one but herself to blame. The scraggly pines surrounding them are the only ones who can hear her shouts for help.
“It doesn’t have to end this way,” a voice says behind her.
Caitlyn whirls around.
Supported by a black iron staff carved with two snakes, is a man. He’s dressed in tweed and linen as if he’s walked out of a campus library instead of the woods. He’s slight, pale, and keen-eyed. She could probably take him if she needs to. She can defend herself against some lost professor.
Then she notices the mechanical wings folding up at his heels.
So he’s a stranger that appears to have flown here on his ankle wings. Caitlyn would love to say that she’s seen weirder things, but she truthfully hasn’t.
“Who are you?” she asks suspiciously, wiping the back of her hand across her cheeks roughly. The winged stranger doesn’t need to see her cry.
The stranger shrugs a shoulder lazily, “Who I am isn’t important. A better question is what you can do to save him.”
There’s light lilt in his voice, flipping over the consonants. It would be pleasant to listen to if she wasn’t so freaked out.
“What are you talking about? He doesn’t have a pulse! I've been doing CPR for twenty minutes!”
“There is no medical solution to this. I would be the one helping you if that were the case,” the man says offhandedly.
“I don’t see exactly how-”
“You’re going to break into the Undercity and take him back,” the man states, “I’d do it myself if I wasn’t bound by duty.”
He looks down at Jayce’s corpse with something a little bit like fondness. And longing. Caitlyn doesn’t understand. She’s never seen this guy in her life. Jayce has never mentioned him. But the way he looks down at Jayce is the gaze of a lover left behind.
“What’s it to you? And what’s the Undercity?”
“The Undercity is where the souls go. After Death hands them to me and I carry them down. I know the way. I can tell you how to reach him.”
“But he’s dead,” Caitlyn argues, ignoring his comment about carrying souls, “That’s kind of a permanent thing.”
“I can show you,” the man says cryptically.
He waves his hand and suddenly Caitlyn isn’t looking at the scrubby alpine trees. She’s looking at some kind of train station. Everything is dark, stained with years of soot. Eerie green light emanates from the tracks ahead. There appears to be no ceiling, just darkness. There’s a line of people leading up to some kind of clerk in a ragged uniform. One head stands taller than the rest in the line. It’s Jayce. He’s looking around, shifting on his feet restlessly. He hates waiting. Always has.
“Jayce!” she calls. He doesn’t turn. He takes a step with the line.
“He can’t hear you,” says the impromptu magician beside her, “You’re not actually there. But you could be.”
The image dissolves and Caitlyn is back on the rocky outcrop.
“What- How did you-?”
The man waves her off dismissively, “While I would enjoy discussing the mysteries of the universe with you, I can't be seen here talking to you. Just hold one of these in your hands,” he produces three large gold coins from his pocket and hands them to her. Caitlyn takes them hesitantly. “Picture Jayce’s soul and you’ll go to him. Once you have him in hand, you can use these to get out again by picturing his body here. I’ll watch over it. No harm will come to it while you’re gone.”
“I don’t understand how that's possible,” Caitlyn murmurs.
“You’ll just have to trust that I know what I’m talking about,” the man says curtly. Caitlyn swears the snake carvings on his cane hiss at her. She's recently developed a distaste for snakes.
Caitlyn shakes her head, “No, I don’t trust you. Why are you helping me? What’s he to you?”
The man bends low, tenderly brushing a line of dirt from Jayce’s cheekbone.
A faint smile flits across his mouth, “I’d given up on mortals long ago. I certainly never thought I’d never love one. Love has a funny way of proving us wrong, doesn’t it?”
“Do you even know him?”
The man stands, leaning heavily on his cane, “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I would like him to be alive and you’re the closest mortal whose intentions align with mine. Take the coins. Keep to yourself. And get him out.”
With that, the man clicks his heels together. The mechanical wings unfold again, panel by panel. They whir to life. He nods to her. And he takes to the sky.
Caitlyn watches him go, slack-jawed. Soon he's just a speck on the orange horizon.
Then she’s alone again on the side of the mountain. The sun is just now sinking in the distance. It’s the sunset she and Jayce were hiking to see. Except now she’s alone. It doesn’t look half as beautiful as she thought it would through her bleary eyes
The way Caitlyn sees it, there are three options. She can stand there and have a mental breakdown. She can hike down this godforsaken mountain until she gets cell service to call search and rescue. Or she can try the coin thing.
Really, the options are an illusion of choice. She’s going to hike down eventually. Whether she wastes her time wailing at the sky or holding a coin waiting for who knows what won’t really change the outcome.
Her curiosity wins out. So what if the coin thing is nonsense. A guy flew out of the sky to give them to her. The likelihood that it works is about the same as her getting them in the first place.
Laughing disbelievingly at herself, Caitlyn closes her hand around one of the coins and closes her eyes.
She pictures Jayce. She pictures the summer they went canoeing and she got so badly sunburned that they could play tic tac toe on her leg. She pictures the night he lost his first tooth and she squealed when he chased her around the room with it. She pictures the afternoon she got her drivers licence and they rolled the windows down on the highway, blasting some song about being young and free.
Something rumbles under her feet. Caitlyn’s first instinct is to check that the rocky outcrop isn’t falling down, but she remembers why she’s holding the coin. It must be working. She needs to stay focused on Jayce or she might end up somewhere she doesn’t want to be.
Caitlyn desperately clings to memories of Jayce, feeling a sensation like sand climbing up her legs. Or is she sinking into the sand?
Suddenly, the sensation rushes up her body. The world goes dark.
As she falls, Caitlyn grips the coin firmly in her hands. She clenches her eyes against the rush of cold air. She falls down, down, down.
She lands with a hard impact. It sends her sprawling. She doesn’t drop the coin, because the coin isn’t there to be dropped.
The ground is gritty yet solid. It feels like cracked concrete under her stinging hands. With a laboured grunt, Caitlyn pushes herself up to stand. She appears to be in the entryway of some kind of drinking establishment. Low music plays under the chatter of patrons. Neon lights illuminate dirty countertops and half-empty glasses in a kaleidoscope of colours. Most of the bar stools and tables are occupied by a rough looking bunch. Their clothes are ripped. Their movements are sluggish. Shadows from the lancing sideways light hide most of their features.
Caitlyn rolls her shoulders back and walks in.
For all intents and purposes, she’s either having a vivid hallucination, or she’s actually in the Undercity. Either way, she’s on her guard. This is nothing like she expected when she pictured the afterlife. A few of the patrons watch her walk by, but most of them are too engrossed in their drinking to bother. Someone bumps into her on her way around a table, but when she turns to apologize, they’re already gone. At least no one seems all that upset that she’s there. All she has to do is find Jayce and get out without attracting too much attention.
It’s not until she reaches the bar that she hears it.
“I don’t know about this,” a familiar voice says, “I want to remember.”
“I know you do,” a second voice says, low and gentle, “But it’s better this way. You can find your peace once you finish the drink.”
A little ways down the bar sits Jayce. He looks exactly like he did on the hiking trail the moment before he got bit. The only difference is the shadow obscuring his face. Jayce is talking to one of the bartenders, a burly man with hair tied back. His features are discernable. He looks kind as he slides a clear drink in a beer glass towards Jayce.
Caitlyn doesn’t know what’s in that drink, but she does know that he shouldn’t drink it.
“Jayce!” she calls, approaching quickly, “There you are. I’ve been worried sick.”
Jayce blinks at her, confused.
“C- Caitlyn? What are you doing here?”
The bartender gives her an expectant look as if he too would like to know what she’s doing there.
“I came to get you,” Caitlyn explains, “I’m here to bring you home.”
“Home?” Jayce’s brow furrows, “I don’t think I can go there. Everyone here keeps telling me that I’m dead.”
That’s also unexpected. For some reason, she thought the afterlife would be more vague and mystical. This afterlife is all blunt force trauma.
“Yes, but someone sent me to get you. This isn’t the end, Jayce,” she gently slides the drink away from him, “Don’t you want to come home?”
Jayce frowns, or she imagines he does. It’s still as if the neon bar lights don’t quite catch on his features. “I do, it’s just… How?”
That one word sounds so hopeless it nearly breaks her heart.
“With these,” Caitlyn digs in her pocket for the other two coins. The bartenders gaze lands on something over her shoulder. He sighs exasperatedly and flips a towel over his shoulder.
Caitlyn keeps digging. She feels through all of the pockets on her dark blue cargo shorts and the one small key pocket on the back of her white tank top. She even feels in the sides of her hiking boots, thinking they might have fallen in there.
“Looking for these?” a smooth voice says behind her.
Caitlyn whips around for the second time that day to find a woman.
She’s not like any woman Caitlyn has ever seen before.
Pale eyes like flashing metal. Pink lips pulled up in a cocky grin. Dark eyebrows. Vibrant magenta hair shorn short and wild around her pierced ears.
Other than the bartender, she’s the only face Caitlyn can see clearly.
The rest of the woman comes into focus too. She’s athletically built with muscular shoulders wrapped in black tattoos resembling gears. The gears trail up around her neck. Caitlyn imagines there’s a lot more she can’t see. She wears a tight grey and black sleeveless top and heavily belted black pants. Her forearms are wrapped in white cloth.
Two gold coins flip between her fingers. Caitlyn stares. The coins catch the pink light from a bar sign as they move between her dextrous knuckles.
Caitlyn shakes herself into her senses.
“How did you-?
The stranger lifts her chin challengingly, “You gotta watch your pockets in the Undercity.”
“I surely will going forward,” Caitlyn says primly, “If you would be so kind as to return those, I’ll just be on my way.”
The woman snorts. With a flick of her wrist, the coins vanish.
“Hey!” Caitlyn protests, “Give those back, I need those!”
“Yeah,” says Jayce getting off of his stool, “Give ‘em back.”
While he towers above the woman, she doesn’t look the least bit intimidated. She just tilts her head back to stare him down.
“Sit down and shut up for a minute, would you? The girls are chatting.”
To Caitlyn’s shock, Jayce sits back down on the bar stool obediently. He doesn’t say a word. From the set of his shoulders, Caitlyn can tell that he’s straining to move. But he can’t.
She tries not to let it rattle her. She crosses her arms to hide her shaking hands. She’s a head taller than the woman who’s stolen her coins, but there’s some unseen power imbalance. Caitlyn doesn’t know where she is or who any of these people are. There's the unnerving sense that everything she doesn’t know is going to come around to bite her. Curse that winged guy who didn’t tell her nearly enough about where she was going and curse that snake for biting Jayce in the first place.
“You’re cute, but I’m not giving them back,” the woman drawls. She taps on the bar and drink is poured for her. She settles onto a stool and pats the one in front of Caitlyn. An invitation.
“Why not? They’re worthless,” Caitlyn tries, cautiously taking a seat on the stool.
The woman laughs appreciatively. In a different circumstance, it would be a nice laugh.
“A ballsy one, aren’tcha? Too bad you’re shit outta luck. This is my town, cupcake. You’re not just going to waltz in and steal from me.”
“I wasn’t stealing from you, I was just…”
Caitlyn trails off. Her town. All the stories say that the afterlife has a ruler. A guardian of souls. The woman doesn’t look like the lord of the dead, but then again, the fellow who gave her the coins didn’t look like a divine being either. This place certainly doesn’t look anything like heaven.
Her head is really starting to ache.
“Oh my god,” Caitlyn murmurs.
The woman takes a big sip of her amber drink. Black smoke pours from the top like ignited oil.
“Yeah, if you want to get all possessive about it, sweetcheeks.” The woman winks and Caitlyn flushes despite herself.
The bartender has wandered to the other side of the u-shaped bar to serve another shadowy patron. Caitlyn is alone with dumbstruck Jayce and the last person she was supposed to run into. Two minutes in, and she’s already failed. Caitlyn rests her elbows on the bartop and scrapes her hands through her hair, ruining her ponytail.
Where the hell is she? What has she done? She’s found Jayce, but she can’t save him. He can’t even talk to her. The guy with the wings made it very clear that she was on her own. She’s broken her way into the afterlife with no way out. That's the same as being dead.
Hot tears prick at the corners of her eyes. She swallows hard and tries to breathe through the tightness in her chest.
A hand rubs soothingly across her back.
“Aw, cupcake,” the woman coos, “don’t cry. You did your best. I’m just better.”
Caitlyn does not find that particularly comforting.
“What now?” she asks miserably, staring at the scratched surface of the bartop, “Are you going to send me back?”
The woman’s hand is still rubbing slow circles on her back. Her hand is unexpectedly warm. Caitlyn can feel the rough pads of her fingers through the thin fabric of her shirt.
“No, I don’t think I will.”
Caitlyn jerks away, “What?”
The woman shrugs with her palms up.
“I don’t feel like sending you back." She pauses, staring off into space for a split second. Then she’s present again and shrugging on a red leather jacket, “Now I don’t mean to be rude, but I gotta get going. Monsters to feed, demons to intimidate, you know how it is.”
“I most certainly do not know how it is.”
The woman reaches forward so quickly that Caitlyn doesn’t have time to react. She tucks a strand of hair that has fallen out of Caitlyn’s ponytail behind her ear and taps up under her chin with the second knuckle of her first finger.
“Chin up, cupcake. And watch your pockets. The dead have hungry hands.”
With that, the woman downs the rest of her drink, stands, and leaves the bar.
Caitlyn finds herself feeling more completely alone than she did doing chest compressions on a dead body on the side of a mountain. At least there the worst thing had already happened. It was only supposed to get easier.
Now, alone in a bar in hell except for a silent Jayce, she has a dreadful sinking feeling that things are only going to get worse.