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The ticking clock is the only sound in the room, and has been for awhile. The ticking clock. Time running out. Time running. Running. They've been running on fumes. They've been--
It's been a hard few weeks. A maddening few weeks. Literally. Figuratively. Interchangeably. Memory is weird. Time doesn't have much meaning, but it's running out. Running on fumes. They've been--
Missing sleep. Rational thought flees before a tired mind. They're all emotions, and fog, and a hard few weeks. Focus. They need to focus. They're running out of time. Something is calling them to focus. It's calling them to. To. There’s an axe in his hands, and it’s calling--
Doc feels like he's falling and he jerks, blinks. His head is resting in his hand is resting on the table is resting by the altar. There are eyes staring back at him, glassy in death. There are eyes staring back at him, hidden somewhere behind the face of the shattered piece of the moon. He was falling asleep, which is a marvel; a mercy afforded when all he could hear was the ticking clock. He can't call it hypnotizing, because he knows what a hold on his mind feels like now, and the quiet ticking is far from that compulsion. Far from the feeling of a string pulling on him from the center of his chest, pulling, gentle, but threatening to yank out something vital if he didn't follow.
Ren, like him, is a wraith in the room, exhausted and tense, all hard lines and weary edges. He's leaning against the far corner, gaze vacant out the window. He looks tired. He looks maybe too tired to sleep, which feels like a state of being that shouldn’t exist, but Doc feels the same way. He doesn't fidget or stir. He could be another pair of glassy eyes in the room if his head weren't still firmly attached to his shoulders. The room is bright, even with all the candles burned so low as to drown in their own melted wax. Bright, because the sky is falling in slow motion, and the moon is too close to afford the night its comforting blanket of darkness.
They're running out of time.
"I know," Ren says, and it's the first indication Doc has that he'd spoken any of his thoughts out loud. His throat feels a bit strained, so he figures he must have used it; the alternative being that Ren could read minds now, which at this point was far within the wheelhouse of possibility. Doc preferred not to entertain the thought. He'd had his mind invaded by one compulsion already, and while Ren was certainly a more comforting presence, he was still an unwanted one in the privacy of Doc's own thoughts.
"It's been quiet for days," Doc points out, since he's apparently of the mood to state the obvious. Exhaustion blunted his wit, he figured, and his desire for meandering conversation. Besides, the end of the world was sure to be a blunt and terrible thing - might as well treat it as it was.
"I don't understand," Ren sounded as tired as he looked, ears back, shoulders slumped, voice wilting, eyes unfocused, "It told us to do all this -- for what?"
Doc rolled his chin against his hand, directing his gaze towards the too-large-moon shining far-too-bright on his lovely Octagon outside, "Maybe it thought one world-ending event wasn't enough."
"We kill each other all the time. For fun. Just because."
Doc made a noise in his throat that was supposed to be in affirmation. It sounded a bit like a cynical laugh.
"At least this time the bloodshed meant something."
"We don't know that yet," Doc pointed out. Stating the obvious. He rolled his gaze to the moon rock sitting on the altar, letting the vacant eyes of his friends become unfocused blurs on the edges of his vision.
“Yes. We do,” there was an obvious frown in Ren's voice that Doc pointed out to himself, in the privacy of his own thoughts, that he assumed weren’t being actively invaded but could no longer be sure of. If he had slept, he might be able to conjure a feeling besides apathy about the whole thing. Maybe sometime in the future disgust and indignance would figure out how to exist in his mind again. Sometime when night finally fell. Fell. Doc looked out the window at the moon again. Night was falling. In slow motion. And when it came it would never end.
If he were well rested, would he feel fear? He didn’t know. It’d been a hard few weeks. Existential dread seemed small in comparison to how big their problems were. How much bigger their problems were getting with every passing moment.
“Do we have a backup plan?” Doc asked, because it seemed like a logical question to ask, even though he already knew the answer.
“We just have to have faith,” Ren countered, skating around the possibility that they’d been tricked by a moon rock into a futile act of violence. Doc made another humming sort of affirmation noise, not sure if it were good or bad that he show Ren how unconvinced he was. Not that Doc had anything against the notion of faith. He had faith in a lot of things. It was specifically his faith in his ability to be duped by a moonrock that he’d chosen to fixate on at present.
Doc felt a bit off-balance, and his eyelids were heavy. He was tired, and his left hand hurt. Had been hurting for awhile, but it was something he kept forgetting and remembering intermittently. He had a pretty nasty wound on his palm, a cut from Grian that, during their frenzied attempt to kill Joe, Ren had accidently splashed poison on. The wound was probably infected, if it persisted so bitterly after so many days from the event. Doc couldn’t remember if he’d cleaned it. The ticking damage from the poison had stopped, and he’d been busy collecting heads for the altar, heeding the soft thread pulling his chest. It’d been a hard few weeks.
The Hermatrix was awake. Doc felt it immediately. There was a string tied around his heart, suddenly pulled taught. It was a nauseous feeling. It made his heart flutter, a frightened bird threatened by a knock against its cage. When he looked up, he saw Ren was staring down at the moon rock, looking the most alert he’d seemed in days-weeks. The bags under his eyes were still dark, but his body was all hard lines and sharp edges, an arrow pointing to the altar of heads. Doc got to his feet. His hand ached when he pushed it against the table, but the ache was fading.
There was a tingling in Doc’s ears. A buzzing. Hornit wings droning beside his head - don’t flinch, they might sting. There was movement in the air, like something writhing just beneath the layers of reality. There was something--
Hh h h h Hh h H H hi I i i s s ss hsh h si ii ss s s s s hh H H
“What’s it saying?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well listen.”
“I’m trying!”
“Try harder!”
S s hhis ss Hiiis sss s na a aaa me mmeeis isiiissssss
Doc felt suddenly as awake as a livewire, felt himself compelled to step towards the center of the room, towards the glassy eyes, towards Ren, who was stepping forward in the same motion. He wondered, distantly, with the parts of himself that were still his, if this was the compulsion that brought the moth to the flame. He wondered when his wings would burn, or if they already had. He felt like he fell a long time ago, started falling, maybe, the moment he picked up his axe and raised it towards Mumbo, hopelessly tangled in webs.
His s s s hh hsiss snname e eeis s siisi ss ss s s
hhHhisssnaaa ame e eee e i ii ss ssss s s
H hhhh his s ssna amee eis s
Doc and Ren made eye contact across the top of the Hermatrix. Doc didn’t know when his axe had come into his hands, he only knew his palm stung against it. He only knew Ren was holding his as well. The blades were dulled from use, but they were still bloody, powerful tools. Ren’s eyes were dark, his expression vacant. Doc figured he looked about the same. He didn’t feel tired anymore. There was a string tugging on his heart, pulling him from the center of his chest, tethering him to a will that wasn’t his own. A will that beckoned softly, whispered soft words of agency while the thread pulled tighter, threatening to rip out something vital. He didn’t have a choice. Or he’d already made his choice. The minute Ren brought him first to the altar and told him to listen. He shouldn’t have chosen to listen, and now it was all he could do.
H i s n a m e i s . …. …. . . .. . . . .
Ren’s eyes flickered with something. Flickered. Briefly. A candle in an open window while the wind weaves in. Doc wondered if he mirrored it. Caught somewhere between regret and determination. The clock in the room was getting loud in Doc’s ears. He was holding his breath.
His name is
“Ren.”
“Doc.”
They said it at the same time, a race to the finish, as if it would determine who lived and who died. Doc felt a compulsion, a string in his chest, pulling him forward. His grip tightened on his axe. Across from him, Ren mirrored the action, the hair on the back of his neck bristling, growing. His eyes were wide open, his muzzle was getting long. Ren could be scary when he wanted to be. The full moon made life difficult for him, but he still possessed some self-control. Now though, it was slipping away from him, and that axe was looking toy-like and small in his clawed hands. Doc hissed, and flashed once with brilliant light. Every instinct in Ren’s body made him flinch.
Doc could be scary too.
His name is--
They lunged at each other in tandem. In the distance somewhere, lightning struck Power Node 1. It was funny how hands that build so much together could turn.
Funny, but not unpredictable. They’d done it six times already. Glassy eyed around the altar. Six times. There was probably some vindication in the seventh and eighth. The clock was ticking. Time was running out.
The sky was falling in slow motion.
Time was running out.
Time was running--