Work Text:
In many ways, the world that Alex dreamed of was an empty one. With nothing left of the old design, there would be unlimited creative potential, and what artist doesn’t love a blank canvas?
That said, there were a few things that they’d miss. Pizza, which was a fantastic invention, and not one that could easily be improved upon even if one had eons with which to work. Songbirds at the beginning of the day, even if they were only singing about food and sex, making a perfect sound that was almost more enchanting because of the petty squabbles they could hear when they listened close enough. Bees that ambled around placidly, humming a secret to the universe that they were too dumb to know they were creating. Clouds that just happened to form recognizable shapes, like flowers or castles or arcane symbols only gods could read.
Morgan, feverishly excited, hunched over a table with a truly ungodly— Alex would know— number of very small clockwork explosives that appeared to be keyed to go off when someone whistled a particularly annoying tune, which Alex was fairly sure their mailman was partial to.
The deafening, furious, determined silence of a tree growing halfway up a mountain, clinging grimly to the thin soil, which would live to be the oldest tree in the world in ten thousand years, but was now only just beginning to know its potential. Alex had considered making a door out of that tree for the brand new lair entrance, just to prove that Fate could suck it, but in the end they left it growing with only the ominous warning not big enough yet lingering in the air. Fear improved the quality of the wood. It made it more malleable, or at least that’s what their mother had always said.
People, though, people Alex could do without. They were so uncomfortably soft and squishy. Pouches of meat and fleshy organs strung on fragile little calcium sticks, they had no idea how they didn’t fall apart with every step they took. They had no idea how they managed without the thrum of the universe’s core in their chest, without the burning of the heat death of entropy under their skin. How could they breathe, with those delicate little sacks they called lungs, when gravity wasn’t wrapped around them like a lover, pulling oxygen and carbon dioxide and every other thing on the planet just a little closer to them at all times? Alex breathed in, and the world contracted. Alex breathed out, and the world flew apart at the seams. How could they live without that constant assurance?
The only thing people were good for was entertainment. It was so fun to watch them struggle in their pathetic little orbits, trying desperately to match pitch with each other long enough to find a soul that responded in turn, if only for a minute, and it was even more fun to crush all of their ridiculous hopes and dreams without exerting even the slightest bit of effort.
It was also very fun to take them apart to see how they worked, to see what made them tick. Alex took notes. One day, they would rework the world, and they wanted to know what not to do with their own creations, what mistakes to avoid making, when it came down to it.
Sometimes, Alex liked to give the noble and brave heroes, with their foolish quests to vanquish evil and rid the world of pestilence and greed— as if pestilence and greed weren’t two of the best things the world had to offer— sometimes Alex liked to feed them a taste of what it felt like to be real. To be aware of every atom in one’s own body, of the rotation of every electron, to taste the frisson of the molecules in the air shifting and sliding together. The screaming was delightful, and that was before they caught on fire and burned with the knowledge of what they could never unknow, which was even better.
Other times, Alex just killed them. Creatively, usually, and with extremely specific threats tailored to what they loved most, what they feared most, what would be most excruciating for them in the moments before death, and often in the interminable time afterwards, but there was no need to make it a whole thing. Most people didn’t deserve to have a taste of the universe, even for a moment, even as it destroyed them from the inside out.
Alex sometimes thought that that would be the way they would kill Morgan, when the time came.
They were under no illusion that they would let anyone else kill Morgan, that would be criminal, and just plain wrong, nor would any thing be permitted to do it at all, not on Alex’s watch. Morgan didn’t deserve to die an ordinary, boring death, from illness or age or mortal wounds. Morgan should get to see what infinity looked like, if only for a moment.
Perhaps they would even survive it, but Alex wasn’t placing any bets.
No matter. Pouring a trillion lifetimes’ worth of knowledge and experience and time into Morgan’s fragile human mind would come later. Alex would burn that bridge when they got to it.
For now, they walked away from the window, where the birds were singing about some fucker in my nest fucking my wife and the bees were bouncing off of the glass as they hummed a universal constant that the clouds reflected unconsciously, and joined Morgan at the coffee table.
“So if I whistled Pop Goes The Weasel, nothing would happen?”
“No,” Morgan said, carefully clipping two wires together with something that looked suspiciously like the tweezers from a My First Manicure kit that they’d been eying up last time they went to the mall. “It’s set to the exact range of Tommy, the minute he hits the final refrain. So it wouldn’t work unless you were mimicking Tommy exactly.” They looked up and gave Alex a very serious glare over the top of their safety glasses. “Do not try to mimic Tommy exactly.” They pointed emphatically with the tweezers that were definitely from the My First Manicure kit— Alex recognized the flowery purple grip— and then went back to their project, humming a profoundly off-key version of Pop Goes The Weasel as they did. Alex decided not to point out the hypocrisy. Being hypocritical was a supervillain’s bread and butter, after all.
“What if he’s got a cold?”
“It won’t matter, whistling isn’t produced using the vocal cords, so unless he’s stopped breathing— do not stop his breathing— this will work.”
“And this work will…” Alex trailed off, and waited patiently as Morgan finished attaching the last wire to a gear at the center of the clockwork puzzle.
“They’ll make these loud cracks all around him whenever he finishes whistling,” Morgan explained, gesturing with the hand that still held the tweezers. Alex took them away before Morgan stabbed themself— or anyone else— in the eye, and Morgan took absolutely no notice, but continued on enthusiastically, “It’s going to create a Pavlovian response of pure terror every time he even thinks about whistling!”
“Right,” Alex said dutifully. “And this is better than just killing him because…?”
“Because then he’d be replaced with a different mailman who might have an even more irritating habit that's less easy to fix,” Morgan said, which Alex honestly hadn’t even considered.
This was why Morgan was going to get to live, and then get to die gloriously at no one’s hands but Alex’s own. They thought of things that Alex would never see, and Alex needed them in order to navigate this bewilderingly fragile human world for just a little longer, at least until they were sure of what they wanted to build when they were on their own.
Then Alex would swallow Morgan up, body and soul, and together they’d forge a new world.
But first, pizza night, and terrorizing mailmen.