Work Text:
There is a fine line between the living and the dead, and now Terzo walked right down the center. Unbearably alone, he found himself roming the rows of headstones or the wandering the endless, twisting corridors of the abbey. Slowly he noticed how siblings tended to act around him, they often shivered and looked around with wife eyes. One or two would star right at him from time to time, whether they could actually see him or not, he didn't know.
For the first few months after Terzo's passing, siblings would come visit his grave, they would leave offerings or speak into the nothingness, some just sat and cried. Their numbers slowly dwindled though, leaving the maintenance workers and the few who had made the graveyard their favorite space.
A few sibling tried to hold a seance a few times, but he never felt the pull of their power like he had herd about, he felt stuck in between.
Time pasted, people moved on and left Terzo behind. No one forgot, but no one had tears left to cry. Terzo was left to his thoughts. In his world, he was competely alone, isolated from everyone and everything. Tethered by a thread. Not even the ghouls payed much mind to him, he knew they were used to feeling spiritual presence and typically ignored it.
There was one particular frequent that held his attention. You had made it a routine to sit by his grave, back against the headstone. Nearly every week you stopped by to read, study, and one of his favorite of your activities, ramble about everything and nothing. You could talk for hours about Copia's sermons, the latest gossip, whatever trouble the ghouls were in with Imperator. At first, he payed little attention to you, but when you started to make a routine of it, you became impossible not to notice. Terzo stopped listing into conversations just so he could sit through those weekly one-sided conversations. It made his existence that much more bearable.
It was about two months into this routine when you stopped mid sentence, turned, and looked directly at the spot where Terzo was perched on the lip of the tombstone.
"By the way, my names y/n." You told him.
He nearly fell of the marble statue where he sat. It struck him this was the first time he had heard your name. Did they see him, or could they just feel him there. He'd lost track of how long it had been since anyone had spoken directly to him like that, it had been even longer since he tried to respond. He spoke in a breathy whisper that could be swept away in a slight breeze,
"Am I real to you?"
The moment seemed to last forever, seconds felt like years as he awaited a response he wasnt sure would ever come.
"You've always been real to me, it's just taken a while to be be shure when you're here," You told him.
Terzo had questioned if he was real anymore. He could feel memories of the life he once had fade with every passing day. He could feel how he became more and more disconnected from the world of the living as his body rotted in the ground. But now, in this moment, he's never felt mire alive, knowing he's not alone anymore hit deep in his mind.
"Terzo, I you will always be real to me, no matter what form you may take."
And just like that, the string broke, and the wall preventing him from moving on fell. It was like someone turned the power back on, people he had only seen in painting and in old records now wandered among the head stones. He recognized his father's father's father's father, the one that he'd met once in a seance when he was little, not far from him. The man turned his head and smiled warmly.
"We've been waiting for you, welcome home kiddo."