Chapter Text
There′s miles of land in front of us
And we're dying with every step we take
We′re dying with every breath we make
And I'll fall in line
***
Tyler looked out of his window out to the grayscale landscape of Dema. It was exactly like every other day here. Colour was almost non-existent in the cement city, aside from the blood red of the Bishop's robes. That blood red, striking against the grey. Striking fear, worship.
If you look close enough, over the edge of the tall wall, only seen from the tops of buildings, you can see wilderness. Outside of the walls, past all of the graves. Tyler wondered, what was it like? There would be colour, life, no cement anywhere, and no Bishops. He wanted to go someday. He would go, someday.
He knew someone, one time. Years ago, he was friends with a boy called Josh. They were inseparable, best friends. One day, Josh vanished. Everybody thought the worst (or depending on who you ask, the best). Josh was gone. Dead. Another neon grave, one of the others who made their way to paradise. If you asked Tyler though, he knew that Josh wouldn’t do that. Or at least, he hoped. Josh had made Tyler’s dreary childhood in Dema loads better, and hoping, knowing that Josh was somewhere beyond those walls made his dreary adulthood better too.
Tyler looked down. He missed his friend.
It was just another day in Dema.
He sighed, stole another glance outside his window, and threw on his bag. It was a corduroy bag, and unlike everything else in this godforsaken city, it wasn’t grey. Tyler had most of his items in this bag. Sure, his room had some stuff in it, but if there was one thing that he learned in Dema was that if the Bishop’s, or in his case, Nico, wanted to move his housing, he had less than a day to get all his things together. It’s happened a couple times now and at this point Tyler just kept his few most important things with him at all times.
A drumstick from Josh, from back when they were kids. A scarf his mother made him before she died, a watch that doesn’t work anymore from his also late father, a leather journal filled with various verses he’s written through the years, and an old notebook that was falling apart from his band days with Josh.
Tyler wondered if Josh still played the drums.
They had created a band, a while ago, back before he vanished. With almost nothing else to do in the grey city, Tyler took to writing. It started out as simple poetry, but once Josh had taken a liking to the drums he expanded his writings into songs.
The band they named Twenty One Pilots. It was an homage to a man who committed suicide after causing the death of 21 pilots in WWII by sending them faulty parts on purpose. Tyler and Josh thought it was a fitting name for their situation. As if the Bishops were the faulty parts that led to their deaths. Tyler couldn’t count how many graves sat just outside the city. He didn’t know if he wanted to.
Their band did generally good. The city wasn’t huge and soon people would recognise their music. Tyler hoped it brought them the same solace to listen to that it brought him to write.
***
Tyler runs into Josh’s room, holding a notebook that looks like it had been to hell and back.
“Josh!”
The boy looked up at his name. He was in the middle of trying (and failing) to straighten his hair.
“Dude, I told you the curls are cool, why do you always try to straighten them? It’s so humid out right now that right when we go outside it’ll just curl right back up.” Tyler did an exaggerated pout.
It was always ‘we’ with the pair. Never ‘I’ or ‘you’. They were a pair, a package deal.
Josh sighed and put the straightener down, taking time to turn it off before setting it on his bed. He smiled up at Tyler before moving his eyes over to the notebook the other boy was holding.
“You brought the songbook!”
“Hell yeah I did!” Tyler smiled. “I have some ideas, but it’s mostly just verses and a few choruses, we have to decide what we like and add onto it.”
“Well come over here, let me see!”
Tyler made his way over to Josh’s bed, sitting next to him on the edge of it. He flipped the songbook open to about the middle of it before stopping on a page.
“I’m thinking of calling this one ‘Glowing Eyes’, here you can read through it.” He handed the songbook to Josh, who read a section of what was written out loud.
“Chorus: I know there's someone at the door, they called for help, of this I'm sure, but do I want to say goodbye, to all the glowing eyes? I'm holding on to what I know and what I know, I must let go, but I would rather play a song, for the eyes to sing along.”
“Soooo? You like it?”
“Yes dude! This is so cool, any idea what it’ll sound like?”
“Not yet, I need to finish drafting some verses.”
Josh hummed. “What about something about death? A little on the nose, yeah, but look at where we live.” He let out a little laugh at that. He thought for a couple seconds. “What about, hm, ‘We romanticize what dying truly is’ or similar to that?”
“I’ll do you one better, ‘We have romantic fantasies about what dying truly is, fall off the grid.’”
“YES. Do that, that’s so good. This is why you’re the songwriter Tyler. You’re great at this.”
Tyler laughed. “You started that line, man! I wouldn’t have come up with that on my own. That's why we’re a team!” He held his fist out for Josh to bump.
“Tyler, we should really make a handshake one of these days.”
***
He was going to get out of here, Tyler decided. Even the smallest sliver of a chance that he would see his friend again pushed him through the pain of the meticulous planning of trying to escape. There were so many factors. When? How? Where would he go, what does he bring? He has no family here, nothing to miss or hold on to. Nobody to bring with him.
There were a lot of orphan children in Dema, Tyler being one of them. He remembers a time where he was part of a family of three, he remembers a time when he was a family of two, and he remains currently as a family of one.
It was hard to be a family when everything around you was trying to convince you to end your life.
There were orphanages in Dema, but they were more so just shelters where you could sleep at night away from the open sky. Sometimes they would provide meals too, until you were old enough to find yourself a job and pay for food yourself.
And after that, when you turn 16, you get assigned a Bishop, and a housing unit.
The orphanage was where Tyler had been staying when he met Josh. The other boy was just a few months older than Tyler himself, with them both being 14. Tyler had been walking the perimeter of Dema that day, not for any particular reason. It had become a constant in Tylers life at that point, the tall, thick, concrete wall that seperated their city from the wilderness outside.
“Hi.”
The voice startled Tyler from his monotonous trailing of the wall, and he turned around to be faced with a boy of around his age. His hair was short (but not too short) and curly. It was a darker shade of brown then Tylers own hair, and his eyes were brown.
“Hi.” Tyler responded. He had seen a lot of kids and teenagers during his time in the orphanage, but never this specific person.
“I like your jacket.”
“Thanks.” It was nothing special, it was grey (though Tyler thought maybe it started out white) and had tie dye of red and blue throughout it. It wasn’t originally his, but he had had the jacket for so long it was almost a part of him now.
The pair stood in silence as Tyler looked at the ground to avoid eye contact.
“So…what’s your name?”
“I’m Tyler.” His people skills were rusty; and it was showing.
“Cool. I’m Josh, I live over there.” He pointed east of where they were standing, vaguely towards Listo’s district. “Where do you live?”
Tyler took a second and mulled over what he was going to say. The boy, Josh, looked at him expectantly.
“Orphanage.” He mumbled.
“Huh? Sorry I couldn’t hear you.”
“I stay at the orphanage.”
“Oh, well, maybe that's why we’ve never seen each other before, I don’t leave my district very much.” Josh paused. “Do you want to come to my house?”
Tyler smirked. “You’re inviting someone you just met into your home? What if I’m a serial killer?”
Josh laughed and eyed Tyler up and down. “I’m not too worried about that.”
***
Today he was leaving. After months of meticulous planning, and planning again, and planning again, he was ready.
Everything was in his bag, along with some fruits and nonperishables. He didn’t know what was out there, he needed to be ready.
The city was kept on lock all of the time, but the Bishops were too high and mighty (or maybe untrustworthy?) to bring in more support, like guards. So all of the defenses of the city and keeping people inside were up to only the nine Bishops. Tyler wished he had noticed this sooner. As powerful as they were, they were only nine.
There was a manhole, well, there were many throughout the city, but this one was the furthest from Tyler’s current housing. And since he lived more towards the center of the city, (Nico liked to keep him close to the tower, slowly moving his housing closer and closer to it), this manhole was almost as close to the edge of the grey city as it could be.
And Tyler could go through it. He wasn’t short, but he wasn’t the tallest person around. The perfect size to fit into a manhole to escape the dictatorship he was born into, if you ask him.
And suddenly, he was out. It was a weird feeling. He had been in Dema his entire life, the grey of the cement and blood red of the Bishop’s robes being all he ever knew. To now be away, Tyler almost couldn’t believe it. The sun on his face, that first breath of fresh air, untainted by the lingering essence of death. It was addicting.
The trees around him were nothing less than impressive, though that might be because he’s never been this up and close to a real, thriving tree (He and Josh wrote a song called Trees once, he recalled in the back of his mind).
Tyler started his hike. He had no direction, no plans. He was so free all he wanted to do was run until his lungs gave out and his legs turned into jelly. You don’t realize how suffocating Dema is until you leave. Tyler looked up. The sun hurt his eyes, but it was so new to see the sun. A layer of grey covered everything within the city, a perpetual fog. The sky was a striking blue, more blue than Tyler had ever seen in his 23 years of life.
He loved to breathe free. He never wanted to leave.
***
Nothing lasts forever.
It had been a few days since Tyler made his escape to the rest of the island. And it was some of the best days of his life. The sun, the trees. The plants, all that greenery that Dema was devoid of. He could breathe freely out here, not worried about Nico, or Keons, or any of the other Bishops. For the first time in his life, he was in control.
The air suddenly settled, thick and heavy compared to the lightness that Tyler had felt before. There was a feeling of wrongness, one he hadn't felt since he was home alone, not knowing his mother wasn’t coming back, but having that feeling of metaphorical bile in his throat that something was wrong.
He felt a hand grip his shoulder. And Tyler knew, then, that it wasn’t over.
Nico’s grip on Tyler’s shoulder moved down his arm until the Bishop was tightly holding onto his wrist.
Nico led him back to Dema, past the forest, the trees, the dirt under his shoes, the blue sky above him.
Tyler kept his eyes closed the whole time, not wanting to face the fact that he was no longer free, he was going back, back to Dema, back to his grey monotonous life with no purpose, no family, no friends. He stiffened as he felt Nico’s hands touch his neck, black pigment spreading from the Bishop’s fingers onto his neck and his hands.
(This was the first time this black would creep up his fingers, but Tyler would learn to know that feeling by heart.)
He felt the reentry into Dema heavy in his lungs, the thick grey air that he had been so accustomed to after living in the city his whole life suddenly hard to breath after his time outside.
Nico led Tyler to his current housing unit and up the stairs to his room. Secretly, Tyler was glad that Nico hadn’t decided to move him closer yet to the towers. He had grown fond of this current room.
The Bishop left him in his room, his grey room looking out onto the grey city filled with grey air.
He wanted to give up.
He knew he couldn’t.
Tyler grabbed his journal out of his bag. It was about two thirds of the way done, he should probably buy a new one before his second escape attempt. He scribbled some words down, almost incoherent, but somehow making sense.
‘I know you′re not a liar
And I know you could set fire this day
Go ahead and make me look away
Strike me down, I am calling your lightning
Down from your dark hiding place
Go ahead and show me your face
Reign down
And destroy me’
This was how he got his feelings out. He hated Dema. He hated living here, he hated that he hated it here. He wished he could ignore everything the Bishops did. He wished that maybe, he would give in. There was a feeling deep down, pushed down, that maybe the Bishops were right. He shook his head. No. He was going to get out, the Bishops weren’t going to control him anymore. He was going to escape, and he was going to find Josh.
Tyler shut his journal. Time for a new plan.