Chapter Text
There was something that consumed you when you died.
Something that infiltrated the deepest crevices of your organs, stealing sunlight away into the trenches of your anatomy, places that should never be seen or touched by anything. Something about violating the privacy that was created to stay locked away like cut-off screams or secrets, the ugly, gory mass of what made you up that no one was ever meant to see because no one was meant to delve that deep into your being. Something about exposing the organic clockwork of a body, heart beating as pendulum swings in a red, pulsating display of all the horrors you spent so long bottling up for one reason or another. The places where sun doesn't shine because there shouldn't be eyes to catch the light, the places that reflect the deepest reflections of you to clutch, cherished in your ribcage.
Beautiful. Ugly. Tranquil. Restless. A miracle. A tragedy. The human body was everything that Grian was, wanted, and could never dream of being. The Elders once portrayed mortality as fleeting fancy, a game of puppetry to distract and amuse. Mortals were, naturally, beneath them, not only in body and ability but emotional and physical comprehension. They were, quite simply, the Lesser, as he had grown to refer to them. At first, it felt a punishment, returning to what he had been before, even if he couldn't recall exactly what that had been. Eventually, it dawned that it was in best interest- an honor, even- to witness firsthand the first Great Feast of his time in the Everlife. Not only witness. Perform in. He was handpicked, and it seemed a medal had been laid cold across his collarbone.
How foolish birds are before leaving the nest.
--------------------
Grian's eyes fluttered open, stuttering in this unfamiliar task. Eyelids were heavy, dragging down as if they longed for a dormant world just a second longer. His vision focused onto a swaying star-shaped leaf on the tree looming above him, rippling with its kin in the slight breeze that ruffled his hair and sent waves of long grass rolling around him. Grian sat up, extending his legs, which bent halfway down and ended in a sculpted, smoothed-out foundation to stack the human body upon. A connection to the earth beneath him, expanding, ever expanding…
He looked around.
And how beautiful could looking be?
A small whisper of a laugh traced his lips on the way out. Lips. Grian had lips. He felt them with his fingers. Soft, vulnerable, sensitive. He instinctually licked them and- he had a mouth. Tongues and teeth and the ability to piece together thoughts stitched together with words, strung together to convey- well anything. He could say anything. Do anything. Everything was suddenly possible once freed from the constraints of eternity and immortality.
It was like a weight off of his shoulders. He couldn’t remember where he had been, but he knew returning to this once home was a comfort he hadn’t known existed. It was suddenly possible to feel on his own, unburdened by infinite knowledge.
Grian collapsed into the swaying grass. His lungs convulsed with more laughter. Wisps of now-lost enlightenment floated about in his fuzzy mind, but Grian was so sick of the metaphorical, the intellectual. He wanted, he craved the physical, the here-and-now. Imagine craving something for yourself alone. He dug his fingers into his palms and smiled to match the crescent moons left in his hands. Cause and effect. He missed it, dearly.
He felt. He knew now that things truly mattered.
Oh, to feel and know all at once.
Life.
--------------------
Scar awoke to himself.
It wasn’t a rush of the sea in his lungs or a tug on his heartstrings when he took his first breath once again. It wasn’t rebirth, to him. He’d been living for too long for dormancy to erase all the callouses the universe spent so long building up. The skin had softened, though, and so things were fuzzy. He wasn’t fresh out of the package, manufactured plastic or a creaky, hand-carved doll whose joints hadn’t moved in a decade. He was still a broken, splintered log of wood, but he’d soaked up a few storms in his sleep. Lichen began to grow in the cracks, and waking from hibernation was more of a dazed transition back to reality than the snap of resurrection he was, for some reason, expecting.
Scar slowly raised his torso up, laying back on his elbows and casting his eyes about his place of hibernation. Two rolling hills rose high above him on both sides, forming a nest that cradled Scar like a hammock at the dip in their meeting place. The low valley was dotted with petals of white and yellow peeking up through the sea of green that surrounded all sides of him, and shafts of light fell onto Scar’s face, curiously searching him as the sun began to emerge over the hillside.
Morning, then. Scar mimed tipping a hat to the light warming him and slowly, gingerly got to his feet, hand raised to block the sunshine he was just greeting from piercing his eyes. He began to walk, silky grass blades dotted with dew brushing up against his ankles as he quietly did so. He wandered, aimless and calm, plucking daisies as they sprung up beneath him and humming a tune he’d long ago forgotten the words it accompanied. So he made up his own, and scratched his throat by wearing it out so soon after it had laid dormant for… who knew how long? By the time he reached the top of the hill and spun to look at the valley behind him, he’d truly begun to wonder.
Who was he?
Who had laid him to rest?
Scar found himself focusing on the latter mystery, which was a conundrum in itself. You would think the missing object would be of more importance than who was in the room when you lost it. Then again, maybe they could help pinpoint where it had gone, whether they saw it drop from your pocket or took it out themselves.
No matter. Scar was Scar. He knew that much, it was branded plainly on his skin, for the sunlight and nodding flowers and all the world to see. And maybe the physical was all he was. Something about how long it took to even consider why he was where he was told that maybe he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Maybe that was normal. Well, anyway.
It was a tranquil place to lose yourself in.
Scar tossed the impromptu bouquet into the dip in the land, like laying flowers on a grave. Whoever Scar once was, he wasn’t enough to stick around. So here he stood, ready to start over with the dusty, watermarked canvas he had been given.
Turning away from his resting place for the last time, Scar spotted a large, knotted tree twisting up from the vast landscape; a beacon for the lost.
As it just so happened Scar was, in every sense of the word, lost.
There was a figure lying at the tree’s feet, Scar noticed from still a while away. Something pattered in his chest at first, a sort of sorrow in the familiarity of seeing still bodies from far off. This prompted more internal questions about the moral character of his past, but he shook the weight off in favor of jogging the rest of the way, trekking a path through the long grass. After quick inspection, it was easy to deduce that the person was not dead, at least. As Scar’s feet came to stop beside the person, he leaned over his eyes, glad to see the rise and fall of the breath on his lips.
“Why, hello there!”
The person stared at him for a moment. He, just like the quick thoughts of death and scars that marred him, was familiar. Porcelain skin with blushes of red at folds and creases, curly brown tufts of hair spiraling around his head. But there was something new.
Scar didn’t recognize the eyes.
The person smiled back up at him. “Hello.”
“You’re familiar to me,” Scar added, continuing eye contact and trying to place it somewhere in his memory. “I seem to have lost it.”
“Lost what?”
“Myself. Do you happen to know where I could be?”
The person tilted his head, arms folded across his chest moving to support himself while sitting up. “What’s your name?”
“Scar,” he replied confidently, stepping back from looming over him. “I seem to recall that much.”
He nodded, eyeing Scar up and down. “Creative.”
Scar shrugged, pushing the embarrassment off his face and into the back of his mind. “What about you?”
“Grian,” Grian answered, almost with a sigh. “And, no, it seems I cannot assist you in your quest of finding who you are.”
Scar grinned, holding out a hand. “C’mon, who said that?”
--------------------
Grian looked up at this…
What was he?
One could say he was a cowboy, a wandering soul in search of those to watch the stars with him to cure the loneliness that follows him like a shadow. One could argue he was a con-man, a liar looking for a naive soul to persuade over into the dangerous waters where he treads to watch them slip away with the tide. One could claim he was insane, a disintegrating mind clawing for a still-intact soul in the false hope that collecting enough might restore his own.
Or perhaps he was a lost soul himself.
Grian took his hand, keeping eye contact as he was helped to his feet. “What now?” He asked, at the world, at the empty land, and at the man in front of him.
“Now,” Scar grinned. “We live.”