Chapter Text
Darkness. The unbearable heat of hellfire. The crackle and pop of burning skin.
Lucy choked on the thick stench of decay as her face was pressed into the mire of rotten flesh that served as the land of this realm. Claws dug into the back of her scalp and yanked her head back until she was face to face with the skeletal visage of an undead fiend, Lucy's blood dripping from its mouth.
Lucy had no sense of time in this realm, but it felt like she had been enduring this torture for centuries. She had been bound, burned and whipped, torn out and consumed by these fiends. She closed her eyes, exhausted and desperately trying to pretend she was anywhere else.
The fiend laughed, a harsh, grating noise that made Lucy's hair stand on end. “Poor, little jotun,” it spoke in archaic Giant, voice dripping with faux pity. “Tired already? But we've just gotten started! You have all of eternity with us to look forward to!”
—
Lucy jolted awake. Her heart was racing, and if she could sweat, she would've been. The room was dark, but as her eyes adjusted, she recognized her too-small apartment in downtown Elmville. She took a deep breath. It was only a nightmare.
Lucy had been plagued by these memories almost nightly since she returned to the plane of the living. Night after night, she found herself back in the corrupted corpse of a god, reliving those experiences again and again. As a result, she found herself sleeping less and less to avoid the nightmares.
It was surprisingly easy to avoid sleep. Since her resurrection, Lucy hadn't really felt physical exhaustion. It was an odd experience, knowing that her body needed rest, but not being able to feel it. It was like going days without food yet not feeling hungry or working in the sun but not feeling thirsty.
Lucy stood up from her too-small mattress on the floor and made her way over to the bathroom, turning the light on and looking at herself in the mirror. Her face looked more or less the same as it always had. Same patchy blue skin, same down-turned eyes, same straight nose… Her face was a little thinner than it used to be, and her eyes were sunken into dark bags, but that was exactly how the rest of her party looked.
Lucy tilted her chin up and gingerly ran her fingers over the scar across her throat. That had been Kipperlilly's work. Lucy was covered in the silver scars of that horrible night by the lake. She had seen her autopsy report. Slashed, punctures, electrical burns, a cleaved skull… Then, of course, there was the y-scar from her autopsy.
Lucy placed her hand over her heart, remembering what was under her shirt there. Despite the rest of her scars healing into silvery keloids, her shatterstar scar was as pink as the day it was carved into her. It stood in stark contrast to the cool blues of her skin, and unignorable, bright red flag that would forever give away what she had been through.
Lucy sighed and splashed some water in her face, wiping off the frost as it froze to her skin. She left the bathroom and turned on the room light. There was no way she would get back to sleep now, so she might as well get ready for the day.