Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Prisoner feels the roar of the crowd in his bones. After the silence, even the beating of another human heart would have been enough to shake him, but this is the pound of an ocean against a shore. The words are indistinguishable, only the rhythm and the feeling. Anticipatory. Expectant. His stomach turns; he hasn’t eaten in longer than he cares to remember, but it still feels likely he will be sick. A small mercy, that the French doors to the balcony are closed and covered with curtains. If he could see as well as hear, there’s no telling what he might do.

“Well,” says the Dictator. “How does it feel to return from the dead?”

The Prisoner does not answer. He has not spoken for some time, excluding anything he might say against his own will in dreams. At first, there was comfort in the sound of his own voice, but that faded within the first month. In his cell in the Ministry of Abandoned Timelines, the echo of his own scream against the walls took on the modulation of a thousand voices, all taunting his inability to die. If he hadn’t retreated into silence, he would be fully mad by now.

Madder than he already is, he reminds himself. These things are relative, and until now, he has had no point of comparison. Perhaps he has already been mad for years.

“It happens so rarely,” the Dictator remarks, as though the silence does not bother him. He is seated in a wingback armchair next to an unlit fire. Long fingers drum against one knee, the only sign of his irritation. “Surely you’ve heard the adage. ‘Time moves in all directions, but the doors of the MOAT open only in.’ Many people would give their family’s lives to stand where you do right now. A little gratitude would not go amiss.”

If the Prisoner closes his eyes, he can still feel the lick of fire against his skin. Smell the tang of his own flesh burning.

But he does not close his eyes. That would be a risk even he is not desperate enough to take. The Dictator is not to be ignored. 

Instead, he lets his eyes wander to the Dictator’s left, no more than a foot. Subtle enough that it might go unnoticed. And how much easier it is to look at Marianne, who sits beside the Dictator on a low stool. Straight-backed as always, her red skirt a pool of blood against the marble. The thin golden leash of the Dictator’s doberman dangles from her fingers. She holds it loosely, as though she hopes the dog might overpower her and lunge for the nearest throat.

From behind him, the Guard’s hand claws into the Prisoner’s hair and wrenches his head up. His breath catches. His chin is forced to tilt upward, an angle that might have been defiant seventeen years ago. The point of the Guard’s blade nicks against his throat. The Prisoner does not dare to swallow.

“I would encourage you to look only at me,” says the Dictator.

He grits his teeth and does. The Dictator has not changed since the last time they met, seventeen years ago, in the moments before the cell door slammed shut for what he thought would be the final time. Then, the Prisoner was on the brink of death, lungs still wreathed in smoke. Ripped from the wreckage and brought back, disarmed and stripped and flung into the MOAT. The same flicker of amusement danced at the corner of the Dictator’s mouth then, too. As though their final gasp of defiance had been nothing more than a diversion, a foolish prank played by a child.

You think they love you, the Dictator said, the frame of his sunglasses glittering in the torchlight. And maybe they did. But they will forget you and everything you stood for. And through it all, I will remain.

The Prisoner has thought of these words as days became weeks, weeks became years. Long enough that they became truth, as anything will with enough repetition.

But now here he is. And while the Dictator has remained, so has the Prisoner.

“You hear them, don’t you,” the Dictator says. He wafts one hand toward the French doors, through which the filtered chant of the crowd continues to stream. 

The Prisoner forces his attention back to the present. Though the Guard has released his grip and the knife has retreated, the memory of it is more difficult to banish. For all the Prisoner has been longing for death, in its presence he finds himself newly afraid of it.

“Tell our friend what they’re saying, Marianne,” the Dictator says.

“Draag,” Marianne murmurs.

Her voice overlaps precisely with the chant of the crowd, so that for a moment it seems as though she is speaking for all of them.

“They are celebrating His Excellency,” Marianne goes on, as though she is reading. “Celebrating the seventeenth year of the Concrete Age.”

“Precisely,” the Dictator says. He leans over to pat Marianne on the shoulder, in a gesture that would have been more appropriate to the dog. “The next chapter of our glorious future. But tell us, Marianne. Tell our friend what else they have been saying. In the tenements and the factories, along the docks and the airstrips. The foolish ones, what are they saying?”

For a moment, Marianne pauses. The Dictator’s fingers again grasp his knee reflexively. When the Dictator orders a response, there is no time for hesitation or silence. In a moment of pure instinct, the Prisoner thinks he might lunge forward, might interpose himself between Marianne and whatever fate will meet her from the barrel of the Dictator’s gun. Proof indeed that he has gone mad—the idea that here, in this world, there is still any reason to give one’s life for another.

But the pause is only a moment. The silence is shattered, and Marianne slides her dark glasses to the end of her nose to expose her eyes, and she begins to sing.

And though you’re dead and gone, believe me

Your memory will carry on.

It’s only two lines. The space of three heartbeats. But it is long enough.

The Prisoner’s knees buckle. He sways, catches himself moments before falling. It is as if the Dictator’s fire has consumed his flesh again. It is as if the words have replaced his blood with an electric current.

Marianne’s gaze spears him in place. The milky cataracts he has come to expect are nowhere to be seen; her eyes are dark and liquid and they pierce through seventeen years of silence and stasis and shake him out of himself. He sees himself as though he has left his body and surveys the scene from the gilded molding of the ceiling. A man forgotten by time, battered and ragged, his hair grown long and lank like an untended plant. Gaunt and pale, dressed in the nondescript gray uniform of Draag’s political prisoners, his forearms rent with scratches and scars he has left there himself with his own fingernails.

A man they called the Conductor, once. A man who fought for something.

He is in agony, and he wishes he were dead, and he has never felt so alive.

Then the music is gone, and Marianne’s glasses again shield her eyes. The only sound is the steady chanting of the crowd, and the Prisoner’s own roaring heart, louder now than the voices in the square.

“Foolish habits die hard,” the Dictator says. “There are still some who recall the songs of the Black Parade, I’ll admit it. I’ve learned since then. Burn their idols and you risk making your example into a martyr.”

The Dictator rises from his armchair. Every sentry and soldier and politician in the room scrapes back their own chair and rises in a wave behind him. Only Marianne and the dog remain seated, both looking without interest in the direction of the Prisoner.

“But turn their idol into a puppet,” the Dictator says softly, “and suddenly there is nothing left to worship.”

He snaps his fingers, and one of the half-dozen well-dressed secretaries in tailored suits turns on his heel and crosses to a tall cabinet on the opposite side of the room. The Prisoner watches, against his better judgment. He does not want to care. He cannot help himself. His nerves have turned to poison, and every thought erodes his defenses.

The Secretary opens the cabinet and removes a coat hanger, on which hangs a jacket.

Now the Prisoner is certain he will be sick.

The Black Parade had thought themselves so clever, when they’d first designed them. Almost the style of the Draag military uniform, epaulettes and braiding and silver buttons that gleamed like skulls. But instead of the olive green they saw marching in strict formation in front of the Dictator’s palace on every Sunday and city holiday, they had fashioned their jackets from black. Black with bone-white braiding across the chest, until it looked as though the dead soldiers of Draag had risen from their graves and resumed parade formation with only their bones for dress uniforms. 

The jacket in the Secretary’s hand is dusty with ash and frayed at the seam. A burn has swallowed half of the left sleeve—a burn the Prisoner can still feel, sometimes, in the slippery moments before he falls asleep.

It’s his. 

And yet it’s no longer his, because he is no longer him.

“To celebrate the era of peace and prosperity ushered in through the Concrete Age,” the Secretary says, with the precision of a man following a script, “His Grand Immortal Dictator invites his citizens to celebrate with a festival led by his most loyal, devoted, and patriotic national band, the Black Parade.”

The Prisoner looks at his own skeleton hanging before him.

“The others?” he says.

They are the first words he has spoken in years. His lips are cracked, and with the movement of his mouth, he tastes blood on his tongue. Once, his voice rang from crackling speakers and through underground gatherings, powerful as a current. Now, it creaks like the door to an abandoned house.

“Will join you,” the Dictator says. “But it seemed like good form to secure your participation first.”

The others are not dead.

He allows himself the beauty of the thought for less than a full second, before the truth rushes back. The others are as dead as he is. A parade of skeletons ushered out of the shadows, set to gambol through the steps of a danse macabre before they are put back in their cupboards to gather dust. This is not an opportunity. This is not freedom.

The Prisoner is almost ready to tell the Dictator no. To tell the Dictator that after he has already experienced the worst punishment man can conjure, every threat becomes an empty threat. To spread his arms wide and invite the Dictator to put a bullet through his heart, at long last, and give him the end he has deserved and longed for all these years.

He is almost ready to say all this.

But then from the corner of his eye, he sees Marianne shake her head.

And that spark of electricity that awoke at the sound of his own song in Marianne’s voice—that spark flickers, and flares into life.

And he begins to think, faster and more desperately than he has ever thought before.

Unaware of or unconcerned by the silent events happening around him, the Dictator saunters across the room. There is a languid ease to his movements that is even more frightening in its contrast to the usual sharp-angled military precision that surrounds him. Every eye in the room follows his movement until he is standing toe to toe with the Prisoner. 

He reaches out and, with the pad of his thumb, traces the line of the Prisoner’s lips. Like a collector sealing an item away for good. Like a lover, considering.

Like a microphone, offering permission.

“The Dictator’s pet rebels, celebrating his triumph,” the Dictator purrs. “It has a pleasant sense of symmetry to it, don’t you think?” 

There are perhaps six inches at most between them. Close enough for the Prisoner to hear the Dictator’s beating heart.

Proof, as though he needed it, that the Dictator is only a man, as alive as any other.

And once all threats become empty, it becomes easier than ever to find something worth dying for.

“All right,” the Prisoner says. “We’ll perform.”

The Dictator applauds, sharp and terse and sarcastic. The rest of the room follows suit by the third clap, the applause ragged and out of time with the chanting crowd. The Prisoner has forgotten, in his years of silence, how laughter can cut deeper than the whip.

But one person in the room is not applauding.

Marianne, who sits with her hands folded, holding her dark glasses in her lap.

Marianne, who can see everything when she sings, and who—the Prisoner strains to hear—is crooning a song under her breath, almost entirely hidden by the clapping hands of the Dictator.

A dagger, a dagger

Please fetch me a dagger

A tool for our treasonous deeds.

A delicate matter,

Yes, trust me, a dagger

Is just what this plan of ours needs.

“Come then,” says the Dictator. 

He grips the Prisoner’s shoulder, hard enough to elicit a gasp, and wheels the Prisoner toward the closed French doors. The Secretary nearly trips over his feet to throw the curtains aside and fling open the doors. The sound of the chanting crowd spills into the room with double force, and the Prisoner feels tears begin to well in the corners of his eyes.

He is afraid, but he is not alone.

After all, he has always felt most himself in front of a crowd.

“Let’s give the people what they want, shall we?” the Dictator says with a smile.

The smile he receives in return is armed to the points of the teeth.

And then the Dictator and the Conductor step out onto the balcony, and the roar of the crowd swells high enough to drown the world.

Chapter Text

Reanimation is the reversal of death. Every child in Draag knows this. 

Every child knows the legend of how The Grand Immortal Dictator cheated death; it is among the first stories they are ever told. How he was shot by a cowardly assassin in front of the Ministry of Justice when he was only a Senator, how his loyal servants rushed him to the reanimation chambers in those crucial fractured seconds between the moment his heart stopped beating and the moment the blood was too cold to flow.

The window of opportunity for reanimation is almost no time at all. A cat might shake its head once in the span it lasts, or a raindrop strike and explode against a pane of glass. Blink and you’ve missed it, and death is again the ending it’s always threatened to be. 

The Dictator’s servants were loyal, and more than that they were wise, and more than that still they were lucky. They guided the Dictator’s failing corpse into the reanimation chamber, and then in a moment his glorious body emerged again healthy and whole, returned from death to save Draag from itself. Praise be. All hail.

Every child has heard this story.

Less well-known is the story beneath that one: that while reanimation can undo death, it cannot undo the fact of having died.

This is a tale the Prisoner knows well.

He opens his eyes to a cold, blazing fluorescent light. He is bound to a chair, secured by thick leather straps at his shoulders, wrists, thighs, and ankles. A maze of wires and electrodes trail from his skin, the ones secured to his temples still white-hot. Air gasps into his lungs and reverses instantly into a scream.

The dagger is no longer in his heart, but he feels it there still.

There is a gash in the wall of it, ragged edges that gasp with each flailing beat. The muscle is knitting itself back together. He feels it connecting, feels each nerve sparking across the gap, feels the blood pouring into cavities where it does not belong while an invisible scalpel and set of sutures repair its home. 

He has heard stories of open-heart surgeries done without anesthetic—all things become grave necessity under the eyes of Mother War—but those patients lose consciousness, they die, there is a limit to what they can bear, and he cannot die, no, for him there is no limit, this can go on forever.

“Silence,” says the Clerk.

He tastes blood in his mouth and knows he has bitten his tongue. The shadows at the corners of his eyes creep forward to blot out the world before being shoved back by the force of the reanimating current being pumped through him, and he sobs Please, and he hears himself begging Let me die, let me die, let me die—

And then it begins to fade.

Not all at once, that would be a blessing, but by degrees. The point of the pain dulls, and spreads, until in a space of minutes he can feel the lapping of his own blood against the two ridges of the poorly healed scar through his heart. It feels unstable, like a wave of protesters against a barricade. Every beat of his heart aches like a blow to the chest.

But it is fading.

The Prisoner slumps like a sliced marionette against his bonds. His head droops back toward the fluorescent light. He is gasping for breath. Sweat pools at the hollow of his throat and lacquers his shirt to his chest. The moan that escapes from between his lips is rough and barely audible, like the entrails of roadkill dragged through gravel.

“Fuck,” he whispers.

The Clerk strikes the Prisoner across the cheek with his open palm. Fuck, it seems, has broken the delayed order for silence. 

The Prisoner barely flinches. The Clerk could drive a railroad spike through his foot and he doubts he would so much as whimper.

This was the worst pain he has ever felt in his life. He knows that without a moment’s hesitation, though he has spent seventeen years thinking he’s already felt the worst pain a man can feel. The agony of flesh un-melting, set up against the slow torture of being un-knifed to the heart. Through the fading echo of his scream, he wonders if anyone else has ever been reanimated twice, or if this comparison is his to make alone.

From a great distance, he feels the tug and release of the Clerk yanking the electrodes free from his skin. The wires are coiled neatly and returned to a cabinet along the wall. They are replaced in the Clerk’s hands by a clipboard, on which he makes several rapid notes, before pressing two fingers to the Prisoner’s throat to check his pulse against the second hand of an analog watch. Every few breaths, the Prisoner’s fingers and feet twitch without his giving them permission, nerves still catching stray shots of electricity.

“That was unwise,” says the Dictator, from the open door to the reanimation chamber.

The Prisoner opens his eyes again. He has no idea how long the Dictator has been standing there, watching him writhe. Only in the past two minutes has he been able to perceive anything but the feeling of his body being wrenched back together. The Dictator looks exactly as he did at the end of the performance, from his perch on the throne. Gold ceremonial braid and red bands across his lapels, sunglasses mirrored like the depth of the ocean. A small smile on his thin lips. He looks very comfortable, from where he leans against the doorjamb. As though he has been standing there for some time indeed.

“A good show otherwise,” the Dictator says. “They enjoyed it, all the papers say so. The Black Parade, together again.”

A laugh stumbles out of the Prisoner unbidden. As though there are papers anymore. As though they do not simply say whatever the Dictator tells them is true.

“But you must have known that little stunt with the dagger would cost you.” The Dictator shakes his head, then turns to go. “Bear in mind, I told Pierrot to be efficient. If he has to act again, I cannot promise the wound will be so neat.”

“Wait,” the Prisoner breathes.

The Dictator turns back.

The Prisoner’s throat is raw like ground meat from screaming. Even the single word, barely voiced, sends him into a fit of coughing. He would kill a man for a mouthful of water. (He has already killed a man, he has killed four men, and none of them the right ones— But no, now is not the time for these thoughts.) The Dictator waits, smooth and cold as marble, for his breath to return.

The Prisoner spits a mouthful of blood against the tile. “What do you mean, ‘again’?”

The Dictator laughs softly. “You stupid gutter rat,” he says. “If I wanted this to be a one-night engagement, I would have made that clear.”

Then the Dictator is gone, and the Clerk is unfastening the leather straps binding the Prisoner to the chair with assembly-line precision. The restraints were the only thing keeping the Prisoner upright. Now that they are gone, he feels the control drain from his body. He is a tangle of limbs and unspooled nerves, and when the two soldiers take him one by each arm and drag him toward the door, there is as much fight in him as a deboned fish.

“Five one three seven,” the Clerk says to the soldiers, who nod.

The hallway moves beneath the Prisoner, who hardly feels himself being dragged. It might be beautiful, might almost feel like flying, were it not for the nauseous feeling at the seam of his heart and the taste of blood at the back of his throat. Long beams of fluorescent light pass over him like streetlights, until the guards reach an iron cell door marked 5137, which they unlock and shove him into with all the ceremony of stowing a mop.

The door is shut and locked before he has finished falling.

He catches himself on his hands and knees, but he does not look up. He lets his head hang between his shoulders, watching the single bead of sweat course down his nose and dangle there before it falls. The room is cold. It is dim, but not dark. It is the same cement he sat on for seventeen years, tracking his own descent into madness. If he looks up, he knows he will see the same cement walls, the same three recessed lightbulbs marching in a line through the middle of the ceiling. The same slot in the door that opens once a day with food, the toilet in the corner. The shackles bolted to the wall, where the Guard will chain him by the wrists and throat if the risk of him harming himself becomes too great. The surveillance camera, in the dead center of the ceiling, beaming his movements back to the legion of Secretaries at their monitors.

He is back in Cell 5137, and again he is not dead.

At their monitors, the Secretaries watch the Prisoner kneel. They see his shoulders tremble. One double-clicks on the image, to increase the resolution. 

“Come here,” says Marianne from the corner.

The Prisoner cries out and rockets his head up. 

It is too much movement too quickly—his barely functioning body is not prepared for fear. Lurid colors flash before his eyes, and wracked with pain and alarm and nausea he doubles over and vomits stomach acid and blood. 

It seems to last a quarter hour, though perhaps it is only a minute. All he knows is that when at last it is over and he collapses trembling to the floor, it is not the concrete slab that catches his head, but the rustle of Marianne’s red skirts against his cheek.

“Poor boy,” Marianne murmurs.

This—the first expression of sympathy he has heard since before the fire—is enough to break him. 

Calling what he is doing crying would not do it justice. It is a silent, keening collapse that shakes the Prisoner like a god shakes the world. His body shakes, tears staining her skirt, and as her fingers gently card through his sweat-damp hair he only finds himself crying harder, because his mother used to do this when he and his brother were ill, used to gather them together and stroke their hair and tell them stories about what beautiful things came to life in the forests of Draag after the sun went down. Hares the size of elk and handsome men that turned into owls and spread their wings under starlight, bluebells that glowed to trace out a path to the streams where selkies played in the waves. Children’s stories. Nonsense. Better to have learned the truth long ago: that nothing in this world is so shamelessly determined to survive as pain.

“I want to die,” he says into Marianne’s lap.

And she, still stroking his hair, leans forward to brush a kiss against his hot forehead, and she whispers, “I know.”

“I can’t do it.”

“You can,” she says.

Now he is laughing, something wild and cracked roaring through him, and he buries his face in her skirt and laughs until he himself no longer knows if he’s laughing or weeping. You can, she says, and if she’s wrong? If she’s wrong, the boot on his neck, and the knife between his ribs, and the white-hot electricity shredding him, sewing him up again, and the mechanical whirr of the surveillance camera in the ceiling as he hears it zoom in, peering for a closer look at this new fracture in his sanity.

If the Dictator has made him a well-dressed puppet, then Marianne has made him a dagger. One that can lunge again and again and again until the blow lands as it should.

But this dagger still bleeds, every time.

“Please,” he whispers.

He doesn’t need to raise his head to know that she is looking directly at him, eyes clear as steel, as she sings.

We all carry on

When our brothers in arms are gone

He chokes on a laugh and drags himself up to his knees.

A fair answer, that.

He cannot reach for Marianne’s hand—his fingers are still sparking with stray electricity, impossible to direct them toward anything intentional—but she takes his, and her fist is warm and firm and steady as her fingers interlace with his. A knot too difficult for him to untangle, and in the pain-wiped void that almost resembles peace, he gives in to the allure of not asking.

Not his to reason why. Someone must, and if it’s him, then it’s him. One of these deaths will stick.

Marianne smiles. It reminds him of a saint in a cathedral, silent and thoughtful over the gored body of her son.

Her voices rises again, and this time, though the music tastes like blood on his tongue, he joins her.

So raise your glass high

For tomorrow, we die

And return to the ashes you call

The surveillance camera whirrs again, wheeling about for a better angle. The Prisoner and Marianne both turn, gazing back into the eyes of the Secretaries.

Then the echo of the music fades, and Marianne replaces her dark glasses, and the Prisoner sighs and leans back against her lap. They sit there together, she softly stroking his hair, until the three recessed bulbs dim and then flicker out, the only sign in the MOAT that it is night.

Chapter Text

It has happened a dozen times by now. 

This does not lessen the horror, only make it more familiar.

But there is part of it—this part—that the Prisoner almost enjoys.

When he closes his eyes and cradles the microphone in both hands, the crowd could be any crowd. Could be the crowd it once was, rebels with carved bullets in their cracked hands, bright-eyed dreamers and half-dead prophets screaming their visions into the night. 

If he keeps his eyes closed, it is possible to pretend they are playing a stage of shipping crates under a black canopy, floodlights from a decommissioned freighter knocked askew to illuminate the makeshift platform. They used to scrap together shows out of detritus and whispers, drumming up audiences with murmured hints and handwritten flyers scrawled in barely legible Keposhka, come one come all, and those who knew would make their way to the sound of the drums. Back when the Black Parade was the voice of a movement, the air at their shows would smell like liquor and burning paper, embers dancing up into the darkness but leaving their glow behind. 

He can almost remember the names of the other members of the Black Parade, in these moments. Can almost remember their faces when not lit ghostly pale by spotlights. Thinks of a voice that sounds like family, the weight of a hand on his shoulder, the feeling of three brothers at his back. 

The memories never fully resolve, but they feel so much clearer when he sings, if he does not look.

It is harder than ever not to look this time.

They have traveled the provinces, the Black Parade and their entourage, played stadiums and concert halls from one end of the empire to the next. Farther from the heart of Draag, it was possible to imagine that a few of the hearts in the audience still remembered the times before the Concrete Age, that they might look on their Glorious Present with something other than undiluted pride.

But tonight, they have come back to the Capital, and the Black Parade has filled the Grand Dictatorial Opera House to the rafters.

There are no black drapes now, no scent of salt air and cigarettes. Only the crimson and gold of His Grand Immortal Dictator, and every entrance and exit to the building flanked by two Guards. Chandeliers glitter overhead like the lenses of twelve dozen security cameras. Every seat in the building is full, the Capital's finest decked out in furs and diamonds and chic blazers and shining glasses. Here to see and be seen, to catch the spectacle of the age, the Dictator's tamed animals let out of their cages to stand on their hind legs and sing.

And, of course, he is here. 

The Dictator himself has taken up residence in the imperial box, so close to the stage that the audience cannot look at the band without catching his profile from the corner of their eyes. 

This is, of course, the point.

He would not miss a hometown show.

It has been a good show so far, by the Clerk's standards. Few deviations, almost no interruptions. The Prisoner has been on his best behavior. At past performances, he has flirted with disobedience, nudged his toe as close to the line as he dares. It has never gone well for him, but he has tried it. Ignored the mid-performance orders and received a slap to the face for his trouble. Asked for clemency on behalf of the political prisoners dragged out at the same point in every show, only to receive a whispered promise that his own reconditioning will be that much more thorough for having dared to question the Dictator's will.

After every show, he strips off his increasingly battered uniform and looks down at the wreck of his body, the palimpsest of stab wounds across his chest. On occasion, he knows, the Clerk adds new scars during reconditioning, but they are never as deep or as thick as those he earns on stage.

Reconditioning. He hardly remembers what this word means anymore. 

The agony of returning from the dead is clear every time, but between the initial scream and the ragged sobs in his cell, the hours tend to blur together. Perhaps this is a blessing. Any moment of this life he is allowed to forget seems like a kindness. Still, even the silent suggestions leave their marks. His face is scarred now, long knife-thin gashes he cannot remember acquiring. The four puncture wounds across his cheek feel like teeth marks when he runs his fingers along them, and he can almost smell the breath of the Dictator’s doberman when he does so.

Don’t think of that now, he tells himself. They are all watching you. You are in the Capital, and you have not died yet.

Your heart is still beating, and so you have to try one more time.

The dagger is in the inner pocket of his jacket. They never confiscate it, which baffled him at first, until he came to realize that the game of cat-and-mouse is the point of it for the Dictator. Let the puppet have his strings, only to pull them taut at the pivotal moment. 

Let them underestimate him. He has survived pain that would drive lesser men mad. The Dictator thinks they have broken him, when all they have done is strip him of the ability to feel fear. There is nothing they can do to hurt him anymore.

One hand on the microphone, the other on the dagger, he counts the band off, and their final song begins.

The citizens of the Capital sing all the words. The crowds always do. The Prisoner has long since stopped marveling at this. They sing the words, but they don’t know what it means. Maybe they never did. Thousands of stalwart citizens of Draag, singing the rebel anthem in unison, while the Grand Immortal Dictator looks on. The Prisoner’s stomach turns. His left hand tightens. His eyes flicker, fast as a prey animal under the open sky, toward the Imperial Box.

He has never been closer than he is now.

Save me

Get me the hell out of here

Save me

Too young to die and, my dear

He can. This time. In front of the shrieking hordes of the Capital. Nowhere better. 

Even behind the Dictator’s mirrored glasses, the Prisoner thinks he can see the glint of a smile.

You can’t

If you can hear me just

Take me

The Prisoner hurls the dagger blade-first from the stage into the box. 

The Dictator jerks back in surprise. They have executed this dance a dozen times before, but this, now, this is new.

The Prisoner’s throw has the force to carry, but it does not have the aim. The dagger slices through the curtain just to the left of the Dictator’s head, the one bearing the imperial seal of Draag. It is almost worth it, to see the deer bristling with arrows slink limply to the ground, unseamed up the middle.

Pierrot's knife enters the Prisoner’s gut and tears sideways.

It is a new feeling, at least. He hasn’t been disemboweled before. Now he knows what that feels like.

The Prisoner sinks to his knees, his insides spilling through his fingers. The Black Parade plays on. As always, he wonders if they have even noticed. After the performances are finished, in the darkness of their shared cell, Marianne always tells him that the Black Parade fights back. That they rush for his body, that they would fight for him, that only the hoods and zip ties of the Guards hold them back from avenging him night after night. It helps to believe her, and so the Prisoner tries to.

Marianne.

At first, he thinks it is the semi-lucid wishful thinking that comes in the moments between dying and death. He has had these visions before, enough times to know not to trust them. The third time the knife pierced his heart, he thought he saw Pierrot’s face washed in tears. The seventh time, he thought he watched the Dictator gouge out the Clerk’s left eye with his thumb.

But those visions lasted only a fraction of a second, and this one is still happening.

Marianne is still there, standing in the Imperial Box, beside the Grand Immortal Dictator.

The crowd is screaming, the Black Parade is still playing, flames lick at the curtains of the Grand Dictatorial Opera House, and yet for the Prisoner, the world has narrowed to the size of Marianne’s face, as she raises one hand to her eyes and pulls away her round dark glasses.

Her eyes are shining bright and clear, and her voice is the only sound sharp enough to pierce through his rapidly onrushing death.

And if you would call me your sweetheart

Then maybe I’d sing you a song

He sees it, then. The laugh ripples up through his belly, leaving viscera as it goes. It feels as though he’s being turned inside out. It is the warmest, most brilliant feeling he’s ever experienced.

Marianne looks down at him from the box, and their eyes lock.

The Prisoner grins and spits out a mouthful of blood.

They finish the verse together.

But the shit that I’ve done with this fuck of a gun

You would cry out your eyes all night

The Dictator rises sharply. Guards are rushing from the exits toward the Imperial Box. The crowd is screaming louder now, the tenor of their raw emotion shifting.  

But Marianne has waited too long for this moment. The Prisoner has given her the distraction she needed, and her target is too close to miss.

Marianne presses the mouth of her pistol to the Grand Immortal Dictator’s temple.

With one flicker of pressure, his brains are painted across the remnants of the dying deer.

There is one moment of pure stillness and silence.

It lasts until three dozen bullets tear through Marianne, leaving her body pinned against the wall of the box.

The Prisoner is still laughing. He cannot stop. Perhaps he has finally gone mad after all, but he laughs until he tastes nothing but blood and hears nothing but his own wild cackling laughter ringing from the rafters. The Black Parade, behind him, has abandoned their instruments, and the sound in the opera house is now only panic, undiluted by music. Dimly, the Prisoner feels someone tugging at his arm, trying to pull him away from the stage. He cannot move. He cannot stand, not with his bowels pressing up against the dirty palm of his hand.

All he can do is laugh, and laugh, and laugh, until the darkness finally takes him.

#

When the Prisoner wakes, the first thing he notices is the light.

Pale, as though filtered. He does not need to open his eyes to sense the difference. This is not the fluorescent eye of the MOAT, nor the blinding spotlight of the stages of Draag. This is something entirely new.

The second thing he notices is the dull, throbbing agony along his gut.

Pain. Low, constant, steady.

The pain of being alive, not of un-dying.

He opens his eyes then, and looks around.

The Prisoner is lying on a bed in a small, comfortable room with pale blue walls. His aching body is cushioned beneath a small mountain of blankets, and a monitor is connected to an IV in the crook of his elbow. A steady pulse beeps from the machine, followed by the periodic drip of what (he hopes) is the strongest strain of morphine available in Draag.

Three men sit in folding chairs at the side of the Prisoner’s bed. One short, dark-haired, the sting of a tattooed scorpion flicking like a threat above his collar. One tall and wild-haired, with soft eyes, quietly wringing his hands.

One who looks familiar enough to bring tears to the Prisoner’s eyes.

“Hey, you,” says the familiar man. He reaches out and takes the Prisoner’s hand, the one resting atop the blankets to allow for the IV.

He remembers, then. 

He has not prayed in decades, and never with any real sincerity, but in that moment, bathed by the sunlight, he sends the whole of his will to whatever higher power might give Marianne the glory she deserves.

If she is an angel now, he thinks, she'll still be able to see me when she sings.

“How are you feeling?” says Mikey.

Gerard runs his tongue along his cracked lips and speaks. His voice is a wreck of its former self, but it is the sweetest sound any member of the Black Parade has ever heard.

“Never better.”