Chapter Text
His lungs move like bellows. Air goes in and out, but it is only by his choice that it does. Conscious effort. An exertion of force. Superfluous and utterly unnatural in feeling. Doesn’t the phrase go ‘as natural as breathing’?
Then again, what’s more natural than dying? The only certainty that anyone is ever granted in this world. Rich or poor, magical or mundane. Death comes for all, mortals and gods alike.
Nothing about it had felt natural. Pinned to that table. Ethrand… the stone…
In those last moments, he hadn’t even gotten to hear how loudly his heart was pounding in his chest. No final goodbye.
Occtis sits alone in a room. Light begins to creep in through the window, banishing the shadows to the corners. The candle burned out some time ago, black smoke escaping like a final breath as the flame sputtered out. He had sat there with wide eyes, staring at it, unmoving. It was still an hour to dawn then, and he was frozen to his seat. Outside his room, muffled conversations continued on, and Occtis sunk in on himself as he tried to pick out the words.
‘Unnatural’ came up a few times. Maybe there were some nicer words too; those didn’t stick too long in his memory.
Operating his bellows-like-lungs, Occtis forces a breath. Not only is the motion unnecessary, it is uncomfortable. He only takes one breath before stopping himself from taking another, to spare himself the sensation and disappointment. Instead he brings two fingers to the side of his neck to feel for a pulse. Roughly every hour he has attempted this, already knowing exactly what he will be met with. Still he runs the experiment again, just to be sure. In the midst of all this uncertainty, he can count on the reliability of his magic, of the facts that are its backbone. He tries to shove down the feelings that well up inside of him with facts instead.
In the back of his head, he can almost feel the way his brain tries to send the signal to send shivers down his spine, but the nerve receptors don’t cooperate. The emotions, the memories of how it feels are all there. But the feeling never comes. It reminds him of when he’d first made Pin: he hadn’t sewn on the back leg correctly, and though it was attached enough, when Occtis had managed to animate him, the leg had been lame. A breathless laugh escapes from his lips as he thinks back fondly on the memory. In the end, it had taken a quick anatomy review, some repositioning of the tendons, and a few extra stitches for stability, but soon his little fox was up and running just like he did when he was alive. Presumably. Based on the habits of foxes and where he’d found the remains, it seemed a likely bet.
The memory fades and with it does the smile that ever so briefly had found its way onto Occtis’ face again. His torso has been stitched back, but this isn’t a matter of arranging the bones or lining up the muscles. His fingers — cold, but all of him is and it doesn’t quite register as anything different — still rest against his neck. No pulse. No heart. There’s nothing in his books about this. Or any books for that matter.
Just like he’s been his entire life, Occtis is a magical anomaly. The only one in his family born without magic. The only one in the world to come back from the dead. He has always been different.
The chair he sits in is in the middle of the room, back to the window. As the sun rises, as light stretches across the sky, warmth begins to make itself known. Footsteps go past his door, and Occtis wants to go after them, but first he has one more experiment. The last one for now. He’s about to take a breath to steady himself before he remembers how much he dislikes that feeling now. And it feels so wrong to breathe but he feels so… lost without it. He activates his bellows-lungs, trying to feel the way air rushes in, screwing his face up as he forces the motion. And it rushes, and the air comes and comes. But relief never follows. There is no satisfaction, no calm, no comfort. Occtis doesn’t know how to steady his nerves that no longer light up and flare but still feel fear. The emotion feels real, but there is no physicality associated with it. No pit in his stomach, no shivers, no shaking, no clammy palms. That just feels worse. Stuck with this feeling with no way to express or release it.
His shoulders hunch, curling in on himself like he’s trying to hide. He waits to feel how warmth feels again. That’s his experiment now. He’ll talk himself through it, run it over in his head, what he’s trying to test here: how quickly will he warm, will it spread, will he feel it?
It takes 30 minutes. It does spread. He does feel it, in a sense. He never actually feels warm. Not inside. Not in the right way. Perhaps he could try crying. Just another experiment.
No. Enough experiments for now. That’s what he tells himself to avoid dwelling on the question of if he can even cry anymore. A thought which just makes him want to cry even more than he already does.
Just like on the path, Occtis feels as if he’s being pulled in many directions. Stuck in this liminality. He is alive in that he is conscious, he has free-will, and he is amongst the living. He is dead in that he doesn’t have a pulse (he doesn’t have a heart), he doesn’t need to breathe, and he is little more than a moving corpse.
Pin is curled up in the corner of the room. Just a little space apart after he’s popped out of his chest twice now. But Occtis casts his gaze over to his familiar and, at the same time, Pin looks up at him, innocuous little button eyes that manage to convey so much more emotion than Occtis thinks he can physically feel anymore. Ever so slightly, he tilts his head and Pin does the same. That’s all it takes for the little fox to come bounding over, jumping up on his lap.
Occtis pulls Pin close, close enough that he may as well be attempting to shove him back into the cavity of his chest, and he holds him there. Neither has a pulse. But the love is there, and right now that’s enough for him.