Chapter Text

Hotel Valhalla housed 540 floors, one of which the nineteenth. There on the nineteenth floor, as did every, hallways lined the parameters. Hallways and corridors and passages with a labyrinthine unpredictability fitting for the infinite amount of eternal warriors who claimed such a domain as their home. Their home, to which was a heaven. And, for these warriors, infinite warriors required infinite doors. Hundreds, hundreds, and hundreds of einherjar behind each door. On this one certain nineteenth floor, this one certain hallway, this suite behind this door, there lay a very lonely fellow—statuesque in their permanent stillness, with a hollow expanse of vast solidarity hanging low in their chest, wallowing salty tears in their eternal paradise.

This fellow was you.

You. You.

You, who had not been prepared for death, who had not considered life after death, had not ever imagined a heaven like Valhalla nor Valhalla as your postmortem destination. You, whose family had ups and downs but ultimately was always there with open arms in the end, every end except for this end. Out of every million scenario of ‘ending’ to have had happened to you, there was only one in which you would never be able to feel their embrace again, and that one-in-a-million had found your unfortunate soul. You had a family and a community and a place for you in the world, you had lovers and aspirations and dreams and a future, you were meant to age with happiness and embrace the effects of time, hair grayed and thin and glowing in the light, sunspots on your weathered cheeks and smile lines showing proof of your joy. Joy which had been stolen by your demise, simply because you had died young.

And it had not been intentional. You were not the hero you had been framed to be, because you had no intention of becoming such a hero at all. The constellations had just happened to be aligned in such a way, the light played a trick on your hair, placed a halo on your head that you had no desire of bearing. Fingers curled around a heavy dagger, dragging you to the earth like lead, and you should have taken the warning to let go like your body had begged you to. But you were stubborn, and you didn’t, and then you were seared with pain and dead and martyred for eternity, forever. And then you were dragged by your collar, away from your home and your family and your peace, for eternity, forever, to an unknown hall overflowing with eternal faces.

A deep, dark nebula of eternal faces.

Faces. Faces.

Faces of none you knew, faces of none you recognized, none you trusted an ounce or appreciated the expression of or could confide in. None at all, because the faces you knew and recognized and appreciated and confided in were all back at your world, your home, the home you had been forcefully dragged from by the collar, where your soul lingered still. The home that was now a billion universes away, separated by the cosmos and the galaxy and the nine worlds and their syzygies and your immortal mortality. You were here physically, but in every other aspect, you were home. And your body had departed from your soul when a red ring formed around where you were dragged by your collar, and when the light was cruel and played itself falsely onto your hair to project a halo you weren’t responsible of. Your body was gone from your soul and now in Valhalla you were hollow. A statue, unmoving except for the pace of tears that streaked your cheeks, and trapped in heaven, and hollow.

Loneliness overtook you.

From the second you’d been given your key to when you fell to your knees in your foyer, you had not pulled back the heavy, drawn curtains, and your world was dark. You lay in you king-sized bed in the lavish drapery of sheets that encase you fully, you rest your head into the pillow and stain the rich silk with your heavy tears and your bitter curses and you sleep. Your sleep is always dreamless, for this heaven is a place of dreamlessness you are caged within. When the raven turns up with a windy arrival to wake you from your slumber, even the look in its beady dark eyes is pitiful and sluggish and burdened, much unlike the spry energy sung by its brethren and the urgency they hold in the beat of their wings. You drag your feet to dinner and you do not eat and you do not starve. You do not feel an ache in your stomach, so either you had already grown accustomed to the dull, lingering pain, or Valhalla would not even allow you of it. You drag your feet to the battlefield and you do not dodge whatever is jabbed in your direction, you are seared with pain again and your eyes roll into your skull. But you will wake up the next morning, and you will not die. You will not die, for you are dead.

At some point, you had caught wind of conversation beside you, about you. They call you a practice dummy. It enters your hollow head, then leaves through the opposite ear without any consideration.

This was how the days of your lifelessness were spent. The days blended together until static hummed in your ears unending. You began to have irritable fits, though still there was no emotion to warm your body or nurture your soul, just a thoughtless swinging of your cold arms droning on for hours at a time until your room was trashed and your knuckles were bloody. Then even that became worthless, and so you often took to falling on your own sword. Hilt propped up against the first wall in your line of sight, you would brace your blade against your gut, and you would kneel down and that alleviated your suffering. This was more nourishing for unconsciousness than sleep. Yet still, you would wake up hours later, your room clean and your body fresh. You could not see yourself wither, just like how you would not see yourself age and mature, because Heaven only held perfect beings and they had reached in your body and corrected every human genome to make you perfect, and they took your humanity, and they left your soul. The mirror would end up broken more often than not. Deeper, louder, the static grew until you were sure you were fully uninhibited; you were sure it were bound to end now, now, you will be fully dead now, you will fall on your blade one last time and then it would be over for good. But it wasn’t. And something, some molecule of your past began flickering throughout the static, once every uncountable number of days. It came and held the parts of your head together with a tremblingly stubborn grip like that lead-heavy dagger you refused to release, and a desperation to trudge onward in expectation of something out of the nothing. You were still going.

The date had been a foreign concept, as Valhalla was timeless in the way you could look outside and see the sun and moon coexist within the same expanse of sky. But that raven had come once more for dinner—god, couldn’t it give you a break—and as you watched it watching you, silently you pondered what would have occurred if you were to wrap your fingers around its narrow feathered throat and squeeze. Squeeze tight, overkill for such a tiny thing, heard its bones snap under your strength of which was once human, eyes bulging until the light inside them diminished to two hollow buttons. Was death meaningless for it, too? Would it, too, wake up again? Would it, too, return dutifully the next day, because it enjoyed the silence like you did, or because it was tied down to its burden of obligatory existence in heaven?

Laid on your bed, you had been staring at it for a while longer than usual before you eventually brought yourself up. Because it would have keep crowing if you did not respond, and its presence on your flank meant you could not avoid it and fall back into slumber unless you bothered to get up and kill yourself again. And by the time you were already up, it didn’t matter what you did or where you went anyway. So you went, you swung your legs, silk sheets cold against your bare calves. Stood up, floorboards cold against the soles of your feet. You wobbled as you rose fully, your head swam, and it didn’t matter. By the time you regained your bearings, that bird was already gone. Your miserable presence suffocated it. It suffocated everything around you, and you had since stopped breathing a long while back.

Down through Valhalla. Descending from Heaven into Heaven. Everywhere was Heaven. This was your life now. Your frigid fingers grazed the frigid bronze handle of your front door, you pulled it open with a cumbersome tug. Except this time, there wasn’t an empty hallway. It was a face.

A face.

Not just a passing blur of face, not a whisper in your peripheral, it was dead-center and looking right back at you with these piercingly warm eyes. Piercingly warm, an oxymoron in most contexts, but the gray lull of warmth was piercing through your coldness and you felt lightheaded. When’s the last time you made eye contact with somebody?

Better question: what was this person doing on your doorstep?

For who-knows-how-long, you’d barely blink an eye at the feeling of a spear embedding you through the ribs at breakneck speed. Autopilot had become your norm, you didn’t even consider yourself depressed. Just empty. Seeing somebody who had, in some point in his consciousness, acknowledged you in some way, and the presence of him in front of you was enough to startle some life back into your face. Just for a second. Your stomach leapt in your gut like somebody had scared you, and he himself got ruffled at your reaction. Obviously. As long as he’d seen you at least once before, it must’ve been common knowledge by now that you were more lifeless than a doll. No wonder nobody wanted to approach you except to kill you. You were barely humanoid. Not like you blamed them; you couldn’t recognize yourself, either.

This face, he was a resident on this floor, you assumed. Unless somebody made the effort to travel to a different residential hall—which was too much work for something like you. To your emptiness, he contrasted you so starkly it made you want to vomit (when’s the last time you wanted anything?). A flat, wide-eyed, simple expression rested on his face, and yet those warm irises were tinted with a vibrant green and his gaze was so soft and lively and warm and familiar. It had almost mistaken you, for a second, of somebody you had used to know, some trillion years ago. This was a trick of the light, again.

Why could he possibly be here?

When you opened the door, his hand was raised in a fist like he were about to knock, and he jumped so hard that you pitied him for a moment. Significantly more flustered than a moment ago, his eyes darted around your background, then he pursed his lips like he didn’t know the answer to your own internal questioning. You didn’t say anything, and he didn’t say anything, and you stood in silence for too long processing each other before he finally spoke up.

“Um. Hello.” greeted the stranger, his tone cautious and gentle like he was talking to a frightened animal. He tried for a smile, an awkward stretch of his lips that looked more like a grimace. He smiled with his mouth upside-down. His fidgeting hands were rubbed with clay and paint. So was the front of his sweater and the lap of his jeans. “Nice to meet you, uh… you just got here, what, last month? Right?”

You frowned. Had you just got here?

There wasn’t a single point in time since you had arrived where you were actively conscious about the amount of time passed. It could have been said that 5 weeks or 5 years had elapsed, and the difference would not have been substantial enough to drag a reaction from your blank head. All of your time has been spent in your bed or with your palms carmine-red with your own blood. Maybe seclusion overtook you quicker than you had assumed. Time was warped here (or maybe your perception had been shifted only because your sanity was turbulent). Either way, you didn’t know.

“Yes,” you said, slowly. It was the first word you had uttered in, presumably, a month. Your throat hurt when you talked. Vocal chords strained to collaborate with your tongue. It felt too big and clumsy in your mouth.

He leaned in a tad, watching you struggle to articulate, expression paused like he was expecting you to say more. When you didn’t, he blinked and nodded vigorously. “Cool! Cool. That’s cool. Um..” He shoved his stained hands in his pockets. “Sorry nobody’s dropped by—I mean, unless they have, but the others kinda told me nobody did. We don’t really talk to the other hallways on 19, but, uh, I think that nobody deserves to have nobody, so… yeah. I’m Magnus.”

Something about his wary tone made you feel like ‘the others’ had a little more in their mouths than just you not getting visitors. Not like it was bothersome. This wasn’t new information.

Magnus smiled again and held his hand out. It turns out that getting caught inside your head for too long will flush all basic decorum from your body, and you ended up staring dumbly at the gesture, trying to process its purpose. By the time you had remembered what a handshake was, he popped his lips and dropped his arm with a sheepish grunt.

 “So! You’re, er…?” Patting his color-flecked jeans, he took a step back and craned his head to get a glimpse of your nameplate on the door, a difficult position given his placement. You interrupted his odd peeking by telling him your name yourself, which straightened him back up and made him nod vigorously. He repeated your name. Twice. The first time normally, and then he enunciated it a little more. The syllables rolled gently along his voice, cradling it vocally. The sound of somebody else saying it, made your chest hurt. “That’s a nice name.”

Silence, again. Too long. You’d forgotten how uncomfortable new interactions can be.

“Well! I’ve got a baking class with my girlfriend. Right after dinner,” he said, gesturing down the hallway like you’d have any semblance of where that is. You knew one strict path only: room, to dining hall, to battlefield. “It’d be great if you could tag along. We hardly see you out here, y’know.”

For a moment, you almost considered this. Behind that dullness in your eyes reemerged the little spittle of humanity left inside of you, deep in the back of your cranium. It was the same fleeting voice that came and went in the deepest depths of your vast silence, the old you, the sociable you. A thick lump formed in your throat as you studied the stranger staring back at you with hope in his eyes.

As it was, that was all he is. A stranger. His compassion may have alighted familiarity, but the features set into his face were unknown, the way in which he carried himself was foreign, the name had never found itself in your thought. He was Magnus, and he was just a stranger, and he was just a face. There was no point wasting time on a face that could not reignite or resemble a face you had once known. You only wanted familiarity. The past. Your home.

And you were already so, so tired anyways.

You shook your head no. “I’m okay.”

He was disappointed by your answer, visibly. His face dropped slightly and his frownish sort of smile morphed into a real frown. The sight nearly made you want to comply just because, but you did not know if this sad expression of his was curated from pity or integrity. You did not know him. “Ah. That’s fine.” Magnus bobbed his head. “But, uh, if you ever change your mind, I’m right down there.” He pointed to his vague right again. Not like you would trouble yourself to seek it out. “You should consider it. We’d love another addition to our group. Really. I’ll see you later.”

Trailing his goodbye came your name again, and then he was gone. Out your sight, the narrow window of your exposure to your fellow einherjar. You almost had a mind to apologize for your curtness, but your words hardly held significance in this unfamiliar world. Nothing like what you were used to. He had already vanished regardless, and your thought of him and his girlfriend behind an oven lingered in your head for just a second. The first thing that had filled your mind for a very long time. And then that was gone, too.

You were tired. You wanted to lay down.

The door slowly shut with a heavy slam, reverberating through your grand and lifeless suite, bouncing off the walls of your atrium. You had been gripping the door handle so hard that your palm hurt, and there was a foggy impression of your hand on the bronze. You were so tired. You wanted to lay down.

So you drag your feet back into your lavish drapery of sheets. You dip your head into the pillow. And you sleep.

Your sleep is dreamless.