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The word purgatory comes from the Old French purgatorie, c.1200, meaning a place or condition of temporal punishment for spiritual cleansing. It descends directly from the medieval Latin purgatorius (adj.) meaning “purging, cleansing,” and the root purgare: “to cleanse, to purify.”
JamatoP turns his porcelain white mask to Spoke and tilts it like a carnivore. His black eyes are empty. The heat is unrelenting.
“You can watch from down here,” he says, referring to the moment when Spoke’s best friends will be massacred and their bodies destroyed and their souls split apart for the sin of loving him, and in an instant, Spoke is gone.
In his place, squalid insect inhumanity. Sick and small and stupid; creeping in the crevices and the corners and the fetid rotting places where dead things die again and again and again.
Spoke, no longer human. If that white mask and black eyes told him to crawl on the floor he would do it. Dirty fingernails and bruised-up knees, he would do it. He would kneel down here and lick Jamato’s fucking boot if it meant Mapicc and Jumper got to live.
That would give him some use.
That would mean there was something—anything—any kind of meaning to this pathetic, destructive, misshapen life and his dislodged soul. Precious, precious, precious Mapicc. Lovely Jumper. He would eat nails and jump in the lava and carve his own heart out with dripstone if it just meant he could see them again. See himself reflected in their eyes again. Pretty, perfect mirrors again. Loving mirrors, reflecting, refracting, constructing, bit-by-bit, in spasms of electric thought, a Spoke, a version of Spoke, a Spoke-in-their-heads, a Spoke who is—what? kind, correct, clear, concise, close to those he loves and conciliatory when he’s wrong and clever to a fault? a Spoke who is loveable & loved, leaned into, leaned against, leaned upon, a leader led to green pastures & clear rivers & sunny days, a better self in a better place, better for being thought and not real, now repeating, reverberating, in their minds, in their whole & resplendent minds, the ones that don’t miss the thing that Spoke is missing which is that thing that makes you human.
“I’ll—”
“Do anything,” Jamato finishes, for him. The shape of a smile tilts his tone up at the edges. “You’d do anything, isn’t that right, Spoke?”
Still, for a second. Then Spoke lowers himself to his knees.
“They’re innocent,” he breathes. “Jamato, they’re good.”
“Fitting,” says Spoke’s long-lost best friend. “That’s fitting, isn’t it?”
And then he rises. From the unrelenting, foul heat, Jamato rises and Spoke watches.
In his palm, a globe of tangerine-tasting salvation. It tastes like a straight shot of cayenne pepper and makes his hands and toes tingle like spearmint and on his knees, Spoke carefully drags two fingers along the surface of the lake. The air-cooled top layer of molten stone bunches up and wrinkles and splits in the path his fingers trace; maroon red-black gives way to bright glowing gold.
In his hands; beaded globes of molten stone and metal, stretching between his fingers like spun glass. In the dark, sparks rising, flickering, levitating in the air for a precious, wonderful moment, like stars dying in the night sky.
Spoke takes a deep breath. He falls in face-first.
Purgatoire, purgatorius, purgare.
In the warm waters of a lava lake, Spoke is washed clean. Molten stone is perfectly, pleasantly warm; a bath of pure radiant light, thick as honey and smooth as silk.
Who could do this, but Spoke? Who could be so clever as to hide this potion—to climb from this pit on his hands and knees through the inferno and emerge out the other end—to time it so perfectly that the fire dies on his skin as he pants on the ground at the top? Who could slip through the halls of Purgatory unseen by every guard; slip the keycard out of their very hands—arm himself with Jamato’s very own weapons and armor and mace. A beautiful mace; spiked at the ends with a long, thin handle like the delicate stem of a flower. Is not the sinner rewarded for his suffering?
Power, purgatory, perfection. Is it that strange, when molten stone drips from his hands and netherite gleams purple-black over his skin, to feel like a God?
To save Mapicc and Jumper—wouldn’t that make his mistakes meaningful? Wouldn’t that give this life shape & form & color? Absolve his sins?
Wouldn’t that wash him clean?
Jamato falls. Spoke watches. Then he falls after.
When the riot is said and done, Mapicc and Jumper refuse to leave his side.
It enrages Jamato so much he just gives in and the three of them are thrown into one tiny cell where they all sit and it is silent until—
In front of him, Mapicc kneels down. His eyes are red as a rose and fixed on Spoke; his eyebrows are bushy and black and furrowed in concentration.
“How much,” says Spoke’s most precious friend.
“What?”
“How much of it was true,” says Mapicc.
“Nothing,” Spoke breathes, Spoke lies. “None of it. None of it was true. I would never—I mean ever, Mapicc, I would never—”
Mapicc cuts him off; frames Spoke’s face in his palms; holds him still there.
“I don’t believe you,” Mapicc says, and then he butts their foreheads together, gently. “I think you’re lyin’ to me, Spoke.”
A hand closes around his shoulder, and then the other one. Jumper, kneeling at his back. No escape.
“Don’t lie, Spoke,” she sighs. He can feel her breath on the nape of his neck. “I’m a spymaster. I'll know.”
An invisible presence behind; trapped in place by his best friend ahead. It’s too much for a revolutionary or a savior God or a crawling insect.
“I—um, I—we—Jumper, Mapicc.” Each stammer trips out and tumbles into nothing; Spoke trembles in place. “I—I can’t—please. Come on, please. Just--we did so much, just then, we were so good, everything was so good, please. I can't--I mean--”
“True or false,” murmurs Jumper. “You can do true or false, right?”
He hesitates; nods. It’s a dangerous game; a false dichotomy. Spoke is true or Spoke is false--Spoke is a thousand miles high and gleaming with sunlight and blood or Spoke in on his knees in the gravel wishing to be unmade. It's one or the other and no in between and Jumper and Mapicc want to know which he is. He can't exactly blame them for it. He doesn't know ether.
“Good,” grins Mapicc. His teeth are sharp and white. He’s missing one pointed canine where Null kicked in his teeth while Spoke watched. “You’re Spoke.”
“True,” Spoke rasps. Sometimes, he’s not certain. But Mapicc and Jumper don’t need to know that.
“We’re in prison.”
“True.”
“You pretended to be Leo.”
Spoke freezes. Mapicc's grin drops; he tenses.
“Spoke,” his friend warns. “Spoke?”
He should lie. He would really like to lie. There's a needling sliver of horror in his mind that won't let him.
“True,” he says. Jumper’s hands briefly tense on his shoulders.
“My turn,” she says, too close, right into his ear. “You killed my spies.”
“They were—” Spoke stumbles over his own excuses, his pitiful pathetic faulty sense-making, trying and failing to speak his way into forgiveness. “They were Leo’s spies, at the time, and Leo, he—”
Jumper’s left hand moves from his shoulder to the back of his neck. Threateningly close. Her calloused palm is set over all the small bones in his neck.
“True or false,” she says, softly.
Spoke owes her this much.
“True.”
Her hand on the back of his neck doesn’t move. Mapicc’s hands on his face are bruisingly harsh.
“None of it was real,” Mapicc seethes. “Two years, our friendship, you were just—manipulating me, the whole time. None of it—”
“Mm, no, no, false, that’s false, that’s not true,” Spoke rambles. He puts his own hands over Mapicc’s. Holds them there even as his best friend’s nails dig into his cheek. “That’s not true. Mapicc, you’re my best friend. I did it all for you. I did it for us. I love you.”
“You love me?” his best friend echoes. His frame softens; Mapicc's familiar wild tense rage eases.
“I love you,” repeats Spoke, easily, immediately. It's easy to say. “I love you. Love you so much. Both of you. Jumper, you too, I love you, too. When—and Mapicc was gone, you—I wouldn’t have survived, not without— I needed you—I needed—oh my god, I need you two. I don’t think you understand. I couldn’t do, um, I couldn’t… I mean I just couldn’t live, I think, without—”
“You need me,” says Jumper, and Spoke nods.
“I do,” he says. “That's true. I would—I don’t think I could’ve… when Mapicc was gone, and I was—like, when I was all alone, I—I barely slept, and I didn’t eat, and I kinda—I started seeing things, and I thought I was—thought I was going crazy. But you—Jumper, you… and I didn’t… I might have… treated you, um, poorly, and I—I’m so sorry. Really, I’m so sorry, I’m so—s-so… sorry, you don’t know… for everything, I’m…”
It’s quiet for a moment; Jumper and Mapicc share an unreadable glance.
“Spoke… whatever,” Mapicc sighs.
“I mean, I guess,” agrees Jumper.
And then Jumper loops her arms around Spoke’s neck and pulls him back into her chest and Mapicc wraps his arms around him from the front and lets his head fall into Spoke’s shoulder and—
“You’re on thin ice, Spoke,” Jumper whispers.
“Bro got sandwiched,” mumbles Mapicc, and Spoke laughs so hard he cries.
In an instant—gone the God. Gone the insect. Here is Spoke.
Jumper’s hoodie is soft. She is soft. She smells like salt and blood. Mapicc is heavy. Solid. When he breathes on Spoke’s collarbone, it’s warm.
Purgatoire, purgatorius, purgare.
“It’s that easy?” he asks. The ceiling of their cell is leaky. It’s got moss in the corners.
Mapicc snorts. “That easy.’ Nah, Spoke, it’s bad. You’re, like, lowkey cooked, bro.”
“I’m gonna make you pay for killing my spies,” Jumper hums, playfully, even as she tangles her hands in his hair. “You’re in trou-ble.”
“But also I love you,” says Mapicc.
“And I do, like, kinda need you too,” muses Jumper. “Since BAT is dead and my spies are all gone and we're in the awful place.”
“Both can be true, bro,” Mapicc sighs, at last, exasperated. It's as if he’s explaining this concept to Spoke for the billionth time. “It’s like, shades of gray and shit. Shut up and relax.”
Counterintuitively, Spoke tenses. His whole body, in place, like a wild rabbit, all locked up.
“Spoke?” Jumper asks. Her voice is gentle.
“Both can be true?” He asks. His voice is small.
“Both can be true,” repeats Mapicc. He drums his fingers against Spoke's heart.
“Oh,” says the God and the man and the insect.
“Okay,” says Spoke, the friend.