#blitzen: threads

[bark4mebtch]

The undead swarmed in clusters, and he could feel every one of them. Every calcium deposit in every rotting frame. Every crooked vertebra. Every femur gone soft with decay. His gift did not discriminate between the living and the dead. Blitzen forced one thought to the front of his mind: find Ducky, get Ducky home. His coat was gone, and what remained of his shirt hung from him in dark, wet ribbons. Along his right side, exposed ribs showed through a deep gash already pulling itself closed, skin knitting together with the faint, nauseating clicks of passive healing. He reached up and touched his left antler. Half of it was missing. “Now I’m pissed.”

For a moment, the glow of his phone lit his face. The text thread tightened his jaw. Why hadn’t Ducky just listened to him? Blitzen closed his eyes and focused past the chaos around him. The city pulsed with death. Skeletons rattled through abandoned streets, corpses dragged themselves through alleys, and somewhere beneath all of it was the single presence he was searching for. Then he found it. Familiar. Alive. Two blocks east. He moved immediately. The streets blurred past beneath flickering emergency lights and drifting smoke. Dead things reached for him as he passed, drawn by movement, but he staggered through them like an animal possessed. Not without effort. Not without wounds. Yanking himself free from the horde he could already smell Ducky now beneath the blood, rot, and burning asphalt. The trail led straight to what had once been a pharmacy, its windows shattered and front doors hanging crooked on their hinges.

The moment Blitzen crossed the doorway, he felt Ducky inside beneath the static pressure of what was transpiring beyond the building. Something lunged from the dark. Blitzen moved on instinct. Bone burst through the meat of his forearm in a pale spike threaded with wet veins, and he drove it straight through the creature’s skull. The impact cracked through his wrist as the point punched out the back of its head. He tore the spike free, but the corpse still staggered toward him. He was finding they were more resilient than other bodies. "Please... die..." With a detached frown, Blitzen’s ribs unfolded outward like a grotesque flower, punching through skin as his spine twisted ninety degrees the wrong way. He held the screaming corpse and jammed his arm into its throat. With a grunt, he dragged his arm through the meat, its head slid cleanly from its shoulders as it sprayed blood in his face. Only then did the body finally collapse.

Panting he retracted his bones. The ones along his spine, the ones he'd pushed through his knuckles, the ridge that had split the skin along his jaw all slowly, quietly withdrawing. Reabsorbed. He could feel them sliding back into him, the skin puckering and smoothing over each point of emergence. He went to the backroom, standing there ruined and reeking, one antler ending in a jagged spike, the last of his own bone spikes finishing their retreat beneath the skin, leaving small raised welts along his forearms. "Found you..." @halcyonsboys

[bark4mebtch]

The first thing one would notice was the stench. Then the macabre scene itself, well, what remained of it. Donner crouched near the far wall of the restaurant the way someone might crouch beside a garden, elbows resting loosely on his knees, head tilted with the particular patience of a man who has nowhere else to be. The skull watched the floor. His fingers were still. Candles still burned on the nearest table, wax pooling slow and indifferent into the linen, and the light they threw was almost intimate. There was something peaceful about his posture, something that did not belong in this dining room, in this smell, against this backdrop of overturned chairs and silenced string music and the careful, specific ruin of every soft thing the room had once contained.

Donner didn't startle when the hero arrived. Instead he rose with surprising grace, unfolding to his full height, and the antlers carved new shadows across the ceiling, long and branching, like cracks spreading through plaster. He turned slowly, the way you turn toward a sound you were already expecting. The off-white, blood-stained jacket shifted with him, buckles catching the candlelight in brief gold flashes, long sleeves hanging past his hands and swaying with the motion. If the other man looked closely enough, long enough, he'd understand what the jacket was. What it had been made to be, before he'd made it into something else.

"Oh, there you are." Warm. Bright. Like he'd been waiting on a friend for a birthday dinner reservation. "I was wondering when someone would come." Donner stepped over a body on the floor without looking down. "It gets quiet, after a while. I don't mind quiet, but…" the man gave a small pause, the skull tilting like a curious dog's, "Company is nicer." Donner stopped a few feet away. Close enough to be companionable. A fallen centerpiece lay between them, roses facing down in a spreading dark stain, petals separating at the edges.

"You look upset." He said it the way a concerned friend might. Observational. Gentle, even. "That's understandable. This can be…" his eyeless gaze swept the room, moving over the very still bodies ragdolled across the booths and the floor and, in one case, a chair they'd never sat in willingly. Bitten. All of them bitten, and worse than that, opened, in the patient and particular way of someone who knows exactly where to press. He looked back. There was nothing in his posture that suggested apology. "A lot to take in, if you're not used to it." He chuckled. A muffled, soft sound, warm at the edges, the kind of laugh that would have been pleasant in any other room, any other life. "I keep forgetting," Blitzen said, almost fondly, "that most people are." He held his hands out in front of him, sleeves flopping past his fingertips, swaying with the small motion like a child showing empty pockets. The gesture was so ordinary, so innocent, it made things worse. "Were you close with any of them? I always think it's important to ask."

@lacemasks

[bark4mebtch]

The morgue always smelled like stale coffee and chemicals, and Blitzen had decided, somewhere around month three, that he didn't mind it. Most of his coworkers did. They developed rituals. Strong coffee before a shift, a specific playlist on the drive home, anything to create distance between the work and the rest of their lives. Blitzen had never felt that particular need. The distance simply wasn't there for him, and he'd stopped pretending otherwise. He walked home. He always walked home, rain or not, cold or not. The city at this hour had a specific quality he'd grown fond of. The sidewalks thinned out, surroundings were quieter, the worst of the foot traffic dissolved into bars and apartments. He moved through it easily, tall and long-limbed, the hood of his jacket pushed back despite the drizzle. His antlers caught the occasional glance from a passing stranger. He returned none of them.

Two years and the city had mostly absorbed him. Kind of. There were still neighborhoods where people stared longer than was polite, still moments where someone's gaze would snag on his ears, his eyes, the subtle jarringness of his proportions. He'd learned to read the difference between curious and threatening in about three seconds flat. Old habit. Useful habit. His hands were clean. They were always clean by the time he left, he was meticulous about that but he was aware of them anyway, turning his phone over idly as he walked. Ducky had texted twenty minutes ago. Clinic's done. Picking up groceries. Any requests? Blitzen had sent back something specific. Chocolate rice cakes. He always did. He had a fondness for them and their simplicity.

Blitz had his hood up and his eyes on his phone when it happened. A body coming around the corner at the wrong angle, the collision sudden and graceless. His hands shot out and caught them by the shoulders before his thoughts had any say in the matter. And then he felt it. Not with his hands. Deeper than that. It wasn't something he could explain to anyone who asked. The ability didn't announce itself. It was quiet, almost passive. He could only express it as pressing your ear to a wall and hearing the whole architecture of the building hum back at you. One heartbeat of contact and the stranger's interior geography opened up to him.

Healthy. Unremarkable in all the clinical ways that mattered. But other things came through too. The specific tension carried in the shoulders beneath his palms read as chronic, settled in. The shallow rhythm of someone who'd forgotten, a long time ago, what it felt like to breathe without something sitting on their chest. He let go and offered an easy smile, the kind he'd practiced until it looked natural. "Um... m- my fault entirely." Blitzen said, tilting his head in a small, reflexive apology. The rain dripped off the edge of one antler. "I... shouldn't text and walk. Are you alright?" Perfectly pleasant. Perfectly normal. The map of them was already filed away somewhere quiet behind his eyes, neat and patient, like a book returned to its shelf. Blitzen blinked, slowly, like waking up from a fog. His sleepy deer brain recognizing the face in the low light. "Doesn't paper... melt in the rain?" There was no malice in his voice despite the question, lips twitching to smile charmingly at the other man, ignoring the rain dripping off his antlers. It was an innocent question. And a valid one at that.

@sanmartyrs