Trick or treat!!
GREETINGS and a joyous Samhain to you!!! And, oh, what's this? A BABS TALE? Again, whether this is a trick or a treat is SUPER open to interpretation!
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When he died, his hair had been styled into a perfect pompadour. It had taken him quite some time to compensate for the awful hard water on the House of the First. He had labored to determine the precise amount of product necessary to keep his chestnut tresses fluffy and aloft.
When he died, he’d been wearing one of his favorite formal outfits. He liked to be able to move in his clothes—to show off his vitality, you know. The jacket, in particular, had become a fast favorite. The buttons had been amethyst set in gold. It was tight on his forearms and had elbow patches quilted in a quatrefoil pattern with golden thread.
(His ex had loved elbow patches on him, and perhaps that should have made him love them less, but he’d clung selfishly to the hope that the idiot might catch sight of his elbows at the theatre some night and take him back… though said idiot had married the fellow he’d cheated on him with about six months ago, so that might have been a lost cause.)
When he died, he still had all of his original internal organs. A few had been supplemented and bolstered, of course, but who’s weren’t? Likewise, all of his blood had been inside of his body, which had been home to one singular soul.
When he died, his own tri-bladed knife had pierced through the back of his jacket, passed through his shirt, stabbed clear through the skin, and entered his thoracic cavity. He’d fallen in a heap, sputtering in a pool of his own viscous blood, and his carefully coiffed hair had become mussed.
Oh, and she’d reached into the cavity, blood up to her wrist, and removed and eaten his entire liver (which seemed a bit excessive, in hindsight).
He’d looked rough by the end. It was not his best day, certainly. He’d seen himself, through his eyes, in her face, and had been disgusted.
(He’d had the audacity to think, “At least it can’t get worse,” until the first time she’d looked in the mirror in the dreadful shuttle lighting on the Erebos. Ugh.)
He wished he looked that good now.
He’d only caught sight of himself for a second. Not only did his hair look like utter shit, but his outfit was some trashy cohort-looking number.
Oh, and it was all singed to hell. Actually, all of him was singed to all hell—a blackened husk in shiny shoes. They’d left him face down in the middle of some tunnel, with garrulous, blind bodies ambling over him like so much trash.
He did not see the cars zooming through, crushing his skull into a million tiny shards.
He did not see the half-starved cadre of feral dogs ripping into his charred meat as if it were a feast laid out just for them.
He did not see the writhing colony of insects making a home in the cavity where his liver had been.
He saw what she saw, no more—and she certainly wasn’t looking at the crumbling, abandoned, cur-eaten cadaver that had once been home to Naberius Tern. He really should have stayed home and gotten married.
