REVENANT X READER ANGST DRABBLE - tw: talk of death, death, detailed fear of sudden death, grief
It’s a quiet evening in the little apartment.
He had no need for a place to rest at night, or at all. The place was rented specifically as a way to know where you were. He liked knowing you were safe in a little place he’d picked personally. Having control gave him some sort of reassurance that you’d be alright while he was away, because it was his home, his bed, his things keeping you cozy and warm.
You’re curled around his waist. He drags the metal of his fingertips across the screen in his hands, clearing jobs off of his list. Ones that had kept him away for months at a time. He tilts his head slightly every few minutes in between logging details of each hit, optics flicking to you, checking on you, casting a small, momentary spotlight on you in the slow dimming of the room as the sun dipped behind the other buildings in the city.
He was the literal mechanical grim reaper. Death was his job, his medium. A grisly artist who left carcasses as canvases, signed with a special brutality reserved for those unfortunate enough to end up in his job queue. He was all too familiar with death. He had died again and again, numb to the darkness that exists in-between each new vessel. Numb to the cold and the pain of the metallic husk collapsing in on itself, of the burn in his chest when the motors and circuits whirr to a painfully slow end, suffocating as his systems shut down.
Then he wakes up again.
Death was nothing to him. Thousands at his hands, thousands of his own. Thousands more simulated in the games.
It had you wondering.
Life was dangerous. Living is dangerous. Something could happen at any given moment. Hell, Wraith had told you that something HAS happened at any moment across different universes. If you could imagine it, it’s happened.
She’d warned you that in many universes, Revenant was your way out. Had your first meeting gone any differently, perhaps in a universe where he didn’t truly know his own strength. One where he was still a human, and you were one of his last hits before dying for the first time.
You’ve thought about it. Stressed about it. But has he?
It itches at the back of your brain for months. Brewing viciously and boiling your entire being along with it, mindlessly moving and writhing as the denied fear tries to look for a scrap, something to feed it and let it fester, something to let it root in the back of your mind—
“What’s got you squirming?”
His rough voice breaks your train of thought. You still, blinking up at him, his eyes already trained on yours, his tablet set aside. He’d been watching for a while.
“What’ll happen when I die?”
The first words that come out of your mouth. You know the answer. He’d told you many times when he was haunted by the thousands of deaths he was forced to endure.
He scoffs, like it’s irrational, “You won’t know you’re dead. You’ll know that you’re dying, but you won’t know when it’s settled in, like falling asleep.”
It’s supposed to settle you, the way he spares you of the worst of it. You can’t decide if it works. You must’ve been too quiet too long for his liking, so he pokes your forehead.
“What else is happening in that pretty little head of yours?”
It almost makes you smile. That sarcastic and playful streak trying to warm the fear bitten part of you.
“What will you do when I die?”
He stops. He’s quiet for a long time. It’s a question he too has wondered about. He’s numb to the concept, death is tangible, yes, he’s seen a light go out a million times, burnt bulbs to never be replaced, but he can’t help the twinge of discomfort of not being able to stop death. He can control the way they go. Cut short and quick, or painful, slowly draining the life. He can’t prevent death.
He’s a killing machine. Not made for healing, not made for care, tenderness and love. Everything he does is rough, it’s harsh, unforgiving. If you fear death, he wonders, why are you with him? It makes him uncomfortably angry at himself. Something soft and weak offers itself to him, equipped with claws and blood in every groove of his mechanical being. Makes his hands itch, even now when he longs to be gentle, he wants to lash out in anger at the way fate has left him as a monster.
He’s lived for hundreds as a monster, and he’ll live for hundreds more as one. Wishing he were gentle for just one night to truly indulge in the fragility of your being does not reverse it. He will remain a monster, long after you are gone. Unchanged.
“Knowing you, you’ll probably have earned it,” he decides, folding his arms. No room for argument as he scoffs, “Asking questions like that, always so fearful. The world out there will eat you up,” his voice dropping to a low rumble before he laughs, the grating mechanical sound hopefully distorted enough to hide the shimmer of weakness. The long forgotten phantom ache on the outer corners of his eyes, the burn that follows after, invisible heat rimming the shiny water lines. He bows before no other, but secretly he thanks a higher being that he is no longer flesh, that you cannot see the ghost of how he feels.
It eases you, his sadistic sarcasm, somehow. This master of death speaks to you as if it is no big deal. So maybe it isn’t.
“Thanks Rev,” the words are soft and reassured, and he leans down to bury his cold face into the side of yours, “keep me warm,” he mutters, grunting as he repositions himself, ignoring the way you squirm and try to push away the frigid metal with annoyed huffs and giggles.
The lights are off, the curtains drawn. You’d leave all the lights on, your eyes weren’t like his: artificial and equipped with night vision. He wanders the place at all times when he isn’t busy, not bothering to change vessels or clean the viscera away when he gets home.
You used to complain about the blood crusted footprints he’d leave on the rug. So he simply stays off of it now.
He traces the damage you’d left in the place as well. Chipped paint from tripping over the coffee table and into the wall. A coffee stain on the white marble counter that just wouldn’t go away. He’s certain he could get rid of it now, but he’s not sure if he can.
Revenant finds himself with his face to the wall. In the couch cushions. Even limp with his head in the empty washing machine, searching for traces of your scent. He’s done this routine enough to know that there’s nothing left. He’d greedily breathed in every trace of your presence in the first few months.
It doesn’t stop him from checking.
There’s a dirty cup in the sink. He holds it in his hand, mimicking you, the clink of his metal lips to the ceramic, following your motions, fruitlessly putting his lips to where yours once were. He wishes he had a tongue, so he could check the silverware for just a taste of you left.
The bedroom is the worst.
He avoids it when he can.
But it’s been a rough day. A rough week. A month, a year. Maybe longer?
It’s going to be a rough forever.
Slipping into the room with the grace of a zombie. It’s been a good couple hundred years since he’s felt exhaustion, but the constant burning around his optics has warn him thin. At the bed, he finds himself curling up in the divot of where you used to lay. The mattress hasn’t been used properly in a decade already, and he knows the hollow has changed its shape. It’s not truly yours anymore, his heavy form wearing the foam down further. He regrets lying in it, damaging the relic of your residence, but starvation leaves a dog desperate.
His legs tucked to his chest, arms binding them in place, head tucked between his knees. Fetal position, though he wishes fate would miscarry him this one time.
He’ll pretend that he is rotting, already with you. He’ll never die. They’ll make more of him for as long as they can.
But for now he’ll keep his consciousness in this one. He died the same day as you, his heart ripped from the otherwise hollow chassis of his being. The slow burn of the death of his circuits the only comfort, dreaming that one night it will be the final time.
