⊱𖣂⊰ | In which you fall into a fictional world with the key to Pandora's box.
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── 𝟑𝟎 | 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐝
⟡ chapter word count: 3.4k
⟡ content warnings: blanket warnings, asphyxiation, nightmares, panic attacks, fire, graphic description of death and afterlife
⟡ a/n: Oh my god. I cannot believe I'm finally here. This was written two years ago. Insane. I am literally shaking rn it Is That serious to me. Anyway. Hope this chapter solves some questions! Im kinda afraid of posting this ngl, i fear i've hyped it too much and it wont live to expectations lmao
Thanks for reading!
𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐑𝐎𝐎𝐌 𝐇𝐀𝐒𝐍'𝐓 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐄𝐃 much since childhood.
There's a chair propped on the corner, covered in not clean but also not dirty clothes. Your bedside table sports a funky looking lamp, a second hand find you don’t remember how you got. Your dresser has stickers stuck to it in the lower half, courtesy of toddler-you.
On top of it there's costume jewelry strewn across, while your real jewelry, a gift from your grandma, sits pretty inside a velvet-lined box. A pair of beat up shoes lays by the lower-left post of your bed, accompanied by your backpack, which has a few seams ripped from use. You have a half-filled bookshelf, filled with trinkets, novels and the occasional manga.
It's nothing like the pictures of bedrooms you see in magazines; those are too artificial, sterile, organized. Yours, you explain when your mom tells you off for the mess, is lived in.
The sound of your alarm is not what wakes you up that day. The honor goes to the sharp breath you take as you shoot up in your bed, hand reaching for the collar of your shirt, searching for the intangible thing that blocks your airway.
You don’t find anything. Your heart settles.
You blink. Your fingers grip tightly the fabric of your comforter, before relaxing. What were you so stressed about?
You blink. You’ve already changed out of your pajamas, and are now checking yourself in the polaroid-covered mirror after fixing your bedhair.
You blink. You are walking down the stars— the stairs with your backpack slung over your shoulder, family photographs oddly foggy in your peripheral vision.
You blink. The voice of your mother is a distant echo reminding you to eat your breakfast. Your father’s distorted cadence wishes you good luck with your upcoming test.
You blink. The door to your house creaks as you close it. You hesitate, a small part of you wanting to come back in. But for what? your brain questions. There is nothing you forgot, nothing left for you to grab.
You turn around almost robotically, the urge fading away with every step you take. Still, you feel as if you are forgetting something. But are you really? Maybe you haven’t forgotten. After all, how could you forget what you know you are missing?
Was there someone else in the house? You can’t remember.
Your footsteps echo against the pavement, and the muffled sound reaches your ear, delayed. There is something eerie in the air today, electric even, that makes you dread an approaching storm.
The clamminess of the atmosphere clings to your sweater, following after you like a loyal dog. There is nothing loyal about it though, and it feels more like an omen than a companion. The crows sing, cawing soft warnings at whoever is smart enough to decipher them.
Crows. You—there were crows—
You ask yourself if the warnings are meant for you, if whatever they are sounding alarm for is inevitable, fated. It is not the first time you hear them, you realize. There is an uncomfortable familiarity in the caws, and deja vu coats the scene, running along like water, drowning you in the recognition it holds for you. You walk the length of the familiar sidewalk, feeling nothing but dread as the seconds tick by.
It’ll be over soon.
Faces of other pedestrians blur alongside you, the morning commute nothing more than a faint drone in the background. You cannot distinguish faces, people, stores. It is all covered in fog, and not even the blinding light of the sun is enough for your brain to process the world around you. Everything is drenched in shadows, everything is drowning in light. There is no place your eyes can properly focus on that is not the path upfront.
Your feet move as if strung along, body following the script that was written. You stop at an intersection and goosebumps riddle your skin. The people moving around you turn further to mist, their figures blurred like the old footage from your childhood you mom hung onto.
You take another step and the sidewalk transforms into the off-white, specked tiles of your school. The sun is replaced by fluorescent lights that coat the hallway in a sickly yellow haze, and the morning commuters by teenagers, all in varying states of worry for the upcoming exams.
Textbooks find their way to your backpack, and in a flash, the first half of the school day is over. You wave goodbye to your friends, and begin to head the other way. One of them rushes back to you. Asks to borrow your calculator. You reach for it and realize you have left it in the last classroom you were in.
There are ten minutes to spare before the bell rings again. You purse your lips, but your friend’s pleading eyes win. You reroute, and promise to meet them halfway back, after they get their material from their locker in the opposite direction.
You walk to the classroom. Across the building, up one floor, the first past the restroom.
There is no teacher and no students inside. Just a forgotten pencil on the floor, a rolled up ball of paper on the corner, a lunchbox someone left behind. And your calculator, where you had left it.
You almost trip on your way over. A quick look down confirms what you had suspected—your laces are untied. While you kneel, one knee on the cool floor, a shrill alarm begins to ring.
Distantly, you register it as the fire alarm. It had already gone off twice this week, both with no fires at all. Some kids had set it off on purpose, you had learned, all to skip some particularly gruelling midterms administered by some of the least liked teachers in the staff roster.
You finish tying your laces with a calm that does not mesh well with the repetitive but urgent sound that blares through the room. You’d be mad, if it were any other day, where the protocol would interrupt your daily routine. But today, with a test you didn’t fully study for on the way, you’re kinda glad. It should give you more time. To study, to freak out about how little you actually remember—anything but the exam.
You grab your calculator and stuff it on the side pocket of your backpack. An old packet of gum springs from it, and you mindlessly make a detour to the trashcan to throw it away. With everything you need, you make your way to the door and make a grab for the handle—
And it's warm.
Oddly warm. Warm enough that it warms the air around it, warm enough you don’t have to touch it to know. Warm enough to be a cause for alarm.
Shit.
The alarm.
The volume of the piercing pitch rises, as does the frequency of the bursts of sound. Your vision starts to swim—either because of the smoke that slithers through the cracks of the door or from the fear fueled tears that fall from your eyes.
Fuck. Okay.
Your eyes dart from one side of the room to the other.
The door.
The widows.
Maybe if you could crack one open—no, they’re too small, and they have those metal screens. You could rip them? But—oh goddammit, you’re pretty sure you don’t have your scissors on you. Not that they’d do much, the unhelpful side of you rationalizes.
A chair. If you could break a window with one—
—or maybe you could kick the screen away—-
—would you get charged for it? Maybe, but you’d be alive—
—wait, you're on the second floor, how would you even—
—if only you were in the art classroom; or the science lab. They for sure had a surplus of sharp objects—
—could you make the jump? You’ve never been particularly athletic inclined but—
—all of this because of a stupid calculator—
—just your luck that there is a fire the one time you take more time than normal—
Something falls outside, interrupting the messy stream of half-formed thoughts that pump adrenaline through your veins. Your left pointer finger feels hotter than all others. It's bleeding. Your right index starts too. Your thumbs are both stained with—oh, your mom is going to be so disappointed you’ve fallen back on bad habits—
YOU NEED TO DO SOMETHING.
So the windows are a no go. The screen makes it impossible for you to escape through it, and even if you somehow managed to crack it loose the space is too small for you to crawl through.
Okay.
Okay. Don't panic.
Too late for that, you’re already hyperventilating, you notice. Or is everything just going by really fast? You feel disconnected and razor sharp at the same time.
Fires.
You’ve participated in fire drills before.
There's the—the thing.
What was the thing?
Right—stop, drop roll. Wait no, that’s just if you catch fire. Are you on fire? No. Your eyes flit down anyway, and no, not a part of you is on fire.
Okay. What else?
A wet rag under the door, your brain provides, finally deciding to be useful for once. Just one slight problem with that—there's no rags. Or water.
You’ve lost count of how long you’ve been standing, frozen in the middle of the room. It's been what, a minute? Two? It feels like it's been three hours and five seconds at the same time.
Your eyes sting. You bring the collar of your shirt up in order to block some of the smoke that fills the room, but the hacking cough that follows is proof it's not enough.
The floor is closer now. One of your knees rests against it, while the other serves as a balancing point for your upper body.
There is not much you are thinking now. What little thoughts you can form are blurry, and they come to life through sludge, lazy and undefined.
Your vision swims. Your muscles give out.
The last thing you see, the last thing you feel, is the warmth of the burning fire that invades through the door, enveloping your body in one last embrace.
Your vision turns black without the need to close your eyes. You go limp in the middle of the room, wrapped in the ash of smoke, in the growing flames.
Still, it does little to warm your ever colder body.
In the end, it is not the fire that kills you, but the smoke that penetrates your lungs until oxygen is purged from within.
And just like that, you’re gone.
There's a certain peacefulness that comes with dying.
You float in nothingness, you float in everything. The universe hums a soothing tune as you pass through nonexistent curtains, their transparent fibers tickling your face, your torso, your arms.
There is no light, there is no darkness.
There is only peace.
Your body doesn’t obey your orders. The burning sensation of not being able to breathe is not there anymore, and it seems neither is any other. Your body doesn’t obey your orders because it is not there anymore.
You’d always figured you’d be mad if there was consciousness after dying. Of course, the thing you are right now is not necessarily conscious but it's the only way you can describe it. It's light—not the kind you see, but the feeling of floating. Not in air or in water—rather, in yourself.
A fourth dimensional cube is the closest allegory you can think of from Before. You don’t need to explain things now—you are you and what is happening right now and you’ve never felt so whole—but it brings you a weird type of comfort.
Everything is weird now. Quiet. But also loud. And also not really. You don’t have senses anymore, and yet You still Are. Am. Was. Is. You, you, you. An Embrace from non corporeal hands that also belong to you, that have waited for so long for you to join Them, that are you, you, You.
And then it ruptures.
You start to feel pain again. Agonizing, burning, incomparable pain.
You’d scream if you had a voice to work with. Everything you’ve felt during your Life—the skinned knees, the wood bark scrapes, the sprain from the third grade—is miniscule in comparison. You are being torn apart. Not your body—you.
The Embrace begins to fade. You cling to It with all your might, and It clings to you with as much force. It is the mirror that completes you, the newfound Something that you have longed to return to and only now realized.
It doesn’t matter that You are One. The link between You shatters, and with it you do too.
The calm melody that had once enveloped you fades, and one with more discrepancies in its harmonizations takes its place. It is still beautiful, still ethereal, complex, but it is also more turbulent. The same song rewinds and plays again, different notes taking different places each time it does so.
You do not appreciate it, for you are too busy writhing in the agony of being ripped away from all you’ve ever wanted.
A sky full of shining stars fills your vision, ripples of light rupturing the celestial sphere. You watch—eyes? You have eyes again—as they reach outwards into the unknown, converging at the center.
You know this place.
You know this place, just like you’ve known all of today.
Your fingers twitch, and the worldly pain returns, before it is again soothed by silky sand. It is molded to the cavities that make up your body, returning it once again to pre-mortem condition. The agony from You and Them and It is eased too, but rather than curing it it is instead dulled until you can no longer remember what you are missing.
Is this heaven's mortuary? Is God your mortician?
Your essence mixes with the damp earth, and you are put together by gentle hands. Your eyes lazily trace the path from the star-filled sky to your side, where the heavenly reconstructor is rebuilding your body.
Somehow, you don't find it strange that a young girl is tending to your bedside. Her hands expertly sculpt your body, not only with knowledge but with familiarity. She is tender when she reassembles you, gently forming what mangled mess you have become in your journey here. Your heart beats again, softly humming in harmony with the melody in the air. Your lungs take up air again, softly inflating and deflating in tune with the thrum that pulses through you.
You try to speak but nothing comes out of your mouth, you try to reach out but the weight of your arms is too heavy.
Time ticks by, rushes to a stop. Rewinds and starts back again in just one blink of an eye. Details get fuzzier as your vision clears, memories of fire and smoke slipping through your fingers like the fine sand that surrounds you. It is then when the girl reaches to cradle your burned face, her touch tender and merciful.
You do not ask who she is, where you are, or what is happening. You know, subconsciously, that you’ve been here before, and that you’re safe as long as she is looking over you. She may seem younger in age, but her hands speak of millennia witnessed. She is neither usual nor unusual, just a fading point in the distance you’d never thought you’d touch.
And yet there’s something different about her. From what you’re pulling, exactly, to make that comparison you have no clue, but it is undeniable that something has changed within her.
She holds no soul, you come to conclude. After all, eyes are the windows from which the soul peers, and it seems hers are nowhere to be found.
Your blood starts rushing through your veins like a wild river.
Or maybe she is the soul. And the eyes from which she peers are in the bright, petrified lighting tree in the middle of the dunes.
She used to have eyes, you distinctly recall. Where are they now?
Lost beneath the primordial sand? Locked in her tomb, hidden from view?
No matter, you don’t have time to linger on such thoughts. Your consciousness begins to dissolve again, carried away by the soft ripples in the sand.
The nonexistent wind picks up, and the particles beneath you gain flight, surrounding you, embracing you. The drum of your heartbeat is all you hear now as the hurricane closes in. You yearn for her gentle touch as the sand beneath you rises, eyes desperately looking for any vestige of her presence.
You only catch a glimpse of the girl before you fade away, ripped apart and stitched together once again.
The dunes dissolve, as do you, and the ethereal light is replaced by organic sunshine, only to be snuffed away when your eyes snap open.
You wake with a gasp, your hand coming to clutch at your shirt, your chest, your heart. Your eyes dart frantically around the room, and sweat rolls down your back, down your forehead. In the darkness of the night you try to stand up, failing to do so when your legs get tangled in the bedsheets.
You heave as you try to control your breathing, and tears roll down your eyes as you clutch your torso, feeling for long-healed burns in your lungs. Your bed creaks as you move, compensating for your erratic moving.
In your mind there is only the classroom, the smoke, the fire, the silence that came after. The peace. The agony. The reconstruction.
You…
You died.
There is no way you wouldn’t have. You are pretty sure you didn’t just feel as if you were being suffocated—you actually were.
Even if by some miraculous event the firefighters and paramedics arrived in time and found you, the smoke in your lungs, combined with the scorching heat of the fire, would be enough to seal your fate.
And you hate that the more you think about it the more it makes sense. You died, and somehow found your way to the Paths, to this world. Your body was repaired by Ymir, your soul stitched into place by her intrinsic powers.
You are looping your own death over and over again, (and isn’t that weird, that you know death more intimately than yourself) when, amongst the blaze of your memories, a colder feeling settles in.
The antithesis of the coolness of it against the heat in your mind is enough to partially snap you out of it. Not completely, not until you are fully enveloped by it and your tear ducts run themselves dry.
Eren’s hand rubs soothing circles on your back, supporting your head with his shoulder, as your heart threatens to tear itself out of your chest, fueled by anxiety and rage and despair.
You’re grateful he doesn’t ask questions, for you try to speak anyway and all that comes out is a mangled sob. His shirt grows damp with tears, but you don’t care. Or notice. There’s too much going on.
You're dead and he's going to die. You're dead and he's going to die. You're dead and he's going to die.
What a pair.
You’re looping your death—death. Death? D eath—when something presses against your forehead. Eren mumbles something—an affirmative, a realization, you can’t be too sure—and his arms tighten around you.
Everything else after that is a blur.
You don’t know how long it has been since you’ve been curled up on the floor, but sometime later your tears finally run out. The pain doesn’t, but your tear ducts have called it quits. You don’t blame them. You want to call it quits too.
Little by little you return to your body. Your ankles protest at your unconventional posture. Your lungs ask for more and more and more air. Your throat is raspy from the sobs that wrecked it.
Your breathing is soothed by the feeling of fingers running through your hair.
“...Nightmare?” you hear Eren ask. His voice is still a little blurred on the edges, but it's clear enough you understand.
Your face is still pressed against his shoulder. “Memory,” comes your muffled reply.
He tenses again. “Future memory?”
You swallow.
“No. Past.”
“Oh.”
You have to tell him before you lose your grit. You don’t want to, because speaking of It out loud means it becomes real—but then again, these past two years have been spent with impossibilities becoming reality. Fiction coming to life, Titans, a whole world against you. Why not resurrection?
“I know how I came here,” you force out. “I died.”
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Writer: Jeff Lemire
Artist: Rafael de Latorre
THE SEARCH FOR MARTIN STEIN!
Lorraine is on the hunt for the only person who can bring Ronnie back from the brink: Martin Stein. But what did Martin do to cause such a rift between him and Ronnie to begin with?
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Writers: Nicole Maines, Jadzia Axelrod
Artists: Dan Jurgens, Joe Quinones, Stephen Sadowski, Ted Brandt
DC’S AWARD-WINNING PRIDE CELEBRATION IS BACK IN AN ALL-NEW FORMAT!
The Key was once a villain who could infect the dreams of even the most powerful heroes through complex chemical cocktails. Now, in Dreamer, he sees a way to control the dreamscape for real — if he can craft a fantasy compelling enough to make her surrender to him. If only Dreamer’s best friend Galaxy didn’t keep interfering! How did she even get into the dreamworld, anyway? No matter. When you push the right buttons, even the strongest friendship can be shattered…
Also featuring a GREEN LANTERN CORPS back up story by Morgan Hampton, Steven Underwood, and Alitha Martinez!
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Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Skylar Patridge
BLAST FROM THE PAST!
After defeating Xotar, Superboy and the Justice League turn their attention to another mystery unsolved. The rocket ship that brought Clark to Earth has been activated. Could this be the key to finding Superman?
