Can you tell about Vigo and Philip’s relationship? What was their dynamic like?
Hmmm, I have probably answered this better before but the short answer is they were deeply in love, and they understood each other. They're very different people, functionally, but I think they have a lot of overlap spiritually and how they understand the world, and they both felt very alienated because of that until meeting each other, and having someone who was like them. They're both also gay men from times/places it was very impossible to be safely out, so this was their first time getting to be around another person sharing their sexuality. A lot of their relationship is that they saw each other, truly, and understood each other.
Vigo is a very odd man. Growing up, he got along well with his family, but a lot of people were put off by his steamrolling hyperfocus on whatever he was interested in, and unusual social skills/seeming complete lack of any understanding or normal social approach. He's generally hated and unliked everywhere he goes, but he really doesn't ever understand why. Like, he gets why factually, but he doesn't understand why it merits the amount of hate he gets. In the same way if you like, knew you were being arrested because you loitered, you'd go 'factually i know the reason for this is I was loitering,' but you would not understand at all how on earth that merited being arrested. He's extremely affectionate, which is not usual where he's from, so that puts people off too.
Philip has no issues with any of this, and genuinely enjoys being around Vigo. He thinks he's funny, and endearing.
There's an exchange pretty early on that sums it up very well, where Philip has just asked Vigo something Vigo was very concerned would make Philip dislike and mistrust him if he admitted to it, but he was caught off guard so he did, and Philip just sort of went 'Ah that's what I thought. Nice. : )' more or less, and Vigo says something along the lines of "...You keep saying things about me like that I'm mentally abnormally developed, or a witch, and usually people become very hostile towards me when they say these things, but you seem to like them, like I do." and that sums up their relationship on Vigo's side pretty well. On Philip's end, Vigo is interesting and familiar at the same time, and he understands him well. He does like those things about Vigo. But also, Vigo likes and is not at all scared of him, and he doesn't hold any grudges, and I think it helps Philip a lot to be able to heal himself, to have someone who so genuinely accepts everything about him.
They have kind of mirrored issues, intimacy wise, in a lot of ways. Vigo is afraid of people thinking he's some kind of monster, and turning on and leaving him (his experience generally in his life before Philip both over how he thinks, his religious upbringing and beliefs, and his sexuality)--he's afraid that the thing he is will be found monstrous, and so he pushes and challenges. Philip is afraid to be hurt or killed for what he is (his general life experience both racially during the pogroms in Nigeria, as an immigrant viewed with suspicion in a very racist part of the US, and because of the sexuality he had to keep hidden), and of letting down his guard and damaged for it. So it's about trust for them both: Vigo, about being trusted not to hurt, and Philip, being able to trust he will not be hurt. And those go very well together, when they're both worthy of trust, which they are. It helps them get close to each other and be very happy.
Their relationship is good. It's the kind of love where once the other died, whoever was left would never love again, because they really were something different. That's just the kind of relationship it was. Both of them felt very empty before meeting the other, because having someone else really see them finally helped them not just know who they truly were too, but be proud of it and own it. They were really alive together. And it changed them both forever. Vigo spends his entire hellish afterlife in the void desperately trying to use any tiny amount of influence he has, to help Philip, or to at least witness his life so he's not alone, even if Philip cannot remember he even exists. Philip is haunted by the hole Vigo left in him, and even with no memory of him at all, can feel the void where that love was, and even with no personal memory of Vigo really at all at the end of ILM, is determined to risk being trapped in the realm again, or die and throw this new life away, for a chance to someday rescue Vigo or at least see he is put to rest. Their souls know each other. I think they could pass each other in another body in another life, and know at once they'd found someone not even god or death or eons of time could make them completely forget.
Here, for @accursed-worm -- this will probably be the most I can put out for a while, with work and life together how they are, and it’s a shame it doesn’t look how it could on AO3 or somewhere else with more font formatting available, but I hope you enjoy the rest of beginning. Feel free to skip ahead to where it left off for you before if you’d like!
Signifying Nothing
There was an awful stench in the air, a kind of rot that wasn’t easy to recognize. A little like the smell of a dead mouse left for too long under a house, or a discarded deer carcass. It wasn’t either of those things though. It was something much worse. ‘Putrid’ wasn’t a word naturally occurring in anyone’s internal dialogue, but for once it would have been. The smell was overwhelming, and it was coming from everything.
A scuffed black shoe that used to shine with its polish set down on a few small shards of broken glass and the quiet crack made the wearer pause.
The shoes belonged to a man, fairly average in height but with a light build, dark skin, and darker hair that fell into his face. Even stained as it was from hard wear, his white lab coat stood out against the grimy grey and brown walls covered in blood spatter and soot stains and something orange and rotting.
The man stepped further into the room, carefully stepping over the larger chunks of glass and torn metal and rubble that littered the floor. He reached the center of the room and made a slow circle, taking everything in.
Anyone watching would have been able to tell two things at a glance. One, that the man was being cautious and two, that he wasn’t being as cautious as he should have been. He stood out against his surroundings as much as the lab coat did, scanning the walls and leftover carnage more like a tourist at an art gallery than a tattered man in a ransacked laboratory.
Floor to ceiling, the lab around him looked like the aftermath of a horror film. Most of the tables had been flipped, some broken, and writings and beakers and broken glass littered the floor. The room’s one window was busted halfway up and a ragged panel of glass still half-hung in the pane, like a waiting guillotine. Both doors had been torn from the walls. One had fallen into the doorway; the other was in shreds around the room, solid oak torn apart like tissue paper. One small chunk of it still hung from a hinge where it had been broken through, and long, deep scratches ran up it. A large, menacing chandelier hung from its chain in the center of the room weakly, likely to go at any moment. The other lamps were on the ground, and there were still scorch marks around a particularly large one showing where it had caught fire to the research materials around it. Even some of the walls were in pieces, laying rubble around the room amidst tables and test tubes. More noticeable than the state of the room itself was the blood. It was everywhere, reds and browns of various ages flung across the walls and the floor and the implements scattered among the debris, but no bodies. There was an overwhelming smell of corpses, and no corpse.
The man kept walking. He stopped by a pool of ink which had a book floating in it. He knelt, almost reverently, and touched the cover with a finger. There were many things a book could recover from. Soaking in a pile of ink was not one of them.
He stood then, using his forearm to push his hair out of his eyes, and took a small pair of glasses out of his pocked and put them on, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the magnification.
Everything around him was still. A crime scene the day after, a battlefield after even the medics and grave diggers had gone.
The man with glasses took a large messenger bag off of his shoulder and set it on a table. He opened it and rummaged around inside for a few seconds, then froze. Something behind him in the far corner of the room had moved.
Ever so slowly, the man turned to look, eyes unblinking, fixed on where he’d caught movement.
There was nothing.
Very quietly, the man took a syringe out of the bag and readied it like a knife. Slowly, he walked towards the corner of the room. If he’d been careful before, now he was being meticulous. A large broken piece of metal, sharp and jagged on the end that had snapped when it was torn from a lamp and laying a few feet away caught his eye, and he stooped to pick it up.
Still cautious in his approach, the man’s footsteps on the stone floor were the only sound as he got close to the pile of rubble he’d seen movement by, jagged hunk of metal at his side and syringe at the ready in his left hand, and then in one quick, practiced motion the man moved beside the wall to see behind the chunks of stone. He immediately gagged and stumbled back, trying to fight the intense urge to vomit. He failed. The man turned to the side, leaning on a still upright lab table for support and wretched until his body was just dry-heaving. It took him almost twenty seconds to stop. Finally, the man managed to weakly push himself back upright, using one forearm to push his curly hair out of his face, and with his other shaking hand he took a little cloth out of his pocked and used it to wipe his mouth.
It hadn’t just been the sight—he was used to seeing things most people couldn’t begin to imagine. It had been the smell, up close and all at once. It had caught him off guard. Face resigned and exhausted, the bags under his eyes appearing even deeper and his face more gaunt than when he first entered thee room, the man took a breath and went to look at the body again.
Gods have mercy on us all, he thought absently. He didn’t mean it. At this point, that thought was more like a sick joke than anything, but it had become automatic.
The man walked over and knelt down to get a better look at the corpses. He hadn’t even realized at first that there were two of them. The smell that came from the oozing, pussy, decaying mass of mutilated flesh and growths that covered the scarred victims was almost unbearable on a physical level, and he had to keep his forearm over his mouth and nose, trying to filter out some of the smell.
One of the bodies was smaller than him and shrunken. It had cuts all over its still form which oozed an orange substance he was all too familiar with—that disgusting puss secreted by the spirit whose world they were trapped in. He’d seen the nectar before many times. Once every year, when it purged. It was the only genuinely reliable marker that existed to keep track of the passage of time. God, did they use just the raw materials? And so much of it. What is this? It smells like the usual rot, but burned. The thought was a little more olfactorily descriptive than he meant, and his body tried to gag again, but there was nothing left in his stomach to come up. Steeling himself, the man put his syringe in a breast coat pocket, pulled a hard-worn pair of rubber gloves from a back pocket, and pulled them on. From his messenger bag, he took out an empty vial. Leaning over the smaller body, he scraped some of the puss from one of its arms and closed it in his little glass jar, inspecting the sample carefully before placing it in his sack. He shifted then, and used the blunt end of his broken piece of metal to poke at the figure a little, moving one of the arms which covered its chest to get a better look at its torso. Absently, his free hand reached into a pocket and took out a clunky old pocket recorder, marked simply by the initial “C” and hit record.
“Multiple injection marks,” he said to the recorder, eyes fixed on the corpse as he tried to get a better angle on it, “all up and down the ribcage, as if whoever did this was attempting to get it into the bone marrow itself. The subject is young—thirties at the oldest. I don’t recognize the body.”
Gentle as he was going, his metal rod accidentally took off a chunk of flesh the size of a napkin, peeling back and sloughing off the side to reveal mucus and bone and clotted blood, thick with orange lumps. The man gagged again and took a deep breath to steel himself.
“The smell is worse than normal,” he continued, clearing his throat to try and bite back the urge to gag, “Could be due to the natural composition of the body, combined with heavy injections. Decay level of the tissue is low, maybe a week at most, but the chemicals seem to have altered body chemistry heavily, greatly lowering the integrity of the skin. That, or it’s been here a long time and the serum did the opposite,” he added as an afterthought. “Unlikely, though.”
He moved a little, crouch-walking to save time, and leaned over the body again at a new angle. “There are skin lacerations around the subject’s wrists and neck. Not deep, but pre-mort…” Shackles, he realized, glancing instinctively to look for the objects. Had it broken free and been killed? There was no wound he had seen that would have caused death, but he’d only just started. As he looked down, he realized that one of the ankles was still cuffed to a heavy chain embedded in the wall. “It was shackles,” he continued, remembering the recorder, “one is still connecting the subject to the wall. The others seem to have been removed.” He clicked the recorder off, then after a second held the record button down again. “Something has completely trashed my lab, but left the bodies. No recent signs of a presence here either. Everything is at least half a week old, going by blood. Maybe five days. But before that, somebody got very, very busy with my research notes.” He released the button.
I wasn’t gone from the lab that long was I? A few months? What the hell happened here? The man looked at the small, shriveled corpse beneath his feet. Female. About my age, weren’t you? Who were you before this? How long did it take for them to kill you?
He had only given the larger figure a casual glance so far. It was slumped against the wall, half-sitting. He turned his attention to it now, clicking the recorder back on.
“The second body I’ve found is larger and more deformed. There are no puss sacs or growths like seem to have killed the first subject, but the chemical seems to have been altered on this one to include organic compounds from the area. There are sharp vines coming out of its shoulders and arms, covering its head, with large growths above its skull. It looks almost like a stag.” The man clicked the recorder off again and got closer, looking the body in front of him up and down. It was like a tree had overgrown a person, seeping into their body, symbiosis. There were little dark slits on the thing’s head where eyes would have been, and horns made of rotting wood rested above its expressionless face. A huge chunk was missing from its chest, leaving what was left of its ribcage bare and exposing the remaining organs inside. He raised the recorder again and continued his analysis. “Exposed chest wound, including major bone damage to the ribcage which leaves the heart partially exposed. Possibly—”
Again, the man had the impression that something had moved, and he froze. –There it was again!
He squinted, leaning in closer to the figure in front of them. It had come from inside the thing’s chest. Insects, rats? Why the hell—there aren’t naturally occurring animals here, so why would a…
His eyes were only a few inches from the corpse’s chest when he saw it for real, as clear as the vines digging into the thing’s lungs. The exposed heart beat.
In an explosion of movement, the monster’s arm swung out and caught him in the chest, throwing him backwards into the pile of rubble behind him with enough force to knock the breath out of him.
He didn’t even have time to connect the pain in the back of his shoulder and down his arm with the blood dripping onto his fingers before it was on him, lunging for his throat, and the man scrambled backwards, toppling over the pile of rubble blindly as the thing crawled after him, roaring like a beast.
“Oh fucking shit!” the man yelled, his brain’s first attempt to give him a rational response or solution to the situation. He crawled backwards, trying to move faster than the thing was crawling towards him, which was physically impossible. It lunged at him and he rolled out of the way, leaving a smear of blood as he crawled beneath a table and came up stumbling to his feet on the opposite side of it.
In the half-second of safety the metal table offered he got a good look at the monster in its entirety. Horns included, the thing towered over him by a good two feet, head tilted and gold-orange puss dripping from its cuts and wounds and mouth and eyes. If you could call them eyes—they were something anyway, a flickering white-blue light coming from where there had been nothing but darks slits on its face for eyes before, and the lights stayed trained on him as it moved impossibly fast and flung the metal table between them across the room in one swift motion. He could hear the table crashing into a wall as the beast leapt for him, its arm catching hold of his hair and taking a handful as the man tore himself free and threw himself to the ground underneath its arms and past its legs, twisting as he hit the ground, snatching at the syringe in his breast coat pocket and digging its needle into the popliteal artery at the back of the monster’s knee, driving his thumb against the plunger, and emptying the container of pentobarbital into the monster’s leg. It spun with him, just as fast, and swung at him again, its hand catching him in the cheek and sending him skidding along the floor backwards into the same pile of rubble he’d been bashed against before.
Without hesitation, the horned beast came at him with a fury, but it stumbled, and the man rolled out of the way and watched it crash into the rocks it had knocked him against moments before. It shook its head like it was trying to clear it and took another step towards him, and then a much slower, more shaky step, and began to sway. It tried to grab a nearby gurney for support and it fell, taking the stretcher with it as it collapsed onto its side
The man sat were he’d rolled, breathing hard, arms still poised to help him crawl backwards quickly if he had to, eyes fixed on the monster in front of him.
It twitched and made an agonized sound and tried to pull itself back up and failed, and tried again, and again its shoulders gave out. It turned its head towards him and he saw a shudder run down its whole body, and the lights beneath the slits on its face flickering. The golden-orange liquid drained from it more slowly now, as the beast excruciatingly dug its fingers into the stone floor and tried to crawl towards the fallen gurney.
The man got to his feet shakily and blinked in surprise at the blood dripping down his arm. Choosing to ignore the wound for now in favor of more present danger, though, he turned his attention back to the creature on the floor and realized for the first time that this second test subject had been shackled too—was still shackled. Its left leg was connected to the wall by a long tether which had almost reached its length. As he watched, the beast dragged itself over to the fallen stretcher and tried again and again to pull itself up from its prone position. With each attempt he could see it getting weaker as the drug took hold.
Noticing his piece of torn lamp pole from before laying by the rock heap where he’d lost it when he took the first hit, the man in the lab coat walked over and reclaimed his weapon, then crossed purposefully to the creature on the floor.
As he neared it, he could see from the slow, ragged rise and fall of its chest and the slow flickering on and off of the lights that seemed to be its eyes that it was fighting to stay awake. As he got close to it, it swung a hand weakly at him twice before its strength gave out and the arm dropped to the ground.
After waiting a few seconds to make sure the drug had worked its way deep enough into the thing’s system, the man knelt by the monster and leveled his piece of metal. He saw it move its shoulder, trying to will an arm up to defend itself from him, but the drug had set in in earnest now and it had seconds before it was dead to the world completely. He looked from its throat to its exposed heart, trying to decide how to deal with the thing. After a second, he decided on the heart and the man placed one hand on its chest to steady his aim, and then he raised his jagged piece of metal over its exposed heart and it made a sound almost like a whimper.
He hesitated then, looking down at the thing beneath him. The lights behind the slits of its wooden face were fading out, but its chest still rose and fell. He knew it was looking at him as it lost consciousness, and he felt it shudder under the hand he had on its chest. Its breath was coming in quick and shallow, even with the sedative seeping through its veins, and he realized suddenly that it was scared of him and scared to die.
The lights behind its eye slits went out and the creature’s head lulled to the side as it lost consciousness and the man raised his makeshift weapon again. Then he stopped.
Instead, he moved his hand to the thing’s face and felt the rough wooden surface. There was a crack over the left side, which spiderwebbed out from near its ear. Gingerly, the man followed the crack down the monster’s cheekbone to a place where a small chunk about the size of a fingernail had broken off the wood. He let his fingertip rest on the spot, and felt the sticky-warm of fresh blood, and the rough-soft of damaged human skin beneath the wood.
He let the chunk of metal fall from his hand then and collapsed back onto the floor and sat there, staring at the thing in front of him. Out of the corner of his eye the bright red button on his tape recorder caught his eye. It had landed by an overturned table about fifteen feet away, miraculously intact. For some reason the sight reassured him, and the adrenaline drained from his system as he calmed down and it left him exhausted. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and took a deep breath, thinking hard.
After a second, he pulled himself unsteadily to his feet, crossed to the recorder and slumped to the ground beside it, leaning his back leaning against the pile of rubble like it was an easy chair. He picked the dented machine up and pressed record.
“Okay. Well. The big one wasn’t dead. It attacked me, but I was able to inject it with a high dose of pentobarbital. Nice to know some things still work on creatures under effects of the serum,” he said, then released the record button to take a shaky breath, eyes on the unconscious monster about ten feet away. He hit record again. “Unsure how to proceed now. I have to do something fast. It’s still breathing, and I don’t think the OD is going to kill it,” he paused, watching the thing’s heart beating weakly in its open chest cavity. “But uh,” he continued half-automatically after a second, “I think it might be salvageable. Yeah. Yeah, I might have to see what I can do. It, uh…” He ran his fingers through the curly hair that hung in his face. “When it couldn’t defend itself anymore, that thing looked…it acted an awful lot like a regular human being. It, uh…” He looked at the thing’s slumped form. It seemed so much less tall now, less imposing. The yellowed ichor that had been pumped into its veins was slowly dripping from where its ears should have been, leaking down its collarbone and seeping past vines into its chest. “Yeah, I might have to see what I can find out.”
The man released the button and set down the recorder, then he slowly slid the rest of the way down the rock until he was laying on his back on the ground. He put his hands over his face and groaned. “Fuuuuck.”
It is dark, and cold, and I don’t think I will be able to hold on much longer out here. I’m losing myself. But I can’t just give up after everything; that would hardly be fair to the others. Not after all of this.
My name is Vigo.
I uh. I don’t really know where to start. I am no stranger to writing, but uh, it has always been academic in nature before. Journaling—that to me is new. I’m afraid on top of that that I am no Benedict Baker. That foolish man, who knowing the power of names chooses to go around throwing his full one about at every turn, even in a place like this. He carves it into walls and signs it on notes he scatters behind him like debris marking the path of a storm. …Well, maybe he’s the one who was right after all, though. He’s lived longer. I’ll honor him by continuing his tradition. But I won’t bring in my full name, not even now, when it seems like I could hardly take on more damage, because names have power. I may be wrong, after all, Benedict has often made some good points to the contrary when debating me, and out of all of us only me and my hidden name are truly lost for good. But even so.
I am who I am.
I could go back, and cut all of these verbal placeholders to sound more loquacious, but somehow that seems disgenuine, and honestly it seems fucking stupid to be wasting my time on worrying about editing at all when I have so little left. How can it possibly matter with a deadline coming so fast now? It can’t. This doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to be, and so you’ll have to take the words as they come. Make of that and my fragments what you will. I suppose you would anyway.
This is a last, well, not a will, I guess, but a last testament. Something to leave behind. Thank you for reading it, by the way. I am glad. Truly, deeply glad, that I wasn’t the only one.
Where to start?
I am…what is relevant here? Fucking Benedict Baker should have been the one to end up here doing this… I have often been called ‘Alchemist’ in this place, though it’s hardly a fitting term for me. I was an apothecary—or maybe a chemist, is as accurate, before this life. There wasn’t just one proper title for it, so even I’m not sure which to pick. My family had long been a bit of a one-stop for all ailments and needs of a chemical, spiritual, or bodily harm nature, and I took up the family business. We are Sámi up here…or—there, there back home. Not here…Though, my mother’s parents were foreigners who left a home in Ethiopia and somehow in a desperate attempt to drastically avoid France at all costs, went about as north as they could go and ended up settled with us in Scandinavia. She always liked that…anecdote. It’s a bit of a joke. I hope you got it. She would be glad you got it. Anyway, my father’s family provided a broad range of services to our home, and I suppose in a way whether I like it or not, that’s more or less where my path begins.
We grew up right on the edge of Sweden and Norway, my sister and me—on the Norway side. Used to introduce myself to people at school by saying from where I lived, I could wake up in the morning and throw a letter to Sweden from my bed. I might have actually been able to, if I’d tied a rock to it, come to think of it… Fuck. I can’t write like this. I’m very bad apparently at anything but academic writing. –Which I swear I’m good. I really am—exemplary, even. But this…? I… … The family trade was medicine, of a lot of kinds. Growing up was actually rather fascinating, the way I did it. There was a lot to learn, and apothecary, shamanistic, home remedies—we did it all, and we were good. I was never sick growing up, not once for more than a day, not unless it was because I’d decided to try mixing some new concoction and tested it on myself to see what would happen and my mother and father had decided to let me learn a lesson the hard way. There was a spiritual side to the practice too, a deeply important one. I come from a line with noaidis in our history and our blood. My father was one, whose songs used to fill me with wonder as a child. As a man. I was…I should have been one. I tried to be. I suppose in many ways I was, at least for a little, there at the end. He would have done it better…but, he would also have been proud. Fuck.
I feel as if I’m already butchering this. I am. I know it. Oh—damn it, I can do better. I can. I’ve read enough of Benedict’s work.
Okay.
Okay. I’m telling this wrong. Please, allow me to start over just one more time. I think I know the way to write it now. I’ve been following the wrong character up till now.
See. This story isn’t even really about me. It’s about four people. Not me.
Well. I suppose it is one-fourth mine, but I think now probably that I am the least of us. I wish I’d thought to tell them that. I will have to settle for writing it now instead.
This story is not long, but it is hard, and it is not yet quite over.
It is the story of a mechanist, a chronicler, an alchemist, a man, and a monster.
Alex Lin grew up on Prince Edward Island, Canada, underneath the red oaks and among bluejays and foxes and caribou.
As a young girl, Alex took an interest in the same things everyone thought she would. She learned to farm, to ride a horse, to cook. She was small, and her family spent a long time having to coax her into including English and French into her conversational Mandarin even well into her teens. She says it wasn’t because they were hard—she just didn’t like the sound of them. Alex used to tell her parents and her two little brothers and one older brother that Mandarin was like chewing bubblegum, and French was like chewing hay, English like chewing tobacco, and there was only one of those three things her tongue liked.
From the first day of school on, Alex liked to experiment with her hair. She would chop odd parts of it off, use watercolor paints to temporarily dye in highlights, pin it up, tie it up, braid it down, pigtails, ponytails, supposedly once a mohawk for about half a day before she was dragged out of school to change it. Her parents yelled at her to stop, and her neighbors and friends gawked and judged, but her brothers who liked trouble just as much as she did started to style theirs in solidarity. All three of them. Once her eldest brother wore a pink bow in his tiny little goatee, and his mother promised she would stop bothering Alex about the less ridiculous cuts so long as he never did that again.
Alex was often in trouble. Her parents were loving and good people, but four rambunctious kids was a lot to deal with, and life was hard. Life always seems to be hard, doesn’t it? Especially when you’re decent. I suppose that’s part of being human.
As is doing things you shouldn’t—another thing Alex loved. In particular, she was exceptionally handy—almost impossibly—at getting fires started. At age six, Alex set fire to her own hair to see if it would really smell bad. It did, but the experiment fascinated her as much as it horrified her mother.
At age eight, Alex figured out that certain household liquids were particularly flammable, and even more to her delight that so were several solid objects she had never even thought to suspect. In a quest for bright flames and the fulfilment of her wonder at the process of them, Alex almost killed everyone in her home by attempting to light, among other things, a large bag of fertilizer high in ammonium nitrate on their porch one night, but saw the “DANGEROUS: EXPLOSIVE” warning label at the last second and took the bag back into the barn, her family never the wiser (Possibly a wild stroke of luck, but I’d argue it’s more likely the universe probably wasn’t ready to let go of her just yet). They were, however, wise to Alex’s combustion of the town sign one year, when Alex was suspended from school for violating the dress code. So was the local Sheriff’s office. She was eleven at the time.
Afraid their daughter might lean into this life of arson, Alex’s father wisely led her into a different area of interest. While it had little to do with fire, it had a lot to do with tinkering and a keen mind—both qualities Alex also had in spades, and so mechanics became her new passion.
It started with her father simply taking her along to patch up tractors, the car, doors, windows, the windmill, the pump—anything—especially anything with enough gears to have some pluck to it. Alex had a gift for machines, and Alex was only 14 when she convinced the local mechanic to hire her on if she could fix the next car that came in by herself in under an hour.
While she failed spectacularly at this, because the car that came in had nearly been totaled in an accident, she got done—correctly—four times as much as the mechanic himself thought he could have done in an hour, so after a heavy amount of debating, drinking, and saying, “what the hell” to each other loudly while clapping each other on the back, the mechanic and his workers agreed to hire Alex on part-time.
Understandably, the thought of their 14-year-old daughter working as a mechanic was somewhat horrific to Alex’s family. There was a lot of panicking, and talking, and very persuasive counter-points about the Sherriff and fires and adult men and the dangers of mechanics, and in the end her older brother Ham (short for Hamlet, according to Alex herself, but of questionable credibility) also finagled his way into a job at the mechanics. Ham kept his job for the next 18 months, until he felt like he could sound the all-clear. Alex kept hers for the next seven years.
I guess it would be more appropriate to say that Alex never really lost that job. She got interested in other things, rather, and started to move from fixing cars all the time to fixing them half the time, and building things at home, until by age 21, she wasn’t so much employed by the mechanic shop as she was simply a welcome face that ghosted in and out as she pleased, and took up an occasional odd job for them. As interesting as making things was to Alex, though, breaking them was more fun. Sure—Alex could do both. Her father used to try and persuade her to re-think her passion by saying anyone can break something, but only the truly gifted can repair them, but Alex decided that, while that might be true, only the really, really gifted could break things you weren’t supposed to be able to break, and get away with it.
When Alex turned 24, she officially stopped working at the mechanic’s shop altogether. To celebrate what she considered a banner year (reaching 24, for reasons that are still unclear to me), she decided to go on a tear with some new friends.
It was the dawn of the 1970s Alex was driving through, and counter-culture was on the rise in prominence all around them, and Alex was intrigued by every bit of it. While things were moving not quite in sync with their lower cousin country, up in Canada, the Civil Rights movement, the resurgence of groups promoting Women's Rights, the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-war movements all ricocheted around her. In particular, the American Indian Movement, which extended to Canada, caught her eye. While she had opted out of a college education, many of her friends were joining protests, and Alex agreed with the anger at the world around her. She had always wanted to break and burn things, but just for the joy of it, never with the intent of destruction or achievement in her heart. Suddenly, Alex had a cause.
None of this is to say Alex was a violent person, some pyromaniac with a hatchet and a can of gasoline. No. It was something very different. Fundamentally different even from the unmotivated chaos she had gravitated towards with wonder all of her life. For the first time in her life, things made sense to Alex, because everywhere she looked, Alex was seeing the people all around her struggling against law enforcement, establishment, government, war, and she looked down and realized all her life she’d been learning and training for really one thing—how to break stuff really, really well, and in that moment her father’s words came back to her, “Anyone can break things, Alex, but only the truly brilliant can fix things,” and she realized in that moment that he was right, but also that there were people out there fighting things they couldn’t beat alone and she had the particular skill set to help them. She was the key. Alex changed her mantra then. No more “Only the really, really gifted can break things you shouldn’t be able to break and get away with it,” no, that had been close, but the real truth was that, “Only the truly gifted can fix things, but sometimes the only way to fix things made wrong by others, is to break them.”
When he woke up, he couldn’t move. That realization registered before the pain in his chest or the burning in his veins. Fear.
Thick straps held down his wrists and ankles and others were fastened at his waist and throat. Something had been shoved down into his mouth—a rag maybe, and tied in place, and when he tried to shout he choked on it and only a muffled almost nothing came out. He tried to struggle and lunge against the straps then, but the straps didn’t budge, and the motion strangled him, and the strangulation with the choking were too much and he couldn’t breathe and that scared him and he had to stop moving and focus on forcing his chest to rise and fall and pump oxygen into his lungs. His breaths came in ragged and desperate, afraid.
As his eyes focused, all he could see was the white ceiling above him, so he turned his head to try and see his surroundings, and it was the same lab as before. The pain in his chest was worse than it had been when he lost consciousness and the shackle was gone and in its place were tight leather straps holding him down against a cold metal table. He remembered then—he remembered the strange man in the lab coat scraping skin off the corpse next to him and reaching for him and trying to fight him off and being injected with something. He remembered the awful feeling of trying to move and not being able to—like slowed motions in a dream but worse, and the way the man had picked up a weapon and looked down at him and knelt beside him to kill him.
He hadn’t killed him though, no—this was worse. His mind was filled with fragments and images—being chained to a wall and having syringe after syringe of gods knew what injected into his veins—the way he felt like he was burning from the inside out, and watching the thorny vines grow out of him and into him and peel the skin around his chest back until he wasn’t sure how he was still alive.
Thoroughly panicked, he tried again to fight the restraints with everything he had, thrashing in spite of the way it hurt and cut into his skin and choked him.
There was the hurried sound of footsteps then, and he turned his head and saw the man in the lab coat rush into the room from a little doorway on the left.
The second he saw that his subject was awake and trying to free itself, the man in the coat closed the distance with incredible speed, not pausing until he was beside the table.
The creature on the table continued to thrash and choke himself, trying desperately to get away, only becoming more frantic as he saw the man begin to dig through his bag and withdraw a large syringe full of something clear. The man in the lab coat paused then and looked down at him.
“Easy now—I can’t have you making noise and leading someone else here,” said the man in a calming voice, towering over his prisoner, “And I really don’t want you getting out and trying to kill me again. I’m sure you’re not enjoying this, but I need you here and still to fix this. Now don’t move. This won’t hurt you unless I mess up the insertion.” He held up the syringe as he said the last bit, and the man on the table felt the bottom of his stomach drop out at the sight.
The man in the lab coat put his hand on his prisoner’s head and forced it down and to the side, exposing the veins on his neck. He tried to fight back against the force of the hand, but he had so little ability to move at all, and he helplessly felt the chilled metal dig into his throat and the sensation of something cold spreading from the point, and his vision started to fog.
His memories hadn’t had time to un-jumble, and he was so confused and lost, everything coming in fragments that hurt, like pieces of a shattered mirror that cut when he tried to pick them up to look at them and remember. He couldn’t even remember why he was here, or where, exactly, he was—what was going on—who he was? Why this was happening? And now everything was fading again, before he had had time to do anything.
He felt the man let go of his head then, and slowly he turned his neck and looked back up at him, trying to see his face. Why? Why are you doing this? What do you want from me? Dark skin, but lighter than his own—and curly hair that fell in his face. He couldn’t make out the lab coat man’s features though. Everything was too blurry, and black was creeping in the edges of his vision.
Shit. He could see the massive hole in his chest and the vines digging into his flesh, but he was afraid something far worse would have happened by the next time he woke up. If he woke up.
“Please...” he tried to manage through the gag, but it just came out as a choked sound. He saw the man in the lab coat cock his head at him.
“What?” the man in the lab coat asked, looking a little surprised.
He tried to speak through the gag again but he couldn’t. The words slurred and just became a pained and weak sound, and then he lost consciousness again.
“The subject is of African descent,” the man in the coat said into his recorder, looking down at the body on the table before him, “probably late thirties in age. I’ve been able to extract enough growth from his face safely that I think I can begin moving onto the more intense fusions.”
The layer covering the man on the table’s head had been almost more like a mask than growth. It had been connected to the skin, but more in the way a scab was than a tumor. Surface layer only. It had caused a lot of bleeding and skin loss, but he’d been able to get the horns and plants from off the man’s head, and there had still been a human face underneath. The bigger problem was going to be the man’s chest. The arms and legs, especially closer to the torso, were also deeply affected. It looked like the main serum injection point into this man had been through his back, right between the shoulder blades, and most of the growth stemmed from there. The plants had dug into his skin and back out, winding around bone and flesh and tearing through muscle and replacing it with themselves, wrapping all the way around to his rib cage and pulling the flesh back and away to expose his chest-cavity. He was missing chunks of so many internal organs it was almost unbelievable that he was still living.
“The organs present the biggest issue,” the man in the lab coat continued, pressing down the record button on his little recorder again, “I have been able to fairly successfully reverse engineer the serum used here—thankfully our destructive friend left unused samples, so I didn’t have to dig. However, reversing what has been done isn’t exact. I can get rid of the plants, but it’ll kill him, because undoing the damage there won’t bring back what the thorns and vines have torn through.”
He looked the motionless body up and down, wincing at the way the tendrils cut through its thighs and calf muscles and bit deep into its lungs. “It’ll die,” he continued in a voice that was slow and careful, “If I am not very careful.”
He, I suppose, thought the man in the coat to himself, not ‘it’.
The man on the table was breathing shallowly, raggedly, and it was getting worse the more of the serum damage he undid on the man’s body.
The man in the lab coat wiped his brow and took a deep breath, trying to think calmly. “Alright,” he said into the recorder, “There’s really only one possible way to do this. I’m going to have to inject him with my own alteration of the formula to keep him alive, while undoing the damage from my predecessor’s work.”
He picked up a handful of notes from a previously overturned gurney he’d repurposed and glanced at them, face forming into a grimace.
“Or, I guess I’m technically his predecessor,” he corrected, looking at the marked-up versions of his own research.
But what kind of fucking idiot just injects whatever he can find into the nearest people to see what will happen? Sure, he was a little impressed that according to these notes the lab’s previous user had managed to catch more than one thing that came after him, but injecting them with serum wasn’t about to help anyone—those things were hard enough to deal with before shooting them full of this stuff. The puss the serum was made from could do many things, but the most easy and basic of them was a loss of mental control combined with one of the most powerful steroids he’d ever seen. And that? That was about as far from the recommended combat strategy for a gigantic, armed monster he could think of.
The man in the lab coat sighed, picked up his syringe, and flicked it with a finger reflexively, watching the gold liquid settle. “I’m combining some of his own unspoiled DNA from the least affected areas of the body to see if I can accelerate the natural regenerative properties of the base serum I developed. I don’t want to have to inject him with the amount I know it’ll take if this doesn’t work out, because that’s likely to make him go mad…” he glanced down at the body, which was beginning to toss fretfully against its restraints. He placed his hand on the body’s forehead and felt intense heat. A fever? He’d been a motionless corpse to all appearances seconds ago. Apparently the first DNA shot was doing something. “The first dose is having definite effects,” he said into the recorder, “About a ten-minute delay between injection and response. Going in for round two.”
He set down the recorder, forced the weakly thrashing body’s head down against the table, and injected his syringe’s contents into its neck. The whole body shook under his fingers and went still, then started to toss again, but more slowly, more faintly. He still hadn’t regained consciousness, which was a blessing for them both. To his credit, there did seem to be some regeneration in the chest already. The muscles and skin were taking it faster than the organs though, which was worrying. Still, a little early to call it.
“I can see some cellular growth already,” said the man in the coat, pressing record, “but it’s slower than I expected. Still, promising. Seems to be inducing fever. It’s likely the plant tissue and the growth I’m inducing are treating each other like hostile bodies. We’ll see.” He sighed. “It’s going to be a long night.”
It was a very long night.
The man on the table woke up several times, the pain beating out the sedative. That was another problem—the man was already strong, and the serum boosted his defenses, and the man in the lab coat had to keep injecting him with more serum to keep him alive, but it was hard to tell amidst the unpredictable cocktail he was throwing into this person’s body exactly how his collection of sedatives would work, and he was choosing to err on the side of caution, because the drugs he carried were technically intended as a method of euthanasia. This, however, meant that the subject on the table kept waking up in intense pain and trying to scream, and fighting against his restraints and damaging himself, and he wasn’t sure what would happen if the man woke up to intense shock when he was in such a weakened state enough times. Mentally or physically. The fact of the matter was, trying to keep his prisoner alive was torturing the man to his breaking point. He could tell, every time the other man’s eyes opened wide with fear and his chest began to rise and fall at a panicked speed and he could quite literally see his heart beating inhumanly fast through the open chest wound, just how agonizing this was. The gag he’d made was good, and necessary—the creatures in the fog were always listening for sounds of life and pain—yet the pain was so unbearable that he could still make out his prisoner’s agonized screams through the gag that smothered them. He might be the only one who could hear, but the shouts echoed in his head long after he’d put the man under again. Often he found himself dozing off, only to be woken by a sound between a scream and a sob, choked and painful, and repeated, because the act of making it was the only relief from his intense suffering that his prisoner could try to give himself. As awful as the initial process must have been, the thorny vines forming and cutting through his muscles and pulling back skin, winding around bone, tearing away flesh as they forced their way in, the reverse process was just as bad, like removing a knife from some’s chest over and over, the agonizing pain of ripping out longer and more horrifying than the wound itself could have ever been.
It was like a nightmare, but a nightmare in which he was the thing stalking prey through the night for once; he was the beast ripping apart the same flesh and killing the same victim on repeat past the point where pain should lose meaning, and the man in the lab coat did not like it.
He thought about stopping—he would have, maybe. Several times he went up to the agonized man on the table as his chest tore itself apart and the serum in his veins burned with his blood, and he choked on his gag and strangled himself with attempts to get free, determined to just inject his prisoner with an overdose and end it, but each time he came to do it, the man saw him coming and looked at him with so much fear that he couldn’t. In its desperation, the subject on the table always tried futilely to get away from him, and never once did its eyes meet his with the request to just end it, but rather that was always what it seemed most afraid of, that the man in the lab coat was coming to kill, and if the thing he was cutting up into little pieces and tearing back together still wanted to live through all that suffering, how could he kill him?
It took 61 hours of this agony before the man in the lab coat actually believed what he was doing would work. He woke to his dismay from an accidental two minutes of sleep to see he’d fallen asleep across the stomach of his subject, but then as his eyes adjusted to the low light he saw that beneath the still partially-open chest wound, the subject’s lungs had begun to regrow. He should have gotten up and started working then, but he just stayed there, close to the unconscious man’s abdomen, watching the lungs reform for the next hour, praying thanks to everything he’d ever considered believing in that this had worked.
By the end of the next 24 hours, the most critical wounds had healed, and his prisoner’s vitals were becoming more stable and predictable.
It was also at the end of those 24 hours that one of the warning traps he’d set on the lab’s perimeter triggered, and the man in the lab coat knew he’d overstayed his welcome.
And then, it was also the time that one more thing occurred.
When the prisoner came to, the unbearable suffering of the past several days was fresh in his mind, and involuntarily trembling at the memory, he waited to be hurt. But the pain was gone. Well, the pain wasn’t really gone per-se, but what he felt now didn’t feel like pain compared to the absolute, excruciating suffering he’d been waking up to for what seemed like an endless stream of nights. As he realized this, the man strapped to the table slowly opened his eyes, blinking at the harsh light. He couldn’t see much, even of himself, neck still strapped down to the cold metal table, but he turned his head to look for the man in the lab coat who was always there. He didn’t see him, for once, and as he considered that and the lack of pain he waited for the other shoe to drop.
The silence lingered though. The shoe didn’t drop.
Move, he told himself desperately through the drug-induced haze that still hung over him, he will be back soon, you must move.
He tried, using all of his strength to tear at his restrains, attempting to keep quiet as he did. Finally, in a burst of strength, he felt his right wrist break something—part of the strap holding it snapped, and another two tugs freed it.
As soon as he had a hand free, the fear of the man in the lab coat returning intensified. It was as if he could hear the seconds of his window of opportunity ticking away on a clock above him. With all his might, the prisoner grabbed the strap pinning his neck and started to try and break it, but his fingers grabbed onto the cold touch of steel and he was awake enough to remember how things like this worked, and he found the buckle for the restraint and released it. The strap at his waist still pinned him to the table, but he felt immeasurable relief at being able to move his head again. He wanted to go for the gag, but no, you have limited time, think, he told himself, and he undid the strap around his waist and hurriedly went for the one at his other wrist.
He heard footsteps then.
Shit.
He thought fast, considering trying to tear through the buckles around his feet and run, but he remembered the syringe and how fast he lost consciousness to whatever was in it.
I’m going to regret this, he thought in a controlled panic, and laid back down on the table, setting the straps at his neck and waist to look natural and slipping his freed hands back into place.
He turned his head towards the doorway and closed his eyes to imperceptible slits, waiting for the man in the lab coat. He didn’t have to wait long.
The man in the lab coat rounded the corner quickly, something between a jog and a speed walk, looking agitated but contained. He paused by one of the gurneys around the room to dig through his big bag, and he withdrew a bottle and a syringe and carefully measured out an amount for use, all the while casting glances back the way he’d come.
As soon as he had what he wanted, the man in the lab coat hurriedly crossed to the table his prisoner was strapped to.
“Okay,” he heard the man whisper to himself, “vitals…”
The man in the coat reached down to check his subject’s pulse, and the prisoner shot out his free hand and locked it around the wrist that held the syringe like a vice.
“Jesus Christ!” the man in the lab coat shouted in shock as he tried to propel himself backwards and jerk his hand away, but his prisoner’s own strength mixing with the overwhelming power of the serum made that like trying to free himself from a hydraulic press and his words devolved into a scream of pain as his prisoner increased the pressure on his fingers until he heard them snap.
The man in the lab coat let go of the syringe as his hand was crushed, and it fell to the floor where it shattered. He reached for the inside pocket of his coat with his other hand, but his prisoner was faster. He wasn’t about to be drugged again, and he grabbed the man in the coat by the throat and slammed his head forward into the side of the table, stunning him and cutting it open with a rush of blood, and then he slammed him against it again just in case, before throwing him with both hands at the nearest wall.
The man in the coat slid like a lifeless piece of debris and slammed into the ruined wall about fifteen feet back with a thud and lay there, trying weakly to drag himself to his feet, but dizzy and blinded by blood from his own forehead.
While he struggled, the prisoner sat up and jerked the restraints off his feet as fast as he could, rolling off the far side of the table as soon as he was free before even stopping to check where the man in the coat was. The second he hit the ground the prisoner regained his feet, taking a large piece of rock from the floor with him. His captor was still struggling to regain his own feet as he did so, and he moved towards him with the practiced walk of someone prepared to kill, knowing how fast the smaller man was and remembering what had happened last time.
“Wait, wait!” The man in the lab coat stammered out, making it to his feet and stumbling backwards along the wall, trying to keep away, “I’m trying to help you!”
The prisoner chucked the rock and the man in the coat ducked just in time. Debris and dust scattered over him as the rock broke into tiny fragments from the force of the throw.
The man in the lab coat came up with a shaking hand holding the small syringe he always kept in his breast coat pocket leveled at his assailant like a knife. “Listen to me, I’ve just been fixing you—” he stopped and rolled out of the way as his prisoner grabbed a drawer from a desk nearby and threw it at him.
They were about fifteen feet apart, the man in the coat trying to keep objects between them and wipe blood out of his eyes with a forearm while keeping his syringe leveled.
“You don’t understand,” said the man in the lab coat desperately, “please—I’m only—”
His prisoner saw an opening and leapt over a table between them with impossible speed, catching the hand with the syringe as it swung down at him and the two grappled. The prisoner used his superior size and strength to force the other man against the far wall as they struggled, cutting off any chance at letting go and making a break for his bag across the room and the supplies he kept in it. Despite how much smaller and weaker he was, the man in the coat wasn’t letting go of the syringe easily, and he was fast. Before his prisoner had time to really register what was happening, he got his feet up against the wall behind him and used it to propel himself forwards and knocked both of them to the ground, digging his teeth into the soft flesh of his prisoner’s hand as they fell. The prisoner let go on impulse, and was suddenly struggling against the full body weight of the man on top of him to keep the needle from digging into his chest. Desperately, with the bitten hand, he made a lung for the fingers he’d broken on his assailant, snatched them, and crushed the hand again with everything he had. The man in the lab coat screamed in pain and lost his grip, and the prisoner tore the syringe out of his hand and sent it skittering across the floor.
His captor fell back from him then, clinging to the broken hand and trying to crawl backwards, but he wasn’t fast enough, and the prisoner came after him, unrelenting, grabbed him by the throat and lifted him into the air. He struggled against the hand at his throat weekly, but the prisoner bashed his frame against the wall to stun him and his efforts weakened.
“If you kill me, you’ll die,” the man in the lab coat choked out, trying desperately to pry the fingers away from around his throat with his usable hand, “The serum dose I gave you is on a timer—without enough counteragent to level it out it’ll kill you.”
The prisoner hesitated, fear suddenly creeping in behind the rage and memories of night after night of anguish. Beneath his hand he could feel the skin on his enemy’s throat beginning to bruise and see his face start to turn pale blue-purple as he lost oxygen.
“Please,” the man in the lab coat managed, voice strained and ragged and weak, “You don’t have to do this—you’re not a monster—I can help you.” The fingers which had been trying so hard to pry away his own lost their grip and were barely applying any force at all.
Monster? You’re the one who’s done this, thought his prisoner, still angry and afraid but suddenly feeling unsure, You.
The man he was choking to death was trying desperately now to make eye contact with him, his eyes pleading. His voice had lost its ability to be heard through the asphyxiation, but he could tell from the movement on his lips that he was trying to say “please,” and the prisoner remembered how he had done the same thing strapped to that table.
He might be telling the truth about the poison, he rationalized to himself, and let go.
The man in the lab coat fell to the ground, coughing and gasping desperately to fill his lungs. The prisoner could have killed him then, just as easily—stomped his head into the floor, run him through with any number of the sharp broken objects lying around. He couldn’t fight back, on his hands and knees, fighting to gain enough oxygen to keep himself from passing out. But he didn’t; the prisoner just stood and watched.
“Thank you,” he heard the man in the lab coat say weakly between coughs, cradling his broken hand “thank you…”
Both men heard the sound at the door at the same moment and turned to face it as one person. Footsteps. Loud and heavy. And fast.
He didn’t know what was coming, but he wasn’t about to lose his freedom again, and the prisoner closed his eyes and felt for his blade. Something told him he was going to need it. Who he was and why he was here had come back in pieces, and he remembered the gift his guardian had given him—the sickle with three prongs, and he tried to sense it, having no idea if it was still here. It had been when he’d first been beaten. Not by….
No, that’s right, it wasn’t this man was it? It was another. At least at first. He didn’t have time to wonder, he had to act. Reaching out, he could sense its presence under a pile of rubble halfway across the room, but he’d only made two strides towards it when the third man entered.
The prisoner stopped, watching, like a feral animal at the ready. The new man stopped too, turning to look from one potential victim to the other. He was big—maybe not quite as tall as the prisoner, but broader. Covered in muscles and chunks of metal, and dripping the same gold serum he himself had been only a few days ago. A mask with a false grin made of sharp teeth covered his face, and the prisoner couldn’t see his eyes through it.
“Trapper,” he heard his previous biggest problem whisper from where he was still trying to regain his breath on his knees.
The Trapper looked at him and he looked back. It was always grinning, and he couldn’t see its real face beneath the mask, but he had a feeling that it was smiling there too. It looked from the prisoner to the man in the lab coat, who had regained his feet and was doing his best to inch towards his bag on the table in the center of the room. Slowly, the Trapper gave almost a nod—as if he recognized him, and turned away from the prisoner. He started to walk towards the man in the lab coat, fingers flexing around an incredibly large meat cleaver as he did, easily cutting the man in the lab coat off before he could reach his bag on the table. The prisoner watched and backed up. He’s not here for me, he thought as his feet automatically took him towards the pile of rubble he could sense his own weapon under.
The Trapper got close and lunged at the man in the lab coat, who threw a handful of dirt he’d gotten from gods only knew where into his face, blinding him, and made a mad dash for his bag. He almost made it too, but two feet shy the gigantic thing chasing him snatched him by his collar and threw him against the wall he’d started by.
It was so almost exactly what his own first instinct had been minutes ago that it was uncanny, and for some reason it made the prisoner uncomfortable to see it playing out. He hurriedly knelt beside the rubble he knew covered his blade and dug through it until he found it—a bit dirtier for the wear, but perfectly intact.
He heard a shout of pain and turned to see the Trapper had thrown the man in the coat onto the ground and was pinning him there with a foot on his chest.
“Help!”
He knew the man in the lab coat meant him—that he was begging him for help—but why should he? After everything that…He looked down at himself and the hole in his chest that was gone and felt doubt again. He vaguely remembered the look on the man in the lab coat’s face when he’d been about to stab him after that first fight.
Fuck. Fuck! Maybe he’s telling the truth about the poison, he thought again, trying to rationalize a motive for his gut instinct.
With one hand, the prisoner used his sickle to cut the thick leather cord still wound around his mouth, and he pulled the rag that had been jammed down his throat out and spat it onto the ground.
“Please! I can help you!” the man in the coat called desperately, trying to look for him from his position pinned on the floor.
Why do you think I will help you?
The prisoner saw the Trapper bring his meat cleaver down and somehow the man in the lab coat moved so it just barely grazed him, and he hooked his foot around a cart behind the Trapper and brought it crashing into the man’s back, knocking him off balance just enough for the man in the coat to struggle free. He only made it four feet before the Trapper had him by the back of his coat again and rammed him against the wall, pinning him against it with his forearm. He drew back his meat cleaver as the man in the lab coat desperately struggled.
“He’s mine!” shouted the prisoner, leveling his sickle at the Trapper.
The Trapper stopped mid-swing and turned to look at him, very slowly. He took in the blade, the stance, the look on the other man’s face, and he let the man in the lab coat drop to the floor.
His attention on the prisoner now, the Trapper moved towards him with steady strides, and the two stopped and circled each other slowly, like feral beasts settling the score over territory, each waiting for a second of something they could use to their advantage.
The prisoner saw his first. He leapt over a table and swung at the Trapper, knowing it would miss, but giving himself time to dodge the counter-attack. The swing from the cleaver came fast and sure, and he barely ducked in time, using his momentum to go for a strike under the broader man’s ribs. His sickle hit exactly where he’d been aiming and cut in, but as it did and he moved back, the cleaver sliced backwards and raked him across the chest. He’d had no idea that someone could move such a big weapon so quickly in close quarters, and he tore his sickle free and gained some distance, the two circling each other again. He was faster than the Trapper, but his opponent was stronger. His blade was one made for stabbing—cutting into things. The Trapper’s was for slicing—clean, deep cuts, like a razor, where the sickle went in like a hook and dug. The prisoner tried to process this into a strategy, and his opponent saw an opening and took it, flinging a lamp at him. The prisoner ducked out of the way and rolled past the swipe from the cleaver behind it, getting in close for an upward swing at the chest again, but this time the Trapper moved, taking it only as a graze, and the prisoner barely managed to catch the cleaver in the prongs of his own blade as it came down with a strike that would have cut through his left side. They were close, almost grappling, and the prisoner leveraged himself and slammed his elbow into the other man’s face, moving to catch the cleaver again as it came for a swipe at his side, and using his free hand to punch the other man’s throat.
It worked, and the Trapper stumbled back and took the sickle across his chest, just shy of the neck the prisoner had been aiming for.
He pressed on with a vigor, trying to keep the Trapper from having a chance to recover, swinging relentlessly, hitting first the cleaver as the Trapper managed to block him, then the man’s forearm, his chest again, and then the man’s hand as he suddenly lunged forward and caught the sickle, seemingly feeling no pain as it dug into his palm.
With nowhere to go, the prisoner reached up for the cleaver he knew was coming and managed to catch the Trapper’s hand, leaving them locked in a grapple—his blade securely stuck in the other man’s hand, and the cleaver hanging above him with a fury, like a guillotine blade waiting to drop. Fighting with everything he had to keep the cleaver from coming down was the single hardest thing the prisoner had ever done. How the hell was the Trapper so strong? His memories clicked in painful crackles and it made sense then, as he watched the gold serum dripping down the man’s face. He could see it pulsing through cuts on his arms, flooding his veins, dripping down his cleaver. The horrible stuff had burned when it was inside him, but it had made him stronger. And as he watched, he saw the cuts he’d left on the man’s forearm beginning to close and then he could tell that he had been right. The Trapper was grinning under that mask.
He lost the struggle against the cleaver and let go of his sickle to roll out of the way, desperately shoving a cart between them. The cleaver sliced it in half.
The Trapper didn’t bother to take the sickle out of his hand. He just kept coming. The prisoner backed up just as fast, knocking a bookcase down to try and block the man’s path. The man just grinned at him, placed his foot against it, and crushed the solid oak like it was nothing.
Shit.
He was out of options. It has to kill him, or he’ll heal back too fast.
In a burst of speed, the prisoner leapt for the Trapper, taking the swipe from the cleaver on his left shoulder and ripping open the other man’s hand as he wrenched his sickle free. He swung for the throat and the Trapper’s damaged hand somehow still had the strength to catch the sickle again. The prisoner didn’t even have time to be afraid or do anything except focus on not losing his grip on the sickle this time before the cleaver came down and dug deep across his chest, and taking advantage of his lost balance, the Trapper placed his foot on the prisoner’s chest and kicked him backwards onto the ground.
Even wounded, the prisoner was fast, and he rolled the second he hit the ground, coming up sickle ready. As he did, he saw the Trapper take a step towards him and then roar and whip around, and he saw the man in the lab coat fall and roll back out of the way himself, emptied syringe in his hand. The Trapper swung at him and missed, and made it two steps after the retreating assailant before the drug overcame him and he fell to the ground with a crash that was somehow louder than anything the prisoner had heard during the fight itself.
They looked at each other then, the man in the lab coat and him, each breathing hard and damaged. In a rather horrifying moment of realization, the prisoner found that his legs were starting to give out underneath him. The blood. You’ve lost too much, his brain tried to warn him.
“Thank you,” said the man in the coat, starting to walk towards him, the brown bag that had been on a table now flung over his shoulder.
“Oh no,” said the prisoner, leveling his sickle at the man in the coat and backing up, his voice dry and ragged from choking on the gag and nights of screaming, “don’t come near me with that. You just felled a man twice my size with it. I’m not going back on the table.”
The man in the lab coat held up his hands, palm out, and placed the empty syringe on one of the room’s few intact tables. “Okay, okay.” He slowly took the bag off from over his shoulder and set it on the table, then turned to look at his prisoner.
“The lab coat too,” said the prisoner, trying to hide the weakness he felt coming over himself, “you keep one there.”
The man in the coat nodded and took it off, setting it on the table.
“Thank you,” he said again, gently, like someone trying to coax a frightened animal, “please, let me help you.”
“What do you want from me?” asked the prisoner suspiciously, taking another step back almost unintentionally as his captor started to slowly edge towards him.
“I want to help you,” replied the man, voice still calming, palms still up, “You’ve lost a lot of blood,” he added, gesturing.
“And the poison?” asked the prisoner, suddenly remembering that.
“Well, half-true,” replied his captor, “I really didn’t want you to kill me. I do have what you need to heal completely though, and you won’t on your own.”
The prisoner stumbled then and tried to catch his balance on a little desk as he fell, and missed, landing on his hands and knees. He pulled himself up quickly, but the damage was done. He could tell from the look on his captor’s face that he knew now how close he was to passing out.
“Just let me help you,” said the man again, too close now.
As he started to black out, the prisoner lost focus and fear kicked in, and he stumbled back in his desperation to get away, the memories of the table and the needles and the agony suddenly very strong and fresh.
“Keep back!” he said as threateningly as he could, raising his sickle.
“It’s okay,” the man said, not stopping, “I’m going to keep you from bleeding out.”
He fell again then, and his captor dashed forward and caught him before he could hit the floor. He tried to swing the sickle at him, but gentle pressure on his wrist disarmed him, and his vision started to go blurry.
“Don’t put me back on the table,” he said pleadingly. It was the only thing his panicked mind could think of—the thick leather, the cold steel.
“I won’t,” said his captor, steadying him, “now let’s just try to get you back over to my bag. I have a needle and thread and we can stop you from losing any more blood.” He slung his prisoner’s arm over his shoulder and used the not-broken hand to raise him up and shoulder him towards the table with his supplies.
“My name is Philip,” offered the prisoner weakly as he felt himself starting to slip away.
“What?” asked the other man, pausing from his focus on his destination to look at his prisoner in surprise.
“I just thought,” said Philip, losing consciousness, “that it would be harder for you to kill me if you knew my name.”
He was vaguely aware of the outline of the other man’s head nodding. “That’s smart. I wasn’t going to kill you, but knowing your name would make it harder if I was. I’m Vigo, then,” said Vigo, “just in case next time you wake up you want to strangle me again. I don’t want to die either.”
Philip blacked out then, slowly, like lights fading before a film began. The last thing he remembered was doing his best to repeat the other man’s name in a whisper so he would not forget it.
Here you go! I have a lot in other notebooks I’m sure-I’ll have to poke around. And I’ve definitely posted Vigo art & Vigojomo art before. I can only find one of my two faves of those rn, but here’s the one as well;
it’s funny how the character you barley wrote about is my absolute favorite. justice for vigo, bestie should of lived😔
You’re not wrong. If it’s any consolation, there’s a 50-50 chance everyone dies at the end of the From the Earth of No Return timeline, and 50-50 chance it would end with them all surviving, and if it ends well, he survives that timeline, and if I ever wrote a sequel to ILM, it would involve Philip et al going back to the realm to try and save him and kill the Entity, and he would survive that. So it’s not I guess, uh, 100% canon? But as the author it’s at least 80+% canon that Vigo survives in the ILM/main timeline eventually. It’s so important to me that you know in that hypothetical sequel, when they go back for him, as soon as he sees Philip he’s like “Ah! Oh let’s see—you’re what? In your forties now? Hang on just a second.” and immediately uses sheer force of perception and will to age himself 10+ years since he’s still in-realm, and make them the same age again, and Philip is like, “What the fuck are you doing! Are you crazy?! Yes, I’m older than you now, but who cares! I’m older because I got to spend the last ten years free, in the sun, living and experiencing life! Why would you do that? You don’t have to! I love you whatever age you are—we don’t have to be the same! You deserve your ten years free too! You’re cutting your lifespan short!” and Vigo is just “My dearest elskede, you misunderstand. It’s not about our ages at all, only reuniting our time remaining. Why on earth would I want to continue living in years when you had passed on?”
you’ve mentioned that vigo has a hard time getting alone with everyone and stuff. what was he like to make everyone so annoyed and how did philip come to like him if he’s a bit of a troublemaker?
I’m not sure how much to say since I want /some/ things to be a surprise or new in the prequel. I will say it’s not that he was a troublemaker though, at least in the traditional sense. More. He just didn’t think like most people do, and his process annoyed others a lot because it caused problems, and often unintentionally came off as selfish and/or thoughtless. And was also both very smart and a huge dumbass sometimes, in fairness to the other survivors, and he left them hanging a lot. He didn’t mean anything by it, but he really did not consider other people’s perspectives much. He’s got poor conventional social skills and has a hard time reading a room, and knowing when to stop talking, but never got why. Philip is a quiet person who likes to listen though, and found Vigo very interesting. While most people found Vigo’s personality and manner offputting at best, and him hard to follow, he and Philip had some social background similarities, especially spiritually, despite being from very different places, and I think they understood the world similarly, so talking in general felt closer than with most people. I’m not sure how to answer this without bringing up too many more details but I guess the short answer is just that Philip liked the things about Vigo everyone else found offputting. I think they just understood each other easily, which was rare for both of them. They were both extremely lonely figures before being together—in life, not just in the realm. And neither one felt truly understood/seen, and welcomed and safe with someone who was not like a parent or sibling their entire life until meeting the other.
hello i just finished in living memory and i just wanna say i really enjoyed it:)) my heart is still in pieces over philip and vigo’s story, tho:( i don’t know about what you have posted here but in the story there isn’t much about vigo. he is very mysterious and i want to know more about him
Ah! Thank you so much! I’m really happy you enjoyed it. And I’m glad that Vigo and Philip’s relationship was impactful—I know the sadness though. TuT
(Spoilers for In Living Memory ahead for anyone else reading this)
There’s for sure a lot in the Vigo tag on my blog if you’re interested, but I’m happy to answer questions too! The short overview is that he’s from the 19teens/1920s, Sámi (and Ethiopian on his Mother’s side), and from Norway, ended up in the realm sort of on purpose—went monster hunting after hearing a lot of legends about a cursed place and some evil spirit, and got more than he bargained for. Was trapped in the realm, figured out how to create a lot of things like the hatch tunnels, and made the Entity regret taking him, which it had previously thought was so funny and clever, and eventually became such a problem it basically tried to assassinate him by sending killers out hunting for him. He met Philip after Philip was sent to hunt Talbot, who ended up misplaced when entering the realm, and Philip was one of the killers trapped by Talbot before eventually Trapper broke free and the Entity got him. Vigo met Philip a few weeks later, and mistook him for a survivor. They kind of speedran enemies to friends to lovers at breakneck speed. And tried to work together to kill the Entity, which, as you know from ILM, ended in an extremely upsetting failure.
Even after death, Vigo refused to totally give up, and the Entity was too proud to kill-kill him (because that would he like admitting a human truly was a threat), and so trapped suffering 98% dead in the void, Vigo used the little remaining energy he had to try and watch Philip (and the survivors in the realm) and do anything he could to influence, or at the least, chronicle, events to mark them with meaning even if everyone else eventually ended up dead too, so at least Philip would not be utterly alone (he’s responsible for some minor luck strokes, like Kate finding the tape. There’s not much he can do, but when he can, he does). Vigo is also the narrator/editor for In Living Memory itself, which is why the flavor is how it is, and he addresses the audience directly at least twice, and why the end becomes slightly scattered/nonlinear once they’re outside the realm, as his connection is weaker so he has to kind of hunt for memories of what’s happening looking for what he wants, instead of vicariously experiencing things simultaneously, and why the story finally ends once he knows his connection will be gone soon with them out and him in the void/realm still, and is able to see Philip is going to be alright, so he is able to let go knowing it’s okay to and his loved will be alright. It’s called ‘In Living Memory’ as a play on ‘In Loving Memory’ & ‘Living Memory,’ as it’s in a way a funeral gift, but it’s chronicling life ongoing and how significant their struggles and loves and pain and hopes and connections all were, no matter where it ended. There’s a prequel that I’ll do sometime called ‘Signifying Nothing’ (also narrated by Vigo), as a reference to the Macbeth monologue (life is but a walking shadow, a poor player, who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’), as en expression of loss and pain in the face of his failure there, in a way naming it ‘About Nothing’ — that perspective comes full circle with ILM, which exists to mark meaning to Philip’s life whatever happens, and which is essentially called ‘About Everything’. Love and life and memory, and marked significance.
They’re very tragic and sweet. Both end up completing the other’s character arc for them. In SN, Vigo’s goal is to save everyone and beat the Entity, and Philip’s is just to be/reclaim being a decent person at peace, living an okay life. Philip throws both his personal quest and future away in ILM trying to finish what Vigo started (and succeeds/beats the Entity and saves everyone), and Vigo similarly fails utterly in life at his own goal, but spends his whole afterlife chronicling Philip’s story and recording him as the good person deserving of peace that he is in stone, and is largely responsible for Philip’s survival in Memento Mori/Vs, because he defended him viciously in the void to anyone with a problem. Which lets both characters end up happy and at peace. They saved each other, even when Vigo was dead, and Philip couldn’t remember him.
Anyway! I’m so happy you liked them; both characters and Vigojomo are close to my heart. Feel free to ask any specific questions if you have them!
What do you think would happen if Vigo and Philip met each other again with Philip’s memories still gone? Having to explain everything they were sounds a bit difficult.
Philip knows they were in love. Even with Vigo dead, I think he is still so in love with him he’ll never love anyone else. Their hearts are each other’s. He would be tentative, and uncertain, with so much lost ground, but his heart remembers things his head will never have the privilege of regaining, and I think, with so much love, it would be easy. Vigo is nothing if not ready. Vigo would forget on sight, that they’re not where they left off, and greet him like they were. And Philip wouldn’t know how to respond to that, but it would make him so happy it would hurt him. Vigo would act like nothing has changed, except the times, and eventually, that would be what’s true.
