Chapter Text
Vinyl traced his hand through Val’s hair meditatively, his husband laying with him on the couch. It was only the Ultra V’s left in the house now, and the evening sun would be settling soon.
Vaya and Vamos bickered over a handheld game at the table, which had been cleared off and cleaned. Their energy was a familiar chaos, their voices filling this space. After some time Val got up to join them, asking if they’d explain the video game to him. He and Vaya were doing better than earlier now. Apparently they’d been able to keep each other company in another room after all, and weren’t too disappointed to hear what they missed out on after they left the table. Val had also apologized, again, for escalating things, to which Vinyl was quick to point out he’d done just as much himself.
But none of that mattered in the present. What mattered now was Vamos’ laugh and Vaya’s passionate explanations of simple game mechanics. Val struggled with the device until Vaya snatched it back to show him the “right way to do it.”
Vinyl smiled. He wondered, as he pulled a fleece throw blanket over himself, why they didn’t do this more often. Why did Vaya and Vamos always need to keep so far away? The way they got along with Val… Vinyl could sit in these three’s audience forever and never grow bored. The world was so soft like this, perhaps he and Val could move to Battery too, one day. Perhaps he’d bring it up in the morning.
His dream started out sunny, just as his last one did. Slow and drunk, the sun spun. Tall clouds in the sky and a cool breeze around them, he lay with Kayla in the dust. They were kids again.
He recognized this scene.
It was the afternoon he’d come out to her. She held his hand. The Earth was at his back.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll protect you.” Her voice was melodic and thick. “Even if it’s us against the world, we have each other.” She smiled, melancholy behind it but a smile nonetheless. Her thumb ran circles over the back of his hand. Dry grass pricked them.
The night before, it was Vinyl who distracted her after she’d gotten on their father’s nerves again so now, within the span of daytime in white light, this was his returned favor. We have each other, Kayla’s words echoed.
It wasn’t a promise he agreed to.
He sank backwards into the ground like a stone into a sheet and came out again, alone, older and jaded. The world was unlit. The interior of the Nest was around him: concrete, safe, and hollowed out barren. The walls were scorched by some unseen event. Vinyl sat up. On his hands and knees jagged pebbles, ingrained into the thin unwashed carpet, dug into his tender calloused skin.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught movement to the sound of wings.
There was an Exterminator on the other side of the busted out window. Just a nighttime ghost through all the ash, the Nest still burning. The Batt drone wore a Halloween store mask and stood too still before moving back out of sight. Steam hissed out a pipe somewhere.
The world was dark.
Just now realizing what he just saw, Vinyl stumbled to his feet, gun already in hand, and ran outside. The door thudded into an already cracking wall when it slammed open. Around the Nest’s corner the Exterminator vanished. Instantly, Vinyl followed.
Why?
On the horizon a distant storm flickered and pulsed. And behind the Nest, the Exterminator stood like a shadow.
Why did you kill?
He was on top of them in a blink, pinning them to the grey matter earth with a thud. The Exterminator’s head bounced and Vinyl’s palms found their way to their throat where he gripped. What was it they said to him, again? How was it they’d hurt him? He struggled to remember. They struggled underneath only halfheartedly because they knew, like he did, that everything was as it was meant to be. He had no choice. Vinyl breathed heavy with euphoric guilt and, his gun long forgotten, he struck the Exterminator with a solid hook. Again. And again.
He watched himself in third person. The world glowed ultraviolet. Neon blood didn’t spray but collected over his shaking calloused knuckles. He felt none of it. Gasps split the air. The Exterminator twisted in guilt, trying to shake him off, trying to catch a last choke of sugary air. Ultra Violence pulsed. Something vengeful cracked and the Exterminator stopped struggling - stopped anything but twitching, and Vinyl couldn’t look away from his creation. The world vibrated and his fist against flesh landed orchestramental. This wasn’t who he was. Or this was all he was. Something hurt in him. When vomit teased the back of his esophagus, he reminded himself: he had to do this.
A voice behind him spoke. “Stop.”
He didn’t, because it wasn’t his fault.
“Stop.”
He had no choice.
It was Val speaking, cool and concerned. Vinyl didn’t need to turn to know. But Val’s hypocrisy rolled off Vinyl’s back like sweat and he kept punching, as he had to, the body below him bruised and swollen now beyond recognition, red and purple like a fruit. His muscles ached, his eyes ached, his throat ached. But he had to do this. He’d swear it a thousand times over as broken as the record player he used to frequent.
Wasn’t this exactly like Val had taught him? That this were how things were meant to be; his eyes wide, his open grimace bloodied, and his past simply dead. Beyond dead. Like clay beneath his fists, it was nothing and it would forever be nothing and he would make it so by his own intentions and no evil would hurt anyone ever again and -. Around the Exterminator’s throat he gripped tighter as if there was anything left to be choked off. Dry grass pricked him.
“Vi -” Hands like fire gripped and burned and damned his shoulders. He startled with a sobering yelp, on his feet and looking around himself through blurry wet eyes. But Val wasn’t there anymore.
The Nest was gone, again, too and replaced by rows upon rows of joshua trees encompassing him. Only they were tall, taller than any tree he'd seen before. Their trunks, red as blood, grew straight as poles and were so close together that they shaded all the underbrush and he couldn’t see any horizon beyond them all. This wasn’t the desert, it was no desert he knew. Most of these trees had bodies affixed upright to their trunks by tight rope chords. Bodies stiff with rigor mortis and posed like saints or targets.
Echoes filled the space between the sound of rustling leaves. The ground was as solid as ever where the trees’ roots didn’t grow, but where the roots grew it was wet and dark. Vinyl kept his eyes trained forward as he walked alone. Paying his unwatching audience no attention, he kept his chin raised and his lips straight. He’d done nothing wrong, he’d killed no one undeserving, he’d only done what was necessary for himself and those he cared about. Crows and pigeons rustled the branches seemingly miles overhead, their silhouettes all the same, their calls all the same. Something ate at him. The rocky earth softened up ahead, where it turned to damp earthen soil all around in a clearing. The ground teemed with bugs. The air hummed. Something was wrong. Something’d been wrong ever since the sun rose. A twig snapped behind him and against better judgement Vinyl turned.
The creature was spotted like a bobcat, soft tufted fur following the contour of its thin hoofed legs downward. A long twiggy tail twitched at its feet and ultraviolet eyes like saucers watched Vinyl from the end of its long feline neck. As it moved, it’s pelt shifted over lean muscles like rays of light. It lowered its head and flashed fangs when it spoke.
“Poor soul. Aren’t you happy?” it asked, its voice unfamiliar.
The way it watched him reminded him of the rabbits the V’s used to hunt sometimes, being it was fearless in a way that it didn’t know fear. It stepped toward him over fallen and rotting logs, keeping inescapable eye contact locked.
“You got what you wanted in the end, of course. You won your freedom. You build your life. You now know then, don’t you, that the Past doesn’t exist anymore? No more than a lie does.”
From between its tufts of fur, black pins sprouted and bloomed into feathers.
“So why aren’t you happy with yourself? Are you seeking out your own pain because you’re simply bored?”
The feathers spread across its form like an infection, until that’s all it was - a mass of sooty ink black feathers.
“Who cares if you delivered their final breaths or not. Anything at all could have. You won,” it hissed regardless, “And the Past exists in no corner of this world anymore.”
Out of the feathers, its bone white head appeared again, thin and pointed and without a judging smile, but instead three slits - like respirator holes - where one would have been on its mask.
“For what it’s worth, if I were forced to add something to your string of apologies my bead would say, ‘I’m sorry you didn’t get to kill them yourself’. The masks they hid behind were of the most pitiful variety.”
It shook its short head plumage like a coyote shakes out dust. Twice the size of him, it stepped forward with clawed arms digging into the mud, feathers so long across its scaly skin they might as well have been wings.
“Or is that not what this is about? What is it about, for you? Who is it about?”
Vinyl was frozen in place.
The apparition plucked a feather from its own body and threaded it into Vinyl’s hair, the way friends do when they’re only sandpups.
I - I still feel it - the Past. He didn’t speak the words as they fell out of him, but he knew this apparition heard him clearer than half the assholes he’d met over the years. I still did the things I did.
“Hmm… But do you regret it?”
He didn’t answer.
“And yet, still, you try to find someone to blame for it all. As if you do hold regret too close to your heart. Who do you blame?”
No one.
“It’s not befitting of you to lie so boldly.” it squinted its hollow eyes. “Look.”
It gestured with one taloned wing downward to the ground where between them a corpse lay, half rotted and its bones showing through windows in its skin; ribs and the curves of a skull. Vinyl took a step back, unnerved.
“It’s only death, child, don’t act like you’re unacquainted. I couldn’t begin to list how many of my habitué were sent by you and your partner. But I forgive you. See. Isn’t that easy?”
Still, the cadaver leaked curse into the ground. It destroyed what corner of the world it touched. It infected his thoughts and it decayed and decayed and decayed and decayed. Vinyl pulled out his gun as if that’d help. He needed it gone, he needed it gone; he didn’t want to remember what thoughts crossed his mind. He didn’t want to remember himself. He needed the rot and everything it carried with it to cease to exist.
“Already has,” The Witch seemed amused by his reaction to the body, “It no longer exists. Dead as a lie...”
Bullshit, Vinyl called, bitter, Don’t bring this here. It exists. Bodies exist after death.
The Witch sighed, unsatisfied. “And? You’re alone for once, germ, you can speak honestly. Do you treat the wound or do you treat the teeth that bite? Which are you treating now? Scilicet, you face cosmic nurturing each day yet refuse to see it for what it is because you’re too occupied caring about the Dead and what part you played. -”
- I don’t care -
“- As if you did not all have some part in it. As if a mere child is to blame for what remains of it. Or, as if the Past still holds anything of value for you at all, really. Does it? I doubt so. You’re intelligent, child, with friends on both Sides. You know where your priorities lay.”
As She spoke, She stepped over the body and closer to Vinyl, into his personal space and into his air. Her aura, not meant for mortals, brushed up into his.
“You know yourself.”
Her eyes were electric and Her presence burned, and with the heat of a thousand lived hours fueling the panic he hadn’t felt like this before - he aimed his gun and shot.
He woke up gasping.
Vinyl was still on the couch, but at some point through the night it’d been set into a reclining position to make more room for Vamos who curled into his side. Everything was quiet and daylight glimmering over his eyelids. Careful not to disturb his sleeping friend, he sat up and rubbed his eyes awake. It was early morning. The house was peaceful. But his thoughts stirred.
When he combed his fingers through his hair, a black down feather fell out and onto his pillow.