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The abbey’s gone for 127 years without a bad summoning, so it would just figure that Rain’s number would come up.
“You unlucky motherfucker,” Omega had said, looking over the thick ledger of summonings in the papal quarters while Copia fidgeted next to him. “Buy a lottery ticket. You must have just used up all the bad luck in your life at once.”
Most ghouls emerge from Hell a little dazed. Flu-like symptoms, general confusion, ear barotrauma. Nothing a little Quintessence and an Alka-Seltzer can’t cure. Summoning sickness, Google tells him, among a barrage of ads for something called Magic the Gathering, but still. It makes sense. If you make a journey like that in only a few seconds, you come out a little… off.
But Rain hadn’t come out a little off. He’d come out with nothing.
Congratulations, Copia! It’s a blank slate.
*
Imperator made him go to therapy at first, which was funny, because they didn’t have a single pamphlet to give him. It turns out a fringe case isn’t worth the Xerox ink.
The Brother at the well-funded but hilariously unhelpful clinic desk gave him an extra handful of free condoms as an apology, and he and Dewdrop had a very nice afternoon using them to soak some new recruits from the widow’s walk.
“It was practice,” Dewdrop had whined to Imperator when they got kitchen duty for a week. “You should have seen how well he filled those with water!”
It’s been okay. It’s been mostly okay. Besides the whole bad cliché amnesia thing, he’s doing alright. Ghouls are fast learners and self-sufficient, like newborn foals: Wobbly, but walking. His tabula rasa got filled up pretty fast, and even though he’s not a particularly good Water ghoul, it doesn’t seem to matter much. He’s got the other ghouls, and he’s figured out Earth quickly enough. DVDs, plumbing, sushi, cat videos. No problem.
It’s the whole Hell thing he just can’t get a handle on.
*
“Your life in Hell probably sucked balls, dude.” Dewdrop says, tossing a ball of fire between his hands. The shadows turn his face into a hundred different shapes in the dim light. “Maybe your brain took the chance to wipe you clean when you got yanked out. Like a free ticket to a new movie.”
Practice is over and Copia’s gone, but they’re all still there, tooling around with riffs from the new album, watching night get deeper and darker through the skylight overhead.
“Is that how it works?” Rain asks. He keeps his eyes on his bass, atomically hyperconscious of everything, especially the fact that they’re not speaking Ghoulish for him. He’s trying to learn, but it bounces off his brain like a rubber ball. Just another oubliette in his mind, darked and locked tight.
“It’s not even that nice,” Cumulus says. “It’s overdue for a reno.”
“Very dated,” Swiss agrees. “Fire and brimstone, river of fire, yadda yadda. Not your vibe at all. You’ve got the better deal up here, babe.”
Then Dewdrop fumbles the light between his hands and sets the carpet on fire, and it’s clear like Rain missed his moment to clarify that it’s not that he thinks Hell is any better. It’s just that you can’t compare something if you don’t even know what it’s like.
He tolerates their hair ruffling and their sincerity. He appreciates the effort. But hearing about something and remembering it are oceans apart, and it’s lonely on the S.S. Came Back Wrong.
On the drum riser in the back, Mountain says nothing.
*
He remembers the heat. It’s something that must be stamped into him on a molecular level, because you don’t forget something that hot. But it was past that, so entirely beyond heat that it went all the way around the swingset into the concept of temperature. Deep and primordial, like the zoomed-out Milky Way YouTube videos he watches when he gets enough service in his room. Planets, dwarfed by suns, eclipsed by stars. Galaxy-level hot.
The finer details skitter away when he tries to chase them, but he thinks he can remember a place of quiet, tucked among the flame. Happiness. A sense of belonging, maybe, unless that’s wishful thinking.
And then he remembers gripping Copia"s outstretched hand and being yanked into a body that felt like an upside-down, five-ton car crash.
Not that he knew who Copia was. Or what a car was. Or like, anything. That came later. In the moment, there was mostly just the screaming and the naked, wordless panic of a Hellbirth gone wrong.
*
“⊥ɥıs ʍɐʎ, ın ʇɥǝ bɐɔʞ!” Mountain says at the fogged-up greenhouse door, pushing it open with one gigantic hand. At Rain’s blank face, he switches to Swedish. “Sorry, sorry. Forgot. Back here.”
It’s early for Rain. Early for everyone, apparently, because there"s no one else here. But Mountain told him he had something important to show him, so here he is, sleep-stiff and grouchy, staining his shoes green in the pursuit of being a good sport.
“I was thinking,” Mountain says. He’s got a fifty-knot wind in his sails today, waving for Rain to follow him on the crunching gravel floor to a table at the back. Rain winds his way through pots and vines, avoiding the worst of the hanging plant debris, but he still ends up with something flowering and sticky in his hair.
“About what?”
“Well, about you.”
Mountain says it so matter-of-factly. All the ghouls are just like that, saying whatever embarrassing or horrific thing crosses their mind. Maybe there’s something in hellfire and brimstone that makes you naturally ballsy, like there’s a dog-eared copy of How to Win Friends and Sinfluence People that Rain never got to check out.
Rain wipes his hand on his pants. “Should I be worried?”
“Nah. Hop up,” Mountain says, patting a tall chair — a big ol’ Earth ghoul-sized stool — at the table in front of him. “Though I am obligated to inform you that you are in the splash zone for the upcoming demonstration.”
There’s a poster on the wall to the left with a cartoon drawing of a cactus that says YOU GROW, GIRL! in big block letters. Rain feels the first tendrils of dread curl around his heels.
“Demonstration,” he repeats. “You gonna transmogrify me?”
“As if I have time to do something like that during peach season.” Mountain pushes a wheeled, rusty cart lined with small potted plants toward the table. “Okay, so you. On Earth.”
“Mountain,” Rain says, warningly. His tolerance for this is pretty low on a good day, and he’s feeling especially fragile after spending half the night watching TikToks about creepy, fang-y deep sea life under the guise of research. Mostly he just freaked himself out. Earth is fucked up.
“Just give me a few minutes,” Mountain says, placing clay pots on the end of the table. Each one makes a delicate clack. “Please. I promise not to go too far.”
He looks at Rain expectantly until he gets the nod he’s looking for, and then he quite literally rolls up his sleeves and gets into it.
“It"s like this,” Mountain tells him, sliding one of the tiny potted plants from the end of the table in front of him. It"s a delicate-looking fern - Maidenhair, according to the handwritten note from one of the other Earth ghouls, with tiny, finely-articulated leaves.
“Oh, wait,” Mountain says. He pats around in his apron before fishing a marker out of his left pocket. Very carefully, with the cap between his teeth, he prints RAIN on the clay pot in big block letters.
“This is you,” he says helpfully, setting it back down in front of Rain.
“I did infer that much, thanks.”
“Oh, I love when you get mean like that,” Mountain says with the cheerful sincerity of someone who appreciates both the rose and the thorn. “It"s so interesting! I wonder if you were meaner in Hell. Speaking of. This—" He squats beneath the workbench to heft up a heavy canvas bag of potting soil and drops it on the table with a thunk. “—Is Hell.”
In one big sleeve-straining heave, he dumps it onto the table in front of him. Heavy, clotted black soil tumbles everywhere - spilling off the table, collecting in piles on the floor and in Rain’s lap. He coughs, tasting earth, waving the cloud of dust away from him.
“What the Hell, dude,” Rain says, rubbing grit out of one eye.
“Sorry,” Mountain says belatedly. “But, also, yeah. Exactly.”
Mountain grabs the pot with one big calloused hand and wedges it in the dirt, twisting it to stay put. The leaves of the fern jostle with the motion.
“Okay, so, you were here, just hanging out in the big dirt mound of Hell, minding your own noncorporeal business. Then, down comes a hand wearing an incredibly tacky leather glove—” he raises his hand above his head, descending in slow motion, fingers wiggling. “—And plucks you out of it. Puts you in a body. A new home. And everything you knew before—”
He makes a broad sweeping motion with his hand, fingers outstretched, and the mound of dirt slowly lifts from the table like a cloud. He delicately manipulates his hands as he controls it until it’s being siphoned back into the canvas bag at his feet. "Was gone. Just like that."
He wipes his hands briskly, then sets the pot down in front of Rain with a sharp rap of ceramic against wood, like a punctuation mark.
“Rain.” The greenhouse is warm and damp all around them. The top of Mountain’s shirt has come unbuttoned, but now Rain’s the one feeling undone. “I don’t buy the theory that your life was so shitty in Hell that you just did a system reset on yourself. Do you?”
Rain shifts in his seat. “No.”
“Exactly.” Mountain says, gentler now. “Look, you’ve just been... repotted. And maybe you didn’t expect it, but neither does anything else. It"s an adjustment period. It takes time. Without the right care—" He clenches his hand in a fist over the fern. Rain watches the fern, at fast-forward speed, turn brown and dry and crumple in on itself, sagging and desaturated.
Black ichor collects in the pit of his stomach. “You die.”
Mountain stares at him, exasperated. “Let me finish, you sad sack. I’m going somewhere.” And something about that jostles a rock loose in Rain’s dumb little cairn of self-pity, and he laughs.
“He smiles!” Mountain frames the scene with his fingers, clicking his tongue like a shutter. Click-click. “Scientists theorized it was possible, but they couldn’t be sure! Someone call the Abbey Chronicle. We’ve got their new cover story.”
“The speech,” Rain begs. He tugs at the corners of his mouth, forcing his face down into a grimace, feeling pink and toasty all over. “Go back to the speech.”
“Okay, okay. Without the right care, yeah, you can wilt. But if you’re patient and gentle, and you get lots of water and nitrates and— Stop looking at me like that. The metaphor only goes so far.” Mountain lets his fist loosen - and in a blink, the fern springs back to life. As easy as opening his hand.
“Just like that,” Rain says. He pinches a frond between two fingers.
“Well, I could get into root mass and overcrowding if you wanted, but basically, yeah. Just like that.” He moves to Rain and sets a dusty hand on his shoulder. “Look, I’m just saying, if you can"t remember things, or don"t know how things should work, or feel… y’know, uprooted — it"s normal. It sucks, but it is what it is.”
“Okay,” Rain says, blinking. He has no idea what to say to something so acutely sincere, so totally stripped of irony that the pink meat of genuine emotion is visible. But that seems to be alright, because Mountain still has some speech left in him.
“Rain,” Mountain says, softer still. “I don’t know why it happened. I don’t think anyone does. You got unlucky. But you shouldn’t feel bad about something you didn’t do. You can’t torture yourself with what-ifs. You’re here now. All you can do is move forward.”
It’s so obvious that Rain feels stupid for getting so worked up over it. But the rest of the ghouls, for all their attempts, have never quite managed to meet him where he is like this. Mountain’s hands drop from Rain’s shoulders to his upper arms, and that kicks up such a geothermal response from Rain’s stupidly, wonderfully corporeal body that he could power the whole abbey for a month.
It may not be Hell, but right now, the greenhouse feels pretty warm.
“So,” Rain asks, feeling courage prick at his heart like a seedling pushing through earth. “What are the nitrates?”
Mountain’s broad hands are warm and heavy on his arms, gentleness belying power. “What do you mean?”
“In your metaphor. Water, patience, nitrates. What are the nitrates?”
“Oh!” Mountain says. “Well, in actual soil, they stimulate stem production.”
“Um,” Rain says, heart thumping, and maybe he’s managed to take a page from the book of Shameless Ghoul Candor after all. “Was this an excuse to get me all pliant and suggestible in the greenhouse? So you could…” He searches for the phrase. “...Stimulate my stem production?”
“What? No!” Mountain says, affronted, but his long, warm tail curls around Rain’s arm, snakelike and squeezing, all the way down to his wrist. “Why? Is it working?”
The curved trowel tip of Mountain’s tail could be a leaf, sitting there in the palm of his hand. Like life, growing, pushing upwards, no matter what. Rain closes his fingers around it and squeezes, feeling his tremulous inhale, like the first breath of spring.
Mountain’s hand is rough on his cheek. Rough with what it means to be on Earth, to toil and work and tend until —maybe, hopefully— you have something tender and green to show for it.
“Why me?” Rain asks, even though he’s a little afraid of the answer. Mountain’s eyelashes are very dark and very long from here, beautiful and delicate among all that grit and soil and sweat.
“Well, I’m a natural caretaker,” Mountain says. “And I love an underdog. Plus, I need someone to help me mist the ferns.” He takes Rain’s wrist in his calloused hand and rubs his mouth against his knuckles. “You know a guy?”
“Yeah,” Rain says, leaning upwards to kiss him. “Yeah, I think I do.”