In A Week: Chapter One

This one is...a bit experimental and I have no idea where I'm going with it, but was fun to work on as a what if situation. 

WARNINGS FOR: Suicide aftermath, discussions of self-harm, alcohol, blood.

They find him screaming in front of a collapsed ruin of a treehouse.  

It’s raining, not that the rain had helped quenched the fire any when it had been raging, and the school ends up having to call the fire department before the fire can take down the rest of the forest – and maybe half the dormitories – with it. In the midst of it all, B feels like he can’t breathe, smoke inhalation still shredding his lungs even when it’s been five whole minutes since the staff have dragged him out the house.

“Get us an oxygen tank here.”

He’s hauled up to his feet, but he refuses to budge, instead scrambling to wrap his arms around A, making sure he’s not letting them go. They’re not waking up yet, and if they do when he’s not there, they might be the one to go back into the fire and try to look for him.  

There’s hands on his arms, trying to pry him from them, and he hunches over, clinging to them so tight he buries his face in their heated clothes, still cooling down from the rain.

“Come on.”

“No.” He pulls an arm back, driving an elbow right into the nose of one of the professors that had pulled him out the fire. There’s a sick crack, and then something hot and wet on his arm – blood, but that’s no matter. It’ll wash away with the rain. He can clean it later, after A’s safe too.

He coughs. His throat feels dry and scratchy, and now that he’s started coughing, he can’t seem to stop.  

Someone is kneeling beside him. “We need to get you out of the rain,” she says. He doesn’t turn to her, only keeps his eyes closed and his head low. “You’ve been in there for almost half an hour, you need oxygen.”

He laughs, or at least tries to. “Plenty here, lady.”

“Let’s at least get your friend out of the rain,” she says.  

Right. It’s raining and A’s also probably having a hard time breathing since they were in the fire longer than he was. If anything, they would need the oxygen mask, and maybe warmer clothes. Poor kid always did catch fever too quickly.  

He sits up slowly and nods, moving his arms so he can loop them under A’s knees and shoulders, standing up with a stagger. When the medic tries to help steady him, he takes a step back, mumbling, “I’m fine.”  

She nods, even if it’s a little hesitant, and leads the way to where the ambulance is.  

B’s aware that everyone’s staring, but fuck reputation, A needs to breathe.  

The medic is nice enough (or maybe just smart enough) to let him place A down on the stretcher with no fuss, and she offers him an oxygen mask after.  

“They need it,” he says.

“We have plenty to spare, we came here expecting a fire,” she says, “Take it.”

He eyes it for a moment before taking it with a huff, and then strapping it onto his face. The second he breathes in the oxygen, he feels his lungs actually burn with relief.  

The medic straps a mask on A. He sits.

“How long were you in there for?” she asks, turning to open a drawer of blankets and to hand one over to him. It’s actually an ugly shade of orange just like he’s seen in photos during classes.  

He wraps it around his shoulders anyway, since it’s cold, and presses the mask to his face as he breathes in. “I’m not sure, maybe half an hour,” he says. There was fire everywhere, and he’d run to the treehouse as fast as he could. “They were in there longer.”

“We’ll take care of them, don’t worry,” she says, and then pauses. “We’ll have to go to the hospital, you understand this?”

He stills. And then nods. “Okay. Just don’t kick me out. I want to wait.”

“You’ll be let in,” she says, and through the haze, B thinks that she says it in a kind of funny way that tickles something in his brain, but he can’t quite place it. The medic steps out of the ambulance to talk to a few of her co-workers, but the only people they actually have to attend to are already in their ambulance, so they’re all quick to start piling inside. B tries to huddle into the corner when one of them sits close to him.

“B!”

Mello skids to a stop in front of the ambulance doors right as a paramedic slams one of them closed. B looks up from his seat, not even realizing that he’d been staring at A, and watches as, a few seconds later, Matt nearly barrels into Mello as he tries to stop running when the ground’s wet with rainwater.

“Is A okay?” Matt asks, goggles pulled up over his head for once. His eyes look red, like he’s just been crying, and he tries to climb aboard the ambulance, but his tiny legs can’t get onto the step properly and he has to haul himself up with the handle near him.

A paramedic gently pushes him down, but he’s already gotten a glimpse of A on the cot.

“Sorry, kid,” the paramedic says. “We’re waiting for Mr. Ruvie, but you can’t come.”

Matt doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring wide-eyed ahead, mouth slightly open in a gape. Mello turns to him and frowns, confused, and then does the same thing he did earlier, climbing onto the step of the vehicle and grabbing onto one of the handles, just to get a glimpse at A. When he drops down, his eyes are just as wide.

Roger comes up from behind them, quickly folding in his umbrella. The paramedic nods in acknowledgment and opens the other door, since Matt and Mello are blocking the already-open one, and he slips inside.

“Oh, dear God.” Roger stares down at the cot, stilling before he can even sit down.

“Mr. Ruvie,” the first paramedic says – the lady that had given B the mask. “Please sit down.”

“They’re - ”

Matt starts screaming.

B feels the prick of a needle in his neck before he can even say anything or hit someone. Someone sighs, maybe the first paramedic, and as his vision starts to blur, B sees her remove the oxygen mask from A’s face.  

He tries to mouth ‘no’, tries to tell her to stop, but she’s not listening.  

B can only watch, the sedative already working, as Roger puts his face in his hands, horrified. The paramedics are talking, but he can’t hear them, trying to direct his focus to where A is – A, with half their head missing like it had been blown off, the remaining part of their face badly burnt, their clothes charred enough to have melded with their skin and flesh.

Outside, Matt is still screaming.

It’s the only thing ringing in B’s head until he passes out.

-

The funeral is on a bright, sunny August day.

Because of course it is. Of course the universe would like to shit on A even on the day of their own fucking funeral, because that’s how life works. That’s how it’s always worked for both of them, so on a bright, sunny, Studio-Ghibli-pretty August day, B nearly chokes himself with his tie while putting it on and trudges to the Wammy’s cathedral in the most ill-fitting suit the nurse has decided to give him. It belonged to her son when he was in middle school, she’d said, and since B has never had a reason to even buy formal wear (not that he could – no one has any money in Wammy’s aside from the staff), she’d thought to lend it to him, even when it clearly didn’t fit.

He told her that she’d outlive her son by two decades. She got out of his (his and A’s) room quickly.

He sits at the front. Which he’s never done before, not in any Sunday services or any of the few funerals he’s attended that were held here at Wammy’s. Just like how they collected orphaned children, these people liked collecting orphaned, brilliant adults too (although they’ve expanded their employment requirement list from the usual ‘must be an orphan and must have a lot of meaningless trophies’ in the recent years) so whenever one of these brilliant adults died, and they had no one to go back to, their funerals would be held here, in this sad excuse for an orphanage.

A used to want to sit at the front. In the beginning, for respectful reasons, and near the end, now that he has time to think about it, out of fascination.

How long until I’m in one of those, they probably thought.

B clenches his fists and feels his nails draw blood.

The sermon drags on, and he barely listens, because it’s going to be about the whole ‘everything happens for a reason’, and he thinks that Roger probably pulled a few strings so as not to mention A’s cause of death to the priest, although since the man is getting paid, suicide or not, he’ll probably happily hold the whole service. He’s the only one here at Wammy’s, after all. It’s not like they’re asking a mass from the public churches.  

Suicide.  

B actually feels his eyes stinging.  

“I’ll be back,” A kept saying, two whole fucking weeks before the treehouse burnt down. “I just want to study before finals.”

“Finals is a month away,” he’d said, although it had become something to say on autopilot after the first few times. He’d never looked up. Never really paid attention, too distracted by his little side project to stop and ask, even when he'd noticed the fluctuating numbers. But numbers fluctuated. Not always, but it happened. People were fickle sometimes. A was fickle sometimes.

Maybe, in the end, that’s why they didn’t even leave a note.  

After the mass, he joins the other pallbearers to carry the casket out of the church and to the tiny little cemetery at the back of the premises. It’s not even a proper cemetery. It’s more of a garden with a few headstones from the two people who’ve been buried here.

A’s going to be the third.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, one hand over the viewing glass. Behind him, he can feel Roger staring at him, along with a few of their professors.

Not like they really cared about A, but he supposes that he’s the only one actually old enough and tall enough to be a pallbearer, from all the people A liked enough in the house.  

He bends down to press his forehead to the cool glass, for a moment, closing his eyes and sighing. After a while, he stands, gently closing the top half of the lid. As he gets to his place while the other pallbearers step in beside him, he thinks, slightly hysterically, that the morgue did a good job with what they had to work with. A looked like they were just sleeping.

-

It’s only out of him being a lightweight (first time drinker, so that doesn’t count) that he goes back to the cemetery only hours after A is buried. It’s finally raining, it’s nearly midnight, and he’s shitfaced to hell and back after draining half of the contents of one of the vodka bottles he’s stolen from staff quarters. He’s still in his too-tight, shitty suit, the hem of his pants not even covering his ankles, and he thinks it would be a good time to slip and hit his head on a rock right now.

He’s too drunk, he probably won’t even feel it.

“I think I hate you,” he says, looking down at A’s headstone, the fresh dirt around it turning muddy in the onslaught of rainwater. It’s nearing zero-visibility with how hard the storm is raging, and he can’t even hear his own voice from the thunderclaps and the rain.  

A’s grave doesn’t answer. Neither does the small angel statue he’d personally picked as a marker for it.  

“Couldn’t you have just told me,” he asks, although he’s already so spent that it comes out flat, “You could have just said something like – hey, B, life is shit and I feel like I want to blow my head off.” He takes a swig of his vodka, which burns, and is most likely going to kill him but yay. It sadly does taste a bit like rainwater too. “Maybe we could have skipped town and fed your postcard addiction or something.”

Their postcards, yeah. They always did like to talk about the outside, and B could get it – it seemed interesting, but at the same time, he’d rather just coop up in the house and maybe watch a few movies, steal some coffee, eat nothing but sweets.  

It hits him then, remembering their yearning look at the poorly-rendered watercolor paintings on their postcards, that A had wanted out for years.  

He closes his eyes and presses the heel of his free hand into one of them.

“Oh, god,” he says, “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

There were the postcards. There were the sneaky attempts at writing to penpals (which rarely got anywhere, since at the time, it was a bit stricter, although that had ironically gotten more lax as they’d grown up but A just...gave up somehow). There were the constant visits to the fences, a bag on their shoulders, like they were considering just vaulting over it, and the visits to the forest inside the compound as some desperate attempt to pretend they weren’t even in Wammy’s anymore.  

There was A trying to talk to him while he was taping photos on the corkboard on his desk, several nights in a row. Their hesitation just grew to reluctance, and then to completely giving up, after a while.

They answered every question he had about L, at least the ones that they could provide answers for.  

“God fucking damn it.” Some best friend he was.  

He groans, digging his heel in deeper until his head aches from more than just the alcohol, and he thinks his eye is probably squashed in a little. It proves to be fine, even if his vision in that eye is a little blurry, when he opens it along with the other one so he can take another swig of his rainwater-vodka. His throat doesn’t thank him, and he wants to throw up.

He nearly does, his stomach roiling so bad that he lets the bottle go so he can clutch at it, gagging. The thing drops into the mud, tipping over so its contents spill out into the ground, seeping into A’s grave as it empties.  

B turns away as he pukes.

Once his stomach is done emptying itself of the only meal he’s had in three days, he stands, trying to get his hair (that definitely has a bit of his vomit on it, but he’s too drunk to care) out of the way. The rain is cold enough to attempt at sobering him up, but it’s mostly through sheer willpower that he stays feeling sick.

Or maybe it’s just because he really does feel sick right now. He can still taste the bile in his mouth, acid burning the inside of his cheeks.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he says, his knees buckling from under him when he tries to step forward. His palms get coated in mud when he holds them out on instinct to catch himself from falling face-first into the dirt. “I’m so sorry, and you know I don’t say this, ever, I - ”  

He thinks he’s crying, but he’s not quite sure. He doesn’t really cry either. He doesn’t know if it’s because he’s had too many reasons to that he’s numb to it or because he’s still riding the shock.  

The ground is cold and disgusting, but he’s so tired, and he just wants to rest. He wants to sleep and never wake up, wants the vodka to have burnt him inside out when he’d drank it earlier, but he sadly didn’t down half the bottle in one go.  

“I’m sorry, A,” he says, hair caked in mud as he leans on the gravestone, cold and harsh, unable to give him any absolutions if he’d even want them in the first place.

And then a bloody hand shoots out from the dirt, catching him straight in the neck.  

Just like that, he chokes and is instantly sober.

-

“Holy fucking shit.”

So, the shitty suit at least has its uses, given that it’s tight on him but still massive for everyone else in this useless house, meaning it's also just as oversized on A. He’s colder than he’s ever been now that he’s shed the suit jacket and is drenched from the downpour, but at least A’s shaking a little less, and it’s not like he needs to warm up to get his limbs working as he scales the wall up to their room’s window when he’s got adrenaline to tide him over.  

“Fuck, are you climbing the - ” A bites down a shriek as they pull on his tie when he nearly slips down the pipe.  

“Shut up and let me concentrate,” he says. “I can’t see shit in this rain.”

“Go through the front door,” A says, their other hand shooting out to grasp the pipe as well. Amazing exhibit of trust, honestly, especially when he could break his neck here.  

“We can’t,” he says, “Now come on.”

“Why the hell not,” A asks, although they do comply and hold onto him again, this time refraining from trying to suffocate him a third time.

B lets out a sigh of relief when he finally hauls them both up enough to step on the ledge by their window. It’s still open from when he’d climbed down earlier to get to the cemetery, and he tries to sit on the sill first, but ends up imbalancing so he just hits his head on the floor as he and A topple over.

“Fuck!”

“I told you, asshole.” A rolls off of him and he gasps in a breath as he realizes they were crushing his ribs. “You keep complicating things.”

“It’s ass o’clock in the morning, you fucking pigeon, the doors are locked,” he says, finally sitting up and turning on his side so he can poke A’s forehead harshly. “Curfews are still a thing.”

“It’s raining, so I didn’t notice, bastard.” A swats his hand away. He pokes at them again. “I will bite that finger off, mark my words, bitch boy.”

“The thanks I get for hauling your ass out from the rain,” he says, flopping back down onto the floor, spreading his arms out on purpose so he hits A in the face. A lets out a frustrated noise and starts hitting his arm before deciding to sit up and get away from him. “That’s so heartwarming.”

“It’s not going to be when I step on your face,” they say, and then pause from getting up as they lift a foot. “That’s actually a really fancy shoe, oh my god.”

“I picked it out for you, yet another thing you should thank me for.”

“Nevermind then.”

He laughs as A stands, or tries to, since they’re just crouching and holding out their hands towards the floor while slowly rising, like it’s their first time trying out how legs work.

“I planned out nearly a third of your funeral, you git, show some gratitude,” he says, getting to his feet as well, although he stumbles before he gets there and ends up prone on the carpet instead.

When he looks up, A has stopped, and they look ridiculous, like they’re sitting on the air, but they have a frown on their face.

“A third of my what?”

“Your funeral,” he says, slowly standing again, this time carefully. He approaches them, reaching for their shoulders first to steady them as they stand.  

“Oh,” A says. They’re really not holding up their weight at all. B’s read about muscle atrophy. Staying so still for days probably wasn’t good for them.  

Although – then again, they’re...whole and alive and he can’t even see stitches on the side of their face they’d shot off. He keeps his hands on their shoulders as he walks around them until he can see them. They slap his hand away when he takes their chin to tilt their head so he can inspect them.

“Stop that.”

“You blew half your head off,” B says, although it’s more of a murmur. A’s shoulders tense. “After you set the treehouse on fire.”

“Oh,” A says. They slowly look down at the floor. “Oh.”

He watches them close their eyes and take in deep breaths, curling and uncurling their fingers.  

“Do you remember?”

“Oh, yeah, I - ” A laughs, finally lifting their head up to the ceiling with a tired, frustrated sigh. “Who found me?”

“I did,” B says, “I heard the gunshot.”

“Fuck,” A whispers. Then, louder, “I thought you had a field trip to be on.”

“Canceled from the storm in the area,” he says.

“Missed that while faking a sick pass,” A says, clicking their tongue in disappointment. “Damn it.”

“A fake sick pass you didn’t even present to me?” He shouldn’t be angry. He knows that. And he isn’t, really. In fact, he’s not quite sure what he feels at all, although some part of him knows that it’s the shock mixed in with disbelief (and the tiniest bit of inebriation) that's clouding his brain right now.  

Because A’s alive.

“You would have sniffed out that it was fake the second you laid eyes on it,” they say, and the way they say it rubs him the wrong way. They try to pry his hands off their shoulders, and he lets them go, but they nearly fall down almost immediately.  

He grabs their arm. “Easy.”

“What the fuck, what’s wrong with my legs?” They try to walk on their own again and actually trip this time.  

“Muscle atrophy, maybe,” B says, walking over to help them get up. “Or you’re just...somehow shaking off rigor mortis, but then again, you were embalmed. Your muscles shouldn’t be suffering from rigor mortis at all.”

“How long was I dead?” A frowns at their hands. They look a little sick. “My arms work fine.”

“Your arms aren’t supporting anything right now,” he says, “Three days. And then some.”

They pause, and then laugh lightly. “Three days? That’s - ” They suddenly heave and slap a hand over their mouth. “Oh god,” they mumble, “Bathroom. Bathroom.”

He half-carries them to the bathroom, their feet only very lightly skimming the floor as they move, and he shoves the door open with his shoulder. A immediately dashes for the toilet, nearly hitting their head on the porcelain, before throwing up.  

It smells like -  

“Formaldehyde.” B shudders in distaste and pinches his nose. He can’t imagine what it must feel like to be throwing the stuff up.  

A heaves for a long, long while, and even when they seem to be done, they still don’t move from where they’re sitting, so B goes over to close the open window, since the wind has already blown some of the rain inside of their room and a part of their carpet is soaked. He pulls the curtains closed, and when he returns to the bathroom, A is still by the toilet.

He heads for the sink and opens the cupboard.  

“Do you think you can keep anything down?” he asks, grabbing the upturned glass and the plastic case of tablets. He sees A’s anxiety meds in the corner of the top shelf.  

“Do I even have any organs?” A asks.  

B blinks. And then shrugs. “Fair. Although I don't think any of them weren't returned. Unless part of you is on the black market right now.”

“Wait, shit.”  

A’s lifting their dress shirt up to look at their stomach when he turns. “Shit, shit, shit. No fucking wonder.”

“No wonder what?”

“Hurts like a bitch,” A says. They lean over to the toilet to spit out for a few minutes before sitting back down on the floor. “Are there scissors there?”

He checks the cabinet, moving all the plastic cases down onto the sink, and doesn’t find anything.  

“No.”

“Okay, razor blade, then,” A says.

B raises an eyebrow.

A huffs. “I cut, that was obvious. Under the sink.”

He checks below and finds a folded plastic bag. When he unfolds it and opens it up, there’s a thin razor blade inside. He eyes it dubiously. “What are you going to do?”

“I have sutures, B,” A says, twisting so he can get a look at the stitches on their stomach, forming a line upwards. “And they hurt.”

Oh. Right. Those didnjust disappear somehow. He probably is a bit more than little hung over.  

“B, blade.”  

He goes over to kneel beside them as they throw up again. They let their stomach empty for as much as it can, before crawling back so they can lean on a wall, heaving.  

They reach for the blade, but B keeps it close, and they let out an irritated noise before showing him the sutures again. He starts cutting them up.  

“Why was I taken for autopsy?” A asks, a little out of breath. “Who had the damn time?”

“Roger had to make time,” he says, snippy.  

A laughs. “I thought it was obvious.”

“There was no note,” he says, “No one even noticed anything.”

“Because no one takes the time to notice, B,” they say, “It worked in - ” A breaks off in a hiss, clenching a fist and hitting the floor with it in pain as B removes one of the torn sutures.  

His fingers are red with blood. In the darkness of the room, it looks black.

“I hate you for getting me autopsied,” A says, focusing their glare on the ceiling. “I hate you.”

“It’s sutures, you’ve had worse.” He sets aside the thread and continues cutting up the rest, before setting the razor down and removing them from A’s skin.  

“I am alive,” A says, “Which in itself is an atrocity, but in addition to that, I have embalming fluids in my digestive system, as well as cotton.” They grit their teeth when he has to remove a longer thread. “And to top that off, unless the mortuary somehow gracefully skipped on it, I have embalming fluid in my arteries, while I am, I remind you, alive.”

He pauses. “That is a problem.”

“Fuck you.” A lets their head thump back on the wall, frustrated. “Just get the sutures out.” They wipe at their lips with the back of a hand, probably still tasting the formaldehyde-bile. At least they didn't have sutures or needles to hold their mouth shut earlier.

He laughs lightly, but works in silence, while A tries not to cry every time he picks one of the threads out. They look like they're half-asleep by the time he's done, absolutely exhausted, and he goes over to the sink to wash his hands while they fix their clothes, pulling his awful suit closer, cold.

"Was that all your sutures?"

"Hopefully, but I am in extreme pain right now, so I can't tell," A says.

"You got to keep your tongue, at least."

"The one price you have to pay for reviving me, Birthday boy," they laugh. "The sass is part of the package."

B frowns, confused. Well, he was drunk earlier. Much drunker than he was now since he's more lucid than pissed at the moment, but even when he was drunk, he doesn't remember doing something to revive A. He doesn't even know how to revive the dead, although that seems like a neat thing to actually achieve, if he did do it. He just has to remember how he did it in order to get the credit properly.

Except.

"I didn't do anything," he says.  

A matches the confusion on his face. He wipes his hands on his shirt, even if he's still soaked.  

"What?" they ask.

"It was your funeral this morning," he says, "I was a pallbearer. Then I slept. I broke into the staff dormitory, I stole some vodka and drank half the bottle - "

"B, you've never drank before."

" - I - know, shut your fucking mouth - I went to your grave. I puked beside it - "

"Quality respect for my memory."

"Stop interrupting me. I puked beside it. I nearly fell face first into the dirt," he says, skipping over his apologies and the fact that maybe, just maybe, he cried a little, "And then, you crawled out of your grave."

He turns to the sink mirror and pulls at his collar, still red with their blood from when they'd choked him with an injured hand. "And nearly killed me, by the way."

"It wasn't my fault you were right there," they say, "And I needed to get out. I thought I was holding onto something instead of nearly crushing your windpipe."

"No apologies?"

A flips him off with a bloody hand.

"I helped you out that grave."

"After I clawed my way out of it," they say, "I think I don't even have fingernails anymore."

"You'll live," he says, walking over to them and holding out a hand. A stares at it, letting what he's said sink in, and in the moment it takes them to do that, he does too.

They'll live. If they survive the formaldehyde in their arteries, somehow, but they're doing fine right now, minus all the throwing up. 

A sighs and takes his hand, getting to their feet, which still do a piss poor job at supporting them so they put a hand on the wall behind them to steady themself. "Yeah," they say, "I'll live. The question is how the hell am I alive in the first place."

"We could ask your mortuary," B says, "I thought it was odd they were able to restore your head quite well, although maybe you've lost a few brain cells."

"Very funny." They shove his shoulder lightly. "But really, this is, firstly, freaky. And secondly, a miracle of science," they say, "I shouldn't even be talking at all."

"I wish you weren't."

"Missed your chance."

"The treehouse is ashes, so, so did you," he says. A stays silent. He sighs. "None of your things have been moved yet. Get changed."

"Were they going to move it?"

"After your funeral, I think they were definitely going to press for it," he says. "Although now that..."

A looks away. They press their lips to a thin line, thinking, before shaking their head. "No," they say, "Don't tell them."

"Why not?"

"The dead are free, B," A says. "As long as I'm dead." They move their hand from the wall slowly to put it on their chest, the blood on their fingers dried and flaking. "I'm free."

They do have a point. Considering they'd wanted out of here for years, they're technically in that position right now, just a lot more alive than they'd preferred.

Works for him.

"This is the most elaborate 'fake your death' scene I've ever witnessed."

"Don't say I learned nothing from Gerard Way."

B barks out a laugh.  

A still doesn't trust themself to walk without tripping and hitting their head on something, so B keeps a hand on their arm as they both exit the bathroom. B lets them get their clothes before walking them back to the bathroom, and they just roll their eyes and wave him off before climbing into the bathtub and drawing the shower curtain when they notice he's a little apprehensive about letting them out of his sight.  

He does need to get out of the wet shirt and slacks, so he goes to his own closet to get changed while they do, and then pick them up when he hears them trip on the edge and sprawl out on the bathroom floor.

"I think I understand the plight of zombies," they say, staring up at the ceiling. He throws a towel at their head. "Ow."

"That didn't even hurt, dumbass."

A starts drying off their hair without bothering to get up from the floor. He waits for them to be done, making sure the sink cabinet is in order while they do, before hauling them up to their feet.  

They look even more tired, now that they've cleaned up and are missing the blood and dirt on their face. B glances at their hands and finds that a few fingers really are missing nails.

"If you didn't do anything," A says, as they sit on their bed. "Then...what happened with me?"

"I don't know," he says, sitting across them. Outside, the storm is still raging, and there's enough of a breeze slipping through the space between the window frames that the curtains are moving. "But you're alive."

A sighs again, looking down at their mangled hands. "Yeah," they says, "Yeah, I guess I really am." They scoot back so they can lie down and throw their blankets over their head. "I can't believe I try to die and I just come back as a fucking zombie."

"Don't break my head open in my sleep."

"Sometimes I want to; maybe this is my excuse this time."

He laughs. "Ouch, tell me how you really feel."

"Exhausted," A says, "Like I committed arson and shot myself in the head."

If he wasn't so tired, that would probably have sobered him up more. He just nods, moving so he can lean back on the headboard.  

He hears them sigh.

"I hate this."

"Being alive?"

"In general," they say, "But right now, I hate that the formaldehyde still in my body, and that I have to think about a what then. Unless you volunteer to pitch me off the roof."

He doesn't answer.

"Damn it, B."

"I was your pallbearer," he says, "What do you want me to say?"

A turns and pulls their blankets down to glare at him. B blinks.  

There's not a lot of light in the room right now, since neither of them have bothered with the lights, and it's rainy enough that there's barely any of it drifting through the window. They're both only lucky that they're familiar enough with their room, after years of staying in it, that they can navigate it easily, in addition to the fact that their eyes have gotten used to the dark.

"I - " A starts, and then looks away. "Nevermind." He watches the gold light in their eyes fade as they close them, and they turn again so they're on their back. "I'll figure it out in the morning."

"It's already morning," he says, trying to keep the banter up despite the fact that his brain his running a mile a minute. In the contrast of the glow of their eyes, everything else from their side of the room looks even darker.

A laughs, mirthless. "Shut up."

"In an hour or two, the sun's getting up."

"Good thing I'm legally dead then," A says, first with a sigh, but then he sees their eyes brighten even more as they push away their drowsiness for a moment. It's like tracking LEDs.

God, he's hungover.

"I'm legally dead," A repeats.

"A, you've been legally dead for years," B says, "You're just dead for Wammy's now."

A laughs, and has to slap their hands over their mouth before they start laughing hard enough to wake up the whole house.  

They turn to him, grinning, and B tries not to stare too hard because their eyes hardly look human now. He doesn't have to try very hard since the glow is too much and he has to look above their head -  

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait.

It might be the dark, and the fact that because their eyeballs have decided to imitate flashlights right now making the contrast more pronounced, but he can't see anything above their head. Not their name, or their numbers. Nothing.

"B," A says, "I can do anything."

"Yeah," he says, absentmindedly, still searching for any sign that A really is alive from the space over their head. Maybe he's just hallucinating, then. Maybe he's still drunk. Maybe he's actually passed out over their grave and is dreaming.  

A laughs again, giddy, and they slap their face lightly. "I'll figure it out in the morning," they say, "If I keep thinking about this, I'll never sleep."

B watches them burrow further in their covers, and close their eyes, giggling.

He keeps thinking about it. He doesn't sleep.