A Lullaby For Gods chapter 44

This is so late, but at least we're starting 2019 with this, I guess.

XLIV. Two for the Show

Jade stares at them for exactly two seconds before she actually drops her bags. And then it takes her five seconds more to open her mouth, close it, and then frown and tilt her head like she’s not quite sure about what she’s seeing. She takes seven more as she turns back to the closed door behind her, and then at the car, blinking too many times, before she looks down and purses her lips together as she aligns her thoughts.  

It’s not like it’s an hour, but it feels like it, and Davesprite hopes his nervousness doesn’t show behind his aviators. The entire car is silent, and no one else has opened a door.  

Jade fishes out her phone and dials something. Steve’s phone rings, and Jade’s dog ears appear to pick it up, flicking up, and she glances at the front of the car. She presses the end call button, and turns to Dave, looking him in the eye. She can probably see it from their glow.  

“Dave?”

Davesprite tries not to miss a beat. “Sprite, but Roxy does insist on calling me that.”

“Wh – Roxy?” Familiarity seems to register on her face, and he wonders if Rose has told her anything about their ectobiological mother. “What are you – how are you – is that really you?”

“Yep, flesh and feathers, one hundred percent Davesprite,” he says. “I can’t really get out this car, though, because – you know, no one’s really seen me around town, I’m a stranger, and there’s something about mutants going missing lately.”

Jade’s ears flatten back for a second, and then she nods. “Right. Right, of course, I - ” She picks up the bags, and as she does, Davesprite sees that she’s still a little dazed, although then she runs down the steps of the porch and looks like she’s about to vault herself at him, but then she skids to a stop in front of him and frowns.  

He tries not to, but it’s hard, when something feels like it’s being tugged in his chest. “Is something wrong?”

Jade holds out her hand, slowly, like she’s testing for something, and then waves it from side to side, and looks satisfied when her hand hits the car door’s frame.

“What is it?” Davesprite asks.

“Checking.”

“For if we’re rigged?”

“For if you’re real,” Jade says, ears flat. “Not that I’d recognize if this was something that wasn’t since I’ve never had to face anything illusionary so far.”

“But it’s a possibility?” Stark asks, turning in his seat. Jade actually sticks her head in the car a little to see everyone else.  

Steve sends her a little wave. Stark grins. Everyone else just awkwardly watches as she looks at all of them, slowly, recognition dawning once she sees Roxy.  

“You look just like her,” she says.

“You look like Janey if she grew out her hair, oh my god,” Roxy says.

Jade grins, practically vibrating in excitement as she looks at everyone, and then Davesprite. “How did you guys even get here?”

“We just got dumped here,” Karkat says.  

Jade pauses. Her ears flick back, alert to danger. “Do you remember?”

“None of us except Karkat do,” Roxy says, pointing to him. “For some reason whatever memory spell they put on him didn’t work. “

“We’re lucky it didn’t,” Eridan says, “We don’t know how to use this information, of course, since we’re missing all the pieces, but knowing things. That’s useful.”

“You know who brought us here?”

“I might, I don’t know their name,” Karkat says. “But I’d be able to recognize them if I did see them.”

“That’s – that’s great. That’s actually good news, I - ” Jade takes time to think as her words are tumbling all over each other in her excitement. “Is everyone else just hiding where you’re staying, or…?”

There’s a small pause. Jade deflates a little, expression falling.

“It’s just us,” Davesprite says.  

She nods, determined, already building up her resolve mentally from what she has at hand. Her friends are here. There’s people here. Everyone else is here. Davesprite smiles fondly as he watches her expression lift again from her just picking herself up by the bootstraps and recognizing the situation for what it is – not a complete win, but a win nonetheless.  

“If you’re here, that means everyone else can be too,” she says, “It’s possible. We didn’t even know we were – wait, where were you?”

“We were on an island,” Roxy points to herself, Eridan, Hal (still on her nose) and Davesprite. “These two were just here when we found them.”

“In New York?” Jade asks.

“Yeah.”

She turns to Kanaya. “Have you been in New York the whole time?”

“Yes,” Kanaya says.

“Oh my god.” Jade brings a hand up, even as the miniaturized bags swing back and forth, to push up her glasses, realization once again dawning on her. “You were in New York the whole time. How long has it been?”

“A couple of months, definitely,” Karkat says.  

“How did you find them if you were on an island?”  

“We found a video online,” Eridan says, “Well, Hal did. It was about an attack in New York.”

Jade’s ears flick up for a moment, and then relax down a bit. “Which one?”

Roxy scrunches up her nose and removes Hal from her face. He’s probably blasting text too fast. Jade stares a second too long, Roxy’s resemblance to Rose probably hitting her full force now that she’s not in shades.

“There was one with missing missiles, and another one of Karkat,” Davesprite says.

“Oh.” Jade frowns a bit. “I know about the missiles, but I’m not sure about Karkat – I haven’t found anything about him on the internet.”

“The video on Karkat was from Hal’s friend,” Eridan says, “He managed to ask them not to upload it before the media snatched it up. It was during an attack. During the one Rogers saved him in.”

“Wait, you saved Karkat?” Jade asks.

“I did. I didn’t know you knew each other, though.”

“That’s – that’s fair,” Jade says, “But oh my god, you were in New York for months, and we didn’t know...”

“We didn’t either. We only heard because of the hospital attack,” Karkat says.

“I...yeah, that was a bit of a mess.” Jade reaches up to coil a lock of her hair around a finger, fidgeting. “It wasn’t easy for everyone and Mr. Stark and Steve barely got the press off our backs. We were tired enough as it is.” She looks to Steve as she remembers. “Wait, didn’t you say you were headed to the hospital?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, “Everyone wants to meet the rest of the crew.”

Jade beams, slowly, her smile just spreading on her face like a sun rising until she’s bouncing around in excitement.

“Yes!” She punches a fist up the sky as she jumps. “Yes, yes – I can teleport everyone there if you want, we can get there faster, I - ”

“Hang on, slow down, kid,” Stark says, “We’d love the offer, and honestly, I would love to try teleportation, but we’re kind of also avoiding being seen by traffic cams. You know that missile vid went viral, right, and if you were seen snapping the car out of here - ”

“I’d be called in for questioning,” Jade says, “Even if I wasn’t the one who made the missiles disappear, I’d be a lead.”

“And the kicker is, you are the one who made them disappear.”

Jade laughs into her hand at that, and then shrugs. “I wouldn’t know, Mr. Stark.”

Stark grins.  

“Would you be okay if we offered to give you a lift again?” Steve asks.

“Absolutely,” she says, and Davesprite scoots over and winches his wings in so Jade can have room to climb inside. When it proves to be difficult considering his wingspan, Jade laughs.

“Do you mind if I shrink you?”

“Honestly, not at all, it’s cramped here,” Davesprite says.  

Jade climbs into the car and tries to sit on the floor and close the car door behind her, folding in while Davesprite lifts his ghost tail up so there’s more room for her. She sticks out her forefingers and thumbs, positioning them so they form the corners of an imaginary rectangle, and Davesprite sees green light wrap around him at the edges of his vision.  

He sees the ceiling of the car start to move away from him, and he looks up, trying not to panic, as it continues to do so in time with Jade bringing her fingers closer together. He feels himself lift from the seat of the car, feels the pressure around his wings cease, and sees Jade slowly grow along with the rest of the car around him – only, he knows, logically, that he’s shrunk.

Davesprite shifts and shakes his wings. At least they’re not bunched up anymore.

“Oh my god,” Tony Stark says.

Jade takes a seat beside where Davesprite is, only since he’s much smaller, she doesn’t have to worry about a tight fit. Davesprite flies over the armrest of the seat in front of him and leans his arms on top of it.

Roxy taps his head. “Cute.”

“I can’t believe I spent months calculating how to shrink things like during the missile incident, and you can just do it like that,” Stark says.

Jade laughs, and then so does Steve, and after a few minutes, the entire car has gone into a laughing fit. Davesprite lets himself smile, because in this moment, for just a while, the urgency of things isn’t felt, and emergency isn’t making their hearts all race.

For just a little while, everything is okay.

-

Rose turns her phone off and sets it on the desk beside Dave’s bed, sighing.  

She wants to answer Steve, she really does, but at the same time – there’s a lot on her mind right now, and right now, she’s not in any mood to answer any calls, not in any mood to be answering anyone save Dave, once he wakes up, because he will, but for now, she just wants quiet, because she feels like if she gets anything less than that, she’s going to start clawing at her own face.

The room, at least, is quiet. Dave is asleep, Loki is concentrating on whatever’s going on in Dave’s head right now, and she – she’s waiting. She’s waiting for something, anything, to happen, although she thinks she’ll take the silence to her brother suddenly screaming and hurting himself again.  

Beside Dave, Loki frowns. Rose tenses, expecting him to open his eyes and tell her something, but he doesn’t, instead just continues, silent, moving his head like he’s looking at something.  

Rose wants to ask what it is. She doesn’t. She can’t break his concentration when he’s dealing with something as delicate as her brother’s mind.

Instead she quietly hops off her chair and goes to the window to check if there’s anyone outside. There’s not, there’s just the empty hallway. Everyone else is probably either conked out sleeping in Cecil’s room, exhausted from the frustration of everything that’s happened so far, or doing errands, since they can’t stay in the hospital forever without changing clothes or getting actual decent meals.

It’s just quiet.  

Thank Skaia for small blessings, she supposes.  

She sighs and turns back to the bed, towards her brother, and then she sees the world tilt, for just a second, her vision spinning, and she staggers, trying to steady herself on the wall and instead hitting her palm on the glass. She hears the muffled noise and thinks her hand print is just stamped there now, like some ugly trope from every B-rated horror movie that’s ever played in every cinema.

When she looks at the glass, there’s no red smear. Of course there’s not. She wasn’t bleeding before that.

She pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs softly. She needs sleep. She’s constantly exhausted these days that the fatigue of her mind if catching up to her body.  

Rose leans back on the wall and sits, knees to her chest, as she stares at the floor and listens to her brother’s heartbeat monitor beeps.

She’s so tired.

-

“Dave!”

Loki doesn’t like dreamwalking.  

For one, it’s a mess going into someone’s mind while they’re in REM, and it’s foolish to expect you’re not going to find anything questionable in there, because it’s a dream. It’s a lot better to sift through someone’s memories, at least the raw ones and not the ones that are recalls of recalls of recalls or false memories, but it takes practice to be able to tell which is which because psychology is complex and fascinating, but he’s had enough  practice in the last millenia or so, so he thinks he should at least be decent at this. Reviewing actual present thought is actually just being in someone’s head, and that, well, he’s tended to avoid since childhood, and it’s also quite difficult, even for sorcerers who have had millenia and millenia of experience.

This, whatever this is, isn’t like any of the three.  

It’s not a memory, it’s not watching events in real time through someone else’s eyes, and it sure as hell isn’t a dream.  

At least, he’s sure it isn’t. He hopes it isn’t.

“Dave!”

He’s in a battlefield – the ground is slick and slippery with so much blood that he’s almost slipped more than a few times, and in the times his feet have scraped and wiped at the smooth floor, he notices that the ground has a pattern. There’s light patches and black patches, a bit like a chessboard, but everything is so coated in blood he can’t be sure until he actually wipes at least a square foot of it.  

There’s bodies everywhere, and they look odd. Humanoid, but not any species he’s seen before. Most of them are in ribbons – intestines hanging out and half-shredded from a torso that looks like it was ripped apart by pulling in two directions; limbs chopped up into pieces; crushed heads and bodies split right in the middle; smeared meat and broken bones on the ground.  

The sky above is red and flickering, like a television that can’t quite decide what channel it wants to tune into, and Loki tries to run past the battlefield when it’s light enough, but the flickering is blinding him and he hates it.  

“Where are you?” he mumbles to himself, and then has to look up in horror when he hears yells of panic, followed by a caw. This has to be the third time he’s heard this now, and he ducks down as he watches some winged creature swoop down and snatch one of the remaining soldiers still fighting on the field, several feet away from him, take it in its claws and then tear it into two pieces like it was paper before lifting up to the sky.

He watches, squinting as the sky’s flickering is making it a bit harder to, and the creature rises to being a black speck from how high up it is. Then, two shapes fall from where it is, small, turning as the wind pushes against them, and then Loki sees the two shapes get closer and closer to the ground, until they explode upon impact on the field, the two torn parts of the corpse crashing onto the ground so hard bits and pieces fly.  

He stares at the remains, as much as he can in this lighting, before feeling a pricking sensation on his hand.  

He turns, and tries to make out the thing clearly since the sky flickers to dark and steadies to red lighting for a second, making it hard to see, and then he lifts the hand near his face, feeling things snake around there, clinging onto his palm.

Light flashes. He sees lines of dark red around his hand, and frowns.

Blood?

The dark red lines suddenly pool to the center of his palm, bulging as seems to coalesce, and then it opens – blooms, like a carnivorous flower, peeling from the center and outward, but with way more teeth.

Loki shakes his hand rapidly to get the thing off, even as the creature hisses, and when it refuses to come off, he summons fire into his hand.  

The thing bursts off of him with a shriek, and the small pieces of it he sees fall to the ground melt into the blood that’s already there.

He stares at his hand again in horror before wiping it off his shirt, even when there’s nothing there anymore, and turns and starts running again.  

He’s got the soldiers to evade, the flying creatures that rip everyone to shreds, and the goddamn blood on the floor.  

And he has to find Dave. He’d seen him earlier, running from something, so terrified he didn’t even notice Loki calling for him. He can call again, try to get his attention, but every time he makes a noise, the more he draws attention to himself.

Damn it.

He jumps over a corpse, rolling, before grabbing it and throwing it at someone running at him from the side, sword and shield in hand. There has to be a way of finding Dave here. The battlefield is vast, though, and he can even see mountains in the distance, so he’s not sure how long it’s going to take for him to go everywhere to find Dave.

He can just end the battle here or at least shift its favor, but he doesn’t know if doing that will damage Dave’s psyche.

This is still his head, after all, even if it’s not a  memory, or the present, or a vision of the future. It’s still his mind, but if he damages this place, he doesn’t know how far the damages will spread.  

That said, it might be best to stop the battle going on, but he doesn’t have the first idea on how to do that safely.

“Come on, Dave, where are you.”  

He glances to the sides, quick and alert, making sure he doesn’t trip. He’s seen Dave head in this direction earlier, so he should catch up. He should be able to, soon. Maybe this is what’s been plaguing Dave, being stuck here with no idea what to do or what to wake up from.

Because this doesn’t look like a dream. This doesn’t even feel like one. This feels like how someone would feel if they were actually just thrust into a sudden war.

He’s heard cases of this before, from practitioners of the craft who were rejected and scorned because they tend to stray from tradition. There’s a way to kill someone from the inside out, from letting their mind think they’re awake but they’re not at all, and let it think it’s dead, that it just shuts down and kills itself by stopping.

The human body is highly dependent on its brain to regulate everything, after all.  

If it’s tricked into thinking it’s dead, and it stops, because that’s what dead brains and dead minds do, the body follows. It’s a silent death, and it’s a gruesome one, especially when the pain is enough it carries to physical reactions.

Loki slips, feeling the patch of ground he’s stepping on give out from under him, and as he falls, he holds his arms out on instinct, ready to catch his fall, but instead, his hands hit water.

No, not water. Blood. Red, hot blood, splashing up his face and his clothes as his hands hit it first, and with nothing solid to hold on to, he takes a dive right into the pool of blood in front of him. He clenches his eyes shut, feels himself go down, sinking, and he waits for himself to hit the bottom, but after a few seconds, it’s clear that there’s not one, so he flails and tries to go upwards, kicking his legs, swimming.

Something cold wraps around his ankle. It takes everything not to open his eyes and burn them just to try and see what’s got him. He kicks instead. It pulls down, and Loki feels the rush of the blood around him at the sudden sensation of being dragged down harshly.

- are you doing?

Loki nearly gasps for air as he feels his lungs burn. It only feels like he’s been in the pool – is it even a pool when it’s so deep – for a few seconds, but his lungs protest that it’s been minutes, and he needs to breathe, but the surface is so far up that he doesn’t think he can even make it at this point.

He kicks, again, and the thing on his ankle only drags him down faster, pulling so hard he thinks his ankle has dislocated and he lets out a muffled noise at the pain.

What are you doing?

He starts kicking furiously with his free leg at the other. Whatever has the other is clamped there and if he can just get it off, he can swim up. So he kicks, aiming blindly, his heel scraping into the side of his leg, his foot, digging in so hard he thinks he’s probably peeled off a layer of his own skin, and a few times he hits whatever’s got him, but it’s not letting go.  

His chest hurts, and he feels the panic brought on by the body’s natural instinct to survive scream at him. Get away, get away; get up, breathe.

But he can’t, because there’s no letting go here, and he’s going to drown.  

Loki, what are you doing?

He wants to open his eyes. He needs to open his eyes. He doesn’t.

The dragging sensation abruptly stops, even when he can still feel the pressure around his ankle. Immediately after, he feels the pool ripple, feels something screech, and as it does, he remembers, as he’s forgotten in his relief, that he needs to go up, so he does.

He starts swimming up, frantic, but his arms and legs are tired from the lack of air and the dizziness that he’s now realizing is hitting him, but he needs to go up, if he wants to stay alive. He thrashes, swimming strokes becoming more aimless as his body’s blind panic for survival overtakes his clarity, but he’s so far underwater that no matter how hard he tries, he’s still not reaching the surface.

Loki.

There’s hands, on his face. He thinks they are, at least – everything here is warm – and he tries to get away, but he’s too weak to.  

They hold him in place, and as he finally decides to open his eyes despite the futility of vision under a pool of blood, he hears:

-

“Wake up!”

Loki sits up straight, eyes wide, gasping for air like he’s never breathed before. He snatches his hand from Dave’s forehead so he can grip the edge of the bed, as if to steady himself, and he breathes in deeply, hungrily, like a man who’s just been drowned.  

Dave’s heartbeat monitor is going crazy, and Rose has already unlocked the door for the nurses to get in since they’re sure to have heard it, and she’s already pressed the call button anyway since her brother started thrashing in his bed again. Loki is staring straight at nothing, pupils blown wide in terror, chest heaving with every panicked breath he takes.

Rose doesn’t know where to look.

“Loki?” she asks, softly.  

He takes a few seconds too many to look up at her, and then a bit more to register she’s actually standing there, and even then, he doesn’t relax.

Rose is about to say something, but behind her, the door opens, and the nurses flood in.  They surround Dave’s bed, trying to get the boy lying flat on his back, since in his thrashing, he’s turned on his side. Rose has to step away to let them do their jobs, and even Loki has to be ushered away a bit so they can check his IV, his heartbeat monitor, see if he’s scratched himself again.  

Loki stands by the wall, across Rose, and slowly, turns to the bed, like his brain is just rebooting and taking in his surroundings. It might be the lack of oxygen, Rose thinks. Why wasn’t he breathing earlier?

Then, she hears it, a soft groan. She turns to her brother’s bed.  

She hears a gasp of air, and then Dave speaking, mumbling, and that’s all it takes for her to try to push past the nurses, finally able to get to his side, just as he croaks out a relieved, “Oh, thank god. Thank god.”

Dave Strider blinks up the ceiling blearily, eyes squinting at the light, but arms too tired to actually move. Rose stares, and as she does, her brother turns to her slowly, trying to see past the afterimage of the light to actually see her.  

“Rose?”

Rose lets out a cry of triumph, and throws her arms around her brother’s shoulders as she cries, nurses around her be damned.