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He looked sickly.
Too lean, too lanky. His clothing draped from him, and he looked lazily around his surroundings before he spotted you, a hulking shadow in the darkness.
You grinned, seeing his paint smeared with blood, three long gashes through his visage.
You strode forward in confidence, and threw your arms open wide.
“I see a follower of the Most Mirthful Messiahs has graced this pathetic realm with their presence!”, you bellowed, “Tell me, boy, how did you come to be here?”
“M’friends are dead.”
“Eh?”, you looked closer at him. He worried his lip with too-sharp teeth, “Friends? Of the church I’d motherfuckin’ hope.”
“Nah brother…”, he murmured, “They said my Messiahs weren’t what I all up an’ thought, y’see.”
You scoffed.
“But the motherfuckin’ thing is… the got-damn thorn crammed in myside?”
You leaned closer to him, jolting when he looked up at you; his face painted now in rage and hatred and betrayal.
“THEY WERE RIGHT!”
Crack.
You stumbled to the side, your jaw throbbing as his club glanced off of it. You looked to him in shock, dumbfounded at his claim as his chest heaved and his dead eyes seemed too bright.
“THEY WERE MOTHERFUCKIN’ RIGHT AND IT WAS ALL YA’LL LYIN’ TO ME!”
Thud.
You stumbled back, shaking your head and baring your teeth as he braced to attack.
“How DARE you!”
“I could say the same to you…”, he snarled, “All these fuckin’ sweeps, worshippin’ and spreading words that almost got to have a fuckin’meaning. ALMOST. And then I get to fuckin’ find out that it was all BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT; EVERY GODDAMN SYLLABLE!”
You stepped back away from him. You watched him crack and break apart like the mud beneath an execution jut, like the blood smeared over your wall like paint.
“It was all lies. All of it…”, wheezed this child, this monstrous force trapped in a lanky painted boy, “Every fuckin’ piece of scripture, every shitty hymn meant nothin’… The Messiahs I heard in my dreams, in my motherfuckin’ skull, the ones I tried to drown out by any means necessary… were liars, cheaters… Blasphemers.”
His eyes hardened.
“Just. Like. You.”
Fear was unfamiliar to you. Fear was not something felt by your kind, you were supreme beings, chosen by the Messiahs as they danced through their Dark Carnival. He stepped forward, and you stepped back.
“All we motherfuckin’ are, all we were was some shitty parasites crawlin’ on some manic star and tryin’ to make a meanin’ out of the whole wide fuckin’ world.”, he hissed, “And you fuckin’ warped that shit man, you warped it and broke it and stuck it back together all kinds of wrong!”
You swallowed hard, sudden flashes of murder, of mayhem and laughter and cruelty projected on the walls of your mind.
“You ruined my whole world! YOU RUINED MY LIFE!”
He slung his club at you, hitting you dead between the eyes and using his other with both hands, slamming it into your stomach and forcing dead breath to vacate your lungs.
You hit the ground, holding your middle and wincing.
He stood above you, looking down at you and you saw a shimmer on his cheeks.
Tears.
He cried for you even as he attacked you.
“You STUPID motherfucker…”, he said, his voice cracking, “You bought into bullshit. How COULD you. HOW COULD YOU?!”
You couldn’t answer, still trying to catch your breath.
“Everyone I ever cared about is dead…”, he said, his arms now limp at his sides, “Everyone who… who ever cared about me is dead… Because you bought into the bullshit… That Empress you all up an’ fuckin’ obeyed like a barkbeast on a leash could have cared less about us.”
You looked down.
“She pretended to give a fuck and you all up and did her bidding. You’re no leader, you’re no Brother…”
You watched him drop to his knees in front of you.
“An’ now… look at me. Fucking LOOK AT ME! IS THIS WHAT YOUR MESSIAH’S WANTED FOR YOUR LINE?!”
You looked at him, just as he commanded you. You saw his sunken eyes, his hollow cheeks. You saw Death staring back at you in more ways than one. He was broken in ways that you weren’t sure could ever be fixed.
And… And it was your fault.
“You say you helped build a church, but all you did was dig a motherfuckin’ grave to lay little brothers and sisters like me in.”, he breathed.
His face dropped to his hands and he sobbed, scrubbing his paint away, tugging his thin cotton shirt to wipe it away… and he looked at you.
He looked at you like lost Saint.
“Do you see? Do you see me? Do you see the motherfuckin’ corpse I became before your fuckin’ Messiahs had the decency to let me die?!”
You covered your mouth with a hand as this boy, this child, sobbed in front of you. You saw now the scar of bisection, you saw the chapping and scars on his lips from sopor ingestion. You knew all the signs.
You saw the marks from him scratching canyons into his skin when he went too long without a dose.
You watched his tears fall skewed, running over the three lines striping his broken expression.
And you knew.
You knew what you had done.
All of your assasinations, your murders, your backstabbing; none of it matched this. Your wealth and riches, the Title given to you as a new adult meant nothing when you saw what you had created.
You reacted, impulsive, and pulled him against your chest as he howled and sobbed, gripping your clothing with one shaking hand as his weakened other fist pounded against the lean muscle of a murderer-king, of a Painted Macbeth who followed his devil Queen to ruin.
You looked around this misty afterlife as Gamzee hung limp in your arms, Job finally come to rest at the feet of his God… And it hit you.
You were dead.
And there was no one else here.
The realization hit you in the gut harder than Gamzee had.
There were no Messiahs here, there was no laughter.
Only silence, and regret.