Work Text:
before:
the acidic smell of redstone smarting your nose, the shrill shriek of the other red name in your ear. you're the only ones left at the end of the world. his voice rises and blurs with the whining of the dogs. redstone has climbed its way into your throat and tongue in reverse, from the gut, from the oozing wound in your stomach. it grits your teeth for you, tenses your jaw. rocks turned pebbles turned dust, turned sand, turned ashes. you dig your feet into rock. there is red under your fingernails.
there is red in front of you, and a man like a sick dog. he laughs like an anvil falling, the metallic clang before the crunch of bones. it digs itself in your ears and cocoons there, content even as you aren't. your teeth ache. your fingers skitter around the lever.
a warning call. his name, over and over. let's blow something up together. it might just end your life. the whites of his startled animal eyes flash, the whites of his teeth. paper thin skin, undertones of sickness like crusted blood under fingernails.
your fingers are careful origami cranes, wishbirds crafted out of paper out of sugarcane you cracked someone open over. crack him open and find a wishbone inside like a fish, snap it in half and swallow it too. muscle memory keeps your shadow on the lever. muscle memory keeps just your shadow on the lever.
let's blow something up together. it might just end his life. his whine echoes off the walls of this crater-before-the-crater you've dug, too pitched and not pitched enough. it does not roll up and down as a dune luring a mirage, but cuts off and becomes a jagged cliff face. it grates.
the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. you are part him and part someone else. gestalt says you cannot view anything in isolation. what does that make you?
eighty percent chance the box opens and the cat lays dead, or you cut the noose around the horse's back. you've played with worse odds. too used to testing things to destruction, to carving out room for the shattering of something before its even begun. you hate rot and illness as you seethe over all growing things that live past their time. dragging a corpse facedown in the dirt.
it is his voice that stops you. you're the only ones left at the end of the world.
you tell him, eighty percent chance. he laughs like he believes you.
after:
the bizarre echo of the explosion, leaving confused quiet in its wake, the jingle of an ice cream truck receding. syrupy ghost lollies dripping over your fingers. wide-eyed sticky child, cheeks round in disbelief, looking at the carnage that wasn't.
it tastes like a wither shriek cut short over soul sand, and speaking of there he is again, shattering the sound barrier with his disapointment. there is another taste, almost unrecognizable in its familiarity, burning in you teeth and throat. even as you scramble out and reach for your sap-sticky crossbow you recognize that the livewire for the taste was first the smell, the smattering of gunpowder cracking over sand. your disapointed yell had echoed over the hills then. now you let him do that part for you.
above, the dawn masquerades as dusk. below, you masquerade as the living.
you die with his name lodged in your throat tucked away neatly with not like this.
rising to watch, smoke coalescing, as they take him down in painful, quick hacks as he foams like a diseased dog, barking swallowed by a surprised yelp.
you should've just killed him.