Work Text:
A wall of sand raised from the ground. When it dissolved again, Alice was gone. The space where she'd been before didn't look empty, but voided: the matter that previously occupated it had been ripped from the sand against its will. Peter could still hear the echo of her screams. His heart ached, but he figured it wouldn't for much longer. If that hollow between his ribs should be the last thing his body felt for Alice —the last thing his body ever felt—, then it would be a welcomed pain. He was still alive. Something inside of him still ached for the life he wouldn't have. What a sorry relief: he was still alive, and so he pained. He would soon feel a pain much greater, and then no more, because he would be dead.
To no one's surprise, that train of thought didn't make him feel much better.
How does one wait for his own death? The fear crippling through his bones was asphyxiating. He knew pain, he'd learnt to push through until he couldn't any longer: he had expected his death to creep on him in such a way, his own body turning against himself, both his home and its invader until there was only room for the latter. He'd expected to die on his bathroom floor all those months ago, and yet he didn't. He had seen death on every bone he climbed that drove him farther from the safety of Hell's soil. He had seen himself die as a little prey in a pretty web, fallen victim to the terrors of his journey and to trust mistakenly given. He still had not died.
And so now death didn't come from within, like he had always assumed, nor did it surprise him through every step of his journey. It lingered instead in his near future, not yet there but inescapable and undoubtedly approaching, he could caress her if only he stretched, and it was his turn to wait for her, in that small trap where finally, after so many wrong steps, things had begun feeling right again.
He didn't regret saving Alice—would do it again and again. Maybe ensuring her survival had been his only way of apologizing, both for wasting so much time and for condemning her to a life carrying this weight. He hoped sometime down the line she would be able to forgive him—he hoped she would live long enough to understand.
He was glad he had found a way to save her, but there were other regrets tightening his throat. He wished the conversation they'd had inside the small hole he was to die in had taken place months, years before. During those late nights in the lab, where they were delirious from lack of sleep and had felt they might conquer the world together: they had thought themselves invincible, as if maybe they'd invent a new form of magick out of those hysterical giggles, as if maybe they'd push through Grimes' abuse—attitude, they would call it—and find enlightenment at the other side. Those nights had been a frenzy of thought, and it was now too late for Peter to realize he would forever (which might only last a few more minutes) miss another kind of closeness they had never dared to look for in each other. One not of thought, but something else he felt but didn't understand. He had tried to coarse it out of her, in this new world they had stupidly thrown themselves in. “Is it so hard to pretend you're in love with me?”, he'd asked before the Weaver Girl. “When you've just what?”, he'd implored, hoping she would name this same urge that clutched at him from somewhere deep inside. She hadn't—how could he expect her to, when they were the same? He too was a prodigy of magick, he too could draw pentagrams in his sleep and figure out a way to journey down to Hell, he too had no words to speak of this. He too had spent his life learning complex formulas and languages and how to trick himself into disbelieving, and had never given thought to this turmoil that, he assumed, someone more experienced could have called feelings. Thus he had saved her, so his intellect might tell her what he found himself short of words for.
He loved her, and he would die because he had absurdly thought other things to be more important.
The revelation didn't come as a shock, but as a small wave. So that's it, he could've thought. That's what this feeling is. There was nothing else to be thought, to be felt: there were only tides of what-ifs.
He lost track of time. He sat in silence staring at the stairs that would lead him nowhere, his mind halfway drowned in memories and regrets, the rest of him numb, lost in the fantasy of the life he wouldn't get to have. He refused to think about death. He wouldn't think of the pain. He thought of Alice, tried to imagine her free, soaring through the dunes they'd just walked through together, back above ground, maybe looking at the stars and remembering him. Would it hurt? No, he refused: imagine Alice, he coaxed himself, going back to Cambridge and—
First there was a sound.
Then there was an opening.
After that the trap became crowded.
There was no time for hellos. There was a sharp, grating noise and then
there was only pain,
the sound of metal against bone,
the taste of blood in the air,
a screech that didn't sound human, was that his own voice?,
oh the agony,
Alice, please live,
he fell to his knees (did he still have knees?),
everything hurt,
the Beast had met its foe,
there was red everywhere—
And then nothing.
///////
There was a door. There was a door in the middle of nowhere, and it made no sense because he was dead. Was he dead? If he was dead, why was he, well, alive? He felt alive. He didn't remember what it felt being dead. Had he been dead? No, but he must have, you see, he remembered the pain, there was red everywhere, oh everything hurt so bad—. The door opened. He still wasn't sure he was alive, because his body moved at his own volition (was it his body or was it him? Was there a difference? His body had died, hadn't it? Hadn't him?). He stumbled through the doorframe. He didn't choose to cross, but it was him—he knew now for sure—who stumbled. He was alive then. Was he?
There was sand everywhere, but it was not the sand he'd come to know as the underworld's. On the sand was a dais, on the dais was a throne, on the throne sat King Yama—wait, what? His arms still ached, he thought, but in truth they didn't, but he was alive when he shouldn't be, he remembered dying, his arms were clean but oh so scarred, and there was King Yama, smiling down at him, but he'd been dead, he was in the Escher trap, how come he was alive now, somewhere else, staring at a God he had no recollection of—
Alice. Alice was alive. Alice was standing in front of the dais and she was alive and she was smiling at him and he loved her, he just remembered. It was him, not his body, who stepped forward now, it was him who stepped again, it was him who broke into a run, it was him who collided with her, it was him who held her tight.
She was warm. She held onto him just as desperately. Peter remembered again his death, he recalled as if in a fever dream the longing. There was a thread that tied his past life and this new one he still couldn't understand: maybe the Moiras (did they exist? had she maybe found them?) had given him another chance, maybe they had reattached the two ends, the memory of his own fantasies spilling over this new realm in which they were coming true, her frame between his arms. She was alive. She was there. He loved her. She loved him back —there were no words, there was no need, for she cried while she clutched him as if to never again let him go, and they were the same, weren't they? Just as intelligent, just as ambitious, just as scared, just as speechless, just as stupid, just as enamoured. He was alive—still he didn't understand, but she was there and they loved each other, surely there was no other explanation.
He wouldn't let go. Not now, maybe never. He kissed her and she kissed him back; they stared at each other in pure wonder, for they were masters in believing against all logic, yet them being entwined was a fantasy far beyond the scope of the suspension of belief of their studies. Alas, truth didn't seem to care about the laws of logic.
“I died”, he breathed. The words felt sand against his tongue, the last thing he'd pronounced had been the incantation to banish Alice from her imminent death. He'd died afterwards. He was alive now. His arms were full of scars that hadn't been there before. “I died, didn't I?”.
“Yes.” She looked satisfied, the way one looks when, he supposed, they have tricked death. He couldn't stop staring at her in wonder.
“How—”
“Exchange. Your notes, your work.” He blinked. He blinked again. She was a marvel.
“You only saw it once.”
“But, Peter. I have a very good memory.” She burst out laughing then; he remembered the pentagram inscribed on her skin, the bitterness of her confession. Still she didn't seem weighed down this time, she looked instead as if she might grow wings and fly out of Hell out of sheer joy. He was the reason, he had to remind himself, why: she had gotten him back not from among the dead but even farther beyond, she looked tired and dirty and oh so happy. She was alive because he had pushed her to leave him behind, he was now alive because she had survived and she was brilliant and had chosen to bring him back to her. They had begun their journey together; any midroute breach notwithstanding, they would find the way back hand in hand.
They kept whispering before the dais, oblivious to King Yama's patient stare. There was so much still to say, again language wasn't up to scratch. How could 'sorry' encompass the pit inside each of their chests, how could mere words contain the journey beyond death and back, the enormous pain that came with dying, the littlest hope for her that existed within him until he existed no more? How could one choose what to say, after making peace with everything that's been left unsaid? How could one ever stay silent again, when fearing their love could stay unknown?
And so they said sorry, knowing it wasn't enough, and held onto each other, hoping it would tell the rest. When they faced King Yama again, the absence of language wasn't scary any longer. If only one could decipher the entwining of their bodies, they would read a whole epic poem in the shape of their held hands. It would not be a tale about Hell, nor about magick: it would be about sacrifice, laws that bend for love, intimacy that powers through the barriers of life, of death, of logic. It would not be an academic text, but a love story.
They climbed up without letting go.