Oh, God, I Was Not Only The First Person To Ask For A Card, I'm Also The First To Post A Fic
One of the things I already had in my head turned out to fit with one of the squares on my new bingo card, in some sense or other, so, hey, why not get this thing started?
And, yes, it's Disco Elysium again. Sorry, what can I say? The fannish heart wants what the fannish heart wants.
Actually, I am quite amused by the patterns I'm seeing in what my fannish heart wants these days. Maybe I'll even make a post about that at some point. In the meantime have... whatever the heck this is.
Title: One More Thing Chewing on Your Heart
Fandom: Disco Elysium
Characters/Pairings: Harry Du Bois
Summary: In the church you've stumbled into, there is nothing. And you want it.
Rating/Warnings: Teen. Warnings for drinking, referenced drug use, attempted (or, arguably, partially successful) suicide, a bit of cosmic horror, and general messed-uppedness.
Length: ~1,100 words
Author's Note:The more I think about the idea that it was the Swallow that took Harry's memories, not the booze, the more it just seems to fit. (On the other hand, the more I think about Harry's lost weekend, the more I wonder how the hell he got back across the canal. But you won't find the answer to that question here.) Written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "Mutation/Transformation." I'd say this qualifies as transformation, right?
One More Thing Chewing on Your Heart
You stagger away from your new best friends, sailing off into the Tequila Sunset, or maybe just looking for a place to take a leak. You pass a payphone and feel the familiar itch in your fingers, your muscles remembering her number. Call her, call her. Tell her how much you need her, how much it hurts to be this animal you are alone. Tell her about the corpse you've ignored and your crashed motor carriage and the beautiful metallic taste of your gun. Tell her it's her fault, that she's the only one that can save you. Tell her that no one can save you. Tell her goodbye.
But your feet have kept you moving, stomping and stuttering, and the payphone is behind you now, lost in the past, and in front of you is...
You squint.
...is a church. The smallest church in Saint-Saëns, like the song playing in your head, over and over. You would often go there, but none of it matters. At all.
Inside, there's Her. Dolores Fucking Dei in broken stained glass, and you remember now why you stopped going into churches, because She still looks like her. Your Dora Dei, your very own Innocence. You used to call her that, and she'd smile like she wanted your worship, but she was fallible after all, just like you. Neither of you could make your two-person suzerainty work.
She looks down at you with monstrous compassion. As if you're the one who's shattered.
The Mother of Humanism, who will never push your own children out from between her stained glass thighs. Because you're a fuck-up. Because you're human. Because you're poor, and sad, and strange. You failure. You victim. You absolute asshole.
You're still holding a bottle. You toss it away from you, hurl it as hard as you can. A pathetic throw, but it still arcs halfway across the church.
The sound it makes when it smashes is... wrong. Muffled. As if half the sound gave up before it got to you. Or as if it was taken away somewhere. Away, away... Maybe somewhere better?
And now you're thinking again, analyzing, wondering, even through the haze of chemicals in your brain. The curse of the cop, the curse of you, to never stop thinking, even when stopping is the only thing you want.
You follow your bottle, stand in the glass-strewn place where you sent it to die. You clear your throat, and the sound seems to cross a thousand miles before it reaches your ears. You take a step to the left. You sing. "Life gets haaaaard..." It's louder here, a little. You step the other way. You sing the same line again. Again. Until you find the center of the silence.
You sing the next line at last, and you hear nothing. Pure, reified silence, like the absence at the end of the world.
The end of the world. It might be. It might fucking be.
You've thought about this a lot, this end, these theoretical world-chewing holes. You've always been drawn to the places where reality eats itself, from the time you were a kid dreaming of exploring the Pale, of scouring it for lost history the way you scoured the catacombs of Jamrock for treasure. Before you realized that the past is exactly like the present: an endless sea of shit. Before you realized that street kids from Jamrock don't become entroponauts. Before you realized the Pale only had one thing to offer you.
You want that thing now. You want it more than you've ever wanted anything. More than speed, or sex, or love, or answers. You want that oblivion. To erase yourself so thoroughly that not even the Pale itself will remember you. To sink into the nothingness that lies beneath everything. The deep, eternal empty. Maybe then you can rest, when there's no you for you to get wrong anymore.
You're climbing, somehow. It's above you, and you're climbing up among the rafters, your muscles loose and boozy but not failing you, not when you need them.
And then you're reaching out for it. You don't know how, don't know where, exactly. The silence is so absolute, so strange, and something seems to be wrong with space, with time, with you. But you think it wants you. Or it would want you, if it could want anything. If it weren't nothing, and incapable of desire.
You desire, though. Still. And you desire this. This, not murders and streetlights and art and beauty and pain and the impossible responsibility of living. You want to dance into the arms of the Apocalypse and disco til you drop.
You want that. You want it. You... Oh, god, oh god, no, I've changed my--
But it's in you now. It's inside you. You're not falling into it, it's falling into you, and it's eating you, swallowing you, but not whole, not whole at all. There is darkness flowing down all the cracks in your mind, breaking you apart into pieces and eating up the parts that connect them, eating that thing you call Harr--
Ha--
That thing you call--
You don't know. You don't know. You've lost something, and you don't know what it was. But it's all right. It will all be over soon. You don't know how you know that, but you know. Something, or someone, has promised that to you. Soon there will be no pain. Soon the entity that feels the pain will be gone. There will be warm primordial blackness forever, and nothing will ever hurt again.
You let yourself go.
And you fall
But not into the nothing. Not into the end.
There is still a you, and you are falling, and something might be catching you. Is there a figure with strangely bent limbs, skittering in the dark? Is there a cushioning updraft of wind? You can't tell. You don't know.
But you're on the floor now, a living human on the floor of a church, and there still is a you of some kind, loose and disconnected, speaking to itself in half-familiar voices.
You raise your head. There is a glass woman above you. She is looking at you with so much pity, so much despairing love.
You wish you knew who she was. You wish you knew who shattered her. You wish you knew why she hurts so much.
You wonder if you'll remember in the morning. This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1018165.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.
And, yes, it's Disco Elysium again. Sorry, what can I say? The fannish heart wants what the fannish heart wants.
Actually, I am quite amused by the patterns I'm seeing in what my fannish heart wants these days. Maybe I'll even make a post about that at some point. In the meantime have... whatever the heck this is.
Title: One More Thing Chewing on Your Heart
Fandom: Disco Elysium
Characters/Pairings: Harry Du Bois
Summary: In the church you've stumbled into, there is nothing. And you want it.
Rating/Warnings: Teen. Warnings for drinking, referenced drug use, attempted (or, arguably, partially successful) suicide, a bit of cosmic horror, and general messed-uppedness.
Length: ~1,100 words
Author's Note:The more I think about the idea that it was the Swallow that took Harry's memories, not the booze, the more it just seems to fit. (On the other hand, the more I think about Harry's lost weekend, the more I wonder how the hell he got back across the canal. But you won't find the answer to that question here.) Written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "Mutation/Transformation." I'd say this qualifies as transformation, right?
One More Thing Chewing on Your Heart
You stagger away from your new best friends, sailing off into the Tequila Sunset, or maybe just looking for a place to take a leak. You pass a payphone and feel the familiar itch in your fingers, your muscles remembering her number. Call her, call her. Tell her how much you need her, how much it hurts to be this animal you are alone. Tell her about the corpse you've ignored and your crashed motor carriage and the beautiful metallic taste of your gun. Tell her it's her fault, that she's the only one that can save you. Tell her that no one can save you. Tell her goodbye.
But your feet have kept you moving, stomping and stuttering, and the payphone is behind you now, lost in the past, and in front of you is...
You squint.
...is a church. The smallest church in Saint-Saëns, like the song playing in your head, over and over. You would often go there, but none of it matters. At all.
Inside, there's Her. Dolores Fucking Dei in broken stained glass, and you remember now why you stopped going into churches, because She still looks like her. Your Dora Dei, your very own Innocence. You used to call her that, and she'd smile like she wanted your worship, but she was fallible after all, just like you. Neither of you could make your two-person suzerainty work.
She looks down at you with monstrous compassion. As if you're the one who's shattered.
The Mother of Humanism, who will never push your own children out from between her stained glass thighs. Because you're a fuck-up. Because you're human. Because you're poor, and sad, and strange. You failure. You victim. You absolute asshole.
You're still holding a bottle. You toss it away from you, hurl it as hard as you can. A pathetic throw, but it still arcs halfway across the church.
The sound it makes when it smashes is... wrong. Muffled. As if half the sound gave up before it got to you. Or as if it was taken away somewhere. Away, away... Maybe somewhere better?
And now you're thinking again, analyzing, wondering, even through the haze of chemicals in your brain. The curse of the cop, the curse of you, to never stop thinking, even when stopping is the only thing you want.
You follow your bottle, stand in the glass-strewn place where you sent it to die. You clear your throat, and the sound seems to cross a thousand miles before it reaches your ears. You take a step to the left. You sing. "Life gets haaaaard..." It's louder here, a little. You step the other way. You sing the same line again. Again. Until you find the center of the silence.
You sing the next line at last, and you hear nothing. Pure, reified silence, like the absence at the end of the world.
The end of the world. It might be. It might fucking be.
You've thought about this a lot, this end, these theoretical world-chewing holes. You've always been drawn to the places where reality eats itself, from the time you were a kid dreaming of exploring the Pale, of scouring it for lost history the way you scoured the catacombs of Jamrock for treasure. Before you realized that the past is exactly like the present: an endless sea of shit. Before you realized that street kids from Jamrock don't become entroponauts. Before you realized the Pale only had one thing to offer you.
You want that thing now. You want it more than you've ever wanted anything. More than speed, or sex, or love, or answers. You want that oblivion. To erase yourself so thoroughly that not even the Pale itself will remember you. To sink into the nothingness that lies beneath everything. The deep, eternal empty. Maybe then you can rest, when there's no you for you to get wrong anymore.
You're climbing, somehow. It's above you, and you're climbing up among the rafters, your muscles loose and boozy but not failing you, not when you need them.
And then you're reaching out for it. You don't know how, don't know where, exactly. The silence is so absolute, so strange, and something seems to be wrong with space, with time, with you. But you think it wants you. Or it would want you, if it could want anything. If it weren't nothing, and incapable of desire.
You desire, though. Still. And you desire this. This, not murders and streetlights and art and beauty and pain and the impossible responsibility of living. You want to dance into the arms of the Apocalypse and disco til you drop.
You want that. You want it. You... Oh, god, oh god, no, I've changed my--
But it's in you now. It's inside you. You're not falling into it, it's falling into you, and it's eating you, swallowing you, but not whole, not whole at all. There is darkness flowing down all the cracks in your mind, breaking you apart into pieces and eating up the parts that connect them, eating that thing you call Harr--
Ha--
That thing you call--
You don't know. You don't know. You've lost something, and you don't know what it was. But it's all right. It will all be over soon. You don't know how you know that, but you know. Something, or someone, has promised that to you. Soon there will be no pain. Soon the entity that feels the pain will be gone. There will be warm primordial blackness forever, and nothing will ever hurt again.
You let yourself go.
And you fall
But not into the nothing. Not into the end.
There is still a you, and you are falling, and something might be catching you. Is there a figure with strangely bent limbs, skittering in the dark? Is there a cushioning updraft of wind? You can't tell. You don't know.
But you're on the floor now, a living human on the floor of a church, and there still is a you of some kind, loose and disconnected, speaking to itself in half-familiar voices.
You raise your head. There is a glass woman above you. She is looking at you with so much pity, so much despairing love.
You wish you knew who she was. You wish you knew who shattered her. You wish you knew why she hurts so much.
You wonder if you'll remember in the morning. This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1018165.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.