Work Text:
The world swims and spins around him. The world twists in and out of his vision, bathed in emerald. The world tilts and collapses.
The world hurts. A whole damn lot. Something about this world is wrong. He could’ve sworn he was just in a better one. Where is he? Why is he in pain? Where is Lee? Why isn’t she with him? Is she hurt too? Is she missing him?
Buck’s memory hits him like the first shovel of dirt in a grave. Right .
He groans and forces his crusted eyes open. He’s sprawled out on the dirt, his head aching against the metal of his car. The stars are spinning. Something is aching fiercely inside of him. He can’t tell if it’s his heart or his stomach. Dark liquid drips off of his fingertips and beads in the dust.
They hadn’t been able to kill him. He had been too strong, too determined to save Lee from their wretched hands. Bile rises in his throat, and he retches into the ground beside him. He doesn’t feel so strong now. He feels a little more than half-dead.
A hissing beside him makes his heart pound. He jerks his head back to where he just threw up the last of the Vide Noir and his own stomach acid. The black in the puddle begins to bubble and stretch out into tendrils. They lunge for his throat, and he falls back, letting out a strangled gurgle.
Buck blinks. There are no tendrils. Just dirt and some of the shit from his car spread out on the ground.
He needs to move. He stumbles up into the driver’s seat, chest heaving and throat raw from coughing. He fumbles–half-blind–for the keys, but his fingers twitch and the keys slip from his hands. His eyes close as he slumps back against the seat and watches emerald shadows dance across his eyelids. A low rumble starts behind the car, but he can’t bring himself to wonder about it. He should be dead. He probably could be, if he just breathed a little deeper, breathed a little less. Where is Lee? How was he going to save her?
A knock vibrates through the metal of the car. Buck tenses then—eyes closed—inches his hand towards his gun in the backseat. If it’s a cop or some other kind of nobody, they should leave him alone after a while, or else they can get hit in the head with the butt of his rifle. If they’re one of Z’Oiseau’s men, they can get shot. Whatever morals Buck believed he had were out the window with Lee on the line.
The knock sounds again. Buck’s hand curls around his rifle. This is not going to be how Buck Vernon goes out. If he can’t be black-brained, he can’t be taken out by whoever’s standing on the other side of his own goddamn door. The musket shakes in his hand, his arm still jittering from the drug in his system.
“Don’t you gotta go get your girl? What’s sleeping in your car gonna help?”
Buck opens an eye, shifts the gun to a more accessible position, and lets go.
The dead boy from the road—Johnnie, he thinks—looks distinctly dead under the light of the moon. He’s lost all the scars and literal evidence of getting taken out, but his eyes glow with a strange yellow sheen and his skin still looks those few minutes into gradual decomposition. Buck really thought that nothing could really rattle him anymore, but something about how quiet the kid’s footsteps were when he readjusted his stance, how long the moments between his blinks, like he had to remind himself…
“I know all you’ve seen me do is die and get back up but it seems like you’re in deep trouble and I don’t wanna pull myself back up to the land of the living again today trying to help you. You ain’t so unkind that you wouldn’t let me in, are you?”
Buck slowly turned the key and unlocked the passenger door. Part of him wants to hit the gas, to run this kid over and leave him dead in the road again with whatever truths he seems to want to tell. Still, another part of him can already see the kid getting right back up again, going to tell the world what Buck tried to do and ruining any change Lee and him have at a normal life. It hardly feels like his decision.
Johnnie’s eyes flick over to the trees, scanning for something. The darkness cloaks near everything, but after a while of looking Buck could just barely make out an object—Johnnie’s bike—covered in a dark tarp.
Buck shifts his focus back to the interior of the car to find Johnnie already in the passenger seat, elbow on the window and feet resting on the dashboard. Time can’t keep slipping like this, Buck knows. The Vide Noir’s still throwing him in and out of pain and total consciousness. Maybe it is just safer to try and shoot the kid. This time Buck lost time to find Johnnie in the passenger seat, the next Buck could lose time to find Johnnie holding his knife to Buck’s throat.
A chill runs through the car, though Buck can’t tell if it’s because of the wind or his fried nervous system. He grips the steering wheel, knuckles white underneath a thin layer of crusted black ooze. He glances back up at Johnny, who has followed his gaze to the Vide Noir on his knuckles.
“You know your name?”
Buck hesitates. Is this a trap? Doesn’t matter. This kid already knows who he is, whether or not he knows his name. “Buck Vernon.”
“So you’re at least a little here. So, Vernon, are we going to get your girl back?” His voice is quick and fiery.
Buck tries to speak, but his words get caught on bile and blood. “What are you doing here?” he finally chokes.
“I figured I’d come and check on you, seeing as how you helped me outta death.”
Buck’s vision blurs, and his blood goes cold. A stabbing pain runs through his head. “Are you real?”
“Does it matter?” Johnnie pulls the knife from his belt and starts flipping it absentmindedly. “Are we driving?”
“Yeah .”
“I mean,” Johnnie starts, pulling a cigarette from his pocket and grabbing a light from Buck’s glovebox, “I don’t wanna be dead or part of your black-brained drug trip, so I don’t think I ain’t real. But if I ain’t real, then I’m real enough to flip this knife and open that door, so what does it matter? You talked to any other ghosts tonight?”
Buck thought back to Frankie Lou. “Yes.”
Johnnie freezes, eyes wide. It seems he hasn’t truly considered the idea that he might not be real. With him sitting so still, it’s painfully obvious that his chest doesn’t move with his breath. Buck shivers. “Shit,” Johnnie laughs. He shakes his head. “Shit, I might be dead.”
“You were dead,” Buck points out plainly.
Johnnie shakes his head again, running the risk of throwing his cigarette out of his mouth. “Yeah, but I ain’t dead dead, or I didn’t think I was. I thought maybe I was just like Avery somehow, but if I ain’t then I’m just some kinda spirit in your mind. Shit.”
Buck glances over at him. “You’re probably as real as any of us.”
“And why’s that?”
A sigh escapes his lips. He’d expected to feel a lot of things tonight, but boredom wasn’t one of them. “My hallucination wouldn’t think this much.”
Johnnie laughs again, real and loud. “So where are we headed?”
“Z’Oiseau’s.”
Buck waits for some kind of reaction, something to indicate that that’d scare Johnnie away, but instead he sees Johnnie straighten up, stash his knife, and fix his jacket. “I know that’s not far,” Johnnie notes, “but are you in a shape for walking?”
“I could take it.”
“Nobody ever teach you about conserving your energy?” Annoyance floods through Buck at the insinuation that Johnnie was in any position to give him advice, but he can feel the Vide Noir drying on his chin and the random twitching of his hand and right eye, and that lends some credibility to the kid’s perspective.
“What’s your grand idea?”
Johnnie shrugs. “I know how to drive, and you’ve still got the telltale signs of a black-braining all down your chin. That kinda thing’s got some strong after-effects. How about we switch sides and you tell me where to go?”
“So you can drive me off a cliff?”
“I ain’t gotta do all that if I want you dead, all I’ve gotta do is leave you here.”
Buck shoots a glance back to his rifle, his jaw clenched. He’s quick about it, but Johnnie’s quicker, and Buck watches his hand fly to his side.
“But I just said I ain’t gonna do that,” Johnnie reminds him, and Buck scans his face before he nods.
Buck goes back to staring at the windshield. Johnnie puts his elbow back on the car door. Buck hopes he’s right. He’s learned he’s a worse judge of character as he believed.
A cloud passes over the bright moon above, forcing the night to take on a darker cloak. They had wasted too much time here, sitting and being suspicious of each other. He could have Lee in his arms right now, or he could be dying trying to get her back. Both seem more appealing than feeling useless. Feeling stuck. Wallowing in whatever could’ve happened instead of getting back on his mission. He can’t tell if he’s becoming more or less lucid, only that he’s becoming more and more sure of how he wants to die if he’s going to die tonight. And it’s not from sitting here waiting to see if the kid is going to shoot him, and it’s not from letting the Vide Noir take its course.
He rolls down the window and vomits one more time for good measure. An emerald glow swirls out of the clear and black puddle. His heart starts pounding fast. Follow the emerald star . Buck opens the door, staring down at the dirt, ready to dig, to fall, to gaze up at the sky until it rained down answers. He has some vague idea that he’s falling forwards, but he doesn’t particularly care.
A cold hand grabs the back of his jacket. “Can’t die until I get to drive.”
The emerald glow fades. Buck’s head burns . “What?” He mutters to himself.
“Well it’s pretty simple, ain’t it,” Johnnie starts, letting him go and walking around to kick dirt onto Buck’s puke. “I wanna know how fast your car can go, but I’m gonna get some questions if the car I’m driving is yours and you’re dead.” He opens Buck’s door.
“You’re gonna crash my car?” Buck gurgles, using Johnnie’s arm as a support as he steps out onto solid ground.
The headlights made Johnnie’s smile look unnaturally bright. “You can trust me.”
It takes longer than Buck’d like to admit for him to get settled in the passenger’s seat. Johnnie’s footprints are still over the dash, and Buck almost yells about it, but then he remembers that Johnnie’s got the keys and the pedals and Buck’s gun is now out of reach, so he gives up. Instead, he finds the empty crystal bottle of Vide Noir on the floor and runs his fingers across it.
He glances over as Johnnie starts the car and begins to pull onto the road. When he looks back at the bottle, fresh Vide Noir has begun spilling all over his fingertips from the small opening at the top of the bottle. It climbs down his hands and begins to leak through the corners of Buck’s mouth into his throat, slithering down into his stomach and making his heart seize painfully. A terrible certainty grips him all over again, stopping whatever breath he has left.
He is going to die. He is going to die without Lee.
The Vide Noir covers his eyes and sends him toppling back into the recording studio. He stumbles back, crashing into his empty chair. Lee is looking at him funny, and he can’t figure out why. She’s laughing, and it’s the most beautiful laugh in the world. The way her eyes crinkle and her lips fly open makes him both desperately embarrassed and horrendously hopeful.
“Buck,” she laughs, reaching out to tuck a piece of his hair behind his ear. “Buck, get up. We’ve gotta finish the song.”
He laughs, but it doesn’t feel right. He can’t figure out why. His head is aching,
“Sorry,” he manages, smiling and pushing himself upright.
Something in Lee’s expression changes. Is something wrong? She’s looking behind him, like she’s looking at somebody else, but Buck knows there’s nobody there. He’s done this before, and there was no one there on the first go around. Her eyes drift back to him. She has the most beautiful eyes. He wants those eyes to stay on him forever.
“Buck,” she asks, grabbing his chin and tilting his eyes towards the light. “Why are you crying?”
Confused, he reaches up to his eye, but breathes out a slow sigh of relief. It’s not tears, he realizes. It’s snow from the frozen pines which stretch out beyond her like the train on a wedding dress. There’s no reason for either of them to cry. He tries to tell her that, but his throat is beginning to feel raw, and he can’t seem to manage the words. She puts her warm hand on his shoulder and leans in close to look into his eyes. Her breath is warm against his cheek and smells like cheap coffee.
Johnnie shakes his shoulder hard with his dead hand. “Vernon. Hey, Vernon, come back!”
The cold shock of the world sends him scrambling for his rifle. Somebody’s breathing too loud and too fast. He wishes they would stop.
“Buck, snap out of it. There’s nobody out here. You start seeing stuff again? You stopped breathing for a bit there. I know a lot but I don’t know how to make you breathe again once you’ve stopped. Seems we can only do that ourselves.”
A quick glance told Buck they’re driving on a new, dark road, and driving fast. “Where are we?”
“Not too far out.”
“Shouldn’t we be there already?”
Johnnie’s eyes are wild, scanning the road ahead. The speedometer seems to be hovering a little above ninety. “We were there, Vernon, but you weren’t there, and I ain’t about to leave you on the porch as a free kill. We’ve been driving the other way about forty minutes now, figured when you came to we’d turn around and you’d have that long to recover.”
“Forty minutes?”
Johnnie flashes him an unreadable look. “What, it not feel like it?”
Buck slumps back. “No.” His breath comes from his chest in a weak whisper. “You didn’t have anywhere better to be for forty minutes?”
“What, you think I’m gonna find a better thrill tonight than helping you out?” The kid shakes his head. Buck notices that he’s not blinking anymore. “Ain’t much out there for me tonight. You wishing I’d left?”
“Guess not.” He groans and sits up in the seat. “Are you still taking me to Z’Oiseaus?”
Johnnie keeps his eyes on the road. “I know he’d kill both of us if he knew I’d told you, but you know Alex had this girl once. I was pretty young at the time so I never talked much to her, but he really liked her. Killed four guys for her, if I remember. Whatever she told him to do he did.”
“Where are we headed? I have to get to Lee.” He whips furiously towards the driver's seat. “Turn around.”
A crack of thunder rings in the distance, but no rain falls. Johnnie eyes him nervously, before veering the car off the road and beginning to turn. He tries to play his nervousness off as a laugh. “I’m getting there,” he promises. “So, Alex loves this girl. Has her meet us and everything. She mighta even met Avery, I’m not sure.”
All the names sound foreign to Buck. He can feel his hand twitching, either from the drug or from his own frustration. Johnnie keeps talking. “Point is, he was serious about this girl. Fought for her and everything. But she wasn’t serious about him. One night she gets up and leaves. Says none more than three words to Alex and leaves.”
“What’s your point?” Buck snaps.
“Alex was torn up. And I mean torn up . I ain’t ever seen him cry more than twice and that was the second. And part of him wanted to follow, but when a girl tells one of us no , we take it. And anyway it’s just that I was talking to Lady Moonbeam earlier an–”
“This is my car, you say what you mean.”
“You sure this girl wants you? She told you so?”
Lightning cracks on the horizon, emerald green. Somewhere behind that cloud Lee was waiting for him. “This is my car. I’ve got a rifle in the back and I know how fast I should drive so I’m gone by the time you’d be in any shape to follow.” Then, realizing how quickly Johnnie was scanning the car, answers “she told me so.”
Johnnie nods. “Hey, can you hand me that light again?”