Chapter Text
The world went dark.
Then, the world went bright.
The world spun, screamed, and sucked reality through the air like a vacuum tube, tight and unyielding.
The world tilted, trembled, and collapsed upon itself in one screaming implosion, bundling and compacting matter and dream together tight, tight, tighter, until it suddenly turned inside out and burst open as gory and glorious as an overfed tick’s self-determined suicide—
—and spat out a man.
For several seconds, or minutes, or maybe years, Noel had no idea where up and down were, or if they even existed. He was in the air, he knew— or something like air, only it was an atmosphere entirely removed from any universe’s laws of physics— and then he was on the ground, rolling across coarse ground that dug into his skin like teeth as though an enormous force had shoved him through a tunnel and sent him tumbling to its end. Then he jerked to a sudden stop, as though the same force had jerked him back by the neck and pinned him for the final kill, jaws wide, teeth dripping.
Noel rolled onto his back, half-limp. He gasped a ragged breath through the fire that the rough sand had left across all his exposed skin, the air itself burning to touch. His head spun and his vision was tilting a million directions all at once, so he shut his eyes for the moment. Back to himself, back inside where nothing was real except what was in his own head— that was always safer. (sometimes)
Nothing quite made sense right now. Things didn’t normally make sense, not for him, but something felt even more off-kilter than usual. He needed to get that thing— whatever it was, wherever it hid— straightened out. He needed to get control of everything again. Needed to hold the world down until it worked right.
Thankfully, the rocks digging into his back offered a sharp clarity. He quickly latched onto that handhold point above confusion’s chasm swirling below him, reaching for the first step that might save him. Always one step at a time. Marching along.
From there, he was able to slowly check through the other sensations moving writhing piercing on his body:
Arms, legs, and back all atop coarse sand and gravel, heavy as lead.
Skin stinging, ears ringing. Both half between too-dull and too-sharp.
Intestines churning as they tried to remember what direction to realign themselves to. Intestines failing to figure that out.
His nose burned as though inhaling fire itself, and so did his throat as he desperately gasped in through his mouth in an attempt to refill punched-out lungs. It took a monumental effort to make each inhalation even, but his body had long ago learned how to take over and step through the necessary rituals for survival. So his stomach moved itself carefully up and down while he breathed as best he could, and worked to—
Wait.
He…
He-
He was breathing.
Fast yet hesitant, Noel raised his arm and placed a shaking hand over the epicenter of pain on his throat, terrified out of his god damn mind for what leaden inevitability he might find.
His fingers ghosted over the caldera of blood, palm sliding in behind, and slowly the reality climbed from his nerves to his mind: the wheezing from one too many holes above his shoulders had stopped, and the violent hole had closed, leaving only a rough scar covered in tacky, half-dry blood and the dull ring of past pain through the surrounding muscle. The bullet hole had near-perfectly healed. The precipice that Noel had been wavering on ever since he looked into the barrel of Larson’s gun and fell into the blackness, had dissolved, and Noel was— once again— alive.
Instinctually, Noel started to try piecing together the mystery of How and Why, but he slapped the urge away as soon as it came. Shut up, Finley. Prioritize. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and all that. He had more pressing issues at hand, anyway.
Starting with: Where the hell was he?
He had been in a grain terminal last he knew, deadweight, slung over a serial killer’s shoulder and making ugly sounds through his throat, as he waited quietly for the world to go dark for the final time.
And now he was- not there. Somewhere else. He just needed to sort through the evidence, piece the picture together. Sure. Fine. He could do that— it was his job, his duty, the one thing he had to be good at.
He still didn't trust his mind to stave off vertigo, so he kept his eyes shut and began to explore through the other senses outside of his own body.
Noel flexed his hands over the ground. It shifted with him, and sharp, fine rocks dug into the skin of his palms. The ground felt mostly level. He at least hadn’t started rolling or falling anywhere again, which was really all that mattered. It also felt cool, but the environment around wasn’t cold enough to hold its lower temperature for long, because his body had already begun warming the rocks underneath.
A gentle breeze curled around his ears, a low whistle. It wasn’t exactly cold, but it was mildly cool, especially against the sheen of sweat and half-dry blood over his skin. Somewhere not quite in the distance he could hear a low, slow rhythm as waves kneaded the boundary of water and beach, mocking the similar melody of waxing and waning dizziness in his skull.
Several minutes passed— or perhaps much longer for all Noel’s drunk-stumbling mind could tell— and sluggishly the final regiments of his senses and awareness began to fall in place, finding their way back to him.
He took stock of his own mind. Took stock of the creak of bones and joints, of the light filtering from beyond eyelids. Of the smells and tastes that flowed in as he opened his mouth to inhale a slow, exploratory breath, and find-
to find…
to…
to
find.
The taste of sulfur and salt burrowing into the back of the mouth—
(no…)
The congestion of thoughts suddenly become tangible—
(no)
The hum of dreams themselves hanging thick like dust in the air—
(nononoNONONO)
NO.
He was- he'd been free, free god dammit free please god he couldn’t come back here not here not here
Here in hell here where he’d died here where Charlie was going to die again he would die he was dying dead
Charlie scrambled to his feet, panting shaking shattering under the heavy phantom chains (or tendrils or tentacles no please god no no) wrapping around his hands ankles ribs throat, trying in vain to shake them off as he darted his gaze around like a dying hare.
This gray and gravel beach wasn't the black and stone prison where Charlie had been before, but he knew he knew this was the same land the same nightmare. Matter twisted wrong to burn in his lungs, atmosphere clawed in between nerve endings, and the past crawled its way straight to the present and twisted the two together into some perverted memorial invading upon every place where it did not belong.
Charlie could not even tell if this was the present, or if the present was even when he’d remembered it being. Maybe he’d never made it out, maybe he’d never been free and comfort had only been yet another dream, just one more shoddy play that he’d once again fallen for like some idiotic toddler only for his parents to tut mockingly as they chided his naivety, yanked him from the theater, and let the sun burn him back into reality.
Poor, foolish Charlie. Caught again. Dying hare lying back down in the snare. Lonely prisoner crawling back to the warden’s feet.
The voice pulsing out each sneer was familiar, more familiar than every other voice he’d ever loved and more cloying than all those he’d hated, squirming in from its throne and shouting its mockery loud loud deafening paralyzing within his brain and pinning him to the ground through his skull.
And the voice was right. Right, yes. Of course it was.
Trapped, as always. Never free. It shouldn’t have been a surprise by now, but somehow it felt like the first time he’d ever been shot on a case back in Arkham, the first time he’d ever watched the world melt into a surrealist canvas in the Pits, the shock and gasp of sudden pain that eclipsed all other thoughts and functions and that left you clutching a torn shoulder or a shredded mind on the ground.
Charlie wanted to shred that mind further he wanted to cram it back in his skull and scream he wanted to wake up and find his stained apartment wall in front of him or a crooked-grinned golden-curled boy or a set of hands owned by two different people holding him to tell him that this wasn’t real it was all a lie it was real no it wasn’t real it—
An awful groan crawled its way from behind him.
Charlie spun around to find whatever threat or nightmare awaited him.
He struggled to make sense of it.
There, on the ground, was a- a man? A familiar man, in fact. His pristine anachronism of a suit was torn, more tatters than outfit, likely by a similar stinging tumble across the rough ground. Once neatly-combed blonde hair now sprawled askew atop the head of a prone body, blood and vitreous humor spilling across the agonized grooves of a cruel, panting face.
Wallace Larson, dying.
What the hell.
So this was the present (however he could define the ‘present’ at this point in life).
And this was- it was real? Yes. Probably. Tentatively.
Okay, okay fine— Noel could work with that. Real meant he could find a tangible foothold and stand on his own. Real meant he could survive.
That was what he needed to do, then: survive. Doing that meant getting someplace safe—someplace he could breathe unthreatened for at least a couple hours— which probably meant getting away from the sneering pile of blood and cloth that wheezed nearby. Not that Larson could do anything in this state, but Noel knew better than to trust the barest hint of security, especially in the Dreamlands— here, pretty hurt, ugly hurt, and everything in between did, too. Nothing could be trusted, except for his own mind.
But where could he go that would not be more dangerous? Where in this hellscape could he find a single corner that would not only bring more hurt?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t move.
Any step meant death or pain or capture.
Any step was wrong and any step was right and any step would twist him tighter in this spider web that he’d already cut his way out of once but just couldn’t ever seem to shake.
No matter how careful how strong how determined he was, he wasn’t able to clean the filth out of his own skin. No matter what move he made, he only dug himself deeper into hell.
He was shaking with the need to flee to fight to survive god dammit, but he couldn’t move and he wondered if maybe if it would just be easier to lay down before the beast pinned him, if it would be less painful to get a head start plunging under the water before more suffering came, if it would be better to just let himself d-
“No!”
The sudden shout made Noel jump. Trembling, he looked up to take in the other man that he had entirely missed earlier.
This man, he had never seen before. This man was sprawled on the ground, thick fingers clutching the gravel and thick arms shaking with the effort to hold him up as he crawled toward Larson’s pathetic, nearly-cadaverous body. Black hair fell from his warm dark brown skin, braids that swished about his shoulders and glinted with gold jewelry, even in the dreary air. Earrings clung up the curve of his ear shells and ones down on the lobes glinted in the sunlight. The long golden cloak clasped around his neck kept slipping under his palms and causing him to stumble, though it did not stop his determined, unwavering path.
“Get up,” he growled, reaching Larson’s side. “Get up.” He tangled his shaking fists in the tattered fabric of the red cloak. A wheeze half-coated in a wet gurgle pulled from Larson at the sudden jostle, but the man didn’t seem to care, eyes frantic, voice trembling as he focused everything on the dying body.
“You-” the man panted, “You promised me! You said you would make me a king again— you can not die. Not now, not before you help m- b-before you-” He was gasping and growling all at once, the air within him warring with itself about what it should become. An awful strangled noise pulled its way out of his throat as he glared down, a half-sob, half-shout: “Get up!”
Ice exploded through Noel’s veins like a lightning strike. Everything within him narrowed in on the man before him, the voice that brushed close. Too close. Right up to a decade-wide chasm in his mind and marrow, to the details he could remember with flashbomb clarity:
The rumble in the periphery of those sound waves, like pure shadow and dream.
The metal of that timbre, the sharp sting that felt capable of slicing through skin.
The echoes of that voice, the feeling that completely matched the aftershocks permanently etched into Charlie’s brain matter through excesses of lies and violations.
Revolver— he- he had a revolver.
Charlie fumbled it out of the holster and aimed it at the man. Everything was shaking.
He knew the answer but he did not want to know, so he asked anyway.
“Wh-who are you?”
The man startled viciously, completely unaware of the other person standing nearby until now, as if he was not used to caring about the physical world around him. He furrowed his brows, eyes struggling to focus against the sky’s light.
“Y-” The man stuttered, hesitated and licked his lips. “…Yellow. My name is Yellow.”
Yellow.
The King.
Hastur.
Noel clicked the hammer.
He felt like every atom was trembling on the edge of nuclear fission, but his hands were surprisingly steady as they pointed the barrel directly at the man's (not a man) face. “Get back.”
Hastur blinked. “What?”
“Get. Back.”
He only stared at Noel blankly.
Noel wanted to scream.
Why wasn’t he doing anything?
That wasn’t- Hastur didn’t just not do things; every single second was a game played with every single atom of the universe, physical or metaphysical. Reality was a toy, a marble that he rolled through his knife-claw fingers, meticulously aimed, and shot to ricochet off physics and logic. He was an endless ocean, a swarm of life and death and cold and darkness that never stopped moving, never stopped shifting and pushing and moulding everything around it with unearthly force.
Confusion oozed its way into the pound of panic in Noel’s veins. Somewhere within, a mirror threatened to shatter. Maybe it already had.
This was wrong, wrong wrong so wrong. Silence was wrong, stillness was wrong.
“Did you not fucking hear me?” Noel spat.
“I…” Hastur spoke slowly, stupidly (wrong this was wrong). “I cannot leave him.” He looked back down lamely at Larson, seeming to get lost in thought as he gazed with an unidentifiable furrow to his brows at the man’s groaning form.
“I’m not askin’,” Charlie snarled. “Get the fuck away from me before I lodge this whole round in your ugly fuckin’ skull.”
Hastur curled his lip, but did not look up at Charlie. “I cannot leave him,” he hissed.
Charlie stared.
Hastur did not move an inch.
What the fuck.
Charlie wondered if he’d somehow fallen into an alternate universe, one where his head was full of acid-soaked cotton and the world had been turned a few degrees to the left, similar but entirely off-balance. Wrong.
He was waiting for Hastur to lunge. Waiting for him to snap. To steal and imprison and manipulate. To do something— anything, god dammit.
Instead of draping relief over him, the prolonged paralysis of the scene only compacted more and more tension inside him, one swelling cloud of paralysis and past and over-awareness that choked out all calm and logic.
The mirror shook harder.
Charlie wasn’t breathing but he was panting, shallow gasps drawn in quicker and unsteadier than he thought his lungs could move. Distantly, he wondered if he would simply asphyxiate himself here, dying trapped by nothing more than a set of bright yellow eyes and a cruel rumbling voice for the millionth time, only he knew hoped dreaded that this time death would actually stick, and it all would have been for nothing everything maybe something.
A little less distantly, a familiar voice barked at him, rough with too much nicotine and too little sleep and just enough protective irritation as it bounced of old office walls. Don’t just lay down, kid. You gotta survive. Get up.
Noel grabbed that voice for the lifeline it had always been.
Right. Okay.
He needed to move— he needed to survive.
Careful to watch for Hastur’s movement in the periphery, Noel glanced around properly for the first time, and saw that the sea to one side was dark and softly churning, as unsafe as any body of water was sure to be in this realm. On the other side, the gravel beach quickly blended into rocky expanses that stretched on all the way to the horizon, dotted with boulders and small dips and rises in the stony landscape. Not ideal. But it was the only way forward and out and away. He could always crawl behind a boulder or beneath a big enough outcrop when Hastur inevitably pursued and he needed to hide.
It was good enough to stay alive for a little while longer.
Revolver back in its holster but hand hovering just above it, he started to march away from the beach. Moving on, getting out, getting away.
Hastur didn’t say anything, didn’t even turn around to watch Noel leave, and it made the mirror seize uncontrollably inside.
Whatever.
Ignore it. Run, hide, survive.
Noel didn’t look back. The things behind him never mattered. It was what lay before him that mattered, the future just on the horizon, the mantra of one more day, get through one more day. He would make it to another day.
He set one determined foot down after the next, over the rocks and sand, away from danger, one step, then another step, one step and step and step and-
His right foot froze. He couldn’t move.
What the hell? Noel tried to push his foot forward again, and again and again, drawing it back and bringing it forward only to have it stop suddenly in the same spot. Pushed as though it ran into a wall, pulled as though it was tied to a post, controlled as though by some force of manipulation or magic—
Noel spun around. Barely fifty feet of ground stood between him and the object of his blame.
Hastur glanced up from his still-bowed head, eyes glaring with guarded judgment.
Fire panic outrage blazed through Noel. “Let me go,” he growled.
Hastur raised his head the rest of the way. His lip curled in contempt, brows lowered in both confusion and resentment. “I am not holding onto you.”
“Cut the shit.” Noel tried to step back again, throwing his weight into the frenzied push. He went nowhere. “Let go of me!”
A growl rolled from Hastur’s chest; the sound prickled against a panic-response buried deep in Noel’s ribcage. “I am doing nothing, human, except letting you waste my time on this drivel. Do not blame me for your own incompetence-”
Hastur started to unfurl from his bow over Larson and went to lean back, likely to throw that stupid haughty glare of his, but he stopped abruptly halfway through the motion. His brows furrowed. Turning his head, he began patting the air behind him, except it didn’t react like air. It was as if a brick wall sat just barely an inch behind his body, and his palm kept slapping to a stop. Trapped.
He whipped his head back to Noel. “What- What the hell did you do?”
“Me?” Noel reeled. “You think I could do any of this freak magic shit? This is your thing, asshole.”
“I have no idea what this force is, let alone how I would have done it. Nor why I would have wanted to, human.”
“Then what the fuck is your explanation, huh?”
“I do not know!” The stomach-churning reverberation of Hastur’s voice seemed to carry over to this body, at least when he was yelling.
Noel wanted to dig in his fists and rip out whatever vocal cords were making that sound from Hastur. He dug his nails into his palms instead, deep and sharp. Real. “Well, somebody’s gotta have a hand on this, and it sure as hell ain’t me.”
“And it is not me, either,” Hastur spat. “I would not bother wasting any energy on the likes of you. Your weakness is worth nothing to me.”
“Fuck off. I don’t want to be stuck anywhere near you, neither, goldie.”
“Then perhaps, detective, you should stop trying to rip my throat out and focus on what is actually wrong here to fucking fix it.”
God fucking dammit. Yeah, sure maybe Noel should have gone with the more practical approach to this (even though he wanted nothing more than to slam a certain god’s head into the rocks instead, watch it spool out red or gold or whatever filth was jammed inside).
Noel took as steadying a breath as he could manage. “Right, sure.”
Rage or fear or maybe every emotion he’d ever felt before churned faster and hotter than a geyser under his skin, but if there was one thing Noel could always fall back on, it was logic. Taking it one step at a time. Piecing together the puzzle. Figuring out the picture and setting everything back into place where it belonged.
Okay, Finley, come on. Look around. Gather the evidence.
He tried to take a step back. Still nothing.
A step forward. That worked.
Another step back. Fine. One more back. Not fine.
He gestured over, and now Hastur tried to lean back. That worked, too, for a bit. But he didn’t get far before he ran into another invisible block again.
“Lean forward now,” Noel directed.
Surprisingly, Hastur listened, crouching closer to Larson.
Noel tried one more step back. It worked, letting him move to that distance of forty, fifty or so feet away again.
But no further.
Fuck.
“It’s a tether,” Noe managed around the bile in his mouth. “We can’t go past it.”
“A- tether?”
“Tying us. We’re-” More bile, too much. Noel swallowed it, shuddered. “We’re bound.”
Hastur blinked. “So… so the two of us have to move together.”
Noel curled his lip. “Appears so.”
Silence curled tight for a second, a rattlesnake just before it strikes.
Then Hastur said “I am not leaving” at the same time that Noel said “I ain’t staying here.”
Noel reeled back. “What?”
Hastur lifted his chin. “I am not leaving his side,” he stated, curling his fingers tighter into Larson’s sleeve, protective, like he owned the man.
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because I need him. He is going to lead me back to my throne. To my home.”
“And he’s gonna do it lookin’ like that?” Noel gestured at the… everything, about Larson’s current state.
Hastur glanced down at Larson, devastation and disgust flickering across his face as though just now acknowledging the rivulets of gore dripping off the man’s face and the now-barely noticeable erratic twitches of his muscles. “He… he will. He swore it.”
“There is no way you still think that leech is a ‘man of his word.’”
“…he could be.”
“But he ain’t.”
Hastur did not look up
Noel bit back the sharp curses begging to burst from his mouth and stab into the man-shaped being kneeling in front of him. Much as every instinct wanted to tear into Hastur’s flesh with molten anger and force him to move, he knew that gods did not work like that— they didn’t respond to angry force (usually). Anger toward a god beget torture toward a mortal. No, he needed to think about this practically. Get the stupid brute to his feet and at least get them started heading toward survival.
Figure it out, or die, soldier. Make him fall in line.
“Look,” Noel said slowly, “he’s done for. No use denying it, and no use wastin’ our time trying to glue together guts and gore. Leave him— he’s got nothing to offer anymore. We don’t have a choice in whether the two of us have to move on, but he’s expendable.”
“Expendable…”
Noel tried not to gag over the taste of the word, especially hearing it from Hastur’s mouth, no matter how oddly dazed and conflicted he sounded while saying it. “Yes. That's the kinda math you get, yeah?”
More hesitation from Hastur almost made Noel snap. He bit his tongue until he tasted copper and decided to try again, tired of making his survival wait for someone else's discomfort.
“You’ll never survive half a day here if you insist on holding onto parasites just because they made you feel nice once upon a time. Rip him out and drop him.”
“I do not need to survive, I am not one of you fragile mortal-” Hastur cut himself off, his curled lip softening as he looked down at his body, suddenly taking in its plush, vulnerable limbs made of flesh, the way they trembled in the sun. Fear— or whatever Noel figured was as close to ‘fear’ that the monster could feel— scattered through his eyes. “I- I do not… I…”
He abruptly shot his gaze back to Noel. “You know how to survive here?”
Noel deftly did not think about the frantic tone to his voice. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“Then… you-” Hastur flexed his fingers in a lost sort of way, then curled them tight into fists. He jutted his chin up too high, eyes burning. “Then you will do everything possible to keep us alive for now.”
Ah, there was the self-important command Noel was used to.
It made Noel’s blood churn, made him want to burrow deep in a hole and hide, or slam a rock into Hastur’s skull until the gold faded from his eyes. But it worked.
“Fine,” Noel bit out.
Hastur nodded. Finally, he started to stand up.
Somehow, though, Larson must have been holding onto a final, desperate scrap of coherence, because he let out a ghastly groan as Hastur stood and let go of his arm.
Hastur glanced back down at the sound.
A strange, pained confliction flashed over his face.
Noel didn’t give him time to second guess. He snapped his fingers. “Expendable, goldie. Remember. Take only what you need.”
“…right.” Stiffly, Hastur brought a leg up and stepped over Larson’s wheezing body. He couldn’t quite take his eyes off the man though.
Noel turned around, uninterested in (or unable to) look at the confounding mix of emotions displayed so openly on Hastur’s face. He set his jaw, glaring forward to the sharp, stone-littered horizon that swam in heatless heat waves, a No Man’s Land that would sooner be traded for his first war than travelled again. It hurt to watch the figure behind him, it hurt to watch the horizon ahead, it hurt to close his eyes and focus only on the raging battlefield of past and present warring inside his own head.
But all his choices over the years had always boiled down to different strains of poison. This was no different than any other point in his life. He knew how to hold his shit together.
Breathe.
Evaluate.
Survive.
Noel inhaled.
(this is real)
Exhaled.
(this is real)
Set his shoulders, lifted his chin, and opened his mouth.
“Let’s get goin’.”
Without bothering to check if Hastur was ready to follow, he took a step and moved forward, welcoming the grating crunch of non-earthly gravel to drown out the drone of screams dropping like bombs in his head.