White Wool

by NeverHornyOnMain

Summary:

“Colum.”

It looks at you, pretending attentiveness.

“It’s your fault this thing is here,” you say to it, though you’re not really speaking to the thing sitting in front of you. The man you’re speaking to is somewhere your voice may never reach again.

It does not respond. It never responds to you verbally.

If only your voice had reached him in your final moments, you wouldn’t be having this one-sided conversation with a thing that looks just like your nephew but has no mind of its own.

“It’s your fault,” you hiss at it, standing abruptly, your chair scraping noisily against the ancient wooden floor, and you’re no longer sure if your words are even directed at the man who is not really here, or at yourself.

It’s your fault he’s dead.

The thought haunts your every conscious moment, but you shove it down and redirect your blame to him because it’s easier, especially when he’s not here to give you that look he gets when he’s tired of you being obstinate or otherwise difficult but won’t voice it out of loyalty.

Silas is alone, except for this thing.

Notes:

Please have my take on how Silas was doing in the River bubble outside of that single scene of him we get.

Hint: it wasn't great.

Also, I had two ideas of how to end this, one which is more canon compliant at least how I see it, and one which was more of an emotional gut-punch. So I decided to write both. The second chapter is just a very short addendum of the version that is less canon-compliant but more angsty. Entirely optional to read.

Chapter 1

It sits at the table.

Unassuming. Silent. Unmoving.

The first two things are not unusual for the person it pretends to be, but the third is uncanny.

The empty, soulless constructs that round out the population of this masquerade do very little when not in the presence of the heretic Ninth necromancer, but Colum – it’s not him, and you have to remind yourself of that even now, even all these days later, even with his uncanny empty stillness – is the worst of them, you suspect.

You and your cavalier had done your utmost to avoid Harrowhark Nonagesimus as much as possible during your cohabitation within Canaan House in life, and so now, in this ghostly nightmare, she cannot conceive of even a fraction of the nephew you know and love and lost.

It’s torture.

The River is not, generally and literally speaking, Hell. You know this intimately; you send your cavalier to the mouth of Hell each time you siphon from him. But this bubble the Ninth necromancer has created – unknowingly, you’re reasonably certain, but that does not absolve her of her guilt for it – is your personal version of hell.

Every day you wake up to find this facsimile of the man you killed sitting listlessly at the table in your quarters, or polishing his armor, or sharpening his sword.

It’s all he does. A plex-thin veil of normalcy, the only activities that that wretched woman can apparently imagine your cavalier doing.

It’s not him.

And yet, the resemblance is seemingly exact. You can’t help but wonder if the birthmark your cavalier bears on his left shoulderblade exists on this soulless copy. You don’t dare check.

It would let you, though.

The real Colum would have, too. Despite his two instances of disobedience, you know he would have allowed you to check.

But this construct would just sit there blankly as you undressed it to see for yourself, and that’s something you cannot stomach.

It’s the stillness that upsets you the most. Colum was never still. Not in private. In public, yes, you can understand where that impression comes from. In public he is always at your heel, standing or sitting patiently until you make a move, forever following your lead and waiting for your cues.

But behind closed doors stillness was never his way. He was rarely at rest unless in bed – always cleaning or training his body or looking after you and your house or his weapons and armor. It’s only the last behavior that remains, and the stillness he exhibits the rest of the time makes you feel sick and discomfited.

“Colum.”

It looks at you, pretending attentiveness.

“It’s your fault this thing is here,” you say to it, though you’re not really speaking to the thing sitting in front of you. The man you’re speaking to is somewhere your voice may never reach again.

It does not respond. It never responds to you verbally.

If only your voice had reached him in your final moments, you wouldn’t be having this one-sided conversation with a thing that looks just like your nephew but has no mind of its own.

“It’s your fault,” you hiss at it, standing abruptly, your chair scraping noisily against the ancient wooden floor, and you’re no longer sure if your words are even directed at the man who is not really here, or at yourself.

It’s your fault he’s dead.

The thought haunts your every conscious moment, but you shove it down and redirect your blame to him because it’s easier, especially when he’s not here to give you that look he gets when he’s tired of you being obstinate or otherwise difficult but won’t voice it out of loyalty.

It just sits there silently, eyes tracking you as you pace the room, and you itch under its soulless stare. You hate the way it looks at you with his eyes. His empty eyes that look just as though he’s yet to return to his body from being siphoned.

Like the real Colum could arrive at any moment to inhabit this cursed thing.

After all, a soulless River construct differs little from a soulless corporeal body.

“I bid you return,” you try – not for the first time since you found yourself in this bubble of hell – and it comes out hollow, pointless as you know the words to be.

It sits there in its mockery of attentive silence, eyes still empty as they’d been before your appeal, body hollow as your words.

You stalk towards it and swing, open-handed. Its face turns to one side with the force of your slap, and then the other way when you follow it up with an even more forceful backhand.

It turns itself back to face front and looks at you placidly, and you scream wordlessly in its face.

It alarms you how broken your voice sounds. It doesn’t sound like the voice you know to be yours.

You are unaccustomed to hearing your own outbursting emotion; the fury and the grief are as foreign to you as if they came from someone else. Emotional expression is a childish and unhelpful diversion, one you thought you’d largely put aside years ago. You had thought yourself above such meaningless intensity of sentiment, and yet here you are, wallowing in a tempest sea of it, unmoored.

“You swore you’d never leave me!”

It stares blankly.

“That you’d always come back when I called…” Your voice breaks on the ‘always’, but neither your plea nor the emotion in it spark recognition in that empty husk.

“You swore, Colum,” you whisper at the thing, and you despair that he cannot hear you anymore.

“One flesh, one end,” you recite the oath you’d spoken to one another, years ago. “What does that mean if we ended and you’re not here? What good is that to me? One end, Colum.”

It stares at you like it can see you.

“One end!” You shove it by the shoulders with all your strength and it topples over backward, chair and all. Two of the spindles that make up the back of the ancient chair snap near the base where the wood has begun to rot, partially separating the back from the seat.

It starts to pick itself up from the floor, pushing the broken chair away as it gathers its limbs beneath itself, and you step forward, pressing your right foot harshly into its left shoulder and snarling, “Stay.”

Like a dog, it obeys. You wonder if Colum would have.

It doesn’t matter, though. This thing is not him. This thing will never be him. This thing has taken his place for long enough.

“Pretender,” you spit at it, and silently curse the name Harrowhark Nonagesimus.

Your foot grinds down as though to make a point before you take a knee at its side, both hands coming to wrap around the thick hilt of Colum’s two-hander. You draw it from its sheathe at the false Colum’s hip with great effort, and as you finally rise to your feet with the greatsword in hand the weight of it nearly pulls it from your grip.

The construct of your cavalier does nothing to stop you. Not as you unsheathe it, not as you raise it, not as you fumble the heft of it into position above its chest, and not as you drop it down, down, down, letting the weight of it carry the blade through two layers of bleached white cloth and skin and flesh and finally leaning all your weight on it with your eyes shut tight until you feel the crunch and give of bone.

The ungodly grinding squelch that follows the cracking of his ribcage makes you retch. You don’t know why. You’re not normally squeamish – no necromancer worth their salt can be squeamish, and you’ve seen far worse – but when you pull your weight back to your feet and remove your hands from the pommel and the grip and open your eyes, the churning in your stomach only intensifies, and your esophagus clenches uncomfortably.

The blood that seeps through his pristine whites looks as real as anything that had once run through Colum’s veins, and somehow that catches you off guard. His empty-eyed stare looks as though it pierces the ceiling to the stars above, and in the unmoving quiet that is his death, you cannot imagine Colum looking differently.

You fall to your knees once more – with far less intention this time – to claw at the blood-soaked wool of his shirt and touch his cheek and let out wail after wail as wordless as your scream had been, each sound lasting as long as your breath and feeling as though the ragged end of it pulls pieces of your soul from empty lungs when there is no more breath to be had to carry it.

Your face is wet and you do not know if it’s from his blood or your tears because you have touched his body and his face and pressed yours against it, and there is no meaningful difference between the two because you are one flesh, and you are now his end as he was yours and you were his.

There is nothing for you here, in this cursed dream. There never was, least of all him, least of all it, but now there is less than nothing, and you regret everything, because at least you’d had this.

You cry, sprawled across his – not, it’s not – corpse, until you have no tears left.

When you finally sit back on your heels and wipe at your face – smearing sticky blood, you can feel the grime of it now – a sudden urge overtakes you, and you can wonder no longer. It takes all of your strength to push him over onto his right side, the hilt of the sword clacking against the hardwood floor, and you pull at the shoulder of his shirt frustratedly until the cloth finally tears. You tug aside the still-white back of his woolen undershirt – your fingers staining it indelibly in the process – revealing the weathered skin beneath (is it yellower than you remember it, or did you not look hard enough at him in life?)

You let out a breath you didn’t know you’d been holding as your eyes track over the skin where the mark should be, and find nothing of note.

It’s not him. It was never him. You didn’t kill him.

Not again, the thought simmers unbidden just beneath the surface of your mind.

Chapter 2: Alternate Ending

When you finally sit back on your heels and wipe at your face – smearing sticky blood, you can feel the grime of it now – a sudden urge overtakes you, and you can wonder no longer. It takes all of your strength to push him over onto his right side, the hilt of the sword clacking against the hardwood floor, and you pull at the shoulder of his shirt frustratedly until the cloth finally tears. You tug aside the still-white back of his woolen undershirt – your fingers staining it indelibly in the process – revealing the weathered skin beneath (is it yellower than you remember it, or did you not look hard enough at him in life?)

The sight of the small, discolored blemish upon his shoulderblade chokes you like a blade to the throat, the disbelief and panic swallowing all rational thought, and the grief smothers you anew.

You bury yourself in the scent of him even as his blood congeals upon the floor beneath your bodies, and you swear it smells like he did in life underneath the sour tang of iron and bile. You cry, but there are no more tears. You scream again, and this time there’s a single word in it, mangled and broken in your anguish, just like him.

“Colum!”

Notes:

Please tell me which ending you prefer (and why!) in the comments! :)