Chapter Text
How long has he been sprawled here in this windowless box in a world he never wanted to visit? Time has become meaningless, one hour, day, year the same as the next. His thoughts trip over themselves when he tries to keep track of anything. What becomes clear slides back into the fog the moment he stops looking directly at it. If the drugs couldn’t keep him dull, the boredom would.
He knows there’s a Djinn, an unholy hybrid of toad and owl that comes in and peers at him and laughs at his attempts to swipe at her. He knows there’s a Habbalite, a scrawny and mutilated human-shaped thing and no threat at all who nervously steps around his sprawled form like he’s an unpleasant puddle. He knows other demons occasionally walk in and tell him to break things. He shouldn’t be able to, can’t muster up the focus when it’s only his own desire against what keeps him down, but when they tell him to he can. Hell is nothing if not unfair.
He shouldn’t be breaking things at all. He should be running. He remembers running. They caught him. No. They stole him while he was elsewhere and dragged him down here. He tripped. They threw him in this closet to destroy things at their bidding. Sometimes, when what he’s destroyed piles up and threatens to bury him, that scrawny Habbalite vacuums up what everyone else leaves behind. He stays, and the cycle repeats.
His old life exists only in fragments. His former name is gone; mostly-forgotten friends are just faint strings of notes in a beautiful language that increasingly slides away from his tongue. All his imagination conjures is a glimpse of a lady in a tower and faded gray sands.
He barely remembers the past few minutes except that he tries. He tries, and the sedatives are finally wearing off.
His fingers spread out against the floor. That’s wrong. He shouldn’t have fingers on this plane the way he shouldn’t break things, but he does. He feels his way about scraps of paper, flakes of plastic, and shards of what feel like glass but aren’t. They came from a demon’s Heart. A Heart he had somehow shattered. He sees the image of that scrawny Punisher before him, pushing a box like any other into his hands. “Destroy this,” she had commanded, and he did. It hadn’t been difficult because he hadn’t realized.
And then she left. But not without leaving him a few presents.
Not the Anger; that Punisher could barely resonate tears out of a funeral, but then, he doesn’t need a Habbalite’s resonance to become Angry. He does that on his own just fine. That Will Shackle now lying on the ground and the time away from the sedatives though, those change everything. For the first time in what seems like an eternity he feels awake. Awake and fully aware of his surroundings. Fully aware of what must have been done to him to bring him to this state.
He thinks of the others who had been held with him before he stopped. The ones who had held out until…until they had reached the end of their useful life and the ones who didn’t and were taken somewhere else to be disposed of. The ones from other Choirs who were thrown in prisons constructed especially for them. He thinks of the voice that recently accompanied that Punisher. Who had pushed her to do more. Help more.
But the Punisher was selfish. Whatever her delusions might tell her about being an angel, that one was always going to serve herself first. That’s what demons did. The voice should have known that.
He stumbles and staggers his way to a standing position. His legs wobble. Is this is first time standing in this kind of celestial body? It might be. He doesn’t remember otherwise. His whole body turns as he looks around and takes in what exists in here besides him and the garbage they make him create.
He doesn’t have much time. The Djinn will notice soon that he is no longer sedated, or she will check in on him anyway. He can’t move very far either, not without her noticing, but this room holds plenty of things—fragile, breakable arrangements of molecules with not that much holding them together. He focuses on the discarded shackle and when that doesn’t crack under his resonance, he redirects it towards the shelves with the collars and the manacles. The stun guns and the prods. The cabinet where the sedatives are stored.
Shackle aside, nothing in here is him-proof.
It feels amazing. It feels terrible. He wants to stay here and tear this whole place down to the depths of the Lower Hells and then drag the rest of Tartarus with it. He knows it’s futile. They’ll destroy him if he does, but he could cause collateral damage and that tiny taste of revenge before his Forces get torn apart would be so, so sweet. He wants to run and plead for forgiveness and become again what he once had been. He wants to hide and be left alone, no one knowing what he is or where he’s been.
Except for that Djinn. She’ll always know. She’s attuned. She wouldn’t have bothered keeping him otherwise.
He almost wants to give up and slump against the wall and stop his struggle against the entropy that threatens to take him down further. The ending is inevitable. He is a Calabite in Tartarus no longer sufficiently bound by shackles and drugs. The Djinn won’t risk this happening again. That’s fine. What final death could be worse than this monotonous and never-ending twilight he’s been subjected to? Dying at least ends.
But no. Someone gave him this opportunity, pressed it into his hands like the evidence of a failed experiment, but no one has commanded him yet to destroy it. No one has told him yet to sit down and let what he holds fall apart around him like the shards of that Punisher’s broken Heart. And isn’t that a surprise? That she out of all the demons here would have the nerve to pick up and run. That she would remove his shackles on the way out?
He can’t tear this whole place to the ground and get away clean, but this room still has so many more things in it left to destroy, and he can make them regret bringing him here. His two eyes focus on an inconspicuous gray-green box. That seems important. Half-coherent images dance through his mind: Demons coming here in a panic every so often, calling out to flip the master switch, shouting for something called ‘lockdown’. Everyone in place. Every door and cage locked. That box holds the mechanism. Surely, it could be used the other way. He opens the cover of the box. Too many switches, it almost confounds him. But, then, he only needs to understand enough to wreck shit.
He won’t linger and risk getting caught. He is a demon too and so will choose to save himself in this moment. But that Habbalite, driven on by that little voice, had done him this small favor when she could have found a safer way to run. And that voice had reached out, and spoken up for him. Had spoken to him and listened to his replies in a way that no one else in Hell had before. If that voice could witness this, it would want him to pass that favor on. So be it.
He looks closer at the panel with his limited eyes. On one side are symbols of a closed padlock. On the other, an open one. It’s not too difficult to figure out what they could mean in context. A sweep of his unfamiliar hand and forearm move all the switches over to the open side, and then it only takes one concentrated shot of his Resonance to destroy the box altogether. There. One small kindness given. One small act of revenge taken.
He’s done here. It’s time to figure out where to go next.
Indistinct arguments come through the other side of the door. That and the Djinn’s thumps. Whatever commotion he’s caused or the Habbalite caused is making itself known to others by now. He hopes at least, that those in the cells he unlocked can do something with their own opportunities. But that’s not his problem. The Djinn is coming towards him, and if he is to escape he needs to do it now. He turns away from any other thoughts of this cursed place and reaches out to the world beyond Hell. A vessel awaits him there and so too does his chance to run.