Notes: Adaequatio Rei Et Intellectus: Latin phrase meaning the correspondence of the mind and reality; one of the definitions of the truth. When the mind has the same form as reality, we think truth.
Classified Material Beyond This Point.
Unauthorized access will be monitored, located and dealt with.
This is your sole warning.
I was dead, and death was cold.
Perhaps everything we'd been told about Hell was wrong; and it was a quiet loneliness rather than the raging inferno of eternal pain.
It didn't seem likely this was Heaven - but maybe it was a sort of Celestial waiting room as I listened for my number to come up so I could take my place at the Judgment seat and learn my fate.
More likely than either of them, though, was that there was no Heaven and no Hell, and that this was it.
Death was apparently fragments of memory; snatches of voices. Like dreaming when you're half-asleep. A quick decision I'd made replaying somewhat fuzzily in the back of what I still thought of as my mind - but couldn't remember what it was. Only that it had been hard, unbelievably hard.
I felt detached, in death. Separated from the living by an unbreakable wall through which no words or actions could slip - if I could have moved, or spoken.
And it was cold.
It was so damn cold.
Had I still been alive, I might have ventured to say that it was cold enough for someone to freeze to death.
As it was, that hardly mattered.
Eventually, I became aware of wherever I was becoming a little brighter, a little warmer.
Voices that were not my own or my memories filtered down toward me.
It took a while to remember how to pluck the sounds from the air and shape them into words, into things with meaning.
"My god, this guy's still alive!"
I thought about correcting them, but they were either also dead; or they were a part of my own experience within death as a product of the deteriorating mind, so it seemed hardly worth the effort.
I let myself fall away from the voices. After so long by myself, though I had ached for another person for much of it, it was jarring to suddenly be faced with them again. I almost wished they would go away, and leave me with the familiarity of my personal afterlife.
The world turned on its axis, and I drifted untethered through death.
Item #: SCP-3120
Object Class: Safe
SCP-3120 was found in the wreckage of a WWII era fighter jet just off the coast of [DATA REDACTED], and was brought into the facilities at [DATA REDACTED] due to the life signs shown though SCP-3120 was encased in ice at the time of discovery.
The next chapter of death felt like waking up.
It felt so much like waking up, I wondered if I was in Hell after all, and this was my punishment for...whatever I did.
My memories were scattered and dismantled, strewn across the fabric of my mind like the pieces of an engine on the ground, waiting to be put back together.
But I remembered what it felt like, to rise out of sleep into the new day.
Hoping to understand more fully, I opened my eyes, blinking against the soft light.
I had previously thought there had been no more light - not to mention my having eyes to blink at the unexpected brightness of it.
Unsure whether to be glad or afraid at this new development, I wondered if the rest of me was somehow restored, so I sat up.
I swung my legs to hang over the side of the bed I'd been lying on; feeling the soles of my feet hit wood flooring.
The source of the light was a window through which the muffled sounds of a city could be heard, and other than the bed and a dresser, the room was completely bare.
My thoughts felt murky and unformed, like I had slept too long in the wrong part of the day.
It struck me that perhaps what had felt like the long period of cold could have merely been my dying, and that this was now the afterlife.
The door opened, and a woman with fiery red hair came in.
She was slender, and moved in an elegant way that suggested deadly grace despite her small frame.
Whatever this was, it was definitely not hell.
"Welcome back to the land of the living, big guy." She said, and crossed her arms as she stopped in front of me, feet a shoulder's width apart.
Many things formed on my tongue, too many to say them all - but one stood out from the rest.
"Steven." I said, the feel of the words in my mouth almost achingly familiar.
"My name is Steven."
A/N: Current on-going work that I've been posting on tumblr and Ao3. Figured I should probably get it here!
This is a crossover with a slightly lesser known fandom, and I will try to answer any questions you may have - it's only fair. Though keep in mind there is a bit of an explanation in chapter four, so try to keep trucking until then and see if that clears it up first ;)
- ACG
