Title: Hand in Hand
Fandom: Gorillaz
Author: Me, Vinnie2757
Genre: Hell au, supernatural, canon divergence, family, angst
Character/Pairing: Murdoc, Noodle, 2D (squint-and-miss hints of 2Doc), a bunch of shitlords from hell, including Beelzebub and all of Murdoc's bffsies
Rating: M for violence and gore
Warnings: language, hell imagery, Murdoc bites it pre-story, major character injury, body horror, there are a few Unfortunate Implications, Murdoc is about to start a redemption arc, trigger for being buried alive I guess?, a few things are non canon-compliant esp regarding Murdoc's venture into Satanism and the history of Kong
Summary: He made a promise to her, that if anything happened, he'd come. He'd save her, no matter what. He promised. So she calls, and he answers. And so Murdoc enters Hell.
A/N: AU of the whole business in Hell and Beirut. This is a serious fic. Dear FF.N please stop deleting half of my fucking words thanks. Enjoy, lovelies~!
Hand in Hand
"I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
Winston Churchill
Getting into Hell is easy. It is so easy he's surprised there isn't just a large doorway with a neon sign above it like some seedy strip club a few streets down from the Drinkers' World he's grown rather fond of. They don't make much of a fuss about him going in at all hours and buying far more than is legal.
He's not sure at this point if it's a perk of being famous or his face just has that Look about it. Stu says that it's his face, but Stu doesn't know shit.
Still, he takes to Hell like he takes to everything else; with very little patience and an absolutely flagrant disregard to anything remotely resembling grace.
He shoulders his way through the queue, causing a domino of half-dressed old priests who howl curses that would make his father blush, shoves past a bunch of rowdy middle-aged men who start pushing and shoving each other, each a head taller than him, and wearing far more studs and leather than they should with those bellies. There is a brief pause in his stride, but he has to pause, it's a moral imperative. When you pass Hitler on the queue into Hell, you have to punch him in the face. There's a law somewhere, he's sure.
Centuries must pass before he's anywhere remotely near the front of the queue. In reality, what little of it there is in this bedlam of a millennia-old queue filled with some of the foulest smelling pissants in the history of all things glorious and evil, he's probably not even a third of the way through, a quarter, a fifth. Bollocks to it.
It doesn't matter, though, because he can hear his name being called. For a second, for one ridiculous, uncharacteristically hopeful second, he thinks it's Noodle.
But no, no, she doesn't know his full name, she doesn't know the utter joke that is his official identification.
The roaring increases in volume. He sighs, turns.
Beelzebub is stood there looking rather unimpressed with him. Murdoc returns the look with equal apathy, but where there is an oddly parental disappointment to the demon's many eyes, Murdoc has the tightness around his of someone still clenching their fist tight enough to cut their palm.
'Walk with me, Murdoc,' Beelzebub says, waving a hand. A separate path appears.
Murdoc glares at it. He considers setting fire to it. But everything is on fire down here.
'Piss on it later,' Beelzebub snorts, and sets off down the path, a lumbering mass of rotting skin and dragging bone. 'Come.'
Heaving a breath, and wishing he'd punched Hitler twice, Murdoc follows. For several long minutes that he feels could have been better spent stood behind those priests talking about the little boy they'd fucked to death however long ago, they walk in silence. It's an agonising sort of silence, one not unlike the rash-like pauses at Kong, the ones that made Murdoc want to claw his skin off just get to 2D to look at him.
'What happened to my body?' Murdoc blurts out, and Beelzebub jerks, as if he'd forgotten the man was there. A boy, really, in the grand scheme of things.
'They gave you a nice burial,' Beelzebub tells him.
He waves a hand; an A4 manila folder at least several inches thick and bound by twine appears on it. A lesser man would never be able to hold it. Beelzebub is not a man, and he idly leafs through several chunks of parchment before settling on a hastily-scrawled note in green biro on the back of a receipt from Tesco.
'Ah, yes, a Mister Stuart Tusspot – '
Murdoc grumbles something.
'Pardon?'
'His name is Pot,' Murdoc repeats, louder.
Beelzebub leafs through some more papers, finds a birth certificate. He hums, considering.
'His dad changed it 'fore he was born,' Murdoc offers. 'It was Tusspot. But not now.'
'Hm. We'll have to update the records. Well, either way, our sources tell us that Mister Stuart Pot gave you a rather nice eulogy.'
Murdoc snorts. 'Oh, aye?'
Beelzebub hums and leafs some more. Murdoc has to jump over a flaming hole in the path, and barely makes it. He scrabbles for purchase on the stone; Beelzebub scoops him up and dumps him back on his feet without looking up from the folder.
'Ah, here we are. We have a transcript. He said. Oh, this was very nice. What a lovely chap. Such a good boy.'
There isn't a hint of anything other than prideful sincerity in his tone. Murdoc chews the inside of his cheek and tastes blood.
'He called you a cunt,' the demon tells him, 'and he called you the most selfish, horrible man he has ever known. He says you ruined his life – you did, by the way. We have it on tape. An Astra? Really, Murdoc? Anyway, he goes on to say some terribly sentimental shit about how he'll miss you and the band and how he loves you, et cetera, et cetera.'
'Poof,' Murdoc grumbles, and bites his tongue. His lips twitch anyway, a little, almost-invisible tug of muscle.
It could be a grimace. They both know it's a smile.
Beelzebub pulls him to a halt, and Murdoc shoves his hands into his pockets, slouches, waits. The fly draws a flaming square with a finger, reaches into it to the harsh joint halfway up his spindly fly-arm, clenches his fist, and pulls. With it, he drags an image. That's pretty cool, Murdoc will admit, and mentally stores the concept. If he gets back, he's having that CGI shit in a video. He doesn't know how. But he will. A cool video, like DARE, but keeping his Very Defined Heterosexuality intact.
The image wavers as it smoothes out the creases of Beelzebub's fist, and settles on what Murdoc recognises, intimately, as a prison cell. He steps forward, hand half-raised. 2D sits there, head in hands, nails drawing blood in his scalp. Murdoc's heart tightens; his arm goes numb, hand dropping to his side.
'What happened up there?' he asks, quiet.
Beelzebub watches him inch closer and closer to the image, to a crystal ball mirage of his – a glance at the manila folder gives little indication of what they are, but everything points to not friends – as he sits awaiting his fate. The police think they set the fire at Kong deliberately, but Murdoc is dead, Noodle is gone, and Russel is missing. 2D is the only one left to question. Murdoc does not seem to remember being in the fire at the studio, does not seem to really remember dying.
The notes say that he went back in to come here, to Hell, to slip through the portal the demons had used to enter. It would be a noble action, if every other word in the man's file wasn't written in the venom that seeps from every pore of his body. Some days, he's so like his mother it's a little sad.
'He misses you,' Beelzebub says, instead of saying any of that, and Murdoc's shoulders draw back. 'You've gone, left him without saying goodbye. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't have you to guide him around by the hand.'
Murdoc punches the image, and it dissipates. He expected resistance, almost falls through it, and snarls as his feet find themselves.
'Shall we continue?' Beelzebub asks, sounding very bored of it all.
Murdoc stomps off down the path. Beelzebub follows with a buzz of wings. They walk in silence, the demon still perusing his human's file, and Murdoc examines his hand. The scar on his palm is missing. It is only a little scar, given the wound that caused it. He stares, and stares and stares, but the white mark does not appear between his life and head lines, and he cocks his head.
'Hm?' Beelzebub leans over to look at what Murdoc is looking at. 'Ah, yes. That business with the knife.'
He flips through Murdoc's file to the appropriate printout, a detailed account of some thug trying to play the big man, trying to rob global superstars. He'd waved a knife in 2D's face, and the stupid bastard just stood there and accepted it. Murdoc had done the grown-up, sensible thing, and grabbed the knife by the blade, yanking it from the thug's grip. He'd thought about stabbing him with it, but Murdoc's blood was on the blade, and that would have to be enough. Small things. Baby steps. It makes something like sadness creep along the edges of Beelzebub's wings. They're starting to lose their best son. There is still time for him to change. Either way, either or. He can still become anything.
Mexican prison did nothing to change him, worsening him, even, but now, there is something off about the boy, something – something –
Hm.
'What was I supposed to do?' Murdoc sniffs, and shoves his hand in his pocket. 'Bastard was waving a knife in his face. I mean, birds are real into that facial scarring and shit. But it ain't good publicity when he's already looking like a god. Might ruin his face, you understand. Can't have that.'
'Such an altruistic soul,' the demon hums.
Murdoc shoots him a glare that goes ignored.
If the scar isn't there, then – he sticks a hand up the back of his shirt. No bumps on the misshapen curve of LUST, taking pride of place on the back of his heart, bumping along his jutting spine. No prison ink. He stops walking.
Beelzebub continues several feet before realising Murdoc isn't following.
'What's wrong?' he asks, as though genuinely concerned.
'I'm not my real age,' Murdoc growls, fists raised. He's not sure what he's doing with that, because he's tried to punch Beelzebub before, and it worked about as well as punching concrete. 'I'm not forty. How old am I, Beetle? How fucking old am I?'
Beelzebub grins at him with his many mouths, and Murdoc's jaw sets, his feet parting.
'Are you going to fight me, boy?' the demon asks, jovial but cold. 'I would very much like to see if you've improved.' A pause, and then, 'you are at your happiest.'
'I've never been happy.'
'You are such a terrible liar.'
Murdoc thinks, and thinks, and thinks. Pre-Mexico, then. Pre-break up. He licks his lips, stares at some flaming geyser a mile or so away.
'The first album,' he murmurs, and his fists open, his palms sweating. 'I'm thirty-two. Why? Why do that? Why?'
'So we can systematically destroy every happy memory you possess, of course! What did you think we did here? Let you get off scot-free with a file this thick? Come now, Murdoc, I thought you knew us better. You sold your soul to me, remember? And it's all worked out rather well for you, but you've been putting off our attempts to collect for some years.'
It takes a moment or three for this to really sink in, to creep like prison ink under his skin. To take root. Shit, he thinks. What happy memories? What fucking memories?
Like a punch in a gut, it comes, swamping him with warm arms and hair that smells of artificial strawberries and cigarette smoke.
'No,' he says, shaking his head, swallowing. 'No, don't you fucking dare. Don't you fucking dare. Take my soul, I don't give a rat's arse, you can have the rotten piece of shit, but don't you lay a hand on her.'
Beelzebub draws another square, pulls another image from the other side. Murdoc sees stripes, and cannot bear to see more than that, casts his gaze to the ground. Claws find his skull, digging into his eyelids, dragging his face up, up, up. Holding him. Forcing him to see.
He can't hear her, can't hear what she's saying, but he can read her lips, see her begging his name over and over again. He knows what his name looks like on people's mouths, has seen it a thousand times in a thousand accents. Noodle's is no different. There isn't a spot of blood on her, but her wrists are red-raw, blistering with the heat of the steel.
A shadows passes across her body, a shadow Murdoc has not seen since he was ten and clutching a battered old occult book to his chest, backed onto a corner of his bed.
'I'm going to kill you,' he tells that shadow though he knows she can't hear him, tears himself from Beelzebub's grip, elbows him in the thorax, and flees.
He has never been to Hell before, and never intends to return, but he knows his heart, his instincts, and he knows how to find Noodle no matter where she is. Once, before she went back to Japan, before she learnt to pronounce his name, she got lost in the supermarket, having let go of his hand and wandered off. He had not known where to begin, distracted by Russel's squawking and crying and threats of violence, but when he'd found his feet, he'd gone straight to her, without even considering it. Noodle had allowed him to carry her the rest of the way, her nose buried in the dip of his collarbone, a soft, natural weight in his arms.
(There had been a hundred birds cooing over how hot he looked with a little girl held close, but he hadn't listened, too busy humming the guitar notes for Tomorrow Comes Today into her temple. He is not the singer 2D is, he cannot give her lullabies, but he can give her their instrument, their tunes. She had seemed to appreciate it, snuggling deeper into his chest. The birds had almost fallen over themselves. Murdoc had almost walked into Russel three times before he was sent to wait in the car.)
There is no hesitance in the way he runs, each step a bound, leaping over maggots and flaming pits and once managing to land a tuck-and-roll without making a mess of it. Imps swarm the path, fly-like and stinking of rotting meat; he kicks them out of the way, punches the ones in range, and keeps moving. A pitchfork – really, he thinks, this is disappointing – catches his thigh, but he barely notices. He leaps between paths, hurling himself onto a side-road that he knows, in his bones, will lead him closer, closer, closer, take him deeper into Hell. Closer to Noodle, closer to Lilith, closer to an escape. As he scrambles to his feet, he sees the lake, grabs at an imp that's been enthusiastically clinging to his leg for a solid minute, and it bites his fingers.
He throws it on the ground and stomps it into the dust.
Alichino tries to keep him from continuing when it becomes clear imps are as useful as papier-mâché. Murdoc reminds him that he Fucked Up with Bonturo Dati. It seems to catch Alichino off-guard, so Murdoc kicks him in the shin and legs it. He has never been particularly strong, nor is he the most graceful of men, but art from adversity or whatever the bloody saying is. And Murdoc is nothing if not an artist.
He takes a flying leap to a floating rock on the lake. It's lava. If he misses, he is fucking dead.
Thank fucking Christ, he lands, but the rock wobbles dangerously, unstable even without his weight. Alichino screeches, nails-on-a-chalkboard and spinning tires and that one monster from that game Murdoc and 2D played once set in a haunted town, and he shudders, tries to ignore it. Another rock floats by. He leaps, and lands it, but eats shit the moment he does, tumbling and fracturing his nose a ninth-tenth-thirtieth time on the burning stone. His fall tips the stone, and he scrabbles for purchase before it dunks him.
He manages to haul himself up and balance his weight, but not before his boots lose grip and a foot plunges calf-deep into the lava. The noise he makes is no more human than anything else here, a stuck pig and a wounded silverback and white noise, but he presses on. He does not have time to stop.
His body is incorporeal here, a non-entity. Everything is psychosomatic. Everything is psychosomatic. Everything is psychosomatic. It doesn't hurt, it doesn't hurt, it's a fake pain like cavities and a broken nose, it's a pain he's felt before, Hannibal's fags stubbed out on his palm, his father's knuckles grinding deep into his belly. He can do it. He has to do it.
For Noodle. Noodle, Noodle, Noodle.
By the sixth platform, he's slipped thrice more, burning an elbow to the bone and splashing his face with the full-body impact of throwing himself onto the stone rather than jumping, searing the skin from hairline to jaw across half his face. 2D would make a stuttering joke about Harvey Dent and ask if that made them brothers.
(It just about keeps him going, though the thought of old paper-brain makes him want to be sick and cry and laugh and punch something all at once. He settles on just breathing. Breathing is good.)
Everything is killing him here, he's in agony. His hands and knees have contact-burn from the lava-hot stone, his jeans melting into his skin, but he doesn't care. The sleeve of the elbow he burnt had caught fire briefly, but when he throws himself onto dry land and the impact rolls him, twisting his not-burnt ankle as he tumbles, the fire is put out.
He lies there for a moment, getting his breath back, biting back the pain until he can taste the blood from his lips.
Alichino, halfway across the lava, stares at him in shock as he gets shakily to his feet and dusts himself down.
'Bonturo Dati!' Murdoc yells at him, sticks his fingers up and takes off running.
There is a dark, forgotten corner buried deep into the wall of one corridor. Having lost the conga line of imps some turns back, Murdoc backs himself into it and catches his breath once more. He is totally swallowed by the shadows here, and he's sure he can't be seen from the corridor. Heard, yes, but not seen.
He rakes his hands through his hair, puts his head between his knees. A jut of stone in the wall digs into his arse as he doubles over, but he doesn't pay it any mind. Just one more pain atop the rest.
Later, he will tell himself that he was not sick, nor did he cry. He admits he is not strong enough for this, he cannot fight his way through the legions of Hell. He is one man, and he has made enough mistakes that he is fucked down here.
Shivering, because he is not crying, he is just so pumped full of adrenaline and it is giving him the kind of buzz he normally only gets on stage or in dark alleys with the glint of steel two inches from his face, he stares at his mangled boots, and for once, for once, he prays to something not Satan. He doesn't know who or what it is he's praying to.
By the time he straightens, he's not panting like a bitch in heat so much, and he feels not-as-woozy enough to continue forward. Checking that the coast is clear, he hurries on, slipping through the gaps of an iron gate, and descends.
There are less imps here, a quieter, stiller air that clings closer to him. Is this what sulphur smells like, he wonders, and his heels click against the stone as he walks. Everything feels both hotter and colder all at once. Sterile and yet so filthy. The immediate lack of an assault on him bothers him more than anything; surely they know he's coming? He has not exactly been subtle about this whole thing.
Beelzebub should have raised an alarm Hell-wide by now, and everything not a sinner burning should be on high alert. He is Trouble.
Once, he might have delighted in that, but now he's just uncomfortable.
The smell that begins to permeate the air is familiar, the burning, stinking skin of rotting corpses. It's the landfill stench of Kong, the zombies in the cellar that are forever trying to break through the barricade. There are gorillas, he remembers, on the hill outside. Are they still there? Or are they down here now, rotting along with the rest of the monstrosities made in that lab?
(He remembers how excited 2D had been to learn of the biological experiments that had taken place. Excitement in theory does not carry into practice, though, and Murdoc remembers the first nights before they fixed the barricade being full of screaming and pissing-pants and Paula making too much noise directly into his ear for his liking, but God forbid he raise so much as an eyebrow in her direction. Hell below, he thinks.)
Walking for hours and hours and hours, suspecting very much so that he is just going round and round in circles, everything looking the same, he finds himself thinking more and more about the early days of Gorillaz, of all the things they did and didn't do – that he did and didn't do. He remembers robbing every grave in the yard the night Noodle arrived, and he remembers Russel trying to fight him on it. He remembers cracking his fingers and stealing more purses and wallets than he had in his life. For Noodle, he thinks. Everything had been for her. The authorities had given him all but full custody of dentface, stupidly. But 2D was an adult and, however legendarily thick he was, he'd made the conscious decision to stay with Murdoc, at Kong. Noodle was a child, and one that didn't speak English. If the authorities got wind of her being mistreated in the least, if her clothes were dirty or her living quarters not up to snuff, they could take her from him. From the band.
He had not come that far to lose her. And he has not changed in all this time. She is still his guitarist, his friend, his –
He pauses at the end of a long path that has either appeared, or he has failed to notice. This, he thinks, rolling his shoulders, cracking his neck. This is it. He knows she'll be heavily-guarded. She always has been. Beelzebub has never trusted her, nor the Big Man Below. She is something foreign to their operation, an uncontrollable force in their chess matches. She has to be contained.
She was never contained. She'd found her way into his bedroom when he was ten and delighted in the taste of his pulse quickening beneath her fangs with not a mark on her to suggest there was resistance.
Murdoc has not seen Lilith for almost thirty years, twenty in this body. Thirty years is a long time to be away. He thinks idly of Chopper, who'd broken his nose the first time. He remembers the taste of his blood in his mouth. What does he do now, he wonders? Has his street-corner-sign position been replaced by a bucket of soil?
If there was any kind of justice in the world.
(Murdoc is beginning to suspect, privately, that there is no such thing, and that really, they are all out here on their own because nothing else in the universe cares. Not justice, not God, not fate. And certainly not Satan. None of them can give even the slightest of shits about humanity. It's a little depressing, that.)
Her guards are hulking skeletons with fists like hammers and the density of diamond. Murdoc's knuckles crack against their shin bones, and a kick from one sends him flying back the thirty or so feet down the corridor he'd just traversed, only to crash into the wall as he goes. The scraping rock takes a layer or five of skin from his back. It's nothing new.
He's surprised his face survived the kick, though he's spitting blood and teeth.
Rolling clumsily to his feet, ears ringing, he dodges their swipes, searches the environment with harried glances to find something, anything, to take them down. If he was doing this for himself, his own personal escape attempt, he wouldn't bother. But he has to come back this way. He has to get Noodle out. So he has to make sure these bastards aren't chasing him.
Fighting Lilith with them present would be a hassle to boot.
'Look,' he tries, because he's always been able to make the universe see things his way, 'can you just not attack me? I'm kind of a little fucking busy, you understand. Gotta rescue my girl, you see. Little thing she is, killer guitarist. Nice singing voice; could go very far. I'm invested in her progress.'
He stumbles back beyond the reach of a swinging arm, trips over a rock and lands spread-eagled on his back. The blow narrowly avoids his cock.
Scrambling to his feet, he cuts his losses, and tears down the path. Hopefully, the entrance to Lilith's lair will be too small for the goliaths to fit.
It is, because the doors are shut when he arrives. The stench is worse here, thicker and clogging his throat with the taste of his own bile. The doors are bone and ivory and the blood of Satan himself. But it's long since lost its power, sapped by her venom.
This will not be like it was with Alichino, or with the skeletons just. He cannot outrun or outtalk her, avoid her blows and get somewhere she cannot go. Lilith is not an imp, not a creature born of Satan's will. She is something else. She is not of Heaven, or of Hell. She is of Earth. Something about that makes her more dangerous. Murdoc is not sure what it is, but he can begin to guess, begin to shape ideas of man and monster and the implications of the bloodlines meeting in the middle. He remembers Belphegor, he remembers going back to the wreckage after the fire. Was there a fire? He doesn't remember the details. He was young then, though, so young and all he knew was he was born there. Had he been hoping to find his mother? He doesn't remember.
Man and monster had met there, he thinks, because what other kind of place could spit him out and deem him fit for life?
Shaking himself out, he slips through a hole in the doors, a small space he suspects only he and the most foolhardy of the imps would dare crawl through. Mouse-like, he creeps across the floor, rounding the corner of the room until Lilith comes into view, her splintering, diamond skin the most terribly beautiful thing he's seen in years. He remembers her that night, caught in the moonlight and grinning with mouths of fangs stretched wide across a thin, pale face.
Swallowing, he straightens, and Noodle sees him. Her mouth opens, he shakes his head.
Lilith will fight him. Lilith will likely kill him. He will have to come back again, if that happens. Again and again and again. He will be unable to stop. He knows the path now.
Noodle is staring at him, and he can see the blisters on her wrists from here. Swallowing, he approaches as quietly as he can, glancing at the ground to avoid knocking stones.
'Murdoc!' Noodle cries, unable to keep her mouth shut now that she is positive he's here.
Fuck.
Lilith whirls, mouthy and diamond-beautiful as ever, but looking starved, hateful. There is beauty in tragedy, he knows. 2D is a perfect example of that.
His demons take physical form, he thinks, waggles his blistering fingers in a wave. Lilith snarls. His broken lip aches as his grin stretches wide, wide, wide. Blood dribbles down his chin, stinking of rust. He wipes it away, and smears it across his jaw, twisted warpaint. But they weren't his demons. Not really.
I owe them too much.
'You!' she screeches, and the bitch lunges.
Every muscle aches, burnt and still smoking, but he ducks the swipe of claws and manages to kick her in the back of the leg.
She skids a few meters, dust flying as she digs her claws in and wheels. Murdoc spares a glance at Noodle, who is staring at him, lip wobbling. Her skin, so clean, so bloodless, snares him for a second too long, and Lilith's claws rake so deep he thinks he hears her nick bone. Shit.
Noodle's scream is so loud, but his heartbeat is louder still, a permanent bass-line pulsing beneath his skin. The skitter of claws and clack of fangs fades to nothing; instinct kicks in, and he almost hacks up a lung trying to keep pace.
(He thinks it now, thinks If I get out of here, I am never smoking another fag in my life, but he knows the minute he gets back to the surface, the first thing he's buying is a bottle of good rum and one of those multipacks of twenties. He hopes by the time he gets out, they still do that brand he likes.)
'You've become the monster we always knew you were,' Lilith spits at him.
'You love it,' he spits back, shifts his weight to the balls of his feet. His ankles protest. He ignores them. 'You'd know all about monsters.'
She waves a hand, the air shimmers, and Murdoc sees himself. His face is burnt and rotten on the left side, his red eye all but falling out, as burnt as the rest. Half of his hair is missing, either torn out or burnt away, leaving only his bleeding, grimy scalp. His missing teeth almost, almost, match 2D's. Brothers, indeed. Nose, bleeding, broken, crooked the other way again. His clothes are singed, in tatters. Blood drips from the chunks Lilith's swiped from him, his skin still clinging to her claws. His boot somehow survived the dip in the lava, but it welded leather and rubber and denim to his foot and calf, everything a mangled mess of skin and dust and hellish shit. His twisted ankle sits crooked under his weight. His elbow is just bone, flesh ending and beginning either side, a cauterised half-finished waxwork. The blistering, blackened skin of his hands and his broken and missing nails are bloody claws.
He meets his own gaze, judges himself.
Barges straight through the looking glass and smashes his heel into Lilith's gaping whore mouth.
She staggers, surprised, but recovers before the imprint of his boot has even blossomed across her face. Touching her cheek, she gives him the same sort of heavy-lidded look she had all those years ago.
'I would know about monsters,' she agrees, a sneer spreading like poison across her pretty, pretty face. 'I've birthed enough of them.'
She eyes him, circling, a vulture examining the recent kill. He cracks his neck. He's going to lose a straight-up fist-fight with her. Her claws are that same shit what's-his-name has. Hugh Jackman. Unbreakable, absolutely indestructible. He's already lost a chunk of his flesh to her. He doesn't need to lose more. They're far more effective than fists.
He wishes he had the knuckle-dusters he kept in the shoebox under his bed. They might help a bit.
Instead he has his cheap Cuban heels, and three shattered knuckles.
Good odds.
'You plan to fight me?' the bitch laughs, and presses so close he can taste the rot in the back of his throat. 'You? Tiny little Murdoc Niccals, with his big words and his bigger plans? You made a big deal back then, my sweet. You cannot live forever.'
Noodle is staring at him, he can feel the heat of her gaze on his temple, working its way beneath the blood and sweat and dirt.
'Watch me,' he says, and they are nose-to-nose.
He smashes his forehead into hers with a resounding crack, and staggers back, clutching his face in agony. He doesn't think his nose is broken again, but something sure fucking is.
His vision spins, and he stumbles sideways, tripping over his own feet. Lilith, totally unfazed, laughs at him as he collapses, sprawling across the dirt and still clutching his bleeding, broken face.
'My baby boy,' she coos, three – no, five – of her skittering closer to climb over him, press her weight to trap him.
His fingers scrape uselessly through the dirt, heels catching on nothing. She laughs at him, pins his wrists with her hands, pressing them into the dust above his head. His bones creak from the pressure. He's starting to develop rheumatoid in his fingers and toes, and it wouldn't surprise him if it had spread down to his elbows, his shoulders.
Noodle is screaming again.
It has been a long, long time since he last felt personal terror. Terror for himself, genuine fear for his safety, his health, his life. But Lilith never forgave him for that time when he was ten, that lingering doubt over was this what I wanted, is this the person I want to become that had permeated the shadows and stained them yellow with nicotine.
'Close your eyes,' he howls at Noodle, not knowing if she can hear him, not caring. 'Don't look, no matter what! Don't look!'
Lilith's breath smells of dead meat and moulding lust, a millennia old but never forgotten. It makes him gag, turn his head. His vision centres, all the swirling patterns meeting in the middle. Her claws dig into his wrist, sliding clean through. He wonders why he feels no pain when he looks; it's his burnt arm. Disconnected nerves. Psychosomatic pain. Shock. Adrenaline. It doesn't matter. He's going to die down here.
This was Beelzebub's plan, he thinks, her claws dragging up along his arm, peeling the skin and muscle from the bone. This was what the bastard wanted to happen. He wanted Murdoc's soul, and he had it. He was never going to get out of here.
He has never seen his bones before, and he never intends to see them again, because he has no intention of putting himself into a position to watch the skin and muscle be peeled away from his bones like a glove. The bones look brittle, broken in a dozen places. He's surprised his fingers don't fall off the moment the skin-and-blood wrapping is gone.
'Wow,' he says with a sniff, swallowing bile and the stench of her.
His bones glitter and click and clack as he waggles them. By all rights they shouldn't move, not with all the nerves and muscles and other gooey bits pulled off, but they waggle anyway.
Interesting.
Lilith stares at him, and he stares back. Nose-to-nose again, she could kiss him and he wouldn't have been any more surprised than if she'd slapped him. He breaks the stare, disgusted with the thought.
'Well now,' she coos, and licks the burnt side of his face with an obscenely long tongue. The acid in it stings, burning through the scabs and singeing the bone. He has never had very nice cheekbones, too low and rounded and thuggish, but they're his cheekbones, and he'd like them left intact.
He has done many things in his life, but he has never, not once, sold his body for money. The thought of doing so makes him sick, tears at the crutches holding his heart aloft in his chest, and he has to take a moment any time it comes up. Sometimes, 2D makes a joke about that time he talked, drunkenly, about Alan Sugar, and he has to step outside to sit with the crows and smoke his way through whatever's left in the packet.
Maybe it's because of what they say happened to him at Belphegor, or because of how he was conceived. He's not sure. But he never lets himself fall low enough.
Lilith seems to not care a whit about that, despite knowing what happened all those years ago. She'd proven already that she didn't care about anything but her own excess, and he hopes, as he squirms and tries to get a leg up to kick her in the ribcage, that Noodle's eyes are shut.
As he struggles and curls and writhes, trying to find the right leverage beneath her weight to free his legs, Lilith calls him adorable, sweet. She giggles and dots kisses all over the tattered remnants of his face, taking particular delight in the tear in his lip. The acid on her tongue, on her lips, sears through the flesh, rotting it away and he tries not to scream. It's the acute pains that hurt the worst, and this is the worst of the lot so far.
He thinks he hears someone call his name, and he knows he cannot die here.
Another twist, a buck, and he's got his legs up, high enough to press against her ribcage and throw her off him. She pulls an arm, and he's not sure it doesn't pull out of its socket as she goes.
Before she has a chance to right herself, flailing like a turtle on its back, he's there, knees on her shoulders, hand behind her head, hand on her fanged, dripping mouth. It burns at his palm, tearing the skin. For a second, as she thrashes beneath him, they lock gazes.
Black eyes stare up at him, betrayed and proud and lusty in equal measure, flitting red as rage ignites.
He sits straight, locks his shoulders, and twists. Something snaps, a crackle and a pop as her neck twists and breaks. It won't keep her down. It's probably barely hurt her. But she goes limp under him, and he chokes on vomit as he staggers back to his feet.
'Murdoc?'
It's quiet, tentative, a whisper in the panting silence.
He turns to Noodle, still hanging there, wrists burnt to blistered black, her eyes firmly shut.
'Noodle,' he breathes, and spits blood and bile to where Lilith's incapacitated form lies before hurrying to her. He doesn't have long, he knows.
He splinters his finger bones prying Noodle's cuffs off, foot braced on the wall and watching Lilith's unmoving body for signs of life. Something like regret sweeps through his gut, that same regret that swept through him the day he learnt his father was dead. But he swallows it, bends his knee, and pulls. He scratches Noodle's arm a little, and staggers back from the force of the cuff giving way. Noodle immediately begins clawing uselessly at the other cuff.
A grinding crackle from where Lilith lies, and Murdoc swears, hurrying the four steps across Noodle's arm span to the other cuff. His fingers splinter further, and he rips another two nails off his intact hand. Stinking and wet, he manages to wipe the blood away to get his bones into the seam and yank. Now that he knows where the weak point is, this one is easy to get off, and as soon as it's free, Noodle is on the move, grabbing his hand and running back the way he came.
Lilith groans, and her shoulder lifts, arm folding.
'Fuck,' Murdoc whispers, and he and Noodle match their strides as they hurry towards the hole he'd crawled through.
'Go,' he hisses, shoving her into the hole, not even thinking about the bloody handprint he leaves on her arse as he pushes.
Lilith has her head up off the floor by the time he's scrambling through the hole.
Noodle is staring at the skeletons, and Murdoc grabs her hand.
'Shift your arse,' he spits, and she does so.
She runs a little faster than he does, but that's hardly surprising. They manage to keep enough pace to outrun the skeletons and get back to that alcove Murdoc had hidden in. There's enough room for the both of them, just.
They catch their breath, embrace hard, fingers knotting in skin and cotton and breathing deep. Murdoc smells and looks like absolute shite, but Noodle breathes him in anyway, laughing against his collarbone. It sounds like sobbing.
When she's had her fill of him, because he knows her well enough, she's practical about these things, if a little emotional, she pulls away, and tells him to lead on.
Noodle keeps trying to pull free of his hand, but he keeps digging the shattered ends of his finger bones into the back of her hand to keep her quiet.
'Murdoc,' she keeps whispering, in varying degrees of fear and worry and childish wonderment, and he ignores her every time. He cannot waste a second talking to her right now.
Lilith will be conscious again now, on the move, and he has to find another way back to the portal. The lake is a no-go from this side, with a teenage girl in tow.
(He blames it on her, but she's been doing twenty-feet-high karate kicks from age ten, it's him that'll be unable to make the jumps.)
'Murdoc!' she cries again, and digs her heels in.
He almost pulls her over entirely, drags her forward with a jerk that has her stumbling into him. He wobbles, but miraculously keeps his balance.
'What?' he hisses, rounding on her.
'I need to rest,' she breathes, and he looks at her.
She looks exhausted, too hot and too tight and too everything not the Noodle he remembers, so full of energy and life and pure joy. God, he feels old.
'We don't have time,' he says, glances at the skeletons patrolling along an adjoining corridor. Have they gone in a circle? No, no this is a different expanse of stone, he's sure.
'I'm too hot,' she tells him, 'I can barely breathe.'
He looks at her again; a black eye is beginning to form. It's splintering across her cheek, broken blood vessels blooming black and purple like a shrinking violet. Only it doesn't shrink, it grows and grows and grows as he watches. It's just bruising, he tells himself, watching as her eye swells, squint forming between puffy lids. It's just bruising. She isn't rotting.
'Lilith,' he murmurs, and goes to reach for her, realises that everything is on the wrong side, and crouches, braces himself with his bone hand, brushes the dirty, burning fingertips of his other hand across the bruises.
Noodle flinches, and he cups her cheek.
'You'll forget this,' he promises her, draws her close to kiss that swollen eye. He leaves a smear of blood. 'When we get out, you won't remember. You'll be okay.'
'Will you remember?' she asks.
'Probably.'
She quivers, but her feet remain flat, her back straight. She nods, and he runs his hand through her hair before straightening.
'Let's go home,' he tells her, and offers his still-skinned hand.
She takes it. Squeezes. Whispers his name like a prayer.
It isn't long before she is almost taken from him again. He has never met Sidragosum personally, only dealt with him through the various letters and phone calls and that one time the radio in his car was possessed.
(In retrospect, this is probably what made him lose control of the car in the Nottingham car park, because he hadn't intended to catapult 2D through the windscreen, despite what he might say.)
The demon is a lanky, human-ish fellow. Not humanoid. Human-ish. Like a waxwork, or a mannequin. He looks like a man, but there is something off about him.
Murdoc dislikes him intensely. Noodle lets herself be shoved behind him, though she's digging her worn nails into his knuckles, a warning. Don't fight him.
'Hello, Murdoc,' Sidragosum says, smiling. Genial, as though there isn't anything wrong with a half-dead, rotting, corpse-like man and his not-daughter-sister-friend standing before him.
'Oh, it's you,' Murdoc says, recognising the voice. He says it throw-away. Uninterested. Inconsequential.
Sidragosum looks offended. His eyes widen, then narrow. Murdoc's ankles protest, but he braces his feet, and stupidly lets go of Noodle's hand. He wipes blood from his nose – when had his nose started bleeding again? He forgets these things so easily – huffs, and raises his fists.
Sidragosum laughs.
'You intend to fight me?'
Everyone says that, it's getting to be a bore.
Murdoc tells him that.
'I fought Lilith,' he adds, slides one foot forward. It's a poor duplication of what he's seen Noodle do when she's been asked to show off her karate moves during interviews or that one time during the Dirty Harry shoot where the cameras fucking broke and they had a squalling mass of children to entertain.
Noodle snorts behind him, and he rolls his shoulders, elects to ignore her.
'Really? No wonder you look like dog shit,' Sidragosum tells him, and Murdoc tosses his head in a shrug.
What remains of his hair is dripping sweat into his eyes, plastered to his forehead and stinging the acid-and-lava-burnt holes peppered into his temple.
'I don't understand how you got so many girls to go to your bed,' the demon continues, and steps close.
He's a little taller than Murdoc, the way most men are a little taller than Murdoc, but he doesn't let the demon use it to his advantage. He's not a squeamish man, not easily intimidated. A demon getting in his business when he can still taste Lilith is not really anything at all.
'Oh! I remember,' he coos, and his eyes bore into Murdoc's.
Murdoc smiles, slow. Behind him, he can hear Noodle shift, uncomfortable. She has seen Murdoc in many stand-offs, many fights. But this is different. The atmosphere is different here, darker, heavier. It isn't just some thug trying to take money from them, or accusing them of something, or saying rude things about the band, insulting what Murdoc sold his soul to build up. This is more than that.
'I know you do,' Murdoc hums, smug. His heart is knocking his ribs out of place, jumping too hard in his neck. Sidragosum watches it for a moment, amused, before sliding his gaze back, over Murdoc's shoulder. 'My eyes are here, mate.'
But the demon isn't listening, and the crack of Murdoc's knuckles in his cheek barely registers on the demon's face. A redness blooms in the shape of Murdoc's hand, but he is unmoving, stands there watching Noodle.
The girl shifts, and Murdoc grabs the demon's face, yanks it back to him.
'Eyes here, Sid,' he spits, and the demon laughs.
He feels, more than he sees or hears, Noodle move, stride short, skipping. Her feet twist, body following.
'Don't,' he hisses, but doesn't dare tear his eyes from Sidragosum's to look at her. 'Leave her be, she's innocent.'
'If she was innocent, she wouldn't be here, would she?'
The remnants of Murdoc's lip curls. He digs hard enough with his nails that blood spots in Sidragosum's cheeks. The demon remains unfazed.
'I suppose she is innocent, at least in terms of her crimes. She is a product of her upbringing, after all, and we can't expect miracles when you are the one she calls for most. Though. Is that because she knows you can come here without limitation? Because you are the only one dirty enough to find her? You do know she's here because of you, don't you? Because you refuse to answer our calls?'
Murdoc knows this, had known it the moment demons swarmed Kong. But he came anyway, because Noodle asked him to, begged him. He has never been able to say no.
Noodle continues to dance, twirling and moving to a song Murdoc cannot hear. He can see her in the corner of his eye, a beautiful, immaculate ballerina dancing for the dead, and he feels something lodge in his throat. His heart, maybe.
There isn't anywhere for her to go, not in this corridor. There are no lava pits, and no dark hollows for her be snatched into. But he worries anyway. The deal he cut with the demon was shady at best, and regret has boiled like sour milk in his gut for too long.
'Leave her be,' he whispers, and the demon grins.
'I'm under orders, old boy,' the demon replies, and reaches up to pat Murdoc's cheek. The exposed nerves almost bring him to his knees. Blood trickles down the demon's jaw as he digs his fingers in. 'Much higher power than your begging.'
'I am not begging,' Murdoc whispers, a hiss now. 'I am ordering.'
'You have no power here,' Sidragosum replies with a laugh, and breaks out of Murdoc's grip, not caring about the scoured lines in his cheeks from Murdoc's nails.
Helpless, because what can he do, Murdoc watches the demon slip effortlessly into Noodle's waltz, a perfect partner for her perfect dance.
('Mud-doc?' Noodle whispers, and he rolls, almost tumbles out of bed as he turns to look at the door. She cannot say his name yet, he remembers, something about the vowels.
He lies there for a moment, blinking hard to adjust to the light streaming in through the cracked door. Noodle is stood there in her pyjamas – one of 2D's T-shirts, and a pair of shorts he doesn't know the origin of – clutching her blanket. He rubs a hand over his face, hauls himself upright.
'You a'ight, love?' he slurs, and makes to get out of bed.
For a moment she stops and thinks. 'Bad sleep,' she whispers back, and slips into the room, shutting the door behind her and blocking out the light.
He squints, and she waves her hand, tries to find another word.
'Bad dreams?' he asks, when his brain has caught up to her mouth.
Nodding, she rubs her hair. He scratches at his jaw – he needs a shave again, and makes a note to get razors, and hide them out of 2D's reach this time – and eventually throws the covers back, shifting to the side of the bed to give her space.
She mumbles something that he knows is a thank you, and hurries over, jumping onto the creaking old bed, careful to not let her legs get within arm's reach of the dark space beneath. She wedges herself into the space between him and the wall, and tugs his arms around her.
He lies awake that night as she sleeps, snoring soft against his collar. Russel goes spare in the morning, and Murdoc has no intentions of explaining that the girl had a nightmare. He's an arse, finds it hilarious. Noodle comes back again the next night, and the next, and naps pressed tight against his side when they break from recording.)
Shaking himself free of the memory, irrelevant and unnecessary and distracting, he does what he does best, and cuts in.
Noodle claws at him, too caught in this dream the demon's created, but he swats her flailing hands away and hoists her up over his shoulder. She's heavier than he estimated, all muscle. She claws at his back, but he digs his fingers into her thigh and backs away from the now-scowling Sidragosum.
'What did you expect me to do?' Murdoc asks him with a grin. 'I can't dance for shit. But I'm great at cutting in.'
Sidragosum looks at them. Amusement curls across his lips. Noodle calls Murdoc a few choice names he hasn't heard for years.
'Hush,' he tells her.
She slaps him hard in the back, where Lilith's claws took a few inches out of him. He staggers, but keeps his feet.
'Well,' Murdoc says, ignoring her wailing, 'I guess this is it. I'll be heading off now, back home. Got shit to do, you understand. I'll have to go stage a prison break for 2D, God knows he'll be there forever if I leave him alone. You don't mind too terribly, do you?'
Sidragosum is laughing now. Murdoc expects to be dead in a second. But that second never comes, and the demon waves him away, apparently entertained enough to let him go without any further contest.
Murdoc does not hang around to let him change his mind.
Noodle is limp now, a dead weight on his shoulder, his pace slowed significantly even without the agony tearing through every pore and fracture and fissure of his body, but he manages to barrel through a set of heavy, blackened doors all the same.
A library? Fuck it. He doesn't have time to look. Noodle groans somewhere behind his ear, and he ignores her, focused instead on putting one foot in front of the next and the next and the next, keeping moving against every nerve telling him to stop, just for a second.
Xitragupten does what Xitragupten has been doing for the last twenty years; he gets in the way and squawks indignantly about putting everything in Murdoc's file.
'Oh, fuck off,' he snaps, and somehow finds it in him to punch the stupid secretarial bastard in the vaguely face-like thing he talks out of. It's a mass of eyeballs and a gaping maw, and it doesn't do much but startle him.
Murdoc feels better for it anyway.
Slamming sideways into the door on the other side of the room, Murdoc finds himself back at the queue. He's almost there. He can almost taste it.
Readjusting Noodle to carry her fireman-style, he takes a breath and sets his sights.
There are imps beginning to swarm the path, but he shoves his way through the queue and begins heading back towards the end. A few people see him moving back, holding a girl over his shoulder, and try to follow suit. The imps, who have orders to take Murdoc down, are not smart enough to prioritise, and begin bullying everyone who attempts to break free of the queue back into line. This is all Murdoc needs to get back to where the priests were bickering. A few thousand more people have arrived in the time he's been running around, but he barges past them too. They scatter, terrified.
Lilith comes skittering out, climbing out from under somewhere beneath them, and Murdoc curses, begs his body to work harder. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a splash of red letters. A green buggy. A new soul, one dead after him.
'Fuck shit up!' he howls at the boy.
He's got a shaved head and broad shoulders and he's wearing a Gorillaz t-shirt, and he looks at Murdoc, burnt in a dozen places, with a girl in black boots and shorts and a striped shirt slung over his shoulders, and he recognises them.
God bless the boy, he immediately punches the guy nearest him, who thinks it was the guy next to him.
Bedlam spreads down the queue within seconds, and Murdoc bellows his thanks as he legs it past the last thousand people. Lilith tries to follow, but her way is blocked by brawling priests and Nazis and maybe even that bastard unfortunately responsible for siring Murdoc too. Maybe even him. Murdoc doesn't give it enough thought to even register it as a possibility.
She screams his name, howls it like a dog, and his ears ring.
He can see the portal. Noodle groans again, clutches at his chest as she tries to right herself. He squeezes her wrist, digs shattered bones into her thigh. She gasps, and goes still again, accepts it.
Just a few more steps, a few more.
Murdoc slams into it with everything he has, and there is darkness.
When Murdoc opens his eyes, he immediately gets a whole load of dirt in them, and he could really do without that right now, thanks all the same. There is something terribly droll about waking up from a sojourn into Hell covered in a pile of dirt, but then, he supposes, he did technically die. That's what happens when you go into Hell. The neon-lighted door doesn't in fact lead to a strip joint, it leads to a cliff face where you plummet onto the rocks and lay there a tattered corpse until some poor bastard walking their dog finds you.
At least they had the sense to bury him in a coffin, so he's at least got some oxygen. That's nice.
Something scuffles to his right. Great, the badgers or moles or whatever have found their way in already. It was a cheap coffin then, no custom grim-reaper-Addams-Family-purple-velvet job for him. Fucking incredible.
He does his best to punch it and make it fuck off.
It coughs at him, sounding very girlish and familiar.
'Noodle?' he asks, voice scratchy, dry, unused and rotting, and Noodle pinches him wherever she can reach; somewhere between two ribs.
'I think my nose is broke!' she hisses at him, but she cuddles up all the same, wriggling the inches it takes to get pressed around his ribs. She feels bigger than he remembers.
How long were they "dead?"
'Join the club,' he tells her. He's lost count of his fractures and breaks.
'I missed you,' she whispers into his collar. Her breath is too warm for the small space and sweat prickles instantly.
'I missed you too, pet,' he says, turns his head, kisses her hair. 'We need to get out of here.'
She nods, and he feels her swallow, hears it. 'What do we do?'
'You cover your face,' he tells her, and his fingers crack as he clenches his fist.
The first slam of his knuckles hits right into a seam between two slats of the lid, and does about as much damage as it does when he punches concrete. Pain zips along his nerves like a spark, and he snarls. The second sends another spark. His knuckle is broken, he's almost sure. The skin is split, definitely, he can feel the trickle of blood oozing dirt-thick down tendons and the knob of bone in his wrist. The smell of iron fills the limited air.
Limited. Shit.
He takes a moment.
'Keep breathing,' he whispers to Noodle, who nods into his armpit. How she can breathe that in is beyond him.
He takes a breath. Holds it.
Three minutes later, he is still holding it. He hadn't even spared it a thought, too busy pounding on the coffin like it's 2D's face.
No, no, not 2D's face. Not at all 2D's face. Jimmy fucking Manson's face. Yes, there it is. Little Jimmy Manson who wanted to suck his dick and stab him in the same breath. Little Jimmy Manson who is swimming with the fishes and Murdoc wishes he met him in Hell. He wishes harder than he has ever wished. It's one more regret to add to the list. He punches harder.
More blood. More iron. More dirt showering down onto them.
Time crawls, marked by the crack of his knuckles against the shattering wood. Noodle is wheezing, clutching at his shirt sporadically. He punches in time with the grasping fingers.
Her grasps slows. His knuckles burn, arm sticky.
One last punch and the whole bloody lot gives way, swamping them. Choking. Murdoc still isn't breathing.
He grabs Noodle's collar, holds her tight, begins digging. Getting two people out of six feet of compacted dirt is not much better than getting two people out of any other six feet of anything.
He's going to have conjunctivitis for months.
For a few terribly scary moments, he thinks Noodle is dead, but then his hand grasps absolutely bugger all, and he manages to shove his arm high enough above ground to get a grip on grass or some other shit and haul. A few tugs is all it takes to break the surface, and he yanks Noodle out.
The earth is nice; it spits them out much like its sister, the sea, spits out the drowned. Noodle coughs and splutters and vomits onto the grass.
Murdoc exhales, a soft sigh. He flops onto his back, stares at the stars.
'At least they didn't bury me upside down,' he snorts.
Noodle crawls over to him, collapses half-on, half-off. He's sweaty and bloody and stinks to high hell of dirt and badger shit and his own mortality. She doesn't care.
They lie there for a few minutes in heaving, gasping silence, Murdoc's mutilated fingers weaving cat's cradles through Noodle's tangled hair.
'Are we alive?' she asks him.
'I think so,' he replies, stares at the stark glow of his finger bones in the blinding glow of the uninterrupted moon. He's seen those bones before, he's sure.
As they lie there, and Noodle begins to drift, body warm and familiar against his, he feels his body begin working again, all the pumps and tickers loosening and getting back into the rhythm of it. His mind is quick to catch up, every moment of Hell flooding his senses. He bites back the sob, the urge to roll and puke, because he doesn't want to disturb Noodle.
(Murdoc does not sleep that night, nor the next, nor the one after that. He watches his girl in what he acknowledges to himself is outright terror. He knows that if he closes his eyes for even a moment, she'll be gone again, killed by his own inability. He'll never get her back if he lets her go. The only clouds he'll see will be smoke.)
In the morning, they pick themselves up off the dirt and take stock.
Noodle is a little scuffed and absolutely filthy, but she's intact and alright. Shaken-up, but alright. Her face is bruised, that same eye Lilith got to, but it's just a bruise here, nothing rotting or broken. She must have bumped it on the way out. It'll heal. She's wearing the same clothes she wore when she died, the same as him, but she's grown, older now, and they're far too small for her. Everything looks tight and uncomfortable, and he manages to pull the neckline of that striped top loose enough (tears it, really, there's no two ways about it) to let her breathe, but there's not a lot he can do about the rest. But other than being dirty and a bit banged-up, she looks alright. All of her limbs are where they should be and there are no gaping holes.
He searches her face for anything that might suggest – suggest – for anything wrong.
She stares back, wide-eyed, breathing deep. He cups her face, tears well, and she collapses. He holds her tight, nose and mouth in her hair. His toes press wide in the space of his boots; he's rocking her like a baby. Like they all did back in the beginning, when the screeching of the crows outside terrified her, when she dreamt of things she couldn't quite remember. She used to bolt to a dark corner, but that terrified her more.
(Murdoc, when he slept in the building, left his light on at all times. She came straight to him the moment she realised a light on meant he was in. He was not necessarily awake, but he was there.
Russel and 2D soon cottoned on, and she went to whoever's light was on. After a while, she gravitated toward Russel. Murdoc didn't mind. Much.)
'Your fingers,' she sobs, and he tells her to shut her mouth.
She shuts her mouth and continues to weep into his shirt.
Eventually, her tears run out, and she straightens, rubbing her face with the crook of her elbow. It smears dirt, but she avoids her eyes.
'You look green,' she tells him, and he blinks stupidly.
'I feel fine,' he replies.
'No,' she says, and her smile is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. 'No, you're literally green. Look.'
She puts her hand against his, and his skin is lime-green compared to the sunshine of hers.
'Oh,' he says, and thinks hard about why this is.
'There,' she says, after a moment has passed. 'It's gone. Back to being you again.'
Murdoc looks down at their hands; his skin is that same pallid, greyish tone it has always been, something a little sickly, but human.
'I suppose I'll have to pay attention, won't I? Can't be scaring the kiddie-winkles,' he hums, and tries for a chuckle.
But the expression on Noodle's face stops him after only a couple of barked laughs, because her expression is mirroring what he's thinking; he's not Right.
When they find it in themselves to move, his arm is numb from fingertip to shoulder, and he lets it hang limp at his side as they walk. Noodle clutches his other hand like it's holding her down. Or holding him up.
He tries not to grip tight enough to break her skin.
They manage to work out where they are after stumbling across a main road, and from there, they manage to find fresh water at a running stream.
Murdoc drinks until he's sick, scrubs his hands and face, and leaves Noodle with strict instructions to stay where she is. He doesn't want to leave her, but there was a row of houses a minute or so back, and she'll be a liability there.
He returns several minutes later with clean clothes for her, a bar of soap, and a towel. She looks at him. He gives her a crooked smile, an attempt. She accepts the gift, stolen as it is, and tells him to turn his dirty old man back whilst she washes. Sticking his fingers up and echoing her stuck-out-tongue, he does as asked and looks determinedly at a bush a few feet away. He read the Bible once, and a bush got set on fire. His fingers itch for his lighter; it's gone. Has 2D got it? Did they – whoever they were, police, hospital, Beelzebub – did they let 2D keep his shit? The lighter was probably the most expensive thing he kept in his pockets. He'd like 2D to keep it, he thinks, and then shakes the thought away.
He listens to her splash about in the stream, and she asks him how he managed to steal a bar of soap.
'Got two of your lifetime's experience, pet,' he tells her, runs his hands through his hair. His hand is looking worse by the hour.
Keeping his back to her, he hops to the other side of the stream and plonks his arse down, dunks his hand in the water.
'Does it hurt?' she asks.
'Agony,' he replies, and rubs his neck.
It's here that he realises his cross is missing, the familiar weight of the old, filthy chain with its pliers-squeezed broken links and bloodstains gone from his neck. He pats his front down, as though expecting the chain to have broken again and got caught up inside his T-shirt, but there is no body-warm copper or chain. Huh. He rubs a tight spot in his neck, and considers whether the loss of it is particularly bothersome. Noodle hums a tune behind him, and splashes about some more; she's dancing, he can tell, putting her mind to something else. Does she remember the details of what happened in Hell? Does she just remember the fear and the sadness and the pain? Or does she remember everything? He hopes to anything listening that she remembers nothing.
He doesn't consider her dancing might not be her. He can't bring himself to think it. His contract with Sidragosum must be voided by now, ineffectual. The demon can't possibly have any way to control him or those around him, particularly ones of a female persuasion.
He glances at his knuckles; the water has gurgled about his fingers enough to wear the clots and scabs and dirt away, drawing fresh blood. Ah, well.
The necklace, Murdoc decides, he does not miss all that much. After that shit-show, he thinks privately that he doesn't much care anymore. Hell had not lived up to his standards, had not treated him the way that he, a loyal follower of the Big Man Down Below, had expected. It was almost like they didn't appreciate him, and if Murdoc's life had taught him nothing else, it had been to recognise where he wasn't wanted, and to leave.
So he left. He left and he took Noodle with him, and he'll never go back.
(He will not admit for years, but he is terrified to sleep for fear of going back. Something is following them, has followed them since he got them out of Hell, and it won't stop following them until he's back in the queue, waiting for his Judgement.)
When she's dressed, she rounds him and kneels, takes his hand into her lap to look at it. The knuckles are exposed, and he's sure two of his proximal phalanges are broken. She presses the remains of that torn, striped shirt of hers to his hand. It hurts, but he says nothing.
The clothes he stole for her are a little small, but not as small as the ones she'd died in. The dress sits higher on her thigh than he would like it to, but it's too late now, and she's wearing underwear at least. If he passes some shorts or something, he'll nab those, too. But for now, mini-dress and pumps it is.
If it was anyone not Noodle, he might joke about the high-necked white dress with its red trim being a little nurse-like. But it's Noodle, and she has genuine concern on her bruised face, and he keeps his mouth shut.
At a picnic spot they pass as they walk in the general direction of "home," she disappears. Murdoc pretends he doesn't go absolutely spare. But he panics. Just a little. She returns at a trot, clutching something in her hand and grinning wide.
'Where have you been?' he hisses, knuckles cracking. But his hands stay at his sides, and he settles for a glare.
She holds up her stolen goods. Ice cream sticks. Brain cogs whir into motion, and the glare begins to soften into something resembling – well, Murdoc's not one for openly displaying his pride, but it's creeping in, around the corners of his mouth.
'I saw them,' she says, proud of herself. 'And I thought you could use them. For your hand.'
She knows him too well; he won't set foot in a hospital until he's dead.
Been there, done that.
He nods; they need rinsing off, still with ice cream and lipstick on, so they wander back towards the stream, and Murdoc does his best with what he's got.
'Did you know I have a medical degree?' he hums as he works, biting down on his sleeve to tear it off. He rinses the fabric out, and the water streaks red and brown for over a minute.
'A medical degree?'
'I'm a licensed doctor,' he tells her, tears a strip from the sleeve, shoves the rest in his pocket. 'Earned it in Mexican prison.' For a moment, he considers this, and then he adds, 'I can legally write 2D's prescriptions now.'
She thinks he's pulling her leg. He splints his fingers, wrapping the scrap of sleeve around his fingers, around his hand, and halfway up his arm, and they carry on their way.
(He tears the other sleeve off after about half an hour, because having one long sleeve is just plain stupid. She looks at the cross and octopus on his arm, and smiles. The memories of Hell begin to ebb under the weight of that smile.)
[ T B C ]
NOTES::
Title is from Feel Good, Inc. [turn forever, hand in hand, take it all in on your stride]
The monster from the game Murdoc thinks of is the Air Screamer from the original Silent Hill, which came out in '98, I believe.
The demons Murdoc faces are the ones he mentions in his live facebook chat, found on the Gorillaz wiki page for him. They are as follows; Alichino, a demon from The Divine Comedy, who done fucked up with the sinner Bonturo Dati, who fools him into persuading the other devils to leave him be to try and escape. Lilith is obvious. Sidragosum, as listed in my Dicitonary of Demons, is a demon with the power to make young girls irresistibly dance (okay, Murdoc, okay.) Xitragupten is my fave of these assholes; from what I gather, he's a secretary who writes down every good and bad deed a person does, taken from The Mysteries of All Nations by James Grant (page 211, its on google books). I like to imagine he's the reason for the green biro note, because Murdoc is never not doing something. What a dick.
I hear Murdoc's heartbeat bass-line as either The Swagga or 19-2000.
Rheumatoid is a type of arthritis, and according to Rise of the Ogre on page 178, he's an arthritic booze-monkey who must be very proud of his repulsiveness. I'm sure he is.
God, Murdoc, Dean managed to dig out of his grave in like 30 seconds by pulling on the lid, what's wrong with you? Jeez, Murdoc.
Thanks for reading, lovelies!