Everything was meaningless. Days had turned into nothingness. Space didn't matter if it was infinite. He stuck his fingers into a jar and scooped the sticky contents into his mouth, slurping up the sticky jam as if he could taste anything. "What's the point of eternal indulgence if I can't taste anything?" Beyond demanded from the emptiness with frustration. That didn't stop him from licking his fingers clean. If this was purgatory, he'd hate to see what hell was like.

Sighing heavily, he willed another jar of Wammy's homemade jam into existence. The world between worlds was tricky like that. He could create whatever he wanted, and sometimes his imagination got the better of him and there would be times he was living in a dream of his own memories or desires. Of course, it wasn't at all like being alive. He could feel the things he conjured, but he couldn't taste or smell them. He could pretend that A or E was there, but it would be them the way he wanted them to be or the way he remembered them being. It would never be A the way he was when he died, and it would never be E the way she was now.

Heaving a sigh, Beyond wondered what she was up to. He hadn't seen her in their little dream world in what felt like ages. Not since she had unexpetedly taken control of their dreamscape. He felt a twinge of envy at her developing ability. After all, he was the older sibling. How could she take yet another thing that had been exclusively his? Not that it mattered so much, anymore. "Essie," Beyond sang into the void, "I'm booooored." It didn't echo. Beyond flopped onto his back, not feeling any impact as he landed, and he reflected on how he thought death would be more fun. Sometimes he would get lucky and peer into the world of the living at that stupid one way mirror that seemed to exist at the center of the void, but he had left it behind, finding that watching humanity in death wasn't nearly as engaging as doing so in life.

He started to hear a song from further in the void, and he sat up, wondering where it was coming from. He grunted and got back to his feet, picking up the jar of tasteless jam as he shuffled towards the source of the tune, wondering if it was that sister of his. Annoyed, he recognised the arrangement as a Welsh lullaby their mother used to sing to them as children. "Why on earth is she singing that?" Beyond grumbled, slurping up another finger full of purgatory-jam.

He saw a woman in the distance, dressed in a loose white gown with her long brown hair tumbling past her waist. With a clean finger, Beyond cleaned out his ear. The tune didn't change, and he blinked hard to try and wish away the specter in front of him. "Would you stop that?" he interrupted the singer's wailing Welsh. She stopped and shifted her torso to look at him. The woman regarded him with icy blue, human eyes and a kind smile. "Oh, it's you."

"Hello, my boy," his mother extended her arms to him as if to embrace him, and he regarded her with an unamused and blank expression. He hadn't noticed how much Essie had grown to look like that woman as an adult.

"You're here in a place like this, too?" he mused, circling around her form with curiosity. "I wonder if this is a special hell for people like you and I."

She grinned at him, an expression ignorant of the void around them or the time that had passed between them, "My baby, look how much you've grown!"

He scoffed at the admiration in her words as she patted down his mussed up dark brown hair. "You're a true lunatic, you know that?" he said to her with annoyance. "What kind of person would name her children Beyond Birthday and Escallonia Birthday? Not only did you pick up a shinigami's death note, you went and convinced it to give you children knowing full well that it would kill you both. Were you that desperate to have your dolls?" Her eerily cheerful demeanor didn't change at his venomous criticisms, and she stroked his face with the back of her hand. "You have no idea what you did to us. Essie was my responsibility. We only had each other, and when I grew into the eyes, I had nothing." He spat the words out, but nothing changed. She didn't stop her brushing his hair back the way that she had when he was a child, and she didn't stop smiling.

"Everything that happened to me, everything that's happening to Essie is your fault!" he bellowed at the woman who had once been his mother.

Still, she didn't react. She just smiled at him, "I love you, Beyo."

His hand shot out and wrapped around her throat, but he didn't feel the warmth of her life in his fingers. Her face finally changed into an expression of mild concern. It looked more like she had missed a bus than her first born was taking out a lifetime worth of suffering on her. She reached up to his hand and scratched at him.

"You're killing me," she said, her voice clear as day, as if he wasn't crushing her windpipe.

"I know," Beyond said hollowly as he squeezed the unfeeling flesh of the image until it crumbled into nothingness, "but it doesn't matter because you aren't real. If you were my true mother, you'd never say something as ridiculous as 'I love you'."

That was the thing about purgatory. It preyed on his memories and the wishes he once held.

Beyond sighed again and conjured another jar of tasteless jam. He wondered why he had conjured such a silly thing as the excitement of the event drained away and left him with his empty boredom. As he walked back into the void of the world between worlds, he started to whistle the tune of a lullaby his mother used to sing to him when he was a boy in Wales.

A/N... Hello, I'm so sorry for making you all wait so long for an update, again. I hope you all enjoy this little short with BB in purgatory.

A few notes:

1. I guess I "graduate college" today? Very surreal, and thank you for hanging on to this story while I got my work done!

2. I learned how to photoshop lol, so we finally have a cover!

3. I've gone through a few pen name changes, but I think that this one is here to stay :)

4. I'm sure you all noticed that the point of view changed in the last chapter. The past few years, I've started to favor a third person narration, but instead of going back and rewriting everything, I think that it's an interesting change with E's character to shift to this perspective. We're getting to a point where Everest isn't the person that she used to be. Her motives have changed, and her identity is taking the form of something less human. To accommodate for these changes, a symbolic change in narration takes place. Let me know if you have any theories about what it all means :) stay tuned for the next chapter!

Thank you for supporting this story!