I'm back, yo! Sorry this has taken so long, had a lot on my plate!
Anyway, I deeply apologise if this chapter is a horrific mess, it's a very different style to previous chapters but I wanted to give it a go, normal service will be resumed next time! I should warn you right now that this chapter is basically a solid block of angst (it's episode 5 from Simon's POV, what did you expect?) with many references to drug use, experimentation/torture etc. I did my best, but if it's terrible I'm very very sorry :/
Anyway, happy reading!
DISCLAIMER: In The Flesh and all it's characters belong to Dominic Mitchell and BBC3. Song lyrics belong to the lovely Gabrielle Aplin. Direct quotes taken from the show belong to the original writers, I make no profit from this story and write it purely out of love for the series! :3
"Just one step, a different day
Would I know you at all?
Would I know you at all?
When the kingdom falls and your family fades
But it wasn't your fault, it was never your fault."
-'Alive', Gabrielle Aplin
The city lights fade into darkness, their impressions lingering on his retinas. He glances at his watch- it's gone past eleven, and he still has a long way to go. All the more time alone with his thoughts. Fuck.
Simon's eyes flutter closed and he draws in a deep, steadying breath, the way Kieren had taught him to.
Kieren.
They snap open once again as he gasps for breath- suddenly there's not enough air, not even for his useless lungs. He digs his blue-tinged nails into the seat at his side. The walls seems closer now, he barely has room to move, or even to breathe.
More breaths. Deep, calming, filling and draining the parched void in his chest.
His head falls against the window, pale eyes gaze out at the rolling landscape- city fading to suburbs fading to countryside. At least two hours of silent travel to go, and a decision still has to be made.
He hunches over with a pained sigh, running his hands through his gelled hair and not giving a damn about the style. With his eyes closed and his mind in overdrive, he lets memories, old and new and sweet and painful, wash over him.
The damp envelope squelches between his fingers, and his ragged nails easily shred the sodden paper, peeling it away in strips from the plastic slip within. Two objects- a train ticket and a room key, the name of the hotel inscribed on the fob. He glances at the destination on the ticket, and knows what he has to do.
Cover-up applied and contacts in, he sneaks past the less-than-vigilant man at the ticket office and boards the train, sliding into a seat in the darkest corner and avoiding eye contact as he is whisked away from the bleak Roarton morning.
It is almost two hours before he finds himself in the city. Another thirty minutes before he finds the hotel. Another God knows how many hours pacing the dingy room, wearing a trench in the drab, threadbare carpet.
The sun has long set when he hears the door. He turns away from his view of the city lights, his darkened eyes landing on Julian. With a smile of familiarity and a warm embrace, he watches as the disciple sets his bag down on the bed and unzips it. He talks excitably, his mind filling with images of a boy with strawberry blonde hair and gentle eyes, a boy who could be the answer to all their prayers and the end to their suffering. He could have talked about him forever if he didn't have an urgent message to hear.
As he sits down on the edge of the bed, leaning forward expectantly as Julian slides the DVD into the decrepit player, and he allows himself an eager smile. For the moment, he forgets about his misgivings. The Prophet is wise- he was their leader for a reason- but he is also kind. He knows what's best. What he thought was best had to be the best for everyone- including a certain sarcastic eternal-eighteen year-old with a penchant for morbid jokes.
As the static subsides and his cloaked face appears, Simon hangs on every word from his saviour's mouth with bated breath. With each passing syllable, he feels his smile slip.
"You must sacrifice the First Risen…"
Smooth skin, a soft smile. "Morning…"
"On the twelfth hour…"
A smirk- part awkward, part arrogant. "'Fucking gorgeous', eh?"
"Of the twelfth day…"
"Want me to stop?" a whispered breath in his beautiful boy's ear, their eyes meeting in the glow of the streetlamp.
"Of the twelfth month…"
A quiet gasp, hands clutching his own. "No."
"The First Risen must be sacrificed."
A kiss, long and deep, warm despite the cold rain on their dead skin.
"Only then can the Second Rising occur."
As the screen turns to static, his mind turns to chaos. He swallows down sickness as Julian presses the heavy leather package into his hands. He forces a smile as the disciple departs, leaving him alone in the grimy room with nothing but his thoughts. He bites back black bile as new images invade his head, gentle kisses and tender touches replaced with blood and pain, wide doll eyes that scream betrayal.
"No," he rasps, staring numbly at the package in his hands. "It wasn't supposed to…"
He can't even finish his thought. What was supposed to be their blessing has become their curse.
He is pacing again, his fingers twitching as restlessly as his frantically shuffling feet. The walls are closing in, he has no room to breathe. He slumps into the corner, the city lights at his back as he clasps his throbbing head in his hands, guarding his ears from the noises that grow louder every second. He closes his eyes to the background noise as it creeps ever closer to the foreground, angry hissing and cold, mechanical beeps. Familiar. Painfully so.
"Where…"
White, so much white.
"Am…"
Blood, bile, toxic black staining the white and turning it to rotten grey.
"I?"
Everything is cold and sharp. Straps bite into his wrists, his ankles, his neck. It should be painful, but all he feels is pressure.
Before long, the straps are replaced with chains, the rack with a chair. He stares uncomprehendingly at his own face, feeling like he may as well be watching a stranger. Grotesque, soulless eyes, waxen skin, blue-tinged lips that had so recently been stained black. He wants to count the differences between his old face and the horrifying creature before him, but he's not sure he can remember his old self. Memories come and go, slipping through his fingers so fast he might as well be snatching at snowflakes in a blizzard.
He barely hears the scientist, too transfixed by his own cold eyes staring back at him. One sentence grabs his attention.
"There's a cure?" he murmurs, looking up hopefully into the bright, living eyes of Dr. Weston.
"With your help, there could be."
It's all Simon needs. He agrees to their terms, taking one last look at his reflection and hoping that he need never look into the eyes of the beast again.
Trapped again, his head tied down along with his stiff limbs. He timidly questions the actions of John Weston as he tightens the strap over his forehead, but raises no further complaints. He can't afford to deprive them. They're his only chance.
"Until I'm fixed?"
He swallows his fear. He has no time for fear if he wants to get better.
As a hundred volts of electricity surge through his head, searing his cells with agony his frayed nerves shouldn't be able to feel, his body starts to shake and his white eyes roll back. There is too much pain to even scream through so he bears it in silence.
He is torn between relief and fear as the light goes, taking the pain and the heat with it. He gasps and pants, his eyes rolling in his immobilised head as he searches for something, anything or anyone, just don't be alone. Don't be-
"You are the First and the Last."
Red light pours over him, the disembodied voice crackling from the speakers above his head. Warped, distorted, speaking in a vernacular he knew well. A childhood of Bible readings, Sunday church services and hands clasped at the dinner table flood back. He finds himself latching onto every word, still gasping for his unnecessary breath as the voice cuts out, the crimson glow fades and the pain returns. The first of many waves to come.
At least it was a feeling.
"Believe him, Simon."
Simon watches Julian's face, tilted back against the cold ceramic tile as he sleeps. His words resonate with him. It just seems such an impossible request- he spent his entire first life not believing in anything. Life, humanity, divine intervention, each seemed as pointless as the last. He often thought of himself as the world's worst Catholic- it hardly spoke well of your religious orientation when you could barely bring yourself to believe in your own deity. He went along with it, sang the hymns and said the prayers and leafed through the delicate pages of the Bible he kept on his bedside table, but every turn of the page felt like going through the motions. He never saw a reason to believe in God, or to believe that a human life was anything more than a struggle for survival before inevitably fading to nothing, lost in time. He'd had no reason to believe in an afterlife until he'd had one thrust upon him. No reason to believe in demons until he had become one.
No reason to believe in angels until he laid eyes on one. Kissed his lips, held his hands in his own.
Now, for the first time in his twenty-seven years of life before death- and however many years after- he actually longed to be among the living. To feel that dull thud in his chest because it's better than the alternative. To feel air filling his lungs because it was a vital force of life, not just a reflex. He was going through the motions again, and now it felt more hopeless than ever before.
He doesn't want to be a dead thing anymore. Even before that last fatal dose that stopped his heart, he'd been long gone. Resigned, numb, his lungs inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide out of some dull sense of obligation to his shell of a body. Now that there is no reason to breathe, no warmth in his veins and no nerves left to feel, he is empty. Hollow. Frozen.
For the first time in his lives, he wants to thaw.
It is a slow process, tedious and harrowing at the same time. He has no idea how long he lets John and Victor poke at his flesh like a body on a slab (which is all he is, in the end). All he knows is that with each passing day life seems to slip further from his grasp. Sunrise, sunset, no change.
They inject him with chemicals he has no name for, stimulate parts of his brain he hadn't even known existed, pick at his deadened nerves in a desperate attempt to make him feel something, anything. No change.
Skin smooth as silk, white as snow and just as cold.
At least six needles in his arm, delivering their lab-grown toxins to his sluggish veins. No change.
Lips, cold and blue but warmed to an almost human shade of pink as he kisses them, over and over.
Electrodes on his chest, charging his heart with enough electricity to kill anyone with a pulse. No change.
Hair, golden-red, thick atop his head and dusted lightly like down across his body, his arms, legs, stomach, chest, feather-soft to the touch.
He wonders what they can do. What can be done to make his dead body feel when even his living, breathing flesh had been numb to the world? Dangerous, often untested compounds had been his solution the first time around- it seemed history had a habit of repeating itself. No change.
The first new feeling he feels isn't physical. It's not the cold of the tiles at his feet or the warmth of his covers on his creaky bed. No, this feeling is all in his head.
The feeling is betrayal.
The foundation feels heavy on his face, the contacts over his eyes the wrong colour, completing his poorly applied mask. His pleading falls on deaf ears as John departs, his white coat sweeping behind him as he leaves Simon waiting in his room, his shoulders hunched and his fists clenched. He isn't ready. He isn't fixed yet. He's still a creature, a dead thing, a demon. He wants to keep his face as far from the light of day as possible until he once again has eyes that can sting and skin that can burn.
When Simon walks he walks with a heavy heart and a guilty conscience. His parents are here already, somewhere. Waiting to see him. What are they expecting? What will they have to say? He hasn't seen them for years. He was twenty-three when he'd last seen his mother's face- right before he went to start his new life, his better life, overseas and away from the memories. How was he to know that certain kinds of sadness would travel any distance to keep you in their grasp?
When he sees his father's haggard face, he forgets how to breathe.
Their words are short, stilted. His father feels the strain of talking to the monstrous remains of his late son. Simon feels the weight of a lifetime of apologies, not knowing where to even begin. And so, because he needs to see another face, a tender face that he knows well, he asks one simple question.
"Where's Mum?"
Over the next thirty seconds, Simon feels his world collapse, his feeble grip on his life and his past slip. He is caught in a storm as the reality of what he's done hits him, and in that moment everything he thought he knew about himself becomes harsh, unavoidable reality.
He is a monster.
He has blood on his hands. Blood from a body he'd loved, the body that had first breathed life into him. He kicks and screams, he cries out as his father disappears, replaced by guards and electric jolts that send his flailing body into spasms. He lets them drag him away across the cold, hard floor and sobs because he deserves it, every bit of it.
He has the feelings back now. Clouding his mind, threatening to explode from his mouth, pour from his fingertips as he claws the sheets and drags his nails across his unfeeling skin. Feelings he knows too well from his first life. Guilt, sorrow, worthlessness. Emptiness.
No change.
They can't cure him. He knows that now. All of this, every shock and every needle, it can't undo what's been done. Even if his heart beats and his blood flows, he will never be who he was. What he was.
"I don't want to do this anymore…"
They're there, right behind him, poking around with skewers and scalpels. All he can feel is blunt pressure, things being prodded and pushed around. He hears a tap and knows it's the sound of metal clicking against his open spine.
"D'you hear me?"
But either they don't or they won't. He can't move, can't leave, his arms are pinned and his body is gutted. He wants to run away, run and hide, but he remains bound like Christ on the cross and there's nothing he can do as his pleas fall on deaf ears.
At that moment, he swears he can feel every cut and every stab.
When they leave him alone in the dark, his flesh open and his body vulnerable, he barely fights back a panic attack.
When he hears the distorted voice again, all its pretty words and promises washing over him in the dark, he feels a glimmer of hope in the shadows.
But then it's gone.
Left behind twice, once by the doctors who claimed to cure him, and again by the voice who claimed to save him. Nothing is clear anymore, no one is right and no one is wrong. Slowly, painfully, he is being torn apart.
Alone in the dark, with the phantom pain creeping up his back and eating away at him like a cancer, he cries himself to sleep.
He isn't ready, He knows he isn't ready.
But he'll never be ready, not really. There is no cure for being a monster.
His father doesn't lash out, verbally or physically. He just drives.
Nearly three hours, and not a word is spoken.
As they cross the threshold of the old house, Simon pretends not to notice the crossbow propped against the doorframe. When his father talks about getting food, he realises no one's told him that his son doesn't eat anymore.
"Fish and chips?" Simon suggests.
He's in no hurry to shatter the illusion.
For a while, it almost seems to work. He forces down a few bites of food, even knowing that it'll be nothing but bile by the end of the evening. His father makes a few attempts at small talk, and Simon does his best to be encouraging. He owes him that much.
Guilt twists in his gut- not one inch of the house is free of her. Photos on the wall, her books on the shelves, her favourite ornaments on the mantelpiece. When dinner is over and his stomach starts turning he excuses himself, and his father is only too happy to let him go.
He retches over the black-splattered sink, dry-heaving until he's sure his system's purged. As he raises his head he meets his own gaze in the mirror, and resists the urge to throw up again. No wonder his father will barely look at him- even under the cover-up and contacts, he's so obvious. His eyes are the wrong colour, flat and emotionless. His skin looks false, tinted yellow like parchment. His mask is slipping, but it was never in place to begin with.
He rinses out the sink and watches the black swirls drain away, and wishes he could wash away the last four years just as easily. With guilt in his stomach and his mother's face on his mind, he goes to find his father.
An apology won't fix anything. But it has to be done.
Unfortunately, Iain Monroe thinks otherwise.
"All right," he says gruffly before Simon can even finish his sentence.
It's not all right, and Simon knows it. But he nods anyway and returns to the solitude of his room, the teenager's room that feels like a distant memory of a foreign land. He should have known he'd have none of it. Nothing he can say could undo what's been done.
But no matter how hopeless he knows it is, how much he tells himself that nothing he says or does can change the past or make things better, he still lies awake thinking about how things could have been different. He lies on his side and stares at the photo, meeting the gaze of the kind face smiling back at him through the glass, and in his mind he constructs a million different realities. In some his feral self goes somewhere else to hunt, tears apart another innocent civilian he has no connection with. In some his father just moves that bit quicker, smashing his growling head in before he can take the fatal bite. In some he never dies in the first place. He picks up the phone when his mother calls, he listens to her when she begs him to come home and let her help him. He lets her destroy his stash and help him through his fevered withdrawal, and he goes to the therapy sessions she always suggested to find a less destructive means of coping with the turmoil in his head. Okay, so that one's a little too far-fetched, but he still thinks about it, one of an infinite number of choices that could have led him anywhere else but here.
When the door flies open and the lights come on, Simon sits up blearily, wondering when exactly he'd managed to doze off. He sees the looming figure cramming various clothes into a bag at a furious pace, and he can't tell if the knot in his stomach is guilt or fear. "Dad?" he chokes out, but receives nothing but a glare in answer. "Dad, what's going on?"
The bag is thrown onto the bed, and his father picks up the photo, brandishing it in his son's wide-eyed face. "You don't deserve to look at her!" he spits.
He brings the frame down, and it shatters against the table. Simon feels what's left of his cold, dead heart go with it.
As he huddles alone against the wall, cold tarmac pressing against his unfeeling skin, he muses on how familiar this all is. This is the place he knows, this is where he belongs- where he always belonged even before he took that last lethal dose. Even as his father had thrown him out into the night, slamming the door behind him, the portion of Simon's medicated brain that wasn't wallowing in anger and self-pity contemplated the unshakable feeling of déjà vu. It wasn't the first time Iain Monroe had banished his son from the family home- of course the last time it happened the drugs in his system had been a lot less medicinal and a lot more illegal.
Still, it isn't quite the same. Now that everyone else hates him as much as he hates himself, now that he's in an almost immortal form immune to the sweet chemicals he used to use as his escape, he feels more trapped than ever before. And his confines are much harder to break with no easy way out in sight for his frustratingly resilient new body.
But something else is different. His head feels different now, whatever strange new substance he pumps into his body every day swirling around in his brain and changing something. Something is gone now, something that used to be ever-present and is now little more than an errant thought. By some cruel irony, it would seem that his rotten brain is now working at a higher capacity than his living one ever did. The fog is gone- that horrifying, impenetrable darkness that used to settle over his mind, telling him that nothing was worth anything, that he was nothing more than just one of the many ants swarming the land, clinging on for dear life until they were dragged back into the abyss, ashes to ashes.
Here he is, alive again, walking the Earth once more for better or for worse. Something brought him back, gave him the strength and the will to crawl through the layers and layers of dirt to find himself back in the land of the living. But how, and why?
Why would he be back here, crawling across the surface of the world he thought he'd left behind, if there was no reason, no meaning to anything?
Maybe, just maybe, someone or something is trying to prove him wrong.
And right now, with his entire life on his back and his entire future up in the air, he desperately hopes it succeeds.
He slips the last of his money into the slot, keys in the numbers he hoped he'd never have to call, and presses the receiver to his ear. When he hears a click on the other end, the words pour out of him in a dry gasp.
"It's Simon," he rasps, scrunching the paper in his hand. "I'm ready to follow."
He gazes at them, the eleven of them around a long table, and they gaze with white eyes back at him like he's a thing of beauty. They approach him, one by one, no fear in their eyes, only acceptance.
Wide, dark doe-eyes, shining in the sunlight.
A smile, a handshake, another, more and more from every direction. Warm, welcoming.
A squeeze of the hand, a chaste peck on the lips, a smile just for him.
A hug. Julian pulls him tight against his body, and Simon gasps at the impact, his eyes widening as he feels his breath on his ear.
"God wiped all the tears from their eyes," Julian murmured soothingly, invitingly. "For when they are redeemed from the earth…"
Arms around his waist, a body draped over his own, beautiful skin so pale and smooth over shoulders so perfect he expected wings to fan from his back and carry him away.
"They are like angels that are in Heaven…"
A deep, stale breath escapes his cold lungs, his eyes flutter closed. He takes in a new breath, a fresh breath full of promise, and allows a strange new warmth to seep through his skin from the body he clings to. A new start, a new home. A purpose, at long last.
Because there's what I believe…
"And then there's you…" he whispers.
The train is racing off into the night, and he is alone on the platform. Not for long, though.
He walks and walks, quickening his pace like it will help him outrun the images that flock to his mind like moths to a flame.
"The First Risen must be sacrificed."
Eyes wide, voice heavy with suspicion. "What do you want, Simon?"
"Only then can the Second Rising occur."
A mischievous grin. "Dead men tell no tales?"
"It has to be done, Simon…"
Has to be done.
He arrives home, brushing past the sleeping forms of his camped-out followers like they were nothing. Right now, they might as well be.
Through the hall, through the door, into his room. The bed.
Hands gripping the blankets, a breathless gasp. Lips brushing skin, jolts of electricity through deadened nerves. Kiss-wet lips whimpering his name, fingers digging into his shoulders, pale throat peppered with gentle nips and adoring kisses.
Something else is on the bed now, dark and brutal against the soft blankets. Brown leather, his fingers working the strings. It falls open. His face remains frozen, impassive.
The knives glint and gleam in the frail moonlight, and the shine doesn't hold a candle to the reflection of silver starlight on copper hair but it doesn't matter. This is what needs to be done. What he was born to do. There is no other way.
The knife slides from the pocket, and the serrated edge flashes as he raises it. It feels heavy in his hand, and even through his dead flesh he can feel the cold of the steel. And still his face remains blank, the mask in place, now and forever.
No change.
"And I realise you have to feel alive
All your worries will escape through the door
And you'll wake up all alone on the floor
It's not too late
Just rely on me now."
Well, there you have it! Simon is v. hard to write, hope I did okay :/
I know I should be focusing my energies on this but if I take a while to update it's because my mind is currently being consumed by a Still Alive AU I'm writing of these two (which is unbelievably angsty and pretty graphic so if I ever publish it I need to remember to add a buttload of trigger warnings), I'm trying to keep on top of both but you all must know by now about my unfortunate habit of biting off more than I can chew!
And I can't believe it's taken me this long to say it publicly (I reply to all your messages privately, but still), thank you so much for all the reviews! It really does mean a lot and it keeps me motivated more than anything, so thank you! I hope I can keep going without letting you down for as long as possible!
Until next time! x