Gabriel
I end up in the same place when I'm not with Vivienne.
It always comes the way it does, soft at first, like a memory surfacing from the wrong side of a lake, then sudden and cold as the water itself.
It never changes, at least not in spirit. The setting shifts, the faces blur, but the weight of it, the truth of it, is always the same: I am a prisoner, shackled, in rags, dragged through the cobblestones by things that see me as less than nothing. It doesn't matter if it's the second night of the hundredth. When I'm alone, it comes.
This time, I find myself stumbling forward in a caravan, iron biting at my wrists, the chain jerking taut each time the prisoner ahead of me trips. The air is hot and dry, full of smoke that stings my eyes, but it's not the heat that makes me sweat. It's the city.
Hell spreads before me like a nightmare made flesh. I don't know where exactly I am, just that it's deeper than any story ever dared to describe. Streets paved with cracked black stone. Towers of bone rising crooked, leaning into one another like corpses trying to stand.
The city around is a theater of cruelty. Demons pace like bored audience members. Officers in black-iron breastplates lean from balconies and clap for slow, inventive punishments. Men and women I remember as faces in crowds — neighbors, an old teacher, a girl who used to sell pastries at a corner store. All staged for execution.
I see a firing line—officers loading muskets with lazy grins as they gun down rows of humans who crumple only to reform moments later, torn flesh knitting itself back together so the execution can happen again. I see gallows where men and women hang like broken marionettes, jerking, choking, never dying. Hooks pierce through chests and throats, suspending bodies like meat in a butcher's stall. All killed and stitched back together so the show can continue.
The things they make humans do are clever in the way a surgeon is clever, precise, and designed to unmake hope. Claws pull on the skin and the strings of the face until the mouth becomes something else.
Some of the suffering is offered as entertainment; some of it, the hopeless invent for themselves. Some humans… torture themselves, scratching themselves raw because repeating pain keeps their minds from drifting into the abyss. A poor child sits and sharpens pebbles until she is steady enough to carve a story onto her own forearm. In an opening to an alleyway way I watch a man slam his hand against a jagged wall until bones split through skin, just to remind himself he can feel something other than despair. A woman presses her head into the dirt and screams at nothing until her voice shreds. Others wander, eyes empty, minds long gone. Only a fool would call these people cowards. Cowardice is a word for the living, not for the ones who've accepted this end.
I want to look away, but I can't. My body is frozen, from fear? Shock? Maybe both.
I stop moving because there is nothing to do. My hands are bound. I can only stare until the chain that holds me snaps taut and the man ahead of me yanks me forward so the shepherds won't beat me for lagging. He does it with the sort of practiced cruelty that makes him look as comfortable as a man adjusting a coat. Nearly tearing me off my feet, I stumble forward, forced to keep pace or risk punishment. I hear the clink of armor, the guttural rasp of demon tongues, uniforms swishing, and cloaks dragging. They look stronger here, more defined, more alive than they ever seemed on Earth. In Hell, they're in their element.
A demon soldier, uniformed in a ruinous black cloak like a torn flag, notices me staring, walks close to me with his shadow swallowing mine. When I slow down, he barks, "Move along." He smells of cotton and iron.
I don't. I have no reason to move.
I swallow hard, then… I don't know why, but I opened my mouth.
"Tell me something," I rasp, my voice cracking from the dry air, "Why do our souls deserve this?" Why eternal suffering? Why must they be tortured by souls more evil than they ever were?"
The soldier halts, looking down at me with ember-lit eyes beneath his hood. His mouth curls into something that isn't quite a smile. "You are all filth. Including you. Filth doesn't deserve mercy. Filth doesn't deserve anything but to be fuel as it feeds the furnace. Filth belongs to the flames."
Something in me snaps. Maybe it's because I know why I'm here, maybe because I have nothing left to lose. My voice rises, sharp and trembling, "Fuel? You think you're any better? You're monsters feeding on pain. You deserve chains more than any sinner here!"
The demon snarls and steps closer, his breath hot and foul. Our shouts collide in the air, rage for rage, until he finally acts. His gauntlet grips the hilt of his blade. He steps in, turns his sword sideways, and—
Crack!
The mordhau strike slams against my shoulder and neck, sending me to my knees. Pain flashes white, but it's not enough to make me stop.
I spit. The glob lands on the iron of his boot, hissing against its heat.
The world goes still. The demon growls, face twisting, curses stringing together in that guttural language I've come to recognize. Something like "Straviélle!" Then softer, almost like a private sentence for me alone. "Die a thousand times, dog. It will never be enough." His sword slides free of its sheath, an ugly slab of metal that learns how to sing when it bites. He raises it overhead.
I don't move. My hands remain bound, my knees pressed into the stone. My chest rises, steady. I almost welcome the cut. The blade drops and blurs as it arcs. But instead of steel I hear—
Ding-dong.
My whole body remembers the blade as if it is still falling, muscle twitching, the phantom weight of panic. The dream collapses into the mattress, the shackles melt into sheets.
I'm back in my apartment. The air is cool, stale with the smell of last night's silence. The clock blinks 12:03 PM.
I curse under my breath and roll out of bed. Noonlight drags itself into the room. My throat tastes like iron and sleep. My legs still feel heavy, but I force them to carry me to the door. When I open it, Elias is there, bundled against the cold, his hair still tussled the way it always is. He does not look like a man who has been carrying the weight of the world alone, but his eyes have that particular focus that people get when they have been keeping something from collapsing for too long. He grins, low and unsafe, his way of scavenging cheer.
"You good?" He asks. For once, I let him see the small things; the way I still smell of the dream, the film in the corner of my eyes. His smile is just sharp enough to mask the worry in his eyes. "You look like you got hit by a truck."
I rub my eyes. "Feels about right."
"Can I come in, or are you gonna let me freeze outside?
I step aside. "Yeah. Sorry. Come in."
He walks in, glancing around the living room before turning back to me. "You just woke up, didn't you?"
I grunt something halfway between a yes and a shrug and head back to my bathroom to tidy myself up and get ready for the day. Elias drops his jacket on the back of a chair and settles in at the table, his presence almost normalizing the quiet space. As I leave the area.
After I come back, I open the fridge, grab eggs, butter, bread, and bacon. My hands move on instinct, cracking shells, whisking yolks, butter hissing as the pan heats. The smell starts to fill the room.
I ask Elias, "You eaten yet?"
"Not yet."
There's a pause, like he's waiting for the punchline, almost like he doesn't want to break the moment.
We don't talk much until I serve scrambled eggs, toasted bread, and bacon crisped just enough to snap. Simple food, nothing fancy.
"I thought you'd never cook anything for me again." Elias tilts his head down
The words are strong. My hand pauses on my fork.
"...Well, Eli," I murmur, barely above the pan's crackle, "You have to at least eat something."
"I thought you'd forget about that nickname," Elias says. The way he digs in, you'd think it was a feast.
"Damn," he says around a mouthful. "I forgot how good you were at this."
I half-smile, pushing my own food around my plate more than eating it.
"You know," I said around a bite of toast I barely tasted, I only blame myself for everything that happened." My smile dimmed.
The words landed like a stone on the table. Eli's fork stopped mid-air. The kitchen noise, a flatscreen TV playing someone else's life, dimmed into background static. No amount of Elias's easy jokes could smooth the raw edge of what I'd just said; I watched him try anyway, saw the joke tremble and die on his lips.
He set his fork down and leaned forward, both hands bracing on the table. He looked at me properly then, not the half-smile, half-deflection version he kept for strangers. "Gabe," he said quietly, the word small and fierce, "you don't have to carry this alone."
It wasn't a lecture. It wasn't a naive comfort. It was a fact, a hand offered. I wanted to tell him the truth — that the blame felt like a hollow I could fall into forever, that last night was a calculus of what-ifs and a ledger of mistakes, but the confession had already emptied me. Instead, I let the silence say it for me. Eli filled the silence with steadiness. "We'll do it together. The paperwork, the funeral, whatever. I'm not leaving you in this."
I believed him in the way you believe in the weight of a hand on your shoulder. It didn't fix anything, but it made the world tolerable enough to move through.
Later that day, we walked the long, thin loop through town, the errands spread out like wounds to be tended one at a time. Probate office first; forms to sign and initials to give. Then the funeral registry, where a woman with too perfect lipstick and a calm, corporate voice explained the cenotaph ceremony as if it were an itemized package: date, time, readings, who would speak. We signed; our names looked like aliens on the dotted lines. I left Iris's teddy bear, Vivi's favorite necklace, and a photograph with them of Vivienne laughing with Iris on some summer day. I felt like I'd handed over a secret.
After that, the funeral outfit stores. They'd multiplied overnight like shops on a shoreline after a storm — places with black fabric and polite staff who could measure your grief between shoulder and waist with the same apron they used to measure suits. They were booming businesses. Suits, dresses, gloves, the quiet accessories of ritual. A man measured my sleeve. A woman suggested a tie color for Eli; he chose navy because he thought it would make me look less like the ruin I felt inside. We left an order; they promised the garments would be ready in a week, pressed and wrapped solemn as coffins.
As we stepped back out into the snow, Elias talked about the shops, about how the storefronts were doing a brisk trade, how people were lining up not for comfort but for obligation. " At least it's good for the economy, right?" He tried.
"Good for the economy," I repeated, tasting the phrase like something sour. It wasn't good. It was a market built on grief. People were making a profit from loss, stitching black into seams and selling it with a polite bow. We walked a little bit farther and watched a window display where two mannequins faced each other in a tableau of mourning. Inside, a clerk smoothed fabric with hands that might have trembled. "It's… practical, I guess," I said finally. "But it feels wrong."
Elias was quiet then, and for a moment, we just moved through the city like ghosts with purpose. Our breaths made halos in the air; snow fell instead, indifferent flakes. I slowed my pace, the pull of something deeper dragging me back a step, then another. Elias kept talking about paperwork, about the funeral schedules, about needing to go to the bank tomorrow, not noticing I'd fallen behind.
A clump of snow struck him hard on the back of the head. He snapped around, wild-eyed, and I was standing there with a grin I didn't think I had left in me, an icicle of snow melting on my glove.
"What the—?" Elias rubbed the spot, looking betrayed. "Seriously? Who—"
"You," I said, perfectly innocent. "Your job is to brighten the mood when we're down. Stop scowling like the world owes you something."
He gave me a look that was part insult, part affection. "You absolute—" he started, and then with a grin, stuffed his hands into the snow and packed a perfect, angry ball. He threw it at me.
I dodged. It hit the lamppost. He laughed, vindicated, then plunged both gloved hands into the white again. He came at me like a child. I braced, the memory of the funeral-shop mannequins folding into the next moment, and without thinking about the overdrive of the tiny price my spirit paid, I let energy kindle into my mind. Empathic Cipher's whisper not to read thought now but to feel intent. I used the edge of it to anticipate the arc of his throw, to move a hair faster than he expected.
Snowballs zipped past my shoulders like white comets; I moved with a cat's grace. Where I guided my body with that borrowed clarity, my throws found him every time, soft at first, then sharp enough to burst on impact. One after another landed, and soon he was laughing and sputtering with snow in his hair. He adopted a mock-dramatic pose. "You're cheating," he accused, breath clouding. "Telepathy now, Gabe? Empathic Cipher? That's not fair."
"You're blaming the wrong thing," I shot back. "You smiled first."
He squinted. "No, really. You're using that skill on me, aren't you? Are you reading my throws?"
"I made a show of looking innocent. "I'll enjoy this now and face the consequences later." I meant it partly as a joke, the consequences as a reference to the headaches, or the way my eyes bled at the edges when spirit energy ran thin — but partly as the truth. Every push I made on the world with spirit took a toll. It was a tax. I planned to pay it in an hour or so. Not right now."
Eli's face went mock-outraged. "That's so unfair, Gabe! You always owe me for being your moral support. This is the least you can do."
I laughed, a short, surprised sound, and for half a beat the sky looked lighter. Then Eli, with the sticky mischief of a man who'd once stolen a taking-bread off a kitchen counter and called it fortune, wound up and lobbed a snowball that hit me square in the face.
It was perfect. The impact knocked my breath out and sent me stumbling back. For a second, the world folded into a white blur, and the cold stung like a slap. I went down flat on my back with a puff, the snow spraying around me, my cheeks burning until embarrassed heat and frost combined into a ridiculous, childish flush.
Eli was instantly at my side, hands on my shoulders, face above mine. "You alright? Damn, man." He lowered himself onto his heels and stared at me like I was a problem to be solved. "You okay?"
I pushed snow from my lashes and inhaled hard, laughing before I could stop myself, high, breathless, ridiculous. My nose has gone so red it might as well have been painted. There was a smear of fine snow across my chin. I blew through my nose, and the sound turned into another laugh.
Elias stared for a second, then he laughed too. The sound cracked the day. Around us, the city continued, people walking, the world indifferent, but for a little while, there was only the two of us in a small orbit of breath and cold shard mess.
"You look like a ripe tomato," Elias said between chuckles, reaching to pinch my cheek. "A very cold tomato."
I wiped my face and wiped the truth away where it had gathered, letting it fall into a soft, private place. "You keep being the light," I said, voice small. "I'll try not to burn it out."
"Don't be dramatic," he said, but his hand stayed on my wrist, fingers steady. "And for the record, I think you're the one who keeps me going. Don't sell yourself short."
We stood up, brushed snow off our coats, and kept walking. The world around us was still fragile, weirdly profiting and rearranging itself, but the small, ridiculous war we'd just had with snow was its own kind of ceremony, a little proof that we were still human, that we could still throw things and laugh and be reckless and get back up.
If the rest of the day asked me to be strong, then I'd be strong. For now, I carried a handful of melted snow, a smear on my sleeve, and the Echo of Eli's laugh with me like a hot ember in winter.