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nukyster-blog · 4 years

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Changing course, chapter 1:

I started writing this story because I love Ivar, but disliked what he became. I loved him up to where Ragnar died, after that he became more of a villain than an anti-hero. For that, I wanted to give him a good hit of karma and figured making him a slave for Christians would be his worst nightmare. Before you continue reading, I’d like to address that the story will be graphic in the blood/guts/death/violence sense. I’m also aiming to get things as historically accurate as I can, but this is my hobby so if I make horrible mistakes, bear with me.

Chapter 1) Changing Course .-.-.

Ivar had always been plagued by pain. Since the day he left his mother’s womb and drew his first breath, life had been an endless road of physical suffering. As a nursling, those insufferable muscle aches and stiff joints made him cry relentlessly. Endlessly. It would drive his brother’s up the walls; send their father overseas. He’d weep in his mother’s arms, only silenced by the warmth of her breast; his pain absorbing strength which turned him hungry. He’d endured remarkably, survived the first crucial years and eventually managed to tolerate the pain as part of his life. He learnt to see the inevitable suffering not as foe, but as an unwelcome acquaintance that needed to be ignored in order to get through the day. That mindset, combined with his stubbornness and willpower made it possible for him to keep his chin up and get through the day. It did not lessen his self loathing and envy towards his brothers. Blessed with strong and healthy bodies, their mere existence were three thorns in Ivar’s eye; the youngest son of Ragnar Lothbrok. The black sheep, the boneless; deformed from the waist down.

His handicap planted a seed deep inside his chest and it spread all throughout his ribcage like poison ivy. It was blinding hate towards the world, to all who were capable to roam free and looked down upon him. Burdened by his physical limits his rage would at times rise high above his handicap, withstanding the pain to solemnly focus on destruction.

Not a single soul forgot Ivar’s first victim. How he’d embedded his axe into the skull of another child. He remembered vividly how his tiny fist had trembled around the handle, how his mother pulled him tightly against her chest and rushed him inside. Hush dyrbare, she’d soothed him, her voice soft and warm, it’s not your fault, don’t feel regret, you are the son of Ragnar Lofthbrok, it’s only right for people to fear you. Her response was the only validation he needed. Ivar took the reassuring words of his mother to heart and smothered all forms of empathy. He was entitled to lash out to others and from that very young age Ivar found a coping mechanism; hurting the less fortunate. It wasn’t physically torture per se; his mother’s smothering grip enabled him to actually torture their thralls and peasants. He might be a useless prince, but he was a prince. His royal blood burdened him to keep their name up to certain standards, so purposely torturing their slaves was inexcusable.

That did not mean Ivar would let any change go by to destroy the little belongings their thralls valued, pinch his nursemaid up to the point it left bruises, sink his teeth into ankles and throw a fit over the littlest of things. It was interesting to see that over time, he became quit infamous to the poor and powerless population of Kattegat. They saw him as a monster and that was much better than to be perceived as a crippled. So Ivar willingly took on the role of something dark and disgusting, he embraced being a monster.

His second act of bloodthirst happened during his pre pubescent years. The Seer had condemned a Christian to death by starvation.

Curiosity made him crawl to their city centre in the middle of the night where he first observed the haggard form of a man, fiercely praying to it’s false God.

It was an offense, openly performing such devotion for it’s Christian God. Although the slave never laid an eye on him, Ivar resented the man with every fiber of his being. It wasn’t the poor man per say, that set him off, the poor thing simply represented defiance; praying to it’s Christian God in the centre of their town. What he later claimed as hate for the Christian, had simply been an excuse to unleash his rage. The wrath towards the entire world had been sprouting all throughout his chest and some of the roots must have reached his brain. Because what he did with his bare hands was inhuman. He destroyed the Christian, with his bare hands, knuckles and teeth. Like a meek lamb the man, awaited his death and did not fight when he was being slaughtered. It had been Ivar’s first intentional murder and it was hypnotic, addictive. Without empathy, it was easy to perceive the human body as a gigantic canvas; with endless possibilities. Destruction and pain was the purest form of art, of life itself. By ending it. Ivar loved every moment, every hair, teeth, every fiber of it. The iron taste of warm blood, the warmth of it running down his hands, chin and chest. He welcomed it, all of it and bathed in it. All for glory, all for Odin. All to make the world forget the crippled boy that wept for his mother’s warmth and see him for what he wanted to be. A monster, because he failed to perceive himself as a man, as an equal to his brothers. No, his weak legs would never place him in the same line as his brother’s. So, a monster then, was the second best choice.

Ivar showed Kattegat another form of Boneless. At the first lights of dawn, the centre filled itself with exclamations of horrors and awe. The cobblestones were painted crimson and a flock of chickens were pecking at the intestines of the Christian. They lay spread throughout the centre, attracting flies and more bystanders. Ivar had just ripped out the tibia bones, leaving the muscles and skin lay wobbly and in a strange angle now that it’s inner skeleton had been removed. Ivar had been scraping the last bits of flesh from the bones with his fingernails when his mother appeared from the crowd and cried out in horror, falling down on her knees.

From that day, his brothers looked at him differently. With disgust, yes, because he mauled the body of the Christian like a starved wolf. Which wasn’t far from the truth, honestly, he’d been hungry. Hungry for blood. And validation.

From that day on, there was a hush whenever Ivar entered the Great hall, or any other place. Folks turned their head, acknowledged his presence. It was enough clarification for Ivar that being ruthless and malevolent paid off. Instead of being the handicapped son of Ragnar Lothbrok, he was the Christian slaughterer. Ivar the Boneless, now he was able to wear that byname with pride.

He’d carved pawns from the Christian’s bones and used them for his tafle game. During a game, he jokingly commented that he should’ve taken a knee bone too, it would have made an excellent king. Hvitserk chuckled uncomfortably, Sigurt’s eyes widened and Ubbe walked out. He’d loved it, pressing everyone’s buttons, making them uncomfortable and on edge. But eventually, his prepubescent act of monstrosity faded.

That was why he felt blessed when their father asked him to join his raid in Wessex. Him, only him; Ivar the Boneless, joining their father on a raid. The Gods never favoured him and instead of glory, Ivar found despair. Their father, Ragnar Lothbrok willingly walked into the belly of the beast, with his hands raised high, unarmed and broken. Like a loyal dog, he’d crawled after his father, knowing full heartily in the castle of Wessex lay nothing but doom. Still, he’d rather die by his father’s side then end up dead in a ditch, from hunger and thirst. His father broke his promise, or rather King Egbert’s son did. The safe passage back home, which had been arranged turned out to be a lie. When he was dragged away from his father’s cell, a blunt object collided to the back of his head and pain temporarily blinded him. Quite helplessly, he’d been listening to Prince Aethelwulf arranging his deposit. The pain in the back of his head was severe. Pain throbbed so violently around in his skull that he wondered why it didn’t just crack open.

For the first day, the nausea was overwhelming, he could not keep anything down. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he lost track of time and place. Curled up, cradling his damaged skull he wished for his mother. Any form of light ravaged his brain, pounding, throbbing, like a rotting tooth right between the eyes. It took his sanity away, his coordination. The few altercation he had with Saxxons made him whimper and plead for salvation. But no relief came to his pain. Without power to fight back, Ivar found himself tossed into a ship hold, as if he were a sack of potatoes; nothing more than damaged cargo. The circumstances below deck were horrendous; human cattle packed up and wedged together as tightly as the overseers could cramp in. Ivar, half aware of his surroundings and halfway sliding into a deep pool of endless nothingness, flinched when fingers reached for his oath ring. A fist formed itself around his wrist like a bear trap and with that, the last bits of his hereditary was ripped off of him. The leather protecting his fragile lower limbs, gone, taken too. His necklace, also gone. Even his shoes and tunic were worth taking. The overseers sniggered at the sight of Ivar’s weak attempt to intervene and shoved him aside, like a thing. Like a nothing.

Their journey overseas started although Ivar wasn’t aware, which in his case was a good thing. The onerous space was filled up to the max, with minimal resources. There was barely any light, no personal space. Water was scarce and so was food. Hygiene became a problem after the ship set it’s sails and some of the unlucky ones got seasick. It did not take long for the cramped out area to turn into a sewage; the stench and heat insufferable.

Ivar withstood the trials in silence, cradling his head in a fetal position. The pain in his head was all consuming. Squeezing his eyes shut, he willed the pain to go away. Over and over, until in the end, the rest of the world became detached.

He could barely hear the people around him. Some prayed in foreign tongues, others whimpered. Somewhere afar, a young child cried.

Eventually, he drifted into sleep, waking up by a sudden toss aside. Cries were lost beneath the thunder that rolled overhead. Their cage of wood and sails was mercilessly thrown into a storm. The waves resolutely grew in size. Their vessel rode the mighty swelling sea like a child’s toy, no longer controlled by the hands of men.

The inhabitants below deck were violently thrown from the far end of the hold to the other. Bodies were being trampled, panic spread like the plague, festering into each and everyone’s head. Violence roamed among the poor souls in captivity in order to breathe.

At one point, Ivar found himself suffocating. Never had he wished more for land, to feel the sweet green grass of his home against the palms of his hands. The sea, it felt like his rage from within. Like punishment, ready to tear itself through the wooden construction to claim their souls. His mother’s prophecy would come true. He would drown and never enter Valhalla, because there was no honour in this poor death. To be dragged down to the bottom of the sea with countless slaves. There was nothing heroic nor royal about this death. This was not the end of a Prince, yet it seemed inevitable. And although he fought the feeling with every last bit of strength he could muster, Ivar was petrified. For the cold water to seize his body, for his lungs to fill up with water, to feel his life slowly ebb away.

In between the lightning, darkness prevailed. In between the darkness there were flashes of his fellow unfortunate souls, their faces overcome with terror.

‘Is it Odin’, Ivar thought, ‘fighting with the Christian God?’ Was this his fault, for it was him who’d coldly, bloodily mauled a defenseless Christian?

‘Please Odin, the All-father, do not allow a Viking prince to die such an unworthy death,’ Ivar pleaded, ‘if I survive this storm I promise you, I will make it worth your while.’

As sudden as the storm erupted, it disappeared. Along the dawn of morning, the ship anchored ashore.

Sunlight burned his eyes, blinding Ivar momentarily as the portholes were pulled open by the overseers. Orders were being shouted in unfamiliar tongues, for those who weren’t familiar with the language, there was the beating of a whip. The human cargo was expected to exit the ship, rather sooner than later.

Few bodies remained lifeless, passed away due to suffocation. One by one they were removed by the overseers; by simply being thrown off the ship. There was no honor, nor time to bury a slave.

When one of the overseers took hold of Ivar’s curled up body, he was surprised to find the slave to be alive. Surprise was rapidly replaced by irritation. Lashing his whip he struck Ivar across the face, making the poor young man hiss and hide his face.

The overseer signaled another member of his crew to lend out a helping hand. Both grabbed Ivar underneath his armpits and dragged him up his feet.

Both men grunted in annoyance when their slave immediately dropped back on the floor. One chuckled and nudged against Ivar’s deformed legs. The other one let out a long impatient sigh and kicked Ivar’s arms right from under him.

Ivar’s chin merely had time to hit the wooden floor, before a familiar boot planted itself onto Ivar’s spinal cord, taking his breath away.

The other overseer sank down on his knees, a knife playing between his fingers. Though rust had set on the handle and blade, it was strong and jagged, enough to cut a throat.

The tip of the knife pressing against Ivar’s Adam’s apple prevailed the pain in his head, the stiffness of his limbs and the heavy weight on top of him.

“I can crawl you croaked-nosed bastard,” Ivar snarled, his hands bracing to carry his upper body. The overseers must have found it amusing, seeing him squirm on the floor like a spider being squished. To exaggerate Ivar’s deride, the boot placed on his back moved up to in between his shoulder blades, pressing him down firmly.

The boiling rage inside of him, swept through his system, like an old favoured friend patting him on the back.

In effort to remain silent Ivar gritted his teeth, his knuckles turned white from clenching his fists too hard. His eyes squeezed closed as his face contorted and he placed his palms down onto the splintery floor. Arching his back, the pain rushed through his body like an igniting fire, but he would withstand it, even if it was the last thing he’d do. Inch by inch, he pressed himself up while another man’s weight pressed him down. With every inch, his demolished resilience sparked back up and inwardly he roared when the overseer took the boot off his back, allowing him to carry his crippled arse out of this hellhole.

Crawling like a worm from a bird, he climbed up the steps, one by one, while sweat trickled down his face and his right eye twitched from the explosive pain inside his damaged skull.

On the upper deck, he briefly sank against a barrel, allowing his lungs to fill up with the salty fresh breeze. Grey clouds roamed freely above – hindering the sun and its warmth.

Once Ivar caught his breath and expelled the headache to the far end of his brain, he risked a peek over the railing.

Dejection curled around his chest with the grip of an iron straight jacket. The ship had anchored at a small harbour, bedded near a murky dirt road. A long line of future slaves were staggering towards carts pulled by mules. One man’s sanity must have drowned during the storm, the poor bastard broke the line and made a run for it.

He did not get far, an armed horse rider strode after him, stabbing a spear through his neck. There was no escape, at least not now.

And so Ivar the Boneless, son of King Ragnar Lothbrok, found himself obeying the commands of Christians, lost in a faraway land while his father was at the mercy of a mendacious king. His mother presumed him to be dead, lifeless at the bottom of the sea. So there wouldn’t be a soul looking for him.

He came to Essex as a Prince, for fame and glory; yet resurrected as a nameless, crippled slave. Oh, the Gods played him the most lousy cards of all.

.-.-.

A/N: So this was chapter one of my Ivar fanfiction, I’m thrilled to hear what you think of it so far. As I’m still very much on Ivar’s side, I’d like to point out that yes he murdered a person in a gruesome way, but he basically did it for validation. Ok, yes that fact might make it even worse, but the way I see it is that Ivar desperately wants to become ‘something’, that he’d rather be a monster than be the person he is.

And now he’s not even a monster anymore, now he’s just a slave, that’s karma baby.

Xoxox Nukyster

#ivar fanfic #ivar the boneless #viking fanfic #ivar as a slave #karma

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divinedinosaurs · 4 years

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Example Writing!

Hi! These are some of the fanfictions I did long ago!

For quick reference, there’ll be snippets from fanfiction/original work beneath the cut!

SETTING

The soft lavender of early morning is breaking to the gentle silvered blue of sunrise. Brilliant golden sun rays peek over the lip of the ridge surrounding them, shattered by the crooked black spine of glossy rocks sheltering the agricultural utopia. They shaft through the air with a magnificence only found now, when no one stirs but beasts. The light halos the lupen, casting their backs with glowing gold. A breeze stirs through the vibrant yellow grasses that gave this region, the Golden Hills, its name. The sunlight glitters off of the metallic blades of grass as it churns magnificent patterns, the contrasting colors of the valley’s shadow and the sun’s brilliance.

Humming deep in his throat, he closes his eyes and lifts his face to the sun. Its magnificent rays bathe his face in warmth, and a gentle breeze plays with his hair. He breathes in and smells the fresh earth and sweet grasses. The world feels new.

This is the perfect time.

For now, in this short time of early morning as the sun crests over the black stone and the world itself only begins to stir, it is quiet. Other than the gentle murmur of the wind through grass, other than the quiet breathing of the lupen as they sniff at the dark earth, the world slumbers. The whole world is consumed by a deep and peaceful silence.

He will miss this quiet.

But when day breaks so does the silence. The whispering gives way to a mundane din of men at work in fields and the bellows of heavy-footed bolven. People shout and cry out at one another; their raucous laughter echoes like warnings. Amon has learned to flinch at the holler of his name, ordering him to get his ass here – it’s always too loud, too angry, too hard on the tongue. Nothing like this quiet.

BANTER

"Oh, boo, reports," Hasdiel says, sitting on the edge of the rickety desk Michael is lounging by, crumpling papers as he does. "That's all you ever do is look at papers."

The human looks like Hasdiel's taken a shit on Michael's desk. He grins even wider.

"Your boldness is excused," Michael says coolly, distractedly, still not looking up from the papers in his hand. His noble brow is furrowed almost imperceptibly - his golden eyes placid as always, but dangerous, like the calm sea before a storm.

"Oh, put away your papers, old vulture, I've found something much more interesting," Hasdiel says, kicking at Michael's knee like a petulant child. Grinning, he produces his prize. "The humans call it a harmonica."

Excitedly, Hasdiel blows into it. It makes a whining screech so horrible it feels like his ears are bleeding.

"That's truly awful, Hasdiel."

Hasdiel grins, dropping his hands to his lap. "I knew you'd love it."

Michael chuckles, rolling and deep, like someone had chucked Hasdiel's beloved harmonica down a very, very deep well. There's a lack of his usual detached coolness, replaced instead by a distant warmth, like sun rays on a cool spring morning.

Delighted, Hasdiel gives the harmonica a few more curious blows - each shriek more discordant than the last. Michael, chuckling, sets down his papers.

"Leave us," he says to the human, who quickly scurries out. Hasdiel winks at her as she walks by and lets loose another scream from the harmonica.

"You can't be playing that right," Michael says.

"Oh, I'm definitely not." Hasdiel puncuates it with another scream of his harmonica. "But how adorably human. To make an instrument capable of such melodies" - Hasdiel blows, stringing a few pleasant notes together - "and such horrors."

He takes a deep breath and makes the worst squeal yet. Michael laughs, tipping his head elegantly back, and those sun rays get a little bit stronger.

FLUFF

“Can’t imagine why not.” Jean grins. “You’re cute when you’re excited. Your eyes light up – it’s really adorable.”

Marco smiles. The tip of the straw twirls between his fingers coyly.

“Y’know, I almost wish this was a real date,” he says, propping his chin up on a hand. “I can at least promise to text you if I’m late to dinners.”

“Appealing offer.” Jean grins. “Yet another reason you’re so much better than that asshole. See, if this were a date, I’d treat you to something nicer than a shabby diner.” His empty glass sits accusingly in front of him. “…Though the milkshakes are fantastic.”

“They are,” Marco agrees enthusiastically. “But if this was a real date, I’d suggest sharing one. Much more romantic.”

The realization that Jean would very much like a real date with Marco smacks him upside the head. He feels his cheeks heating like a schoolboy. A nervous knot ties in his stomach. Chuckling awkwardly, Jean wraps his hands around the milkshake glass and stares at his emptied plate.

“I, uh. I – um. Maybe… we could… next time?”

Goddamn. That was – awkward as fuck. Marco might just leave him now.

But it doesn’t seem like that. In his periphery, Marco’s eyebrows shoot up, and his lips part small, excited O.

“Y’know… for an actual date?” Jean elaborates, feeling foolish. His cheeks are actually on fire, he’s sure of it. “If… that’s something you’d like? Maybe somewhere nicer if you’d…?”

“Jean.” A warm hand closes around his fingers, chilled from the cold glass. “I would absolutely love to have a real date with you.”

MORE SETTING

Eren’s always loved the lively sprawl of a good traders’ den.

Never, ever has he found a boring one, but some are just absolutely incredible. The thriving of a noisy, crowded, crime-riddled mess of markets and stalls that all seem to have one massive heartbeat, all the whores and beggars and merchants and thieves and mercenaries dancing to one colorful rhythm – that is what he loves.

There’s always something happening in a good traders’ den. Usually, there’s many things happening. Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it things happening with one main stage for a select few events like the most exciting theater play.

Dreki Kló is no disappointment. Eren can’t help grinning from ear to ear as a running woman with a dagger in hand accidentally collides with a man beside him so hard they both crash into the waves. Bubbles froth upwards, a few limbs breach the surface. Only the woman emerges again, but she seems to have lost her dagger.

The air smells of piss and sweat and ale. Eren breathes in deeply and grins all the more broadly.

ANGST

I kiss his forehead tenderly and let my body fall heavily back against the mattress again. Jean, carrying on with his massage, waits patiently for me to find my words. His ginger touch makes me feel safer, a physical anchor to him and the world around me.

Everything happened a long time ago, of course. But trauma is a wound. And like any wound, it infects if it is closed hastily with thick thread and blunt needles without washing the dirt from the sore. One who does not care to cleanse, to receive help and accept the healing – one who sews it shut impatiently to have it over with, who ignores the severity of their injury – is doomed to have it reopened again and again. The horrible memories can fester worse than any wound, like a plague of the mind, and I know it better than any.

That said, my wound wasn’t cleaned properly. I had the stitches torn open time and time again, none of it by my own accord, and I always was left in a daze of pain worse than the last. It feels – odd, to say the least, to be the one prying these memories from their tightly sealed case in the back of my mind.

[...]

There are things I do not tell him. I do not tell him how it wailed, how it swam towards me in vain hope of rescue. I do not tell him how it reared its head from the water while the thunder crashed and drowned out its cries. I do not tell him of the lightning that formed silver sickles in its pale yellow eyes when it met my gaze and bleated for salvation, and how the salt clogged my throat when I screamed its name, how my numb legs pumped fruitlessly in the pitch black sea. I do not mention the horrible, sticky warmth of the water as I drew nearer, and how a red tinge clung to my clothes for weeks afterwards. I do not tell him that the warmth of its spilled blood was the only reason I didn’t freeze and die there beside it in the cold, dark sea.

It is not that I don’t trust him with the gruesome details – Jean would understand the horror of it all better than any, I think. But it is also… raw.

Dirt in the wound. Dirt that must be cleaned. But not now.

TENDERNESS

The straps beneath my stump are difficult for me to reach – they’re smaller and slender. After a few fumbled attempts of pulling them through the buckles, Jean clucks his tongue and moves closer. He brushes my fingers away.

“I’ve got this,” he reassures, glancing quickly up at my face. I hesitate, but my hand falls back complacently by my side, a silent declaration of trust I’m not quite sure he understands.

“I can do it myself, you know,” I murmur.

“I know.” His fingers pause for half a second, resting against my breast. “I want to.”

He glances at me so quickly only the swift flash of gold from his lovely eyes can betray him. A light pink colors his cheeks. Ducking his head, he busies himself in adjusting my armor.

There is a gentleness in his movements that takes me aback. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that nimble fingers work so delicately to fasten it all into place. But that isn’t merely it – he seems tentative, careful, as if with a wrong touch I may fall to pieces like a delicate spring bloom. So different than the callus touch of Berk. It’s strange, but in its strangeness is intrigue.

Jean tugs down on the leather. Satisfied with its snug fit, he turns attention to straightening out every last detail. Straightening the strap across my chest, shifting the pauldron, growing so close I can smell his hair to straighten its collar.

He smells of pine. I know not how he could, on an island with no evergreen, but it’s nice. A kick of nostalgia hits me hard in the gut at the memories of Berk’s lush forests.

Jean’s ministrations draws my attention back. His hands linger across my abdomen, flattening the scales of my armor slowly. The gentle pressure feels ever so heavenly. I lean slightly into his touch.

SUSPENSE

The one-armed Chief faces the Boneknapper, his expression stone. His bear cloak ripples in the wind as regally as any king’s velvet. Braced in one strong hand, a slender broadsword gleams wickedly. Its flash of silver is the only thing keeping the dragon at bay.

The Boneknapper snarls. A shiver runs down its back, rattling its bones together threateningly. Its long, wickedly sharp talons sink into the oozing mud with every cautious step, leaving long-fingered prints in its wake.

The pair size one another up and circle each other slowly. Clattering bones and snarls, careful steps and silence. Neither seems willing to make the first move. It is the tense calm before a storm, the moment a doe looks into the hungry eyes of a wolf before she flees, the still second before the poisoned arrow is released. If either one strikes, there is a mutually assured potential for this fight to end in defeat.

It is an unsteady calm.

And then, suddenly, it’s broken.

#example writing #original fiction #fanfiction #my writing #mine

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robininthelabyrinth · 8 years

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I wish you'd write a fic where, to save Len, Mick must find his soul/heart/presence in the void the Oculus left (somewhere in the wreckage of all the shattered timelines) and bring it back. AKA a coldwave Orpheus and Eurydice AU

sooooo this got away from me a bit

Fic: Sailor’s Sorrow (AO3 Link)Fandom: Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Literary Allusions GalorePairing: Mick Rory/Leonard Snart

Summary: Sailors tell the same tales everywhere you go.

Sometimes, they tell you how to bring someone home.

(an Orpheus and Eurydice retelling - and a bit more besides)

———————————————————————————

Sailors tell the same tales everywhere you go.

Different languages, different cultures, different people, but in the end it always comes down to them and the sea: stories of danger, stories of wonder, stories of strange things you can’t even begin to imagine.

Mick Rory was born on land, as far away from a coast as you could go in his continent.

Kronos was born to the sea.

The Time Masters belittle it when they call her the Time-Stream, their pathetic and futile attempts to make it less than it is, to make it something they can understand, something they can master.

She is no mere stream: she is Oceanus and Tethys, Varuna and Varuni, Anahita and Aegir and Ryūjin and Idliragijenget, all of them together, the great Tiamet who blankets the world entire. She is the Many-Named, the Inexorable, the Endless, Time in all its forms: all oceans come from her, and she is both the greatest of them all, and yet beyond them. She is the slow, rolling wave, the quiet calm, the swiftly rushing current that carries the many-mirrored universe ever forward in her hands, gentle and rough in turn, and she had no beginning but is in herself the whole of creation entire.

And, like all seas, there are those who sail her, and their stories.

It’s on a mission for the Waverider when he first hears of it.

It’s just another boring day in, day out, honestly. Travelling to different time periods rather loses its shine when all you ever see are people being people the same the world over, different architecture, different languages, different clothing, but the same nevertheless—the Tower of Babel was a lie: it did nothing, nothing at all, because in the end people are people no matter when and where and nothing can make that untrue—and not a single soul on the Waverider had Len’s passionate creativity, his bold recklessness, his sense of humor that could turn even the dullest outing into a thrilling adventure.

He’d rather be going to a grocery store to get a loaf of bread with Len than breaking into the Winter Palace with the Waverider.

For this mission, he was sulking around a pirate’s bar in his Kronos gear, faithfully recreated to his specifications by Gideon. The others on the ship had not believed him at first when he had said that his reputation preceded him and would still be valid, accepted by all, but he had proven them wrong, and now they used his dual persona in the same clumsy way they wielded all their weapons.

He opted not to mention that he was not the first Kronos, and that as he travelled through Time he had met others, time remnants, who saw him and looked upon the shape of their future. He had the feeling it would disturb them to know it, this crew that sails the sea of Time but never loves and fears her like a sailor ought.

Len would have laughed in devilish glee.

He misses Len like a stab wound that never heals.

Time is meant to cure all things, they say, but those that said that never rode Time’s currents and mastered its complex navigation, never found their bearings in a place that knows neither set time nor place, never flung themselves forward upon the currents of always and forever, never turned sail to the winds of Fate and spat in the face of destiny.

There are no lighthouses to guide the way through Time, no signs to show you the hidden shoals and reefs that could wreck the finest sailor’s ship, no; this sea so bright that no light could shine through but that of the human soul.

Len was a light so bright that he sometimes thought it should have been seen for miles, for years, for centuries.

His chosen rival, the Flash, shines bright and blazing as well. They should have had that, that glorious clash that echoes through the ages, brightness enough to light the path home for a thousand lost sailors’ souls.

But Len is gone: the light has gone dark, and he sails onwards blind and without a friend.

And then one day he hears it.

“They say it’s a black hole,” the old man croaks from the corner of the bar, his eyes bright and black and shining like beetles. He clutches his pitcher in his hand, but does not drink; he sits by the fire, old and wiry and just as mad as the rest of them, time-sailors all. “Brand new, where it oughtn’t be. Someone ripped that hole into Time herself, they say. The hole – the Endless Pit, the Time-Stop, the End of All Things. It is a pathway to the land of the dead.”

“By which you mean that anyone who follows that path ends up dead,” another younger man scoffs.

But the old man shakes his head. “It’s happened before,” he says. “It will happen again. A pit, a pathway: the brave may go forth through and seek their dead, and if they are brave and strong and true, they may call them forth once more. Time itself will yield up her prey to he who braves the deepest of the still waters.”

“It’s a myth,” a third man scoffs, drinking deep. “It’s nothing more than death-trap.”

“It’s true,” the old man insists. “I lost my love, who I thought I loved more than life itself, and I walked Charybdis to find her.”

“Did you bring her back?” someone asks.

He is somehow unsurprised to find out a few seconds later that it was him.

“I was not true,” the old man says bitterly. “I had a sister, a family, an audience, all waiting for me back home, and I loved them the more, though I would not admit it; I brought my love almost all the way out, but failed my tests, and she disappeared again into the deep.”

Hidden by his Kronos helmet, he swallows, staring at the old man, half-remembering a story Len once told him, a silly snippet of nothing, an amalgamation of tales that Len found in books, in movies, in libraries – nothing at all, and yet he remembers –

He strides forward abruptly, and grabs the old man’s hands, pulling them loose of the tankard and turning his fingers up.

The old man’s fingers are callused deep and hard, each one formed from years of savage beatings in the name of passion, and the weapon a string of gut in a harp of bone.

He looks at the man.

“Yes,” the old man hisses, voice low and silky, his beetle-black eyes shining with all the colors of an oil spill. “I am he of whom they speak, for I mourn my loss until the end of Time herself, and speak of it to all.”

“Heard they ripped you apart till only your head was left,” he replies. “In a fit of madness.”

“They did,” the old man says. “But they could not bear to lose me, or my gifts, and so they stitched me back together after. I can only tell you where the path is, and how to follow it; the trials are different for each man.”

“But you will tell me,” he says, knowing it to be true.

The old man looks upon him and there is pity in his eyes. “How could I not?” he asks. “You have lost everything – even your name.”

And he knows that the old man is correct.

Kronos is too tight a fit, a slave-name given to him by his masters to make others fear him; Mick Rory is too loose, for that name had become a half name, meant to cover one-of-two, Len-and-Mick, and not one alone. Heatwave is a name he held but briefly, a gift from a lover, an apology, never truly claimed as his own and yet it is all that he has left: the name, the gun, and the ring.

Len also left him a mission.

If he were better – if he were true – he would stay with them, he would do his job, he would return to the gray walls and the endless days of the Waverider, to mockery and to use, and suffer them gladly as fit punishment for having not been a better friend. But he is not better: he is true only to Len and not to Len’s wishes. He cannot go forth much longer without Len by his side.

He has already started to seek oblivion to return to Len’s side, and Len wouldn’t have ever wished for that.

“What can you tell me, then?” he asks, forsaking the last of that which he was given. He will not be returning to the Waverider today, not without Len; one way or the other, he will find Len once more.

The old man dips his head into a nod, a recognition, and the others in the bar forget them as if they had not been there, neither of them: these others do not have a black hole in their hearts to echo the one in reality, the sort that is needed to hear these words, this story; this story is not for them. Not yet, and if they are lucky, not ever.

The old man may be an omen of doom, a trap in glittering tempting form, as the sailors say, or he might be the guide to salvation.

At this point, he-the-nameless, he who was once Mick Rory and at last has hope that he may yet be that again, does not care.

“Tell me,” he says a third time, and there is some use to Len’s half-learned religion – to ask three times turns the key and opens the gate, and shows those who are truly willing from those whose will shall fade in time. “Tell me where to go.”

“You know where it is,” the old man says.

“The Vanishing Point,” he replies, finding that he does know, after all. He’s always known.

It is the path he must yet learn.

“You must follow the albatross to find your way,” the man says. “She will lead you to where you need to go. But be careful – if you err upon your path, the albatross will take from you until you have no more to give, and take yet more than that.”

Another memory drifts up, fragile and precious, Len younger and happy, letting him lay his head in his lap, and Len read to him aloud –

“Water, water everywhere,” he says, echoing words he had not known that he recalled. “And not a drop to drink.”

“There is a greater hell than death,” the old man says, and his voice is weary, his eyes distant. “And it is to be lost in in the sea of memory forever.”

He can imagine it well – every touch a memory, every sight and sound and smell summoning recollection, and yet never able to go forth into reality once more – and he does not need to imagine it at all.

It is his life every day, even now.

“There are those whom Time cannot heal,” the old man tells him, and he knows that it is true. They are the damned of Time, who have no succor but desperation. “I wish you luck.”

He nods, and goes.

Finding the ship is easy enough – the time pirates fear him and honor him and worship him, or at least the suit that he wears, and one is more than happy to convey him back to the ship which he molded to his own use long ago and left behind only for Len, a finer prize by far – and he takes it as no more than his due, stepping back upon her, master and commander once more.

He takes her sailing.

No rough-formed AI for him this time, no; no Barry Allen working wonders with code and the Speed Force, bringing the future forward in time in a backwards threading that only speedsters can do. He guides the ship himself, and its ghost is silent in honor of his task, and he rides the crest of the wave to his destination.

The Waverider’s crew sees only the utility of the current, not the beauty. Even Rip turned deaf ears to the tempest outside, Time Master to the depths of his soul even once he spurned the organization; he covered his eyes with maps and his ears with his ghostly navigator, and he turned his back upon it so as better to focus on his plots and his hopes and his dreams, which in the end were not so dear to him as he thought they were. And the crew Rip gathered, the crew Rip left behind – the crew knows nothing. They see a uniform green, a blank highway, where he sees swirls and knots, bends and currents and flows, roaring storms larger than Jupiter’s and little break-tides so gentle and sweet it could bring tears to your eyes.

They know nothing of it. He knows it all.

Some part of him was born to it.

He was - and here he smiles - always capable of handling extremes.

He contains multitudes.

He tacks and turns, steering expertly through the shoals and back into regular space far enough away that he can see that which is his goal, and oh, the sight of it is enough to shake a man’s soul.

Charybdis, the Boundless Whirlpool, the Storm of Storms, the Great Eater, Ship-Crusher, Life-Ender, the Hole In the Universe, the End of All Hope - the sailors give them many names.

Science calls them black holes.

Gravity roils its bindings here, pulled so close and tight as to squeeze out all else, physics free at last of the chains of rules. Life herself yields up her domain, energy over matter at last. The swirling mass churns around the outside, swirling as through in a drain, atoms tearing apart in the fury of the storm, colors beyond colors ever yet imagined by living being, and in the center – ah, in the center, there is nothing but a dark so deep that the eye cannot understand it. It is beyond black, it is nothing, and to contemplate it is to contemplate madness.

Nietzsche’s abyss: entropy itself, king of death, enthroned in all its glory in the land of the dead where even the universe itself cannot reach but can only pour itself into, draining itself of all that makes it what it is, stars and planets and even space itself, consumed into the nothingness.

Abandon all hope, ye who would enter here.

The sailors of Time fear this danger above all others.

When the Time Masters took him, they put him in a machine built along the models of this, the great monster of the deep, the fears that haunt the dreams of all living creatures. Their machine tore apart his soul into its component atoms to mix it back into Kronos, but the machine failed, where it never failed before, because all of him, every last part, down the atoms, was marked by Len. Len’s life, Len’s light, Len’s spirit, Len’s mind: they tore him apart, but they could not take that memory away from him. He might have forgotten it, for a time, but the raw star-stuff of his body always remembered.

The first time Kronos beheld a Great Eater, he did not think of the stories shared furtively in the nighttime dark of barracks of the Time Master’s captive hunters. He did not think of gravity, or of science, or even of myth and fairytales and children’s dark delight, nor even of the nightmares that can only be recalled in part when you awaken because to remember all is to lose that which keeps you together.

He thought instead of Len, smiling in delight, holding out in his hands a tape of such ancient vintage that all Kronos knew would sneer at it, and of Len’s hands, cool and long and perfect, fingers clenching against Mick’s as a horse got stuck in the mud and fell prey to sadness, of the stone giant that was eaten by the world-consuming Nothing.

That’s what he sees, when he looks upon the Storm of Storms.

Nothing.

Len.

It was that thought of Len that brought him from himself, that reordered what the Time Masters had mixed up, that gave him a mind of his own instead of a mere body to be puppeted at the Time Masters’ will. It was that thought – Len – that gave him hope.

If he is to find hope once more, he must find Len, and to find Len, he must offer up his soul to the Great Eater and hope against hope itself that the king of the damned will find his sacrifice worthy.

And if it doesn’t work, well –

He can’t imagine a better place to die than here, where Len burst open the dam of Time and let it run wild through the many worlds. Worlds of echoes, worlds of paths untrod, the roads more and less travelled, worlds so different in tone that life scarcely can recognize itself in the faces of its kin, worlds so similar that a single flap of a butterfly’s wings is all that changed.

The great sea of Time contains them all.

He waits, patient, his hand on the helm, guiding his ship’s prow to stillness, his mind on the waves, his ship beating back against the sirens of death, gravity herself singing temptation and pulling gently for him to come nearer, to come close, to come to them and never return. Up and down, bottom and top, strange and charm – those are the sirens that sit at the foot of Charybdis and smash the sailors who fall into their arms.

He will not fall.

The old man said he would be guided by the albatross.

He watches, sentinel and silent witness, as a nebulae barely born gives in to the lure of Fate and belches forth her many colors, streaming towards the hole but never touching it, watches as the Eater drinks down her fiery heart. No more stars will be born here; this is their graveyard.

This is where he lost his North Star, his guiding light, and it is here, he hopes, that he will find him once more.

He holds on hope, his hope, his Len, who may be there, in the land of the dead, waiting for him.

And then he sees her.

A white dwarf, soaring through space, arrowing straight towards the very center of the Pit, a glorious elongated streak of white with the wisps of the colorful nebulae drifting in her wake, draped along her shoulders like a gossamer-thin shawl, an angel descending into the deep as though to light the way by her very presence: Beatrice, she was called by one man; by another, Eärendil.

To the eyes of a third, she was an albatross.

His fingers clench upon the helm.

Len.

Where there is hope, there is life.

And oh, he hopes, he hopes, how he hopes.

His hands move on instinct, a sailor’s knowledge sunk deep in his bones, and he follows her trail, his ship flying into the cloud that she leaves behind her like a lighted path which he hopes will lead him to salvation. His ship floats between the gas and the debris, the shining rock and the glittering ice, and he follows her on her sure path into the deep.

He hopes.

He keeps as closely on her tail as he can, until his ship groans beneath him in protest at his nearness to that incandescent heat, next to which even Lucifer in his original glory would be shamed, and his hand is steady, his gaze firm, and he does not stray from his path no matter how the gravity breaks upon his ship, no matter how Time itself begins to fray around him.

He hopes.

It could be seconds, it could be a million years, but he does not care. He follows his albatross, his hope, and he follows her into the dark.

He hopes.

His ship screams beneath him.

He might scream himself, he’s not sure.

And still he follows.

He follows, he follows, he follows, his whole attention fixed upon nothing more than that white point ahead, that glowing ember, and then -

It’s dark.

He might be dead.

He finds himself rather unsure about the whole matter.

His fingers cannot feel, his eyes cannot see, his ears cannot hear, and yet there is something of him alive: he has no mouth, and yet must scream.

why do you come here

There is no voice in this place, if this is a place and not hell.

For hell is empty, Len told him once, and all the devils are here.

why do you come here

Len.

you come for one of the dead

Yes.

Little by little, he feels himself come together. Atom by atom, electrons intertwining, neutrons locking together and forming strands, elements being built from dust, dust to dust, like all living things, the materials of a dying star regrouped in just the right order to make a man.

He is a man.

He is alive.

His ship is - he knows not where. He thanks her in his mind for her service, and spares a moment to wish that her death not be in vain, for a sailor loves his ship, loves her passionately, but not as much as he loves the sea.

Not as much as he loves Len.

He has lost Kronos’ armor. He finds himself clad instead in stardust, in his favorite set of heavy pants with many pockets, his shirt a few buttons loose, his heavy fireman’s jacket to protect him from the element he loves most.

you come here, nameless one, to collect your dead

He turns, his body his own once more, and regards the Throne.

There are no words that can describe it, the King of the Void in Darkness. He is formless; he is all forms; he is anti-matter and matter cannot comprehend him, the one true unknowable beyond the reach of all science. Death is his handmaiden, not his definer, and Might herself cowers before him. He inspires neither wonder nor horror: there is no room for anything but awe. Gods are born and die in the blink of his eyes, Olympian and chthonic both.

This is He who all life has sought in desperation to name, and yet He is Nameless.

Honestly, he’s not entirely sure He is a He at all, or if He is, it is only one of his many faces.

what will you give for your dead

He would laugh, if he could; what would he give? He is no Orpheus, here to win love with a song that brings forth sadness in all who behold him; he is no scholar, no poet, no hell-raiser.

He has nothing to offer but his hope.

and that hope is beautiful

it shines a light no matter where it goes

even here where there is no light

If there were room in his skull, he would feel something, he’s sure: relief, perhaps. But there is nothing, nothing but awe, and hope, and the voice.

His hope is enough.

the way will not be easy

there are tests

He will do what he must, what he can, and if he fails, so be it.

yes

go forth now

be wary, nameless traveler, for you have many miles to go before you may rest

There is a path beneath his feet, leading away from the throne.

Len laughs in his mind, another memory springing forth to just behind his lips and eyes, and the path solidifies into golden brick.

He takes one step, on to the road. He takes another.

Turning his back on the throne is the hardest task of his life to date, and he knows that it is nothing compared to what lies before him.

But if he succeeds - if he’s true -

It will be worth it.

The path is long, and he must walk every mile.

He walks.

And then there it is.

The first test.

The oldest story had three heads to tame before he could proceed; the nearest named four times fifty living men that cursed the sailor with their eye -

He groans when he sees what obstacle he must pass.

No Cerberus for him, oh no, nor allies lost.

His first test is to confront his murdered dead.

He has killed -

There are so many.

But he has his path, and he has his test, and he has his hope.

And so he goes.

He walks along the path, and the path leads him forward, and then he is wading into the sea of spirits that stand between him and his goal.

His hope, his Len, for whom he would do anything.

He is anticipating that his dead hate him, he expects hands upon hands to rip him apart.

He is wrong.

“I do not care about you,” drawl the ghosts of the men in the mine. “I never even knew I died.”

“I have my own ghosts,” say the soldiers from the past, Capone’s and Germany’s and others still. “I have no room to fight you, too.”

“I wronged you,” say his rivals, his opponents, criminals like him, shrugging it off: honor among thieves, even in the end. A match fairly played between unfair men: the possibility of loss accepted. “And I know it.”

And once those melt away, then and only then, there they are. His hateful dead. The ones he killed, the ones he hurt, the sins of his life there to stop him in his tracks the way he once stopped them in theirs.

“You killed me,” they hiss. “You hurt me. I had more I wished to do. Your fault, your fault!”

Their fingers grow into claws, their eyes glow with fire, and their heads are haloed by spitting snakes, and they reach for him, and he flinches - his eyes shutting in anticipation of terrible pain, for there is no vengeance like that of the angry dead -

“I love you.”

What?

He opens his eyes.

“I love you,” says the ghost that stands between him and the Furies that lust for his blood, and he cries out in pain.

It is his mother.

“I love you,” she says a third time. “I forgive you. It was an accident.”

“I love you,” the shade of his father says, stepping forward to stand beside her.

“I love you,” the children whisper, gathering around him.

His brothers.

His sisters.

They gather around him as he walks, tears slipping down his face, and though the Furies around him rage, they guard him.

And around them -

“You gave me food when I had none,” a small child says. She had come by the restaurant where he had once worked, thin and starving, and his fingers were light enough to vanish the food he left out deliberately into her pockets. He never saw her again.

“You defended me from pain,” a boy scarcely past adolescence says. He had been in prison for the first time, a friendship badly chosen and a dare gone wrong; the others had looked upon him as prey. He had defended him for the few weeks he was inside; they had never spoken.

“You taught me a trade,” a man says. He had been bumbling and foolish; he had strength and size, and they were to be used, but he had no skill. They had met in the gym, and he had taught the man what he knew, and the man did not die the first time he went into battle under the Family’s command. The next time they met, they did not recognize each other.

“You saved me,” an old woman says, and he remembers her, remembers how she had been dying, her heart giving out, and he had ruined one of Len’s carefully timed plans to get her to the hospital. Len had never held it against him. He never found out what became of her.

He did not help these people for love, nor satisfaction. He just – helped. Because there wasn’t any reason not to.

There are bad deeds he has done in his life - the darkest, the meat of the Furies – but there are also good deeds, good will he spread through the world for no reason and no cause and no demand for payment, and he has enough, just enough, to get him through the sea of dead and to climb the path upon the other side.

She is waiting for him there.

Her lips were red, her looks were free; her locks were yellow as gold; her skin was white as leprosy -

The nightmare Life-in-Death was she.

“Lisa,” he says, the name a sigh of breath, barely spoken.

She turns to him and smiles. Her teeth shine in the dark. And she reaches forward and takes his hand in hers.

His blood runs thick with cold.

“Come,” Life-in-Death says. Dante imagined her as Virgil, statue and teacher stepped down and come to life, his companion to lead him down and down; the oldest songs called her Despair, she of the crooked hook that she slides into the hearts of men to drag them low.

He can only see her as Lisa, much-beloved and much-wronged. He told her of her brother’s death and watched as she grew colder than ever before, her brother’s ice climbing around her heart.

They have been companions for some time now, Life-in-Death and he.

“Come,” she says.

The path is long, the path is hard.

“Come,” she says, and guides him onwards.

There is a swamp beyond the sea.

The trees are old and withered and bent; their roots curl down and their branches droop. The golden bricks are barely visible beneath the muck and grime. It sticks to his boots, it sticks to his pants. It makes him heavy. It makes him slow.

He is a lumbering beast, trudging through the mud.

Mindless. Stupid. Dumb.

Why does he keep trying? There’s no point. It’s obvious he won’t succeed. There was never any chance of succeeding: he was doomed from the start. Everything he touches dies. Was not the sea of dead enough to show him that?

He used up all his good deeds in getting this far.

He’s just a criminal, in the end. Just an arsonist. A sick man, who can’t stand by himself, useful to nobody and no-one.

Even the Legends knew he was worthless and they were heroes.

He trudges through the swamp.

It’s harder and harder to lift his feet.

God, why is he doing this? If he just stops, if he just dies, he’ll be dead, and that’ll get him to the same result, won’t it? He’ll be by Len’s side again. If he keeps trying, he’ll just mess everything up. He’ll make it all burn down. He’ll turn it all to ash.

Everything he tries turns to ash.

Every endeavor he begins.

Every plan he joins -

Len’s plans.

He ruined those, too, every one of them; he dragged Len down with him, he -

Len laughs in his mind, gleeful and manic; the memory sharp as ever. He reaches out his hand to him, a shared joke, a shared adventure, a shared life, and –

“We dawdle a bit,” Len sings on the way to a job, the memory faint and distant but growing stronger. “And then - we loiter a while, and dawdle again. We gather our strength - to start anew - on all of the loafing and lounging we still have left to do –”

He frowns, and something stirs in the base of his mind.

Something about a swamp.

“Why did we become criminals?” Len had asked him.

“Because we hate working and love money,” he had told him.

There was something –

About a swamp.

“Don’t,” he rasps, and his voice is dry and it hurts to speak. It’s so much effort - and what a waste! It won’t help. Won’t help at all. Just a waste of time, like everything else; a waste of energy, a waste of a life –

Len sang this to him once.

“Don’t,” he says again. “Don’t say –”

It’s pointless.

He’ll never remember it.

“Don’t say there’s - there’s - there’s nothing –”

Nothing, nothing, nothing, that’s all he is.

Nothing.

He remembers.

“Don’t say there’s nothing to do in the doldrums,” he forces out through numb lips. This was Len’s favorite movie, and the one he raised Lisa on, and even if he pretended later that it was something slightly more respectable, Star Wars or Lord or the Rings or something, it was never true. This was it; this was the one old tape he wrapped his childhood around. “It’s just – not – true.”

It’s not true.

None of it.

This is not true.

A child’s movie: the swamp of despair, of apathy, of thoughtlessness, which can be conquered only by thought and will and want. The Doldrums that would just as soon eat you alive, make you stop thinking, make you stop-stop-stop – and the only way out is to march straight through regardless.

He bares his teeth and speeds up.

Maybe he is a failure, maybe he is dumb, maybe all of that is true.

But he has his hope, his hope that it will get better once again, and he will not fail.

Life-in-Death snarls, robbed of her prey.

Her hook is still lodged in his heart, her sadness and her despair and her apathy still lodged in his brain, but he will not yield. Not now. Not when there’s Len to think of, and god, Len is all he thinks of.

Len is what pulls him through and makes him forget not to care.

The swamp ends.

His boots are clear, his pants are dry; the mud of the Doldrums cannot hold him now.

Life-in-Death has challenged him, and he has overcome, and so she turns and leads him onwards.

But there is more yet to come.

He follows the path.

Given the color of the bricks beneath his feet, he’s almost unsurprised when he comes upon the gates of Dis, glittering and green.

No jeweled city for him, though, no.

It’s a prison.

A prison made of glass and metal and twinkling stone, a hundred memories of confinement. The towers of Iron Heights, the depths of the gulag, the twisting turns of Chicago, the glaring weight of the Tombs in New York, and more and more and more -

And inside the prison there is a chair.

He moans.

He knows what test he must face here.

It is a test he has faced before.

This is the prison of the Self.

He walks forward, and he meets himself, reflected in a thousand mirrored planes.

Face twisted in greed, face twisted in hate, in rage, in fury, and worst of all, in the calmness of premeditation. He wore this face many times before – but the last one, the calm of death-inside, he only wore once.

He walks, and he sees:

Kronos sits upon the chair, with rusted chains looped around his arms and legs, and regards him with disdain.

“How low I have fallen,” Kronos says to him.

“How high I have risen,” he retorts. “To be you is to be a slave: I have cast off your name.”

“I was the most feared of the Hunters,” Kronos responds. “None heard of me but that despaired; My hunt was inexorable; I never tired nor weakened, and my prey never escaped me.”

“You were a dog,” he says. “You barked at the order of your masters.”

“I was strong, and nothing could hurt me.”

“You were alone,” he says, and that is the end of it.

Kronos bows his head. The chains about him crack and break, the rust eating away at them at the last, and they burst forth –

And then Kronos is gone.

There is only what he carries with him.

That was the easy part.

He turns next to regard what he once called himself.

“You left them behind,” Mick Rory, forty-three years old, Legend and sometimes even a hero, accuses him. “Len trusted you, and you betrayed him, and you left him behind, too, and he hated you in the end.”

“I love him,” he says. It is not a defense. It is a fact.

“You threw away the gift he gave you,” Mick Rory, Heatwave, enemy of the Flash and supervillain of fire, tells him. “He wanted you to join him, and you left him to the mercy of his father.”

“I love him,” he says. It is not a defense.

“You destroyed him,” Mick Rory, criminal and husband, burning with the flame of a cursed warehouse, says. “You drove him away; you made him abandon you, and you tore out his heart.”

“I love him,” he says.

“Why do you persist?” Mick Rory, younger than the rest, a groom, wearing a ring and promise, says. “Your crimes are not merely against the world; they are against him. Why would he want you still?”

“I love –”

“Why did you hurt him?” Mick Rory, youngest yet, fifteen and foolish and not even knowing that the heat that licked his heart was love. Tears stream down his face. “Why?”

“I love him,” he says, weary beyond weariness, sad beyond sadness. There is no defense but this: “I will not judge myself for him.”

They stand aside, the hollow men, the old skins which he has worn and was and has since cast off behind him, the soul of him carrying forth to be the person that includes all of them but is not bound by them, and they let him pass.

There is a garden outside, silent and dead, and beyond the garden there is a door.

The gate is locked shut, but the path continues.

On the door it is written: He who was living is now dead – and those of us still living are dying, with patience.

After the agony in stony places, the shouting and the crying, prison and place and reverberation –

He knows what he must do now.

He takes a breath in, pulls it all inside himself, everything he was, a tight ball of feelings and thoughts and memories, and he breathes it out, letting it go.

The gateway opens.

He walks on, and leaves himself behind, and goes forth truly nameless.

The pathway leads him down to a valley.

The stories tell of a test of trust: do not look back, traveler, and she will follow upon your feet.

The stories do not tell that there is first another test.

Recognition.

He’s found Len.

He’s found all the Lens.

Len at thirty, as Mick remembers him best, young enough for irrepressible energy but old enough to be grumpy about it.

Len at fourteen, as Mick first met him, a skinny bundle of bones with greedy eyes and light fingers.

Len at twenty two, bright and eager and enthusiastic, circles under his eyes from raising Lisa.

Len at forty, clad in supervillain parka and practicing his speeches on Mick, apology and forgiveness all at once.

And there’s the Len that Mick never knew: Len at four, chubby cheeked and happy; Len at eight, a beaten dog that doesn’t understand what he’s done wrong; Len at sixty, old and tetchy but still as clever as ever.

Len at eighty, curled up comfortably, old and smiling and content with a life long-lived.

Len at thirty-eight, weeping over his partner’s burned, comatose body.

That last one is a stab - he’d never known that Len had done that, that Len had screamed at the nurse trying to separate them that they were married and he had a right to be there, that he had slept for three days in a crappy plastic chair until the doctors had confirmed that everything would be okay.

Just like Len, not to mention that.

“What do I do?” he asks Life-in-Despair, who still lingers.

“Find him,” she answers.

And he nods. Len is in them, all of them, but only one of them contains eternity, a human soul that lights the sky.

He doesn’t bother examining them: they are all Len, and all are him, and he could spend eternity here learning about each of them.

Instead, he closes his eyes and blanks his mind.

Len is his hope, his guiding star, his true north.

Len’s gotten him this far.

Please.

At first there’s nothing.

But then -

A memory curls in at the corner of his mind, slowly shading in the lines and colors.

It’s nothing special. A day in fall, not too hot, not too cold; raining a little. They’re in their thirties; Lisa, adult enough now to be on her own, has come to visit. They have watched movies all day. Mick cooked. There was a popcorn war, and then they made s’mores on the stoves and stuffed their faces with delight.

Lisa’s asleep on the armchair.

Len is curled up into Mick’s arms on the couch, his fear of intimacy fading just enough to permit him this. There are no open warrants, for once, and they pulled off a heist a few weeks before, a big one that went perfectly. They’re rich, they’re free, they’re together.

It’s quiet but for the rain.

It’s perfect.

“I could live a hundred years in this moment,” Len said.

“And then you’d be old,” Mick had teased, breaking the feeling of it.

He opens his eyes. He’s not that man anymore - he would never break that moment now, but let it go on and on as long as he could, would luxuriate in it, wouldn’t fear feeling every damn second of it - but he remembers.

He doesn’t need a guide.

He knows Len.

He opens his eyes.

Life-in-Death waits before him. Her eyes are avid, her fingers keen, her mouth bright and red. He sees that there is more of her, too - Lisa young and innocent, Lisa older and freer still, but only two more.

Three in total.

Hecate Three-in-one, they call her; the Morrigan, the Moirai. Child-Mother-Crone, they say of her, and they worship her, but here in the dark she is not guide but guardian.

She of the three heads snarled and bit and barked and slept when clever Orpheus came; she wove visions over the graves of the heretics for starry-eyed Dante; she told lies made of nothing but the truth to doomed Macbeth.

He knows her, too.

“Well?” she asks, and her eyes shine with the glee of victory close at hand. “Where is he?”

He smiles.

“In the ice.”

Her smile freezes.

The Sphinx at Thebes looked just so, when Oedipus answered her riddle.

Oh, he would love to see Len in that moment, that remembered moment, that perfect peace, forever and always warm and safe in the arms of his lover, eyes on his sister, safe and happy, the rain keeping the world away. It would be heaven for Len.

But the Len he knows has never loved himself so.

No.

If that was heaven, then Len has cast himself to hell.

And for Len, there is only one hell for which he deems himself fit, and he knew of it long before Len told the whole world.

“The lake of ice,” he tells Cerberus, who has grown large and monstrous. “Where they put the traitors to kin.”

No Sheol for Len, full of the screams of lost souls, ever-wandering, no. For him is the freezing wasteland, for the father he could never please and later killed, for the sister he felt he failed, for the partner who he loved but left behind.

Cold enough to freeze all the tears of regret that Len has never shed.

Now that he looks at the Lens, he sees the truth: the only thing they have in common is the blank look in their eyes, the stillness behind them, for there are no eyes here, in this valley of dead stars, this hollow valley, this trap.

He turns and finds the one Len whose eyes still shine: trapped forever in that terrible moment when he turned the cold gun, whose capacities he knew better than any other, upon himself, the moment the ice froze the blood and muscle and nerves and bone. The moment where he gave up his livelihood, gave up his life, for a chance – only even a chance – of saving his partner.

How could he do any less, to save Len?

He reaches out and touches that one, and abruptly the valley is empty, his choice is made.

“Am I right?” he asks Cerberus mildly, because he never met a monster he didn’t want to fight.

She disappears, the three-in-one, and that is all the confirmation he requires.

The path is still beneath his feet.

“Walk, then,” she hisses in his ear. “Walk forth, nameless traveler. Your journey is not yet done – you have found the soul, but not yet the body.”

He walks.

He thinks, perhaps, that Len is behind him, now; he has reached the pit and now must climb the mountain of Purgatory to make it home.

Going up is always harder than going down, and going down was hard enough.

He sees the albatross far away before him, a single point of light in the darkness, and he remembers hope.

He walks.

He does not look behind him.

Just in case.

He wonders where he will find a living body here, in the land of the dead.

The path winds upwards, slow and sure, and he gains heart from it. He is a nameless traveler, but he has faced three tests: the reproach of the dead, the swamp of grinding sloth where the suicides curl up as trees, and the prison of self-hatred. He has bearded Cerberus in its lair and has walked alongside Life-in-Death without fear.

And best of all, he feels a gaze itching between his shoulder blades.

It might be his imagination.

But perhaps not.

His steps are sure, his spine straight, and he imagines he can see the albatross guiding him up.

And then the path turns abruptly left, and when he turns with it, his mouth drops open and the air in his lungs leaves him in a single huff, as though he’d been punched in the gut.

It’s not fair.

They should not have asked this of him.

Before him lies a river of fire.

It delights his soul, the siren sound of it, the crackle and the snap, the heat that beats on his face even from here, cracking his lips and baking his skin, and it is beauty beyond the concept of beauty to him. It is the balm to the anxiety that pricks the center of his soul, the restlessness that dogged him for as long as he can remember.

He finds that he has gone several steps towards the river, all unknowing.

The river feeds into the boiling sea and upon the river there stands a ferryman.

There is a ferryman in every such story. The only question is what shall be needed to pay his price.

He draws near, then nearer, and then he is there, standing upon the dock.

The ferryman, who has no eyes and a face made of shadows, smiles and says, “Welcome.”

It is the voice that sings in his sleep, dreams and nightmare both; it is his greatest love, it is his most hated foe, it is his holiest of holies. The agony and the ecstasy -

The flame itself speaks to him.

He stands mute before the ferryman, unable to speak, and yet he must. He must, he must, but it is so hard to remember what it is that he must demand. Here his sorrows are lifted, here his dreams are fulfilled. Here there is no pain but that which he invites into himself; here is the fuel that drives his spirit; here is the meat and drink of his soul.

He raises his eyes to the open flame of the river.

At the very top, between the barest tips of the tongues of fire as they beat their fury into the air, whipped by inexorable passion, he sees a glimmer of light that comes from beyond the flames.

A white light, the merest pinprick, and rimming around her, like the iris to a pupil, is a cloak of many colors.

The albatross.

He’d been following her - he’d perjured his faith, he’d ignored the call of the flame, and for what? For -

Hope.

Eyes of many colors, blue and hazel and brown and gold.

He’s never won this battle before.

He has to win it now.

Len’s counting on him more than ever.

“What do you want?” the ferryman asks, that voice of voices ringing in his ears.

He opens his mouth to ask for safe passageway, but what comes out is “I want Len.”

His voice is weak and ragged, pained and small and miserable like it hasn’t been since he was a child. He sounds like a child, begging for his favorite toy that daddy took away.

The ferryman smiles - grotesque and glorious, a skull-grin that stretches too wide - and offers him a cup.

“You have given much, and so you may take,” the ferryman says.

He takes the cup and stares at it. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to do with it - it’s empty, a round plain ceramic container with no handles or differentiation, and the only thing around is the river of fire, but surely that can’t be..?

“Why?” he asks plaintively.

“This river finds its beginning in the heart of a star,” the ferryman says. “This is its end.”

Understanding is slow in dawning, but dawn it does.

He has the soul. What he needs is the body.

And what are our bodies if not the ashes of burnt-out star-stuff?

His gaze drops down to the river, which flickers red and yellow and orange and white and blue and a thousand other colors. It looks real, it sounds real, it smells real.

This is going to hurt.

He takes the cup in one hand and clenches his fingers around its unbroken edge as hard as he can manage, and he kneels by the churning shores of the river of heat, and he dips his hand into where he last saw white and blue, despite knowing it will be even hotter than the yellow, because Len would like it better that way.

It does hurt.

It hurts more than he could have ever imagined.

He thought he knew pain, that he had been burnt before, but that was nothing - every part of him screams, even his mouth, and his fingers feel as though they are melting, the flesh sloughing off like so much ash, the smell of blood and burnt and -

He pulls his hand out.

The pain stops.

His hand is unblemished.

The cup is filled with fire.

“Well done,” the ferryman says.

He nods, too shell-shocked even to wipe the tears from his face.

He looks up at the ferryman, not rising from his knees. “Will you let me pass?” he asks.

The ferryman regards him for a long moment. “I will take you to the other side,” he says finally. “To where your path continues. But only you can decide if you may pass.”

He understands all too well what the ferryman means.

Even with the memory of pain lingering, he finds his eyes straying, his head turning, the flames singing out his name, and he knows if he lets them take him, he could be here forever amongst the crashing atoms of the death of a thousand million stars.

But it’s still nothing but a graveyard.

He has the hope of more than that.

He climbs into the boat, and the ferryman takes him onward.

He clings to his cup and he wraps his lips around Len’s name and prays to the only thing that could ever draw him away from his flames.

The journey takes forever and a day, and he feels as though he has endured every minute of it.

But at the other side his companion Life-in-Death, the Three-faced Hag, Lisa - glorious, wonderful, simple, beloved Lisa - waits for him.

He fixes his gaze upon her and does not let himself look at anything else, not the flames, not the dock, not the ferryman, not even the path beneath his feet, not until he is by her side.

“I have crossed,” he tells her.

“You have,” she agrees. She sounds approving, for once. It was a hard test to pass. “Give me the cup, and I will give you a man.”

He hesitates.

“I swear upon the start,” she adds, amused. “The weft and hue, the loom and the thread - and the twist.”

He gives it to her, recognizing that she has changed again: not Moirai at all right now, no, not the cruel weavers of fate and destiny. He’s looking at her truest form, singular and unlike any other.

Tyche: Lady Luck, Mistress Chance, Mazel and Shimazel both; the spin of the wheel and the adventurer’s byword, the flip of a coin that determines everything.

Len’s patron goddess, if he ever had one.

She takes the cup and it disappears in her hands, and then she reaches out and grabs his shoulders, staring at him right in the eye.

“I have reformed him,” she says. “And your journey, which has been long, is almost done: there is but one last test.”

He nods.

“Then I tell you only these words of caution, one you know and one you don’t: don’t look back, and -”

Her eyes shine black as the pit of entropy in which they now stand.

“- run.”

He runs.

He runs as he has never run before. He was never built for speed; he is powerful, not fast. He withstood the tide, he did not outrun it. But now he runs, and he doesn’t look back, and behind him there is a scream like he has never heard before:

A Great Eater at risk of losing one of its prey.

He runs.

The scream rises and rises like the wind in a hurricane until -

“Mick!”

It’s Len’s voice.

It’s Len.

“Mick, hold up a damn second!”

He runs.

“Damnit, Mick! Wait! I’m falling behind!”

He runs.

“Mick! It’s catching up with me! Just fucking wait! Just - listen to me, for once in your life!”

He runs.

Tears stream down his face, but he runs.

“Mick! Mick!”

He claws at his face, a habit he thought he’d grown out of years ago, turning his nails on himself when his anxiety grew too great and there was no way to make fire, and his nails gouge long tracks in his cheeks.

He runs.

“Mick! No! Mick, don’t leave me here!”

He runs.

“Mick!”

And then a scream.

He runs.

Don’t look back.

And then, worst of all, there aren’t any more words. No more words, no more sounds, no more scream, no more presence, just the absolute certainty that there is nothing behind him, that Len has fallen, that he is far behind him.

The feeling scratches at his eyeballs and tears at his throat, demanding - insisting - just one quick check -

Don’t look back.

This is a test of trust and a test of faith.

He forces himself to look ahead, nails digging into his temples as he forces himself to keep his face from turning, hands on both sides of his head to fight against his own instincts, and in the distance he sees her.

The albatross, large and glorious and beautiful, white and shining, and beneath her is a ship. Not his own, for that was torn apart, but another - older than his, of strange make, but a ship nonetheless, and it will carry him upon the waves of time if only he can make it.

He is abruptly certain, certain as the pit, that if he reaches that ship he will be safe - but he, and he alone, and what use is all this if he is still alone at the end?

But she told him not to look back, and she told him to run, and she is as close to Len as he can get in this pit of horrors, this land of the dead, and he will trust in her, in Len, when every fiber of his being cries out that she has lied.

He trusts in his hope.

He has to.

Faith is the substance of things unseen.

And all the things unseen, the nightmares that you wake up after panting and terrified but know not of what you dreamt, are chasing after Mick now, and they’re getting closer.

He runs.

His lungs are burning, his eyes are aflame, his head pounds, but he runs.

His muscles scream, his joints lock up, his feet drive iron nails up his heel and toes with every step he takes, but he runs.

He runs -

And then he’s there, the ship is there, the path leads there, and he throws himself forward into the ship and suddenly he’s tumbling-tumbling-tumbling for forever and eternity and -

Silence.

He opens his eyes.

He’s on the bridge of a ship. It is not one he has ever piloted before, but some principles of design are universal. In the window of the bridge he sees that they are falling further and further away from that rarest of sights in the theorized universe: a white hole.

A knot of spacetime with no start and no origin, which nothing may enter but through which you may leave.

His albatross.

They are back in normal space.

And so he turns, barely daring to hope, barely able to make himself twist enough to see, to check, at last to know -

Len is lying there beside him, just as he remembers him, blinking awake even as he stares at him.

“Len,” he whispers. “Len. Len…”

He cannot say anything else.

Len’s beautiful eyes widen and dart around, before fixing on his face, and then he smiles. “You got me out,” he says, as if he knew it all along, as if there was never any doubt, as if his faith in him was as great as his in Len.

“I gave up my name for you,” he says helplessly, when he means to say ‘Of course’ and ‘I was always coming for you.’ He doesn’t know why. It’s not important, a name, not when he could have this.

Len smiles, and reaches out, and he trembles at the touch of Len’s hands, human-warm and Len-cool, as Len cups his face in his palms.

“That’s okay,” Len says. “You’re my Mick; that’s who you are.”

And so he is, and was, and will forever be.

Len’s Mick.

#my fic #dccoldwave #mick rory #leonard snart #captain cold #heatwave #DC's Legends of Tomorrow #sailor's sorrow

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