Chapter Text
“One thousand years,” A voice says, reverberating through the crypt. The mother—Polly, Patty, Poppy?—raises her head from where she kneels beside the first one—Ted, Troy?—who’d been knocked to the ground by the creature. Steve has no memory of the time he’d spent underground, but he feels sure that if he’d met something like this, something would have stuck.
The new one—Billie, whose name hasn’t yet slipped from the fragile grasp of his memory, but is more sure to do so with each passing day—had been cast across the room by one of the creature’s many-jointed arms, landing near the three others, whose names Steve never tried to learn. At the sound of the voice, she struggles for a moment then sits up, seemingly unharmed.
Steve feels a wave of relief in the roiling panic of his emotions; humans are fragile, their bodies far more easily damaged than that of a Jellicle. And yet, at this moment it seems that all six of the humans who came below the surface with Munkustrap are somehow still alive.
“Cesare.” The booming hiss of the creature chills Steve’s very bones. “Don’t you have, hhh, a new target waiting for you, hh, on the surface?”
Shockingly small in the doorway of the crypt, Steve spots him. Him; the one who sent him here, who spent so much time following him and trying to capture him for reasons Steve had never understood. He feels himself tense with expectation. What could he—what had the creature said his name was? Cesare?—be doing here now?
“One thousand years,” Cesare repeats, stepping into the room. “One thousand long, miserable years. I’ve Watched it all.”
He walks slowly, almost casually, like he’d done on the surface just before he’d taken Steve prisoner. The movement is deceptive, Steve now knows. It means there is danger. Almost without thinking, he squares himself in preparation.
“I caught everyone and everything you asked me for,” Cesare goes on. “I’ve been—not to brag—the best goddamn Watcher this rinky-dink operation has ever seen! And what do I get? Another thousand years? And after that, what’ll it be? Another few thousand more?”
“Don’t be foolish,” the creature says. “You’ll do, hhhh, exactly what I tell you, because without me, you’re NOTHING.”
The last word resonates against the stone walls of the crypt loud enough to send small chunks of rock tumbling from the ceiling. The humans cower and cry out in fear, but Steve’s attention is on Cesare’s approach, on the strange expression playing across his face—casual indifference with a thin veneer of anger, and a spark not unlike fear bright in his sunken, yellowed eyes.
“I’m gonna be real with you, my guy,” Cesare says, walking past Steve as he does so. Steve catches a brief smell in the air: sharp and dangerous, like ozone, like lighting. Like the smell that came just before his final moments on the surface of this planet. In a hand behind his back, Steve can see gripped in Cesare’s fist a short, spiral-striped rod.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these past few hours,” he continues, “and I’ve gotta say: this deal just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I mean, you clearly think you can scare me into doing whatever you want for the rest of eternity, right?”
He stops in front of the creature, raising his free hand to point up at it. “Well, think again, you top hat wearing, spidery son of a bitch! You can’t trap me down here forever! You can’t feed off me until I’m nothing but some brainless, dessicated husk! I won’t let it happen! I won’t stay here! I’m tendering my resignation! I’m punching my clock-out card for the last time as of right this very second, do you hear me!? I! QUIT!”
The creature lets out a vicious, howling laugh, raises one of its many hands, and brings it down in a fist on top of where Cesare had stood just a moment before.
With a speed that would impress even a Jellicle, Steve watches Cesare dodge past two more slaps of the creature’s massive hands, each impact shaking the room hard enough for more small pieces of stone to fall from above. It lets out a rattling, furious scream.
Cesare extends his arm. The strange metaphysical tool he’d used to send Steve down to the crypt expands in an instant, and the room is flooded with the smell of electricity. Steve feels his skin prickle, and takes an instinctive step backward.
Then, the hammer comes down dead center on top of the creature.
The hat crumples instantly into its shirt collar, and its scream halts so abruptly, the silence of the room is deafening. For a moment, all is still and silent in the crypt.
In a sudden burst of color and light, the creature explodes. A wall of purple-blue smoke pours from the center of the room and surrounds them. Steve is blinded by it for a moment, seeing nothing ahead of him but a sea of blue and brilliant flashing sparks.
Almost as soon as it happens, the smoke dissipates. When the last of the sparks twinkle out, Steve looks around the room to see everyone—all six humans, Munkustrap, and Cesare, all of them somewhat dazed and disheveled but otherwise unharmed, and no sign of the multi-limbed creature aside from a deep divot in the center of the floor where it once had been.
Cesare takes one step back from the newly formed chasm, then another. He turns around to face the rest of the group, who are staring in abject shock. He opens his mouth to speak, but is interrupted by a pop as the hammer in his hand snaps abruptly out of existence. He flinches in surprise, shakes his now empty hand as if stung.
“Huh,” he says. “I honestly didn’t think it was gonna be that ea—”
Suddenly, Cesare jolts, his body twisting in an unnatural arc. His head twists by incident to face Steve, and he has an expression on his face that fills Steve with dread: an abrupt, startled blankness. Then he stiffens, tilts, and collapses to the ground in a pile of warped limbs.
–
For a moment, Steve doesn’t move. Then he hears a chorus of frantic shouts and glances over to see the other three humans scrambling toward the prone figure.
“Boss!” The large one shouts, reaching him first and kneeling down beside him, reaching out then freezing just before he makes contact with Cesare’s form. “Are you…?”
The one-eyed one is next, quickly followed by the pale-haired one, and they both stop short from touching the body as well. Driven either by curiosity or good-natured concern, Steve sees his own humans begin to approach. Even Munkustrap—driven purely by curiosity, Steve suspects—follows to join the group. Eventually, Steve feels himself begin to move forward along with them.
“What happened? He wasn’t hurt, he was just standing there, and then…” The one-eyed one looks ashen and fearful, almost more so than she had been when the creature had been with them.
“He looks…” the pale-haired one hesitates. “Well, he looks like he always has, but he’s… something isn’t right.”
Steve finally reaches them, glances down at the figure. He agrees, Cesare looks exactly like he always has, gaunt and pale, just with one critical absence the humans can’t seem to understand: a body only looks alive when it’s moving.
Munkustrap crouches down to observe Cesare’s collapsed form, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
“Good moon,” he says. “This must be the worst resurrection spell I have ever seen.”
“Huh?” Peggy says.
“What do you mean?” One of the others asks.
“Well, he clearly died some time ago,” Munkustrap says, “but the resurrection doesn’t seem to have preserved the majority of his bodily functions. It looks like just about every physical attribute has been damaged. Partial collapse of the nasal cavity, massive skin discoloration, no doubt a host of internal organ degradation. Frankly, it’s a miracle he’s been moving around as well as he has with such little musculature left in him. A real hatchet job, wouldn’t you agree, Deuteronomy?”
Steve doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing. Cesare had been dead—of course he had been, Steve had known that from the beginning. He knew the difference between living humans and dead ones. Then again, this was the only dead human he had ever seen that could move and speak, which had complicated things for him.
“Now, hold on,” Tom says. “Are you saying you can, what—bring people back from the dead?”
Munkustrap stands up, eyebrows furrowed. “Well, we Jellicles have the ability to resurrect the dead, of course. But as our holy text teaches, death is a natural—in fact revered—component to the grand cycle of life! Bringing someone back to the physical world after they’ve gone on to the Heaviside Layer is simply unacceptable to our people.”
He doesn’t say, aside from the most exceptional circumstances, Steve notes. He suspects it’s because Munkustrap hasn’t yet decided whether or not this event counts as an exceptional circumstance.
“So, you can’t bring him back?” Perry asks, placing a gentle hand on the shaking shoulder of the large one, still knelt on the ground and crying softly.
On her other side, Billie narrows her eyes shrewdly at Munkustrap. “Or do you mean you won’t?”
“Maybe it’s… for the best? He can… rest in peace,” the pale-haired one says. Steve hears the wobble in his voice, the hesitation as he speaks the words. “He did say he’d been watching Earth for one thousand years. That must have been—”
“I’m sorry, did you say one thousand years?” Munkustrap interrupts. “My goodness, he was terribly young, wasn’t he?”
He looks momentarily abashed, and Steve remembers how he’d felt when he first learned how violently brief the human lifespan was. For a Jellicle, a thousand years was a blink of the eye; for humans, it may as well be an eternity.
“That is a true tragedy,” Munkustrap says, pinching his chin between thumb and forefinger and looking thoughtful. “Perhaps, given the circumstances, it would be worth considering the ritual. Deuteronomy, what do you think?”
Munkustrap turns to look at him again, eyes wide and vaguely reverent. Steve looks down at the corpse between them. He looks small, frail, his eyes closed to the world around him. His fingers are rigor-tight, curled at the ends, cracked lips pulled back just enough to reveal peeking, pale teeth. In the year Steve has known him—another blink of the eye, he thinks mildly—he has never seen this man so still. He finds it disturbing, and when he looks around at the collection of humans surrounding him he sees their faces, drawn and stricken with grief, but momentarily safe from danger, and oh so very alive.
“…He did save our lives,” Steve finally mutters, gaze flickering back up to Munkustrap.
Munkustrap beams at him, apparently pleased by the choice. “He did save our lives, didn’t he? Excellent point! I suppose in this particular case, we could make an exception to the rule. Mind lending me a hand, my dear?”
Steve dips his head. “Of course,” he says.
The humans move back to make room for Steve and Munkustrap to kneel on either side of the corpse. Munkustrap’s eyes drift closed as he puts his hands on top of the body and begins to mutter the sacred vowels in a low, reverent tone. After a moment of hesitation, Steve places his hands in the proper place. The fabric of Cesare’s jumpsuit is thin and scratches roughly against his palms, and he feels the frail bones of his figure. He closes his eyes and joins Munkustrap in the chant.
In the millions of years he’s been banished from his home, Steve has forgotten many things. Like a fog slowly rolling across the plains of his mind, blurring ideas and events, the details of his present are often enshrouded from his view. But when he looks to his past, to visions of the bigtop, of Broadway and the Jellicle ceremonies, of the names and faces of his brethren so many thousands of lightyears away, they are always vivid, and clear as a pane of glass.
There is no hesitation as he speaks the words of resurrection, even when he hears the sounds of the humans gasping and murmuring. He knows without looking what it is they see: a brilliant, golden circlet of light growing between them, surrounding the corpse, sparks of red and green glinting around the contact points at their palms and fingers. A symphony of color and light, vivid enough to capture the attention of even the most far flung soul.
He has himself borne witness to only a handful of resurrections in his millions of years, and none of them performed on a body so dessicated and ancient. Yet like Munkustrap, he has no doubt in the vivacity of the magic, of its power that will succeed in returning life to even this far past being. Even so, as the end of the spell approaches, he can’t help but lift up a single lid to peek down at the body laid out between them.
He watches the ashen blue fade from Cesare’s sallow, sunken skin, replaced by a sun-kissed, warm olive. His hollow cheeks inflate and round, turning pink at the corners, and his lips grow plump and shiny. The wiry scrangles of his hair curl and lighten into a rich brown, thickening into long tendrils that frame the heart-shaped curve of his face. The deep bags below his eyes smooth out underneath long, dark eyelashes, and as the glorious golden light surrounding them begins to fade away, those lashes flutter open to reveal white, human eyes with almost hypnotic brown irises, and Cesare is suddenly, vibrantly alive.
Steve has the thought, fleeting and incomprehensible to him, that he may be the most beautiful human he has ever seen.
Then Cesare sits up with a gasp, nearly slamming his forehead into Steve’s as he launches forward. He continues gasping, long fingers scrabbling at his chest and throat and leaving thin red marks along the delicate skin.
“Ah, yes, not to worry,” Munkustrap says, talking indirectly either to the alarmed humans behind him or the newly revitalized one in front. “This is a perfectly normal reaction after such a long time suffering with a botched resurrection. It’s been a while since he’s had to use lungs, so it may take him a few moments to remember how to do it properly. Take your time, my boy! Go along with me: in, then out. In, out. In, out, in, out, in—”
Cesare’s gasps evolve into frantic, fast panting, air sucking in and blasting out of his mouth with alarming speed. Then, with one last rapid intake, his eyes roll back into his head, and he collapses backward onto the ground.
“Ah,” Munkustrap says. “That may have been a bit too fast, I think. All for the best, I suppose; that’ll give his body some time to sort itself out without that pesky human superconsciousness getting in the way.” He stands up, dusting off the fine gray powder from his pantaloons, and turns cheerfully to look at the dumbfounded humans. “Shall we head back to the surface?”