anactoria

Title: A Keeping-House for Hell
Author:

anactoria
Fandom: Watchmen
Characters/Pairings: The Comedian
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Nuclear incidents, mild horror, quite a lot of swearing.
Notes: Written for

dark_fest prompt, "Any fandom, a survived encounter with Nyarlathotep."
Thanks to

flyingrat42 for beta-reading!

He isn't the only one. That's something, maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, there are definitely others here; he's seen a few of them around. They all move with the same shambling gait, keep to the shadows when they can; roachlike in the ruins, scrambling from the light and the cold, poison-heavy rain. He never gets close enough to see anybody's face, here, but what his imagination conjures up is grotesque -- or ridiculous -- enough. A whole legion of human ruins, withered and as unreal-looking as B-movie monsters, vacant-eyed, dead to the world. Without feeling, and without much sense, either. All of them like him.

He laughs at them, but only sometimes. Eddie Blake probably would've laughed, too, and louder, but he isn't Eddie Blake any more.

*

Rushing air and the sidewalk hurtling up at him, and all the breath had been ripped out of his lungs, else he'd have been holding it, braced for the impact. But the impact never came.

Biggest punchline of Eddie's life, and he had to go and miss it.

Everything vanished, just for a second, or that was what it felt like, and then he was awake and conscious, if not breathing. And he was there.

Funny, but he's never quite been able to remember what the guy looked like, since. Sometimes he thinks he remembers a toothless, expressionless mouth, or eyes as flat and shiny and alien as a lizard's, but he can never be sure about any of it. Other times, he figures he must never have seen the guy's face at all, and whatever's left of his brain is just projecting what it knows from being alive, because all he can remember is his own face staring back at him.

Whatever, the guy seemed pretty creepy at the time -- maybe because he was impossible to get a handle on -- creepy enough to make Eddie shudder and try to close his eyes. He couldn't, which seems inevitable enough in hindsight, but at the time he'd started to think that maybe he was losing his mind. If he even still had a mind. Anyway.

Not exactly the kind of afterlife he'd imagined, this. Sure, he wasn't expecting choirs of angels -- if he believed in any of that bullcrap in the first place, he oughta be well prepared for the fiery pit -- but this was just... nothing. No landscape, no objects, no sense of distance, just an absence filling all that the eye could see.

Nothing, but this man, thing, whateverthefuck it was, staring at him with its empty eyes.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked it, forcing a sneer. (Smile and you'll feel better, right?) His voice worked, which was a plus, but only kind of. The words came out, but he couldn't actually hear them; instead he just felt them, like currents in the air. Creepy. He squared his shoulders. "And what do you want? 'Cos if you're here to threaten me, I'm pretty sure that prick Veidt already beat you to the punch. Still, you wanna have a go..."

He heard -- sensed -- laughter. The nasty, grating kind, and it reminded Eddie of himself on a bad day. Not that he'd had many other kinds of days, lately, and this was shaping up to be somewhere near the bottom of the pile.

"You can do better than that," the thing told him in a voice like scuttling insects, and fuck if it didn't still manage to sound more supercilious than HRH Queen Ozy himself. "I think you already know that killing you would be a pointless exercise. No, I'm here... for my own amusement, shall we say?"

It was probably smiling, Eddie decided, and he bet the smile was gruesome.

"I'm here," it went on, "to offer you a choice. Things turned out rather disappointingly for you, really, didn't they? And we all know what happens next. He kills a few million, your, ah, friends agree to keep their mouths shut or else add their names to the cenotaph, and the world lives on as dumbly as it ever has."

Eddie blinked. "What the fuck you expecting me to do about it? In case you'd forgotten, I'm not exactly of that world anymore."

The thing chuckled. "You're primitive creatures, most of you, I forget. Life, death, time space... these things aren't as difficult to manipulate as you'd like to think. I could, if I chose, give you a body, a physical presence, of sorts. I could send you back there. I could give you time. Another chance. Don't you think it's worth a try?"

Well, shit. Eddie Blake, the big damn hero after all. That was when he knew it had to be a joke.

Maybe if he closed his eyes and just imagined himself away from here really hard the thing would go away and he could just get on with being dead.

"I know you have a reputation to uphold," it said, actually managing to sound a conspiratorial note, "but nobody ever has to know that you foiled Ozymandias's plan. After all, you'll still be dead, really. Come on, now. Isn't there anybody out there you'd care to save?"

There was a smirk in its voice, and Eddie opened his mouth to tell it to go fuck itself.

Laurie.

Rockefeller was a safe distance from the city centre. They were high security, they had protective bunkers, her boyfriend was the goddamn atom bomb--

Laurie, sneaking out through windows and scaling wire fences just because. (Jesus and motherfucking Mary, why’d she have to be so much his?) Laurie, with sunglasses pulled down low and hands shoved deep into her raincoat pockets, unrecognised in the crowds. Laurie, walking and smoking fiercely in the striplit night, eyes flicking sideways sharp as a switchblade at any loser who dared check out her legs for a second too long. Sally, beside the phone in California, choking down Martini and denial and refusing to cry.

While Ozy, smug in his fortress of solitude on the ice, smirked and congratulated himself on having averted the tragedy he had decided was inevitable.

"Fuck it," said Eddie. "Why the hell not?"

*

The arrogant little cunt hadn't even stuck around to watch him hit the ground. That pissed Eddie off. It was the kind of anger he hadn't felt since before he found out, before he knew that everything was pointless, and damn if it didn't feel good.

He probably didn't look too good, himself -- there weren't exactly any mirrors in the afterlife or wherever it was he'd just been, but the look on Ozy's face when he stepped out of the shadows told him all he needed to know. Surprise -- and the fact that he didn't seem to feel pain anymore -- worked in his favour, and it was over in seconds.

Eddie did stick around to watch, couldn't help it. Had to be sure the bastard was dead, didn't he?

Besides, the whole thing was kind of comical, when you looked at it. Two bodies, yards apart on the pavement, frozen with flailing limbs; like a disaster movie on pause.

The laughter came up from deep in his belly, then, and he howled and howled.

*

He spent most of his time watching Laurie, after that. Most people would probably have said he was trying to make up for something, and why the hell not? He'd just come back from the dead to make sure his daughter got the chance to get old and die in her own time. Why shouldn't he get the chance to hang around for a little while? That was what ghosts did, right? And Eddie couldn't think of any better way of describing what he was, now.

Sometimes she did a double take almost in his direction, or blinked like there was a lash in her eye, but she never quite seemed to see him.

She didn't go to his funeral.

*

He'd hang around the Veidt building sometimes, too. Looked a little different with cops everywhere in sight and police investigation tape all around the penthouse suite. Golden boy had always been so careful to preserve his reputation, every single move calculated to emit Essence of Nice Guy (tm). Eddie'd have loved to see the bastard's face now that wild speculation about his little scheme was plastered across the front page of every tabloid in the country. Biggest scandal in the free world.

Well, it was until people started claiming Manhattan had given them cancer.

And that was when Eddie started to feel like maybe something wasn't right. Like maybe he hadn't been told the full story, after all.

If there was any evidence that Ozy'd had a hand in it, it had been destroyed. Clever bastard had been playing a longer game than anyone would've guessed, and killing him had only knocked out the half of it.

Eddie had a nasty feeling that the thing had known that. He should've figured that this was too good to be true. That he was being played for a fool, a royal goddamn fool.

Then Manhattan up and took off, and the warplanes started moving into position, and when the sky went out over New York, Eddie couldn't even pretend to himself that he was surprised.

*

And now he's still here. However long it's been, whatever he is now, because he doesn't feel pain or cold or anything much, or need to sleep, and he doesn't seem any closer to being really, actually, dead-dead.

Sometimes when he blinks, for a split-second he thinks that he sees the city like it used to be, with high-rises stretching up to the sky and people out walking and spitting and cursing and fighting in the streets, jammed traffic and blaring horns.

It's never real. All the buildings stand in ruins, and there are cracks in the tarmac where nothing grows. The Veidt building took a pretty big hit, but part of the skeleton is still standing, just the first few floors. An occasional piece of window pane drips off of it like flesh. Once, he thought he saw someone – something, something like him -- standing where the entrance used to be, but he didn't bother going over to check it out.

He does go walking, sometimes, just stupidly following his feet with no idea where he's actually going. He doesn't know what he's looking for, but since he never finds it, he guesses that doesn't really matter. Mostly he just sits here, watching the things that used to be people shuffle by and the city rot, thinking that maybe he'll still be here when it's finished rotting, when there's nothing left to show that this was where New York once stood.

There are no nights, and there are no days. And the dead world stretches before him without end, and up above the winter roars like laughter.