Work Text:
Getting the mark of the black hand burned onto the back of her neck hurt. It hurt a fucking lot actually. It felt like her very core was burning and every inch of skin was being stabbed and tied back together with chains as her immortal soul was bound to her flesh for all eternity.
At least until a human fulfilled the prophecy.
Fortunately for Mel, there was still another ten-thousand years until another human showed up. And wasn’t that a thought. She would live for another ten-thousand years at a minimum. Probably more.
As her screaming died down and feeling came back to her limbs she realized she was being propped up by her Dad.
“Damn kid, makes me nostalgic. Welcome to immortality or whatever.” Mud shrugged as if the mob of angry people watching her branding weren’t even there. A leaned forward and coughed up a gun into his hand. “Do we test it or…”
“Do not kill my daughter right now Mud. How are you feeling hun?” He gently raised Mel onto her own two feet which after a stumble she managed to successfully stand on.
Hesitantly Mel took off one of her gloves to reveal pristine pale skin. “I kind of expected to rot…” She confessed. She reached around with her hand to the back of her neck to try and feel for the branding.
It was odd. It was still definitely skin but the texture was all wrong. It felt more like some sort of leather scab than meat. It leached the heat out of her fingers making her shiver but it didn’t exactly feel cold.
“Rot will take a while. A millennium or two, at the least. And a couple deaths but that really isn’t something you should be rushing into.” Ken informed her. He tried to be stern near the end but it was still overpowered by his fatherly concern.
Mel felt odd at the idea. She had a license to be as reckless as she wanted now because nothing could kill her. Nothing that would stick anyway. “Probably going to at least try and avoid it for a while. I like having my original limbs. Might need a new tooth or two though.”
She had lost more than one tooth being reckless as hell and she had the scars to prove it. Would her skin still scar if she was cut? If she did she’d probably eventually just be one massive one and no one else seemed to be. Unless that's what rotting was. Damn this was confusing.
“Well we’re going to have to test it to appease the rapidly growing mob out there.” Mud gestured to the window of the butcher shop that had a crowd of people standing by and a few priests praising the black hand for welcoming fresh meat into the Gaslight District.
Hesitantly Ken took his signature cleaver out of his head and with his other hand took Mel’s own. Hesitantly he pressed the blunted and rusted edge to the back of her hand.
She inhaled sharply from the pain without any kind of adrenaline to dull it and was surprised to see purple blood leak out.
Breadhead grabbed her by the waist and took her outside. With feigned confidence she held up her hand to the crowd and squeezed. “Uh there. I’m not human anymore. Are we good?”
A rotling with a sign warning of humans around his neck shrugged. “We’re good.”
With that the crowd dispersed. Most went off somewhere else, but a few entered the butcher shop to buy something.
“Alright, shows over. Back to work.” Ken came outside to drag his kids back in.
Overall, becoming immortal was weirdly boring.
The first time she died sucked, a lot.
Someone had hooked Jack out of his eternal hell of drowning and he held a grudge. Although with the human now firmly about as human as the rest of the residents of the Gaslight District no one really cared about his raving.
He wasn’t exactly the first person to get out of some kind of fate worse than death, people like him were a dime a dozen. What was rarer was going out to try and get revenge.
People that managed to escape their hell usually hid, scared in some remote corner of the Gaslight District until whoever tossed them into the sea forgot about their existence or were cemented themself. Regimes, governments, bureaucracy fell as often as they rose and in that chaos was the perfect chance for someone to change their name, replace their face, and rejoin their unholy society.
Unfortunately for the Smiling Dead, Jack wasn’t that smart.
“Jack, buddy. Come on.” Mel talked to him in a calm tone as if she wasn’t on the hood of a car speeding down the highway. She plucked a bit of the windshield out of her arm revealing a bit of purple blood along with it. “I’m not even human anymore. We were entirely content to ignore you raving about it but attacking us? You’ve got to know better than that.”
“Kid! I told you not to do this again!” Ken shouted from his car as he raced to catch up.
“Ignore him. He’s not used to me being immortal yet and still gets worried.” Mel waved her hand. Riding on cars was cool! “He kind of drives me crazy sometimes but he’s my dad, you know? He hid me on threat of Inferno, he cares about me a lot but he’s just a little overprotective sometimes.”
“Yeah yeah.” Jack was constantly shifting between glancing at the road ahead, Mel who was blocking half of it, and his mirror to make sure he wasn’t being shot at yet. With his attention split it wasn’t any surprise ended up crashing into a guard rail launching both him and Mel into the air with a couple seconds of airtime before they impacted the ground.
Surprisingly it didn’t hurt. She still felt pain, even the rotlings still felt a blunted pain from their dead nerves. For a moment everything was just, kind of dark. It felt like she had stood up too quickly and everything got fuzzy and went dark.
Until a flash of green light burned itself into her retinas and suddenly her lungs were empty and she needed to breathe. She inhaled sharply forcing air back into her lungs. When she looked up everyone else was there. Breadhead and Mud were busy making sure Jack couldn’t do anything and Ken was by her side, holding her hand.
“How are ya feeling kid?” He asked gently. As if she was sick and he came to wake her up to give her some chicken noodle soup.
“Cold.” Mel shivered as if freezing to death was actually something she had to worry about anymore.
He wrapped an arm around her and she leaned into his embrace. “Yeah. Human bodies really like staying at one specific temperature and being dead, even for a minute, tends to stop that from happening. You’ll get used to it.”
Hesitantly Mel started inspecting herself. Other than the gashes in her usual bandage wrap she was as good as new. “Did I lose anything?” The ground around them was splattered with purple blood and it felt like she had all her parts back but…’
Ken lifted up her arms, counted her fingers, stood her up on her own, turned her around, and stopped her in place. “Seems like you’ve got everything. Usually something like that usually knocks off a finger or two at least but you’ve still got a lot of sinew and tendons holding everything together.”
“Is it always so… Easy?” Mel hesitantly asked as she watched Breadhead make balloon animals out of Jack’s innards. “It felt like a nap or something. I didn’t even feel anything. Dying should be harder, right?”
“Kid, this world is godless. Take what blessing you have.” He gave her a little pat on the back. “Now come on. I need you to clean out the meat locker. Some of that stuff has been in there for longer than I’d care to admit.”
Overall, dying was oddly peaceful.
The first time she saw another human was, a lot.
Ten-thousand years seemed to blink by in a whirlwind of crime, girls, gluttony, and quiet moments with her dad.
Most relationships, platonic, familiar, or romantic, in the Gaslight District only ended up lasting about seven-thousand years on average. People changed, people forgot, and bridges were burned irreparably over time. Last she heard Mud was with Jack robbing people blind after he and Ken had a particularly nasty fight.
Despite its ups and downs the fact she could still confidently call Breadhead and Ken her family was a point of pride for her. Although she didn’t really see much of her brother anymore, he had moved off to play the piano professionally somewhere.
She was walking through an alleyway after taking the trash out of the massive dumpster behind the butcher shop. Until some random kid bumped into her anyway.
“Sorry about that miss. I’m just going to-” He tried to apologize before he started running again.
“No problem kid.” She dismissed before she gave him a pat. “Nothing to worry-” She paused when she saw a stain of black on some of the wrappings on her arms. For a brief moment she thought it was hers, even after ten millenia she still thought of herself as the human. Except, that was the problem. Ten-thousand years. A new human was due and they were standing right in front of her.
He seemed to realize he had been made and before he could run off she scooped him up into her arms. “Hey kid, couldn’t help but notice you aren’t exactly as rotted, as the rest of us.”
“Please don’t kill me” He started begging.
Hesitantly she held him with his arms stretched out as he started babbling for mercy. “Easy kid, I’m not going to kill you. I was human too at one point?” At his look of confusion. “Every rotling used to be human. Me included. Although I’m a bit of a recent addition.” As recent as ten-thousand years could be anyway. To some people who could remember the beginning it felt like a week. “All you’ve got to do is get a cool little tattoo and bam, immortality.” She grinned.
“Like you?” He hesitantly asked. At her nod he started crying again. “But, I don’t want to rot! I don’t want to be like you!”
At the admission Mel gasped and dropped the kid, who ran off to some other part of the district to be someone else's problem. She- this wasn’t a bad thing right? It was eternal life!
She walked back inside and headed into the bathroom to stare into the mirror. It had been years since she had seen a reflection. More since she actually went to inspect it.
Just like Ken had warned her, she rotted. The wrappings she once used to hide her very unrotted skin had become ingrained as part of her, their removal ended up with her organs spilling out because they had effectively replaced her skin.
Her face was mostly untouched, although she had to replace an eye at some point. Her hair had become stringy and filled with split ends and tangles. It had stopped growing at some point she didn’t remember and was on its last legs. Everytime she died she lost a little of it to the wind turning it into the abomination she had now.
She looked inhuman.
This would be her for eternity. An eternity of parties and food and lust and-
She wouldn’t die. She wouldn’t rest. She looked inhuman because she wasn’t human anymore.
The mark on the back of her neck made itself known as it let off a wave of cold.
Overall, she thought she was starting to regret her choice.