Chapter Text
Marie’s smile was not that stiff.
He shifted his weight; the fabric of her dress scratched the angry open wound on his temple. It was not the pain that reminded him that he was dead – that he was alone, again, because there was and still is not a soul who understands him – but the soft glow emanating from her chin, from her lips. Their lips.
“My friend. You have awakened.” Marie’s warm voice coursed through his nerves and soothed the aching cold in his silent chest. He sank into Them, into her lap, wishing he could drown.
And drown he did.
He worked his tongue through Their folds and drew an elaborate design on Their swollen bud. Tod-Marie groaned obscenely as They threw Their head back, shut Their eyes and bucked violently against him, drenching his face anew. Their quivering thighs almost crushed his neck; Their nails clawed at his scalp and caged his head as he started to pull back for air. He choked but pushed down the urge to cough and continued peppering kisses between Their legs.
As Their infinite eyes gazed down at him once more, he rose to kiss Them. Something dripped from his chin and onto their half-discarded clothes; he watched in horror as the dark stains shone in crimson and expanded before the colour disappeared. He flinched. Marie’s mirky, unfocused eyes stared into his for a moment. He saw her lifeless figure countless times, but never this close - never touching. His vision blurred; his breath grew laborious; his tongue felt too long for his mouth.
“Are you well?” His stomach twisted and turned at Stephanie’s distant voice. “Rudolf?” Elisabeth called, making his brain swell in his skull. “Father!” Elisabeth Marie cried. The hole on his temple answered with a gush of fervid liquid. “My friend.” Coldness enveloped him and caressed his wounds, easing the searing pain of living. He shakily held his hands out to clutch at the last drop of reality that They provided.
Der Tod stayed in Their usual form throughout Their unmeasurable visit. This time, They did not blindfold him to prevent him from reliving his visions. He watched Them worship old and new scars; he watched Them smooth out his spasming muscles; he lied on his back, mesmerized by the dome of thousands of mirrors reflecting Their careful touches and the way their limbs intertwined. He shivered, trembled, then thrashed under Them as They shattered and remade his world. Their hardness anchored his shaking body; he floated across an ocean of stars as waves of something salving — something divine — filled him and took him away. He finally felt himself let go.
…
Rudolf did not sleep. When he closed his eyes, he heard whispers of a crumbling world; when he opened them, he saw metal and men bent and re-shaped in alien ways. He “dreamed” of an army at the feet of a wall stretching across the land like a dragon’s spine; he flew above the ghost of a city starved and sick and half buried under a new capital; he lit up the exposed gut fat of a tyrant and watched the giant, flayed corpse burn for three days and nights; he saw his own head fall, but when it tumbled on the ground to stare up at him, it wasn’t his face.
Images of empires falling, rebuilt, then destroyed danced around the shadows. The dead man’s face flashed behind Marie’s curls. He often “woke” up to find himself in the arms of der Tod, his body full of marks he earned from his “excursions” while Tod, bearing Marie’s figure, Stephanie’s, or Elisabeth Marie’s — mostly Marie’s, because she promised to accompany him to and in death — hummed the same song They did a century, maybe half, or maybe three millennia ago, when he sought for (the) love (of a mother). The gentle melody slowly washed away screams of the past, present, and future.
…
“Is this of your doing? Is this my eternal punishment?” He once asked Tod upon his “wake”, his body trembling and remembering the feeling of slowly disintegrating into nothing.
His mother’s eyes looked back at him and morphed into his.
“My friend,” he saw his own lips move, “you chose every action that made you.”
He mirrored himself: “We chose us.”
Elisabeth’s face, carved by grief and masked anger against the world, briefly overlapped with his before both blended into the endless night.
“I chose this.” He did — does — not know if the whispers came from him, or if they made him.
…
Once again, Tod cradled a broken Rudolf lying in sweat and blood, devoured by nightmares that came true.
…
Strangely, the air smelled sickly sweet.
He stood in a grand, ornate hall proudly displaying portraits of past and future rulers. In front of him stood a misfit: crown prince Rudolf Franz Karl Josef. He looked down to see himself dressed in the same heavy regalia which always left him stiff and weary. He has not touched these symbols of power — which belonged to his father and not him, never him — since the death of his close allies.
He stared at his painting: his own face grinned back at him as the scent of blood grew insufferable. “Emperor Rudolf will rise against time,” he sang mockingly and heard a duet reverberate. A hot, sticky substance poured from his head — from their heads — onto the ground, filled the room, and filled him from within. His throat tightened as an erratic heartbeat drummed in his temple… a heartbeat?
As dark red engulfed him, he called for his only friend.
…
A distant lullaby pulled his soul away.
He lived for a short eternity in vivid memories that stood against fluid time until he became Rudolf again: the suicidal crown prince, the mad lover, the coward, the liberal doomed to his own despair.
He sat up on his bed in Mayerling, a hand clenching onto a soft thigh; another holding a revolver.