Tangled String Canvas

    The first thing Cassius remembers is the screaming. The final moment of life was spent just as the first - delirious, confused, desperate to gulp in air. 

    Then there’s the vertigo. His head spins before he realizes he feels gravity weighing down on his body. Everything so dark - null of sensation other than that gravity. No air resistance pulling through his hair and falling through his fingers, no sound ripping through his throat into the colorless void, no light flashing in his eyes as the world filters out. Just gravity. 

    Was this death? A profound sense of falling until the flame gets snuffed out? 

    What happened? Surely he’d know - surely he’d know how he’d got here through the memories flashing through a fleeting memory. 

    He learns to walk, to speak, to run and to hide, to become a thousand things he didn’t want to be and the one thing he couldn’t let anyone know about. Studying for years, crawling until his fingers bled and he cried out into the night waiting for the opportunity. Getting a taste of freedom. Sweet, fleeting freedom. And then- 

    And then what?

Something, something with college, a grad program.  Everything so recent falls into a fuzzy blur and it drives him insane - only one thing cuts through. 

Victim. 

I was a victim. Again. Again again again and for what.

I cry and I bleed and I work until my body gives out. The one thing I didn’t want, I am. 

And for what.

And for why? 

What did I ever do to be damned like this?

The gravity builds like water pressure, or going deeper into a cave system. He grits his teeth and forces his eyes open. 

No. I won’t die like this. Every moment I spent building myself a life - a career, an escape, something entirely and holistically mine - I won’t give that up. Not yet.

Dying a victim - it’s unfair to blame that on a God that doesn’t exist for me. I’m stronger than that.

Fuck that.

“I’m not dead-! Wake me up, you shithead! I’m not dead!! I’M NOT DEAD-”

The strings dig into his back as they catch him like a fly in a trap. Taut threads spun like a dense spider’s web bounces him into the air and back down again. As far as the eye can see. 

He sits up, partially falling through the netting but not enough to be in danger. Knitting his brow he looks around - nothing but void and the string, infinitely spreading out. 

That, and a new voice in his head.

‘I heard you crying out in the night alone. The soul leaving the spirit is hard, I know.’

Cassius hears himself scream this time.

“What in the f-”

‘Language, please.’

    All-encompassing is the best way to describe this voice. It’s like a bell - soft, but hollow and haunting as it rings with no source to be found, with a sort of tone that almost sounds pleading. 

Turning around, he blinks enough times to try and discern what he sees - because it’s definitely not anything of the world he knows. 

Standing before him, holding fistfuls of strings in their hands, is a doll the size of a human. Cracked ball joints covered by an antique poet’s shirt and high waisted pants splattered in a red sort of something that seemed to be paint but Cassius didn’t want to investigate, long light brown hairs tied low into a sort of ponytail - and by god, that face. Carved out eyes dusted with blue paint, artificial pink blush, and a splash of bright bile-yellow where a mouth would be if it had one.

Frozen in fear was one way to describe him.

“Who- what are you?” his voice stammers to a quiver, body still with nowhere to run. The crooked doll tilts his head with the sound of coarse rolling clay. 

‘Dead - much like you.’

“I’m not dead,” Cassius’s tone bites. “I refuse. I don’t know what happened but I’ll get up.”

‘Sure you’ll get back up. I’m here to help you with that! But you are very, incredibly dead right now.’

“How do you know that?”

‘Takes one to know one. Also this is the Underworld.’

“Mother fu-”

‘You have such a terrible mouth for a linguist!’

“You’re doing a lot of talking for a doll!”

‘I can drop you into damnation right now if you prefer, sir!’

“Ok don’t do that-” Cassius waves his hand for them to stop as the being loosens its grasp on the strings. He takes a deep breath before continuing.

“I will admit, I’m very confused and on alert right now, I apologize, let’s redo this,” he holds up a finger and then clasps his hands together. “Hi. I’m Cassius. We’re both dead. This is the Underworld. I don’t remember how I died. What the - frick.”

That hurt him to say. The doll does pull the strings tight again though. 

‘Hello Cassius!’  the colors on their face seem to grow more saturated. ‘I’ve not a name, but you can call me the Myopic Marionette. I don’t remember how I died either, and I’d prefer not to be dead as well.’

Cassius throws his hands up in the air. 

“Great! We have so much in common!”

‘It’s true!’ The cream porcelain of the Marionette gains a rosy hue. ‘And we’d both like to get back to our lives and careers, right?’

“Yes! What do we do with this information!” 

‘Well, Cassius the Impatient, I have a bit of a deal for you. I can revive you, put you back in your body and help you get back your memories-’

“Delightful! Great! Where do I sig- WUAGH!”

Cassius jumps at that, going a little too fast and almost falling through the strings, having the lay on his stomach to keep his leverage. 

‘In return you have to let me inhabit your body with you AND you have to help me get back my memories too.’

“Hell of a catch, isn’t it?” Cassius says between the wheezes of almost falling to his ghostly demise. “Never much was one for roommates. I don’t mind helping you out but - do you have to be...in me?”

‘I don’t have a body, you do.’

“Fair enough.”

He thinks on that a second, and looks back up at the Marionette. 

“Will you be able to move my body without my permission?”

‘No. I can revive you if you die again though.’

“Ok, alright, that’s pretty cool I must say. Can you listen in on my thoughts?”

‘Yes.’

“All of them?”

‘I can choose not to listen.’

“Ok but-”

‘Otherwise yes.’

Cassius grimaces. 

“Hm, alright, anything else I should know about.”

‘I can give you some of my essence as a ghost! Also I am mostly trauma held together with popsicle sticks and elmer's glue but so are you so I don’t think that’ll be a problem!’

“I-”

Cassius pauses. 

They’re not wrong.

“Ok.”

He’s not sure how to feel about being read by a terrifying blood-and-paint-stained ghost thing right now.

“Can I call you Mari? ‘Myopic Marionette’ is a mouthful and a little impersonal.”

‘I don’t mind, no.’

On one hand, he is volunteering to be possessed by a GNC as fuck Annabelle. Willingly giving up his body to be occupied by a stranger, all to escape literal death - possibly murder? He hates how fuzzy those details are. 

On the other, this is his chance to get back out there, to return to right whatever sick, twisted wrong befell him, and return to his proper life. He was twenty four, so much time that would just fall through like sand if he didn’t do this.

What other choice did he have?

    “I’ll take it,” he sticks out his hand for a shake. “But under one condition.”

    ‘Yes?’ The Marionette tilts his head to the other side - the rolling sounds scratchier this time.

    “I will swear. You cannot stop me.”

    ‘Fine, I suppose. Let’s make a wonderful team, Cassius.’

    “Let’s get our lives back.”

    The Marionette’s limbs creak and crack as a delicately crafted, cold to the touch hand takes Cassius’s, and in that moment two was one. His body glowed with a faint ghastly blue, feeling light as a feather but stiff as a board, and it sunk in how truly, devastatingly dead he was.

    A dead man walking - and a ghost living within. 

    A dead man doesn’t mean a done man- and his blood lit fire with the desire, the need, the hunger to reclaim what’s his. Life, memory, home, all his. 

    And though he feels like he’s flying, the Marionette disappears into ephemera, and so do the strings. Once again, he’s falling.

    ...Down, ever deeper, into the Underworld. 

    “...Do you have a plan for this one, Mari?”

    Silence.

    Long Silence.

    ‘...I didn’t exactly plan this far, no!’

    “GOD FUCKING DAMMIT-!”