Doomsday has no way of knowing how long it has been since she’s left here, and that’s not necessarily because it had been so long ago but more owing to the fact that time passes at odd rates throughout time, space, spacetime, and the Offices. There’s probably some rocket scientist out there who could calculate all of that out for her, but lapse of time since being back in her home office isn’t her primary concern.
She wants to know where he went.
She’s scoured the In-Between in search of him. Been all over a thousand different Earths over, and just as many offices. Thinking it was all a waste of time she almost gave up, until she realized she had actually learned a very valuable piece of information in all her searching - he does not like to stray far from home, and he has no way home, making the Office is his next best option.
That must be where he went - right back where he started. Where everything started. Back to the beginning, as things usually go.
(Cut here due to length!)
Things are different this time around, though. The Office is still dead, yes, but in it there is a small flicker of life. Two lives, actually. Of course they both survived - one could not have without the other, and who was she but the useless middle man? The one left forgotten. The one left behind. The one left to die.
The same story she’s lived her entire life. Some fun narrative she got doomed with.
Oh but that will all change now. She can see them. Two souls - one flaming red, the other bold purple - clearly living within the old Office where everything else is dead. She can see them exactly where they sit and if she has anything to say about it, it’ll be the last place they sit.
She creeps along the darkened hallways, silent as the grave she wasn’t even honored with. No lights flicker on. No voices come on over the speakers, demanding to know what she is and what she’s doing there. The Office is as dead as she is. That’s fine. She likes that. It gives them less time to prepare, but still far more time than she had.
The control booth is still where it was - at the end of the long, dark hallway with the doors that never led anywhere except back into themselves; at the top of the ridiculously tall ladder that extended beyond the ceiling; sitting atop the platform with no railing and no support structure leaving one to wonder exactly how it was remaining upright; behind the door that only stayed locked when it felt like it.
It was there that they sat, sharing tea no doubt. Remaining loyal only to each other.
She’d show them loyal.
The ghost decides to bring her scythe onto the scene. Put the fear of the God of Death into them before they actually die. That would be some nice justice, wouldn’t it? Poetic if not dramatic, and Doom is neither if not both.
She has no need to, since she can walk straight through solid objects, but she decides to kick in the door. Give them a good start, not that they have anywhere to run or hide in that tiny little closet of a room. Her boot lands with so much force that the door is pushed straight off its hinges and across the inside of the room, knocking over the filing cabinets in its way before leaving a hole in the wall opposite.
Predictably the two Nightcrawlers are startled, both immediately on their spindly legs and backing away from the doorway that to them had exploded inward for no apparent reason. Doomsday marches in, dragging her scythe along the floor, blade down, making sure to leave a long, ragged tear in the carpet. She grins at the tearing sound. She regards the two of them with her dead, empty, headlight gaze, casting the bright yellow light burning within her outwards and causing shadows to spring to life on the walls, dancing on this joyous occasion.
“Hello, Cyrus, Aurora,” she says with a grin, making sure to flash her sharp, shark-like teeth at him in a way that could exhibit either mischief or a threat. Considering she’d kicked in the door, it isn’t difficult to tell which. “Miss me?”
She may be difficult to recognize with her sickly pallor, giving off the appearance of wet paper, eye sockets missing their eyes and instead replaced with a hellish yellow light, hair that’s longer and scragglier than it was before along with a bluish tint towards the tips, and those teeth... but her voice is something that didn’t change.
His voice, though it comes through directly into her head - or what would be the equivalent of her head, given she doesn’t have an actual, living body anymore - didn’t change either. She can hear his tone, his accent, his cadence. His astonishment. The waver. “...Thursday?”
The ghost barks a laugh. “Oho, so now he remembers me! Someone get this man a prize!” Her head is tilted a bit to the side and her teeth are pressed together in what could either be a toothy smile or a snarl. “Actually, I’ve got your prize right here,” she says, pulling her scythe off the floor, spinning it around a couple times - taking extra special dedicated care to make sure she hits, knocks over, and destroys as many things in the way as possible - before slinging it back over her shoulder, cavalier as can be.
The Narrator and the Curator stand close together, pressed as close to each other as they are to the wall. They clearly don’t know what’s going on or how to address this angry specter who used to be the other Narrator.
“We- We thought you were dead,” Cyrus says.
Doomsday’s eye sockets darken. “Oh I’m dead, all right. No thanks to you. Would you like another prize for that? Actually, I’ve got that prize right here too.”
She takes a step forward.
The Nightcrawlers press closer to the wall.
Finally, Aurora speaks, her voice implanting into her mind too, bearing the same accent. “But what’s happened to you?”
“...Okay this is getting stupid already,” Doomsday remarks with a scoff. Where her words hold an undercurrent of mischief, her tone is pitch black. She would roll her eyes if she still had them. “We’ve already ascertained that I’m Thursday and that I’m dead. You with me? Okay, good. Might you know something about how that happened?”
She takes another step forward.
The Nightcrawlers scoot a little further down the wall but are stopped by a filing cabinet.
The control booth’s dimensions never changed either.
It seems the two of them are starting to catch on, though. They blink their wide, black hole eyes at her. It’s difficult to tell how they are feeling by looking at their expressions alone, but Cyrus’ voice gives it away. “Thursday, I am so sorry for how you must have suffered.”
“Sorry? Sorry? Oh, he’s sorry now. Sorry now that I’ve got you literally backed into a corner, is that it, old man?” she snarls, advancing on them. Now they really are backed into a corner. “When were you ever sorry before, huh? When were you ever sorry for throwing me out of the control booth repeatedly when I was scared out of my mind and had no idea how I’d gotten there? No memories of anything before? Huh?!”
The scythe, resting on her shoulder less than a second before, is now flying through the air, crashing against a filing cabinet and in a screech of metal slicing through it as easily as a hot knife through butter, sending ruined papers into pieces of confetti that rain down all over the room.
The Reaper continues her destructive tirade. “Or how about that time you blamed me for Stanley not wanting to talk to you after you made him fall off the lift?”
There’s another grating sound and a crash as Doomsday swings the scythe into another wide arc, taking out part of the ceiling this time. Bits of obliterated ceiling tile fill the air and various wiring dangles down like bundles of entrails.
“Or all the times you blamed me for everything!”
Another forceful swing, this time taking out the wall where the two Nightcrawlers had been standing moments before.
“Treated me like SHIT!”
Another swing, another explosion of debris.
“Criticized everything I ever did!”
Another swing, and the room shuddered.
“And then how you LEFT ME TO DIE!”
“Thursday, I’m- I’m sorry- Truly, sincerely sorry- The plan- We had no choice-”
Doomsday’s eyes flash. Everything boils over in that moment. “YOU DID THIS TO ME!!” she utterly screams, so loud it rattles the walls and causes more of the ceiling to fall out. “YOU TOOK EVERYTHING FROM ME! MY LIFE! MY DEATH! MY BODY! MY SIGHT! MY DREAMS! MY SENSES! MY- I CAN’T FEEL ANYTHING ANYMORE AND IT’S ALL BECAUSE OF YOU!”
With every bellow of rage, the scythe comes down, hacking and slashing at everything in her path. Walls explode. The ceiling collapses. Filing cabinets become twisted pieces of shrapnel. The desk on which sits the old monitor and the microphone - where they used to view and talk to Stanley, Stanley who died, who died and whose soul was destroyed, never to come back - are buried and lost under the rubble.
Somewhere in the middle of that are Cyrus and Aurora, the two people who caused all of her pain, including her inability to feel pain anymore. She’s aiming each of her blows directly at them, wanting nothing more than to destroy them as they destroyed her.
Their fault. It’s all their fault.
But mostly, it’s his.
She wants to cry. More than anything she wants to cry, but she can’t even do that. She literally doesn’t have the eyes, nor the tear ducts, nor the tears with which to cry anymore. That was taken away from her along with everything else.
At some point, the floor collapses, taking the ruins of the control booth with it. Doom watches, floating there as it falls away into the blackness below it. Finally, something as dark and empty as she feels.
And then some of the dust settles. And she sees them. She sees them, still standing there, protected by a magenta colored bubble surrounding the two of them. Her blows had done nothing. All of her fury, her anguish, her suffering, the literal edge of her blade had done nothing.
She charges at them again, this time taking clear aim solely at him, putting all of her focus into landing the blow.
It lands.
But it doesn’t land.
The blade passes harmlessly through their bubble shield. Through him. That stupid connection. That god damn fucking connection, tethering her to her living counterpart, preventing her from harming others unless her counterpart herself to harm them. All controlled, taken away by someone who could never even begin to understand her suffering.
It’s at that moment that she breaks. Really breaks. The Nightcrawler twins can only watch as the ghost wails and wails, her haunting cries echoing around them as her body dissolves from human into something monstrous. Her black suit with the silver pinstripes erupts into patches of rough shredded black fur. Her limbs twist and bend and pop into different directions as she crouches down onto all fours. A pair of long black ears, one ruined and flopped over while the other still stands although it too is shredded, burst out of the top of her head. Her face melts away, revealing her skull beneath, which enlarges along with the rest of her until she’s about the size of a car.
That hellish yellow light burns through the two eye sockets of her skull. Her bony jaws part and a sound that is both human and unlike anything a human would ever make roars outward. It is a shriek of pure and utter rage, and anguish.
The black rabbit continues emitting the sound until a portal splits open in front of her, she leaps into it, and it closes behind her.
All that’s left is a pile of what used to be the control booth, and two living souls, one red and one purple, stunned in her wake.
She leaves them the way they left her - but at least they get to live.
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