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Chapter Text

The first time Simon sees Edwin Payne in Hell, they're in a dilapidated classroom, where Headmaster has set Simon to the task of tearing all the pages out of the ritual book he used to accidentally summon a demon and doom them all.

The book seems much thicker than it did that fateful night. Every page cuts up Simon's fingertips, and each cut reminds him that this is the least pain he's felt since he condemned himself and five other boys to perdition. Every little cut is a horrible relief, when he's experienced so much worse so many times before.

Hell is always being thirsty, hungry, aching, cold, nauseated, the body pushed to its limit in every possible way, and then it is punished and destroyed and reborn only to hurt again. The paper cuts distract a little from the basic agony that comes of being here; he'd almost welcome them, but he can't, quite. No matter how many times he feels it, the little lacerations shock his nerves every time.

Simon rips pages and rips pages and rips pages and his fingers bleed and bleed, and then he looks up and Edwin Payne stands there before him in his school uniform and smart blue cap. He looks severe but lovely as ever, the elegant lines of him, tall and slim and well-knit.

"You're not suffering, then," Simon says. "I'm glad."

"Of course I'm suffering," Edwin sniffs. "I'm forced to be here with you."

There's nothing much Simon can say to that except, "I'm sorry. For all of it." He's repented so many times to no avail, often to the laughter of demons or other damned souls, but what else can he do? He is sorry.

Of course he's sorry. He has been from the moment his friends bound Edwin to the table in the cellar and Edwin stared up at him in terror. Simon had wanted to scare him, but he'd imagined him angry as well as frightened, had pictured something like the pulp stories Edwin was always reading, a struggling captive facing his adversary in a storm of passionate intensity.

He'd wanted Edwin in his power, and he recalls with shame that he did feel darkly thrilled to achieve that. He'd wanted it to be more like a game, though. After all, really, a demon summoning, who could possibly take that seriously? It really was something straight out of the pulps.

But Edwin was not a brave adventurer or an intrepid detective, he was a sixteen-year-old boy, dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by classmates he knew were willing and able to harm him; he knew it wasn't one of his stories with its predetermined happy ending. How did Simon not realize until it was too late?

And then to save face in front of his friends Simon carried on anyway, to fatal consequences for all of them. He is sorry. He can't be more sorry.

"Save your breath," says Edwin, fixing his cuffs, pristine and disdainful. "You ought to be sorry for more than merely everything you did and everything you're doing. I'm owed an apology for what you wanted to do, as well. Did you think I didn't know what you meant with all those smiles in secret? Why do you think I was so quick to run?"

It's nothing Simon hasn't thought before, but it's still crushing to see disgust curl the pretty bow of Edwin's upper lip. "I know. I'm sorry for that as well," Simon says. "I feel stupid for thinking we might be the same."

"As you should," Edwin tells him. "And shortly I'll be tortured again, because of you, and I expect the only respite will come when they make me trot here to look at you again, which is every bit as bad in its own way. All because you threw a wobbly when I wouldn't pay you any mind."

"I'd do anything to fix this, please believe me," says Simon, but Headmaster returns, his long cruel hand clamping onto Edwin's shoulder, nails sinking in. Four streaks of blood soak down the front of Edwin's blazer, spilling freely; his face crumples in pain, and Headmaster lugs him away. The blood lingers on the floor for a hundred thousand pages.

Headmaster eventually returns to castigate Simon for failing to destroy the profane book, and he will hear no protests that the book always restores itself just as Simon nears the end. Simon is turned out of doors in a blizzard and blown by blinding winds to the lake behind the school.

Spindly ghoulish arms rise from the water and catch hold, pulling Simon under. For some unknowable eternity he drowns, revives, drowns, and then the water begins to freeze and Simon is immobile up to his shoulders, his body cold beyond enduring, his head somehow even colder than that, battered by the howling wind.

At length the freezing storm slackens and Simon can see for the first time in so long, but blinking the ice and frost from his eyes, he soon wishes he hadn't. The storm rages as relentlessly as ever, but Edwin Payne lies curled on the ice before him, his ruined body warding off the wind.

For some time Edwin only lies there, weeping, his entire form an awful wreck of injuries. Bruises and abrasions seem to cover every inch of him, fresh crimson and old rust staining the nightclothes he wore when Simon and his friends attacked him. Simon never meant to harm him, but now he's forced to see his own awful handiwork. An ear is nearly wrested away from Edwin's head, his nose broken, fingers snapped and twisted, his mouth mangled.

Simon would suffer any pain to spare him this. But this is Hell. He is already suffering every sort of pain, and so is Edwin.

Edwin's sobbing gains coherence, and Simon hears him saying, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you in an unbearable litany. And yet, eventually, Edwin's fractured hand moves to settle on his hair, melting a single spot of warmth among the cutting chill of the rest of Simon's body.

For this scrap of a moment they are united; Simon meets Edwin's eyes and glimpses a sort of appalled sympathy. Quick as that, an enormous burning hand appears from the fog and seizes Edwin with a hiss of scorched flesh and the crack of bone, and Edwin vanishes into the storm, screaming. Simon calls for him until his tongue and throat are as frozen as the rest of him.

Eventually the ice cracks and Simon hauls himself out, sliced and jabbed by shards of ice, and he's wet and freezing as he shivers his way to the next horror and another and another. Years pass, Simon thinks.

He's shuffled around through different punishments; eventually he's thrown into a slaughterhouse and cut into pieces some uncountable number of times, and when he's intact again after all that, he's shoved into a meat locker full of blood-soaked bodies all writhing and moaning together.

They yank him down into the fray, and only once he's buried among the bodies does Simon realize that what looked like kissing and groping is actually a tumult of vicious biting and clawing. These people aren't coupling, they're tearing each other apart. Simon is savaged and smothered by turns, dying in a panic each time, waking from the nightmare to find he's still here, while parts of his last body continue to be put to use in nauseating ways.

After the meat locker, it's a kitchen which is also a hospital. Doctors use butcher knives to perform Caesarians and appendectomies while steam billows and oil pops and sizzles. Placentas and umbilical cords and offal go into pots and saucepans and it's impossible to track where the patients go.

Things are mad enough in the kitchen that Simon is able to steal away for a few precious moments alone in the larder. Only he's not alone at all. Seconds later, Edwin Payne slips into the little room after him.

Edwin's healed since their last encounter, whole and hale as if he's never been hurt. He's in his shirtsleeves, buttons open over his vest, soft and handsome.

After everything Simon's experienced here in what he's come to understand must be the circle of Lust, he could not have imagined ever wanting to touch another creature again. But the scoop of the white undershirt over Edwin's chest, the bared taper of his forearms, the gentle set of his mouth... it reawakens all the longing Simon ever felt to draw close to him, to take his hand, to know him.

To his shock, Edwin steps toward him, and when Simon instinctively reaches out, Edwin moves into his arms. Holding him feels better even than Simon could have imagined, and better still when Edwin returns the embrace, arms around him, his head on Simon's shoulder.

"It's been so long," Edwin says.

"I have you now," Simon answers; impossible as it seems, it's true.

"But why did you hurt me?" Edwin implores. "What did I do? Why were you so cruel?"

"I wish I hadn't done it, any of it. You didn't do anything wrong," Simon tells him fervently. "I wanted you close and it made me angry. But that was all in me. It wasn't you."

Edwin nods, a motion Simon feels more than he sees. "I could have been yours, you know," Edwin murmurs. "I was so lonely. You could have had me for a kind word."

"I'm sorry," Simon whispers. He's weary of saying it, knowing it will never be enough, but how can he stop? It's always true.

"I know." With a sigh, Edwin untucks Simon's shirt and goes underneath, spreading his chilled hands at the small of Simon's bare back. "That's better," Edwin says. "You can, as well."

Simon scarcely dares to believe the invitation, but neither can he resist. He delves under Edwin's clothes, enjoying the subtle curves, the valley of his backbone and the dip of his waist. Edwin is striking in any number of ways, but that last year, he'd come back from summer hols so nicely turned out, a bit taller with such long legs and shapely arms and shoulders; Simon had been achingly aware of his body.

He's even more aware, now, of his breath, the stir of it when Simon traces his spine, the hitch when Simon lets his hands drop lower. But they could be found here any moment, so he doesn't venture as far as he'd like, returning his touch to the safer territory of Edwin's waist, his soft skin, a jump of muscle when Simon surprises him.

Edwin lifts his head but doesn't draw back just yet. His temple rests against Simon's cheek, as if he's gathering courage to offer a first kiss. Simon certainly will if Edwin doesn't.

But the warm flesh under his hands turns clammy, the intoxicating scent of clean sweat and bay rum fades into the odor of corruption. Impossibly, for those few precious seconds embracing, Simon forgot where they are, but no longer.

Simon knows what awaits him if he looks; Hell has few secrets from him by now. He is holding a dead carcass that is falling to ruin in his arms. He will not be able to release it and escape the sickening feeling of its deterioration or the reek of rotting flesh unless he makes himself look at the decaying remains of that lovely face, and he can't do it. Both choices are terrible, but in time his hands will forget the slime of the grave; the smell of the tomb will fade from his mind. If he looks, he knows the sight of Edwin's corpse will haunt him forever.

So he holds on, even as he gags and retches, until he has nothing but bones, and then nothing but dust. Just what he deserves.

Eventually Simon is chased from the charnel of Lust by vicious hounds that snap at his feet and chivvy him to a misty black swamp. The largest dog bites a hole in his calf before it retreats, and Simon already knows the foul waters of the swamp will make that wound fester until the limb is unsalvageable.

"Hell is so predictable," he mumbles aloud, and almost at once he's proved wrong. Here, in the most unlikely place, a fencer practices his bladework against a sapling. Or rather, not a sapling, Simon sees after a moment, but a creature made of sticks that moves like a fencer itself, one of its limbs longer than the rest as if wielding a foil.

The fencer... that is, the human fencer... moves with tidy grace, each parry ending with a little flourish. The closely fitted white uniform only clings more as the damp fog encroaches. Everything about the figure is compelling, so of course, when it eventually pulls off the mask, it's Edwin.

He says nothing this time, just nods to the stick-thing and turns to Simon, standing en garde. Simon has just enough time to scramble and find a branch on the ground and lift it to defend himself.

Edwin is relentless, pressing every advantage, exploiting every distraction. Each touch sends the blade piercing through Simon, front to back, he feels it go through. As it goes on, he grows increasingly lax in defending himself. If anyone has the right to perforate him it's Edwin Payne.

He thinks that, he believes it, but Edwin's next swipe of the blade cuts across Simon's nose, and that's a new kind of pain, a shock that spurs him to really fight back-- to ignore fencing's fiddly rules and just slam the foil out of the way with his branch and tackle Edwin into the mud. They grapple in the filth of the swamp, but now it's no contest, Simon easily dominates. In a last defiance Edwin tries to spit mud in his face and fails, and then he just lies there, his face half dread and half anticipation.

It always goes back to that night in the cellar, to Simon's childish fantasy: having Edwin at his mercy, in a way they would both know couldn't possibly be serious, a way that was only play. But for that to work at all, Edwin would have needed to know Simon had mercy for him, and Simon had hidden that all too well.

This isn't Edwin. Simon wonders if he has ever really seen Edwin in Hell at all. That wasn't him in the larder, he knows that. He hopes the devastated boy he saw in the blizzard was false. The first one, immaculate and spiteful, that might have been him. He doesn't think so, but his doubt might be merely wishful thinking.

This illusion lies under him, coiled and enraged as a rattlesnake. Simon suspects that no attempt at compromise will get him out of this one. If he lets up, this Edwin will sink fangs into him. If he keeps on wrestling him down, rutting against him as he's more and more enticed to do, eventually Edwin will make an opportunity of his distraction and strike.

Even so, Simon can't bring himself to hurt him. He hurt Edwin in life, he won't do it here, even if he's quite certain this isn't actually Edwin Payne. In the end, he strips his own shirt off and uses it to tie the effigy's hands to a protruding loop of twisted tree root. The duplicate will be able to undo the knots before too long, but with any luck, Simon will be halfway across the swamp by then.

But of course, it's Hell, and mercy is anathema. Simon has scarcely run twenty yards when he hears Edwin screaming behind him and whirls to see a horrifying beast rise up out of the mud, sharp teeth jutting in all directions, devouring Edwin.

Simon runs, but of course, he is next, and next, and next, and next.

A long time after that, or maybe it's only days, time is strange here... after that, Headmaster leads Simon from the swamp and sends him off marching through a desert. The sand shreds the soles of his bare feet, and his knees when he falls to them, which happens often. If he stops walking, a horde of scorpions swarm him and sting him all over.

For some unknowable while, as he trudges, he seems to hear an echo of his footsteps. At last he thinks to look around. Edwin Payne walks alongside him, pacing him, wearing an officer's uniform, just like Simon's brother Andrew before they lost him to the war.

"Are you a sign?" Simon wonders. "Maybe you got away, maybe the demon didn't take you." It's far from the first time Simon has hoped for that. When he felt the dread touch of Hell fall upon him, Edwin had still been laid out on the table. "It could have snapped up all the rest of us and left you alone, since you were innocent."

"This is who I could have been," says Edwin. "Have you ever heard of cryptography?"

He has to strain to recall the sunlit world of before, but, "It's to do with codes," says Simon.

"Indeed. If I'd lived, I would've been recruited by MI1 for codebreaking. I would have been able to offer the crucial insight that as part of a certain high-level cipher, many of the Germans' important strategic messages were translated into Polabian before encoding. It would've allowed England to triumph in battles they otherwise lost, and saved thousands of soldiers' lives."

"I should've known." Simon watches his own raw feet come down on the sand alongside Edwin's boots, one step after the other. "You were always so clever."

"If you'd only just left me alone," says Edwin, forlorn. "The life I might have led, the good I could have done... it wasn't just us six you condemned. It's everyone who might've known us. The place in the world that was meant for us. All gone."

It makes Simon cry. By the time his eyes clear, the officer Edwin might have been has disappeared.

Simon wishes he could see him again, wishes he could hear more about who he could have become; he wants that more than shoes, more than water. But he never sees that version of Edwin again.

There are other Edwins, variations on the themes. Resentful, or wounded, or tempting, or vicious, or mournful. Something always gives them away.

Simon has had so many punishments visited upon him, it seems as if Hell is almost bored with him. One day (not that there are really days), he dies suffocated in a landslide, and revives in a strange maze-like house.

It's dim and dingy-greenish with broken dolls everywhere. A giant monstrous chitinous thing pursues him and slices him to bits when he's caught. Simon always sort of dreaded crabs; this thing looks as if it's made of shards of doll parts, but it scuttles just like them.

Sometimes large maggot-like creatures corner him and touch him and he feels all the regret and sorrow he's ever felt, all at once, until he is so drained he can only lie there and let the crab-doll-monster find him.

After one such encounter, Headmaster turns up again and harries Simon into a little room full of copies of the demonic ritual book. He's to tear the pages out of all of them.

"Then you can leave," says Headmaster, as if Simon hasn't heard that before. Eventually Headmaster will return, and the pages will still be in the books no matter how many piles Simon rips out, and he'll be caned and his hands beaten with a ruler. And just when he's grateful for these minor pains, merely welted, merely striped raw, only a few fiddly little bones broken... then he'll be shunted off to some new place with some worse punishment.

But there's nothing else to be done. He sits on the floor, his back to the low bookcase, and starts tearing.

He fills the room with pages once, until the stacks and piles get in the way of destroying the book in his lap. Then the pages catch fire and that kills Simon, and he revives in the same place with the same book with the room smudged with ash and the pages gone, and he does it all again. He learns to rip the paper as slowly as he can without bringing the impatient footsteps of Headmaster to the door, because the latest wrinkle is that if he malingers, Headmaster throws in a match to start the fire early.

The anticipation is almost worse anyway, if he slows too much. The fire will come. Best not to put it off.

It's been a long time since he saw an Edwin, but now he looks up and Edwin is there.

This is a new version. He's hurt, blood all down half his face, but not mutilated, as the hurt ones typically are. He's in his nightclothes, but they are only disarrayed, not savagely rent apart as they usually are when he's hurt, or clean and softly clinging as they usually are when he's tempting.

He stares down in astonishment and breathes, "Simon."

"You're not real. You're another trick." Simon tears the next page.

Edwin looks anxiously toward the door and the corridor beyond. "You have to stop that."

"I can't." Honestly. Whatever these Edwin copies are, surely they know how this works.

Dropping to his knees, the effigy says, "Simon, it is me, Edwin. I need you to be quiet, please." He looks around, brow furrowed. "You've been here all this time?"

"How long is 'all this time'?" Simon asks.

"Over a century."

More than a hundred years. Only a hundred years. Oh well, it's only going to last forever, how much longer can that be.

"It's all right," Simon sniffles, half gallows humor, half grief. "The headmaster said I can leave once I finish tearing out the pages."

Of course, just then the book restores itself, as always.

"Can you please be quiet?" Edwin begs.

"No." He can't, or Headmaster might come set the room on fire while Edwin is here. Simon has seen Edwin's doppelgangers die in so many gruesome ways, but not fire, not yet, and he doesn't want to witness that.

Edwin looks around. "Wait. Is this your punishment?"

"What?"

"You sacrificed me to a demon, who traded me to another demon, who traded me to something worse. And this is your punishment?" Edwin demands, outraged. "An eternity of paper cuts!"

There's no point telling him about the other punishments. If someone else had put Simon here in Hell, he can't imagine he would ever forgive them, no matter what they suffered themselves.

"I didn't know," he says miserably, the only defense he can really make for himself. "It was a prank. It was just to scare you."

"It is right that you're here, after what you did," Edwin says bitterly. "Do you want to know what I went through down here every day, over and over again?"

But then something strange happens. Edwin's attention is caught by something else in the room, and he moves away. Something distracts him, and when Simon rips another page and looks over, Edwin seems to have left entirely.

None of the copies have ever behaved this way before. They've always been there to hurt Simon in some way, they have always focused solely on him until something destroys them or they disappear, they've never lost interest in him before.

This is, funnily enough, the most authentically any Edwin has ever behaved toward Simon here in Hell. In life he always drifted away from Simon, just like this.

What if it's him?

Another stack of pages later, and Edwin returns all in a taking. "Simon. I didn't come here to gloat," he says. "I would never. You do know that?"

Of course not. He hadn't been gloating, he'd been righteously furious, and why not.

Still, he seems upset about it, so Simon nods, looking at him as Edwin sifts through the torn pages around them. Even bloodied and distressed like this, Edwin is such a welcome sight. If it really is him...

"Remember that blue cap you used to wear?"

"I remember you snatching it off me," says Edwin.

He did. He was such a child about it all. Sixteen years old, born into good fortune, benefitting from the best education in the world, just two years to go until he'd be sent to the battlefield, and he'd been so juvenile.

"You looked very smart in that cap," says Simon. "But when I tried to tell you, you just walked away. You never spoke to me. I got so embarrassed thinking that we... we were the same."

"Simon." Have any of those Edwin copies ever said his name before? They certainly never said it like this, with such a wealth of conflicting feelings. Edwin falters, "I... I was nervous, around you. I was afraid if we spoke, I would give myself away. I didn't realize..."

Of course. It wasn't safe to be who they were or to want what they wanted, and Simon did nothing to prove himself trustworthy. Even if Simon had behaved as befits a gentleman, the risk might have seemed too great for Edwin to respond to him, and as it was, with Simon's puerile pranks and needling, how did he ever expect anything but fretful avoidance?

"Do you think it has to be torture?" he asks. "Being the way we are?"

Edwin moves closer and meets his eyes, shaken but determined, and Simon knows it for certain now: this is really him.

"Listen to me," Edwin says. "No, it does not. And although it is difficult for me to believe, I feel sorry. I am sorry. For both of us."

"So am I," Simon whispers. "So am I."

Tipping closer, Edwin seems almost to intend to kiss him, but he stops, his face suffused with mingled horror and bemusement. Just how Simon has felt for so much of his tenure here. Hell is, among so many other things, absurd.

"I'm all over blood," Edwin says.

"I don't care," Simon leans near, and their mouths meet. It's nothing like touching that copy in Lust's larder, nothing like any of the temptations Simon's encountered before. It's a soft brush of lips, the smell of iron, the prod of Edwin's nose against his cheek, his warm sigh. It's knowing, at last, that what they feel is the same.

They part, and the shy smile on Edwin's face is the perfect and complete opposite of everything Simon has experienced in Hell.

"I'm going to get out of here again," Edwin tells him.

"Again?"

"Yes! I escaped before. Thirty-four years ago. And I made a life-- or, that is, I made an existence for myself that's worth fighting for. I've made friends. We help people. It means something, and it's beautiful, and I will get it back."

Simon has to smile at that. Even if the phantom codebreaker Edwin he saw wasn't real, it comforts him to know the real Edwin fulfilled that part of his destiny, that he makes a difference in a way that makes him proud.

"Escape took a long, long time," Edwin continues. "It was hard and it hurt, but at the end of it, I was free of this place for decades and I mean to be free again." He reaches out hesitantly and his thumb strokes Simon's cheek, the gentlest touch. "You should come with me. It won't be easy. I confess it will likely be quite a bit more painful than paper cuts. But I swear it will all be worth it to stand again under an open sky."

The very idea has Simon's eyes brimming. The idea, and the understanding of just how little he deserves this grace.

"I'm truly sorry for all of this. For what I did." Mercy is anathema in Hell, so how can Edwin offer it now so freely? Simon admits, "I think this is what I deserve."

"Simon." Edwin cups his face in his hands and catches his gaze again, insistent. "That's not so. You can let this go, now. If you punish yourself, everywhere becomes Hell."

It has the ring of truth. But Simon condemned himself and five other people to this relentless ordeal; maybe everywhere should be Hell, for him.

He looks back to his interminable task. "Headmaster will be angry." Now that he's convinced this is really Edwin, he can't risk the fire.

Edwin tips his head to touch their brows together, his expression growing desolate. A clicking shuffle, movement and laughter, echoes from out in the corridor, startling Edwin back. He stands, looking fearfully toward the door, and seems to steel himself.

"Simon. Please. Come with me," Edwin holds out his hand.

And it finally occurs to Simon. If he truly repents, if he truly wants to make it up to Edwin, if he truly cares for Edwin, and if he truly believes this is the real Edwin Payne...

If all those things are true, how can he do anything but agree?

It only feels wrong because it's what he himself wants so badly, and he has spent a century telling himself that his ugly desires brought him and all the others to this nightmare.

But put all those desires and self-loathing and regrets aside, and what is on offer?

A chance to help someone he wronged. A chance to protect someone he cares for. A chance.

Edwin looks at him with such warmth. Such hope.

Simon puts down the book, and takes Edwin's hand.

Chapter Text

"Into the Night" - Julee Cruise
Night so dark, where are you?
Come back in my heart

"The Road to Hell pt 2" - Chris Rea
On your journey 'cross the wilderness from the desert to the well
You have strayed upon the motorway to hell

"Something I Can Never Have" - Nine Inch Nails
Everywhere I look, you're all I see
Just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be

"Monkey Gone to Heaven" - The Pixies
And if the ground's not cold, everything is gonna burn
We'll all take turns, I'll get mine too

"Lullaby" - The Cure
It's much too late to get away or turn on the light
The spiderman is having you for dinner tonight

"Cuts You Up" - Peter Murphy
Move the heart, switch the pace
Look for what seems out of place

"Enjoy the Silence" - Depeche Mode
All I ever wanted, all I ever needed
Is here in my arms

"Breakthru" - Queen
Turn my heart inside and out for you now
Somehow I have to make this final breakthrough

"This Is The One" - The Stone Roses
Burn me out or bring me home
This is the one, this is the one I've waited for.