The Undead Spider #91.
Jake had pivoted, taken two steps forward before the Reaper's voice stopped him cold.
"Your passion is admirable," the Reaper said.
He kept his back to it. Something about the voice scraped against the base of his neck, like the feeling of standing at the edge of something deep and being told by someone behind you that the edge was closer than you thought.
"But it won't get you out of here."
"Watch me," Jake said, and walked.
The laugh started low and grew without hurry, filling the room from the edges inward, from the floor up, and by the time Jake had put twenty paces between himself and the Reaper's position the laugh had become something ambient, something architectural, and when he glanced back the figure had dissolved into the dark so completely that the phosphorescent light seemed to have decided it had no business reaching that far.
He faced forward and kept going.
The interface. He turned the thought over while he walked. He'd been trying to summon it since he'd come to in the cocoon and nothing had come up -- no web motif assembling at the edge of his sight, no quiet warmth behind the eyes that preceded the display. He'd had it drop out before, briefly, in conditions that pushed his biology to its edge, but this was different. This felt external.
He crouched and picked up a component from the floor without breaking stride -- his fingers found it before his eyes did, a circuit board the size of his palm, edges clean, the copper traces running in patterns he didn't know well enough to read but knew well enough to recognize as deliberate. Someone had made this. More than one someone, probably, given the spread of components across the metal floor -- boards and wire and housings that had come apart at the seams rather than been broken, like the failures had been slow and internal rather than sudden. He turned the board over. Set it back down.
Above him the cocoons hung, and he didn't look at them directly, because looking at them directly meant counting them and counting them meant asking what they held and he wasn't ready to spend that processing yet. He felt them though. Their faint pulse pressed into his awareness with each step, and his spider-sense read them without comment -- present, contained, alive in whatever sense applied here.
He was also aware of the Reaper. Had been since he'd started walking. It hadn't moved from the dark it had dissolved into, or if it had, he couldn't track it, but the weight of its attention sat against his back like a hand not quite touching. He ignored that too and kept walking, and the laugh had dropped out of earshot but hadn't stopped -- he could feel it, more frequency than sound, a vibration at the edges of the air.
The floor described a curve under him before he admitted it.
He stopped. Turned. Looked back the way he'd come and found a debris scatter he recognized from the angle of a split board near his left foot, and understood that he'd been walking a loop wide enough that he hadn't felt it closing until it already had. He stood with that for a moment, his feet on the metal and the cold pressing in from above, and then he looked up.
The ceiling, if there was one, sat beyond the reach of the light. The threads rose from the cocoons and converged somewhere in that dark, all of them, drawing to a point he couldn't see. He'd tried the threads during the fight and found them viable -- they'd held his weight, they'd offered angles -- and the ceiling was a better bet than the floor had proven to be.
He fired a line and climbed.
The first cocoon he reached felt solid enough, the web dense and layered, and he grabbed the thread above it and moved from one to the next with the rhythm coming back to his hands faster than the rest of him, the motion more natural than anything he'd done since waking up. He went higher. The room dropped away below, the debris field shrinking, the light thinning, and the Reaper's laugh had gone silent -- not faded, stopped, the difference between a sound ending and a sound being cut.
His spider-sense spiked.
He held the thread he was on and stayed still, and the sense came in from every direction at once, like pressure on all sides simultaneously, and he turned in place and found nothing and turned again and found nothing, the room below him empty, the dark above him empty, and the pressure not diminishing.
He'd worked out, during their first fight, that the Reaper was bound by something. It had been held by chains after he'd consumed the thorn and recovered his time., which meant there were rules operating here that it couldn't simply override with will. It hadn't put the scythe through him when it had the position for it. It had lifted him, held him, lowered him. Every action had stopped short of the thing it could have done next, and that pattern didn't happen by accident.
The spike rose a note.
The adrenaline moved through him before he could stop it -- he felt it in his forearms, in the back of his jaw, his muscles tightening and orienting toward a threat his spider-sense was registering but couldn't locate. His heart was going fast. His skin was warm despite the cold pressing in from everywhere. He clenched his fists around the thread and held the position and did not look at his hands.
"You claim to know no fear." The Reaper's voice came from nowhere and from everywhere, filling the dark from the inside out. "Yet you're warm. Sweating despite the cold. Your heart is racing. Body shaking."
A silence, and then, from below, from above, from the same sourceless everywhere:
"The darkness is closing in, and you are afraid of it."
The phosphorescence went out.
Not gradually -- it dropped, all at once, and the dark that replaced it was not the dark of a room with no light but something with more substance to it, something that pressed against his eyes rather than simply being the absence of what had been there before. He stayed on the thread. Willed his hands to hold. His spider-sense had gone quiet.
He started crawling along the ceiling, feeling for surface ahead of his hands, moving because stopping was not available to him as an option. He couldn't sense the Reaper. Couldn't sense anything. The thread under his fingers was the only geometry he had and it wasn't enough to navigate by, and the cold was inside his chest again and the surface beneath his hands felt less substantial with each inch he covered, like the ceiling was losing its conviction about existing, like the dark was eating the edges of the things it touched.
At some point he couldn't tell which way he was moving.
At some point the surface under his hands was more suggestion than fact.
He was still moving his hands, still reaching forward, still putting one forward and pulling himself to meet it, but the tactile return was thinning and the cold had gotten inside his head and the dark had weight to it now, pressing against him from directions he didn't have names for, and the Reaper's voice arrived without location or warmth:
"You are broken, Jacob Cross. Give up and accept your fate."
He kept moving his hands.
He'd been here before. Not here here, not this dark, not this specific dissolution, but the mode of it -- the moment when the forward motion stopped making sense and his body started presenting the argument for stopping. He'd been here in the pool with the cold eating his legs and nothing to grab onto. He'd been here suspended in the vat with the chemical burning his shoulder. He'd been here standing on a bridge in Gotham at two in the morning with thirty people dead behind him and the city making its case that he should not continue.
He'd moved his hands then too.
The dark pressed harder and he moved his hands and the surface thinned further and he moved his hands and closed doors -- he felt them, not literally, felt them the way you felt a migraine before it arrived -- swinging open in the dark, each one offering the interior of something he'd sealed and moved past, and the light behind each one fell on things he recognized and would have preferred not to. The sixty. The pheromone secretion he'd run in Star City with his hand smoothing Dinah's hair back from her face and the quality of her gaze afterward. The crystallized arm left in an intersection for anyone to find. Harvey Dent shambling toward Batman with something fundamental broken in him that Jake had broken.
He moved his hands.
And then -- not all at once, not dramatically -- his friends were there.
Not around him. Ahead of him, in the dark, the way dreams placed things in spaces that had no business holding them. Mike on the couch. David with his arms crossed and his mouth doing the thing it did when he was working out whether to say the thing he was thinking. Sarah standing the way she stood when she'd already decided.
"Come back," Mike said. "Come home. We miss you."
Jake's hands kept moving.
"Report back to work," Sarah said. "You're fine. It's over."
"I can't," Jake said, to the dark and to them simultaneously.
"What do you mean you can't." Sarah's voice had shifted.
Jake tried to stop the words from coming out his mouth, but failed. "A lot has happened. Things have changed."
"What you've done, Jake?" Sarah's voice grew colder.
"I --"
"Tell us." David now, and his voice had the thing in it that Sarah's had, the pressure that had moved past concern into something with an edge. "Tell us about all those people you killed."
"The people who were trying to get through their day," Mike said, and Mike's voice never sounded like that. "Women and children. Civilians."
"I drowned in the vat," Jake argued, and heard how it sounded as it left him. "I had to cut my arm -- you don't understand what it --"
"You are a murderer," Sarah said. "Say it."
"No."
"You killed them." Three voices, and the dark behind them had moved closer. "You need to stop. Accept it. Give up."
They pressed in. Not physically -- they weren't physical -- but the pressure was real, the same quality as the darkness, the same weight as the closed doors swinging open. He felt it against his chest, against his throat, the accumulated gravity of everything he'd sealed and moved past, and his hands had stopped moving.
He became aware that his hands had stopped.
He looked at Mike, at David, at Sarah's face -- at the face of someone who had sat with him in a too-hot jacuzzi and said it's not the wrong gear forever -- and something moved in him that wasn't anger and wasn't grief and wasn't the cold, something that had survived the pool and the explosion and every door the dark had thrown open and had not finished deciding what it intended to do.
The tendrils came out of him before he thought about it.
Three lines, three targets, and the trio snapped backward and held, and Jake looked at them suspended there and said, to the dark, to the Reaper, to whatever this place was made of:
"You are not my friends. None of this is real."
The cocoons above him, the walls, the dark -- none of it responded. He raised his voice anyway.
"You won't break my will, Reaper."
The dark thinned. Not all the way, but enough -- the phosphorescence coming back at the edges, a grey suggestion of the room returning around him, and the Reaper's voice arrived from somewhere that had moved closer without him noticing.
"You are strong," it said. "But not unbreakable. I only need time."
Jake released the tendrils. The not-friends dissolved without ceremony. He stood on the ceiling -- on the ceiling, which had returned under his hands while the dark was doing its work -- and looked down at the room coming back into dim resolution below him, and said:
"The souls. The kill milestones. All of it started after our first encounter, when you looked at what I was and knew I'd burn out in no time." He was working it out as he said it, the pieces settling into a shape he'd been circling since he'd woken up in the cocoon. "So you started taking precautions. And when the explosion hit, you pulled me out the same way you pulled out the souls of the people I killed. The very same ones in these cocoons."
"You sound sure," the Reaper said.
"I'm not wrong," Jake said.
"But I don't think you did it so that you could ensure my death by your scythe," Jake dropped from the ceiling, landing on the metal floor and absorbing it through his legs, and looked toward the space where the Reaper had settled. "I've been here long enough."
The Reaper stood in the returning light and held the scythe at its side and looked at him for a long time. "Why do you think?"
"You put me in a cocoon. Threw me your scythe. Tried to break me with my memories." Jake took deliberate steps forward. "I've been misreading everything up to now." He turned the thought over and let it be true, which was harder than anything the dark had managed.
"You are testing to see whether I'm done," Jake said.
"And if you are?" the Reaper questioned.
"The system discards me," Jake said without hesitation. "And you get to do the honors."
The Reaper extended its scythe to the side.
"Have you made a decision?" Jake asked.
"Depends on your next answer," the Reaper returned the scythe to its holding position.
"You have been tasked with no simple responsibility, Jacob Cross," it said. "The burden will only get heavier. Completion of your quest won't guarantee you freedom from your responsibility. Only an escape from my inevitability. You can end this now by giving up, and die by my scythe."
The Reaper paused.
"Or?" Jake asked.
"Trade half of your life-force to go back and--"
"Take it." Jake didn't wait for the Reaper to finish. "Don't waste more of my time."