A friend's theory #1 that Eriche’s death was a suicide.
(One shot)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Munroe Davy & Eriche Wolff, Munroe Davy/Eriche Wolff
Additional Tags: Hurt No Comfort, Angst, Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Grieving, can be read as romantic or platonic, no beta we die like Eriche, Mophead and Eriche Are Different People, Eriche Wolff Is Not Mophead, Denial
It's like I've laid him in a casket, Munroe thinks, observing his sleeping friend.
Eriche’s skin and hair are clean and a ghostly-pale, standing out starkly against the dirty sheets in the dim light of their quarters. The thought crosses Munroe’s mind that Eriche is able to sleep this deeply despite the dampness that seeps into every corner of the room. For a moment, he envies his friend.
If soldiers were granted the privilege of an honorable death and funeral, this is how he would have liked to see Eriche positioned in his casket: at peace, his spirit seemingly freed from the maelstrom of violence in the material realm. But this world offers no such mercy. It was no longer the norm for corpses to rot underground in boxes. By decree of the Crown, families can instead sell their dead to be repurposed, reused, or reanimated for the empire.
Not many turn down the offer.
Munroe himself sinks into the cold floor next to the bed—not that his own bed felt any warmer—to be closer to the other. Sleep was out of his reach, and so he was left to linger on his own thoughts.
It's not as if understanding escaped him when contemplating Eriche’s own reasons for his attempt. Only a fool would claim to grasp the full cost of trading service for immortality, but the atrocities make themselves known all the same in excruciatingly clear detail, whether in the trenches, in their bunkers, or even in the more quiet routines of a Crown soldier's life.
He understands just as much as the next cursed soul why one would dream of an end.
The ones who make it this far cling to something tangible, fighting to see another day like a lost ship chasing the distant glow of a lighthouse in thick fog. Unfortunately for Munroe, his lighthouse happens to be Eriche. And so far be it from him to allow his own friend to willingly walk toward oblivion.
He is a selfish, selfish man.
D’ya think we'll ever see an end to this?
It's an hour later when Eriche jolts awake with heaving gasps. Munroe pushes himself from the floor at once to ask, “You okay?”
The disorientation sets in almost immediately. Munroe hears it in Eriche’s trembling voice, the way his unfocused eyes search inwardly for something they fail to recognize. Munroe’s heart sinks, knowing he has to fall into a familiar song and dance of withholding the truth from him. Still, he couldn't help but confirm:
"You don't remember me?"
The answer comes, and Munroe looks away. Disappointment settles heavily in his chest, but it isn't new. He'll get better, like he always does.
So he tells Eriche—at least this new version of him—exactly that instead. That at least he’s alright. That he's glad for it. The same reassurances, offered carefully, meant to steady him long enough for the memories to gradually trickle back in. He'll be fine. He always is, in every cycle.
It's why Munroe plasters a slight smile on his face and hopes it's comforting enough, why he comes to Eriche’s defense when their squadmate belittles him for the memory fog, blaming sickness pre-rezz as the cause. Because between the two, Eriche has always been the one who comes back stronger in each cycle. Munroe’s faith is undeniable, and yet he still keeps him at arm's length anyway. A habit learned over too many cycles; stay close enough to guide him, far enough to force him to sharpen himself again, to shake off the fog faster.
Whether that calculated dismissiveness eases Eriche’s distress this time is anyone's guess, but Munroe keeps his cards close and chooses patience.
It'll come back to you.
Deep down, a quiet voice whispers that the hope he clings to is rotten and nothing short of ugly.
—
It must be divine mockery that Munroe is assigned wetwork again. With Eriche.
"It's strange,” Eriche says idly, “thinking someone must have cut me up like this.”
An awful image of blood-matted white hair flashes through Munroe’s mind and even more of the same grotesqueries follow in its path. Dismembering Eriche, gutting him, peeling burnt fabric off his skin. Yes—he is convinced that the cosmos are working against him. The corner of his mouth nearly twitches into a bitter smile at his friend's musings and at his own misfortune. Even with his eyes open, nightmares continue to strobe through his vision as he works.
It never does get any prettier.
The process always begins easy enough before plunging straight to hell. First, the drab olive green uniforms, stiff with dried blood. Then flesh. Every bone, ligament, muscle, organ—felt through the thin barrier of his gloves. Viscera assaults his senses: the squelching of guts being pulled out, the crack of bones through the blade, the overpowering, dizzying stench of iron and charred skin. Red smears in his vision until each crudely butchered piece of flesh was indiscernible from the next.
All the while, he thinks of Eriche's blood on his hands, and the blood yet to be spilled.
As long as most of him is whole, he'll be fine. Like he always is.
Munroe’s reflection stares back at him from the gore-slick table. Weariness weighs him down, from losing count of the corpses he processes, and Eriche's own lack of progress through the amnesia gnawing at him just as much.
When the work is finished, they don't leave the room fast enough. The cart’s creaking wheels echo down the corridor until the eerie heartbeat of the machine grows louder with each step they take toward it, filling the hall.
There's cruel irony in the machine, having something kept alive only by feeding it the dead. A godless marvel performing the unspeakable with no regard for the outcome. Something as extraordinary as that wasn't for Munroe to question. All that matters is that it offers the comforting certainty of another chance at life, as many as the Crown requires.
The low echoing thrumming draws his thoughts to Eriche's chest. Whether the heart beating in there was even his.
The machine did its job. He’s back, breathing, walking, talking, alive in all the ways that matter. So where is he?
When a nurse approaches Eriche and asks for his name for a check-up, he simply says, "I thought you'd be the one to know," without even pausing to think, following her into her office. Munroe’s insides twist painfully at the sight.
As their figures fade into the shadows, he tears his eyes away, bracing his elbows against the cart's cold surface. He buries his head in his hands and wonders how much longer this fog will be around for.
He clings onto that rotten hope all the same, because Eriche will be alright, he always has been, always will be. What's a few more cycles?
The disgust at himself festers.
—
He's running out of lies to feed Eriche. Ineffectual as the performance is, Munroe keeps up the act anyway. But it's never gotten this far before, not without at least a sliver of memory returning.
There are pieces of him, scattered and wrong, yet none of the ones that matter. Beyond the ghost-pale skin and that ridiculous mop of hair, there's almost nothing left that resembles Eriche at all, inside and out.
A paper with names from their previous regiment comes into Munroe's view on the cafeteria table, with Eriche demanding the answers he should have figured out on his own long ago. He didn't even recognize his own name on the paper, he thinks.
Munroe couldn't come up with a believable lie for why the truth is being kept out of reach, so he's not surprised when his weak and faltering facade is seen right through.
Like a coward, he escapes the confrontation and prays it buys him more time. He tells himself that it's just strategy. That the stalling is necessary. Just a while longer. A few more cycles.
He walks until his legs burn, until his hands slowly stop trembling, until the hope he has been nursing like a wound finally speaks up from somewhere deep in his chest and brings him to a dead stop—
He’s not your Eriche.
—
Eriche’s deterioration happened slowly, then all at once.
Munroe, blinded in the way only certainty can make a man, couldn't tell where in the cycles it began. He resented himself for that, for not noticing the exact moment of their relationship’s fracture.
But there had been cracks long before the break. Tiny ones. Easy to brush off. Jokes that didn't land the same, forced laughter. Silences that lingered a beat too long.
A seemingly innocent question of, “D’ya think we'll ever see an end to this?” asked a few times with a half smile. And variations of it.
A hesitation in Eriche's eyes that Munroe mistook for exhaustion, pain, the thousands of acceptable excuses that came with war—anything else other than what it was.
Desperation.
Munroe believed—truly believed—that being alive was enough.
Walking, talking, breathing. An able body. A conscious mind capable of rational thought. As long as those boxes were checked, then the rest would sort itself out, because it always had. The gift of resurrection smoothed over most of the damage as it was built to do. What more could a soldier need or ask for?
Not once had he stopped to consider what resurrection couldn't restore.
He never questioned the changes Eriche had gone through even while he still lived, how each return seemingly cost a small trait. Those changes had been treated as tolerable losses and collateral damage in exchange for keeping him upright and breathing, because being alive had always been enough. He would keep repeating that to himself.
Because Munroe needed him.
In all their time together, the damage dealt to their bodies in the trenches had never gotten to the point of unsalvageable being as careful, methodical, skilled enough as they were. Even as the memory fog became more frequent with each death and Eriche’s shining personality dulled, there was enough unspoken trust established that they would keep saving each other. My life in yours and yours in mine. For that, Munroe had taken it as proof that things would always work out in the end.
That assumption was the real rot.
In the trenches, at a time they've finally lost count of their resurrections, artillery fire rained down on them harder than ever. The noise swallowed all thought and the earth seemed to tear open beneath them. They were overpowered.
Eriche's eyes, emptier than they have ever been before, met Munroe's own. They were stripped of all pretense.
Munroe's heart dropped.
“Don't take me back.” Eriche said with finality, then threw himself over the trench line.
Munroe screamed his name, lunged forward, but another soldier held him back, yelling not now.
He saw a flash of light, and Eriche was reduced to something uncoverable by design.
The signs have never been clearer.
But Munroe was a selfish, selfish man whose lighthouse had never been anyone or anything else and still would never be anyone or anything other than Eriche.
He gathered what little of Eriche remained in the aftermath and prayed his friend would forgive him, if there was enough of him to come back to forgive his sins at all.
—
He hasn't spoken to Eriche since the confrontation at the cafeteria.
They move around each other like the strangers they are, avoiding any interaction if they could help it. Munroe finds himself hesitating now in his own thoughts, unsure if he should still call him Eriche at all.
He thinks he's terrified of his friend coming back and reuniting with the knowledge that he wasn't supposed to in the first place. And yet at the same time, in a way, Munroe waits helplessly for him to do exactly that. He's caught in between these useless, contradicting wants, almost mourning Eriche as if he was truly dead. But maybe in denying Eriche the truth, Munroe denied himself reality and lived all this time in utter delusion. But the ideal outcome would be for his old Eriche to finally awaken but without recollection of his last death, without knowing Munroe denied him a simple wish. And Munroe would then have the chance to mend their friendship and be Eriche's lighthouse in return instead of only taking from him like the selfish bastard he knows he is.
The idea is laughable.
Days continue to pass without the fog lifting, and Munroe carries the weight of his silent suffering. Alone.
They're in the trenches again, another pointless battle where nothing of significance will be lost or gained. There's no movement in this war. They're puppets doomed to perform the same act with no other purpose. Perhaps Munroe figured that out long ago, which is why he held on so tightly to Eriche, because Eriche kept him sane and stable in the vicious monotony of this hell.
He leans over the trench wall, firing at a distant shape barely visible in the wasteland. A speck. Movement flickers in his periphery, and he turns to see Eriche wearing a lotus mask and—
Munroe’s breath catches.
The gas rolls in seconds later. It burns his eyes and invades his insides excruciatingly, and he collapses on the ground, clawing at nothing. Through the haze, he sees Eriche staring down at him with another mask in his hand, raising his arm to grasp at it.
Eriche leans over him, pinning him down by his collar, and harshly whispers his cruelest demand yet: “Tell me who I am. Tell me, and I'll save your damn life.”
Fury surges through Munroe, hot and defiant even as his body fails him. He struggles. The mask is pushed onto his face and relief comes in a shallow wave, barely enough to let him breathe but enough for him to curse at the other.
Mophead threatens to kill him. Munroe bites back saying he'll return regardless.
Behind the mask, Munroe could tell there was an almost sadistic glee watching him struggle for air, holding his life hostage.
Perhaps a broken fragment of Eriche still lives somewhere in Mophead's soul, seeking vengeance, for this new body to carry out Munroe's punishment for denying him the only freedom he had left to break out of the suffocating cycle of immortality.
Perhaps a part of Eriche survived if only to enact justice for himself and make Munroe face the cost of his selfishness. To force him to confront his sins. His guilt. His regret. To beg, to break, to repent.
The punishment fits the crime.
You'd never do this, Munroe thinks in between gasps, through tears. You'd never do this to me.
You've done this to yourself, the hands murderously gripping his collar seem to proclaim.
In an instant, everything clicks.
That if he continues this useless game, if he keeps clinging onto this rotting fantasy, nothing will change. Like the war itself. This was a prison of his own making. This tormented ghost will only grow more relentless and haunt him for as long they're alive throughout the endless cycles. It will stop at nothing, and it was already willing to go as far as to take his life from him.
Something in Munroe finally breaks.
When those same hands finally pry Eriche Wolff’s name from his lips, driving him to admit he's gone, he feels nothing but a crushing defeat.
Eriche Wolff is dead.
"You were-" he finally chokes out, "you were like a brother." And you're never coming back.
Familiar white locks flutter in his vision full of stars, and Munroe knows they will never again bring him the same comfort he had grown so accustomed to. Before his consciousness fades to black, his mind betrays him with a memory of Eriche laughing breathlessly in the trenches long ago, artillery screaming overhead as he throws himself over Munroe without hesitation, grinning while shielding him from the worst of it.
From everything.
You're never coming back.
