CORPUS

Content warnings: invasions of privacy, unhealthy coping mechanisms, suicidal ideation-adjacent thoughts, medical talk, very bad coping mechanisms for grief, (kind of) ableism from lane, discussion of self-mutilation (not done, only thought about), and discussions of dead body and dead body stealing (human and animal)

Lane wasn’t supposed to dig through the boxes in the corner—Augur made that very clear when he let him move into the shitty little three-room apartment in the first place—but no one was home, and Augur wasn’t the boss of him anyway.

And besides, it had been two whole months since he moved in. He’d been really chill for that whole time. He’d even cleaned the fridge, and he hadn’t even asked what was going on the day Augur wouldn’t get out of bed and just sat in their room popping painkillers and asking him to go stick the hot water bottle next to the heater again. So because he’d been so chill and nice, he deserved to do a little snooping. Especially since he had to live here with this guy. Maybe there were dead people in there or something.

There weren’t, obviously, he kept his dead people in the spare parts bucket, but there could have been.

So he dragged one of the boxes down from the corner shelves and got to work doing some probably-immoral prying into the private life of his roommate. No big.

The first box was pretty boring, all things considered. A bunch of old t-shirts, a tiny sports jersey, a high school yearbook. The only real prize was a few faded photos of Augur as a kid, and those weren’t even that interesting. He had been just as mean-looking as a five-year-old.

The second box had a few more interesting things. There was a whole fuckin’ scrapbook’s worth of baby Augur photos in there. Some from when he was an actual baby—kind of cute, somehow—and some from when he was older, like in middle school or high school—less cute. The more recent photos looked more like Augur as he was now. Acne scars, same stupid glasses, and apparently he’d started wearing those weirdly tough wrist braces real early on in his life.

But the third box was when Lane decided to stop, because the third box was full of journals.

And yes, this was kind of super immoral, and he probably should not have been doing it, but he didn’t actually care, and also Augur wasn’t telling him shit. Like, absolutely nothing, about himself or his life or his family or anything at all. So he was going to have to resort to reading private information. Really, this was basically Augur’s fault.

The journals themselves weren’t really anything special. Marble composition books labeled with the year in smudged pen, Augur’s name written in the front in his tiny wide-ass handwriting. But Lane checked the clock, and settled in, and started reading.

There will not be any “Dear Diaries” here, said the first entry in the first book, labeled with the year—Augur would have been a teenager, probably a young one. Typical of him. He just had to be the coolest guy in the room at all times.

There will not be any “Dear Diaries” here. This is exclusively for documenting my symptoms, like I was told to, and recording my thoughts at the end of each week, like I was told to. It’s supposedly good for me to collect my thoughts about my diagnoses. I do not think this will be particularly useful, but I am supposed to do it, and I am not going to turn down anything that can possibly help my condition.

Ew. Now he felt really bad for reading. Thanks, Past Augur, for the fucking guilt trip, he thought before turning the page.

The next two pages were a table, the lines shaky and uncertain. The top was labeled with a bunch of things—dizziness, hunger levels, nausea levels, hours of sleep, levels of pain in various areas—and the side was labeled with the days of the week.

Augur was really sick. That was weird. He seemed mostly fine to Lane when they were talking. Except for maybe those couple days where he just didn’t get out of bed, but hey, he figured he was just being lazy. If these charts were the same today, Augur was, like, basically constantly in pain.

This was… well, it was kind of interesting, but mostly it was just depressing, so he turned the page.

Another journal entry—this one just as short, only a page and a half long—and then another table, and then another journal entry. Apparently, Augur had been just as consistent as an annoying teenager as he was now, as an annoying adult.

I’ve been thinking about my condition, said one of the entries. Or rather, conditions. I should be precise in the language I use here. I know, rationally, that I’m not being punished for any misbehavior. If we were only ill when we were doing things wrong, things would be much different than they are now. But still, there is something in me that protests at going to doctors’ appointments, at having to sit and watch blood fill vial after vial, at the constancy of my pain. My psychotherapist talks about the concept of an “inner child”. Perhaps that is what protests when treatments fail, when I have to put on my knee braces simply to go on a walk outside. The petulant little child that says that it isn’t fair.

He flipped past the rest of that one—it was making him sad, and if he started feeling bad for Augur now he wouldn’t be able to finish the journals. The next entry took up almost six pages, and was a lot weirder.

It started out the usual stuff in the journal so far. Self-pity and a lot of long medical words. But then about halfway through it got really weird.

I started going to the library to do research—at first just about what’s known about my conditions, but then about medicine, about what they used to do to fix illnesses. They used to use leeches for medicine; it was supposed to suck out all the bad blood, because they thought having too much blood caused some disease. And they would send you to the seaside to fix you, because of the bad airs. I think it would be nice, living in a time when they didn’t know the right way to fix things. But I suppose I still live in a time when they don’t know the right way to fix things, only now they hide it behind chronic diagnoses and blood draws and genetic tests. At least back then you would be prescribed time away, where you would be comfortable while you died.

Lane put the journals down. That was just freaky. He was a freak of nature, someone who had beaten death, so he didn’t really have a place to speak on it, but Augur did not have a good relationship with death. Or at least, he didn’t when he wrote this.

But then again, he was currently sitting in Augur’s apartment, which was full of corpse parts and necromancy experiments, so he was pretty sure he still didn’t.

The next journal entries got progressively more and more freaky. More talking about old-ass medical practices, talking about something called a fleam, whatever the hell that meant, and some weird, borderline death-fetishy stuff that made him turn the page really fast. Apparently, sixteen-ish-year-old Augur had gotten really into studying Victorian era surgery.

After one more absolutely batshit entry—fourteen pages long, what the fuck—things slowed down a little.

I think it’s unproductive to record such long entries in my journal. It’s a waste of space that could be better used recording my symptoms. These thoughts would be better put to use in a research paper.

Or a mental hospital intake form, Lane thought.

True to his word, the entries after that were short, four pages maximum. He mostly talked about how whatever was going on was affecting his life, his school, his classmates. Never any friends, but that kind of made sense considering how fucking insane he was acting.

In the next journals, they started getting long again. Long and weird.

I started reading about resurrectionists. Stealing bodies from graves. Of course, the names were pure euphemism, but I think their pursuits were noble even if their methods were not. It’s an important thing, understanding the workings of the human body. I have started studying it myself, whenever I have a free moment.

There aren’t any books on necromancy in our library. I’m going to go look for some the next chance I get.

After that, the journal entries had more charts, more records—notes about necromancy, anatomical drawings, reanimation formulas. He kept on recording his medical stuff. Lane skimmed those, noting with no surprise at all that the number of hours he was sleeping started ticking lower and lower.

I stole my first bones tonight. They’re not anything special, not human, just pig bones from a dissection at school. They’ll do for my purposes, though.

A few weeks later: They’re animate. I managed to get them to move. Just a twitch, but it’s more than anything else I’ve ever gotten before. It’s really happening.

A few days after that: I know they won’t fit me. I know these bones aren’t going to slot into my joints, and that I don’t have flesh to cover them, and that cutting off part of my body would raise too many questions. But there’s this burning temptation—I know that I can make it work now, and all I would have to do is find or generate healthy tissue, and then I can fix everything. I can fix everything.

Lane shut the book and put it back in the box. He felt like he was going to be sick.

So that was what all the body parts were for. And why Augur was so insistent on finding out how Lane worked and how he was animated.

It wasn’t even like Lane was scared for his own safety—Augur had been very clear in the earlier journals about how he wasn’t going to use anything that he killed himself, and that he thought that if undead creatures did exist they deserved to be treated like living people. It was just—

There was this fervor. In the way Augur wrote about his experiments. There was something genuinely very scary about how devoted he was to making this work.

He didn’t really know the exact details of what Augur was planning. But he was writing this stuff in his personal medical journal, and he had talked about wanting to replace his parts, so he could make an educated fucking guess. He couldn’t shake the images. What if Augur hadn’t found him, but instead a real dead body? What if he had actually tried to make his fucking experiments work on himself?

Lane shoved the journals back into their box and shut it again, shoving all three boxes back onto their shelf and going to find something to drink from the fridge. He knew he couldn’t get as drunk as he used to, and Augur only kept shitty beer and schnapps in the house anyway, but it was comforting anyway. He didn’t want to think about the sketches in Augur’s notebooks or the rack of old-ass medical tools or the over-the-counter painkiller bottles lying empty on the floor next to the bed. He wanted to think about nothing except how he could best annoy the shit out of Augur when he got home.

After he’d drank a can of very light beer and thrown the empty can at the wall, he heard the familiar sound of the basement door unlocking. Augur, back home, two bags of groceries in hand and his wrist braces tight around his arms.

“Uh, hey, you think we can put a hold on the experimenting for a few days?” Lane asked once the groceries were away and Augur had had a chance to actually sit down.

“What? Why?”

“Just need to recuperate a little. Just ‘cause I heal super fast doesn’t mean I don’t still kinda hurt after being cut open so many times.”

Augur regarded him with great suspicion. “You don’t feel pain.”

“I mean, I kinda do. Not a lot, but kinda.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “You should have let me know. After you’ve healed and you feel ready, remind me to give you a painkiller before we start our dissections.”

And that was it. Augur just… was okay with it. Maybe that was a good sign, that the guy was mellowing out after so many years of being a weird little unhinged maniac. Or maybe it was just him being nice for once in his life. Who knew.

It was only after a couple days had passed that Lane noticed he’d put the boxes back in the wrong order, and a couple days after that when he noticed they were back in the right order again, neater this time. Augur didn’t bring it up, not even once. He obviously knew, but he just… kept on going, as if nothing had happened. If he was upset about it, he didn’t take it out on Lane.

And if Lane was a little nicer the next time Augur was having a really bad pain day, he would never admit to it.