Headfirst into the Abyss

When he smiles, Sundowner’s lips are stretched wide and his teeth nearly yellow, though darker on the meeting points. They’re somewhat sharp too, although this applies only to his third and forth teeth in the upper jaw.

Phoebe’s not sure why she’s noticing this.

She has to look at him, however. She wants to look at Viktor, because it has been two years since she has seen him in person, but she cannot. Not now, when she has both of her children in the same room after a decade. She cannot look at Arianna, because she’s—because she just is.

So she looks at Sundowner, the biggest threat in the room apart from her daughter.

“Of course there’s something we want from this.” Sundowner snorts. It feels like he never really stops talking, but Phoebe’s noticed that, sometimes, she hears his voice even when he’s not close to her. She’s not really sure how much of it is in her head anymore. “It’s just one planet that you own though.”

“You could’ve easily taken the planet from us.” Arjun Royce is a smart man. Phoebe has been working with him for the past twenty years, and she’s known him for even longer. She knows, as well, that he’s not afraid of anything. He’s never been afraid of the tyrants and she thinks he might be even less afraid of them now that he knows them in person.

If anything, their appearance has surely made them more human to him.

He hasn’t seen what Phoebe has seen.

“We could’ve.” Sundowner shrugs. “But it’s all such violent business, not that I hate violence.” His eyes are nearly slits when they narrow. She doesn’t like the look in Sundowner’s eyes when he licks his lips after the violence.

Just like Arianna, he is entirely genderless too, and they’ve taken his word that he’s been a man before he became this. Before the universe made him monster, or so the two of them claim happened. Phoebe doesn’t believe them, but she doesn’t know what else to believe in.

If she thought they could be anything else than unsubtle and violent, feral, she would think that Sundowner is trying to make passes at Arjun. As it is, she’s rather afraid that he will try to vivisect her boss in front of them.

She turns towards Viktor and his co-workers, small smile ready to throw at her son, but he’s not looking at her. His eyes are glued to the flailing hands of the star destroyer. He’s not looking at Arianna either. Nobody in the entire room is looking at Arianna, who’s sitting behind Sundowner with the most bored expression pasted to her face.

“You actually need something that’s on that planet and you need it to remain in-tact, is it?” Arjun’s always been straight to the point. Phoebe appreciates this from him. This is going to be over a lot faster than it normally wood; no more than twenty more minutes, perhaps half an hour, and she can get back into her room, drink her pills, and then talk to a child of hers that doesn’t have a wish to commit a genocide.

“We actually need people to work on Essia’s surface. There’s just the two of us after all.” So that’s what they want – a free working force.

“Just the two of you brought down a big part of the universe, Mr Osborn.” Arjun’s laughing, too, and Phoebe would’ve had to suppress her own smirk at this if Grimgrinner wasn’t who she was. “Since my bosses at TIA have explicitly told me to accept all of your conditions or prepare the fastest ship towards Earth, you’re making it real hard for me not to get fired.”

Honest, if nothing else. Sundowner seems so greatly amused by this.

“What is it that has you so worried?” Sundowner says in the end. There’s still a shit-eating grin pasted to his face. His teeth look even more yellow since Phoebe’s so close to him. They don’t seem unhealthy, rotten, like the human ones. They just look darker. They look like they’re not even bone. “No harm will befall them. I will make sure they can eat, sleep and have normal working hours and a lot of free time. And if we decide to wipe off the human race, of course they won’t go.”

Well, when he puts it like that.

Arjun’s face looks like he’s about to give up on an insolent child.

“They’re gonna have to be volunteers, Mr Osborn.” Sundowner nods at Arjun’s words, ecstatic, and smiles even wider, if possible. The scar in the middle of his forehead flashes darker in the middle, almost blood red, but it disappears in a second. Phoebe wonders if she made it up.

She knows that Arjun made a good call. He was right, after all—there will be volunteers. There are entirely cults believing Grimgrinner and Sundowner to be deities, gods brought down from the very pits of universe to teach the living world a lesson, to put them back into their place and keep the selected living. Many of them would give their life to work for them, willingly—to be the chosen ones.

“You keep your job, I get my planet. I love it when our plans work out this well! Don’t you, Aria?” Sundowner even claps his hands together. Arianna turns around only slightly, not bothered by the sound, and nods slowly. There is something like a smile clinging to the morphed skin of her face.

“Why not?” Because there hasn’t been any blood shed, there haven’t been limbs and quick, painless, but brutal deaths and mutilation. The girl is death, Phoebe has seen. She enjoys nothing more than she enjoys mindless destruction of all order.

“Do you need it on the paper?” Arjun asks, almost as if though just to make sure, and both monsters look at him with wide eyes and half-smiling expressions on their faces.

“Nah.” Sundowner speaks again. He just talks and talks and talks. Phoebe’s head is starting to hurt from his voice. “If you don’t come through with your side of the deal, we’ll just throw you to those brand new aliens.”

That, Phoebe reckons, would be a more merciful death than what those two would bring upon them.