Chapter Text
1: suicide chess
(also known as anti-chess, or the losing game. lose all of your pieces before your opponent can, leaving yourself with nothing on the board. capturing is mandatory. forcing your opponent to stalemate you also constitutes a win)
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From this high up on the bridge, Virgil is pretty sure that the raptors can’t see him. Even if they could, they probably wouldn’t be able to follow him up here anyway, because tiny bipedal flesh-ripping abominations of nature aren’t really known for their skill in scaling complex, criss-cross wire man-made structures.
“That’s one thing we have over them,” Virgil says to nobody in particular, not that there’s many people to make light conversation with – here, at the highest point miles around. “Opposable thumbs. Go, human race. The world as we know it might be falling apart in basically every way I ever even vaguely predicted it would in my many, many fits of extreme paranoia over the years. But hey. At least we can climb bridges and get the lids off pickle jars, if our wrists are feeling up to it.”
It’s getting close to dusk, which means the sky is lit up all pretty red-pink-gold and is beginning to hum and trill like the distant sound of a choir warming up in a long tunnel. If you keep your eyes high enough you can almost ignore the low-hanging angry clouds ready to pour acid rain all over an exhausted and weary populace. Virgil tries to enjoy it, but gives up after a few minutes. The colors are kind of pretty, but the distant screams and chitters of the raptors in the distance really are a mood killer, to say nothing of the rest of the landscape.
He hadn’t climbed this high up the suspension bridge overlooking the river to appreciate the view, after all.
So, yeah, there’s no soft and gentle way to put this. Virgil is here to finish things off. Take the easy way out, as it were. Head down the coward’s highway, or maybe up the river Styx. You know, check himself out early? That thing where you Commit Die and you aren’t alive anymore at the end of it? ‘Suicide’ is such an ugly word. Honestly, it’s a good thing the English language has so many pretty euphemisms for it.
He casts a glance down the river below the bridge. The water is kind of dark and sludgy-looking, but that could just be down to a combination of the time of day and the angle he’s looking at it from. He’s pretty sure oil or apocalypse gunk or whatever hasn’t managed to get into the water, but hey. He could be wrong. Also, if he does this right, he’s not going to have to worry about the state of the water. If what remains of the internet is to be believed, as long as he’s high enough up, he’ll barely feel the impact at all and he’ll be dead before the rocks in his hoodie pockets have a chance to drag him to the bottom.
The hope is that he’ll end up deep enough that the raptors don’t end up getting to him and he doesn’t end up surfacing until he’s completely unrecognizable. He doesn’t really want his body to get eaten by overzealous predator chickens, and he really doesn’t want Thomas to have to see his sagging, waterlogged, limp corpse.
Virgil thinks about it for a minute or two, then decides he’s going to wait until just after the sun’s gone down to jump. Less chance of anyone spotting him, and he’ll be able to psych himself up to jumping a whole lot easier if he doesn’t need to look down at the water.
It’s at this point that footsteps and the sound of distant, hushed conversation from a long, long way down below him draw his attention towards the ground. There’s two people down on the shore. Virgil squints down, curious despite himself, and then mentally corrects himself. There’s three people, heading down towards the river from the road that curves and curls away from the bridge and towards town.
One of them is being carried between the other two. Their body is loose and limp and covered in dark fabric head-to-foot, but he can see a hand dangling from it, bumping and scraping along the ground as they go.
Hm, he thinks to himself.
As Virgil watches, the two of them place the other guy on the sandy, grimy strip of shore, and start methodically scooping up rocks from the riverbank to shove into the dark fabric – which Virgil is very quickly realizing is, in fact, a body bag.
Virgil has to very, very quickly come to terms with the fact that he’s witnessing a legitimate crime and quite possibly the aftermath of a murder. Because, like, nobody dumps a body into the river for good reasons. It doesn’t actually take him too long to come to terms with it. He just thinks about it for a bit, and shrugs to himself, and is like, yeah, okay. It’s not like he needs to worry about it, because he doesn’t even know who they are, and they don’t need to worry about him either, because in half an hour or so he won’t be around to testify against whatever terrible crime they’ve committed.
It’s funny how imminent suicide has made Virgil the chillest he’s been in a long, long while.
The two men – one tall and gangly with a colorfully-patched leather jacket, the other in notably darker, more sensible-looking clothes – put their heads together for a few moments. The sensible-looking one glances all around, as if checking for anyone looking in.
And almost inevitably, his gaze lands on Virgil, several hundred metres up in the air and perched on a steel support strut near the top of the suspension bridge. Virgil can tell the body-disposal guy has seen him, because he goes all still and silent and then grabs his companion’s arm, and now they’re both staring up at Virgil.
Virgil waves at them, distinctly uncomfortable with the sudden attention. He does not want to be perceived, no sir. He clears his throat and calls down to them, “It’s fine, you’re good! I’m here for murder reasons too!”
The sensible-looking one clears his throat audibly, places the half of the body that he’s carrying down on the shore, and then yells up at him, “Pardon me. Am I correct in assuming that you’re here to end your life?”
“That’s the general idea!” Virgil screams back, feeling sort of embarrassed about it. Jumping off a bridge is kind of stupidly cliche. Maybe he should have stuck to trying a good ol’ classic hangman’s noose or something.
There’s silence for a beat or two. And then the taller of the two drops his end of the body too, then cups his hands around his mouth and screeches, “ Do a flip! ”
Virgil gives him a big double-thumbs-up. He’s never been all that great at gymnastics, but hey. Who is he to deny a request from an enthusiastic audience?
Sensible-guy thwaps tall-guy on the shoulder with the back of his hand, and says something to him that doesn’t carry. He yells upwards at Virgil, “Stay where you are!”
Virgil shrugs, because all right, why not, he’ll stick around a bit longer and see what these two weirdos are up to. And then he watches in bemusement as the sensible guy (who isn’t looking very sensible anymore, at all ) strides over to the base of the bridge, and then starts to climb it. Pulling himself up along the support struts like a goddamned monkey, or an Olympic gymnast. Within a minute, he’s up at the main bit of the bridge where the cars go along, and he’s going up even higher, taking pretty much the same route that Virgil had – except he makes it look downright efficient . Which is just unfair, really.
“Holy shit,” says Virgil to himself, and then two hands clasp over the top of the beam he’s sitting on, just to his right, and a head pops up.
“My name is Logan,” says the guy. Virgil sees that he’s wearing glasses; they’re hanging kind of crookedly off his face. He doesn’t seem at all out of breath from having scaled the height of the bridge in, like, three minutes flat, which is massively unfair. It had taken Virgil a full twenty minutes to get up here.
Abruptly, he realizes that Logan’s hanging onto the beam closest to him, apparently waiting for a response. “Oh, uh – hi.”
“I’m led to believe that standard conversational etiquette dictates that you should give me your name in return,” Logan says, rather expectantly.
Which is the weirdest possible way to phrase that, but okay. “Um, it’s Virgil. I’m Virgil. Are you up here to kill me?”
Logan blinks at him. “Ah... no. The opposite, in fact. Would I be able to convince you to come down?”
“Why? Are you planning to kill me?”
Logan takes a second to consider this. “You appear to have a morbid obsession with – well, death.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” says Virgil, and waves a hand at the bridge, and the river, and everything .
“Any special reason why you feel like ending it all in the most permanent way possible today in particular?”
“Um, I don’t know. Do you need a reason to be sad?” Although sad barely encompasses it, really, and it’s less sad and more just a wide blank empty void of nothing at all.
“Yes,” says Logan instantly.
“That was supposed to be a rhetorical question,” Virgil tells him, “With the implied answer no, you don’t. ”
“Well, you do,” Logan says, with the tone of voice of someone stating the outright obvious. “It could be a memory or an anxiety or some other immediate, physical reason, but it is equally as likely that an inexplicable feeling of outright sadness may be caused by, for example, a chemical imbalance in your brain. Or any other number of physiological or psychological reasons.”
Virgil blinks. “Oh. Well, neat. I’m still gonna jump, though.”
Logan pulls himself all the way up, and swings his legs over so he’s now sitting right next to Virgil. “I’d really rather you didn’t. Is there any way at all I could convince you to do… ah, anything else at all?” Virgil hesitates before he opens his mouth to speak, and he hesitates for just a second too long. Logan seizes onto that hesitation, and says, quickly, “I’ll make you an offer.”
“An offer, ” Virgil repeats, not really knowing what to say to that. “Uh-?”
“Twenty-four hours, and if you still feel as if life is no longer worth living, I’ll escort you back to this bridge personally.”
Virgil can’t help it; his eyebrows go shooting right up. “That’s... a bold claim. You’re claiming that you can stop me being suicidal in one day?”
Logan’s lips tighten a bit, and then he says, “Well, maybe twenty-four hours is a touch too optimistic. Nonetheless. Virgil, would you please come down off the bridge?”
“I could just jump now,” says Virgil, wavering a bit.
“I think,” says Logan, “that if you really wanted to jump, you would have done it already.”
Virgil wants to argue against this – wants to uncurl his fingers from the bridge and go hurtling forwards and down, just to prove a point. But if he does that, then he won’t get to see the look of shock and ‘ oh shit I guess he was right’ on Logan’s face, which...
Well, that kind of defeats the point.
“Fine,” he says, and casts one glance down at the murky water below. “Twenty-four hours. Sure, let’s do it, why now. But this better be good.”