I will face god and walk backward into hell; team formation

[Pollock]

He does not care about their homes. 

(Let the god read that from his mind, and judge him accordingly.)

Fuck their homes. His had been… unsatisfactory, as so many things in his life had been for so long. He had let that go. Shed the bindings of that word and that concept – let it die with the colt and boy (why won’t they die?); discarded it atop the mountains of misfit realities, things that fight his narrative and things that are senseless. Things of pine and castles of ice; polar bears and the sharp smell of melting plastic; hands and clothes sticking to his naked, hairless chest; the gurgling of babes and the loneliness sunk deep and heavy.

Let them die. Let them be forgotten, all.

He comes for fleshy things.

He comes for bodily pleasures.

He comes for things that are his.

(The bitch. That greedy, larcenous...)

Things that had been taken away when She had found herself used to abuse.

Had they not been Her monsters? If they bit Her flesh, was it not because She had inadequately cowed them when She had the chance to contain? He feels no sympathy, though She rolls beneath him and She bleeds him – She makes him mountains to climb without his nimble feet. Amusing.

He feels no remorse. She had taken his trinkets – these, at least, he had been given through natural means – fertilization, growth, all things that are Hers. Earthly.

But so too has She taken his weapons. No. This would not do.

They had not been fashioned of Her magic. She should have felt that when She slaked herself on them – those horns and feet, the Fear. That the make of those things were not her craft, but cold and iron, and jingled with the soft, cheery songs of another universe entire. Those efficient and brutal parts of him – the godly parts, not as magnificent as Harmonia’s, certainly not Carnage’s, but they had satisfied him. The things he had made! The beautiful, abstract expressionism... He had fought and fallen and killed for them, across continents and Atlantics.

Yet she had taken them all the same. Asked him to kneel for them. To kiss her ring.

No. This would not do, at all.

He follows the summons like another kind of pilgrimage – this one is easier, more benevolent. It does not seek to choke him, or trip Bruise (his son, he hurries along with a great, strange wing, to keep pace – he wonders where Sinew is, who had once nourished the dark god's disciple), and though he does not get to feel the weight of his headgear or the electric plunge into invisibility when he gets to Carnage, there is a different kind of fulfillment than when he reaches the climax of stone. The Father (for Pollock, a handful of greats back) offers something more substantial. Reclamation, pounding like a war drum.

... besides, he has always hated mothers.

The other golden wretch of this land speaks, the second does not (he wonders, fleetingly, if she does not scream either; he is who he is) but gesticulates, they pledge and the gift-giver considers.

“Yet she has been so very generous to the penitent thus far.” His lip curls and he dips his head, still resting a wing over his son’s back and side, something like protection. He is not one to follow, try as he had – not since he had been remade; he had been a wolf and shepherd in gold cloth since – but he finds stimulation in the chaos and vengeance that coats their lungs. “Fuck them. I have... stuff I need to do. For that, I need myself back. Whole. Besides, I think they need us.”

Even if they do not appreciate.

Balance.