He’s been here all of a week.
Or has it been a month?

Time had passed differently in the afterlife and, if he’s being honest with himself, he no longer has any idea how time works on earth. He’d been dead much longer than he’d ever been alive and he’s spent most of his time back in Beqanna – this new, different-but-still-somehow-the-same Beqanna – asleep in the sun, not bothering to keep track of how any times that sun has risen or set.

The point is that he hasn’t been here long and he’s already pretty tired of it. But Antidote is not a coward and he feels no overwhelming urge to fling himself off the nearest cliff just to get back to the afterlife. Especially not with the way he’d left things with Cuerva Lista, when he’d insisted on being the one who came back. (Wasn’t there supposed to be a reason he was here? So far he’s done little more than sleep and complain about having to be here). He couldn’t give her the satisfaction of him lasting all of a month back on earth before he threw in the towel.

He’s in the meadow, has spent most of his time in the meadow (primarily because it’s one of the only places he still recognizes), and a brilliant white thing catches his eye. He lifts his head, grunts, and then hauls himself to his feet. She doesn’t remind him of anyone he knew once but with the uncertain way she’s blinking into the light, he thinks she might be like him. Dead. And then not dead.

He moves slow, cursing the way gravity affects the body, and offers her a slanted smirk as he stations himself near enough to not have to shout when he addresses her. “Ain’t this just a son of a bitch?” he asks, gestures vaguely to the great swath of land unfurling around them. Earth. Being alive.

Truth be told, he hadn’t been expecting such a strong reaction.
She spins around to face him and he takes one stumbling step backward, away from her.
It has not been lost on him that the magic in Beqanna has taken a stronger hold on its inhabitants and he’s seen more than a few horses wandering around with a predator’s teeth in their mouths. He has no way of knowing that she doesn’t have venomous fangs that she could easily plunge into the meat of his throat. (Strange that he should have any shred of self-preservation left in him when all he really wants to do is go back to being dead – and what better way to get back to the afterlife than by being attacked by someone else? Cuerva Lista couldn’t give him shit about that, could she?)
“Son of a bitch,” he yelps, more at himself than at her, because he’d spooked her and she had, in turn, spooked him right back.

He drags in a ragged breath, trying in vain to tame the wild beating of his heart.
The good news was that she didn’t sink her teeth into his throat. For all intents and purposes, she seemed just as regular as him.
But the fear in her eyes is not lost on him and it feels bigger than him simply catching her off-guard. It’s a real fear he sees, not the temporary kind that comes from being startled. Not the kind of fear she undoubtedly saw in his eyes when she’d spun around to face him and he’d awkwardly stumbled out of her reach.

She says, ‘excuse me’, but she says it in a way that suggests she has no interest in hearing him repeat what he’d say. She says it more in a way that suggests she’s offended that he’d said it at all. But he’s never been very good at apologies, so he doesn’t immediately say anything. She guesses so. Which is not her disagreeing with him, so he considers it a victory.

“Did you come here on purpose?” he asks without bothering to clarify whether or not she’d been dead before she arrived here. “Were you in the river?” he plunges on without giving her a chance to answer his first question. The river, of course, being the place where he’d been reunited with Cuerva Lista, where a roan mare had cloned herself for a reason he hadn’t totally figured out yet, where they’d been tasked with helping… with something.

Anonya, she says, and he doesn’t recognize the name but he supposes it doesn’t matter. He’d been dead a remarkably long time. “Antidote,” he says, pauses and then adds, “I think.” He rolls one shoulder in a kind of shrug before he says, “my name was Antidote when I died. I don’t know if you get a new one when you come back from the dead.”

Her apology is unnecessary and, as such, easily discarded.
Apologies had always made him uncomfortable anyway.
Just the whole concept of taking responsibility for his own actions. Or, if he was the one being apologized to, absolving someone of guilt. If he had palms, surely it would make them itch. As it stood, though, they merely made him want to crawl out of his own skin.

So, he moves past it as quickly as he can. Doesn’t bother to acknowledge it. Hopes that she’ll follow suit and not try to force him to tell her that she was forgiven. He’d known plenty of women like that in his day. Women desperate for reassurance. Or, even more specifically, women deadset on finding reassurance in the very last place they’d ever find it. Antidote had never been built for stroking egos or soothing broken hearts or making anyone feel like they were worthwhile. How he’d managed to maintain a herd for so many years was really anyone’s guess because he had never been what you’d call personable or even mildly pleasant. Quite frankly, he’d been an asshole and that was one thing, at least, that had not changed.

She mentions a gate. He doesn’t remember hearing anything about a gate. It had been like he’d kind of just blinked and he was awake in the meadow in a place that reminded him of Beqanna but certainly was not the Beqanna he’d known. The corners of his dark mouth turn down in a frown as he considers this. So, she’d walked through a gate and hadn’t been in the river. Which meant… what? The dead were allowed to just mosey their way back to earth?

“That’s interesting,” he says. But he asks her nothing further. Instead, they exchange names and she smiles, which is a relief because she’d been starting to look like a damsel that he was going to need to reassure. He hadn’t meant to be funny, but she seems deeply amused and who would he be to stand in the way of that? So, he offers up a kind of sideways chuckle.

“No, there’s no one left who’d remember me,” he tells her. In fact, most everyone who would have remembered him have probably been dead as long as he has. How long has he been dead? Centuries? He doesn’t know how to go about drawing up that kind of equation, so he skirts around it. “But I’ve never been known for my creativity, so Antidote works just fine.”

She looks awfully alive for someone who’s just returned from the dead, perhaps invigorated by her own realization. “And who and what do you want to be this time around?”