Chapter Text
There is nothing but darkness. It swims behind his eyelids and makes his head spin. He knows he is a person, a man, but he can’t bring himself to recall anything else or else the spinning gets worse, rocketing his pitch-black world into nausea.
Something cold and hard is digging incessantly into his spine.
He wakes up. His eyelids flash open.
Immediately he squints, the moon unusually large and bright in the sky above him. It takes him a moment, but he realizes that he is lying spread-eagled on some sort of road. There is a rock below him, which explains the sharp bruise he can feel forming along his back. He sits up, dust falling from his shoulders and back as though he has been there for a very long time. He doesn’t remember lying down, but he's there, so he must have done so at some point.
A flash of moonlight in front of him catches his gaze, and he stares, eyes widening as he identifies what the woman in front of him is holding. Her dark hair curls wildly above her brows and her eyes, set on something far below them, glint with something steely. Her hands clench comfortably around a sniper rifle as though she was born holding it.
He sputters. “I- what the hell?”
The woman turns her sharp gaze on him, making him flinch. The eye roll that follows is surprising, but immediately endears him to her.
“Don’t interrupt me. This is an extremely important mission for the-” She turns, her face morphing into something mildly exasperated, as she talks into the radio on her shoulder. “What were we calling it again now?”
“The Not-Dead-Yet Battlefront.” The answer crackles from her jacket, inciting another eye roll. She is dressed in all black, the detail helping her to blend into the velvety night sky behind her. She doesn’t bother responding to the radio, instead focusing her attention back to the scope of the rifle. “Also, Farah, we’re supposed to welcome the newcomer, not sca-”
A swift hand silences the thing, and the woman -Farah- shoots a glare at him, as though it’s his fault that the person on the other end was interrupting her concentration. She squeezes the trigger, once, and a quiet ‘pop!’ that sounds nothing like a true gunshot goes off.
“Damn.” She swears under her breath, lifting her eyes above the scope for a moment before dipping back down and readying her fingers for another shot.
It encourages him to look down, and he is alarmed to see what she is looking at. A man, standing alone in the centre of a large field, a bright yellow jacket and dark red pants making him stand out more than the fact that he is the only person in the area. The ground around him glitters in the moonlight, littered with bullets and holes. He watches, almost in slow motion, as her fingers move to fire again.
“What the- no, what the fuck are you doing?” He launches himself to his feet, firmly pressing a hand into the rifle and throwing off her aim. The barrel is uncomfortable hot under his fingertips. If he’s honest to himself, he had no idea where this bravery came from - he just knows he doesn’t want to watch someone’s brains explode all over the grass below them.
“You don’t understand.” The woman seems steady, although her fingers are twitching slightly above the trigger. “Don’t worry, you will soon enough.” Regardless of her words, she sighs and lifts the sights from the man below them, instead turning fully to face him.
“Look-” The only thing that betrays her nervousness is the fluttering of her fingertips over the gun, muscle memory guiding her through checking each and every part as she speaks. “You’re dead. Get over it quickly, because you’re going to have to get used it it.” She swears under her breath, and he leans forward slightly to catch what she’s muttering.
“-that blunt, Ken is so much better at this, hell, even Tina- no, Farah, you can do this. Come on.”
Her gaze softens slightly. A glance over her shoulder betrays that she hasn’t completely forgotten about the man she was shooting at. “You’re dead, and this is the afterlife. Every second here, you’re in danger of disappearing. We call it Obliteration. The only way to keep yourself from getting Obliterated is joining up with us. That man,” she jabs over her shoulder with a thumb, “is one of our enemies - part of Project Whitewing. His name is Icarus.”
Holy shit, he thinks, completely speechless in the face of the woman, she’s absolutely insane . He inches slightly away, half in his mind to just lie back down on the dusty ground. This had to be a dream . No one can be that crazy, right? She thinks this is the afterlife .
Seemingly done with her explanation, Farah lifts the rifle once again. He makes a split-second decision and takes a step down the stairs. “No offence, but I’m just gonna…” He darts, not bothering to finish his sentence before he sprints down the stairs towards the man. If this is a dream, he may as well do something crazy too. He could swear he heard an irritated sigh behind him as he runs.
He’s out of breath when he makes it to the bottom, but he’s there, in front of the man. Now that he’s closer, he can see that the grass around him is indeed peppered with bullets, but the man seems unfazed. In fact, he even grins.
“Hiii!” The man waves awkwardly, yellow jacket swaying slightly to reveal a tie patterned with tiny ice cream cones. Oddly enough, his accent marks him as British.
His mouth gapes open a little at the reaction, and he feels his eye start to twitch.“You realize she’s shooting at you, right? Are you insane?” His voice is an octave higher than usual, a bellow that echoes across the relatively empty field.
The man furrows his brows, looking more concerned about the loudness than the fact that he almost died about sixty times in the last couple minutes, by the look of it.
He rubs a hand over his eyes, closing them against the growing realization that this absolutely cannot be real. Is everyone in this dream going to give him a headache?
“Oh, you’re here about that? They do that all the time. I don’t mind too much, though I rather wish they didn’t. It’s not like I can die. It hurts like hell when they hit me, though.” The yellow man is surprisingly solemn sounding, at least until he opens his eyes and the goofy grin is still plastered stoically on the man's face.
“For fuck’s sake! Just wake up!” He gives up on trying to make sense of this, instead pinching his arm, slapping his forehead, and generally trying every possible way he knows to wake up from a dream. Finally, when he’s exhausted all his options, he looks back at the yellow jacketed man, his hands shaking slightly.
“Are you okay? This isn’t a dream - that's actually a common thought here, for newcomers - but you’re dead, like all of us. It’s really quite unfortunate, though I don’t find I mind all that much - after all, once you’re dead, you can’t die again, and that’s rather convenient, isn’t it?” Yellow jacket pats his arm in a way he seems to think is comforting, morphing his face into something that looks like a poor attempt at concern.
“Fucking hell- alright, fine, if I’m dead, and this isn’t a dream, I shouldn’t be able to die, right? So just- I don’t fucking know, kill me!”
The man’s face changes into something even more concerned, but he lifts his arm nonetheless. His lip trembles slightly. “I- no, I don’t do that… I don’t kill people, I don't 'Obliterate’ them, I help them, you see, I'm a detective and I... and I don’t know who told yo-”
Something hot and painful burns through the back of his skull, cutting off all sound - including interrupting the yellow jacketed man before he can finish. He blinks, once, twice, and watches through half shuttered eyes as the man’s eyes grow as large as saucers, something red and wet splattering on his coat. He realizes far too late that it’s his blood. He sinks to his knees, the man in front of him blurring into multiple colours as he collapses, vision fading slowly before dropping all of his awareness sharply into nothingness once again.