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The first day - the first few, even - went swimmingly. The doors closed, the seals activated, and Skulduggery existed in a bubble of pure silence. These last months were filled with fussing and feuding, tightly packed and completely unstable, all leading up to the moment where he would be behind one side of the wall with the rest of the world behind the other. The quiet settled in comfortably and it was as if he had already been here for years.
Skulduggery had come to know the facility quite well, and he strode down every hall and entered every room save one - and he looked and acted very purposeful, but he was moving too quickly. There wasn’t a rush, however that’s not to say he was rushing. He was going his own pace. It just happened to be inappropriate for the circumstances, is all. He decided to stop walking in circles and iron all his clothes, and he fell into the menial rhythm of such a task and a new thought didn’t enter his skull for hours and hours.
He was one man, a brilliant man to be sure, so he would of course remain occupied like this with all the, to use a casual term, housekeeping that had to be done here. There were so many things to take care of, so much to check up on and keep running correctly. Perhaps he was too brilliant, because he completed every task sooner than expected. By the third day he had lapped the place a hundred times, touched everything there was to touch save a few things, seen all there was to see save the same few, and entered every room save one.
Skulduggery meditated for a few days. It ended up being a horrible experience, amplifying the silence so that it was deafening, suffocating. He took to the arboretum and let butterflies land on him, and he listened to the birds chirping in the trees, the faint rustle of the leaves as a controlled breeze swept in and out - and it was too loud. He paced what used to be a bedroom and tried talking to himself, for that felt like an appropriate middle ground between utter silence and the piercing sounds of nature, but he had nothing to talk about, his voice was empty.
Still Skulduggery avoided the last room, and worse he felt. He spent a fortnight reading everything Gordon ever wrote. He imagined himself as a pile of dust. He offered himself the possibility that he was a pile of dust - he never left the Faceless Ones’ dimension and this was where his madness had taken him. She never came for him, she left magic behind and lived a normal life, grew up and had a family and died old but fulfilled. Skulduggery repeated that thought back over, Valkyrie leaving magic behind , and managed to laugh, grounded back in reality. She’d never do such a thing, and of course she never left him - and he wouldn’t leave her, either.
It was self-centred to believe that all that had happened was a product of his own mind. The people out there in the world, they were real, their suffering had been real, and there had been more suffering to come. This had been the right thing to do, she said so herself. And he couldn’t avoid her any longer.
Skulduggery stood before the Cube and felt a pain, a vague ache in a heart that wasn’t there. His head reflected off the Cube’s surface, projecting the image of a skull tilted upwards, gazing endlessly and helplessly into Darquesse’s resting face. He willed her eyes to open, just to look into them one last time. He hadn’t spent long enough looking before they put her to sleep, there hadn’t been enough time. She wasn’t smiling now, but she had been smiling then. At least there was that.
He creaked like an old door when he sat down and became conflicted over whether he wanted to imagine how she would have made fun of him or not. Skulduggery held the guitar so tightly he thought he would break it - and he couldn’t do that, he’d only brought the one. He strummed his thumb down on the strings, looked back up for a reaction. There wasn’t one, naturally. So he played on - songs he would have played for her if things were different, music she used to play in the car, old tunes from memory.
Skulduggery went on to spend more time in there with her than anywhere else. The silence there was the true comfortable silence, and it didn’t hurt to be away from her. He took long strides again and talked to himself, meditated deeply and dreamed vividly, finally tried his hand at writing and halted very shortly afterwards. He stopped pretending he didn’t have access to modern technology and had to live in complete isolation, and answered one of Ghastly’s calls.
It must have been two years later when one day Skulduggery got a song stuck in his head, one he had only heard once before, not even the entire thing - and yet from what he was hearing he could tell he was not hearing it as it was meant to be heard. He hummed it without being aware of it. He held his guitar for forty minutes and tried to play it. He tried to meditate to escape it, which had been a mistake. It swirled around him and Skulduggery was weightless, floating in a great black expanse, and heard the song louder, much more clearly.
The singer was mumbling half the words and not very good. Skulduggery felt like he could turn, so he did, but even now that he was looking at her Darquesse kept going. She was looking off to the right before her gaze drifted over to him. The moment she saw him a huge grin spread out over her face, impeding her singing further, and she interrupted herself with her own laughter, turning fully to him. The black expanse moved with her hair in an incomprehensible but undeniable way.
“Don’t look at me like that,” said Darquesse. “We can’t all have the voice of an angel.”
Everything warped and Skulduggery snapped back into consciousness. He scrambled to his feet and threw himself at the Cube. Darquesse had gone unhealthily pale and her brows had knitted to paint a picture of strain. Monitors to the side of the room were chirping for Skulduggery’s attention. Darquesse had suddenly become drained of energy, energy that should have been completely dormant and unaccessible - yet somehow over the last eight months she had squared away enough, just enough, to very poorly sing at him for an hour and a half.
Skulduggery should have called someone. Anyone. He looked for her song online instead.