Chapter Text
It was quiet hour. Rows of men and women sat unmoving in their unlit prisons, their eyes staring out into the hall that bridged between the two lines of cells. The light of the few sconces in the hall bounced off the yellows of their eyes, and for the case of the slackjawed, their yellow teeth. These were The Prisoners Who Stare. It was an unnerving hour for those who stood guard.
This quiet hour was a strange one, however. It was entirely quiet. This was because there were no guards. No guards shifting around tiredly or conversing, picking their nose in a silence so profound that you swore you could hear it. None of that. But before they would convene to discuss the strangeness of this matter, they had to serve the remainder of the hour of quiet to which they were honourbound, and so they sat, and they stared.
Thirty minutes later, an elderly voice crowed from its cage, a voice we will call Old Crow, "When'sa last time any'un saw a guard in 'ere? Isn't it Muffin Top's time t'day?"
"Yeah, I miss that guy, he's like an honorary member here," responded a voice that might've been feminine at one point until it'd been run through a cheese grater.
Muffin Top had a reputation in the prison for his ability to move entirely silently despite his large and stocky frame, and never spoke a word. In fact, no one actually knew his name because of this, but he had unwittingly, and perhaps unwillingly, earned the respect of The Prisoners Who Stare and become considered a part of their family. Thus, his apparent disappearance in particular was of deep concern.
A sob broke out from another cell, a child's sob. "I-is he d-d-dead?!" they wailed between choking on their tears.
"The first stage of grief is denial, stop crying and start denying!" a gruff voice retorted, but it wavered as though it were on the verge of joining the child in their throes of sorrow - if only to shed a single manly tear, of course.
"He is much too powerful to be felled so easily," said a voice that brimmed with authority, but had a posh accent so fake you could have bought it in a Lislo pawn shop.
There were murmurs of agreement, and someone who seemed to be wailing just for the hell of it, like that one lady in court always does when the guilty verdict comes down.
"Silence!" said Posh Voice. She probably wanted to continue, in grandiose form, but lost her opening.
"We been in silence the past hour ya twit, I'll be runnin' mah mouth if ah want!"
The prison broke into a chaos of noise.
And then the prison broke into a chaos of noise that was not a chaos of voices, but a deep rumbling in the earth that shook the very walls that confined them all. The sconces in the hall fell from their perches and flickered out, leaving darkness to rule over them.
There was a shock of calm in the hold when the rumbling stopped, barely a whisper to be heard.
"Just a small quake, eh," someone laughed, nervous, clearly trying to compensate for the pee that'd been let loose in their pants.
And then the noise came back with a force tenfold, roaring, horrible crashing and tearing as pieces of the stone walls and ceiling crumbled away to rubble, their fall sending tremors through the ground. Someone let out a massive fart in their terror before the room erupted in paniced screams.
The bars that held them captive were bending with a screech and collapsing, making gaps large enough for passage. The hall swarmed with frantic bodies desperate for escape, but it bottlenecked quickly and they squirmed against each other, trampling and tripping every which way.
"HALT!" a voice boomed, louder even than the destruction around them. It demanded attention. It was Posh Voice. Not one person moved, and it was then they seemed to realize that while the world they had known for years was crumbling around them, it was precisely crumbling only around them, on the outskirts of the horde they'd formed. Overhead the ceiling remained, despite having almost no pillars of support to hold its weight.
Posh Voice waded through the crowd like Moses parting the sea - well, if that'd been a thing that'd happened in this universe. She was an ancient, wrinkled old thing but had a voice that spoke of youth, magic, and someone with too much time on their hands.
"Follow me, and I will not let these stones fall upon you!" she boomed once more, not without a dramatic flourish. And so they did, and so she did protect them, not even a fleck of stone catching any one of their heads as they ascended the cracked and rubble ridden stairs leading from the dungeon. After maneouvring through a series of halls and what were once doorways, they were outside. Posh Voice turned to them and bowed, and the entire weight of the building they'd been in dissolved to dust behind them, pouring downward like some enormous hourglass of sand that had been shattered.
It was unspoken that, with such power, she could have long ago escaped prison, or quite frankly, demolished it, at any point. But it was also well known that many of The Prisoners Who Stared had committed petty crime in order to be readmitted to the prison immediately after their release. They had been there because they'd wanted to be. And now they'd had that refuge, their home, taken from them. Truly, it was tragic.
Alas, there was no time to mourn. The crowd spread out, eyes all asquint in the presence of the unfamiliar brilliance of sunlight as they looked about, sounds of distress echoing from one person to the next.
It wasn't just the prison that had been demolished, they saw. The entire city had been levelled.
----
The Prisoners Who Stared had been reduced to a headless chicken made up of more than fifty men and women. Some had gone to examine the rubble of the buildings around them, and the lack of bodies there was both relieving and eerie. What they'd remembered once as a bustling city square appeared a ghost town. Some of them, as though their brains had short-circuited and knew not what else to do, were sweeping dirt off the sides of the cobbled roads in typical peasant fashion, using their feet in lieu of broomsticks. Posh Voice showed no signs of resuming her leadership after the display that had apparently been both her finale and magnus opus of theatrical fame, whisking herself off to a younger woman's arm for support as she griped about the aches in her bones.
They'd never really had any semblance of leadership in their fold. As some sort of cohesive unit of equals, a hivemind, they had stared; they had played card games with imaginary cards and incessantly yelled accusations of cheatery over those games; they had pondered the intricacies of life, such as why dogs and cats and the like had tails and they didn't, the closeted furries among them silently seething in envy all the while.
There was never a need for authority of any kind, until this point. And it was strange, being able to touch and to see each other clear in the light. Most of them weren't much of a pretty sight, but they were family. They would stay together until the end, probably accomplishing nothing in the process, but it was the journey and the friendship that mattered most.
"What are we gonna do!?" It was the voice of the child that had been wailing earlier. Now visible, he looked to be a boy not even edging on teen years. It did give cause to wonder how someone so young managed to land in prison. He looked like he would break into tears at any moment.
"We have to pool our skills together to rebuild civilization," said a man barely past boyhood, plump and peach fuzzed.
"I was an accountant," someone offered.
"If you need a paper delivered, I'm your boy!" the Wailing Boy proclaimed.
No one else came to stand, either too busy pushing dirt or not paying mind at all.
"I don't think this is going to work," said Peach Fuzz.
Wailing Boy, true to his impromptu name, wailed, "We're all gonna die!"
No words of comfort came to the boy. The people resumed their indulgence in apathy, misery, and sweeping dirt.
"Wait, look at that!" someone called. Heads swiveled in the direction of the voice, where a wiry haired tall woman stood, and then they looked to where she was pointing.
"Eeh? I don' see nuthin'!" the Old Crow retorted.
A wave of murmering spread throughout them.
"Do you not see that house?" she yelled back, still pointing. "Right there, it's standing! It's still standing!"
Old Crow, with eyes older than sin that yearned for spectacles, said nothing more. But others, others were starting to see it too. It was a very small blot on the canvas of ruined land, miles away. They exclaimed in wonder and bewilderment, and already people were making their way forward in its direction. The rest of the crowd began to follow, and the Prisoners Who Stare marched under the bright afternoon light through a wasteland, with the one house left standing serving as the sun on their horizon to guide them.