Work Text:
i.
Even with the deliberate gaping holes of information among the medicine-related texts in the house, it’s not like he’d ever needed much external evidence to know that his bouts of illness were manyfold worse than the brief colds that almost everyone else but Emma sometimes caught. That he might not have lived long enough to turn six, let alone eleven, if not for how undeniably skilled Mama was in all matters of childcare – though he hadn’t known enough to understand the depths behind her expression, back then.
ii.
Then he had known, sure as the certainty that’s exactly like a realisation except there’s nothing new about it: that he’d do anything, give anything, to fulfil Emma’s wish. Had carried that promise, that decision, in the impossible weight of an empty suitcase as he’d put one foot in front of the other, step after step after step after–
iii.
He hadn’t stopped, but there had also always been the possibility that Lambda would end him instead. Not unstoppable force nor immovable object – simply the steady paring away of momentum until there was nothing of him left. Especially after Smee had confirmed his suspicions, that the vast majority of tests and experiments at the facility were hardly so benign (if it could still be called that) as what had been done to him.
But in this he’d had the dubious boon of a reprieve. Whatever other data the Lambda scientists had received, it seemed to have also included his records of ill health, for they were always careful to the point of solicitousness, never pushing too far beyond what he’d demonstrated himself capable of the day before. Sometimes he wished they wouldn’t be; sometimes he hated how glad he was, that they were.
Even his pills had been buffered and adjusted compared to the doses that Vincent and everyone else had received. Merely half the maximum dose rather than ninety percent, hundred fifty, lethality in tidy white casings and Norman will feel bile rise at the back of his throat as he reads the experiment records, up in the room that is only an office the same way Grace Field had been a home.
Isabella had not been his mother, after all, but she’d kept him alive anyway.
iv.
And then there is this, now, the march of time and a siege of his own making. He sees the certainty reflected in all the faces around him as surely as he feels it himself – that this will be the end in truth.
The board is set, by his hand among others, and only the move of pieces will decide what ends, here.
He is not unaware of the impact that his loss (the loss of him, the piece, not the game he’s set) would have, both in strategy and morale, and there are contingencies to address that, as well. Personally he’d prefer not to enact them, at least not until they have certain victory in hand, but he has never been one to take chances. There is no guarantee that their forces won’t be overwhelmed despite his plans, that Zazie or Cislo or Barbara will be too slow to fend off a strike against him, by chance or otherwise.
Improbable, yes, but not impossible.
Neither is this: that he will succumb to this illness, will fail to stave off the creeping burn of weakness before their objective is achieved. All things equal he is certain that Vincent will be the first to realise the truth in that case, to deduce that he’s been suffering the same sickness as them but only hiding it better, unless –
v.
Unless, of course, Emma and Ray return in time to see him fall. Because they have always been able to read each other too well, after all, and more importantly: he is not infallible to either of them, not in the same way he is to Vincent and Barbara and everyone else.
But Ray is also deeply practical, and Emma has learnt to be even despite her innate kindness. So he knows that they will know, if not understand – that this has been inevitable all along, a path two years in the making with many ends different except in the fact that they all end.
Maybe, if he is lucky enough, weak enough, he’ll even be able to say some of it, I’m sorry and I’m glad that you’re here and I wish –
Because Emma had been right in this, too: he’s no god.
Gods don’t die, after all.