Work Text:
The phone in Alston’s Elsewhere keeps ringing.
It used to do that, sometimes, when it was his real life. People calling with invitations, or in crisis and counting on him, or worried they hadn’t heard back from him in days. He’d try to pick up sometimes. Wasn’t always in the right state for whatever was on the other end. Or he’d listen to the voicemails and swear he’d call them back, as soon as his head cleared up. Then he’d pour another drink and put off that possibility a little while longer.
They’re leaving voicemails now, too. That seems kinda weird. People shouldn’t be able to send messages to Elsewhere, he doesn’t think. He certainly couldn’t get through to Cedric when he was gone. Maybe the voicemails are just hallucinatory dreams like the rest of this. Alston has been pondering the logistics of Elsewhere occasionally; it’s as good a thing as any to turn around in his head while he sips his cocktails alone on his balcony. He kind of wants to pick up the phone or listen to a message. Get some more data about what this place is and how it works. But he’s more afraid than curious; whatever’s on the other end, it’ll tell him more than he wants to know about himself, just like the shape this place has taken for him.
A few... hours? days? pass before he feels ready to listen to a message. Time is fuzzier than usual here. The sun doesn’t rise and set in any particular pattern; most of the time it’s that early pre-dawn hour when the streets below are empty except for drunks like him and responsible people rising early to go to hard-labor jobs. Alston can’t keep track of time too well when he’s on a real bender to begin with anyway. He naps randomly, eats in sporadic bursts. Eventually, though, he hits an internal equilibrium of emotional state and intoxication that leaves him feeling ready to listen.
He isn’t ready.
He doesn’t start with Cedric’s message, which turns out to be a mistake, because he opens CV’s first, thinking, what kinda funny shit did this kid leave me? Instead he gets a horrific burst of sobs and nasal attempts at words in a voice he almost can’t recognize as CV’s. He has to listen to it three times, his gut wrenching with each repetition, to pick out the words and to fully understand what they mean.
York is dead.
Alston looks at the barrage of missed calls and messages from his teammates. The whole team. Except for York. And except for him.
He drank his way through his teammate’s fucking death and he didn’t even know it.
Alston ricochets back from Elsewhere into his own bed, snapping wide awake, suddenly and hideously dead sober and shaking violently. He’s freezing cold and sweating hard. His stomach roils, making him clench the sheets in his fists. A voice, young and reedy and gentle, whispers in his ear: You must change your life.