Work Text:
the Panopticon falls. it falls and crumbles and cracks just as Jericho and there is dust everywhere, there’s dust in your hair and your mouth and you see flames licking around the ruins as the plan unfurls. you hear tape unspooling rapidly and you have done your job, you have saved this world and the man slumped against you is dead, the knife you plunged into his back slick and red.
you cradle him to you like a precious thing, not a once-a-monster, not a harbinger of Fear, and the world around you begins to crumple in on itself rapidly, the Horror that was holding it up, like Atlas to the Sky, now gone. blood seeps into the cuffs of your jumper and you know you should let go of him, but he’s anchored against you and you don’t know what will happen if you move except that you will scream even louder. you pray to a god you know has no room to exist to kill you, to let you go with him for fucks sake, you don’t want to do it without him where are you supposed to go what are you supposed to do?
your surroundings fold in and in and in and you can hear the tape unraveling faster, lightyears and kilometers and meters and inches to go before it stretches far enough to reach, far enough to save Them but suddenly it stops. everything stops then, stops being. but not you. and not him. he’s still warm to the touch but he won’t be for long, or maybe he will. does time exist here, in this place that is not a place that is not a void that is not occupied?
you lean against a wall that you cannot see and lay him down in your lap. you cannot bring yourself to take the knife out, so you lay his head against your chest. the handle of the knife presses against your stomach. this end should be blunt, but the guilt makes it cut just as sharp as the other. you rest his body on yours, face up, like he’s Looking at the stars. there are no stars, of course, but the sky? ceiling? up? isn’t black and empty, it’s just nothing. true nothingness. no color or absence of color, no shape or space without a shape, no light and no darkness. a full-empty in-between. it could be comforting. it is awful. you know he is not Looking at the not stars, you know he can’t even look. you brush his hair out of his face anyway.
you should be lost at sea without him, and you are, but it is so, so much worse. he’s not just off at the shops, he’s not out for a smoke he thinks you don’t notice, he’s not sleeping at his desk again. he is flush against your body but he is gone. you are entirely Without Him. the weight of it settles around your shoulders and you expect to feel the fog creeping in around you, but it can’t get to you here. it should be freeing. it is nauseating. you don’t know how to be alone without the cold, damp, sharp press of sea fog around you or what will come of you, if anything, in this strange pocket of space, but you do know one thing:
you are Martin Blackwood. and you are lonely again.