Work Text:
There is a street in London that No One lives in.
Once, the street held a looming tower, glowing eerie in a dark and destitute world. Floor upon floor upon floor stacked in uneven and haphazard layers, blinking eyes caked in cement, eye bags weighed with rubble as they had no eyelashes. Luminescent green filtered through the grotesque eyes, shining down on civilians crying in the streets, sheltering their eyes so no one could see their tears.
Now, the rubble has been swept away and neatly packaged into perfectly marketable homes, shiny “For Sale” signs hanging in the new apartment complex window. No One wants to spend their time there. People walk past daily, shuffling just slightly faster as they pass the cursed apartment complex as if they cannot stand to be in its presence. No One knows why.
If anyone bothers to step through the new, shiny glass doors into the modern, mid-century tower of cement floors, dizzyingly high ceilings and open door plans, they will be affronted with an assault of fog so thick it is suffocating. No One wants to leave. As any person chokes on the heavy, condensed air wrapping tendrils around their throat, their other senses might adjust and sharpen, in which case their first realization would be the cold chill seeping through their clothes, through their skin, stitching a frost onto their blood and freeze their very bones like a lake in the wintertime. The palpable cold will stain their fingertips. They will taste seawater if they attempt to open their mouth to speak, the gentle lulling of the fog and overwhelming pressure silencing them. No One is silent.
And then, they might hear a broken record kick up and begin, scratchy and distant in the nothingness beyond the fog.
You're coming back
And it's the end of the world
Anyone visiting will look around wildly, but only the fog would greet them. They attempt to soldier through the fog, blindly pawing at the space in front of them. Someone might stumble through the space, gently attempting to avoid each and every obstacle. As a person travels perilously through the wasteland, they might wonder what they are tumbling into. No One knows. As they descend deeper, that someone feels the cement yield into something softer under their feet, soft creaks of oak beginning to leak under shoes. The prickly smell of sand and seawater wafting through someone’s nose subsides slightly to lend space to inky pages, and string-thin pamphlets aging for centuries may touch their fingertips as they move through the new landscape.
We're starting over
And I love you darling
A person might realize that the fog has grown yet even more suffocating, and may hold their hand up to their face only to see that their hand cannot be seen. The unsuspecting person brings their hand closer and closer still, until they can feel the warmth of their breath on their palm yet they cannot see the limb. Their breath might pick up, eyes widen, before the fog shoves itself down their throat and nestles there. Their feet will feel heavy, as if the fog latches onto their feet and drags them down, crawling up their feet, ankles, shins with clawed hands.
And I am done, dear
Their eyes will threaten to close as someone gasps for breath absently, muddled brain a natural anesthesia as they fight the overwhelming cloud infiltrating their body. The edges of their eyes will start to dim, and they might only see fog. They might only feel fog. The muddiness would drown out the wood and the seawater and the ancient paper until there is only them. And they are alone.
And only then will they see No One.
You're in the house
And I am here in the car
'Cause I just need a quiet place
No One sits on a small, rickety chair any person would assume uncomfortable. He dons a filthy brown sweater, caked in sweat and mud and dust and rubble and blood. So much blood. Covering his chest and staining the place over his heart, so embedded in the fabric that it seems fundamental to his very body. No One might touch his round eyeglasses unconsciously, a habit from his human form, as wisps of brunette hair adorned with white move gently in a nonexistent breeze. His fingers will pass by his freckles before it rests in his lap, over a flurry of half-completed poems. Littered on the floor, inches upon inches of the same paper piles up to No One’s ankles. Languid cursive scrawls across each page, and ink half-dried when dropped to the ground runs like frozen waterfalls from one paper to another to another. And beside him, No One only has a desk with overfilling papers, still unmarred from the ink that sits atop a desk next to a picture of a man in glasses and dark, long hair and scars dotted across his face.
Where I can scream
How I love you
Should someone finally see No One, No One will look to them, at first with astonishment.
“Who are you?” He will ask, attempting to peer through the fog. A person will see No One reach out a calloused hand, still bathed in cracking, dry blood, and touch the man inside of the picture frame.
“Is this you?” No One asks curiously. The fog will clear and a person may look up at the large man ing in the chair.
“No,” he will sigh. “It isn’t.” Then the fog will return, and No One will leave you to die, peacefully, in the fog.
I want you
I want you .