Work Text:
Kim had once heard the pale described as unravelling.
He was quite young at the time, and it had delighted him. He hadn’t understood the horror of entropy. That meant nothing to a child.
But mothers did.
An enormous mother cradling the whole world in her hands, gently loosening threads that reached out to her from the cloth. All of creation beneath her loving hands, unweaving and tugging and setting it aside in a great pile, neat and tidy, ready to be knit into another pattern.
He held onto this image until the moment he saw the pale for the first time.
Unravelling.
Standing on a whistling cliffside and watching the world—no— existence disappear before him, he couldn’t bring himself to feel any warmth in it.
He watched a tree peel away from reality, rings exposed like a journal at a crime scene.
He watched a radio station blink into the sky, its defunct frequency flooding with ghosts in its last moments.
He watched as a home fell apart straight to its foundations; the wood, stone, and steel carding away while the memories inside persisted.
Not for long. Just long enough.
The picture frames and the hearth—the pots and the swing—all of it unravelled, too. Eventually.
No one left to cling to. No one left to remember.
At the time, he’d been terrified. Had wanted to run; whether to or from, he couldn’t decide.
Couldn’t begin to decide until he met Harry.
Harry, who jogged through Martinaise like a man dragged along by an invisible rope around his neck that would strangle him if he ever slowed down long enough to rest.
Harry, who picked at every thread of a person until they came apart—even himself.
Kim fell into a fascination as Harry spent those days by the seaside collecting everything around him—clothes, trinkets, ideas—until he realised that he was rebuilding himself. Making something new.
He picked up thoughts like one would choose the patterns of a quilt—feeling the weight, holding it against the others to gauge if it made something cohesive. Something good.
Something beautiful.
And it was beautiful, if terrible at times. Like seeing the other side of the pale, where everything once cherished could become something new. Something with neither pain nor love. Only—the memories in the pale weren’t alive; weren’t partners and friends whose threads were still inextricably woven into the walls of someone else’s life.
Kim watched Harry patchwork himself together in that village. Watched him rediscover the memories—the lives he’d forgotten but still persisted—and loop them through the holes where others had been discarded. He watched as threads came loose inside of his own tightly-knit life, teased out by gentle, curious fingers.
He stood on the cliff again, facing the terror of unravelling, but unafraid.
The hands he shook on the coast held the warmth of potential.
His threads knotted together with theirs.
And as he looked into the future, he could only hope that whatever picture they made together would be beautiful, too.
