Chapter Text
“When were you going to tell me?" Melanie asks. She addresses the back of Wilford's head as he stares into a roaring fire, the room heavy with heat and the cloying scent of pine. Joseph always loved Christmas, from the giving of gifts, to the throwing of parties, to the music and the decorations - he goes all-out, sparing no expense. This year is no exception, she can see, from the lights, to the tree, to the Christmas village, complete with electric train set.
Melanie watches a miniature version of Snowpiercer chug through puffs of cotton as she waits for an answer to her question. Her coat, scarf, gloves and boots form a breadcrumb trail from the door to where she stands now, numb and exhausted.
She's been on a plane for nineteen hours. Several planes, actually. From Giles research base, to Seoul, to Doha, to Chicago, all the while calling Wilford, over and over, filling his voicemail with desperate pleas as he stubbornly refused to answer. Just a text message: 'Not over the phone.'
"You won't even look at me?" she asks. "After everything. All the lies."
"I didn't lie," he retorts, turning just enough to catch her at the edge of his peripheral vision. He drapes an arm over the back of the sofa, a scotch-on-rocks dangling from his fingertips. The ice clinks as he swirls the drink with a droopy twitch of his wrist. He's drunk, she's certain. That's infuriating, or it should be, but she can't seem to conjure any emotion for him at all.
"I didn't lie," he repeats with more emphasis.
"You told me the model was stable."
"I told you not to worry. You disobeyed me, going to Australia."
"You falsified data. You destroyed evidence-"
"You make it sound like a crime's been committed, instead of what actually happened." He takes a long sip from the glass, pinky raised in the air. "Human stupidity, Mel. That's what's done us in. Government contractors. Some idiot dropping a negative, dividing by zero or god knows what."
Melanie can't hear him anymore, the roar of her dawning realization is so loud in her ears. Tears stream down her cheeks. It's now that she realizes, she didn't really believe it was happening. Not until he just confirmed it. Somewhere, deep down, she expected to come here, and for Joseph to laugh, and tell her she was wrong. That she made a mistake. That there was some kind of misunderstanding, and everything was going to be fine. Because every time she'd come to him in the past, no matter the problem - in her life, in her work, in the world - Joseph always said the same thing, everything's going to be fine.
But not this time. This is something even the great Mr. Wilford cannot fix.
He stands in front of her with a freshly made glass of scotch. His voice seems to come from very far away. “Drink this,” he says. Melanie barely catches the scent of the alcohol before she turns and runs to the bathroom, falls to her knees in front of the toilet, and heaves.