Work Text:
The world was fire.
After escaping the destruction within the city and discovering fire’s new meaning, Montag was once again forced to face the flip side of their reality. Fire was destruction and warmth. It was a burning, hypocritical chemical reaction blazing with inconsistencies and mirrored meanings – just as life was. This left a ball of discomfort tight within Montag’s chest and throughout the few months that he, Granger, and the others had spent scrounging through the city to find any survivors – if that is truly what they were doing, Montag really didn’t know – he had learned to live with it. He kept the Book of Ecclesiastes in his mind and on his tongue as a form of comfort, taking on the persona of the book and shedding everything about his past life. The deaths of Clarisse, Beatty, and Mildred were far from his mind now. Even Faber, who now traveled with them, seemed to be a figure buried so far back in the misty confines of his mind that Montag sometimes had a hard time recalling the old man’s part in their scheme. When he tries, he smells the pungent sting of gasoline and the stale tartness of mothballs, feels the crisp pull of the river against his skin and the sway in his bones, but nothing more.
There were survivors in the city, though very few and far between the wreckage of skyscrapers and shopping malls filled with the broken shells of televisions, computer screens, parlor walls, and other seemingly immortal devices. Montag finds a sick sort of amusement in the realization that these ‘gods’ were no more indestructible than the fragile society itself. The people are stunned and filthy, but a small society has already sprung up within the sewers. These people are strange to Montag. They have just discovered themselves, no longer tainted with the glowing, iridescent images of flashing headlines of top models, dietary supplements, or the latest gadgets. They have time. Just as Faber had said. Time to think and reply and digest, to feel and see and sense. With minds full of advertisements and word vomit; they were slowly but surely beginning to learn how to piece together their own thoughts. Just as a child learns to place shapes into the corresponding openings, these men and women and even children were learning to form words formerly unknown to them on their dry, cracked lips and speaking them delicately like a foreign language they were terrified to insult.
Within the city there were whispers of a man with seared skin and bubbling eyes wrapped in bandages and preaching the words of books. He was described as a raving lunatic by some and as a prophet by others and Montag couldn’t help but feel a sense of curiosity. He knew that when he and Granger had found people worthy or willing to join their cause they would leave the city and never turn back and thought that perhaps this man could be one they were looking for. The description sent a shot through his heart and a cold chill down his spine, however. He thinks about meeting this man, this man now known to people as, “The Burned Man,” and tries to imagine what he’d look like under those bandages and without the singed flesh. He cannot help but shake the familiar image that comes to mind and he is confused at the conflicting feelings that come along with the face in his mind.
- - -
At night he dreams of flames and the feeling of hot, searing metal in his hands. He’s holding acidic, liquid power that blazes out with the slightest pull of a brass nozzle. His target is anything he wants, and he wants everything. Everything is set aflame, and in the flames he can see his reflection – a man with a soot-covered face and a blazing in his eyes. His teeth are gleaming white and behind him are the bodies he’s burned. Countless bodies. He’d never considered himself a murderer, only a problem solver. But, now…
He awakes screaming, his hands flying up to cover his ears as he hears countless whispers filtering through his mind and touching on all of the parts he’s tried to bury down with a shovel. Bury within the coal of his brain for it to be shoveled into his consciousness and burned with the rest of his useless thoughts. Away into oblivion they go, the ashes leaving nothing left to read or say, but he still cannot get the words from his mind, from his eyes. He hears them in the night and sees them scrawled on the back of his eyelids. He cannot hide from his past or his dreams as he ran from the Hound. The voices are clear. The voice, a single one with many octaves in Montag’s mind. This voice was almost everything for him once. He can still remember the words…
Life. The usual. The same. The love that wasn’t quite right, the dream that went sour, the sex that fell apart, the deaths that came swiftly to friends not deserving, the murder of someone or another, the insanity of someone close, the slow death of a mother, the abrupt suicide of a father… At the time, Montag hadn’t thought much of those words, but now he’d experienced them. Every single one, in some way or the other. Beatty had wanted to die. Who was the Burned Man?
- - -
The day before he, Granger, Faber and the others are set out to leave the ashes of the city behind them for good, Montag travels to the farthest edge of the underground tangle of sewer pipes and drains. The descent is a stench unlike any he had ever smelled before, and his mind is swept clean and pure by this rottenness. His eyes burn and his nostrils flare, but he presses on, desperate to know the truth. He can feel it, in his skin and in his bones, but he needs to see. The one who was burned… and just who had done the burning? Who held the flames? But, then again, who asked for it to happen? He reaches a large drainage chamber, the water from above still pouring down into the chasm below like cascades of putrid filth. The smell isn’t as harsh in here and the light misting creates an ethereal glow around where the sun filters in through the large windows up above. Montag concluded he must’ve walked far enough through the pipes to be in a water purifying plant outside of the city. In the center of the misty glow is a man covered in bandages, murmuring softly to himself with his head bent and his back turned to Montag. His bandaged hands are at his sides, loose and relaxed as he grasps at something that Montag cannot see. It is nothing, he realizes. The man grasps at nothing, for there is nothing physical left for him to grasp. No books or nozzles of flame – the two sides to the only coin of this man’s life. Montag walks further, the mist sweating trails of dirt and grime from his face the closer he gets. This place is clean and bright, he realizes, and as he makes out the words of the man he knows who it is almost immediately.
"Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account. And I saw something else under the sun: In the place of judgment—wickedness was there, in the place of justice—wickedness was there. I said to myself “God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed.” I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”
Montag drew in a breath and walked nearer, close enough now to see the wicked redness of the man’s skin beneath the vest that he wore and the bandages hidden beneath. His voice. Montag knew his voice.
“So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. For –“ Montag couldn’t take it anymore and announced his presence with a single utterance, finishing what this man had been reciting to himself. It was meaningful and appropriate in a place such as this, in times such as these, and in a circumstance so significantly horrifying that it couldn’t have possibly been real, couldn’t have possibly been more than a trope in one of the soap operas Mildred had adored so.
“- who can bring them to see what will happen after them?” Montag’s voice echoes quietly, almost lost by the roar of the water and the heaviness of his tongue. The man is quiet for a moment, and twists in a way that looks as if he is reliving the agony of his whole life when he turns to face Montag. His eyes are dark and glisten with the potential of a burning, fiery hatred, but those days are long over. There is a light inside, a light of a burning passion long forgotten and now lit back up and strengthened with a passage of time that no candle could ever have. Montag is faced once again with the duality of fire, and the duality of man.
“Montag… my old friend.” The man says at last, and if Montag listens close enough he can hear the tinge of a smile on the edges of that deep, rumbling voice. Montag cannot help but smile back, and he doesn’t know if the mist has gotten thicker or there are tears running down his cheeks. In a world where everything is lost but memory and language, it is nice to find a tangible, old friend.
“Beatty.”
- - -
They leave, then. A long talk of circumstance and understanding filling the void between them. There is no need for an apology and neither for forgiveness. The world has ended and only the shining light in front of them and the burning of the now matters. The past is the past, and it will only live through their words of old books, poems, and loved characters. Between the two men, there were quotes exchanged. Quotes of novels and poetry, of prose and passages and excerpts from the lives, memories, loves, and fears of all mankind. They enjoyed pulling apart the words like pearls on a string and piecing them back together into something magnificent, something that they could share. They had once been destroyers together, finding pleasure in ripping apart and leaving to rot, but now, they ripped apart in a new way.
Montag learned something astounding with every passing day. It seemed that with every negative word or idea, there was also a way to see the opposite. Funny, he thinks now, how a simple view can change the glass from being half empty to hall full, a life full of past sorrows to a future full of bright, burning beginnings. Beatty laughs at him as he voices these thoughts, the sound as warm and inviting as the simple barrel fire over which Montag had placed his hands when he’d first begun his life anew. Beatty explained that humanity had to learn that lesson of strength and experience over and over – it wasn’t a new discovery. Montag smiled and shook his head, feeling silly despite himself.
He was thrilled as he said the last words, thinking of Granger and the Phoenix and how maybe, just maybe, this was the true beginning of a new life. A vivid spark on a pile of tinder. He meant these words, truly, and for the first time he felt that there would never be a phrase he could speak so confidently, a phrase that would never change and never betray him, such as this one.
“There is nothing new under the sun.”