Work Text:
The difficult truth is this: Doctor Jonathan Ohnn is dead. No certificate is ever signed, no corpse is ever wrapped in velvet and sent six feet under, but he is dead nonetheless. The pale figure who crawls through his apartment window late at night and collapses on the wood floor is not the same man who used to watch cartoons on the tattered couch late at night over a cup of cheap microwave ramen. This is barely a man at all. An anomaly, maybe. A ghost. A shell. A white void of a person.
His exile from humanity is sinking in, piece by piece, his empty apartment suddenly a haunted house. He flips the switch, again and again, watching the lights turn on and off, on and off, on and off. Nothing is right. He keeps them off. No shoes to leave by the door. No scarf to hang on the rack. No glasses to leave on the nightstand. He hovers over the sink for a moment, feeling like he might throw up, but he doesn’t know how he can without a mouth or stomach. He avoids the mirror. He already knows. He doesn’t need a reminder. He sleeps on the floor, too afraid to touch the bed he made the morning previous, still frozen in time as he holds on to every last remnant of his life before, every last bit of proof that he was ever alive at all.
The sun rises in the morning and he hates it for moving on like nothing ever happened. He showers even though it doesn’t really make sense to him anymore. The routine feels good, familiar, even when his skin feels all wrong under the water. He sits in bed for some time after, wrapped in only a towel and no clothing, letting self hatred eat away at him like moths eat away holes in his favorite T-shirts. He doesn’t get hungry - no organs to satiate. He keeps the TV on but he has a hard time paying attention to anything. He’s alone. The sun starts to set and he hasn’t left his apartment once. Still alone, but now in the dark.
He hates that he’s a servant to destiny. He can’t recall anything he’s done to make him worthy of a punishment this harsh - he frequently forgot to recycle, but who didn’t? Sometimes he borrowed money and forgot to pay it back. Once he let Dr. Octavius fuck him in the back of her Honda Civic, even though he had explicit principles against love making in automobiles, so maybe it was that.
He misses her. On good days she let him call her Liv. Barely a day has scraped past and he misses her already. He always got the feeling that she saw him as more of a weird pet than an acquaintance, but still, she was the closest he could ever call to a friend. Without thinking about it, he finds himself already halfway out the door, draped in a coat and covered by a hat and as many scarfs as he can pile on, anything to hide himself under the dimming light of the evening.
Everyone stares. Or maybe they don’t, he isn’t really looking, but he can feel his entire body burning with shame, even in the dark. Brooklyn is vibrant at all hours of the day, dazzled with lights and laughter and people, and he feels unearthly walking among them. Liv’s apartment is just a few blocks down. He can’t get there fast enough. Every whisper, every quiet laugh catches his attention. He wants oblivion to swallow him whole. He wants to welcome a life of non-existence with open arms.
But fate deals him no back-hands between the time he leaves his apartment and reaches Liv’s, so he arrives at her doorstep in one piece, albeit one piece with more holes than swiss cheese or the plot of a Michael Bay movie. Liv would like that joke, if she wasn’t already laughing at his misfortune. Ducking to glance through the window, he sees her figure lounging on the couch, phone in hand. Smiling, all teeth and dimples and creases around the mouth. Her leg is propped up, bandaged neatly in a cast. She looks happy in the only way a woman who’s boss was arrested and science lab exploded can look happy.
His hand hovers over the doorbell, held hostage by hesitation, frozen by self-doubt. “Liv,” he whispers, and the words hang in the air and die without witness. He cannot think of anything else to say to her. He can see the next few minutes play out in his mind: she opens the door, she laughs, or maybe throws up at the mere sight of him, then shuts the door in his face. Why open himself up to the opportunity to be laughed at again? Fate deals him bad hand after bad hand and he keeps trying to play anyways.
Liv will be happier without knowing a freak stands on her doorstep and waits for her, all alone in a black coat. He lingers for just another moment, imagines an alternate scenario in which Liv answers the door and wraps him in her arms and whispers sweetly into the crook of his neck, then finds this implausible. Perhaps in some other universe he is brave enough to test his luck. This is not that universe. Dignity hanging on by a thread, he leaves without ringing the doorbell.
His apartment seems even emptier than before when he gets back. Taunted by glimpses of his own pallid reflection, he drapes a coat over every mirror in the house until he can only see himself in the glassy surface of a picture frame, which holds a photograph of him and Olivia, pre-collider, side by side, both smiling. Most likely she will forget him one day, except when she whispers his name as a cautionary tale to aspiring scientists, "don’t fuck with the collider room unless you want to end up like Johnny," but she won’t remember his face. Nobody will. Not even him.