Work Text:
She’s dead they tell him, but the words don’t seem to form a sentence, don’t fit together in any sort of coherent pattern, or hold any meaning. Words don’t sit in the pit of his stomach, a sadness that gnaws away at all his internal organs until they’re nothing but dust; pictures, sensations, those are real. He held Zoe as the life crept out of her, blood seeping into his clothes, the ache taking root inside of him and obliterating the final traces of the man he’d once been. He got to Justin even sooner, felt something like his ghost slipping away, weightless and free while John clung to what was solid, laid down on the pavement, unable to let go. Even Ian, shot by Alice to a soundtrack of John’s shouts of protest, was real, in front of John’s eyes, a clear ending to a story that had become a tragedy.
John saw, touched, felt them all, at the end. But all he has this time are words - dental records and prints and water on the lungs - and words could never be enough to kill Alice Morgan.
Is there someone I can call?
No he says, because there’s no one. He knows because he felt them go.
***
He dives back into it because it beats taking a dive off the cliff in his front yard. Or maybe it’s just easier, more familiar, routine. He still has the jacket and tie, the friends in the right places; he’s not sure what he’d need to take with him into the abyss. (He thought he might be ready for that, once, loading his revolver with a single bullet. But fate had ordained otherwise.)
He goes back to London where they won’t even take him to see her body. So he kidnaps his best lead and finds out what he knows. The diamonds, São Paulo, all of it fits. And yet, there’s a dreamlike quality to the whole investigation, as if John is moving through water, in slow motion at a high velocity. She’s dead, they told him, but the city’s heartbeat keeps on pounding, and he hasn’t had to wash out a bloodstain in ages.
There is love in the world, she told him, but those were just words, too. And words aren’t what’s real.
***
He sees Justin, sometimes, and that’s how he knows his own senses are suspect. But he doesn’t worry himself about it, long past having any need for that. He feels him near when he’s standing on a ledge, on the edge, the breeze blowing right through him. Boss, his voice calls out, and John never flinches. Sometimes, he thinks Justin is going to lecture him, tell him that he can’t go with Alice, he needs to go back to work; or that by no means should he ever go back, for the sake of what’s left of his sanity. But he only ever speaks to John like it’s just another day at work, catching his partner up on the roof, staring at the ground. They talk about the weather, about God, about Alice and Zoe and Justin’s mum back in Cheshire, and then he’s gone again. A cloud drifts in front of the sun, or a bird passes by, and the spell is broken. But John knows he’s never gone far.
He feels her, too, but not in the same way. She is out there, her body somewhere in Europe or South America, but her strange heart never far from his own. She steals for him, kills for him, smiles secretly in another man’s bed for him, things he never asked for, but he never asked her to stop. This is their way of being together, a dance designed for two. The song still hasn’t ended; he’d have felt it if it had. She’ll pop round any day now, he knows, with two new passports and a cartoon sack of money, bloodstained teeth and fire in her eyes. No sea could ever quench those flames.
***
At first, he thought Alice was the black hole, evil at its most pure. But in the end, it was John who sucked in and destroyed everything around him. Zoe, Ian, Justin. Alice, or not.
He keeps Mary’s letters, the ones that keep on coming long after he’s stopped writing back. He still replies to Jenny’s emails, though, about her new job and the people she meets. Just let me know you’re alive, okay? she asks him, but Mary knows better, and doesn’t push.
Others have slipped through the cracks entirely. Mark’s moved on with his life. Teller’s division is thriving. Gray got a new job somewhere outside of London, he hears, but she never liked him. She trusted Justin, though, and they had that in common. So he spares her a thought from time to time. (Marwood put his bullets into all of them, yet John is still standing. It seems unfair that Justin alone is gone.)
The more he fights it, the more he destroys. So he buys a house at the top of a cliff and waits to be swallowed by the sea. He waits to be nothing but matter.
***
Hell is real, and no one knows it better than John Luther. He knows she’s there, too, behind and beside and all around him; she always has been, even before she killed her parents. Yin and yang, after all.
Megan tells lies, but lies are only words, too. Megan’s lies don’t kill Alice any more than DCI Bloom’s words of sympathy did, and they roll off Luther’s back like rain. But Megan stares daggers and talks circles around the things she may or may not have done. So John sends Stacey Bell away, and then he lets Megan know, in no uncertain terms, that he is coming for her. She doesn’t flinch, and it reminds him of her. He’s not sure what to do with that.
He gives away the diamonds and with them, his last chance at a new life. How fitting that he would have shed his old skin, once, in this very spot, only to don it there once more. But there will be no more coffees, no phone calls; no São Paulo. There is Benny waiting for him back at the office, that worried look written across his features, never smoothed out by the stuff he used to smoke, anymore. There is Schenk, and DS Lane, and all of them wait for him to say the words that will solve the next case, bring the next killer in, carry them forward through another day.
But words are only symbols, like the jacket he peeled off his weary back and dropped into the water, or the pictures on the walls of Alice’s old apartment. John could be a symbol, too, but for what, he doesn’t know anymore.
***
Alice’s words do not make her. She is the sum of all of her parts, red hair and pale skin, brilliance and bloodlust. But her voice over the phone vibrates in his ear, not hollow platitudes, but a sensation. He feels her, now, and it’s just like every other time, except something that was off-kilter has finally slid back into place. Disbelieving and knowing are two different things, and John knows Alice better than he knows himself. She is the part of himself he could never face without her, and he is solid, once more, when he picks up the phone and hears her, staticky, but alive.
Meep meep.