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There was something unearthly about the Realm around them. Blue mist creeping around limbs like ghostly caresses, stealing into lungs and sucking breath away.
He didn’t recall how he’d wound up in this place, but with each passing moment he wished nothing more than to leave, haunting visages consuming him the longer he wandered.
Piles of bodies made up the strange apparition, almost like the discarded specimens in Kijuju, before the Fog had come for him.
At first they had seemed faceless and nameless, and then the wraiths began to become clearer to him.
Around one corner, Burton, but younger, far younger than he could recall ever knowing the man. Around another, Chris, but old, weathered, new lines in his face from wrinkling his brow, dressed in black. Propped nearby was the discarded corpse of a woman he couldn’t put a name to, and beyond that were more he couldn’t recognize. The same blue mist emitted from each hollow shell, dull eyes vaguely following him.
“Al…bert…Wesk…er…”
He ignored the hiss, keeping his gaze firmly forward as the monster’s claws reached for him, closing around nothing. A kafkaesque being from one of the books she’d so loved. How Alex had found her way here was beyond him, but she too had not lasted.
How long was he wandering these wastes? Days? Hours? Minutes, perhaps, dragged out like time was meaningless.
And it was, in the Entity’s playground.
Was this still the Entity’s?
Yes, he thought, surely this was. This was her dumping grounds.
A flash of red in the corner of his eyes and he turned, following it like a moth to the flame, seeking that which he knew.
But it wasn’t red, dulled as it was, and he turned away, unable to bring himself to look into the lifeless eyes. This was not his Meg, but it was a Meg, discarded from the Fog once she’d proven to be of no more use.
The longer he wandered the more he saw. Faces he knew, faces he thought he might if he had cared to look. Crumbled remnants that might have once been structures, rusted metal and broken glass. Leaning against a wall, Valentine, blonde as she had been once, under his command. Propped against a broken generator, a woman he somehow knew to be Meg’s mother. The same eyes, the same nose, the same hair, but older and haggard and dull-eyed gaze following him as he walked.
Birkin stared at him, both father and daughter, the latter accompanied by a redheaded man with an oddly familiar gaze. Icy blue lips shaping a word he dared not try to understand as he ventured further, seeking to put the ghosts behind him.
It was harder still when he stared, the specter moving with him when he stepped to one side, then the other. Soft mist emanating from its form, coat billowing in the wind. A gaze he knew to be hollow, shielded as it was, because there was no unhollow gaze here. Watching him, following him, mimicking his movements perfectly as though he were moving before a mirror.
He turned, and his double did as well. Another stood there, and as he turned, he was caged in by hollow-eyed doubles. Figures of his past, even. Younger, older, hard to know.
He was the one who had survived, and yet…how many had not?
How many had given in and caved under indeterminate periods of pure torment? How many had gone mad in this prison and become nothing more than taunting phantoms?
“Release me from this torment,” he hissed out, closing his eyes behind his sunglasses, turning away from the judging gaze, his double’s frown a match for his own. Black Kevlar and RPD blue. Shiny lenses specked with blood.
He was met with nothing but the howling wind and icy silence.
When he next turned, they were gone, as though there had been nothing there. Perhaps he was going mad; finally snapping after all these years.
He closed his eyes, shakily exhaling before he opened them.
And he was in the library, books scattered on the floor around him, half-reshelved.
He left them forgotten as he walked out, down the stairs, out the main hall, into the streets.
The farther he walked, the more the false city faded around him until it all but disappeared, the Entity unable or unwilling to supply him with the streets and buildings. He didn’t want them. False comforts to some, perhaps, as he’d found more than one of his former S.T.A.R.S. before on the steps lamenting. Valentine, most of all, but she was nowhere to be found today.
That was good. He didn’t want her to see him in his shame; did not want the opportunity for others to know he could experience such…dread? Fear? It was hard to know.
He didn’t do fear.
He finally came to a halt when he’d wandered through at least half a dozen realms and found himself back where he’d started.
Some kind of a sick joke, he thought, blinking. When he opened his eyes, momentarily, he saw blue — the building crumbled, half-standing and abandoned, vacant holes like a gaping maw, debris scattered around — and then it was pristine once more.
He kept walking, passing the RPD four more times before he stopped and collapsed on the steps.
This was madness. The definition of insanity.
He could bring himself to walk no longer.
Perhaps it was his plight that drew Meg Thomas to him. Maybe the Entity took pity and encouraged the runner to pass by.
Or maybe it was a sixth sense.
Or perhaps she’d come for another one of their trysts.
Likely the latter, he thought, because what other reason would she have? To “catch up” and commiserate on their shared hellscape? Meg was not one for that.
And they had seen one another so recently, it could be nothing else.
Or had it been some time ago? Time was difficult to tell.
He truly was going insane.
“You look like a wet cat,” Meg commented, stopping before him and flicking wet hair from her face. “Washing your clothes?”
“Leave me be,” he replied, refusing to even look up. It was completely undignified of him to lay on the ground like this, face pressed into cold, wet concrete, but the water slicked off his leather so easily and he was probably incapable of catching pneumonia, Fog or not.
Meg crouched before him, frowning as she tugged at his arm. “You can’t just stay here.”
“I most certainly can.”
“Someone will step on you,” she replied. “The Nemesis will step on you.”
“Good,” he muttered, closing his eyes. “Leave me to my fate, Meg Thomas.”
“I’m not leaving you to sulk out here,” she retorted, tugging again, and he was too bewildered by the sudden movement to resist as she flung one arm over her shoulders, the other around his waist. When she moved, he stumbled after her, before giving up and scowling as he was half-dragged up the steps.
She dropped him on the couch in the reception area. “God, you’re too heavy to take up those stairs. What the hell happened to you?”
“I wasn’t aware you could carry me,” he replied, instead.
“I dragged your sorry ass in here, I didn’t carry you,” she replied, plopping down beside him. “You looked — and don’t get mad at me — like a pathetic wet cat of a man.”
He grumbled under his breath, slouching on the couch. She sighed, tugging his trench coat off.
“Come on, you can’t stay in this. You’re drenched.”
“I can’t catch pneumonia, I’m beyond—”
“Beyond human sicknesses like the common cold, I know,” she huffed, rolling her eyes. “And even if you weren’t, we don’t get sick here. Unless you’ve been kissing the Plague, or something. But it can’t be comfortable.”
“What’s the point?” He retorted. “We live, we die. We come back and do it over again. I will spend the rest of my miserable existence in this hell like a rat in an endless maze, repeating the same tasks over and over until it finally drives me mad and I tear myself to shreds, only for it to start all over again ad infinitum. And when I’m finally worthless, I’ll be discarded.”
“You’re not worthless,” she replied, twisting to straddle his waist, struggling to get him to cooperate long enough to pull the stupid thing off him. “For fuck’s sake, Albert, get a hold of yourself.”
“What does it matter to you?” He hissed. “I’m just a distraction. Something to pass the time, make it less miserable until you tire of me.”
“Is that what I am to you?” She replied, voice low.
“Obviously,” he hissed. “Because at the end of the day, we have our roles.”
“Is that what you really think of me, Albert?” She asked, quiet. “Or is that what you think you should think?”
He huffed, eyes burning as he looked for something scathing and true that he could say to drive her away, to leave him in his misery.
He couldn’t find anything.
“That’s what I thought,” Meg replied, smoothing hair from his face. With that, she finally managed to remove the trench coat, throwing it over the back of the couch. At the exasperated expression on his face, she smoothed it out, laying it flat over the back with a roll of her eyes and a sarcastic, “Happy now?”
He was more cooperative when she helped him pull his boots off, and it was then that he was shaking. Cold, terrified, or distressed, it was impossible to know as she curled into his side, head resting above his heartbeat. His chin rested atop her head, arms hesitantly wrapping around her. His grip was crushing, as though he couldn’t bear the thought of letting go of her for even a moment.
Or letting anything — or anyone — take her from him.
She slowed her breathing, matching it to the rhythm of his heart as it began to slow, attuning to her own rhythm.
“Do you want to talk about it?” She asked finally, after the shaking had subsided and she could almost pretend like the events of earlier had never occurred.
“No,” he said, eyes half-lidded. “I do not.”
“Do you think you should?” She prompted.
“I think I simply…dislike the imminent future before me,” he replied. “As I always did, I always will. I do not like…losing control. I prefer to be the one in control over my own fate. And yet…”
“We’re at the whims of a psycho-sadistic god-like being?” Meg asked wryly.
He did not reply to that, exhaling softly against the top of her head.
“Do you wonder about your mother?” He asked quietly. “What became of her? Of any left behind? I did not spare a single thought for any of those I left in my own world, and yet, I wonder if it was my world that each of us came from, or if there are countless others alike. Surely, there must be, if there is a version of myself that has lived in a time I cannot recall.”
“Multiverse theorem, then?” Meg asked, humming softly as she closed her eyes, focusing on the rhythm of his heart. “I wonder if there’s a world outside here where I still found you. I bet there is.”
“I saw myself,” he said, quietly. “As I have been. As I never was. As I might have been. Faded, hollowed out versions. Nightmarish wraiths with my eyes, peering from the mists. Empty-eyed husks of those I once knew.”
“The Void,” Meg said, softly. “We call it the Void. The line between it and the rest of the Realm is…weaker, I think, during this time. Mikaela—”
“I don’t want theories or explanations,” he interrupted, exhaling slowly to try and save his voice from breaking or shaking. “I just…”
“It’s okay,” she replied, placing a hand over his own where he held her, fingers interlacing. “You don’t have to say anything.”
She pulled his hand away, lips touching his knuckles before she slid her legs over his own, curling into his lap to listen to the rhythm of his heart.