Work Text:
The Final Viewing
The scent of disinfectant and burnt plastic fills the waiting room, clinging to every corner and crevice of the space. The hum of surveillance drones drifts overhead — a silent reminder to behave. The walls are a slick, monotone grey — the floor a polished, uncomfortable steel.
Practical. Polished. Perfect.
The room is disgustingly clean, the smell of sanitiser pungent and taunting.
A screen flickers above the check-in desk, white text scrolls across a black background:
FINAL VIEWING CENTER 042
GRIEF IS SERVICE. SERVICE IS SACRIFICE.
He snorts despite himself, the sound a hollow, dry thing in the quiet. How poetic. Almost made you forget they were about to feed your loved ones into a furnace.
Arthur didn't sit. The line moves forward with the practical efficiency of a production line, the atmosphere is a dull one. The people waiting keep their heads down, eyes not meeting. The woman ahead of him scans her wristband, murmurs a name, and is ushered through the automated doors without so much as a nod.
Five minutes. No exceptions.
The doors automatically slide open with a subtle hum and she is gone.
It's his turn now.
He steps forward, holding out his arm. The scanner lets out a series of approving beeps as it reads the barcode imprinted into his wrist like a factory label.
"Thank you for your contribution," the machine-voice chirps. "Proceed to Chamber 3."
Contribution.
Right. Like Alasdair had contributed when the roof gave way at the factory and he'd suffocated under the rubble. Another 'Unprecedented Structural Failure'. Another twenty bodies to quietly fuel the Grid that began to stutter only a week prior. A convenient coincidence. How efficient.
He drags his feet like dead weight through the automatic door as a worker recites to him, indifferent and just as cold as the rest of this pathetic place.
“You get five minutes. No touching. No crying.”
Inside the chamber it is colder, freezing even. The lighting here is dim, artificial in a way that gives the room a clinical quality. The pungent scent of disinfectant stronger than ever, harassing his nostrils. It all leaves him feeling numb, like he isn't the one moving his limbs — like his brain matter has been replaced with a cold jelly, leaving his head blank.
In the centre of the room, illuminated by ivory light, is the transport pod — a hideously practical, bean-shaped thing. Its surface is flawless, engineered for smooth transit into the processing unit. Arthur genuinely hopes that by the time it's his turn to be processed they'd have redesigned those appalling things — who would possibly want to be processed in a large steel legume, of all things?
The lid is open, a body resting inside. Arthur finds himself facing a ghostly, unfamiliar face — pale, sickly and devoid of colour like a ghastly mushroom. His brother. His Alasdair.
He stands planting himself a safe distance away, looking over the terrain of him — the proud angles of his jaw. The sharp bridge of his nose. His lips, now pale and chapped, the colour of death. The faint blemishes that spoke of a time before, of rough work and necessary struggle. He doesn't move. He can't trust his hands not to reach out and feel him one last time. The constant hum of the surveillance drone hovering makes sure of that — he can see it in his peripheral vision, watching his every move silently, waiting for him to make a mistake.
He doesn't quite look like himself. Not really.
They had scrubbed him clean of everything that made him real.
The permanent grit under his nails was gone. His oil stained clothes, his favourite beat-up leather jacket, replaced with a pristine white cloth wrapped around his suspiciously clean figure. This isn't Alasdair. This is a cleaned specimen. Something they'd stripped of all its humanity and left blank. Gone was his gold chain, his lucky watch; confiscated during 'preparation'. To be recycled. And, perhaps, to ensure every physical trace of Alasdair's existence for Arthur was erased. They were unravelling his existence, thread by thread.
The ticking of the clock in his skull grew louder by the second.
Soon, the state-grey vans would pull up to their apartment. They would take Al's tools, his worn rugby shirt, the cracked, stained mug he drank his tea from — Arthur's entire world, to be logged, melted, shredded.
The jacket they took had a permanent smell of engine oil and a woody, sharp scent ingrained into the leather. A quiet echo of nights when Alasdair would finally come home, knuckles scraped raw and calloused from fixing machinery, humming an old tune under his breath.
He used to grow things.
Illegally, of course. Soil was rationed. Water was counted. But he did it anyway, smuggling seeds, stealing water rations, keeping a whole secret garden in the cracks,
"They can pave over the whole damn world, Artie," he’d said once, kneeling in the dirt, a sly grin on his lips, pink and alive. Sunlight hit his face through a tear in the clouds, lighting the copper of his hair, and the fierce, striking green of his eyes. With his solid, capable hands caked in stolen soil, he looked more content than Arthur had ever seen. "But they can't kill the want in things to grow." He'd continued, "Something always finds a way."
Arthur, younger, more cynical, had scoffed. "It's just a weed, Al..."
"Aye," Alasdair had smiled, a small, knowing thing. "The best things usually are."
Arthur hadn’t believed him then.
He believed him even less now.
The speakers chimed, a cruel, piercing sound. His signal.
The lid slid shut with a mechanical hiss, sealing the pale thing away.
Soon, he’d be fuel for the same streetlights that now shine brilliantly outside their apartment.
Arthur stumbles out of the place in a hazy daze, sorrow a vast, heavy thing weighing him down. But along with that comes a sense of... what is almost a sort of indifference.
Perhaps defeat?
As he numbly leaves behind the only warmth he’d felt in this world and all that came with it, he catches something in the corner of his eye — a wildflower. A bright blooming thing, impossibly bold, growing through the sharp cracks in the pavement.