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“Falling was originally just another name for flying.”
There is a sense of hopelessness that comes with a loss of reality. Then again, it is not a loss of reality at all – more the sensation of shattering through glass, being broken into the ‘real life’ you did not know was there.
Sunday did not know that ‘real life’ was there.
Of course, he knew it existed, but knowing of something is not the same as knowing it. You can look out of the window and see the stars and still see them as only pinpricks of light in the sky, hardly registering that they are suns burning light years and light years away. He has looked out of his glass cage many times, and he has tried to tell himself that is the same inside as it is out.
It is not.
Outside, there is a freshness he has never before registered. A sense of new and bold and he does not know how to handle it, does not know what to do when his wrists are still raw from being rubbed by handcuffs. How can he taste freedom with this sick feeling still in his stomach?
(How can he know life when he wishes more than anything, he was never born?)
Like blood on his tongue, all he can taste is something metallic and salty. A hint of sweetness, maybe: the flavour of nostalgia for something he never had. The flavour of childhood laughter and watching a bird try and try and try again before everything shattered on the paves below. Shattering like a memory. Shattering like his last thread of composure before everything snapped.
“Is darkness equal to daylight?”
The thing about fools is that they believe they are righteous, and that is what is foolish. Some semblance of superiority and importance can go a long way – especially when you are full of yourself and you believe the world is bright.
The world is not bright.
The world is some mockery of a clamour of fluorescent yellows and greens – the kind that burns your retinas in an attempt to stand out, be special, be anything other than the norm. To be anything other than a face in the crowd. Sunday cannot last much longer: at least, not when he is falling, with bitterness bubbling in his throat and threatening to spill past his lips, a plea to whatever god would listen to him now, if the Aeons were ever listening at all.
If the Aeons managed to care for any. If the Aeons’ existences themselves did not cause a sickening misery, a weight upon the cosmos like an anvil. There is nothing comforting about gods – about hopelessness, or about death? Perhaps. The Aeons are a different situation entirely, and always have been.
Sunday lets his eyes open slightly.
He has to peel his eyelashes apart with energy he does not have, blinking slowly at first and then rapidly; eyes focusing on the nothingness and the Penacony Grand Theatre far, far above him. Like a dream he almost grasped or a chance he almost had. The sky laughs at him. His lips part slowly, and a whisper of a wish escapes, but Penacony is not a place for personal wishes. No matter how much he tried. A deep-set ache settles in his bones – weighing him down in the vast, endless fall, although it does not seem to mean he falls any faster.
If anything, he falls slower, like letting go of a feather in the air and watching it drift slowly. However much he hates it, he has time to waste, watching and regretting and pinching himself, hoping this is a dream within a dream. Though in a paradise, why would this even be a possibility?
Perhaps he does not know the Astral Express, truly. They do not know him – even the heroes, the protagonists did not get his full life story. Who would? To whom would it be useful if he poured out his heart, begged for mercy – some futile, pleading sort of chance? Far above him, the stars blink with a petty innocence. He does not have the energy to spit and curse, and so he stares at them, wide-eyed, whilst plummeting towards the ground.
A parody of an ending. A round of applause for the villain, for the big bad – “Congratulations, Sunday Oak!” The cheers for when he drags his chains across the floor and begs for mercy and it is still not enough, and it will never be enough. Atonement is barely the start – the sickening words of people who should never have been here slandering him as if they had the right.
They, of course, had the right.
(They, of course, were in the right.)
Sunday has always been a forgiving person. Despite everything. The eyes of Order could not force him into being the kind of person who hurt others as amusement: the expectant gaze of a thousand audience members did not have a fraction of the will that he needed. He forgives them. He forgives the audience, and the players, and his sister, although she did not need to apologise in the first place.
For him, a thousand apologies will not cut the quota. Anyone could forgive him and it would not begin to start the words that he knows he deserves himself – the words that he tries to tell himself whilst falling fifty metres a second, feeling and knowing nothing but what fallacy of emotion that the Dreamscape shows him. He does not let himself cry – tears, right now, are not something he deserves nor something he thinks he could manage to create. His face scrunches up slightly and instantly every muscle in his body starts burning and aching, exhaustion and pain a constant siren, a constant reminder of his mistakes.
He is so tired. All he wishes – more than anything – is to close his eyes – let himself fall until he shatters like that godforsaken Charmony Dove against the ground. Bones beyond repair, figure unfixable, unable to form back into something that resembled a human. (Does Sunday count? Does he still receive the title of humanity? Is that still something he deserves?)
A feather drifts past him.
“Brother, the dream… is over.”