Work Text:
It was on his mind again.
Cardboard boxes were the easiest thing to find on Spamton's shopping list. Paint was harder, especially if he only wanted red, but he knew where to look to find scraps of it scattered around. He peeled open tubes and pots, scraping their last dregs out into a palette made from an empty pie tin, and stirred the colourful mess until shades of scarlet and vermillion and amaranth all blended together into a uniform crimson. There were never any brushes, but a rag tied to a stick worked better than his bare hands, and didn't leave him with a stain that stagnant water would take hours to wash out of white plastic. His precision suffered for it, but his precision was already long dead.
The first stroke splattered the box with tiny droplets of red that stood out like stars against the dirty beige canvas.
Spamton couldn't remember what had gotten that phrase stuck in a loop in his head this time. It could have been something specific; overhearing something that sounded like it too many times, too much pretentious talk, even just poetry. Spamton had never liked poetry. The line didn't rhyme, but it sounded like it was supposed to rhyme with something else.
The first pass of the outline was shaky, the paint layered unevenly and splashed outside the lines.
More likely, he'd been thinking about its subject. A TV show, a pen scrawling a signature on paper, a betrayal. There were a lot of things that made Spamton think about the Lord of Screens, although the phrase "Lord of Screens" shouldn't have been one of them. It was a completely, ridiculously, hilariously unfitting title, as long as you didn't know what it meant. Spamton knew what it meant, and he knew that the translation made it fit a lot better. A splinter peeled off the brush handle and stuck in the second ball-joint of one of his fingers.
Maybe he'd just been having a bad day. This was just what he needed to feel like himself again. Art therapy. Spamton had never done art therapy. It sounded like some feel-good crap therapists had invented to make people think they were fun. Maybe this was a version of it that actually worked.
It was funny, really. Not all that funny, but it was the funniest thing Spamton could think of. It was as if, when his life had twisted around and gone to hell, this one thing had gotten confused. All the good turned to bad, all the bad turned to worse, but this, these eight little words that had brought him so much grief, had played a starring role in destroying him - this was his new ray of hope. Anxiety had turned into anticipation. The constant refrain of "he's going to die" had soared into a major key. Spamton was going to get his revenge after all.
It was taking a while, though.
Maybe that was it. With the hyped-up blockbuster endlessly delayed, he was forced to deal with his impatience by watching the teaser trailer over and over again. Spamton painted the boxes red because he was bored.
As he finished the rectangular outline and painted the first few diagonal streaks, venturing down from the top right corner, he wondered how he'd end up finding out about it. Maybe he'd be dumpster diving behind an electronics store and hear some TV-hawking Darkners talking about it, or have a headline catch his eye when he pulled a pile of newspapers over his head to sleep. If there was some kind of big public announcement, even someone living in the garbage would be unlikely to miss it. If it happened live, that would be a big enough event that Spamton might find out within minutes.
Was it more likely to happen live, or off the air? Spamton couldn't really guess. The line he knew wasn't specific enough for that. It could be an assassination, a knife in the night in some dark corner backstage. Maybe it would be hours before anyone found the body. Maybe it would be days. Maybe-
Spamton's brush stopped moving.
When it happened... it could take a long time for Spamton to find out. Weeks. Months. Maybe longer, depending on how many people still cared about TV. And he wouldn't - he'd know in hindsight, but he couldn't - there was no way for him to -
When it happened. When it would happen. When it was going to happen? The moment when "he's going to die" would become "he's dead" was going to pass Spamton by no matter what, and no matter how long it took for him to catch up, in those minutes or hours or days or weeks or months or years - he'd only know how long the delay was when it ended, and for as long as he was in that limbo, he wouldn't know it. He'd be completely ignorant, just living his life, crawling through the alleys and the trash, doing everything he could to become Neo, painting boxes, with no idea that Tenna's already dead.
The brush slipped from his fingers, an arc of red smearing across the dark concrete, but then, Spamton dropped things all the time, casualties of his plastic puppet hands, unfamiliar at first and then just unsteady.
He'd painted an optical illusion. Tilt your head the right way, and the cube inverts, the lines curve, the colours flicker and dance, but the picture doesn't change. It was still a plain red rectangle with a diagonal line slicing it in half, painted crudely on the side of a large cardboard box.
From one angle, it was a threat, and from the other, it was an obituary.
Tenna could already be dead.
Tenna could already be dead, and that shouldn't have made a difference. Spamton already knew all of this. Tenna was already dead to him, ever since that one phone call and the dozens of unanswered calls that followed, since he'd talked Spamton into risking everything and then abandoned him the moment he stopped being useful. Tenna's impending doom was the one thing Spamton knew for sure he could look forward to, so the idea that Tenna's corpse could be lying completely lifeless somewhere right now shouldn't have made him feel like there wasn't any air in his body.
The painting warped, splitting in two and bending around itself in a blurry, disorienting pattern, as Spamton's head shattered.
Spamton screeched like an old modem as he lost cohesion. The glitches didn't even hurt anymore. They had at first - when he'd been thrown out of the mansion, half-mad and three-quarters-blind, with a brand new and horrifically stiff set of cheap plastic joints, they were as painful as they were terrifying - but either he'd built up some kind of resistance, or the pain had just faded into the background. Now, the feeling of conflicting sensations from dislocated pieces of his body, and the unnatural awareness of extra space between them, usually just made him feel sick. The sudden, overwhelming pain in his chest had nothing to do with his broken code.
One flickering hand reached out blindly for support, struck the painted box, and clipped through the thin cardboard. His shattered arm jumped through piece by piece, getting as far as the elbow before he pulled enough of himself together to yank it back to his side.
The image of Tenna stuck in his mind like a splinter. Something that might have been tears blurred his vision. A part of him noticed that, once both his eyes were pointed in the same direction again, the painting looked better like this, abstract enough to hide the dirt on the canvas.
He shouldn't be feeling this. Not after everything Tenna had put him through. He already knew it was all fake, all of it, all the time they'd spent together, everything they'd shared, the trust and the friendship and the love - he'd had his heart broken already! He shouldn't still be able to feel this much grief! Hadn't he wasted enough time, years ago, grieving in advance for someone who was just stringing him along? How difficult could it be to quit crying over a man he hated and just get on with his life?
How difficult could it be to just stop painting boxes?
This time, his hand didn't clip through. Hollow plastic was still stronger than flimsy cardboard, especially when it was already soaked through with wet paint. Spamton tore a hole into the box and kept going until the painting was just a pile of damp, dirty shreds on the ground.
It didn't make him feel any better. In the twilight of the trash zone, the dozens of boxes that Spamton had painted with Tenna's prophecy still stood, uncaring, staring apathetically with Tenna's broken, bloody face.