One moment, August is inching towards death in the backseat of a taxi-cab; the next he is somewhere else entirely. He blinked and the world was different.
The room is tiny and cramped, smokey with the smell of burning incense and lit softly by several soft yellow lamps. Darkly woven, gold-embroidered cloths are draped over the walls, and there is an eclectic but matching set of furniture: a spindly little coffee table and several small couches and chairs.
He takes all of this in stride, mostly because the woman who is currently smiling at him seems unsurprised that someone has just spontaneously burst into existence inside what he assumes is her room; he supposes that if she has not been caught unawares, then he should not react to this as some momentous event. He has, after all, seen stranger than this.
"Would you like a cup of tea?"
The woman is swathed in rich exotic clothing: deeply colored silks and some sort of gold-embroidered scarf. There is elegant silver jewelry adorning her neck, wrists, fingers; her tightly curled black hair is knotted at the base of her neck with a glittering jeweled clip. Her wide dark eyes sparkle at him and her lips curve into a pleasant smile as her slender coffee-colored fingers wrap around the handle of the teapot, transferring to sit carefully on a teatray on the spindly little table. She is elegant but not ostentatious; warm and welcoming and soft, but August senses something sharp in her, a hidden edge that he is very much aware of.
This much he knows: she is not human.
"You remind me of a courtesan I knew. Know. Will know." His eyes cloud over. "I get confused, sometimes."
"No doubt." She gestures to one of the couches. "Please, sit."
He does so reluctantly, perching on the edge of the seat cushion. There is something strange about all of this; he does not know how he got here or where he is. It is almost as if he fell out of awareness in one place and awakened into in another; and he still feels- what is this? what is this feeling? Anxious, nerve-wracked, quietly terrified. Some trace of emotion has carried over from the place he was before.
"The girl," he says with a start.
"The girl is safe," she says soothingly, then quirks her lips into a strange smile. "Both of them."
Of course. He had known she was safe when he had...died. Was that what had happened?
August feels very odd. More...something than he was before. Some part of him is dimmer and some part is brighter. As if he somehow exists more than he did before, but in a reality that is blurred around the edges.
"You picked an inopportune time for an ending, you know," she informs him. "You might have made Fate very...irritated. They say that there are whole patterns of events to be rewoven. You have changed what was meant to be."
"And so something else will be meant. It has happened before," he tells her quietly, although he is sure she already knows.
"Yes, but never in quite so...difficult circumstances." She sits down beside him and moves as if to reach for the teapot, but she hesitates and her hands flutter down to rest in her lap. There is...not anger, but something more desperate, more helpless, coloring her cheeks, as she opens her mouth to scold him half-heartedly. "By saving one girl, you have brought a world of hurt upon another."
He blanches. "I am...older than eternity but nowhere near as wise."
"The tea is weak," she says, seemingly ignoring his statement as she reaches for the teapot again, pouring it into two delicate cups. "And hot. Very hot. We might wait a moment."
"I am not sorry," he says, forcefully, and she looks at him critically. He says it again, softer, more subservient, but with the same weight of determination: "I am not sorry."
"No," she murmurs, "I don't suppose you are." Her gaze falls to the cups of tea, to the clouds of steam that are twisting and disappearing into the air.
"I am dead," he states, and she nods.
"Yes." And then: "In so much that an abomination like you can be dead. After so long, were you even alive?"
"No. At least, sometimes I did not think so. But- it was coming back to me," he confesses, quietly.
This gets her attention. Her eyes snap to his face, and she is lit by a sudden fervor. "How?"
"After...After the girl, the first time, I felt...more real. Like the self that had numbed and desensitized itself over all these millennia was coming back alive. My...my taste was coming back, I think. Not very, not so noticeably, but..." He trails off and looks up at her tentatively. "What will happen to her? The one...the one they say matters?"
"Much pain."
There might be guilt, if he were not himself; and he is beginining to suspect that he is not, because there is an uncomfortable lurching in his stomach. He can already feel the echoes of the future- or is it the past? who knows how long it took him to travel from one state of being to another- drifting back to him with the anguish of war, destruction. There is the thing he can empathize with most, hitting him in softer waves than he would expect: heartbreak.
"Stop that," she says mildly. "What belongs to Fate no longer belongs to you." He opens his eyes, although he hadn't been aware of closing them. "It hurts, doesn't it? What you feel. What you've done. But you're not sorry."
"What will happen-"
"I have heard rumors. I know nothing for certain; I am merely a gatekeeper, from one world to the next." At the look on his face, she sighs irritably. "Not the worlds you are familiar with, August. Even your kind must admit that only Fate knows all. And even She is feeling rather out of the loop these days."
Almost despite himself, he can feel his lips twitching in what he believes in an actual smile. How strange.
But the woman's face has grown stormy, her voice sharp and bitter. "I have heard rumors, that she will lose her war, that her world will be destroyed. Her mirror will-"
"It doesn't have to. It can be changed."
"I have heard...I have heard great things about this woman. It seems you share the sentiments," she says. "You could put the faith of the universes in her?"
"I..." He struggles for a moment, to feel the waves of the pastpresentfuture, the waves that have been slowly washing him away for all these years, but they are suddenly very faint. "I do not know." The words are strange in his mouth, and he repeats them, rolling them around on his tongue: "I do not know. I was simply..."
"My friend, I believe they call that praying," the woman says warmly. "And as of now, that's the only thing creatures as insignificant as you and I have left."
From somewhere outside the room, there is a clanging sound, accompanied by voices with heavy accents, and the woman heaves what seems an uncharacteristic sigh. "I think I need something stronger than tea."
"Where are we?" he asks.
"It would be too hard to explain." She gestures to the cups of tea. "Please, drink up. You have more journeys ahead of you."
August takes the cup gingerly, aware suddenly of the fact that the porcelain is hot. Hot, and he can feel it. He looks up with wonderment at the woman, but she is looking over her shoulder as the noises outside grow louder; he expects that he is to leave soon. Either way, he will drain all of the happiness out of this he can: it has been so long since he has been so very aware of heat. They never mention to you when you are born how thousands of years can deaden you, never tell you to enjoy it while it lasts; never tell you until it is too late.
He brings the cups to his lips and tilts it, bringing the scalding-hot liquid into his mouth and tasting, as the weak tea burns his tongue. The bergamot oil, the hint of vanilla.
The woman glances back at him with an almost rueful smile. "You may have forgotten this after all of this time, but every day is an adventure."
A/N: So I have not written fanfic in like, forever. But Fringe has been my incredibly unhealthy obsession for however long it's been on TV, and after several half-hearted attempts to write something for this fandom, I wound up writing this when I was supposed to be paying attention in class.
Also, apparently the gatekeeper for the afterlife is Inara from Firefly. Yeah. Don't know how that happened. XP