Title: Uncomfortable Chairs
Author: Winter M.
Rating: PG-13 (one cuss word)
Pairing: gen
Spoilers: NFA
Distribution: Want it? Just tell me where its going.
Summary: "Funny thing about black and white— you mix it together and you get gray. And it doesn't matter how much white you try and put back in, you're never gonna get anything but gray." Not every hero ends up in the same place.
A/N: Smooches to Britt for the beta. I am lost without you girl :)
I don't know what I expected. Sure people like to talk about tunnels and bright lights at the end but… no one really believes that. Not even people like us, people who have seen enough myth and fairytale in live pulsing flesh to doubt very little. I must have expected something though to be this disappointed. No, not disappointed, disconcerted. This is not the afterlife I had in mind, consciously or unconsciously.
It reminds me more of something out of that film, what was it—right, The Matrix. Like a large waiting room, millions of tiny television screens set into the wall, each displaying a different picture. Sort of rectangular but the edges are rounded and smooth. The walls curve when you look at them from the corner of your eye and they are a startling white that never becomes dirty.
At first glance, the chairs look extremely uncomfortable; first cousins to those wretched pieces of furniture you find in hospitals. Made from cracked grey plastic, oddly shaped and too knobbly to be comfortable. And, in truth, they are. Uncomfortable. After a year or so you get used to it though. It's either that or stand all the time. And even that's not so bad because after awhile you start to get a hang of how to sit so that they are slightly less uncomfortably.
The old timers that seem to have been here forever tell me I'm pretty decent at it.
I used to hear people talking about what it must be like after death all the time. To have happiness and a sense of peace, how wonderful it would be not to be waited down by the pressures of the world. No more stress or having to rush here and there all the time. Feeling as if you were being torn from one place to another, spread too thin over too much existence.
These people must have been talking about a different afterlife then this one. Actually, I can say with a certainty that they were. And it may have been the one they would eventually go to but it sure inst the one I ended up in.
Not completely surprising though, not really. Heaven and hell are just so black and white; they simply can't take some of us I figure. Or, if they would it's to a place nothing we did was quite bad enough to deserve that. Maybe the Catholics weren't so off when they created the idea of Purgatory. A place to review ones sins, except we cannot leave, we cannot cleanse ourselves of the sins. Only remember them.
And watch what comes of them.
I don't regret what I did. I regret that I had to die, sure, because everyone regrets dieing. Or those of us here. But I don't regret the final act, the decisions to do what I did. Because for once in my life I did something that was good and selfless and all those things Cordelia would have smiled upon me for.
I do regret the pain it caused them; of course I do. The little screens licker and change, back and forth, showing each of us pictures of those we left behind. What they are going through, what we left them in. it tore me up to see her watching that damn video, to watch her face crumple and the tears tracks to ruin her perfectly applied makeup. Runny mascara and blotchy red patches were never meant to take up residence on Cordelia Chase's face. I hate that I caused them.
Even years later, I regret that what I did still had the power to bring them out in her.
After awhile it became just too hard to watch them all the time. Watch them struggle through the daily dead-end job of keeping the clueless citizens of LA safe. Too hard to watch the vampire try to hold up the brunette mortal failing under the strain of a curse she was never meant to bear.
So, I'll admit I stopped watching them sometimes. For months on end even—because there is time here; we just never age or change ourselves.
It came as a surprise then to look up one day as a flood of new arrivals poured into out little white waiting room, look up to see that rigid English back. It must have happened while I wasn't looking because it had always seemed to me that their little bookman had been too straight and unerringly good to end up in a place like this. But he did.
I wasn't expecting him to notice me let alone appear to recognize me. Maybe from the video, maybe from some snapshot I don't remember having ever posed for. He doesn't seem too surprised by this place either.
When he speaks, the voice is a little too rough and I can't help but notice the newly appeared scar around his throat. It looks weather though.
"Lilah was always more right about things then was good for her."
Cocking an eyebrow I regard his blank face passively, waiting him for to elaborate. He doesn't but at least now I've got someone to share the uncomfortable chairs with.
END