The Last Man's Dead
Summary: It was the chocolate. Always the chocolate. The chocolate and the songs. Coincidence did not exist. Not in the Party.
Disclaimer: I don't own 1984.
It was the chocolate. Always the chocolate. The chocolate and the songs.
Winston had never been a lover of literature, but he had been a writer. A thoughtcrime inventor. An author of thoughts. A writer- a writer who wrote, and was that not all that mattered? Mechanical hand movements, words spilling over pages like the ink was his soul come alive. Black loops on thick, heavy paper.
They'd read it. He knew that.
The Ministry of Torture,
the Ministry of Lies,
There be the scorcher,
the killer of the wise.
The Ministry of Starvation,
the Ministry of War,
both leech the nation,
from within and afar.
And oh, may the bells
Of the Church ring again,
Then this country
Shall live again.
Strange. Only once he was no longer capable of writing it down, it drifted into his mind as if it had come into existence on its own. Slipping in and out of his mind, like a wet soap bar he kept wrestling to get a hold of.
He sighed, eyelids heavy. They would put him under again soon. Who knew how long it would take to wake up again.
Was he even awake at all?
''We shall meet in the place with no darkness,'' O'Brien had said. No bright future was meant. No, even back then, Winston should have known that even if paradise did exist, there would be darkness. Because darkness, in itself, was not bad. Nor was light, mind you. They were simply opposites. Continuous light would cease to mean a thing. If there was no darkness, then there was no light, for there would be no need to name light if there was no darkness. It would be the only thing in existence, after all.
War is Peace
So love is torture.
Ignorance is Strength
So truth must be a lie.
Freedom is Slavery
Because when freedom ceased to exist, slavery was all that was left.
The heaviness of his eyelids dragged him under. Slumber was fitful but deep.
He shot up with a start.
''For seven years, I have watched over you.''
''We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.''
O'Brien had known the words. Known the words that had dwelled only inside of Winston's mind for seven years- the exact number of years O'Brien had been watching him. A dream it had been, in which they had first been uttered, and hope they had given him like no other.
With gasping breath, lungs rattling inside his chest, he clutched the side of the bed.
How had he known?! Had the dream been a prophecy? Winston acknowledged that his death, his torture, had been a long time coming. But the phrase and the person who spoke it were both so specific- coincidence seemed impossible.
Coincidence did not exist. Not in the Party.
It had been a setup
His drink was waiting for him in the Chestnut Tree café, but Victory Square was even more crowded than usual, and Winston had been pushed against the buildings lining the square. It was fine- he had no desire to see the prisoners.
He had little desire for anything since the Ministry of Love.
Jostled to the side again, his knees buckled. Only just managing to catch himself against the wall, he stared dumbly at the stone before him. It was a carving of a little man. Fat, cheeks spilling everywhere, in possession of short, stubby legs and an impossibly broad chest.
It reminded him of Parsons.
Parsons. Even Parsons, the one who Winston had thought would live forever, would never be arrested, had been taken into custody. ''Down with Big Brother,'' he had chanted in his sleep. His own little girl listening at the keyhole and betraying him to the thought police.
At first, Winston had dismissed the thought. Parsons would never even think of saying such thing. The girl must've made it up.
But Winston himself had been set up. While he had no doubt there had been traitorous thoughts in his mind his whole life long, it had been his dream of O'Brien that had caused him to act, in the end. The dream had not been his own. He knew this with the kind of certainty that had long been lost in all other things. It had been fabricated by the Party. It had been planted in his brain. This had seemed impossible before, but he had also thought it impossible to read minds back then. The Party had done it. Even if they had not planted the seed of rebellion, then they had fed and watered it.
Even his betrayal had been directed by them as if he was a character in a play.
As his hand glid over the likeliness of Parsons, there was no doubt in his mind. They had done the same to Parsons. Parsons, who was so mindless, so loyal to the Party, that it was only his sleep that betrayed him in the end.
Had he believed it? Perhaps. It was one of those things Winston would never know.
But it was a setup. Had always been a setup. This was it. The entire elder generation, set up with traitorous thoughts one by one, even if just for the purpose of teaching the younger generation to sell them out. To betray everyone until the only thing dear to them was Big Brother.
Winston looked up, blinking to keep the tears from falling. The stone, the carving, belonged to the entrance of the Party Accomplishment Museum. Saint Martin's in the fields. The Church on the picture that had hidden the telescreen in Charrington's shop.
Julia had told him the line that accompanied it. ''You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's.'' They were taught to her by her grandfather, who was vaporized when she was eight. Taken to the ministry of Love, most likely.
Both her grandfather, Julia and Winston had learned the lines of the poem before the end. It could be a coincidence.
Coincidence did not exist.
Once the church rhyme was completed, the end was near.
''Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes the chopper to chop off your head.
Chip chop, chip chop- the last man's dead.''