You Wouldn't Know
If there is a future waiting for you, at some point in the short time you have left, it doesn't really show.
To be completely honest, you are not sure whether what you have even feels like a present. It is more of an eternal fight – a battle which crawls up to the smallest of things, from your very breath to the cans of loose drinks you down to stay alive.
It's not about the world. It really isn't. They told you, over end over, that the worst passed long ago, and the war raged most violently as you were fighting your personal fight. At the core of a wrecked planet, shielded and trapped, you ran through Aperture as your own private chessboard.
The idea, or part of it, is still devastating.
The point is simple, really. The point lies the healing process which takes place all around you. You have seen lost nuclei of a town sprout anew, a new dawn of running water and concrete – you have knit their wounds together, to watch their scars fade away in the growth.
If everything else can rise anew, why can't you?
And to think freedom was your motive. Well, it was – it still is. But when you poured your soul into your fatigued limbs, with the idea of an escape engraved in each of your nerves, it wasn't this you were bargaining for.
It was not the haunted silence you expected. Neither was the gamble you play at night, in the faint hope to fall asleep without echoes of acid in your nostrils. In the heat of the sun, under a sky so blue, you would have sworn you were through with running away.
How far you were from the truth, you did not want to know.
You got what you could, at any rate. You grabbed your own sliver of space with a fierce hunger. Yet, at the end of the day, your tattered bed still feels like a prison – it reminds you, with suffocating sheets, of what is going on.
There is no ignoring the pace of your chronic cough, nor the slow way it slithers up your throat. The times it bends you on your chest, making your rib cage vibrate in pain, have grown too frequent for your liking. Even so, what choice do you have?
The truth is, things are not fine. Every time you feel it, wondering when your brittle bones will finally crack under your weight, the concept becomes whole. You are ruined for life.
She is ruined for life, too. But you wouldn't know.
You drag your life on, inhabiting a crumbling body. You devote every inch of your energy to the struggle of holding it together. You are glued to yourself – where is the point in thinking of her?
She cannot suffer, not like you do. She can replace parts of herself at will. Just as the one body you have caves in, she is reborn every day.
You never focus on her mind. You cannot imagine how that, too, is free from rust and dirt – she must preserve her memories intact, condemned never to age.
Against her will, she tears herself apart. But that she suffers, newly wounded each day, how are you supposed to guess?
In the end, the whole matter is hidden from you both. Far from one another, you go on living your respective deaths in silence. To you, to the strained human being you are, focusing on yours is more than enough.
You would never suspect, after all. You would not know.
And if you did, in all likeliness, you would not care either.
Devastating post-game flashfic, heavily inspired by the song it shares a title with. In the slow years to come, a long silence stretches between the two. This is the other side.