A/N: A genfic that resulted after watching "Shonin." I'm quickly learning to love this show. I'm a bit hesitant to post this, since writing for a new fandom is always a bit intimidating.
THE CYCLE OF SLEEP
Humanity's greatest enemy is Time. We have spend eons studying it, manipulating it, and finally, held onto the illusion of conquering it.
With the death of the pagan gods, we started to worship science til it finally became a religion unto itself. With each technological advance, we craved more. Our eyes were opened, and we crafted our own temples, our own houses of worship.
Time and Death.
They are the last of the gods we feared.
The world creeps in our bones, the porous marrow expands and contracts in our measurement of time. We count in increments: minutes, years, decades. But here, twenty-eight years is the exact length of a lifetime. It's the gestation of opportunity, a generation of exploration, and yet another wave of bodies to sacrifice for what we call the greater good.
They say – the scientists and the poets and even the philosophers – that true immortality is in the blood. There is literature about it, another measure of permanence, built upon the folklore of old. Like vampires. Like Bram Stoker's Dracula, or Le Fanu's Carmilla which predated it. The blood is the life.
The warriors, with their frozen, shell-shocked faces and restrained hearts, echo the cry.
The pages of the story overlap, and the cast of characters grow. Because this tale isn't about a single man who wants to change the fate of all people; it is about him and the journey, and the shoulders he bleeds upon.
James is a common name. Cole as well. James Cole is not the only time-traveller the world has to worry about.
"His vitals... It's as if...he's..."
"...Dying."
We are all a means to an end. Splintering the cage that holds our most basic instincts – survival, personal legacy – into forms we can relate to. The Man becomes the Child, the Doctor becomes a Mother, the Daughter becomes the Soul.
There is suffering behind the asylum walls of Philadelphia, a woman-child who speaks in riddles and overflows in emotion. An enigma. Her tears are collected by a soft-spoken woman with gentle, pink lips and ever-calm eyes. They are grey, like the swirl of time.
Olivia presses the corner of facial tissue against a rough cheek framed within a curtain of brown, dishevelled hair.
The tears transmute into a vial in the hand of Dr. Railly, bubbling lightly as the passion and the wonder of an impossible love manifests. It thrums the thread of her lifetime with the hesitant touch of a time-traveller. He has eyes that long for her.
A man with no childhood to be proud of, a man who did not keep faith in anything except her, except now – he disrupts her cage. James Cole braces his thin body against the metal bars and heaves – he bends the walls with deep, unspoken longing and intent – and walks in.
Because the thread of Fate is not a single strand of golden cotton, but a philharmonic orchestra of dancing water molecules. Human life that originated from the dark sea.
Each drop is a family; if not in blood, then in loyalty. Each glistening tear a person that encompasses infinite possibility. Bubbles swell, thinning the flow with pockets of empty air, and inside that space is a grey-haired woman coloured with deceit and genocide.
Katrina Jones, née Warner, burns the truth of the second mutation and thinks only of herself and the lost legacy that is her only daughter. The virus scorches the peeling walls of her morality, and marks her stomach black.
(Whitley leaves in the dark of night, taking his shattered hope with him. Shards of glass, fragments of bullets burrow into his brown skin, and the blood of his father pools thickly in his stomach, stinking. Patricide. Rotting.)
He thinks it is all over. He is wrong.
It is not over yet.
There are too many faces, too many dead men tell no tales, and in Chechnya 2015, Adam Wexler hates to become one of them. He has so much to give. But he is put to sleep, just as the virus threatens to put humanity to sleep. Wexler is one of the first, and that makes him important.
The disease spreads, gaining momentum as people are swept away all over the globe. Bodies of water do not hinder the spore, the seed of destruction, and a diminishing few struggle weakly to staunch the wound, pull back the tide and its continuous flow.
And at the centre of it all is a body. A decayed corpse of a mocking man, the pull of gravity that wants everyone to join him in the liquid abyss of his capsule-like containment cage. He hums vibrantly with sickness and malevolent vitality. He is dead, but very much alive. A malady to many, perhaps an answer to some.
He grins a skeletal smile, raises a bony hand that is the colour of off-white stone, and points at Cole. The personification of Death.
We are here, it says. We are the Army of the Twelve.
Humanity is wrong.
Scientists and soldiers try bank the crash of the waves with guns and ammo. Death of the many, the future to some. Literature cannot help them after the fires have burned, it is just paper after all.
Time cannot be stopped.