Title: A last goodbye
Prompt: Prompt 3—Not my concern
Character/Pairing: Lacie, Glen (Revis), Oswald, Jack
A/N: Lacie is hard to write. :/
Summary: Her brother, she knew, would never forgive himself for this.
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"They can't see it, can they?" Lacie asked, clutching her brother's hand. He tightened his grip on her, forever the older brother, and nodded.
"Too bad." She reached out to touch a glowing ball, softly giggling at the feeling. Hers was a world of gold, of light strung up like pearls.
A world that was not one but two and it was so easily to slip between the two. To merge them and see the new beauty it created. Her world was always full.
"I guess we have this all to ourselves."
-x-
"So are you ready to go?" Glen asked, still somehow looking infuriately smug despite the bandages that wrapped him head to toe.
Or maybe she shouldn't be calling him Glen. Her brother was now Glen in all but possession of that last gate.
"As much as I can," she replied. Looking out the window, she could see the tree Jack liked to lurk under when he was waiting for her or Oswald.
She'd never see him under it again. Never hear him tinker on his favourite clock nor sing in that slightly off-tone manner.
Lacie turned away, unsettled.
"I see the puppy is gone," Glen commented, coming up to stand behind her. Leaning down, he rested his right hand on her belly. She suppressed a shiver, used to his forced intimacy but disliking it all the same. "How's the experiment?"
"If it worked, you'll find out soon enough," she answered coolly. She removed his hand, replacing it with her own. She couldn't feel a bump, not yet. Maybe she wasn't pregnant.
Maybe the core would remain alone.
"I might not be able to," he sighed, his body creaking with every movement. Even with the wrappings, his body was crumbling too fast, and she felt a perverse pleasure at the thought.
"Neither will I."
Distantly, she could hear Oswald playing the piano somewhere nearby, an old tune he had made for her birthday.
It sounded hollow without her lyrics.
-x-
"I'll miss you," her brother said, confessed. The night was dark but for the moonlight, his body started to blend in with the shadows.
If she paid attention to the faint lights, she could make out every crevice in his skin, every tremble in his hand. His eyes were always the most expressive part of him but in night she could read his actions like book. If she paid attention.
She didn't and let the shadows claim Oswald.
"Missing," Lacie mused, holding her brother loosely. Loneliness. She could taste her brother's sorrow, feel her own mortality with every breath. Each clock tick was a second she no longer had.
How strange it was, to have a time limit, to know the exact hour, the exact second of her death. To know by whose hand it was and to be holding them now.
(To know whose voices she'd never hear again, to know they'd never hear her voice again.)
For once, she was glad for the dark, for how it hid her.
She had never expected to feel like this, not with all her preparation. Her brother's tune played through her head again, winding down like one of Jack's boxes.
Her grip tightened on her brother's body, and this too was an ending. "I think I understand now."
-x-
They slept together often as children, their warmth the only thing keeping them alive.
She let him hold on to her again, these last few nights. In the quiet of the night, she watched him sleep and traced his face.
Just how will it change, when she was gone? Her brother had always been a stoic one, more out of denseness and confusion than anything else. Her fingers followed the contours of his eyes, the rise of his cheekbones.
The smooth planes of his forehead. These were all so familiar and she couldn't picture them as anything else.
Maybe he'd be more closed off. Maybe Jack—her breathe caught a little at the thought, at the man. At the strangeness of him. Maybe Jack could help her brother.
Maybe her brother could help Jack.
(She feared nothing could.)
-x-
"Are you sure you don't want to see him?" These were more words than Oswald usually put together and she shook her head, smiling.
"It's fine."
He looked particularly put out by this, frowning. Maybe he was hoping she'd run away.
She would have agreed but for the core.
"It's tomorrow, right?" she asked, already knowing the answer. He didn't say anything and she watched him in silence. His shoulders hunched over slightly, as though he was protecting himself.
"Oswald."
"What?"
"It's the last day you'll be going by that name, isn't it?" Already some of the Baskervilles were calling him Glen.
He gave her a sad smile. "It'll die with your name, then."
-x-
Glen—because he was Glen now, wasn't he? Glen's eyes were full of something. Regret. Sorrow.
Hesitation.
Lacie resisted the urge to reach up and console him, to touch him a last time. This was the last time he would be Oswald, the last time she was Lacie.
She had no such regrets, the core—she knew the core might be helped this way.
But he would never know this. Oswald would never be able to understand or agree and he was still waiting for her to tell him to stop.
To tell him to let her escape.
"Get on with it," she urged, and she gave him no such reprieve.
Her brother, she knew, would never forgive himself for this.
It was fine, she couldn't forgive herself either.