NIGHT OF THE COMET
By TB's LMC
Summary: Scott can't wake from the nightmare, even when he's asleep.
Note: Completely, utterly and totally my fault in every way, shape and form. In other words, unbeta'd.
Surely he had to be dreaming. Things like this didn't happen for real. Somewhere there'd be an answer if only he could run faster, harder, farther. Yes, through the maze of confusion, of darkened buildings that showed no evidence of ownership though he knew they were colorful, vibrant and there were families that dwelled within each. He vaguely remembered a girl and her dog, but it whispered away upon its own private zephyr and left him.
The world was dark, black and white, hdystopic. He teetered on the edge of sanity, sweat making rivers, joining into streams, pooling at the small of his back before soaking into the band of his white briefs. Barefoot, bare-chested, clean-shaven and every hair missing from his body except for the walnut-brown curls he could feel atop his head because he'd not had a haircut in far too long.
And yet he'd just had one last week, when he, Gordon and their father had made a trip to their favorite barber on the Gold Coast. Gold Coast, Gold Coast…of what? What coast of anywhere is lined in gold, anyway? He ran and ran, bare feet slapping wet pavement, but rain, no, not rain, not this sickening wetness creeping into the pores of his ankles, heels, dorsums, between his toes, making the soles of his feet burn.
At last, a cross-street! There would be people, surely, this wasn't a rescue, this wasn't Kansas, this wasn't…
Scott skidded to a halt in the middle of a four-way controlled intersection. The lights weren't lit. Pebbles flew from his heels as he fought the slickness of the blacktop to maintain his footing. Left, only more rows of homes and right, so many homes, he knew they were inhabited, these people, they had to be there, they couldn't be gone.
A bright flash from the heavens and he looked up. Lonely, alone, last human being standing, in the middle of a manmade street where Main bisected Cross and not even a breeze stirred yet piloerection mottled his skin in spite of there being no hairs to raise.
It blazed across the black starless sky with a tail that spoke of terror, of death, of victory slipping from his grasp. He had failed them all.
An involuntary gasp choked his throat. He leapt from bed as from the maw of a childhood monster, everything soaked from his briefs to his sheets. Scott darted to his ensuite bathroom, noting the three-day beard-shaped stubble on his face, the black and slightly curled hair plentifully layered on his chest. He ran his fingers through it briefly, needing to touch because oh, how his eyes played the cruelest of tricks, how they tortured him with their deception night after night after night.
Slowly he made his way to the sliding glass door at the outer edge of his bedroom suite. A fingerprint on the panel opened it quietly. He stepped across the threshold and looked down upon the craggy rocks of the cliff with which the villa and all the Tracy family's secrets had been so expertly intertwined. A dream, Jeff Tracy's dream, a nightmare, reality gone wrong, a future with no one but him and none of it thanks to Gordon's annual Halloween nightmare-a-thon four months ago.
Scott grabbed a towel he'd left hanging from his balcony railing the night before for the exact same reason, and mopped his forehead, his arms, swiped each armpit, pulled it behind him hand-to-hand, a seesaw of soft dark blue cotton across the expanse of his back. It dampened more than it had the night before, and as he neatly laid it over the railing in anticipation of the same occurrence tomorrow at the exact same time, he chanced a look above and froze mid-movement.
The sky was black.
There were no stars.
From behind him, in the beyond that stretched behind his field of vision over the villa's roof, it emerged. It was nothing more than a streak of white light as it sailed overhead and when he craned his neck to see its tail it was déjà vu all over again and he felt himself losing purchase and falling, falling, falling, blacking out, yet somehow still aware as he came to what felt like mere seconds later.
The pavement was wet beneath his feet. He felt small pebbles and tiny shards of glass embedded in his flesh as he slowly pushed his exhausted body up and up until at last he was standing, a lamppost with a light he knew would never shine again providing him with purchase and support. Hand palm-flat against its slick surface, he stared at the barber shop in front of him, the red, white and blue barber pole that hung askance from the small building within which there were two chairs and two barbers always on duty for a close shave or a cut or a trim. It was as though the pole were trying to run away and Scott instinctively knew that whatever was causing his neverending nightmare was somehow in there, where he'd watched his father and one of his brothers get their standard cuts from Robby and Seth while he chatted up the old regulars who hung around less for snips and more for quips.
The colors faded into memory though it was hard to remember even the faintest ones anymore, grays and blacks now shutting out even whites and turning his mind into the kind of five-dimensional thinking board that made him the best leader of International Rescue. Or it used to.
Up the steps he dragged his carcass, into the tiny shop once lively with smack talk and laughter.
It'd been years since their father had handed over the reins and feigned retirement so he could woo Lady Penelope properly. Years that Scott had run the entire show on the secretive side while John ran the very public family businesses that kept International Rescue funded. It was always a family affair, everything from their home to their businesses to their various private pursuits, but they were all getting older and in spite of Tin-Tin and Alan liking each other so much, not a single Tracy had headed to the altar or even come within sneezing distance of producing heirs. The family was getting older and older, and he'd known somehow in his gut, way deep down inside where fear was kept sealed tighter than the most impossible-to-open jar, that there was only one way any of it could end.
Hollow. Gray. Dismal.
No future here. There. Everywhere.
How long could this go on? How many times could he run through the same streets, always rubber-banding back to this place like it was the epicenter but refused to share the exact origin of its hell? He knew the floor was black and white checked, yet the visual eluded his senses. He touched a silver metal and red leather chair and it crumbled in his hand, dust coating his legs, feet, hairless, gone again like he'd run afoul of a dirty bomb.
There was no place he could turn to. He'd gone left and right. Straight ahead and behind. Every road led to the same intersection in this tiny place. Not one sound reached his ears that was not of his own making and so…alone. Again. He couldn't sit on the chairs. Feared sitting at all.
Except maybe the ground will open now and swallow him. Melt him. Erase him like the forgotten curves and lines of Kindergarten homework, mistakes made when A's and B's and C's eluded tiny fingers holding fat pencils. Mistakes made when man could not fight that which he would never be able to control.
In anger and frustration and feeling the empty ache of years and time and solitude, he helped the barber pole escape and though the jagged metal edge should have sliced his hand damn near off, it tore nothing, bruised nothing. Not that he could tell in the sickening, twisted red-green light he knew he shouldn't be able to see. Forbidden color like forbidden fruit like forbidden life.
The pole flew, clattered, shattered, destroyed.
Forbidden.
He forbade himself. They all did. They dedicated their lives to what? For what? Here in this place, no one left to save. The Rapture, a distant recollection from long-ago Sunday School stories meant to scare children into goodness? No, because none were left behind but him. A bomb, perhaps, a missile, razing this area in a way no one could come back from. Those would have been instant. Maybe even painless. For many this had been so, but for him it was so much worse. Oh, to have disappeared between thoughts as the rest had.
He stumbled down the four front steps of the Osgood Barber Shop, even as he mourned for the one he knew was still alive back on Tracy Island if only he could get back again. As he navigated his nightmare, Scott saw his flesh beginning to darken and allowed himself to sink in defeat upon the stoop.
He would just have to pass out again. That was all.
Surely he would come to any time now in his sweat-soaked sheets, safely ensconced in his private suite with Virgil on the other side of their interior shared door. He'd shuck off another pair of damp undies, toss them down the chute where they'd fall with a swishing sigh into the whites pile for automated laundering later.
Everything was automated. Man grown so comfortable, so used to everyday living. Today he would kill to do his own laundry by hand. Trade Air Force stories with his dad. Pull a child from the rubble of a building. The little things, even so little as the smell of coffee first thing in the morning, gone in a flash.
He'd shower. Shave. Maybe the klaxon would blare and he wouldn't have to check everyone's GPS transmitters from his father's – now his – desk in the Lounge just to be certain they were all still there. He knew they were.
He knew.
They weren't.
A dizzy spell and he teetered to his left. The black wrought iron railing disintegrated, his meager body weight still enough to carry him over the edge. How he hated the thorns of dead rose bushes.
Virgil keyed in the seldom-used override code to enter Scott's bedroom. Their suites were soundproofed, so it wasn't as though he'd heard him having nightmares or anything. It was just his Scott-sense, honed from years of working hand-in-hand like the well-oiled machine they'd been practically from the time he could walk.
Scott wasn't in his bed. The shower wasn't running. There. Out on the balcony, a shape. Virgil vaulted over the double king bed like an Olympic gymnast and reached his brother's body so fast he very nearly pitched himself over the railing before he managed to stop. He crouched, hairs rising on his arms as he took in Scott's sickly pallor and only then realized his own skin bore the same hue.
A strange flash of light above and there it was, the harbinger of doom, the one thing none of them could do anything about. The thing that had come. Gone. Kept coming, so long as Scott kept coming, so long as Virgil kept running in.
Scott was awake. So Virgil did the only thing he could in times like this: he lifted the dead weight of his eldest brother into his arms, put him back in bed and covered him with the thin maroon cotton sheet that always adorned it. He left the sliding glass door open. After all, it didn't matter. Scott always came back from being awake. He would again.
The comet streaked across the sky, an arc that was traitorously beautiful. He saw it in the distance as it disappeared into an invisible horizon. Alarms blared. He squeezed his eyes closed, unwilling to remember, but refusing to forget because he had to be here for Scott. Though everyone else had moved on to their next best destinies, the man for whom responsibility had become a leaden cloak of invisibility could not leave the place where they'd all lived, worked and played together as the family behind Tracy Corporation. The family behind International Rescue.
The family who hadn't been able to stop the one thing they had never seen coming.
A bright white light flashed on the horizon. Virgil sat down on the edge of the bed, rump against Scott's arm. Felt Scott's hand envelop his wrist and squeeze so hard he knew bones would break. Bowed forward, elbows on his knees, Scott's hand falling away in acquiescence. Virgil ran his hands through his hair then looked up. He had to watch it come, had to be there because Scott had never forgiven himself for not being there.
At least six hundred feet tall it came, the wall of water that crested on Gordon's bathyscaphe, crushing it, mowing down his and Kyrano's undersea farm and roaring forward. Even their advanced shielding had been unable to protect them from something that should never have come this close. The reality was that nothing, not even International Rescue, could've protected Tracy Island.
Nor most of the rest of the planet.
Virgil smiled as Scott sat up on the edge of the bed, eyes turned toward the ocean. They faced it together every night here, in the only place where he'd ever see his brother again. Their gazes locked. Scott whispered, "I'm sorry," the same two words his eternal mantra. Then, unexpectedly, "I'm weaker." Virgil nodded, sad but happy and then as it always did, the wall of impossibility engulfed their island.
Scott gasped awake. He looked at his sliding glass doors. The day was bright and sunny. He looked at the other side of his massive bed, where Virgil was faceplanted the wrong way around, snerfling with part of his upper body hanging off the foot of Scott's bed.
He wasn't going to get up. He was going to sit here and enjoy the sounds of being alive, while he still could. Closing his eyes, he listened to the snore. Listened to the roar. Woke up on the floor.
The barber pole hung askance. The landscape, grayer still. He hadn't much time left.
END