The end of the world. And a diner. And that just about wraps it up.
(Wolverine, Storm, Emma, Domino)
Thanks go out to Andraste and Timey, for beta'ing. Archival is my site, anyone who asks, and anyone who has prior permission. I own nothing. Absolutely nothing. There is no graphic imagery contained within, but it some might find it disturbing, in a vague sort of way.
*
With a Whimper
(1/1)
*
There is this:
Nothing.
Then there is black, mixed with nothing. Shadows and whispers that twine across the ground, nightmares that undulate from the spaces.
Between here and the end of the world, there is no light and no space and no sound, just a vast emptiness that is everything.
Here there is the edge of a faint glow. Just a notion of light. Some illumination so small that the difference between the black and the nothing can almost be seen. Gradually lighter, as the light chases away the dark and is eaten by the empty spots.
There is this:
A circle where the ground is almost solid. Faint illumination coming from a flickering neon sign. Shuttered windows on whitewashed walls that gleam and play tricks with the mind and dimensions. A single, long plate glass window through which warm light floats and hangs like a shield.
Through the dark and the emptiness, a single figure dances.
*
Black and white tile on the floor. Sometimes their patterns switch, subtly. Negativity, white and black flipping. Straight lines pulled slowly into spirals, broken into boxed patterns which slowly differentiate between one other. They mean a coming change, a changing time.
There are times he thinks they whisper to him. He can almost read their meaning. Emma, when she comes, can hear something in the white. Ororo sees warnings in the patterns of black.
Sometimes he forgets who's here with them now. Sometimes, he can't tell who was there before and who's still to come.
You'd think that at the end of the world, you'd know who was there with you, but there are times that Domino still steps over Cable's body in the hall.
*
He likes to watch movies in the dark.
Movies, each movie, every movie, is nothing more than a series of still frames. They're strung together and run so fast that the human eye can't keep up, can't separate one from another, so all they see is one continuous, moving stream.
He likes to watch movies in the dark because while the human eye can't keep up, his can. They're a stream of photo stills, with a pause between each one. The dark in between seems to wrap around him, mix with the night and the room and the stale air around him.
The frames are out of order. More on some days than others. They'll skip one and then come back to it later. Minute changes, mostly. One flipped for another. Just enough so that the stream is disrupted, so that the film runs choppy to normal eyes, so that the movement of the figures on the screen is jerky.
It keeps him guessing. It disturbs the dark between the frames, because he's always wondering which will be next. He can't lose himself in the dark between the bright flashes of each picture any more, because he can't stop wondering what the next one will bring. He's watched each movie a hundred times, a thousand times, and each time they run differently.
It started slowly, but the difference grows with time. Now, there are frames from the middle at the end, or the movie will start with the very last image from the tape.
He likes to watch movies in the dark with Ororo. Sometimes she rests her head on his shoulder, and in the blanks between the frames all he knows is the sound of her heartbeat and her breath against his skin. Sometimes, she's small and she sits in his lap. Hides her face against his shoulder when she's scared, her collar bones digging into his chest.
She doesn't have the spaces of dark like he does, and he's glad. For her, there's always the steady glow of the screen, and it keeps away the times when all she knows is the weight of a building and her parents' bodies pressed against her by plasterboard and wooden beams.
*
The end of the world. It was deja vu. Small things that you could have sworn you'd already done. People sinking deep into their own memories, refusing to respond to the real world.
Telepaths warning that there was something wrong. One after another after another. When they were taken seriously, they were examined, of course. You can't take a dire prediction without asking questions. And it wasn't unusual that the odd telepath had gone insane. It was even understandable that telepaths who had gone insane would start to spout fancies of Armageddon.
More and more of them. Maybe there was some sort of virus spread through telepathy. Contagious schizophrenia. There were too many people, and mind readers just couldn't handle it. Public fear. The world was ending, or the telepaths were spreading a disease. If they were just going insane, it was almost worse. You don't want people interfering in your head to start with, much less someone insane.
Then there were the null spots, where there was nothing. There was just nothing.
Nothing at all.
They were cracks at first, maybe. Pin prick holes in the surface of reality, hair fine lines that split what was solid. They grew, eating the world around them, feeding on what was true and real and there.
They called. They sang. There was a resonance that they put out, and it drew people. Maybe the telepaths heard it first, felt it coming, and it shattered the reality in their minds even as it did the earth itself. Maybe they were the figures, the slips dancing across the growing plains of nothingness, reaching with ghostly fingers to those that were called.
*
There's a body in the hall. Silver and red, bright against the tiles. The shutters on the windows are knocked open when it's there; with that one hole in his temple and the smell of gun smoke in the air; and the nothingness peers in at them.
It is nebulous and threatening and it whispers sweet nothings in Logan's ears. He watches as Domino comes down the stairs and steps over Cable's body in the landing. Her eyes are elsewhere, not in the manner of one looking anywhere but there, but like one numb to it, who has ceased to care.
She pauses when she draws even with Logan, who leans against the wall, head back as he listens to the dark singing. I'm sorry about the blood, she says.
It does no good to mop while he's here, because the blood and the body belong to another moment in time and they cannot change them. He takes his blood with him when he goes, leaving a faded stain that does not move over top of the shifting tiles.
I wouldn't have shot him if I'd known, she says.
It would be easier if he looked like he was sleeping. It would be easier without the blood and the little bit of grey that you always saw if you looked at his head.
It would be easier if he had died long before.
She steps past him again, and Logan notices that the patterns on the tiles break around the impact of each heel, and as she steps through the doorway, things seem to pause. She turns her head back to him as everything-
-There is a-
-She steps over the stain, and he sees the past. He sees it again, because it reaches for him, licks at him from the pool of Cable's blood that is not there any more
He sees this:
Eyes that dance with the dark. Hollow, dancing eyes that shift focus and mutter words without a voice.
Cable's silver hair, sharp against her skin. Hands around her throat, breath ragged against her cheek. There is a whine somewhere deep within his throat on the inhale, and a slithering, slimy noise upon exhalation.
She cannot breath.
The shutters behind her are shattered with the force of the blow that drove her back, and the darkness drifts chains around her. Black and white break beneath her feet, and she sees this:
She sees her death, there in the hall. Sees her lips and fingernails, blue with the lack of air. She sees her body, bruised and still, propped up against the wall. A purple ring, almost black against dead white skin. Her eyes empty, her head rolled at an unnatural angle. Her arms are spread wide, the backs of her hands to the tiles. She sees the way the dark plays off of the silver glinting at her side.
I'm sorry, she'd say, but there is no air left to her, and she thinks it may be mercy. So she mouths the words as she fights her gun free with numb fingers and presses it to his temple.
The patterns right themselves, and it is Logan and Domino, in the now. As much as now is anything. It is him and her and patched shutters and a stain on the dancing tiles. The memory of gun smoke and of blood splattered on her lips and eyelashes, staining her pale skin.
Cable used to ask her, in his brief moments of clarity, what was going on. She would never tell him. She'd say Nothing special.' Except for that it was the end of the world and they were all that was left, in this cursed changing diner, with the dark and the ghosts dancing outside the windows. There was no need for him to hear it in a space of sanity. The dark took all the telepaths. At least the first ones to go didn't know what was happening, didn't have to cling to their small shreds of sanity and watch their minds go.
Nate had burnt his mind out when he realized what was going on. Switched some small part of his telepathy over and used it to exterminate the rest. Destroyed too much of his mind, maybe, or maybe too much damage had been done before he did it.
Maybe better he had died long before, and maybe the dark knew it.
I'm sorry, she says. I wouldn't have shot him if I'd known it would leave such a stain.
And she steps through the doorway and into the next room, leaving Logan staring at the marks left on the floor by her lover's blood.
*
Ororo hums as she drifts through the room, taking care to ghost her fingers across the leaves of each precious plant. The sound soothes him as he wipes down the counter. There is no dust, there is never dust, but there is something in the motion that keeps him tied, keeps him centred, keeps him here. The soft swish of the rag helps to block out the whispers of the dark.
The tiles are black and white, stark. The green of the plants is urgent, heavy. The vinyl on the diner benches is black and shiny - it never seems to scuff, or tear, or stain, despite the time. It makes him wonder if this is all one giant, cosmic joke, and they are still trying to outlive a single moment. The table tops are just as immaculate, but he wipes them down anyway. Breaking down the minutes, however long they might be.
Domino helped them at the start, tried to organize things, but then she was too busy looking after Cable, and now she doesn't care. Sometimes Logan thinks that the dark has gone deeper in her than it ever did in him. If the light catches her eyes quickly, they are black, but then the dark hides away from the light and leaves them empty. It's a look he knows too well, and they've all lost too many people to it. That look that says that the dark has found some way inside of them, and is eating them from the inside out.
This is a refuge without protection. It is a place to stay where the nightmares don't strangle your steps. It is light without warmth, warmth without comfort. These things, whether you can hold or not, on all depend on you.
He fights the dark inside of himself because he can't just let go, and he won't let himself fade away.
He wipes the tables, and all he knows is the swish of the rag, and Ororo's humming. He's stopped paying attention to who sits at the tables, because he can never remember who's there now, with them, who's still to come, and who came before.
Logan knows he's slipping.
He glances up when he realizes that the humming is twinned now, two threads winding together, forming an intricate song with a meaning he cannot quite catch. The plate glass window stretches along the face of this front room, and throws out weak and fluttering light, mixing with flickering neon and casting some sort of illumination into the nothingness and darkness that surround them. He thinks that there's less of the nothing in the space around them than there used to be, but he cannot know; with the way now is then and what you see hasn't happened yet.
Out, in the distance among the swirling black and hints of ghosts, he sees a glint, but the night quickly swallows it. It comes again, closer this time. Distance and perception are even more unstable outside than in here, where the rooms change and tiles break and dimensions defy rational thought.
Closer again, and the humming is louder. A pale figure dances through the dark, somehow managing to find the spaces of solidity, though she herself seems to be missing pieces, where the dark clings to her.
Ororo's tune changes though she does not turn to look. The bell at the door peals and the pale figure drifts in. Diamond chimes as long hair swings. He looks at Emma, and he thinks that he can see some of the dark stuck within the faults and lines of her diamond form. She hums under her breath and drifts through the tables, pausing here and there to tap the head of an occupant. The ones she touches are the ones who are ghosts of the future, who haven't made there way here, yet.
Emma brings people to them, sometimes. She leads them to the faded circle of light and the white washed walls and leaves them on the shifting tiles. She brings the old and the young, the violent and the crazy, the would-be martyrs and the crippled heroes. She brings them all, without a thought as to if it would be kinder to let the nothing finish them off.
*
There is light, somewhere, and it dances behind his eyelids. He has been in the dark for so long that it scares him. He wants to run from it, but he cannot move. The final tear away from the nightmares, breaking the chains they wound around his ankles, has drained him.
He cannot see, but there is a picture in his mind. Himself, gaunt and pale, each movement slower as the dark reaches and twines and tears strips from his skin and soul. Eyes open, eyes closed, it does not matter, because he cannot see either way, but he does not like the thoughts of the strands winding their way into his eyes.
There is a hand on his shoulder that is not a part of this picture, and all he can think is that something out there has finally taken form to reach out and touch him. He is lying down, he realizes, and he feels the start of rising panicangerfear. The spinning is in his head because he hasn't been able to stop moving in a very long time. If you stop moving in the dark, it has you, and he almost does not remember the last space of real. He is not moving. He has to get moving.
Light hands dance across his body, leaving behind trails with a hiss. They keep him pressed to the floor and the panicdesperationfear is rising.
He'll be all right, someone says. He hears the words, but they do not make any sense. They are loud and they hurt his ears. They are jarring sounds without meaning.
You hope.
Of course. We can never stop hoping. That is all we can do.
He is hauled to his feet, and he despite the fear he forces his eyes to open. He cannot see anything but light and blurs, and they start to water. Three figures stand around him, and the ground is miraculous. It does not dip and weave with his weight, and there is white mixed with the black.
one whispers, and wipes the tears from his watering eyes. They are adjusting quickly, but it has been ever so long.
That is a word that almost makes sense to him.
it-he- (SHE) says again, and he sees blue and white and black and smiling. You are going to be all right.
He finds the meaning for these. He will try to be, for her.
*
First. Firstly, they would. At first, they could find things scattered about the diner. Wrinkled potatoes in the bread box in the kitchen. Things sitting on counters since the last time you blinked. Things lurking in corners with the wrong number of eyes and tails and arms and legs and fur, that bit when you grabbed for them, or stung. Stringy, bitter things that would fill your stomach if you could keep them down.
At first. Maybe, the heartbeats of more people were too loud, or the ghosts took up too much room. Maybe they just got sneakier. Maybe they just had more rooms to hide in.
Whatever it was, as more and more people found their way, they were less and less able to count on their environment. So Ororo coaxed tiny seeds found on the floor into life.
Logan thinks he sees how she was believed to be a goddess.
Crystal chiming all around, and he looks to see Emma standing there, with her head cocked to the side. Her hair dances, and he almost thinks that she was listening to his thoughts. He knows she wasn't but the set of her eyes and old prejudices make him uneasy.
He doesn't understand her at all. She's survived by living in diamond, where her telepathy doesn't work and the dark can't reach her mind. He thinks that maybe all that means is that it's found other ways to touch her.
She rarely speaks - as if without her telepathy, she has found another way that renders words callow. She hums under her breath as she moves, and never seems to stop dancing. She lives in the dark and comes dancing through the shadows to them when she will, bringing with her a seedling, a video, a child's toy, or some lost soul. Sometimes, she just sits on the counter and watches them all with hungry eyes.
It is then that he realizes that it is just the two of them. Ororo, the others, the ghosts of those-that-were and those-that-will-be, all are elsewhere, and the room seems dark.
You were gone, Emma says. Her voice is low and melodic, and at first he has a hard time picking it out from the singing of her hair. You were here but gone.
He nods. He's slipping, and he knows it. The dark is running through his system, and he doesn't know how much longer he can fight it.
You're gone still, she says, and a cold chill settles firmly into him.
I'm here, he says.
Yes. You're here. Here, not there. You're gone.
The room is cold.
No, it's not. It's the same.
But the plants are gone.
You are gone, and I am with you. The plants are where you left them.
He's cold.
It's too deep in you, you know. It's deeper in you than it is in Domino, and it's more rooted. It's sucking all of the warmth from you, and it wants more. It wants the rest. Through you, it knows this place. Through you, it creeps. With that, she turns away, and it is bright again. There are plants, harsh against the tiles and the counters, and there is a dull murmur of conversation.
Emma pulls a handful of seeds from somewhere (he did not blink but they are in her hands) and pours them from her cloudy, clear palms to Ororo's bright, dark ones.
He is still cold.
*
He sits and smokes, and bats away the nightmares that reach out of the dark to grab at his ankles. He likes to watch as they shrivel away under the light.
He does not know where he got the cigarettes. He thinks they just were.
It is dangerous out here. It should scare him, but it does not. He thinks that the fact that outside no longer scares him should set alarm bells ringing in his head, but he does not care. It just is.
He knows, now, that he was right. There is solid in the circle of light cast by the diner. He thinks that there is more black than nothing surrounding it, and him, than there used to be. A change. An island. Hard fought and long won.
He doesn't know if time moves forward when it angles off and you relive the past. He doesn't know if it moves at all, or if everything already was and they just flit back and forth among the points.
There is humming at his side, and chiming, and he continues to stare out into the void.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
He smokes and flicks another nightmare away. What if when you look into the void, you're already looking into yourself?
He has survived this long by anchoring himself with Ororo, with the sound of her voice and the scratch of her nails and the smell of her hair, by using her song to keep out the whispers of the dark.
Emma hums, and he remembers how the melodies interwove, making something so much deeper and varied and more complex than either alone.
she says. Parts in a duet. Neither stands alone. Never will both be right for the same singer, and if you try to force yourself into a part that does not fit you, you break some part of that line.
He will not let go.
Cling all you want, and it clings to you.
He wishes...
This is all that there is.
He will not let it be over.
Every song ends. Every song ends, but there will always be something more to sing. The song changes, but the singers never do. Ororo, at his side, her hands light on his arms.
He promised that he would be all right. For her.
She kisses his forehead.
You've seen this coming, he rumbles. His voice is low and scratchy, and he can feel that it does not fit.
For some time now. She is still blue and white and black but she is not smiles, and he wants to cry for her.
He can see how she was thought a goddess.
He doesn't want to leave her.
-Not when he-
He promised.
You will always be here, she whispers. You will always be here.
There is-
-There is something else, something more and something less-
-And the nothingdarknight whispers in his mind -
-Paints pictures with charcoal and velvet -
He sees this:
A start. An end. Two sides on a coin. The dark, through him, winding through everything everything there is and everyone he loves. Sucking up the light and the warmth and wilting the plants. It will eat him if he does not let go. It will claw him and suckle until there is nothing but what was, and nothing of what is or what should be.
She kisses him, lightly, and sings without words. She kisses him and he loves her, but he cannot sing her song.
He will always be here. Everyone who has been here is always here. Ghost of those-that-were. The past never changes, though it comes and whispers in your ear.
He will always be here.
A cool hand on his, cloudy and clear and dancing with the dark. It is cool, but it burns. Emma dances, and she sings, and he can feel her song start to flow through him. It twines through the dark eating him from the inside, and it sings in words he can almost understand.
And he listens.
And he moves on.
And he hears.
And he moves on.
And he understands.
And he moves on.
And there is this:
Everything.