Epilogue,
And so in the end the story crumbles, floundering on the failure to produce the long yearned for happy ever after. The narrative cannot ever satisfy, jerking beneath the expectation of happiness that, if it can never be achieved in life, should surely at least be our refuge in fantasy. For who wants a story to be like real life? And who, in the end, can tell you the difference between what is real and what is not? Life, no more real than the story, flounders too and Ragnarok is upon us and so in the end, reality crumbles.
And so you ask, why tell this story? What is left when creation is gone? In answer, this story must be told because it is a true one; it is only a true one that has not yet happened. This is what it has always been going to come to.
It comes to this, but this is not the end. Did you really think all of that could be destroyed? All that energy, all that passion, everything, countless souls living and breathing – did you ever think all of that could be transformed into nothing? No that alone would be the greatest impossibility of all. There is never nothing.
And here, here is the secret, in the end there is Ragnarok, but then there comes the after. Ragnarok itself is a trick –
- and you whisper, who played the trick, who pulled this final lie out of the bag, who calls the shots, who plays the tunes, and if you don't know who it was by now you've not been listening to a single word the wind has to blow your way when you listen to the tales of Ragnarok, my child –
It's been played on us all, and now is the time to laugh in the light of discovery.
For who among us has not experienced an ending? Of a life, a time, a place, an event? Call up the person who can say they have not known a loss and there is a liar beyond the trickster's reach. For here is the catch – later, no matter what the time scale, everything comes back.
You don't always notice when life returns, be it your own from the darkness in which it resides, so too you do not notice that the world has come back. And it does, it does it behind your back when you stopped thinking, when you had despaired and stopped wondering when it would all return. That is when it does. When your back was turned. Suddenly you look up and the world is before you again, rolling golden and green and blue before you. It may not be quite the world you knew but it is there and it is, in time, better. You cannot always see how it has changed- and it has changed, you were right when you knew nothing would ever be the same, and that's not bad. Not in the end.
As with you, so with Ragnarok. Bit by bit and at the same time all at once the world sings itself surreptitiously back into being. Snow falls, grass appears, earth and see and heart and home. Before you know it history too has come rushing back and all those delicate lights that started glimmering in the darkness have swollen like an orchestra into the city around you, cars rush by, buildings break up and rush up to the sky. Everything is back as it was and as it was not.
And somewhere in this mad chaos, this storm of life, a man sits, maybe in the window of a coffee shop that could be any coffee shop, tasting a drink he has never tasted before that is somehow yet strangely familiar. And maybe his eyes are as blue as the sky before the storm and he frowns because he cannot quite remember what it is that he has lost. Maybe he passes by a shop window that day and sees the glare of a silver railing reflected in a green glass bottle in a junk shop and in that laughing light he remembers and smiles to himself again.
And maybe, just maybe, at the same time, in another place, the boy with the green glass and silver in his eyes remembers the colour of the sky before the storm.
And he looks up and smiles in anticipation of the thunder breaking.
-x-
This is now just as finished as a fic can be!...well, except for all those AUs out there that could be a sequel to this story! Thank you everyone who's stayed with this, I'm quite proud of it.
There's a couple of lines in this bit that were sort of quotations – the "coffee shop that could be any coffee shop" was sort of based on a line in "Little Plastic Castles" by Ani Difranco. The line about it being a true story, just one that hadn't happened yet was actually something someone in work genuinely said about the Christian end-of-the-world story "Left behind", to my partner just the other day. Also I feel a hint of tone from the OV on "The Crow crept in here a little bit. Eh, just about everything ever written takes something from somewhere else, I just like to reference where I can!
In other news watch this space for a new AU starting in the next few weeks….O_O
I'm researching David Bowie right now, that's all I'm gonna give you. -)