A/N: The last exclusively Alex chapter. W00tness. W00tness also to reviewers. I am happy you enjoy this, and I am also pleasantly surprised that nobody chewed me out for that borderline smut scene last chap. Just so everybody knows, it is okay to hate or like Alex. I didn't build him to be black and white in this story. Also, most of you groovy dudes seem to think that Danny is fairly doomed here. If I wanted to advertize myself, I'd tell you that you'll have to wait for the climax, which will happen in the next chapter, to see the truth about that. But of course I'll be strictly professional and say no such thing.
Sing to Life
By JadeRabbyt
Chapter 25: Words I Used to Say
Alex stalked off into the forest, confused and frustrated and generally furious with no one in particular. It was the fricken' end of the world and still nothing made any sense. Danny was one of the hero types and Alex never had been able to understand that small segment of the population except as misguided optimists. He knew something had been exchanged between the two humans just before Sam went, and it bothered him as to what exactly that could be. Alex didn't even know what he was doing out here in some abandoned forest. He couldn't use anything in here, but he had told Danny that he'd try something.
It was just that he didn't have any idea what.
After walking some distance and coming to no conclusion whatsoever, Alex found a small glen and stopped. Here the thin light of the clouds had managed to reach the ground, and it seemed like a good place to stop and think. He laid down on his stomach, rested his head on his fists, and stared off into the dim forest beyond.
What did he really want to do? Not save the world, that was certain. Alex was pretty sure it was beyond saving anyway. The rock's goo hadn't been half as excited as the city's, and he'd had a pretty good idea of what the rock looked like before forcibly dissolving it. Even then, it had taken him quite a long time to reform it. Still, it seemed like he should be able to try something. After all, he definitely had a kind of sixth sense when it came to the fifth force. Especially with the black goop. He didn't know what he could do with the main destructor cloud-force-thing, seeing as his mind had been… occupied with other matters at the moment of its last visitation.
Alex groaned. Logic sucked. This world sucked. He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to know what had happened for him to deserve this—ALL of this, and from the beginning. It was the end of the world and Alex didn't even know who he was that he should die. He wanted to know, and he used his link with the blackness to tell it as much. And like a computer, albeit a very snide self-satisfied computer, it assigned him an ambiguous direction and an undisclosed location and suggested that he go there. And Alex, on an impatient impulse, followed it.
It took him miles and miles away. Alex didn't know where or how far it was going, but from the landscapes flashing by below he guess it was at least several states over. The trail ended at a three-story compound built of stained cream-colored cement blocks. It could have been an above-ground bomb shelter were it not for the ornamental pattern of white cement above its main entrance. A naked flagpole stood out in front, and a small patch of grass lay inside a circle that went from the road to the building and back to the road, allowing for easy pickup and dropoff. A sign of heavy, swollen wood declared it a school, but the official name had been scratched off and replaced so many times that only the board remained.
A bug-eyed Alex stood paralyzed on the grass in front of it. 'New Grounds High School,' he thought. That name was almost funny, but he was certain it was the right one. He also knew that, in a storage closet off the main counseling offices, there was a yearbook for every year the school had been open.
New Grounds had still been open when the black stuff hit, that much was obvious from the bodies Alex had to step over to reach the glass doors of the front entrance. He knew it was in disrepair because nobody wanted to go to it, even so many years later. Another school had been built for the rich kids, but New Grounds had taken the inner city alcoholics, druggies, and simply unlucky ones. Several of the bodies lying on the roads, the grass, and the steps of the building had puddles of clotted blood spilled beside them, and spikes of black junk curled up from the roof. The place must have been a war zone by the time it was hit.
Alex's curiosity beat out his mortification. Working on autopilot, he stepped over the bodies, phased through the glass doors and turned left, into the office hallway. Yellow signs with black lettering announced the attendance office, cashier's desk, and registrar, but there was nothing that said 'counseling.' Alex scrounged around in the attendance office, coming up with a flashlight which, miraculously, still worked. From there it was a simple matter of digging through closets until he found the right one, which, eventually, he did.
A box of cruddy, mildewed yearbooks sat on the rusted shelf of a gray metal bookcase. Alex phased it out of the locked closet and upended the box, dumping the yearbooks across the floor. 1930s sounded about right. Continuing mechanically, acutely aware that taking any kind of opinionated stance on this matter would probably incapacitate him, Alex flipped through the books, nonchalantly ignoring the billions of memory's little warning lights going off in his head. He opened the '33-'34 book, a squicky feeling growing worse in his chest.
There, in the middle of a cluster of grinning, scowling, nose-picking freshman, Alex spotted a familiar face. He traced it to the list of names which scrolled down the margin.
"'Alex Gardener.'"
His last name was Gardener. Alex sat back on his heels. Gardener. He never would have guessed it.
Something moved at his legs, knocking Alex out of his astonishment. He yelped to see that he was fairly surrounded by the black goo, which stretched several feet deep all up and down the hallway. It rolled up in a wave that touched the ceiling as Alex scrambled back. It crashed down and smothered him.
The stuff struck his brain like a gong, measuring the resonance before striking again. Alex squeezed his eyes shut as the blackness extracted the information necessary for reconstruction, and, before Alex could stop it, his eyes flashed open and there were living people in the office. Polite women manned the attendance and registration windows, a disgruntled cashier chatted amiably with a hall guard, and somebody that sounded remarkably like him was laughing somewhere nearby.
Alex looked to his feet. The yearbooks were gone, and a kid in the hallway had just walked right through him. The black stuff must have found the rest of his memories.
Feeling a little strange at this but figuring he should be used to anything by now, Alex followed the sound of his own laughter into a cluttered meeting room off a side hallway. A slightly chunky, good humored senior boy had taken out some of the older yearbooks. She sat at a table across from a shorter, happier, less destructive version of himself. The senior was one of the school's junior counselors, and the yearbooks had been the ice-breaker between them. Alex's vision clouded, and when it cleared, there was himself and the senior having a violent argument several weeks later.
Alex watched himself get the upper hand in the back-and-forth struggle, just like he always did. He'd always been pretty good at winning arguments, in spite of the claim that such a thing was impossible.
Fragments of memories passed before him. Himself being a loser, himself not having any friends and blaming everybody else for it, himself flunking out of school in disgust and ending up at junior college. Then, himself discovering that people in junior colleges were even more retarded than in high school, and himself returning to high school on the first day of the next year and killing everybody with the help of his newfound blackness, which he had accumulated over time, almost without even realizing it until it had owned him. All in all, it was pretty much what Alex had expected to see, but it still surprised him, and disappointed him just a bit, to discover that yes this actually really had been all his fault in the first place.
It seemed logical at the time, he remembered, but then those things usually did. If people hadn't been so insufferably stupid he never would have gone to the dark side in the first place. Alex couldn't think what he could have done to stop it, but there must have been something. If there was, he didn't know what.
The blackness dinged like a game show buzzer. The school flashed away and was replaced with a world, then with a thousand world. Alex watched every one of them rot among the stars, infected with blackness. Earth snapped up, and image superposed on the former scene. The clumsy technique revealed a powerful message. These things were happening because Earth's number had come up. It wasn't personal, it was just business. This thing destroyed universes, tidied the slate whenever it got too cluttered or chaotic, and that was that. It was nothing personal; it was just business. Business according to a malevolent, barely-conscious force that probably never should have existed in the first place.
Alex felt the stuff pulling out of his head like spaghetti being pulled through his nose. His eyes cleared and the hallway came back into focus, empty now. Dead silence echoed throughout the building.
Alex's hands clenched into fists. A twitch brought his lips into a snarl, and he wished ardently for the skill and power to blow the blackness apart, to shatter it like a Ming vase against a brick wall. Alex buried his foot in the wall's plaster and roared, punched out the glass windows of the offices and sent shards of glass scattering. The glass tinkled against the floor and the broken-in walls puffed dust, but after each blow the silence returned, inevitably, as it always had.