v. acceptance
Nikki accepts his fate and falls like autumn leaves – unassuming, unnoticed, and unliving.
The world he had fought tooth and nail to protect is no place for him now, every effort wasted and every nose upturned; America will never change, they tell him through eyes chipped from icebergs and backs turned away, and he was as much of a fool for thinking that ending the Doctor's life would reignite his own as he was a fool for thinking a gun in his hand and a dream in his mind would be able to combat the force of millions. Stubborn millions. They don't want him here, in their city, in their country, and when he looks at himself in the mirror (a stranger: blue eyes emptier, skeletal cheeks somehow more hollow), he muses that he doesn't quite want himself here, either. To put the barrel of his Beretta against his temple is more of a service for the world than anything else he has ever done, and he has always been a man of the people, even if they never quite knew it. He breathes, he sees, he cries – (his index finger jerks, and he sleeps).
When the blond wakes, heavy lidded eyes protesting his movement and brain exploding with the force of a fission bomb, his immediate thought is that he should not have woken at all. Lungs flutter with air, his heart beating to the rhythm of a child first sitting down behind the drum set, but his eyes won't see and his mind won't think beyond his first thought, repeated in a mantra that echoes off the boundaries of a room he can't make out through blackened eyes. Fingers rake against the floor, grab for walls he cannot seem to reach from his spot splayed across the floor, dust against his wound – or, at least, where it should be. Pale light floods in from beneath the floor, and he realizes simultaneously that he wasn't blind so much as in a dark, dark room, and that the self-inflicted blow to the head has either been rendered useless, or never happened at all.
A dream? It couldn't be. The harsh lighting of the living room, the smell of rain from outside, the biting cold wind from the opened window lashing out against tear-caked cheeks – all too real to be conjured by an overactive mind from a rare bout of deep sleep. But at the same time, there is no bullet hole, which means it couldn't have been real, either. He fumbles as he tries to discern what is fact from what is fiction, more and more light crawling from the cracks beneath his tennis shoes at the racing of his thoughts, and he can't say how long footsteps have been ringing throughout the air around him before they fully process in his mind, lifting eyes from calloused hands and into the half light of his surroundings.
He sees her form before he sees her face, pale light cascading around her like a veil, and his mind stills like the rest of his body to make room for a name.
"... Mary?" Nikki dares to ask, syllables dancing across the paralyzed air in a waltz that never ends. Time had already been "kind" enough to show him her image (twisted, cold) in the eternities following her death, and for a fleeting second, suspicion blossoms in the back of his head. Futile attempts to steel himself at what may very well be another verbal barrage that had driven him to the furthest point, the likes of which he's beginning to doubt ever truly happened at all. Her mouth draws itself into a smile, however, lips upturned in a manner that holds more shameful hesitance than enmity, and the worries wane on cue. Black habit traded for a snow gown – black words traded for pure affection. (Not a dream after all.)
"Nikki," the deceased says. Remorse flickers in the leafy hues of her eyes as his name falls from the tip of her tongue, something pleading in the way she speaks as though she had played some heinous part in setting about everything that had ruined his life in the last eighteen years. No; that's wrong. That's wrong, and even if it hadn't been, he forgives her, he forgives her -
He howls her name like one last war cry in the same moment he leaps to his feet, moving in desperate motions to the only one who'd really cared for him (the only one he'd really cared for in turn) and embracing her with a force that would have sent her toppling to the ground had he not caught her in his arms. Words can't hope to describe what he's feeling, and he abandons them without ever giving them a try, trading them in, instead, for feather-light kisses peppered across her face and staccato, whispered promises that had been stolen from him in the night he had confessed to her these same feelings - in the night she had died. Elation promised at the demise of the Doctor cannot compare to what he feels when she reciprocates the hug, dainty arms wrapped around his tattered trench coat and fingers digging into the folds. Perhaps they could have wished for better circumstances than a mutual loss of life – but she is here, and he is here, and he thinks that it is more than enough for him.
It starts with her death and ends with his own, the world around them erupting into brilliant light so strong that he thinks he might go blind and the body in his arms growing weightless in his grip. His own legs seem to disappear as much in sight as in weight, invisible now in the supernova engulfing them, and he pulls away just long enough to catch her eye one last time. A smile – two, devoured in a sea of white.
Nikki burns the image of Mary's face in his mind and finally learns to let go.
Probably too late to issue that suicide trigger warning. Well - I suppose it's vague enough. c':
And with this "exciting" conclusion, our story comes to an end. I'd take this moment to complain about how terrible of an ending All the Promises was, even more so in comparison to how perfect Eyes of a Stranger brought together the first one, and even more so considering that Nikki, Mary, DX, and That Guy No One Like have their story capped off with that - but the completion of this (albeit already completed) story is a happy occasion. Heck, this must be the first non-one-shot story I've completed on this account. (Don't be surprised if it's the last. ouo) Are they in Heaven at the end? Are they actually being whisked away to the underworld? Maybe the whole ending doesn't exist at all. Not like we really understood what was going on when we listened to the song to begin with. Guess it'll forever be a lazy, unexplained ending.
Just because the Five Stages is over, though, doesn't mean I'm not done attempting to introduce rock opera fanfiction to . As of right now, I'm currently a few one-shots into a collection that will, admittedly, never be finished (as much as I would love to write number one hundred... prooooooobably not happening), so if I can just figure out how to finish the one I'm stuck on, anyone who's interested might be getting to see a few of those in the future. Anything from novelizations of existing canon (like this), what-if stories before, after, or between songs, crazy AUs, and maybe a story where Doctor X tries to contract with Kyuubey and become a magical girl (magical... boy? man? scumbag?); whatever you can think of might be there. Either way, prepare for an avalanche of head canons a year-and-a-half in the making. Until then? Happy reading!