odditycollector (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
odditycollector) wrote2007-12-14 09:49 am
odditycollector) wrote2007-12-14 09:49 am
Entry tags:
Fic: Into the Empty Spaces
Lots of thanks go to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
m_butterfly and devilc, who helped me pound this into the shape of a story.
Title: Into the Empty Spaces
Notes: This is forhannahorlove, who wanted a Brimstone/Astro City crossover: the meeting of Ezekiel Stone and the Hanged Man.
He is old, these days.
He must be old, if age can still have meaning to a people that have dissected youth and quantified its secrets. The earth itself is new, is unrelentingly new, made and remade in man's fickle image. The world's wildlife zones are populated with clones of unicorns and dragons, the oceans are packed away to increase real-estate opportunities, the moon is tethered with diamond string. It's a tired joke that world is spinning ever faster, and he believes it, because it's spinning away from him.
The face in the washroom mirror is young enough, in a coarse, unprocessed way, but these are not a young man’s thoughts.
He presses two fingers against the inside of the sink, and water gurgles up to meet his fingertips. He bends down – the reflection in the basin is broken, twisted, shallow – and splashes a handful of cold water onto his face. The water is contaminated with tiny nanomachines that swim over his skin, seeking out grime and sweat and making it vanish through some involved process he’d never cared enough about to understand. He taps the sink again and the water seeps away.
Back in the mirror his skin is now fresh and pink and otherwise the same. A few drops of water have fallen onto the spider-thin tattoo on his chest, making the black ink shimmer blue. It strikes him as strange, wrong somehow, although he’s forgotten for the moment why.
You have forgotten much.
The words sit in his head, but he doesn’t remember speaking them. He catches movement in his peripheral vision: there is a shadow at the edge of the mirror.
Instinct takes over. He ducks to the side of the washroom and flattens himself against the wall. He reaches to his belt, but his weapon is... something... something....
His weapon isn't there.
He risks a glance thorough the doorway into the rest of his apartment: there is a shadow at the edge of the room. It twists like smoke, though the environmental alarms in the building stay silent. Floating in its centre, like negative space carved into the universe, is a figure like the absence of a man. It’s wearing a burlap sack over its head, tied in place by a rope knotted around its neck in the style of a hanged man’s noose. The figure and the smoke register with his senses as the opposite of whatever real is, but he can see the weave of the burlap, can smell the mustiness of old fabric and twine.
That this figure is here in his apartment means something, and he struggles to remember what.
“I have to kill you,” he finally says, testing out the idea in words. The figure turns its head towards him like something broken. It doesn’t answer, but he feels foolish in its cowled gaze.
“You are... here to taunt me?” he tries again, but that doesn’t feel right either.
No. I find no humour in your situation. The words inscribe themselves inside his mind. He thinks of the letters on gravestones, before they dug up the graveyards to build apartments and energy farms, no space in this new world for the dead. You have lost too much.
He waits a few moments for the hair on the back of his neck to bristle with anticipation, but it doesn’t. He realizes, with some surprise, that he isn’t afraid.
He steps into the other room, holding his weapon-less hands out beside him in a gesture halfway into a shrug. “Then I’m out of guesses. Your turn to tell me why you’re here.” He places a palm against the wall, and the floor warps and balloons upward. It settles into a mound resembling a half-digested couch. The recently-vomited look had been fashionable at some point, he supposes. Or the apartment was just broken. It never seemed important enough to find out.
He sits on one end of the furniture and raises an eyebrow at the corner of the room. The tendrils of imaginary smoke start to move in his direction, and the figure centred in them drifts gently closer, propelled by a breeze that touches nothing wholly inside his apartment.
You are a crack in the universe, hemorrhaging secrets. At the moment, you are strong enough to stop those things that would use your existence as a way into this world, but that will not be true for much longer.
There are ways of compensating, of course. I can destroy you, and in doing so erase every moment of history you have touched. Or I can return what you are missing, if you so wish.
And for my second wish, he doesn’t say, can I have a pony? He doesn’t say anything at all. He looks around the bare walls of his dumpy apartment and tries to imagine fighting some nameless creature for them. It comes easy, unnervingly easy: blood and cascading laughter and the taste of ashes heavy on his tongue. Nothing left of the world but ruins and abandoned cleaning nanites, polishing shattered bone to a brilliant ivory shine.
He nods.
The figure reaches down towards him with a shadow of a hand, and he raises an arm up to meet it. “You know, I always hated this painting,” he says, quirks his lips, and –
– skip to high school, however it looks from the outside, some of the most important years of his life. He’s strong enough and handsome enough to have power, if he wants it, and sometimes he doesn’t and sometimes he does and –
– the comforting weight of his badge and his gun and his oath and his righteousness as he carves a path into the world and –
– Rosalyn lying naked on their bed three months after the honeymoon. The moonlight catches on her left breast and it’s like he can’t even breathe, he loves her so much and –
– that asshole that fucking that ratfucking bastard how dare he how DARE he, and the happy thrill of vengeance as he plunges the needle down and –
– staring into the brightest light he’d ever known that half second before the bullets rip his brain out the back of his skull. And then there's darkness and pain and time and time and pain and pain and –
– the closest metaphor is jailbreak, and the jailer needs someone to clean up the mess. “What I’m offering is a second chance to walk the Earth again. To live! To love! To die an ignominious death and get sent back to, well, you never know.” He takes the deal, of course, doesn't hesitate, and the second metaphor is bounty hunter. "No one ever gets away from me. You'll make sure of that." And –
– the unnatural shriek of a soul expelled from its injured container. Gunpowder and brimstone and sense memory –
– And –
– staring into disdainful, Cheshire Cat eyes. “Well, it’s been fun. I’ll see you again when you’ve finished the job.”
“I have less than a dozen souls to send back to Hell. You’re finally admitting I’ve reformed enough to escape you?”
“Oh, no. No, it’s far worse than that. You’ve gotten boring.” And –
– he goes back to visit Rosalyn one day, and she’s gone; her tombstone crushed and used for paving, for path stones, for souvenirs and –
– Time –
He’s kneeling on the floor of the apartment, one hand curled over the tattoo on his chest. He lowers his arm, revealing pictograms in a language that, a lifetime ago, took him a lifetime to learn to read.
Meaning coalesces in his brain:
in His name unyielding
steady prophet
Ezekiel Stone
“Oh,” he says.
Ezekiel Stone climbs to his feet. He staggers to the wall and brushes his hand along it, dissolving the malformed couch, turning the lighting too high and then too low, changing the colour of the walls, and finally finding the spot that ejects a drawer at knee height. He bends down towards it.
A handgun, a pair of wallets, a set of dumb-fabric clothes. A handful of America-era money: thirty-six dollars and twenty-seven cents. A wedding ring shaped from gold.
He moves his hand towards the ring, hesitates, brings out the weapon instead. The gun is warm against his skin, and his hand slides against the grooves of the metal like an old lover. “I haven’t,” he whispers, and then he stops. He looks up at his visitor. “I haven’t seen this in a very long time.”
I know.
Ezekiel walks to the apartment’s single window and taps it open. The sun is hidden behind a cluster of thousand-level buildings, but he can see the twin city-stars of New L.A. and Santa Britney gleaming gold against the sky. A mile below, the silver-blue walls of his apartment building vanish into the depths of fog. On an open-air path nearby, a girl in translucent Victorian-parody attire is walking a three-foot, violet spider on a leash. She doesn’t glance over as she passes by his room, but it’s likely enough that the window is set as a one-way mirror. She wouldn’t even know that he’s there.
Ezekiel turns to the inside of his room. The world behind his back doesn’t feel any more substantial than it had an hour ago. Than it had a century ago.
He raises a corner of his mouth at the being hovering in the middle of this room. “I suppose I should say thanks,” he says. “Although, considering the options, I’m not sure you did me a favour.”
I did what was necessary.
“I know,” says Ezekiel, because he's a cop too. Because he's a good cop, whatever else is true: history boasts a number of people who lived because he saved them. Of people who exist now because he threw himself between their ancestors and the monsters he was hunting down. “Thank you,” Ezekiel says, raising his eyes to the empty mask. He gets a slow nod in return.
The Hanged Man fades away, stretching thinner and thinner until the world has room to rush in. Ezekiel is left alone.
In Ezekiel’s palm, the once-standard police-issue gun is a familiar smoothness, shaped precisely for his fingers. He can tell by its balance that the weapon is loaded, but he had known that it would be before picking it up. He touches a finger to his ribcage, tracing the symbol of his name tattooed across his flesh. The infernal script twists and fights itself in his mind as he reads, nothing constant except shape and interpretation. There were once a hundred and thirteen names written on his skin, a list of one hundred and thirteen souls he was sworn to send back to hell, and now there's only one. He's almost done.
Ezekiel leans back against the window. Behind him, the light grows old and tired at the edges, falling into dusk.
m_butterfly and devilc, who helped me pound this into the shape of a story. Title: Into the Empty Spaces
Notes: This is for
hannahorlove, who wanted a Brimstone/Astro City crossover: the meeting of Ezekiel Stone and the Hanged Man.He is old, these days.
He must be old, if age can still have meaning to a people that have dissected youth and quantified its secrets. The earth itself is new, is unrelentingly new, made and remade in man's fickle image. The world's wildlife zones are populated with clones of unicorns and dragons, the oceans are packed away to increase real-estate opportunities, the moon is tethered with diamond string. It's a tired joke that world is spinning ever faster, and he believes it, because it's spinning away from him.
The face in the washroom mirror is young enough, in a coarse, unprocessed way, but these are not a young man’s thoughts.
He presses two fingers against the inside of the sink, and water gurgles up to meet his fingertips. He bends down – the reflection in the basin is broken, twisted, shallow – and splashes a handful of cold water onto his face. The water is contaminated with tiny nanomachines that swim over his skin, seeking out grime and sweat and making it vanish through some involved process he’d never cared enough about to understand. He taps the sink again and the water seeps away.
Back in the mirror his skin is now fresh and pink and otherwise the same. A few drops of water have fallen onto the spider-thin tattoo on his chest, making the black ink shimmer blue. It strikes him as strange, wrong somehow, although he’s forgotten for the moment why.
You have forgotten much.
The words sit in his head, but he doesn’t remember speaking them. He catches movement in his peripheral vision: there is a shadow at the edge of the mirror.
Instinct takes over. He ducks to the side of the washroom and flattens himself against the wall. He reaches to his belt, but his weapon is... something... something....
His weapon isn't there.
He risks a glance thorough the doorway into the rest of his apartment: there is a shadow at the edge of the room. It twists like smoke, though the environmental alarms in the building stay silent. Floating in its centre, like negative space carved into the universe, is a figure like the absence of a man. It’s wearing a burlap sack over its head, tied in place by a rope knotted around its neck in the style of a hanged man’s noose. The figure and the smoke register with his senses as the opposite of whatever real is, but he can see the weave of the burlap, can smell the mustiness of old fabric and twine.
That this figure is here in his apartment means something, and he struggles to remember what.
“I have to kill you,” he finally says, testing out the idea in words. The figure turns its head towards him like something broken. It doesn’t answer, but he feels foolish in its cowled gaze.
“You are... here to taunt me?” he tries again, but that doesn’t feel right either.
No. I find no humour in your situation. The words inscribe themselves inside his mind. He thinks of the letters on gravestones, before they dug up the graveyards to build apartments and energy farms, no space in this new world for the dead. You have lost too much.
He waits a few moments for the hair on the back of his neck to bristle with anticipation, but it doesn’t. He realizes, with some surprise, that he isn’t afraid.
He steps into the other room, holding his weapon-less hands out beside him in a gesture halfway into a shrug. “Then I’m out of guesses. Your turn to tell me why you’re here.” He places a palm against the wall, and the floor warps and balloons upward. It settles into a mound resembling a half-digested couch. The recently-vomited look had been fashionable at some point, he supposes. Or the apartment was just broken. It never seemed important enough to find out.
He sits on one end of the furniture and raises an eyebrow at the corner of the room. The tendrils of imaginary smoke start to move in his direction, and the figure centred in them drifts gently closer, propelled by a breeze that touches nothing wholly inside his apartment.
You are a crack in the universe, hemorrhaging secrets. At the moment, you are strong enough to stop those things that would use your existence as a way into this world, but that will not be true for much longer.
There are ways of compensating, of course. I can destroy you, and in doing so erase every moment of history you have touched. Or I can return what you are missing, if you so wish.
And for my second wish, he doesn’t say, can I have a pony? He doesn’t say anything at all. He looks around the bare walls of his dumpy apartment and tries to imagine fighting some nameless creature for them. It comes easy, unnervingly easy: blood and cascading laughter and the taste of ashes heavy on his tongue. Nothing left of the world but ruins and abandoned cleaning nanites, polishing shattered bone to a brilliant ivory shine.
He nods.
The figure reaches down towards him with a shadow of a hand, and he raises an arm up to meet it. “You know, I always hated this painting,” he says, quirks his lips, and –
– skip to high school, however it looks from the outside, some of the most important years of his life. He’s strong enough and handsome enough to have power, if he wants it, and sometimes he doesn’t and sometimes he does and –
– the comforting weight of his badge and his gun and his oath and his righteousness as he carves a path into the world and –
– Rosalyn lying naked on their bed three months after the honeymoon. The moonlight catches on her left breast and it’s like he can’t even breathe, he loves her so much and –
– that asshole that fucking that ratfucking bastard how dare he how DARE he, and the happy thrill of vengeance as he plunges the needle down and –
– staring into the brightest light he’d ever known that half second before the bullets rip his brain out the back of his skull. And then there's darkness and pain and time and time and pain and pain and –
– the closest metaphor is jailbreak, and the jailer needs someone to clean up the mess. “What I’m offering is a second chance to walk the Earth again. To live! To love! To die an ignominious death and get sent back to, well, you never know.” He takes the deal, of course, doesn't hesitate, and the second metaphor is bounty hunter. "No one ever gets away from me. You'll make sure of that." And –
– the unnatural shriek of a soul expelled from its injured container. Gunpowder and brimstone and sense memory –
– And –
– staring into disdainful, Cheshire Cat eyes. “Well, it’s been fun. I’ll see you again when you’ve finished the job.”
“I have less than a dozen souls to send back to Hell. You’re finally admitting I’ve reformed enough to escape you?”
“Oh, no. No, it’s far worse than that. You’ve gotten boring.” And –
– he goes back to visit Rosalyn one day, and she’s gone; her tombstone crushed and used for paving, for path stones, for souvenirs and –
– Time –
He’s kneeling on the floor of the apartment, one hand curled over the tattoo on his chest. He lowers his arm, revealing pictograms in a language that, a lifetime ago, took him a lifetime to learn to read.
Meaning coalesces in his brain:
in His name unyielding
steady prophet
Ezekiel Stone
“Oh,” he says.
Ezekiel Stone climbs to his feet. He staggers to the wall and brushes his hand along it, dissolving the malformed couch, turning the lighting too high and then too low, changing the colour of the walls, and finally finding the spot that ejects a drawer at knee height. He bends down towards it.
A handgun, a pair of wallets, a set of dumb-fabric clothes. A handful of America-era money: thirty-six dollars and twenty-seven cents. A wedding ring shaped from gold.
He moves his hand towards the ring, hesitates, brings out the weapon instead. The gun is warm against his skin, and his hand slides against the grooves of the metal like an old lover. “I haven’t,” he whispers, and then he stops. He looks up at his visitor. “I haven’t seen this in a very long time.”
I know.
Ezekiel walks to the apartment’s single window and taps it open. The sun is hidden behind a cluster of thousand-level buildings, but he can see the twin city-stars of New L.A. and Santa Britney gleaming gold against the sky. A mile below, the silver-blue walls of his apartment building vanish into the depths of fog. On an open-air path nearby, a girl in translucent Victorian-parody attire is walking a three-foot, violet spider on a leash. She doesn’t glance over as she passes by his room, but it’s likely enough that the window is set as a one-way mirror. She wouldn’t even know that he’s there.
Ezekiel turns to the inside of his room. The world behind his back doesn’t feel any more substantial than it had an hour ago. Than it had a century ago.
He raises a corner of his mouth at the being hovering in the middle of this room. “I suppose I should say thanks,” he says. “Although, considering the options, I’m not sure you did me a favour.”
I did what was necessary.
“I know,” says Ezekiel, because he's a cop too. Because he's a good cop, whatever else is true: history boasts a number of people who lived because he saved them. Of people who exist now because he threw himself between their ancestors and the monsters he was hunting down. “Thank you,” Ezekiel says, raising his eyes to the empty mask. He gets a slow nod in return.
The Hanged Man fades away, stretching thinner and thinner until the world has room to rush in. Ezekiel is left alone.
In Ezekiel’s palm, the once-standard police-issue gun is a familiar smoothness, shaped precisely for his fingers. He can tell by its balance that the weapon is loaded, but he had known that it would be before picking it up. He touches a finger to his ribcage, tracing the symbol of his name tattooed across his flesh. The infernal script twists and fights itself in his mind as he reads, nothing constant except shape and interpretation. There were once a hundred and thirteen names written on his skin, a list of one hundred and thirteen souls he was sworn to send back to hell, and now there's only one. He's almost done.
Ezekiel leans back against the window. Behind him, the light grows old and tired at the edges, falling into dusk.
no subject
Thank you.
no subject
(I do wish we'd gotten more info on the Hanged Man - I was making all sorts of guesses, and now I'll be somewhat disconsolate when his backstory is finally written.)
no subject
no subject