Chapter Text
You’re climbing the stairs.
Feet scrape against concrete, echoing louder with each dragging step. Four sets, making this damned trek.
Until four becomes three.
(you heard the cry)
A blur shoots past you; a flash of black-blue running higher. Rounding the corner to slip out of sight.
And three became two.
You can’t feel it.
Can’t feel the hurt. Can’t feel what’s ripping your team apart, piece by piece. Word by unheard word they are rendered to shreds. Is it better this way? Did you wish you could hear them, too?
Do you wish you’d suffered with them?
One. A lone man left to make this journey. Up higher, until there’s no way but forward.
A hall, stretch, stretched, s t r e t c h i n g ahead. No doors but the one at the end. Pass by water-yellowed paint, walls with holes pocketed in them. Signs of the life this building once held.
One door.
One choice. Always just
one.
Open it (don’t, not again) and finally see . Always a second too late, one step too many behind her.
A flash of green. A spray of red.
Erin always was one step ahead.
Ahead.
A head.
Two bodies, one a head lighter. Both fall. One you cradle, while one watches on. Hold her like it will keep her together, like you can make up for your failure. Cold, life already gone, skin like plastic under your hands. You don’t look - if you don’t look, you won’t see, and it won’t be real.
But you know.
You know that this isn’t how it happened,
don’t you?
You are climbing the stairs.
Where ?
Always climbing, they never end. No more footsteps echoing except your own; where are you, Ricardo? What were you doing?
Were you always alone?
Another door. Another choice. Metal instead of wood. A hospital facade; wolf in sheep’s skin, hiding away the rot. Swing it open with a grinding creak, step inside and-
Faceless figures clad in all white. As featureless as the room they stand in. They do not see, as if you no longer exist.
They do. This did.
Erin, scooped off the pavement and stolen away; she existed. Brought here to be spread out on a gurney like a sacrifice on an altar. Cut up and peeled open - wings of an insect pinned to a board.
She’s crying, but nobody hears. Here.
Here, nobody cares.
Throw yourself at them-
stop, stop, STOP
-but one step forward is two more back. Never getting close, making no progress. Couldn’t save her before, you can’t save her now.
She’s crying, and you are screaming. Threatening. Then pleading: please don’t, please let her go, please just stop. Knees hit linoleum, you beg for forgiveness; you’re so terribly sorry, you never meant for any of this. But the figures don’t see you. Their white runs red and they move like you don’t exist, because you were never here to begin with.
you
never
came.
You are running up the stairs.
Chase your black-blue blur. Go after her, hero. Maybe this time you’ll save her. Maybe this time, things will be different. Things can change.
(Can they?)
Erin is fast, but you are faster.
She is racing to her end, and you are hot on her heels.
No flash of green. No red, no stench of burning skin. But remember.
Remember ?
(Not the gun)
A body hits the window; glass rains, glimmering under bright afternoon sun. You lunge , push your body harder than ever. A body you’ve broken and mended, bent it to your own will, you’ve defied the odds before.
You are just fast enough
(you know.
you know you weren’t)
Glove finds glove, hand grips hand. Hold tight now. Fighting gravity and even heroes can’t prevent inevitability. A (not dead) weight, dragging you both over. Down. Down
D
O
W
N
Falling.
You are always falling.
Cityscape fades, mountainside rushing by you both. A bad jump (faulty equipment, always too reckless, Charge). Four storeys up, five, ten. Were you always this high? You know.
You know how this story ends.
You never left those stairs. A ghost haunting a gravesite that isn’t yours. Walking. Running.
Lunge. Miss.
Repeat.