Drabble: Mock Death
Title: Mock Death
Author: interpretthis
Fandom: Prison Break
Pairing/Character(s): Alex Mahone
Rating: Mature
Genre: AngstAngstAngst
Summary: When the man woke up, face down in the grass beneath a moonless sky, every single part of him was dead save for his mind.
Notes: For pamalax. Spoilers for 4x01…and possible liberties taken with a fine plot point that we’re going to ignore for the time being.
When the man woke up, face down in the grass beneath a moonless sky, every single part of him was dead save for his mind, which fought tooth and claw against reality, trying to throw itself back into the dark abyss of sleep, clawing at the sloping walls of unconsciousness - mock death.
It came back to him more quickly than was merciful.
His name. His crime. His son.
There was nothing beyond the little brown haired boy. The boy whose Daddy had failed him.
The noise that broke the still air then was jarringly, painfully human. It tore itself from Alexander Mahone’s mouth like a horrible, formless cancer that could no longer stand to inhabit such a broken creature.
Seconds passed. Minutes. Years. Millennia.
The ground pushed itself into his head and curled against his knees, and the air picked him up then, slowly, carefully. The low brick wall slumped against him. His hands, dead hands, lifeless hands, shook themselves. A cigarette fumbled its way from his pocket, found a flame somewhere in all the pressing darkness, and caught with a pfst that his ears didn’t hear.
The playground to his right was a mess of vibrant blues and yellows and reds beneath all the black. His eyes - dead, dark eyes - forced him to watch as the memory of his son ghosted down the slide, laughed with a joy that didn’t belong in the world anymore, a joy that smashed its way through Alex’s dead heart like poison, splitting veins and burning dead flesh.
His lips curled themselves around the cigarette and his lungs sucked, hard, filling themselves to the brim with the empty promise of death. He wanted to kill himself. Wanted his dead hands to wring his neck. His dead feet to throw himself backwards and around and upside-down off the highest peak of the playground. Wanted his dead lungs to distort themselves and grow around the thick, tarry air in his chest and suffocate him forever and ever and ever until there was nothing.
Pure nothing.
Alex Mahone was not a man used to getting what he wanted.
The weight of pure everything forced itself down on his shoulders and he let out a breath with his own lungs and crushed the butt of the cigarette into the scratchy brick surface of the wall digging into his back.
His heart, quick and very much alive, crushed and spat blood and pain in his chest.
He stood up by himself on his own thin, unsteady legs and started off, shakily, through the park and away from the park and away from this everything, forever. He took a breath of darkness.
The cage wasn’t going to let him go. Not tonight.