Drowning on dry land [fic]
Title: Drowning on dry land
Rating: PG - 13
Prompt: 64. Fall
Summary: Jack's not crazy. Really. He's just been thinking a little too long.
Word Count: 2095
Warning: Weird format.
Jack has, throughout life, been lectured on the evils of his “shoot first, questions (and apologies) later” methods, and to begin with he tried to take it on board. Always without success. He would offer up excuses and an apologetic expression; he was a creature of instinct, spots couldn’t change into stripes or whatever the saying was. These days he doesn’t even bother listening. There’s a very good reason why he doesn’t pause for thought (brooding is as close as he’ll ever come to it) and he doesn’t have to explain that to anyone, thank-you-all-the-same.
Even if he tried, would anyone get it?
Variety is the spice of life and needed if nature is to sort the strong from the weak. Jack has often observed such happenings, though usually among people - very rarely animals. Of course there is that voice, buzzing around like a fly around a dead pig’s head, that tells him they are all the same. It is not a voice unexpected or born in a chain reaction of realisation. It is what remains of a former self; a Jack rendered alien not by some perverse technology or golden, life giving energy, but by viewpoint. He separated himself from them, looked down on them, watched, with mild indifference, the insignificant gestures which swelled into apparent catastrophe. He heard their childish laments of broken promises and not enough food, not enough of anything, saw the suffering and murder they looked away from while deeming them necessary, and turned away in disgust.
Jack has found he collects viewpoints, the various facets to a story and sides of an argument, ever since this blessing/curse wrapped itself around him like a bad smell. It has given him the power to see the bigger picture in all its baffling un-glory, allows him to negotiate (or at very least converse) with pretty much anyone or anything on a near-level playing field. Of course, there’s no one, except maybe him, who could return the favour - not really. This shouldn’t matter - so many angles, he could easily just have a conversation with himself. Except that would be crazy, and Jack has been very careful over the years to keep from going crazy.
Is this real?
There are always a few fish that slip through the net, though…
What else would it be?
A dream…?
Real is more than impulses and reactions within the consciousness.
And these two little fish have been following him around for years, blip blipping little thought bubbles he doesn’t want to hear.
How much more? What else can it be?
Surroundings, other people.
It’s state of mind. Reality itself is a mere idea.
Oh, very Zen. If reality itself is only an idea, what exists outside?
No-one’s looked. All too scared or stupid.
Madness? Sanity? How do we know which way around they go? And so the argument/discussion goes in ever increasing circles, kinda like ripples in a pond, except more like a spiral really.
And whenever this floats through his head he feels…weightless. Not like his body’s become weightless, almost like there is no body. He’s left it behind. That’s what the afterlife should be like. He can never remember when he gets back whether it really was just swirling darkness with no sensation or whether that’s just the gaping holes in his memory. He intends to be prepared and so expects the worst - no bad comes of that. No disappointment.
There are some who have called Jack mad, but there are those who have called him evil and evil is a matter of opinion. People would argue with this and lay out several atrocities, stating that this is surely the work of evil. Of course, in this hypothetical conversation Jack could turn around and argue the evil of the very elements the world is made of
(Immortality gives you far too much time to reflect on these things, and more time than anyone should ever be allowed to wax poetic. Jack has been trying to come up with a proverb on and off for the past sixty years. Something to put on his gravestone. He could put a quote from someone else on it, but it seems somehow…lacking. Like the best student in the class handing in a short, rough-around-the-edges essay. He’s got time and experienced more things than Shakespeare, Poe or Confucius put together. He should find his own words.)
“A” is for “air”. And “apathy”. Air that just hangs there without a care. Doesn’t do much - particularly this mix: 78% N, 21% O2, 0.08% CO2 etc. Air of other worlds pulls apart so much more easily, as some of it sinks and some of it rises and some of it sinks faster than other bits.
Worse still are metal and water. Metal’s a cunning bastard, skulking in a man-made disguise, allowing itself to be manipulated and re-shaped. For centuries man was tricked into believing that it was almost his own creation, an unnatural thing - centuries before science proved that actually there’s iron in the body: just enough to make a nail, gives the blood that tangy taste. Water has a slyness to it - you’re mostly made of it, need it to live, but just that bit too much and you’re dead. Too hot and too cold and it does even nastier things, and, just right, it’s full of germs (so you’ve been told).
Earth seems to give you a cold shoulder. For reasons Jack can’t quite quantify he’d always assumed that earth was warm - not hot, necessarily, just warm. But, waking up to find six feet of it on top of his chest once or twice, Jack can testify (if anyone would believe him) that it’s snow cold, if not always as wet. Fire. Hot, obviously. That and it clings to you and just won’t die. Kind of like a really possessive ex. Another element that fools you into thinking you have control over it (worse, that you need it) but can kill and maim near irresistibly. The fact that it can be associated with warmth and home and family as well freak butchering blazes makes it that bit more evil and perverted in Jack’s view.
He does this a lot now - personifying objects and forces and elements to within an inch of their lives, forcing mood and personality upon them. Objects are simple. Can’t help it if they let you down in their use - it’s all circumstance and nothing’s made to last these days. It’s the opposite with people (a symmetry which allows him (if he wanted to) and others (if anyone could look into his head and see this) to refer to this way of thinking as “back to front”) - he diminishes them. Their lives (and deaths) are not so remarkable. There will be others, just as anonymous, to take their place. He still does this a little, though he tries not to (really, he does) and it’s not to the extreme it used to be. The androgyny so fashionable with the kids today means old habits die hard.
He likes to think of himself like this; he is an object. Can’t help that he’s not suited to the job - he wasn’t made for it. He certainly wasn’t meant to still be going this long. Way past his sell-by date or guarantee. He can’t really be expected to work correctly anymore, even if he wasn’t broken to begin with - all the customisation has made him even worse (cold insensate absent) it’s no wonder he keeps getting tossed aside.
Most people were just missing the point, anyway. Slavery and incarceration for example. People got up in arms about it - men treating other men as animals, all men born equal, etc. but none of them seemed to see the real evil. Walking through the park the other day he saw that; a girl dragging a dog along on a lead, clearly wishing she were somewhere else and just trying to get the chore over and done. One point she pulled so hard she pulled the collar right off the dog’s neck. The dog, despite the miserable look it had had as she dragged him along, just sat down and waited while the girl moved gingerly to replace the collar, clearly expecting to get bitten, or for the dog to run away. But the dog let her slip it back on and they continued on, the girl pulling a little less, though still impatient.
Because that was the real evil cruelty - caged birds always came back, too accustomed to their prison to take a chance at the freedom instinct demanded. Some creatures, like the dog, knew it and just sat down until the restraints were replaced.
Or maybe Jack’s just over-thinking things. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Jack hates getting trapped in these back rooms where he puts all the things he doesn’t want to think about (of a philosophical nature, anyway - the really dark, twisted stuff is locked (with a depressingly ineffective lock) in the basement), being made to tread these same old tracks, with nothing to add and nothing he can think to take away and call it gaining. It reminds him of someone. Well, not so much someone as of the things he/she used to say (a colleague of some kind. Can’t remember where from, though. Or when. He keeps coming up with a tall girl with a fetish for Latin poetry and yellow knitted sweaters, but he knows that’s a mistake. Memory extraction can really screw with your neural pathways). They’d pick up an object - a piece of paper usually, so maybe they were in an office of some kind? - and torture him with the statement, “Nothing exists slightly”…
Nothing can exist slightly so how does this paper exist at all? Is it complete? It has to be to exist, but I can write on it, draw, fold it into a paper crane or fortune teller, glue it together with lots of other pieces to make a book - does any of that make it any more complete? I can tear it up - does that mean I’ve created more objects?
The speech, like the paths, never changed and they never expected an answer. The weariness this memory brings suggests night shift.
All these thoughts, visceral and abstract, placing him down in other times (including a few he’s never actually been in, and quite a few more that probably don’t exist outside his skull) and worlds (not just planets, here, but the world of war, of the unremarkable middle child, of the traveller - all with different colours and emotions hanging in the air, each with their own vocabulary, words repeated so often (or said just once with such weight and significance) that they became as essential in communication as pronouns) put him in mind of a quote. A famous one. Semi-famous, anyway; not quite up there with “Never put off ‘til tomorrow what you can do today”, but definitely somewhere above “The man is the head of the family, but the woman is the neck”.
Both had been favourites of his mother’s, particularly the latter, which she often murmured to him when he and his father weren’t quite seeing eye to eye (“She can turn the head any way she wants”). As he grew older he became sure she was warning him, for if he ever met a woman and settled down with her. She never had any wisdom for if he found a husband, though. He had to go to his father for that.
No, this one… it’s one of T.S. Eliot’s, he thinks. Something about shadows and motion and the end of the world. It’s significant somehow. Will be more so in the days to come. Something coming out of the darkness…
“Jack?”
He looks up and there’s Gwen, and he feels his chair under his back and ass and the desk under his feet like he’s just suddenly been transported here in this position, feeling his surroundings for the first time.
So easy to just fall through your own mind, forget you’re actually there, living. Far too easy and life moves far too fast for it.
He straightens quickly, because she’s got that look of amused curiosity and he really can’t be bothered. “What was it?” he asks.
“Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the shadow… Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, falls the shadow. This is the way the world ends.”
T. S. Eliot.
Slam the book shut.