There was an idea...
Title: There Are No Rocks, But Everyone Dies Anyway
Fandoms: Avengers, Life/Standoff, Sherlock, SGA (no x-overs, just a series of fic)
Characters: Pretty much almost all of them. Almost.
Words: around 2300 for all four fic together.
WARNING: These are DEATHFICS. No one survives! Please heed this warning before reading on further!
Notes: Written for caersmane, because it was her bday sometime in the past and she is awesome and loves deathfic and I had an idea and then torra had an idea and things got going from there.
Due to the nature of the fics, they have not been checked for typos or strange phrasings by anyone but me. If you read them, please feel free to point out anything I missed.
Caers: These fic seem to be unrelated, but there is a mystery hidden among all those deaths. The clues are in the letters. Can you find them? ;)
AVENGERS
Phil Coulson
Coulson is the first, but not the last. After all, with a profession such as theirs, it’s only a matter of time until the final blow. Nobody becomes a spy or joins a league of superheroes with the intention of making it all the way to their pension. Well, maybe Coulson did, but look where that got him. Stabbed through the back by a vengeful demi-god. At least it was quicker than some other possible deaths. At least it serves a purpose, you could also say, it brings them together, makes them fight harder and win. This time.
Bruce Banner
Bruce is the next one to go. No one would have expected it, especially after his confession about the suicide attempt, but there you go. Bruce is second. He’s on the sidelines for this one, they’re trying to avoid too much destruction if they can help it, and Bruce is with the SHIELD agents at the periphery when the bullet finds him. It comes from behind him, a sniper hit, that’s why he doesn’t know it until it’s too late. The bullet shatters his spine and buries itself into his heart. Too fast and too deadly even for the Big Guy. There’s nothing much anyone can do. Bruce is dead before any of his team makes it back.
Natasha Romanov
Natasha wakes with a start one night and finds herself holding the hilt of her knife buried deep in Clint’s neck. Clint’s eyes are wide, awake and aware of what’s happening before her brain even makes the connection. It’s only been a matter of time for the two of them, and she doesn’t apologise. He just looks at her and there is no accusation, no anger or sadness, just calm acceptance. She knows what she has to do. She pulls out the knife and uses it to cut her own wrists. The second one is harder, her hand almost useless from the deep wound pulsing blood, but she manages. They find them like that the next morning, blood soaked into the mattress so deep they have to burn it. They burn the bodies too and the stones on the wall only carry their names and nothing else.
Thor
Thor makes the trip to Asgard one day and simply doesn’t return. There’s a summer full of storms and forest fires and temperatures playing haywire. Scientists say it’s because of global warming, but no one is quite sure if that’s correct. Eventually Jane Foster gets the Einstein-Rosen-Bridge to work and when a carefully selected SHIELD team sets foot into Asgard, all they find is a world full of burned out ruins, darkened skies and bleached bones. Ragnarök, Erik Selvig mutters and looks sadly at the destruction around them. They find Thor’s bones in what appears to have been the central hall, roughly nine paces away from the skeletal remains of a huge snake. They turn around without touching anything, there’s nothing to be gained in this dead world.
Anthony Edward Stark
Tony drinks himself to death. It starts with Coulson, or maybe it started long before that, but he’s careful about it and manages to hide it for a long time. After Bruce it gets worse and once Clint and Natasha are gone he’s not even hiding it any more. Pepper and Steve find him one morning, on the highest accessible point of the Avengers Tower. There’s an empty bottle of single malt in his left hand and his arc reactor in his right. He’s smiling, staring out into the night with unseeing eyes. Pepper doesn’t cry, not in front of Steve. She bends down and closes Tony’s eyes, says that he always felt like he was living on borrowed time and maybe, Steve thinks, maybe it was good that Tony got to choose his own death.
Captain America/Steve Rogers
Steve is the last one. He keeps dodging the proverbial bullet even after all the others are gone and buried and on their way to being either forgotten or glorified. But in the end, they get to him too. He dies in a roar of flames and what the ice failed to do, the fire does with a vengeance. When they finally manage to douse the flames, there’s nothing much left to find. A few teeth and bone fragments, brittle and blacked from the heat. They resurrect the monument at Arlington and that’s the last of the famous Avengers gone.
LIFE/STANDOFF
Ted Earley
Ted was never supposed to get caught up in all of this, but Charlie needed Ted. He needed him to look after his money, he needed him for his secrets, and most of all he needed him for his sanity. So when Ted died, Charlie didn’t quite know what to do. The worst of it was, maybe, that Ted didn’t even die because of Charlie.
Charlie had sometimes wondered what he’d do if Ted got killed by Nevikov or Rayborn’s people and he’d had a plan. He’d had a Zen plan that he knew he would have discarded in a heartbeat if any of his scenarios had actually come to pass. But it hadn’t happened that way and now Charlie was left without a plan and without Ted, nothing but the hard facts and no real idea of how to cope. He just sat in his big empty house, feeling too big and empty himself and not even the Buddha had anything helpful to say.
Turns out that Reese did. She showed up in the early hours of the morning, the day after the funeral, a bottle of vodka in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. She just let herself in and sat down next to Charlie at the kitchen island. She opened the bottles and pushed the vodka in front of him. He took a swig straight from the bottle and she followed suit with her own. They matched each other swallow for swallow, Charlie with vodka, Reese with water.
When half of his bottle was empty, she took it away from him, pulled him off the stool and led him upstairs. She lay him down in his big empty bed and slid under the covers next to him.
“Sleep,” she said, “You’ll continue living tomorrow.”
And he did.
Dani Reese
Tidwell called him from the hospital. There was a long pause before he said, voice raw and broken, “She’s gone.”
Charlie buried his head in his hands and let Matt wrap his arms around him.
After a while he went and got the bottle of vodka he kept hidden in the kitchen cupboard.
“Get drunk with me?” He said.
Matt nodded.
“We’ll continue living tomorrow,” Charlie promised her memory.
Emily Lehman
“Emily, get down!” Matt yelled, but it was already too late.
The explosion ripped apart the front of the building and debris smashed into the ground around them with deadly force. People screamed, ducked, ran and crawled for cover. Matt stared at the spot where Emily had just been. Dust and smoke filled the air, the fire backlighting the scene with a flickering glare. It was hard to see anything clearly.
When it was clear that there wouldn’t be another explosion, Matt moved towards where he’d seen her last.
“Please,” he muttered to himself, “please, please...”
He found her curled up on the ground. She’d been standing too exposed to not get hit by the blast or broken pieces, but Matt was still hoping that it might only be minor injuries. Sometimes people got lucky. Sometimes people survived the most unbelievable things.
Mostly, though, people died.
Emily didn’t beat the odds.
It was days later when Matt resurfaced from his grief long enough to look at Charlie properly. He’d been there with Matt the entire time, for everything, and he’d not said much. No more than absolutely necessary.
Now Matt looked at him, asked, “You got anything helpful to say?”
Charlie gave him one of his cryptic smiles. “The Buddha says, if you get angry you stop looking for the truth.”
Matt nodded, this one he got. “I’ve been angry. Have you been looking for the truth?”
“I’ve found it.”
Matt Flannery
Thirty-four years is a long time to get to know someone. Charlie had thirty-four years to get to know Matt. Matt had sometimes wondered if Charlie would ever get tired of knowing him. Charlie never did. It took Matt twenty years to believe him, but in the end he did. After all, Matt never got tired of knowing Charlie.
When Matt’s heart finally gave out, the pain was less sharp than Charlie had imagined. After all, they’d had thirty-four years. They’d said all the things they’d wanted to say, done most of the things they’d wanted to do. Back when they’d first met, Charlie hadn’t even thought he’d make it through the rest of the year. Matt had helped with that. Matt had given him thirty-four years of his life and Charlie could let him go now.
Charlie could wait until they’d meet again.
SHERLOCK
Sherlock Holmes
What if things had ended differently? What if Moriarty hadn’t put the gun in his own mouth? What if he’d pointed it at Sherlock instead and pulled the trigger. Because after all, he was smarter, was more ruthless and had less to lose.
The bullet, weighing between 115 to 147 grains, would have left the gun at a speed of roughly 1300 feet per second. It would have penetrated Sherlock’s skull and most likely gone through, considering the distance between the muzzle and his head.
The bullet would have crushed his skin, bone and brain tissue and caused nearby tissue to stretch and expand as it passed through. It would have left a permanent cavity as well as a temporary cavity and it would be interesting to know by how much the second deviates from the first if it weren’t his own brain. A hole through the brain causes instant unconsciousness and will likely kill the recipient, so he would not be interested in the deviation after having been shot. Someone else might be, though. Maybe he should have investigated this when he still had the time.
The bullet would surely have killed him. Maybe Moriarty should have put the bullet in Sherlock’s brain, instead of his own.
Mycroft
John sees it in the newspaper one morning.
Mycroft Holmes
1966-2013
In Loving Memory
No matter how much he tries, he never finds out more.
John Watson
His psychiatrist thinks he’s suicidal. She’s not mentioned it, but he’s seen the note in her file. She knows he still checks what she writes, so she wants him to know. Maybe she thinks it will stop him.
He hangs around Scotland Yard until Lestrade tells him to fucking go and fill out some paperwork. John’s got the medical training and someone pulls enough strings to get him a job at the morgue. Molly’s gone, but maybe that’s for the best.
John works in the morgue until it’s time for him to retire. When he does, the department throws him a party and even Lestrade gets his arse back down from Edinburgh and celebrates with him.
John’s not sure what to do with himself once he hasn’t got a job to keep him going.
“You should try beekeeping,” Lestrade jokes.
John does. It’s surprisingly complicated. There’s even an air of mystery to it because according to the experts, the bees have started disappearing all over the world and nobody knows why. It makes John chuckle quietly to himself in the evenings when he checks the websites for new theories.
When he feels the end coming, he sells the house, the bees and gives most of his things away. He moves into assisted living. A week later he decides that it’s been long enough. Overall,
he’s had a good life.
The nurse finds him in the morning.
“He died peacefully in his sleep. I hope I get to go that way one day,” she’ll tell her colleague later.
SGA
Atlantis
She knew the feeling of death. She’d been close to it many times. Once, she’d come so close that she’d thought it really was the end. But she’d held on. Held on for her children that had come back to her at last and they’d found a way to bring her back.
They’d fought together, her and her children, fought many battles and saved many lives, although many were also lost. She learned to love them all, the ones that couldn’t hear her just as much as the ones that could. They were her children, their lives intertwined.
But there were others. They took her children away. They forced them to abandon her, back on a planet that she had long since left behind and had never thought would have to visit again. Her children were taken away from her, one by one until none were left and only strangers’ feet pounded through her halls. Strangers who could hear but would not listen.
She did not like them. She did not want to work with them, live with them. She wanted her children back, but they weren’t coming.
She made a decision.
They’d moved her out onto the open ocean, out of the way of the places with many people. That was good. She didn’t want to hurt any innocent lives. Some of those lives were linked to her children or might be one day.
She gave the strangers two hours warning. Enough time to get away from her.
The self-destruction sequence took her down to the bottom of the sea. It shut down all systems and broke her irreparably.
Her last thought was that she’d not known death after all.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth. Comment there. (
comments).
Fandoms: Avengers, Life/Standoff, Sherlock, SGA (no x-overs, just a series of fic)
Characters: Pretty much almost all of them. Almost.
Words: around 2300 for all four fic together.
WARNING: These are DEATHFICS. No one survives! Please heed this warning before reading on further!
Notes: Written for caersmane, because it was her bday sometime in the past and she is awesome and loves deathfic and I had an idea and then torra had an idea and things got going from there.
Due to the nature of the fics, they have not been checked for typos or strange phrasings by anyone but me. If you read them, please feel free to point out anything I missed.
Caers: These fic seem to be unrelated, but there is a mystery hidden among all those deaths. The clues are in the letters. Can you find them? ;)
AVENGERS
Phil Coulson
Coulson is the first, but not the last. After all, with a profession such as theirs, it’s only a matter of time until the final blow. Nobody becomes a spy or joins a league of superheroes with the intention of making it all the way to their pension. Well, maybe Coulson did, but look where that got him. Stabbed through the back by a vengeful demi-god. At least it was quicker than some other possible deaths. At least it serves a purpose, you could also say, it brings them together, makes them fight harder and win. This time.
Bruce Banner
Bruce is the next one to go. No one would have expected it, especially after his confession about the suicide attempt, but there you go. Bruce is second. He’s on the sidelines for this one, they’re trying to avoid too much destruction if they can help it, and Bruce is with the SHIELD agents at the periphery when the bullet finds him. It comes from behind him, a sniper hit, that’s why he doesn’t know it until it’s too late. The bullet shatters his spine and buries itself into his heart. Too fast and too deadly even for the Big Guy. There’s nothing much anyone can do. Bruce is dead before any of his team makes it back.
Natasha Romanov
Natasha wakes with a start one night and finds herself holding the hilt of her knife buried deep in Clint’s neck. Clint’s eyes are wide, awake and aware of what’s happening before her brain even makes the connection. It’s only been a matter of time for the two of them, and she doesn’t apologise. He just looks at her and there is no accusation, no anger or sadness, just calm acceptance. She knows what she has to do. She pulls out the knife and uses it to cut her own wrists. The second one is harder, her hand almost useless from the deep wound pulsing blood, but she manages. They find them like that the next morning, blood soaked into the mattress so deep they have to burn it. They burn the bodies too and the stones on the wall only carry their names and nothing else.
Thor
Thor makes the trip to Asgard one day and simply doesn’t return. There’s a summer full of storms and forest fires and temperatures playing haywire. Scientists say it’s because of global warming, but no one is quite sure if that’s correct. Eventually Jane Foster gets the Einstein-Rosen-Bridge to work and when a carefully selected SHIELD team sets foot into Asgard, all they find is a world full of burned out ruins, darkened skies and bleached bones. Ragnarök, Erik Selvig mutters and looks sadly at the destruction around them. They find Thor’s bones in what appears to have been the central hall, roughly nine paces away from the skeletal remains of a huge snake. They turn around without touching anything, there’s nothing to be gained in this dead world.
Anthony Edward Stark
Tony drinks himself to death. It starts with Coulson, or maybe it started long before that, but he’s careful about it and manages to hide it for a long time. After Bruce it gets worse and once Clint and Natasha are gone he’s not even hiding it any more. Pepper and Steve find him one morning, on the highest accessible point of the Avengers Tower. There’s an empty bottle of single malt in his left hand and his arc reactor in his right. He’s smiling, staring out into the night with unseeing eyes. Pepper doesn’t cry, not in front of Steve. She bends down and closes Tony’s eyes, says that he always felt like he was living on borrowed time and maybe, Steve thinks, maybe it was good that Tony got to choose his own death.
Captain America/Steve Rogers
Steve is the last one. He keeps dodging the proverbial bullet even after all the others are gone and buried and on their way to being either forgotten or glorified. But in the end, they get to him too. He dies in a roar of flames and what the ice failed to do, the fire does with a vengeance. When they finally manage to douse the flames, there’s nothing much left to find. A few teeth and bone fragments, brittle and blacked from the heat. They resurrect the monument at Arlington and that’s the last of the famous Avengers gone.
LIFE/STANDOFF
Ted Earley
Ted was never supposed to get caught up in all of this, but Charlie needed Ted. He needed him to look after his money, he needed him for his secrets, and most of all he needed him for his sanity. So when Ted died, Charlie didn’t quite know what to do. The worst of it was, maybe, that Ted didn’t even die because of Charlie.
Charlie had sometimes wondered what he’d do if Ted got killed by Nevikov or Rayborn’s people and he’d had a plan. He’d had a Zen plan that he knew he would have discarded in a heartbeat if any of his scenarios had actually come to pass. But it hadn’t happened that way and now Charlie was left without a plan and without Ted, nothing but the hard facts and no real idea of how to cope. He just sat in his big empty house, feeling too big and empty himself and not even the Buddha had anything helpful to say.
Turns out that Reese did. She showed up in the early hours of the morning, the day after the funeral, a bottle of vodka in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. She just let herself in and sat down next to Charlie at the kitchen island. She opened the bottles and pushed the vodka in front of him. He took a swig straight from the bottle and she followed suit with her own. They matched each other swallow for swallow, Charlie with vodka, Reese with water.
When half of his bottle was empty, she took it away from him, pulled him off the stool and led him upstairs. She lay him down in his big empty bed and slid under the covers next to him.
“Sleep,” she said, “You’ll continue living tomorrow.”
And he did.
Dani Reese
Tidwell called him from the hospital. There was a long pause before he said, voice raw and broken, “She’s gone.”
Charlie buried his head in his hands and let Matt wrap his arms around him.
After a while he went and got the bottle of vodka he kept hidden in the kitchen cupboard.
“Get drunk with me?” He said.
Matt nodded.
“We’ll continue living tomorrow,” Charlie promised her memory.
Emily Lehman
“Emily, get down!” Matt yelled, but it was already too late.
The explosion ripped apart the front of the building and debris smashed into the ground around them with deadly force. People screamed, ducked, ran and crawled for cover. Matt stared at the spot where Emily had just been. Dust and smoke filled the air, the fire backlighting the scene with a flickering glare. It was hard to see anything clearly.
When it was clear that there wouldn’t be another explosion, Matt moved towards where he’d seen her last.
“Please,” he muttered to himself, “please, please...”
He found her curled up on the ground. She’d been standing too exposed to not get hit by the blast or broken pieces, but Matt was still hoping that it might only be minor injuries. Sometimes people got lucky. Sometimes people survived the most unbelievable things.
Mostly, though, people died.
Emily didn’t beat the odds.
It was days later when Matt resurfaced from his grief long enough to look at Charlie properly. He’d been there with Matt the entire time, for everything, and he’d not said much. No more than absolutely necessary.
Now Matt looked at him, asked, “You got anything helpful to say?”
Charlie gave him one of his cryptic smiles. “The Buddha says, if you get angry you stop looking for the truth.”
Matt nodded, this one he got. “I’ve been angry. Have you been looking for the truth?”
“I’ve found it.”
Matt Flannery
Thirty-four years is a long time to get to know someone. Charlie had thirty-four years to get to know Matt. Matt had sometimes wondered if Charlie would ever get tired of knowing him. Charlie never did. It took Matt twenty years to believe him, but in the end he did. After all, Matt never got tired of knowing Charlie.
When Matt’s heart finally gave out, the pain was less sharp than Charlie had imagined. After all, they’d had thirty-four years. They’d said all the things they’d wanted to say, done most of the things they’d wanted to do. Back when they’d first met, Charlie hadn’t even thought he’d make it through the rest of the year. Matt had helped with that. Matt had given him thirty-four years of his life and Charlie could let him go now.
Charlie could wait until they’d meet again.
SHERLOCK
Sherlock Holmes
What if things had ended differently? What if Moriarty hadn’t put the gun in his own mouth? What if he’d pointed it at Sherlock instead and pulled the trigger. Because after all, he was smarter, was more ruthless and had less to lose.
The bullet, weighing between 115 to 147 grains, would have left the gun at a speed of roughly 1300 feet per second. It would have penetrated Sherlock’s skull and most likely gone through, considering the distance between the muzzle and his head.
The bullet would have crushed his skin, bone and brain tissue and caused nearby tissue to stretch and expand as it passed through. It would have left a permanent cavity as well as a temporary cavity and it would be interesting to know by how much the second deviates from the first if it weren’t his own brain. A hole through the brain causes instant unconsciousness and will likely kill the recipient, so he would not be interested in the deviation after having been shot. Someone else might be, though. Maybe he should have investigated this when he still had the time.
The bullet would surely have killed him. Maybe Moriarty should have put the bullet in Sherlock’s brain, instead of his own.
Mycroft
John sees it in the newspaper one morning.
Mycroft Holmes
1966-2013
In Loving Memory
No matter how much he tries, he never finds out more.
John Watson
His psychiatrist thinks he’s suicidal. She’s not mentioned it, but he’s seen the note in her file. She knows he still checks what she writes, so she wants him to know. Maybe she thinks it will stop him.
He hangs around Scotland Yard until Lestrade tells him to fucking go and fill out some paperwork. John’s got the medical training and someone pulls enough strings to get him a job at the morgue. Molly’s gone, but maybe that’s for the best.
John works in the morgue until it’s time for him to retire. When he does, the department throws him a party and even Lestrade gets his arse back down from Edinburgh and celebrates with him.
John’s not sure what to do with himself once he hasn’t got a job to keep him going.
“You should try beekeeping,” Lestrade jokes.
John does. It’s surprisingly complicated. There’s even an air of mystery to it because according to the experts, the bees have started disappearing all over the world and nobody knows why. It makes John chuckle quietly to himself in the evenings when he checks the websites for new theories.
When he feels the end coming, he sells the house, the bees and gives most of his things away. He moves into assisted living. A week later he decides that it’s been long enough. Overall,
he’s had a good life.
The nurse finds him in the morning.
“He died peacefully in his sleep. I hope I get to go that way one day,” she’ll tell her colleague later.
SGA
Atlantis
She knew the feeling of death. She’d been close to it many times. Once, she’d come so close that she’d thought it really was the end. But she’d held on. Held on for her children that had come back to her at last and they’d found a way to bring her back.
They’d fought together, her and her children, fought many battles and saved many lives, although many were also lost. She learned to love them all, the ones that couldn’t hear her just as much as the ones that could. They were her children, their lives intertwined.
But there were others. They took her children away. They forced them to abandon her, back on a planet that she had long since left behind and had never thought would have to visit again. Her children were taken away from her, one by one until none were left and only strangers’ feet pounded through her halls. Strangers who could hear but would not listen.
She did not like them. She did not want to work with them, live with them. She wanted her children back, but they weren’t coming.
She made a decision.
They’d moved her out onto the open ocean, out of the way of the places with many people. That was good. She didn’t want to hurt any innocent lives. Some of those lives were linked to her children or might be one day.
She gave the strangers two hours warning. Enough time to get away from her.
The self-destruction sequence took her down to the bottom of the sea. It shut down all systems and broke her irreparably.
Her last thought was that she’d not known death after all.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth. Comment there. (
comments).