Work Text:
By the time they find him, Derek's slipping repeatedly into interrupted, pitiful sleep.
It’s hands. Fingers. Two people, maybe, but in this instance, it’s a thousand pressing into his skin, under his arms, dragging him up, up, up into the smallness of his room, the frozen floor, the window he’s never gotten around to closing.
The light from his computer smears against his face like mocking laughter. It illuminates over his slumped, humiliating figure against the two professionally suited strangers, against the variety of opened smoothies scattered around his desk and fridge.
“Bring the stretcher,” someone says, quiet as the dead of night. In his ears, though, it’s as loud as the galaxy thrumming at his temple. “He can’t walk.”
Something shuffles. Someone shuffles. Derek lies lifelessly under these hands with a burning, excruciating pain rummaging through his mess of a mind and will not fight back. Can not. Can’t even.
Good god. Is this how he’s going to be taken? He imagined a hundred possibilities, down from every cell, every illness, every impossibly physical manifestation that’s ever existed and researched and given a name to, but this is one he never took an eye out for. He imagined decomposing under the summer sun. He imagined the wind over heavy eyelids.
But as his back hits fabric and the pain multiplies tenfold until it’s pitch nothingness, the definition of a black hole, he claws the last of his energy to turn his head against the very thing that kept every thought, every possibility, at bay.
Avery, he thinks as the light on his computer thrums in the darkness. A-ve-ry.
The patronymic name from father to son, king to prince. A wisdom of the ages, a hope bestowed.
Then, just as how suddenly Avery entered his life in a split of a second, the light fades to no more behind walls, doors, the outside world, and Derek thinks of everything except the boy he’s sworn to protect.
He’s given something. Fabric, but it doesn’t feel like fabric. Emptiness, but to be empty means there needs to be nothing at all.
His mind is still stripped to oblivion. The burning pain akin to needles, nerves pinching, an ice pick stabbed through his orbital lobe and up, never ends. It is still something. It is not emptiness.
But the dark does provide an absence of new information. Light does not penetrate, and so Derek does not have another layer of sharpness over his temples.
His ears have been blocked. His vision is obscured. All that’s left is taste and smell, but there is an absence of both for him to process.
All he feels is the rumbling of metal under him. A car, judging by the rumbles over concrete roads. Dirt, maybe. Something equivalent to the building in the middle of nowhere.
People have experienced further than this, the deprivation of everything except the mind. To be put in water, to feel nothing and everything, to claw at everything until it is the brain and nothing else.
Ironic, seeing how the only thing Derek wanted in life is to hack his brain up into pieces and be done with it already. Whoever these people are, they must’ve heard about the mess cleaned up and absorbed in that stupid world. All the sacrifices and the decisions and his own mind rotting to hell.
That's why they covered his vision and hearing. To experiment and trace the thread until its first ever knot, the brain must still be intact. A dead man tells no tales, and Derek will not ever open his mouth at the verge of nothingness like this.
Even if it means only interacting with a neighbor he’s despised for so long.
You have a lot of nerve, is what the king spits out.
Horrible, gnashing. Shallow breaths, as if everything has deteriorated.
In this playfield of imagination and knowledge, one could not physically exhale the same as a human body, but memories bleed into instinct, and instinct bleeds into imagination.
They’re still in that split space between dimensions. They're still staring at each other. An exposed eye, a mouth that never moves.
A knight, a helmet melting in gold.
“You can’t hurt me further,” Derek hears himself say. Imagines. “It's a dead end from here. Any more pain is rendered useless.”
You are sick and absolutely nothing. This is the result of your selfish, so-called heroic deeds. You hurt, and he hurts. What have you after everything?
Memories, instinct. Words become memories become instinct. The king, trapped in between tightly packed neurons and this blood brain barrier, has been subjected to all of Derek’s thoughts, of Avery’s name, of Avery again and again and again.
But the human imagination is endless, if not eternal. Through repetition, a word is a memory. The king’s words seep into perception, into the past, present, future. Until Avery becomes a synonym for guilt. Regret.
Stupidity.
“Don’t know,” Derek lies, although it’s rendered useless. Both of them know the answer. Both of them ask anyway. Both of them lie. “These people might help me. They might kill you and I both.”
Foolish. You know that’s impossible.
“You lie. There is still room for imagination. There is still room for hope. You have taught me there is no such concept as impossibility.”
But I have taught you the concept for slim chances. Of asymptotes. Of a number so close to zero it is zero itself.
“You have taught me belief, in return.”
Across centuries and the void of a world, sleepless, I seek you, is what Rafael Alberti wrote in his anthropology, translated from Spanish to English and thought to words. Again and again and again, Derek seeks. Derek hopes. Derek thinks about Avery.
The asymptote will never cross. The number will never be the perfect zero.
But he can dream. And in his dreams, only then will he be free.
And you never will, the king says. The scene never changed. The world never changed. You have sacrificed yourself for nothing.
On New Years, after everything happened and Derek slumped against his chair in never-ending, slamming pain, fireworks painted the sky in majestic, grandeur colors. He could not watch, for his skin melted and his head contained the endless, miserable sufferings of the universe.
But Avery did. And Avery had.
Staring at a sky like that, it must’ve been a beautiful, beautiful core memory.
“But he lives another day,” Derek replies, smiling and smiling and smiling. Under the blindfold, his mouth curves until the world sees. Until the pain of stretching, far so different from all of this, is real and grounding. “You can not take him away from that.”
You are sick.
“I am,” Derek repeats. A truth. “That's why we’re both here.
“Maybe later when they experiment and deprive me even more, you’ll suffer, too.” Derek grins, and it is everything. “That's the real definition of selfishness. To decide someone’s fate at your own convenience, ignoring everything they’ve said. It's only fitting it’s the two of us and no one else, you think?”
You think of it as a blessing.
“It is,” Derek replies. Believes it. “As long as he lives, my death is no more than the very thing that will bring him peace.”