(no subject)

[celery_cool]

There are questions Abbie should have asked before this experiment occurred. Some had felt too personal, or simply not worth voicing in light of their own working understanding of the town. If Mount Absalom's ghosts aren't ghosts — if they don't rise from the grave under their own power, driven by their own motivations — then what they really need to consider are the potential motivations of the entity that brought Norah here in the first place. Questions like 'why is this so important to you?' or 'are you sure this is necessary?' — too personal, but also misaligned. Norah isn't the one they want to interrogate, and her answers (if she had answers readily available) might not have been useful.

'Why Omega Centauri?' might have been worth voicing, though. A data point that might have explained why one disappointing star cluster is worth such a monumental fucking meltdown.

The floor trembles. The air vibrates with echoes. Marisol stands frozen, her phone dipping under the onslaught, probably getting a decent shot of Norah's knees.

And Norah is unresponsive, bent over the eyepiece like a limb that something else is flexing.

"Norah — Norah, listen to me," Abbie says, to her, to whatever might be listening. "There are other star clusters, right? There's an entire night sky full of other star clusters! There's a universe of other star clusters! You can find another one—"

"It's empty!" Norah gasps, halfway to a sob. Abbie hates the sound of it. Desolate. Petulant, like a fucking child. She deserves better than this.

A statistical unlikelihood of echoes cry out: WHO ARE WE?

Norah straightens. She doesn't look at either of them. "I don't know," she answers. And then she's gone.

"Norah!" Abbie's voice echoes, uncaught, through the silence that Norah left behind. Shit. Shit.

And then the floor begins to shake in earnest. Abbie moves, finally, darting towards the telescope as one of the far walls begins to buckle.

"Abbie, we need to get out of here," Marisol starts. Windows shatter, one by one. "I don't like what's—"

"Help me get the lens!" Abbie says, hurrying to unscrew the drawtube lock. If they can just access it, if Marisol can get the eyepiece loose...

"What?" Marisol asks, unhelpfully.

"Of the telescope!" They have to shout to be heard over the storm outside, over the sound of the Observatory's ongoing implosion. "We need to take it!"

"This is super fucking dangerous," Marisol shouts back, in lieu of fucking helping. "We need to leave now!"

She doesn't understand. There needs to be something left. This can't just be a failed experiment. "They worked so hard!"

"Abbie!"

"She and Rudy worked so hard to build this! She’ll want it when she comes back!"

If she comes back.

Their hands are shaking, inefficient. The lens is still out of reach. A piece of the ceiling falls with a deafening crash, and Abbie flinches in spite of themself, curling over the eyepiece.

And then, for the second time, the cacophony abruptly subsides.

Abbie cracks their eyes open, then straightens by slow, stunned degrees. The Observatory is gone — not in the way it was working towards, just gone. The telescope, Marisol, both comprehensively erased and overwritten by an unfamiliar city block: sidewalk, cars, shop fronts. Pedestrians that don't look twice at them until they eject an alarmed, "What the fuck?!" That earns them a few looks, startled and disapproving.

They're dead. They're dying, and instead of cliché visions of white light or departed loved ones, the last desperate firing of their neural synapses is granting them a vivid hallucinatory approximation of being rude in public. Why not?

It's startlingly realistic, they'll give themself that much. They categorize the sensations with distant, intellectual fascination: the faint breeze, the hum of traffic and voices, the smell of exhaust and damp spring earth and a hint of salt, the marked chill of the cool air against their cheeks. (Are those tears? Mortifying.) The unanticipated weight of the object they're mindlessly clutching in their right hand. Abbie looks down, uncurls their fingers, and looks at the other thing they've been granted.

Nestled in their palm is Norah's lens.

Comments

[loficharm]

It's the shout that catches his attention, and while Martin often unkindly thinks of himself as the sort of person who just ducks his head and hurries by when someone is loudly in distress, he never truly has been that sort of person at all, and he stops instead.

It's early, before work; he'd gone out ahead of John to take a longer walk and pick up a few workplace necessities that had been running low. There is a certain hum of activity, people on their various morning commutes, but it still feels too early for this sort of ruckus. Easy enough to spot the source of it, standing in the middle of a sidewalk staring at something clutched tightly in their hand, plainly shell-shocked. Martin didn't see if they'd been there a moment ago, but he can all too easily guess what might just have happened.

He sighs softly, resetting his expectations for the day, and makes his tentative approach.

"Hey, erm — hi," he says, trying to get their attention as gently as possible. "Are you okay?"