Epilogue
Blair felt really strange. Not ill, but thin and vague, with that odd disconnected feeling that he used to associate with being ill, until the military had done him a favour and shown him otherwise. A distant part of his brain wondered if he had always spirit walked when he was unwell, and grinned faintly as the answer - 'well, duh!' - echoed in his brain from his own unconscious.
At the same time he felt more alive, more *real* than he ever had before. Every step was so heavy that he wanted to check to see if he ahd left prints in the metal floors, and the walls were no more opaque when he looked than gauze. He wondered distantly, as he reached through a wall to jerk out the alarms and electronic locks, if it was the solidity or the unreality which was letting him walk out of here.
Their alarms were howling all around him, and he didn't care He watched with silent disinterest, stepping softly out of the way, as uniformed ants ran past him. Their eyes slid over and through him with no more interest than if he had been a brown stain on the dark painted wall.
//Jim?// he murmured quietly, and smiled happily as he touched a familiar mind. //I'm ready. Wait for me?// he asked, with the quiet confidence of a man who already knows the answer.
"Well, well, Mr Sandburg, there you are." The man's voice was flat, all expression lost through the speakers on the wall. "Please remain where you are and we will be able to end this ridiculous attempt of yours."
"I don't see it as so ridiculous," Blair said mildly. He tilted his head in thought. "In fact, I don't think you see it that way either," his hand lifted slowly to waist height, "You know, I don't think you see me at *all*," and his fist clenched and there was a howl over the speakers, "My eyes!" before the mike was shut off in a crackle of electrical overload. Blair's face set in hard lines, and he kept moving. They'd shut the blast doors, and he sighed, touching a finger lightly to the metal.
Steel, reinforced with titanium, infilled with concrete. Nearly three feet thick, and more similar doors beyond it, guarded by men whose fear he could taste from here.
He thought about the door, leaning quietly against it, ignoring the whoop-whoop of the tocsin, and the pounding feet, and the chatter of gun fire shattering on the walls around him, never hitting him. In the scheme of things, the door was not there. He smiled peacefully, and felt the bones of it as it murmured of its making, cooled and molded, cast and boiled. It had only been in place for years. The metals, once rich ores buried quiet and deep in the earth knew him, and listened as he whispered that they didn't really fill the space as heavily as those who wrought it believed. The metal loosened its bonds, and he reached past to the centre of the door. The concrete was only sand, soft and yielding, bound thus, and thus. He took in another deep breath, and slipped between the gaps in the bunker door, sinking through it, around it, beyond it as though it was not there, or as though solid matter itself conspired to bend around him, refracted through him, as solid as light.
From the far side of it the sounds were more muffled, enough that he instantly noticed the hissing of air vents. The men there, staring wide eyed from behind gas masks were shocked into immobility for a fatal second as he apeared walking through those impregnable doors as though they were mist. Without a flicker the air exploded, burning out, first depleting the oxygen, then impossibly igniting the poisonous gases pouring through the vents, a pair of fireballs rolling back like fire up a fuse. The dull thuds in the distance as tanks of the stuff exploded gave him no satisfaction. Lives flickered and went out.
//They chose this,// his sentinel's voice murmured, //come home to me?//
Tears tracking through the ash and soot, he walked out of the military facility onto the green slopes that he had watched for a year or more. He didn't bother wiping them away. They would not have mourned for him, but he needed to mourn for them. His mind was not truly on the ruined hillside behind him though. He turned and looked back. In a hundred years it would be as though this place had never been, and he smiled, and turned his face back to the sunlight and home.
He hurried. If someone had been watching him they would have wondered how he travelled so quickly, so invisibly, but to Blair there was no invisible, or quick. He stumbled over unexpected trees and boulders that threw themselves up out of nowhere. He blinked his eyes desperately, trying to clear them as the very landscape flickered and changed before him. Flick - a mountain before him; flick - a road, quiet and unmetalled. Flick, another road, bushes cleared back for fifty feet on either side. Flick - a truck and...
He stopped dead.
Jim was leaning against the truck and smiling. Blair stopped. Everything stopped. Between one moment of time and the next, sliced so finely that no one but they could have ever seen it, he was in his arms, held hard and tight, in a timeless split moment.
And they kissed, and time began again.
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The Labyrinth: Epilogue |
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Page last updated 18/09/2004.