Chapter Text
Oblivion, when it came, was an insult barely worth the name.
Verso lay on the cold, churned mud. Blood pooled beneath him. His own, mostly.
There was supposed to be an instant when pain dissolved, when the world receded like tide from a sandbar, and all that remained was the silent answer to a question he’d never been allowed to ask. There was, the first time, he thinks. Now, in its place, all he got was the slow evaporation of sensation, a cruel patience in the nerves. The battlefield around him remained vivid. Shouts and gunfire, the vaporous taste of spent powder, grit grinding against his teeth. Every detail lingered to the last.
He tried to close his eyes. Reflex failed: lids prickling with a million glass splinters, refusing to slide, vision locked on a lattice of trampled grass and an unloving sky, blue torn into strips by black smoke. The world didn’t want to let him go. Life, as promised, was already mockery, he supposed: a space between states. Not dying, not living. Just the thinning of his existence until he became translucent to himself.
He had died seventeen times before. Or perhaps it was eighteen? In its familiar grasp, his consciousness would dim like a candle flame starved of oxygen, guttering but never quite extinguishing. Then the slow, agonizing reassembly: atoms finding atoms, memories threading back through reformed pathways without any singular moment of blessed silence.
The battle sounds grew distant. Not that anything was ending—putain, that it could end—but because Verso was receding from them, pulled back through layers of his own unmaking. He tasted copper. Felt his heartbeat stutter. His fingers twitched against mud that was becoming less substantial with each labored breath.
There was no "going." No crossing over. Just this interminable suspension between versions of himself.
The worst part was remembering. Remembering eyes in the moment of recognition. Slowly being digested. His torso being torn from his waist. The fall from the Reacher. Drowning in the river where gestrals start life anew. Each death collected like another thick layer of paint he couldn't scrape from his skin. Death, then life, cursed to remember but never be the same. Fitting, he supposed.
A shadow fell across his face. Someone checking bodies. Verso couldn't turn to look. Didn't matter. Soon they would move on, and he would continue his private dissolution, unmourned and unremarked, in this Canvas made to remember him.
And then, he would walk away.
What torture it was.