Breekon had never needed to breathe before. Of course he had done it occasionally, out of boredom or to make his presence all the more unsettling by doing it wrong, but for the first time it seemed to come naturally, and he hated it with every fiber of his being. His chest hitched uselessly as he sobbed, tears he hadn't known he was capable of producing rolling down his face. They were bitter on his lips, chemical, not at all the saltiness that had been described to him.
Would it have been a comfort or just another source of pain to have a bit of him left? Something that could fill his achingly empty arms, though it would never be the same as the cold other half of his existence. As it were, what remained of "Hope" was merely a fine dust that was indistinguishable from the dull grey of his uniform.
Referring to him felt.. wrong. He'd never needed to before—always, they had been one being, never separate for more than a few seconds. To talk about him was to talk about them. The thought of second person had never crossed his mind, and it burned to think of it now.
It was such an emptiness, being incomplete. It felt like a sudden amnesia. When he reached out to that part of his mind that had always been there, searching for the feelings and notions that were at once his own and seperate, he was met with nothing. There was no other part, but how could that be? It had always been him and.. him. Them alone. Never alone, not really. It had always just been him.
It couldn't be that, though. He would not come undone like this at the simple loss of self, not considering who—what—he was. Had been.
It was enough to make his head spin, his hands gripping the steering wheel of the delivery van. His knuckles did not go white with the pressure, but they did crackle quietly.
All at once, he wished to be something else. Out of all the foreign thoughts he was dragged through, this was most jarring. He was not capable of being anything but what he was, hadn't ever tried to be. There would be no change and no becoming, not as long as they had some sort of cargo and a destination. The idea that they might not forever be such as they were was so unthinkable it had never in their centuries of being had the opportunity to frighten them. Maybe if he had been anything other than what he was, things would have been different. Humans did not mesh so closely that one became the other. That honor was reserved for them and various parasites. Imagining it only made the ache in his chest grow worse, the picture of a reality where they had never been one somehow worse than being so alone here and now. He did not know how to exist without Hope there to pick up what he lacked, leaking his vicious laughter into the space where they overlapped.
He had told him he loved him, once. Or.. Hope had told him? It hadn't ever mattered who did what when they were so much the same, though their differences were still evident. It had been in a church, before a preacher that was at the end of his rope. The stunted little man hadn't been able to make speech of what he saw, the two beings dancing between the pews, laughing as they bounced the phrase between them in mocking voices. They had left that place in flames, though neither of them ever lit a match. That was not their job. The preacher took care of it, anyhow, mumbling all the way about the claws of satan and the cleansing light of God and how this place was wrong and in need of purification. The glazed look in his eyes as he staggered about gathering the lanterns had only made Hope laugh harder. Breekon could remember they way the smoke had streamed from his mouth, his nose, the sockets of his eyes as he breathed it in.
He felt empty. Often Breekon had wondered if that's what they were; thick skin molded into vaguely recognizable shapes like an amateur clay project. On long drives their mind would drift, picturing what it could be that lent them their steady, overbearing weight but still made a hollow sound when they were struck. Sand, maybe. Nobody had ever stabbed them hard enough to find out. Now, he wished somebody would tear him apart and let the emptiness seep from inside his covering, knowing it was true.
He knew because when Hope had crumbled on the ground, he had collapsed in on himself as if there were nothing holding his shape any longer. He wanted so badly to simply dissolve like Hope had, leave nothing but the terror in his.. their wake. He did not care if it was painful. Whatever it was could not possibly be more painful than this dizzying incompleteness.
When the coffin in the back of the van began to rattle, he was not broken out of his reverie, the most it affected him being the lightest slip of solace. It must've started to rain at some point, because the coffin began to moan in it's reaching song. He could draw no true comfort from the fact that the person responsible for this was shoved deep into it; for all his brute strength, it had done nothing to stop her from taking them.
No, it was that he still had cargo. They were still delivery men, for the time being, though he could feel his obligation to the coffin had been severed the moment Hope had died. He clung to the notion of having one last job to do, even if it was no longer his reason for creation.
Maybe.. Maybe, with no deliveries to make and no partner, he would stop working. It was terribly wishful thinking. Nothing had ever stopped them before, so he had no idea what a motionless "life" could be like.
His halved mind could not cover the possibility of after. After, there would be no Breekon & Hope deliveries. It was the only thing he had to fight for to as hatred curled up over the space where a heart could have been any other day. He was going to do.. something. Stopping wasn't a choice. It never really had been for them, had it?
Faint memories of a time before prickled at the edges of his mind, scraping the open wound where Hope had been torn away. There had to have been something before there was this, with them, but nothing from such a meaningless place could console him.
Nothing meant anything if it did not mean something to Hope.
The metal steering wheel of the delivery van did not appreciate his strength. Not that many ever had, but most at least had the decency to be afraid. It clicked and ground as he leaned his weight forward, as if it might make the miles pass any quicker.
Breekon could only think of one other who hadn't succumbed to the terror they.. he brought; he could imagine the way he might've ached from slamming to the walls on his way out of the Eye's pedestal if his body had had any bones in it.
The road stretched straight ahead before him in an unpleasant blur of green and bleary morning grey, English countryside zipping past him at a speed Hope would have found delightful.
For the first time since their stint of being highwaymen, Breekon did not know where he was going. The usual compass in his palms, itching to turn left or right or to hop out of the car and march, was absent. It was a prickling, anticipatory pain, and it had gone along with his Hope.
It didn't hurt so much to think about now. That was unnerving in it's own right, but he reassured himself the wound was still there via randomized flashes of memory that briefly returned the feeling to him like a spike of iron through his skull.
Now he just felt exhausted. The coffin had been unbearably heavy without another to help bear it's weight, even if he'd lifted things three times the size in the circus. Even his own limbs were sluggish, his chest weighed down with the heft of sorrow.
The longer he was alone, the more he felt.. seperate. It was awful. He tried so hard not to think about it, but he had to, didn't he? He couldn't very well clutch desperately to the last, remaining bits of his partner without remembering him. Not when memory was all that was left.
It would do a little easier if those memories could be the ones they'd liked, though, he thought indignantly. The looks of resigned horror or clawing, struggling fear. But instead, all he could think was "gone", "gone", "gone".
Breekon And Hope—one name split between two, but not evenly. The edges of the divide were jagged, and so each new piece of the whole remained at least somewhat unique.
Breekon was here, Hope was not.
Breekon was steadfast, Hope was jovial.
Breekon took the front of the casket, Hope took the back.
Breekon tended the mule, worked the levers, made sure the car ran smoothly.
Hope carried the corpses, punched the tickets, got signatures for deliveries.
Breekon was here, Hope was not.
Last time, Breekon had gone first.
The sudden, vivid assurance that there had in fact been a before stopped any other thought in it's tracks.
He'd been so aware of his breath since The Unknowing, but now it had sped into dry gasping without his consent nor knowledge. He could not have been anything other than what he was.
Breekon repeated that thought to himself over and over, but it failed to drown out the dread. He could feel it rising in his throat, heavy and hot—the sensation he could now recognize as coming tears. They could not have been anything but what they..
Were. Were, past tense, and if one did not die with the other now, could it have been so before?
It was so, so long ago. So long that it hadn't been seen even when the Archivist had scoured his head for all his history, the minute detail of a true beginning so buried it had somehow escaped their prying fingers.
The van juddered sharply, reminding him that even so useless as he was, he should be looking at the road instead of his hands. The rugged bit of land were concrete road met the gravel ditch had dark marks from the tires going over the edge now.
Even as he stared ahead, fixing his gaze to some safer point more likely to keep him in the lines, he veered. Swerving gently in an attempt to correct his path, cutting back through the yellow, over the white, back to the middle again.
There was really no reason to be so deliberate. You couldn't eat from half a plate. Half a box was already open. A nesting doll without it's double was just an empty vessel, alone, containing no true mystery.
Breekon's hands had gone slack on the wheel. He barely felt it turning slightly on it's own as the road curved and the car did not curve with it, and maybe, just maybe, he was weak enough to be mercifully ended as a human might, and—
The oncoming wall of earth was small, but steep. It was a shallow dip in a hill that had been cut straight through to make way for the road, rising from the grass at the moment the road curved sharply to the left. Each layer of soil was visible, like a classroom diagram; dead life just beneath the scraggly grass, a pale and dusty stripe, and then it got darker each layer until somewhere it became clay became rock became gravel became street.
It seemed to be such a natural next step, maybe the only natural thing they had ever done. One simply could not exist without the other. That was the way of things. That was their way.
The van sped forward, faster than it had gone in a decade or so, no longer carrying the burden of the casket and it's second courier. Its last few seconds of movement would be its most free. The little red dial at the dash ticked up, up, up.. And Breekon loudly filler his lungs to capacity, hoping that he wouldn't need to do it again.