Work Text:
John flicks his lighter up and down.
He can’t bring himself to smoke the cigarette pinched between his fingers, for once. Something about the idea of smoke fills him with unease. He’s wired. Up and down goes the lid.
His throat is tight. The air smells like smoke. Where there’s smoke, there’s–
Nothing. There is nothing. He is fine.
The thing sits in his peripheral vision. It moves when he turns to look at It. It drifts through the air, circling people’s bodies and invading their thoughts. He has other people’s memories in his head. His head. Is it his? Or is it the Martian’s? Us.
He is fine. He is fine. The lighter continues to click. Up and down.
The world around him is exploding with colours. They aren’t nameable, completely incomprehensible to the human mind.
The thing whispers, cannot understand yet. Colours leak into the car like smoke. The café is smoking. Where there’s smoke, there’s–
Sweat beads on his neck. He cannot bring himself to get out of the car. In here, he’s safe. Bad vibes, It’s green voice crows. Collapse Eminent.
The thing moves to the parking garage sign. It twists words, changing them in a way only John can see. A lone, red dot sits in the middle now instead of arrows pointing up and down. The lighter clicks.
The red follows him wherever he goes. Blood, at crime scenes. Play-doh, on Tyler’s desk. Blush, painting Bridget’s face. Anger, inside all. The red can be found where there’s smoke. Bad Idea #1937-231. The café. The hotel. His cigarettes. Middleton.
The smoke curls around his face. He breathes it in, all of it– love, anger. They go hand in hand. Like up and down. Like smoke and–
Cannot understand yet.
The word will not come to him. Instead, the memories do. The café. The ground. Red on him. Red around him. It’s dripping from his nose, puddling beneath his head. He blinks. He does not remember. There’s a shroud, a curtain made of green. The singular red eye continues to stare at him.
Cannot understand yet.
“Why?” John asks. The thing appears in the passenger seat. The sign is back to normal, telling people to go up and down.
Why is a question John asks a lot. He asks it when he lifts up the crime scene tape. He asks it when he’s looking for the suspect. The answer he needs now is a different kind of why, though. It’s a question he has never asked before.
Reality was something he had taken for granted. Now, he cannot comprehend the shattered prism that is reflecting in his windshield. The sky was not blue and the grass was not green. The sun was piercing white. Colours ebbed and flowed as they shifted through the rainbow. A normal mind would shatter underneath the pressure. John’s already had, long ago.
Calm down, the green voice tells him. Remember:
Holding Tyler for the first time. New, bright eyes staring up at him. Innocence.
A wedding. His wedding. Bridget is walking down the aisle in the most devastatingly beautiful dress. Promising forever, in sickness and in health. It’s the only time John could ever figure out how to say what he meant to: I love you. I love you, and I will always love you.
He stops flicking the lighter up and down. The red dot leads him through his memories. Piano notes drift through his ears and the smoke clears. He takes a deep breath, inhaling all of it. Anger, death. Relief, comfort. Smoke, and–
He opens his eyes. “Why?” he asks. “Why can’t I understand? What are you protecting me from?”
The martian does not answer, not for a moment. You. Me. Us. The Fire.
The prism explodes again as he is released from the inner clutches of his mind. He feels like a scrapbook, pieces of himself scattered across a page. Glue holds him down as stickers pin his wayward feet. Markers press onto him and colour him red, green, blue.
His skin is no longer skin, his mind no longer his. Thoughts are jumping through the rainbow, completely arcane and obscure.
Mind. Hunt. Kill. Save. Redeem. Heal. -Er.
It is tattooed across his brain. It repeats in his head when he lies in his lonely bed, following him into his dreams. His mind is a battleground and the doctor keeps telling him he is fine.
Everything is normal and turned upside down. Kaleidoscopes bloom wherever he steps. Colours and smoke ooze out of people’s mouths, noses, and ears. Sweat pools at his brow and leaks down his shirt collar. It’s killing him, he thinks. Reality is bending at the seams and splitting before his very eyes.
It’s all random— the way the smoke drifts through the air and hangs in his head. Lines twist and turn and nothing is parallel. There’s no pattern. Panic pulls at his throat and rears something ugly.
John sits in the parking garage and falls apart. There’s a Martian in his passenger seat and a lighter in his right hand. He wants to burn it, all of it: the scrapbook, the car. Middleton and the pack of cigarettes that he stole when he was twelve years old. It could all burn underneath his psychedelic hands.
He flicks open the lighter, then closes it, up and down. The Martian moves to the smoke, its red eye appearing near the mouth of the lighter. Cannot understand yet, It tells him.
“Me, or you?” John huffs. God, he’s lost it. He’s lost all of it. Or maybe, he was like this the entire time. Red, green, blue.
You. Me. Us. The outside influence has come to end humanity with whatever it can possibly imagine. So humanity must imagine the impossible.
“This is impossible,” the blonde replies.
No. It is not. This is normal.
The Martian drifts through his windshield. Its body elongates but the eye stays centred at the mouth of the lighter. It knows everything about him and everyone It has ever passed.
The doctor said It was just stress. John thinks he needs more tests. You hit your head pretty hard, the paramedics had told him. He doesn’t remember that part.
He doesn’t recall any of it. Colours wash over his brain and fill his pia mater. The green curtain is drawn across that day, hiding the café where no one can find it. Not even John could, if he wanted to.
Trails of thoughts leak into his car like smoke.
He flicks the lighter open and close. Up and down. Where there’s smoke, there’s ****.