Title: jigsaw
Prompt: Prompt 11—The Cellar
Character/Pairing: Echo, Noise
A/N: Ahahaha, the song Echo by Jason Walker is kinda too on point for these two.
Summary: Echo picks up the pieces her master discards, picks up everything she can. It's not enough, it never is.
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Echo is supposed to be an echo, a shadow, a whisper in a cave. Punished by the gods and doomed to loneliness.
They spend a hundred years in that cave, a hundred years with only themselves to talk to, to listen to. A hundred years is nothing to a Baskerville, especially if that Baskerville is really just travelling through time, through a snapshot of a century.
A snapshot of time but it's longer, so much longer, when Noise is in charge. Noise can't control their passage, their tumble through the rabbit hole of time and space. It's all Echo can do, all any of the Echos can do, to keep her on course and on track.
"Vincent?" Noise asks the darkness, the abyss. The bright lights of their youth are missing. "Vincent, where are you?"
She drops her shyness, her fears. Drops her kindness like she's taking off her clothes and putting on new ones.
"Vincent, I'm stronger now, Vincent I can protect you." Noise shouts, shedding more and more of herself. "I can do it now."
Echo picks up her worries, her tears. Picks up the pieces of Noise that are lost and puts them on. It's a strain she isn't made to take, a strain she isn't used to.
(She drops her cruelness, her swears, drops all the parts that don't fit with this new persona, with this old Noise.)
Her body, it's breaking. A new Echo is already emerging from the depths of Noise's mind, a new Echo that is only new to Noise and so familiar to Echo.
"Here, take this," she asks, she begs. She holds what she can in her arms, the pieces of their master that she has saved. That the Echos have saved over the years. Things are missing, things are lost—she can never find them, no matter how hard she dives into her master's soul. "It's all we have now."
The new Echo takes them, slowly opening her eyes as the old one does. Takes them and changes, her expression becoming kinder, softer.
"I'll protect her," Echo promises, watching the old Echo sink.
Already, she can feel the reins of control being given to her, feel Noise being forced into the background. She hates it, she always has, but Noise can't handle the abyss for so long.
"I'll find Vincent," she promises her charge, her host. "I'll find him."
And she will, in the hundred years they have to cross, he has to be somewhere. And maybe, just maybe, Noise can have the peace she's been looking for.
(But Echo fears, as she always has, as they always had, that nothing will give her that peace.)