Title: Morse code
Prompt: Prompt 11—The Cellar
A/N: This is mostly based on the chapter when Glen dies and Jack reacts to it
Summary: His heart speaks in Morse, in Braille, in a thousand languages he can't understand.
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Glen is dead. It's a strange thought, a strange feeling that's born within him.
Glen is dead. Oswald is dead. How long has it been since he said that name? Years, years and years and now Oswald is gone just as Lacie is gone.
(Lacie, Lacie, Lacie. He loves her. He hates her. He feels everything and nothing and the world is so much duller without her.
He should never have met her.)
Oswald is gone. The concept is hard to wrap around, to even think. There are no more tunes on a midsummer's night, no more songs and music boxes to match.
Lacie was easier to accept, to understand. To decide what to do next.
This one is harder because he caused it. Twice. He caused it and this isn't a twisted act of fate to fix, a wrong to correct.
Something wet slides down his cheek, something salty and warm. Touching it, he stares at the tear.
What is this for? Grief? Loss?
Why now? A hundred years ago, he stabbed Oswald. He stabbed him and cut him and did a thousand wrongs that can never be undone. His head severed, given to a woman who danced in ruin. His body broken and chained away from the cycle Oswald sought to protect.
Not once then did he cry. Not once. Only when he failed and only because he failed—his heart has always been under control, under lock and key.
Shut in a box and nothing comes in and nothing comes out.
Oswald had said once that Jack is like water. Clear and with no substance. He was wrong.
Jack is more like an inky darkness, the clouded mirror. There is nothing reflected from this abyss, there is nothing to find, and yet everything exists within.
He doesn't know what he feels, if anything. A thousand times, he's looked in the mirror and wondered just what was looking back. Just who existed in that reflection.
(A thousand times he's stared at the mirror and wondered if he's the reflection looking back.)
Jack doesn't feel emotions, not without Lacie and her smiles and her whims and how she took it all away only to give it back.
And now he can still feel the tear as it slides down his cheek. Feels it stick to his skin, carving a path from his head to his heart.
Jack clutches his chest—he can feel something, a twinge, a pain. Something is hurt. His defective heart is still beating.
His defective heart is still beating, but it's in a foreign language, in a code. His heart speaks in Morse, in Braille, in a thousand languages he can't understand.What does this mean? This pace, this beat? Just what does this mean?
"I don't know," he tells Oz, truthfully. "I don't know what I feel."
He thinks he lost the ability to tell a long time ago.