A prologue for a TMA x DC fic that I'm currently writing. Constructive criticism is welcome!
“Cut the tether, send them away. Maybe we both die. Probably.” Jon’s voice falters, just slightly. “But maybe not. Maybe everything works out, and we end up somewhere else.”
The words hang between them, thin and fragile against the groaning collapse of the Panopticon.
Stone shifts as something vast and unseen turns its attention towards them.
Martin’s hands tremble where they clutch Jon’s. “Together?” he asks, the word breaking halfway through.
Jon smiles, small, sad, and terribly certain. “One way or another,” he says. “Together.”
Martin looks down at the knife.
“I don’t know if I can,” he whispers.
“You have to,” Jon replies softly. “The Eye won’t let me do it.”
The pressure builds, awareness pressing in from all sides, a suffocating knowing. The weight of a thousand, thousand unseen gazes.
“Are you sure about this?” Martin asks, though they have long since passed the point where certainty matters.
Jon lets out a quiet, humorless laugh. “No,” he says, and threads their fingers together, gripping tight as if to anchor himself to something smaller, something human. “But I know that I love you.”
Martin chokes on a sob. “I love you, too.”
He pulls Jon close, desperate and shaking, and kisses him like it might be enough to hold the world together.
It isn’t.
The knife sinks in with a muted, terrible finality.
Jon gasps, and for a moment the watching stutters. The great, all-seeing presence flickers, fractured by an act it cannot control.
The Panopticon begins to fall. The great, impossible architecture of the Eye collapses inward, spiraling into itself as though reality has simply…lost the will to continue holding it together.
Jon’s grip slackens, but he does not let go. Martin holds on as everything else breaks.
And then, nothing.
At first, there was silence.
Not peace, or rest. Just the absence of anything that could be called real.
Then came a low, crackling hum, like a tape struggling to remember how to play.
A voice bleeds through, overlapping itself, layered and distorted:
“Everyone fears death. Of course they do.”
“Perhaps they sensed it.”
“The song is loud and beautiful and I am so very afraid.”
“It’s like there’s a door, in my mind.”
“There is a wasps’ nest in my attic. Perhaps it can soothe my itching soul.”
The voices multiply, familiar and unfamiliar voices bleeding into one another. Statements without context, without beginning or end.
“Above us, you see, there’s only the sky, the infinite, a void of space and emptiness so incredible that to think of it in detail is to overwhelm the mind,”
“May you find your rest where no shadows are cast, and no eyes may see you slumber,”
“How much in this world is done because we fear death, the last and greatest terror,”
“Let us simply say that once there was a place,”
“It is astounding the sort of thing you're willing to choose, given an unpleasant-enough alternative, isn't it?”
“A place where the universe had… cracked.”
The static builds, layers upon layers of voices, statements folding over one another until meaning collapses under the weight of its own telling.
Until something focuses into a singular point.
Not a place, but the certainty that there must be a place to go.
A tear forms in the nothingness.
Not jagged or violent, but precise, and intentional.
And the tear begins to widen.
Reality, new and unfamiliar, pushes back, but not enough. Not quite enough, at least.
And through that fragile, impossible opening, two bodies fall, unceremonious and unobserved by the world’s inhabitants.
They hit cold stone hard enough to knock the breath from their lungs.
For a moment, neither of them moves.
The world around them is quiet, but not empty.
There is wind, somewhere high above. The distant hum of a city that does not sleep. The faint, ever-present tension of something coiled beneath the surface that's watching.
Waiting.
Far above, unseen by any human eye, something shifts. A gaze, fractured and unfamiliar, opens, filled with curiosity and hunger. In the quiet, terrible need to know.
And somewhere in the dark heart of a city built on terror, a new story begins.
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