This isn't... quite what I started out to do?? It started out as a request fill but then it got a little bit out of hand, so now it's going to be its own little stand-alone two-shot thing.
Setting is my amazing bro's Lagtrain Verse (please go read it, they're a phenomenal writer!), with my OC Tee (on the right) as the stranger on the platform.
(cw: none. themes of loss and mourning.)
It's taking all my will just to run alone,
when are you coming home?
-'Die for You', Starset
***
The station is silent, the last train having long since left for its final docking, and Emmet feels the weight of the quiet like a stone around his neck. He hates how the station becomes a lonely liminal space at night, the once-bustling platforms now echoing nothing but his own footsteps as he finally calls it a day.
He barely looks around himself as he walks towards the exit that will spit him out closest to his home; he keeps his gaze on the floor beneath his feet and doesn’t focus on the lack of a matching pair beside him, doesn’t let himself drown in his own too-quiet footfalls, no longer in perfect synch with another’s. He rounds a corner, heading for the staff door beside the turnstiles…
…and nearly jumps out of his skin.
There, sitting utterly still on a lonely metal bench, is a silver-haired man in a long black jacket.
Emmet chokes.
He takes a faltering step in the man’s direction, shaking hand raising slightly as if to reach out. “…Ingo?”
His voice, already flat and low, comes out like a breath, like nothing; his brother’s name is barely a word on his tongue and what little there is quavers just as badly as his hands. But it’s enough. The man on the bench must hear something, because he lifts his head as though waking from a trance and looks to Emmet with a glassy grey stare.
It’s not Ingo.
Emmet suddenly feels like a complete and utter fool. Of course this person isn’t Ingo - looking at him now, Emmet sees that the man’s only similarity to his brother is the color of the coat he wears.
The man is thin; even sitting, he looks like a reed in the wind, with a graceful neck and long-fingered hands tipped in sharp black nails. He uncurls from his shallow hunch with an almost inhuman smoothness, turning his face to reveal high cheekbones and silver piercings in his nose and lips and brows. His hair is black on the bottom, a dark undercut accenting a tousled top and fringe the color of a storm cloud, not the pale silver-blond Emmet mistook it for at first.
But lastly, and most tellingly, are his eyes.
Behind a pair of thick rectangular glasses, the man’s eyes are a shade of grey too dark to match with Emmet’s - more steel than silver, deeper, duller - framed by smoky black shadow.
The man watches him curiously, seeming to search for something without so much as shifting his gaze.
“…Hello,” he says at length, finally breaking the bubble of impossible silence. His voice is calm, quiet, soft in both tone and pitch, and nothing at all like the one Emmet has missed for three long years.
Emmet bites down the sickly wave of disappointment that rolls inside his stomach, savagely swallows it down, feels it corrode into anger instead. He narrows his eyes at the stranger, the not-Ingo, and says, “Can I help you?”
It’s said with heat, with teeth. The words themselves are helpful but the sound they make is irritable and mean.
(He regrets it instantly; it’s not the man’s fault he isn’t Emmet’s brother.)
But the man simply smiles at him, painted lips stretching into something laced with a familiar kind of sorrow.
He shakes his head slowly and looks down towards his lap, at a spread of three tall, black cards balanced atop his thighs. “…Just waiting for someone.”
Emmet takes a second to school his tongue before speaking again. He presses it tight against the roof of his mouth to keep any more harshness at bay, and only once he’s certain no more will leak out does he respond with a tight, “The last train has already left.”
Again, though, the man just smiles. It touches the corners of his eyes, brows drawn down, and for a single brief moment, Emmet thinks that the man is about to cry; he doesn’t.
Instead, he brushes the tips of his long nails along the edges of a card, before delicately tucking them under it and flipping the card over.
“…I know,” the man says.
Emmet’s mouth flattens out into a thin, straight line. He can feel the irritation bubbling anew, and is about to tell the man to kindly leave, since the trains won’t run again until morning, but the man sighs mournfully before Emmet can speak. He flips a second card over and trails his fingertip over its paper face.
“They’re late, aren’t they?” He reaches for the third and final card, flips it over, picks it up between his fingers to hold in front of his face as if examining it. His expression saddens even further as he slowly looks from the card back to Emmet, then finally through Emmet to the tracks beyond. “Both mine and yours…”
Emmet doesn’t know how to respond. Habitually, he feels his hackles raise at what can only be an allusion to his missing brother, but then the man’s face crumples into something like grief for a long, agonized moment, and it’s too real a reaction to have been anything malicious - leaving Emmet with the realization that this odd stranger might just be missing a loved one of his own.
And now Emmet really feels like a dick.
Before he can properly ask if he can help, the man’s expression smooths back out into the eerie, controlled blank slate it had been at the start, with glassy grey eyes staring far ahead into nothing. The man blinks, and for just a tiny sliver of time, Emmet could swear the man’s eyes have changed to a glowing, brilliant gold; the man blinks again, and the steely grey returns.
Without another word, the stranger stands and sadly tucks the cards back into their deck before slipping the whole thing into the pocket of his jacket. He picks up a hat from beside himself that Emmet hadn’t seen a moment ago - black felt with a round, broad rim and a curved, tapered tip, accented by a braided band of white and black and grey leather.
“The waiting isn’t even the hardest part,” the man murmurs, slipping his hat onto his head. He exhales, deep and slow, breathing out what might be a faint plume of dark smoke despite his lack of cigarette. “...It’s that I can’t see when it ends.”
The man glances up once more and gives Emmet a tiny, raw, exhausted smile. “All I know is that it does. One day…”
He turns then, pivoting on his heel and heading towards the exit, while Emmet tries to think of something to say that isn’t everything he’d never wanted said to him after Ingo disappeared.
By the time Emmet unsticks his tongue the man is already past the turnstiles, a little purple espeon now trotting along beside him and nuzzling at his shins. Together, the pair moves soundlessly out of the station and disappears into the lonely night beyond.
The sky rumbles with distant thunder when Emmet finally follows suit, and the whole walk home he can taste the oncoming rain like blood in the back of his throat.
