I have been bitten by the fanfic bug yet again!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
It had been so quiet. For so very long.
The bony beast once known on the planet Earth as Doomsday had been left here, on a broken crag of rock in the middle of a cosmic dead zone. No individual stars were visible to him now. Just the endless dusty swirls of galaxies. To fling himself into the void would take until the heat death of all things before he found foothold on another planetoid, probably also dead. The Doomsday couldn’t remember any longer if this floating mountain of space dust was the one he had started upon.
How long had it been since one of the little green streaks had shot past? Light years away to check that the monster hadn’t escaped its cage. They had come often at first. Then further apart. Then further than that. Replaced by young humanoids in floating bubbles and golden rings. Though eventually even they too stopped coming.
It had even been eons since the golden sun god that had once been the Doomsday’s most hated enemy came here. What once had been battle that would shake cities to their core, a battle that left the Doomsday roaring its last guttural cry as the Kryptonian too fell into death was less than nothing to the Kryptonian now. The Doomsday’s blows didn’t flinch the golden skinned Superman. The Superman simply spoke as the Doomsday raged, with a voice so deep and loud and bright that the monster behind the bony spines had to listen for there was nothing else to hear.
“You are alive. Despite all you are. Despite all that the accident of your birth has taken from you. That is inarguable.” The golden Superman said as the monster howled bloody murder, still attempting to rip the Kryptonian’s spine from his back as he had tried to do before. “You will outlast many. Perhaps all of us. When even my connection to Earth’s star has flickered and faded. I wonder if there might be a time where, eventually, there is some good purpose to you being alive. I forgave you long ago, Doomsday. Eventually you may find you have nothing else to be angry at. Nothing will hurt you here. Nothing can. What will your mind be like without the pain?” The golden sun god said and then simply drifted away. He paid no mind to the monster roaring a challenge. Its hulking body still shot through with the same pain and rage that it had always had.
But once the golden Kryptonian was gone. It was just the quiet and the stillness. Year upon year, century upon century. The cold emptiness of the cosmic void holding close to the creature’s impossible bulk. Slowly soothing away the artificial growth that was like a glass shattering spike of pain. Slowly allowing for distance in the hatred for the scientist who created the Doomsday through an experiment of callous unkindness upon an infant creature that once was. Pain was replaced with...not pain? Fear was replaced with...not fear? Anger with not anger.
Eventually the quiet became so much of everything that the Doomsday found no more reason to roar. No more shouts, or screams, or clashes with the pitiless rock beneath its feet. The creature...sat. It laid back, drained of all purpose but...alive it was still.
For eons its simply watched the rolling of galaxies. It marked specific ones not with names but with...recognition. Millennia would pass and the galaxies would complete an orbit and he would know that galaxy, the one whose furthest limb bent slightly at the edge, or the one whose disc was an ever so slighter shade of purple, or the one with the tiny gap in its right side. Dust collected upon it. The Doomsday watched, and watched, until a mind could simply watch no longer.
Until that mind began to wonder, as minds do. (Also, the Stingray fic is NOT dead, I just hit a blank on the next chapter and needed to start on something else)
