#vast!jon

Jon tries to move again, but at last, his body has stopped obeying him. He cannot even seem to breathe deeply anymore. The jagged metal that pierced him—penetrating, bursting through his side like some weird, red birth—is still there, a weird and uncomfortable pressure, but at least it no longer hurts the way it first did.

Jon is trapped, staring at endless sky, a bug pinned on back. A groan from somewhere behind him is no comfort. He doesn’t know how the rest of the team is—besides dying or dead—but he was the only one, after the crash, that cried, Hello?

And help!

And please, I don't want to die!

The sky did not care. Though now, it seems to listen.

Blood loss, he thinks, because it has to be, because the sky is atmospheric gasses and radiation and gravity, not a thing that can push down toward you like a hand in a big blue mitten.

It’s terrifying, this hallucination.

He keeps staring, still. He’d stared at the sky when the plane’s first engine went out, when they were still over Xi’an, and there was time to turn back. He’d stared at the sky when the second engine went, somewhere over Chengdu, and the pilot’s rapid, frightened Mandarin failed to get a response on the radio.

He’d stared when the third engine went, and everyone panicked, and—trying not to drown in sound of the people he’d loved for three years crying and shouting and praying and pleading—pushed his mind and his gaze and his self out toward that perfect, thin horizon, instead of anticipating his horrible, flaming, crushing death.

He does not remember when the fourth failed. He’d stopped listening. And when he saw the white, jagged mountain coming at the plane so fast, too fast, like a fist, all he could do was curl in a ball and close his eyes.

This'll cost National Rage at least 60k, he thinks in a daze, tallying up the cameras, the hard drives, the lights, the mics, the various equipment his team had carried safely through four continents and twenty-eight countries.

What a weird thing to think.

Jon does not want to die. “Martin,” he whispers, and tastes blood as his lips crack. He wishes…

They should have kissed. He’s a moron.

My fault, he thinks, but has no strength to laugh. His eyes will no longer close. All he can see is blue.

Gravity feels reversed. Like he’s falling up, somehow, away from the world, spinning without moving at all. Maybe the sky will swallow him. Maybe he’d like it to. It seems… a peaceful way to be eaten.

Jon stares at the sky, and stops fighting to breathe.

#

“Mister Sims? Come on, now, I know you can hear me. Hello! Mister Sims?”

He doesn’t know the voice. He shouldn’t be hearing a voice at all. The wind, the vastness, the emptiness of falling up forever and breathing nothing and breathing it all—

“Mister Sims!” It’s so aggressively cheerful. Bright, like sun shining on many waters, piercing and impossible to ignore.

Like the sun, it leaves phosphenes behind his eyes, painful and sharp. “Go ‘way,” mumbles Jon, and is amazed that he can. He doesn’t taste blood. Wait...

“There we are!” says the voice, so absolutely happy.

Somehow, Jon opens his eyes. They hurt. Everything hurts.

A little old man is staring at him—a tiny, chipper skeleton of a person, whose bright blue eyes do not belong in his pink, bony face.

“What?” is all Jon can manage, inside and out. “Are you God?”

The old man cracks right the hell up, doubling over, which probably means no.

Jon’s face burns (and he is amazed it can). He doesn’t believe in God. He stopped going to church when they wouldn’t answer his questions, no matter what his grandmother said. He—

“Congratulations on your rebirth,” says the old man, wiping tears from his eyes. “Tell me, do you like your last name? You can keep it, of course, but I like to present the option.”

Jon stares at him. “I think I’ve missed something.”

The old man somehow smiles harder. "How are you feeling?”

That’s a good question.

He’s wearing loose, white pajamas sewn with blue thread, somehow like the sky. He’s in an enormous space, too big for the intimacy of a bedroom. The walls are a sort of gentle pinkish beige that he immediately thinks of as summer dusk sky. There isn’t much in terms of art; instead, there are tremendous mirrors with gilt frames so elaborate that, were they to fall, they might just break through the floor.

There is a balcony taking up the far wall, closed only by diaphanous white curtains, waving in the breeze. And while everything hurts, it doesn’t hurt. Not like it should. He wriggles his fingers and toes and is amazed to find he still has them.

“There, you see?” says the old man. “Come on, now. Sit up. You must drink some water. You still need that sort of thing, after all.”

“Still… need?” Jon is not keeping up with this. He does, however, sit up. There is one tenuous moment of vertigo. Then, it’s gone.

“Here you go, my boy,” says the old man.

The glass of water is as clear as meditation and cold as Tibetan frost. Jon gulps it down. He shouldn’t, he thinks. His body will go into shock and puke it, he thinks. It does not, and he does not. That’s when he realizes there is no IV.

There should be.

He checks his arms. No indication of puncture, anywhere. Or scratches. Or bruises. He lifts his shirt. There is a scar where the metal came through, a white starburst in his dark side, wrapping jagged lines around his torso like a hand made of lightning. In a moment of raw insanity, he finds it breathtakingly beautiful. Then he finds it breathtakingly impossible. “What?” he says, and touches it. Oh, it feels…

Good? It shouldn’t feel good. It’s a scar. But touching it is pleasure, of some kind he can’t begin to parse.

So clearly, he’s gone mad. “Was I in a coma?” he blurts, thinking that his nerves must be fucked up, that his electrical signals must be all backwards, that he’s got horrific brain damage that will ruin his career and his relationships and his life.

The old man laughs. “You’re a fun one! No, you weren’t in a coma. Before you ask, I pulled you out of the wreck today! No, nobody else survived. Well. By now, they haven’t. You’ve entered a very special club, Mister Sims!”

“Nothing you just said is in any way comforting,” states Jon with only a hint of a tremor. “Wait! My camera!”

The old man holds it out.

Jon grabs it and clutches it to his chest like it’s his child, and spends a moment just breathing, hands shaking, so grateful it survived.

How the hell did it survive?

Maybe it didn’t. He checks it. It did. And the photos on the screen are…

He inhales. I did it again, he thinks, because these somehow capture the vastness, the wideness, the inertia of falling in a way he’s never seen in other photographs. They are also terrifying. Peering into them makes one feel like falling, feel like sharing that endless sky along with the photographer.

These are award-winning, he thinks. Then he shakes himself, because he just survived a crash, and everyone is dead, and he’s being awful. “Lost my mind,” he mutters.

“Not at all,” says the old man. “I’m thinking, in fact, that it will be very important to share those with the world.”

Jon clutches the camera again. “You looked?”

“Had to figure out who you are, didn’t I?” The old man grins like a bone-thin angel. “Simon Fairchild, at your service. My boy… I am about to blow your mind.” And he offers his hand.

It is reflex to take it.

And they are—

Falling?

Not flying. Not. Not with this gravity’s grip, this unbreathable air, this minimalizing and overwhelming and breathtaking second. Literally breathtaking, flinging Jon through the sky, not weightless at all but lusted after by gravity in ways he cannot comprehend, by the neediness of falling without ever finding ground, the significance of life and weight and worth flitting away like leaves snatched from his hair.

And it is terrifying.

And it is glorious.

And Jon weeps, and the air licks his tears away as if with wind-burn tenderness, and he would not choose to do anything else even if given the option.

#

He doesn’t recall coming back to earth.

Or to his body. Or… away from whatever that was.

Simon Fairchild’s look has changed. It is still effusive, and ridiculous, and chipper—but it has an edge now, a thoughtful consideration, as though Jon has done something worth weighing. “Well,” he says. “I can see why the Vast called you.”

“The what?” says Jon, unable to catch his breath, which is ridiculous because there is more oxygen here than in the sky.

“The Vast, my boy. The entity that has chosen you—though it’s not the first,” he adds in a mutter. “Ha! Elias was right, after all. Can’t wait to see the bastard’s face.”

And they’re back to half of Fairchild’s words making no sense.

Jon doesn’t like things that make no sense. There are too many in the world, and they scare him. “Please,” he says, hating how young he sounds. “What is happening?”

Fairchild pats his shoulder. “There, there. It’s all going to be just fine. Let’s start with the basics, shall we?”