Equillibrium - Ficlet - Incision
Title: Incision
Fandom: Equilibrium
Pairing: Partridge/Preston (implied)
Summary: Partridge has been to Hell.
Errol looked at the words on the page before him. Such simple beauty - created for its own sake. There was nothing like this in the endless drone of Father's speech. Words, language, emotion, the sum of human experience, of human achievement. He had watched the painting - the Mona Lisa - burn, and he had thought back to when it was first brought across the Atlantic.
The rescue had been before Libria came into its own. When it was rescued from what would become the European Empire. He remembered a warm hand holding his own and a familar voice - one he had known all his life - telling him of the history and the erratic genius behind the work. The tone had been less ...forceful than it would become, when it led millions to create a totally controlled society.
Now he watched it - and the buliding filled with men, women and children - burn and felt only the emptiness of a total void. He did not need Prozium or even Mary any more. Dreams, wishes and regrets were no longer enough. He could not live with only his dreams to sustain him. He would live though them instead.
He wondered as Preston understood what he was trying to offer. Mary would be found - she was too embroiled in the old idea of a perfect, romantic love to realise that he could never be her one true love. She would be angry, wounded on his behalf. She would be mourning - perhaps that is how they would find her. He regreted the lies he had allowed her to weave about them in her own mind. He was not the perfect leader - the Son of Father's infalible divinity. He is not even capable of suppressing the despair that has brought him here.
Dupont was doubtless already whispering poison in John's ear. Soon, aflame with an anger he was not capable of identifying, the younger Clerick would come to look for him. They were evenly matched - the new rising star and the first of the First Class. It would be an epic battle...if it were to be a battle at all.
It would not be. The time was long past when Partridge could pretend that he would be able to shoot at John with anything even approaching fatal intent. He knew his partner's hidden feelings and how he would act. Despite the sterotype, John was loyal, to the point of devotion.
He looked along the line of worn text. Light - a car's headlamps sending smears of coloured light across the church wall - a moment of beauty. Then...familar footsteps. Partridge turned the page, to the poem he had been reading earlier. Tread carefully...for you tread on my dreams.
Fandom: Equilibrium
Pairing: Partridge/Preston (implied)
Summary: Partridge has been to Hell.
Errol looked at the words on the page before him. Such simple beauty - created for its own sake. There was nothing like this in the endless drone of Father's speech. Words, language, emotion, the sum of human experience, of human achievement. He had watched the painting - the Mona Lisa - burn, and he had thought back to when it was first brought across the Atlantic.
The rescue had been before Libria came into its own. When it was rescued from what would become the European Empire. He remembered a warm hand holding his own and a familar voice - one he had known all his life - telling him of the history and the erratic genius behind the work. The tone had been less ...forceful than it would become, when it led millions to create a totally controlled society.
Now he watched it - and the buliding filled with men, women and children - burn and felt only the emptiness of a total void. He did not need Prozium or even Mary any more. Dreams, wishes and regrets were no longer enough. He could not live with only his dreams to sustain him. He would live though them instead.
He wondered as Preston understood what he was trying to offer. Mary would be found - she was too embroiled in the old idea of a perfect, romantic love to realise that he could never be her one true love. She would be angry, wounded on his behalf. She would be mourning - perhaps that is how they would find her. He regreted the lies he had allowed her to weave about them in her own mind. He was not the perfect leader - the Son of Father's infalible divinity. He is not even capable of suppressing the despair that has brought him here.
Dupont was doubtless already whispering poison in John's ear. Soon, aflame with an anger he was not capable of identifying, the younger Clerick would come to look for him. They were evenly matched - the new rising star and the first of the First Class. It would be an epic battle...if it were to be a battle at all.
It would not be. The time was long past when Partridge could pretend that he would be able to shoot at John with anything even approaching fatal intent. He knew his partner's hidden feelings and how he would act. Despite the sterotype, John was loyal, to the point of devotion.
He looked along the line of worn text. Light - a car's headlamps sending smears of coloured light across the church wall - a moment of beauty. Then...familar footsteps. Partridge turned the page, to the poem he had been reading earlier. Tread carefully...for you tread on my dreams.