Oz
Title: Al-Infitar (Part 1)
Author: missnegativity
Fandom: Oz
Rating: R (see fandom)
Warnings: You've seen the show? Foul language, gay sex, sacrilege, lots of violence, and irritating monologues.
Disclaimer: Tom Fontana owns them. I’m just renting them and subjecting them to Armageddon.
Author’s Note: Set during early Season 6. The fandom gets sucked into dead_earth in between See No Evil… and the end of Sonata De Oz.
SURAH 82 (Al-Infitar, or The Cleaving Asunder)
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
1. When the Sky is cleft asunder;
2. When the Stars are scattered;
3. When the Oceans are suffered to burst forth;
4. And when the graves are turned upside down; -
5. (Then) shall each soul know what it has sent forward and (what it has) kept back.
The Holy Qur’an, (trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali)
The ghost of Augustus Hill:
Apocalypse. Armageddon. Doomsday, End of Days. Whatever you wanna call it, it’s bad news.
Norse mythology called it Ragnarok - Doom of the Gods. Starts with endless winters, then wolves eat the sun and the moon, plunging the earth into darkness. There’ll be earthquakes, and the giant gods will have their last battle. The world will burn, and the earth will sink into the sea.
*
In another world, it doesn’t happen like this, with the cities falling to ruin. In his dreams, he is back in Oz, awaiting appeals while he sits on Death Row, no longer even sure if he wants to live. So many are already dead - not just Cathy Rockwell and Gary and Genevieve and Augustus and his own father, but Said and Cyril O’Reilly and Schillinger.
And Chris Keller.
On most nights, it’s Chris’s ghost that haunts him, calling Toby’s name as he falls to his death.
On other nights, the thought that Vern Schillinger is also dead brings him to tears, and he doesn’t know why.
When he wakes up from those dreams, Tobias Beecher is glad that the world is ending.
*
October 31
Toby is almost finished packing when he hears about the earthquake. He packs a little faster, the minivan visible from the bedroom window, and tells Holly and Harry to hit the bathroom before they go. They won’t, and they’ll want to stop somewhere along the road. He hopes it’s sooner rather than later. They have only a few hours of daylight left.
When the flooding and the storms started, he knew that he’d had to take the kids and leave. The same instinct that kept him alive in Oz for almost six years governs him now. And even as the death tolls rise, he tells himself that he is going to survive this. He always does.
Holly got a kitten a few months ago. Her therapist thought it would be good for her, and now she is refusing to leave without it. He concedes to packing enough cat food to last a month or so, and after that the kitten will have to find something else to eat, or Holly will learn yet another invaluable lesson on why letting another living being into your heart is guaranteed to result in torment and suffering.
Harry, for his part, insists only on bringing his Gameboy and a few comic books, given that Toby ruled the Playstation too heavy to take along.
Just before the television signal fizzles and dies, the announcer mentions the earthquake upstate. He is standing outside of Oswald Penitentiary. Governor Devlin has called in the National Guard, fearing that if a second quake hits, the prison’s architecture won’t hold.
That’s when Toby knows that he has to go back.
Everything in him resists to the point where, when Holly asks, “Daddy, where are we going?” he can’t even answer. She sits in the front of the minivan, holding the fucking cat on her lap, and he’s so proud that his brave little girl hasn’t even cried yet.
She’ll cry, before long. They all will.
*
He hadn’t realized, of course, that the earthquake would also fuck up the roads, turning what should have been a day’s drive into a hellish marathon of closed-off highways and unpaved back-country roads. (Because, why not? God forbid anything should go right for him, ever.)
This one DJ on a local station has opted not to be evacuated along with his colleagues. Like Toby, he’s realized that there’s nowhere to go. From the reports that trickle in, it actually does sound like the entire country has been affected.
The DJ has a twisted sense of humor. He plays “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” and “Rock You Like a Hurricane”. His favorite song seems to be “Stormy Weather,” which he plays at least three times a day. After two days, both of the kids are singing “keeps rainin’ all the time” along with Billie Holiday. It’s their constant until a garbled cry of pain blasts from the radio, and after that, there’s nothing but static.
No one has said the A-word yet. The kids are still too young for it to have occurred to them. And as for Toby - well, when you’ve survived what he has, what’s a little bad weather, after all?
“Are we almost there?” Harry pipes up from the back seat.
“No,” Holly snaps before Toby can, “Just shut up.”
He shoots her a stern look, but he barely has any claim to fatherhood as is, and no right to discipline her for rudeness when he’s fucked a serial killer and slit a man’s throat with his fingernails. Harry turns away and covers his face so that Toby can’t look in the rearview mirror and tell if he’s crying.
Hailstones crackle against the windshield, and he’s not sure if there will even be a prison by the time he reaches it.
*
Half of Oswald Penitentiary is crushed into a smoldering hole by the time Toby’s minivan pulls up at the gates, and there’s nothing that Devlin or the National Guard can do about it.
Toby kills the engine, unfastens his seatbelt, and turns to the kids.
“Stay in the van,” he says, “Whatever happens. I’ll come back.”
“Dad…” Holly starts.
“No. Stay here. Hide under the seat and keep the doors locked. I won’t be long.”
He steps outside, slamming the door. Snowflakes and ashes settle against his face, and he breathes in the smell of charred flesh. The body of a soldier is sprawled a few feet away from him. He takes the dead man’s assault rifle and kicks the corpse aside.
Toby clenches his jaw and walks back into Oz.
The lobby, too, is full of bodies - hacks, soldiers, and a handful of inmates who seem to have gotten past the makeshift barricades. The silence is so complete that it occurs to him that it’s possible that no one survived.
He presses against the wall, edging down one of the hallways until he reaches another barricade. The gateway to Em City is blocked by a second barricade, but this one has a gap in the mattresses. A pair of eyes watches him through a steel grill that looks like it was lifted from the cafeteria.
“Go away,” the man says.
Toby grins and taps the barrel of the rifle. “Fuck you, prag.”
They stare. The prisoner blinks first.
“Who’s in charge?” Toby asks. When the other man hesitates, he adds, “You don’t have a gun, or if you do, you’re out of bullets. Otherwise you would have shot me by now. So. Who’s in charge?”
Before he can respond, the prisoner’s attention is diverted to something below him, and then he disappears from Toby’s view altogether. Bright blue eyes replace the stranger’s face behind the grill.
“Shit, Beecher,” Ryan O’Reilly says, “Who do you think? Yo, give me a hand with this fucking barricade.”
*
As soon as he’s through, Ryan catches Toby in a bear-hug that startles both men, then holds him out at arm’s length. Eyeing the stubble that has covered Toby’s face in the absence of hot water and soap, Ryan asks, “Hey, you’re not crazy again, are you?”
Toby chuckles. “The rest of the world seems to be, so why not? What the hell happened here?”
They follow the walkway towards the guard station, where Zahir Arif and a handful of other Muslims watch their arrival with stony faces. Toby doesn’t see any more bodies, but no one has bothered to scrub away the blood that covers the stairs and floors. It reminds him of the riot so much that he’s startled when he looks up and doesn’t see Adebisi’s boys making a mess of McManus’s office.
“The shit hit the fan right after the earthquake,” Ryan exchanges obligatory glares with Arif as they pass. “The National Guard held off a day before they stormed the place.”
“And you fought back?”
Ryan gives him the sort of look he normally saves for Cyril. “You did see the barricades, didn’t you?”
“Looks like they worked.”
“No, part of the prison got flattened by the second quake. That worked.”
Toby blinks. He’s been avoiding the question for long enough. “Who made it?”
“Don’t know yet. We had to cut ourselves off, so no word from Gen Pop or Death Row since the earthquake. Said wanted to send out search parties but the rest of us vetoed it.” Ryan glances away, and Toby understands what that decision must have cost him. “We weren’t sure that the fuckers had given up. So in answer to your question, no, I don’t know if your boyfriend is still alive.”
Which, Toby reminds himself, is better than knowing for sure that he’s dead. But he keeps it to himself. “I need to see Said,” he says, “And…whoever else is left, I guess. You did hear that the world is ending, right?”
END PART 1
Author: missnegativity
Fandom: Oz
Rating: R (see fandom)
Warnings: You've seen the show? Foul language, gay sex, sacrilege, lots of violence, and irritating monologues.
Disclaimer: Tom Fontana owns them. I’m just renting them and subjecting them to Armageddon.
Author’s Note: Set during early Season 6. The fandom gets sucked into dead_earth in between See No Evil… and the end of Sonata De Oz.
SURAH 82 (Al-Infitar, or The Cleaving Asunder)
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
1. When the Sky is cleft asunder;
2. When the Stars are scattered;
3. When the Oceans are suffered to burst forth;
4. And when the graves are turned upside down; -
5. (Then) shall each soul know what it has sent forward and (what it has) kept back.
The Holy Qur’an, (trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali)
The ghost of Augustus Hill:
Apocalypse. Armageddon. Doomsday, End of Days. Whatever you wanna call it, it’s bad news.
Norse mythology called it Ragnarok - Doom of the Gods. Starts with endless winters, then wolves eat the sun and the moon, plunging the earth into darkness. There’ll be earthquakes, and the giant gods will have their last battle. The world will burn, and the earth will sink into the sea.
*
In another world, it doesn’t happen like this, with the cities falling to ruin. In his dreams, he is back in Oz, awaiting appeals while he sits on Death Row, no longer even sure if he wants to live. So many are already dead - not just Cathy Rockwell and Gary and Genevieve and Augustus and his own father, but Said and Cyril O’Reilly and Schillinger.
And Chris Keller.
On most nights, it’s Chris’s ghost that haunts him, calling Toby’s name as he falls to his death.
On other nights, the thought that Vern Schillinger is also dead brings him to tears, and he doesn’t know why.
When he wakes up from those dreams, Tobias Beecher is glad that the world is ending.
*
October 31
Toby is almost finished packing when he hears about the earthquake. He packs a little faster, the minivan visible from the bedroom window, and tells Holly and Harry to hit the bathroom before they go. They won’t, and they’ll want to stop somewhere along the road. He hopes it’s sooner rather than later. They have only a few hours of daylight left.
When the flooding and the storms started, he knew that he’d had to take the kids and leave. The same instinct that kept him alive in Oz for almost six years governs him now. And even as the death tolls rise, he tells himself that he is going to survive this. He always does.
Holly got a kitten a few months ago. Her therapist thought it would be good for her, and now she is refusing to leave without it. He concedes to packing enough cat food to last a month or so, and after that the kitten will have to find something else to eat, or Holly will learn yet another invaluable lesson on why letting another living being into your heart is guaranteed to result in torment and suffering.
Harry, for his part, insists only on bringing his Gameboy and a few comic books, given that Toby ruled the Playstation too heavy to take along.
Just before the television signal fizzles and dies, the announcer mentions the earthquake upstate. He is standing outside of Oswald Penitentiary. Governor Devlin has called in the National Guard, fearing that if a second quake hits, the prison’s architecture won’t hold.
That’s when Toby knows that he has to go back.
Everything in him resists to the point where, when Holly asks, “Daddy, where are we going?” he can’t even answer. She sits in the front of the minivan, holding the fucking cat on her lap, and he’s so proud that his brave little girl hasn’t even cried yet.
She’ll cry, before long. They all will.
*
He hadn’t realized, of course, that the earthquake would also fuck up the roads, turning what should have been a day’s drive into a hellish marathon of closed-off highways and unpaved back-country roads. (Because, why not? God forbid anything should go right for him, ever.)
This one DJ on a local station has opted not to be evacuated along with his colleagues. Like Toby, he’s realized that there’s nowhere to go. From the reports that trickle in, it actually does sound like the entire country has been affected.
The DJ has a twisted sense of humor. He plays “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” and “Rock You Like a Hurricane”. His favorite song seems to be “Stormy Weather,” which he plays at least three times a day. After two days, both of the kids are singing “keeps rainin’ all the time” along with Billie Holiday. It’s their constant until a garbled cry of pain blasts from the radio, and after that, there’s nothing but static.
No one has said the A-word yet. The kids are still too young for it to have occurred to them. And as for Toby - well, when you’ve survived what he has, what’s a little bad weather, after all?
“Are we almost there?” Harry pipes up from the back seat.
“No,” Holly snaps before Toby can, “Just shut up.”
He shoots her a stern look, but he barely has any claim to fatherhood as is, and no right to discipline her for rudeness when he’s fucked a serial killer and slit a man’s throat with his fingernails. Harry turns away and covers his face so that Toby can’t look in the rearview mirror and tell if he’s crying.
Hailstones crackle against the windshield, and he’s not sure if there will even be a prison by the time he reaches it.
*
Half of Oswald Penitentiary is crushed into a smoldering hole by the time Toby’s minivan pulls up at the gates, and there’s nothing that Devlin or the National Guard can do about it.
Toby kills the engine, unfastens his seatbelt, and turns to the kids.
“Stay in the van,” he says, “Whatever happens. I’ll come back.”
“Dad…” Holly starts.
“No. Stay here. Hide under the seat and keep the doors locked. I won’t be long.”
He steps outside, slamming the door. Snowflakes and ashes settle against his face, and he breathes in the smell of charred flesh. The body of a soldier is sprawled a few feet away from him. He takes the dead man’s assault rifle and kicks the corpse aside.
Toby clenches his jaw and walks back into Oz.
The lobby, too, is full of bodies - hacks, soldiers, and a handful of inmates who seem to have gotten past the makeshift barricades. The silence is so complete that it occurs to him that it’s possible that no one survived.
He presses against the wall, edging down one of the hallways until he reaches another barricade. The gateway to Em City is blocked by a second barricade, but this one has a gap in the mattresses. A pair of eyes watches him through a steel grill that looks like it was lifted from the cafeteria.
“Go away,” the man says.
Toby grins and taps the barrel of the rifle. “Fuck you, prag.”
They stare. The prisoner blinks first.
“Who’s in charge?” Toby asks. When the other man hesitates, he adds, “You don’t have a gun, or if you do, you’re out of bullets. Otherwise you would have shot me by now. So. Who’s in charge?”
Before he can respond, the prisoner’s attention is diverted to something below him, and then he disappears from Toby’s view altogether. Bright blue eyes replace the stranger’s face behind the grill.
“Shit, Beecher,” Ryan O’Reilly says, “Who do you think? Yo, give me a hand with this fucking barricade.”
*
As soon as he’s through, Ryan catches Toby in a bear-hug that startles both men, then holds him out at arm’s length. Eyeing the stubble that has covered Toby’s face in the absence of hot water and soap, Ryan asks, “Hey, you’re not crazy again, are you?”
Toby chuckles. “The rest of the world seems to be, so why not? What the hell happened here?”
They follow the walkway towards the guard station, where Zahir Arif and a handful of other Muslims watch their arrival with stony faces. Toby doesn’t see any more bodies, but no one has bothered to scrub away the blood that covers the stairs and floors. It reminds him of the riot so much that he’s startled when he looks up and doesn’t see Adebisi’s boys making a mess of McManus’s office.
“The shit hit the fan right after the earthquake,” Ryan exchanges obligatory glares with Arif as they pass. “The National Guard held off a day before they stormed the place.”
“And you fought back?”
Ryan gives him the sort of look he normally saves for Cyril. “You did see the barricades, didn’t you?”
“Looks like they worked.”
“No, part of the prison got flattened by the second quake. That worked.”
Toby blinks. He’s been avoiding the question for long enough. “Who made it?”
“Don’t know yet. We had to cut ourselves off, so no word from Gen Pop or Death Row since the earthquake. Said wanted to send out search parties but the rest of us vetoed it.” Ryan glances away, and Toby understands what that decision must have cost him. “We weren’t sure that the fuckers had given up. So in answer to your question, no, I don’t know if your boyfriend is still alive.”
Which, Toby reminds himself, is better than knowing for sure that he’s dead. But he keeps it to himself. “I need to see Said,” he says, “And…whoever else is left, I guess. You did hear that the world is ending, right?”
END PART 1