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Breekon has never really contemplated what it means to be a creature of fear built on love. In fact, Breekon probably would not describe the way he feels about Hope as ‘love’. He is Hope, in all the ways that matter, and without Hope he thinks that Breekon simply wouldn’t exist. If pressed, Breekon would probably say that he doesn’t love Hope any more than a human loves their arm. Breekon has seen how humans love others. It is messy, fleshy, wreathed in tears and snot, punctuated by pleas for mercy.
The one part of love Breekon recognizes in himself is that humans cannot bear to be parted from the things they love. Still, Breekon thinks he knows love— and he knows nothing else if not the way he feels for Hope— and he is pretty certain they are not the same. Humans can love that which is not themselves because they are separate from it. Some humans hate their arms. Some humans hate their stomachs, hate their thighs, hate their broken minds, hate their treacherous hearts. Hope is a part of Breekon, and Breekon could never hate Hope.
Hope is all Breekon has ever had. He imagines there may have been a time before, a time when food and drink did not curdle before him, a time before he chose the face that he has worn since they rode through town after plague-striken town. He does not care about what may have been before. It was worse, he is certain, if he had no Hope. It may also be that he and Hope were brought into being as one at the exact same time. That, he thinks, would be—right. For the two of them to have shared each moment of their lives.
Hope is Breekon’s laughter and his levity, Breekon’s helping hand, Breekon’s driver and conductor. Still, Breekon would not say he loves Hope. Not until the beast of the Hunt rends them apart.
“I’ll kill you,” the beast says, and Breekon thinks she is speaking to him.
He smiles. “Will you, now?”
Hope joins him, laughing because it is what he does best. “Ooh, pretty scary.” They exchange a knowing look that will stay burned in afterimage on the back of Breekon’s eyes forever. “If you can, that is.”
She can.
She does.
The world ends in a rush of gore and the rending snap of Breekon’s heart.
In that moment, Breekon knows the pain of those whose loves once sat piled high in their carrion carriage. He knows the fear of passengers and cargo. He does not feel guilty, but there is so much that he regrets. He regrets leaving anyone untouched in the villages they trundled through; perhaps with every extra death he could have heard Hope laugh once more.
Breekon wishes they had never left the Russian circus. He wishes they had never left their ship, never delivered the coffin, never rejoined Nikola, never laid eyes on the Archivist. He wishes the beast of the Hunt had taken him instead.
None of his wishes come true.
“Shame you don’t know your own coffin,” he spits, and makes a delivery instead. A body for the buried. His first solo job. “But you will.” He tries to laugh but the noise is wrong. It leaves him raw. He does not feel it in his chest or his throat, he is too full of the ache.
He waits for the rush of triumph. Surely, the satisfaction of revenge awaits him, barely out of reach. It never comes. There is only the twisting pain, and the breath he cannot take, and the emptiness that spreads inside him like a rot. He leaves the ringmaster’s dance to fail. He drives away alone.
Breekon parks on a hard shoulder and sits in the passenger seat. He wraps his arms around himself, something he has never done. He knows that he and Hope were of the same material. Desperately he holds himself, fighting to imagine that he is clutching Hope, keeping his partner safe inside the willing cage of his arms. His fingers dig into his own rubbery flesh.
Breekon does not want to drive the van. Breekon has no idea what he wants anymore.
In the darkness, truly alone for what may very well be the first time in Breekon’s existence, he thinks of all the times he has touched Hope. Their arms brushing on the deck of a doomed ship. Their knees knocking together in time with the rattle of a long-dead train. He thinks of their arms entwined in a strongman show and their shoulders pressed together under matching intimidating leers, of their hands clasped in a show of greeting, of their bodies connected by the heft of yet another shared delivery.
Breekon thinks he wants to hug Hope. He wants to feel the other man and know he is there and alive. Breekon thinks of all the times he could have held Hope, could have taken his hand where it rested on the center console, could have pressed their foreheads together and spoken low.
Breekon thinks he wants to cry.
“What is your real voice,” the Archivist compels, and Breekon tries to make the sound of laughing even though his humor is gone. Breekon tries to tell the Archivist that real is fake and voices are nothing.
"What do you want? Why are you here?" asks the sharp Detective.
Breekon wants to hurt them. He doesn't want to give them answers, doesn't want to give them closure. He just wants them to bring Hope back. He knows they can't, and without Hope he wants nothing, “No point in doing it on my own,” he reveals instead. “Don’t know what happens now.”
He almost knows. In the back of his half a mind, where addresses and laughter used to sit, he has the constant knowledge of emptiness and drudgery tucked away. Breekon is coming to realize that nothing happens now. Nothing will ever happen again—at least nothing of importance. Without Hope things are not important.
What use is a strongman with nothing to lift? What use is a deliveryman with nothing to deliver? What use is Breekon, he thinks, without Hope? He used to have a purpose. Not in his titles or his actions or his faces, but in his self. In their whole self. He had a reason in the us and them and we and the two of them together.
Breekon wants to know what happened, but he cannot ask the Archivist. He wants to know why the beast of the Hunt took Hope when nothing else could, neither time nor disease nor the auctioned knife. He wants to know why Hope is gone and why he is alone. He wants to know why he is not dead.
He thinks he did everything right. He made Hope laugh, he bore his half of every load, and when they were not content Breekon followed Hope into becoming Hope and Breekon. Now Breekon has only hate and loss and the useless desire for every part of him that has been torn away. He wants to visit these terrible vestiges on the archivist, but he no longer has the strength. One pair of hands is not enough.
That night, Breekon sits in his van alone again, because it is his van and not theirs. He tries to speak in a voice that is a something rather than a mockery of nothing. He cannot. He wants to know if Hope had a real voice. He wants, desperately, to know if Hope was real, and if that is why without Hope he is less than nothing. He does not know or he cannot remember or he is not anymore. Breekon drives for a very long time, glazed eyes tied to nothing but the empty open road. Breekon has nowhere to go and it does not matter. Breekon will deliver himself to somewhere else.
He does not know why he keeps the name, or why he is ‘he’ when he has always mostly been ‘it’. Breekon and Hope were stolen titles. A convenient pair, a suit the two of them could wear and laugh at.
Hope died Hope. If Breekon is allowed to die, then Breekon thinks he must die Breekon.
He tries to laugh at that, because he loved Hope for their levity. He cannot. His throat is wrong and broken and the noises all hurt.
When Breekon and Hope were, they did not need to sleep. Breekon sleeps long in this dark new world, curled on the floor of his janitorial closet. He murmurs to himself in false Russian, false Cockney, false promises of a familiar false voice. Breekon would wake crying if sleep were real at the end of the world. If he knew how to cry.
Breekon wonders if he could cry before the end of the world. The end of the world, he knows, came when Hope died. The Eye opened only to see that he was gone. It would not surprise him if Hope had taken their tears along with their levity. He knows to his core that Hope did not take their misery.
“Hope’s dead,” the Assistant says when Breekon finds him in the fluorescent halls. “A bit on the nose, isn’t it?”
Breekon thinks he might have one last try at killing the Assistant. The Archivist, he knows, is right at home at the end of the world. The Eye reigns over all. Below it, in the observed kingdom, the Archivist has its Assistant. The Assistant has his laughter. The Archivist is whole.
There is no point. Not to violence or revenge or severance. Hope could not see the splitting of the Archivist’s heart, Hope could not hear the Assistant’s keening misery, and without Hope there is no reason. Without reason Breekon is nothing.
Breekon tells a lie about deliveries. As if these walled kingdoms were anything separate, anything other than a mass of lashes on the Earth’s great new eye. As if there were nothing to deliver in a hospital resplendent with its medicines and other tools of pain. It does not matter what there is to deliver. Alone, Breekon’s hands are too weak to bear the load. There is no space in his mind for addresses. There is nothing but space, the aching space in the middle of him where Hope once rested, the space he feels frayed along one half of his existence. There is no space for addresses when all of Breekon’s space was Hope’s. He fills his mind with shadows of the shadow that was Hope instead.
Then he tells the truth.
“Maybe if we were complete, we could’ve done something, but as is... No. Can’t say I want this to be my forever.”
He adds in the pain, as if it makes any difference. As if pain matters when there has only been pain since the Unknown was Known. Or, well, blown up. Breekon supposes the Unknown was never really Known that night, and that is what makes this end of the world different from his end of the world. Everything is Known, now. That night it simply went away.
Breekon wants to try to laugh. He can’t, not even falsely, in the bowels of two apocalypses with his heart wrenched out.
He feels grateful to the Archivist because he knows it is a mercy. A mercy to die at all, to rest in this ceaselessly-watched ruin of blasted earth. A mercy for him especially, the walking half-dead, his strongest foot standing in the cold grave and his true voice stolen and his laughter ripped from his throat.
The pain is blinding. Breekon is seen, and he hates that all of him is known, all of him consumed. What he hates worst of all is that the Eye thinks it can really know any part of Breekon when the Eye cannot know Hope. There is no all of Breekon anymore, only remnants and shadows. The Eye takes in the empty space where Hope once stood as if it means nothing, as if in his emptiness there is nothing of interest but the jagged edges left behind on every part of Breekon.
Breekon stays Breekon, and ‘he’, even under the scrutiny of the Ceaseless Watcher’s pupil. Hope died Hope. Breekon must die Breekon.
Breekon realizes that it must have hurt Hope, too. To be beaten. To die. Hope must have known the pain that Breekon knows now, and that shared pain is sweeter than anything he has felt since the dark night of the Stranger’s dance that took everything away.
Breekon could not live in a world without Hope any more than hope could live in a world without fear. He is ready to leave the hopeless world behind.
Now Hope is dead, and now Breekon is dead, so Breekon and Hope are whole. Breekon thinks dying feels like laughter. Breekon tries to speak, but their voice is gone.