Work Text:
It's cold.
Neil never thought it was possible to be so cold. Or so dark. He can't move. Can't even feel the goosebumps. Nothing but that damn cold.
A light flicks on only to flick out before returning. Neil's body lays on the floor while Neil watches Nathan walk down the stairs with Lola, still covered in his blood. If Neil could vomit he would. It looks like he already did after his legs were- Neil steps back, trips, and falls to his knees. His knees are in the corner of the room, separate from his legs.
Nathan's horrible voice plays in his ears. Nathan had told him everything he would do to him before doing it. And the words wouldn't stop . He didn't want to listen. He tried to focus on the foxes, on all the good memories instead of what was to come, but he couldn't think about them. It would taint his memories too much once the pain came, his mind twisting and turning them in every awful way it could.
Why is Nathan even here? Helping Lola chop up the rest of his body. Neil flinches at every chop. Nathan always let Lola take care of the bodies. Killing Neil wasn't enough for him, was it? Or was he Nathaniel now? That's what he had decided before reaching Baltimore. He said goodbye to Neil. But now that Nathaniel is dead, Neil is all he has. But Neil Josten never existed.
It fully hits then. Nathaniel Wesninski is dead. He is dead, and that is his corpse. He did not survive Baltimore. He was never going home to the foxes, to there smiles, and kind deeds, to Andrew's kisses, to people jokingly saying they would adopt him. All of it is gone. They will never know what happened to Neil Josten. His body will never be found.
Nathaniel Wesninski never really existed either, did he?
Neil's corpse is carried out of the basement in all its many pieces. Nathan leaves without taking any. Lola can handle it. Just as she always has.
Goodbye, Neil Josten. Goodbye, Nathaniel Wesninski. Goodbye to every other identity. Goodbye to everything except a ghost trapped in the basement he was murder in, where he shall stay, slowly forgetting everything but his death. When the house has long been abandoned and half torn down, the ghost still remains.
He walks up the stairs for the first time, the dust stirring in the air. Sunlight shines through his body. Bullet holes cover the walls and floor. Dried blood surrounds them.
For a moment, he laughs. So hard it enters the mortal world and rats rush away from him. The sicking sound fades as the ghost becomes clearer. He closes hid eyes and lets the sunlight take him, erasing the last trace of his not existence.
Somewhere out there, in a place of good memories the ghost has long forgotten, is a picture of him and Andrew, are the text messages and call logs that haven't been deleted, is a gravestone with Neil Josten engraved in it, and an old man who was once the other young man in that picture walking away from the grave, where every year on the day Neil disappeared, he leaves an unlit cigarette.