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Dick is alive in the end of the world. He is under Northern Lights clouds, burning in a kaleidoscopic hell. He looks at the horizon in a hazy state.
The acidic touch of the air make his eyes water, his skin crawls in itself. This is a technicolor nightmare, green smoke rising from the fallen city.
The world ends and Dick wishes he burnt with it.
He begs the sky would put a prayer in his mouth, his tongue searches words which he would prophecy the stolen breath back to the dry bones.
But there's no prayer to erase his sins even when he beg to a god who have never heard him before. No four winds breath so the dead may live again, nor the sound of rattling bones coming together, tendons, and flesh and skin juxtaposing themselves into something tangible can be heard in the silence of a tomb. And he feels the tears in his face fall in the graveyard that was once a city but is nothing more than debris and memories of once living things.
A scream make of his throat a nest, burrowing itself behind the scorching guilt. If the fire purify, he could be reborn in these dark feeling. Dick is a kid begging to be found, a burnt offer who would never be enough to actually be put in the altar, but one that is covered in yesterday's ashes. This, he thinks, serves like his penance. Chasing after ghosts that no longer exist, walking a pilgrim path to a temple he make out of a heap of rubble.
He is a hollow man, carved inside out with a pocket knife he has had since childhood, a rusty little thing that he doesn't had let go yet. He is a stuffed man, yearning for something he would never possess.
And he knows this isn't real, an interactive memory of a time that has passed a long time ago, but he can't tear his eyes away of the wreckage. He has walk for what it felt like forty days, and forty nights blinded by the incandescent remembrance.
And it's wrong, the world doesn't end with a whimper. It ends like this: with a bang. Burning, feverish, profusely. It ends and ends again and Dick wishes he burnt with it.
"Bang" there's a way bodies sounds when they hit the floor, breaking and shaping themselves into something without a form, paralyzed force. Maybe they heard him cried out their names, and they processed it-
"Bang" he thinks it would have been nicer if Jason have died before he spotted the bomb.
"Bang" Flames licked the big top of his childhood home. He'd have prefer to never seeing it again if it could still stand. He has been stolen from his own place so many times, this is just an example of an old routine he should be used to.
"Bang" and there's no way he can erase from his memory the smell of burnt flesh, torn bodies, everyone dies because of him, always him. This, the valley of dying stars. Maybe there's a joke somewhere, one he doesn't know the punchline yet.
"Bang" Blockbuster wouldn't have confused his silence with a prayer. Dick was just a hollow man, fading stars for eyes that don't see.
"Bang" Tarantula's smile has shred glasses glinting like sunlight trapped on a broken column. Stardust in her fingers tip, she touches him like he isn't a starving man, craving, always craving. She tainted him, marking, taking more that he could ever dreamt of having or to be stripped off.
"Bang" and the hope in a child's face is nothing but a condemnation, everyone else believe in him with this sacred kind of conviction. A Hero, Dick thinks dully. A Hero against himself, against odds he cannot surpass this time.Trust have always been a explosion in his chest, his own ribcage the shrapnel through his bleeding heart. He wants to mark down every failure he has ever commit, but there's no enough stars.
There are superimposed images inside his eyelids, a cacophony of cries. His skin is prickling against his own bones, melting while sulfur pours under a dark sky, burning, scarring, the smoke rises like one of a furnace. Lets the fire rain, like a baptism let it wipe the earth clean again.
Dick's pilgrimage is interrupted by a Voice he had heard before, one he recognized but don't understand. He is finally unmovable, trapped in a chimera of his own making, looking at a Burning Bush. There, the figure of a man stands, quiet and distant against the flames. Dick can't look away for fear to be turn into a pillar of salt.
'Father,' He wants to say 'forgive me, for I have sinned' He wants to beg. Because it's easier than to say 'If, I have not sinned then why have you forsaken me?'
'Father, i have been learning how to carry the wood like a child's grief from you so i could become both of them, Abraham and Isaac, I mean. This sacrifice a proof of love.
'Father, I'm tired.'
'Father, where were you?'
'Father, it hurts to breathe. It hurts to be alive in this, the valley of dying stars, of dry bones, in the end of the world.
Father, i needed you, and by that i mean, i have never stop to need you. Father, love me like a son, love me all flesh and bones. Hold me against your chest and let me hear your heartbeat. Show me how to be human again because I'm ruined and naked, burned by a holy fire. Tomorrow is Sunday, but i can't resurrect when I'm not sure I would even want to live another day.'
Father, there are prophecies in my chest, but I'm still hollow. My tongue doesn't know enough languages to explain this to you.'
But he doesn't say. He is unmovable under acidic rain, a technicolor nightmare, a valley. There's a scream in his throat, but a whimper is heard. This is the way the world ends.
'Dad.'