bakerstreet | Train to the Afterlife Meme

Entry tags:

[warning] death

Train to the Afterlife Meme

Train to the Afterlife Meme

Congratulations: You are dead.

Maybe you know how, maybe you don't. Perhaps the memory is fuzzy, or perhaps it's crystal clear down to the look in your comrades' eyes. Maybe it was your time; you've done all you wanted to. Or maybe you weren't at all ready to go, maybe you went out kicking and screaming - but none of it matters. You know you're dead, and the train is taking you to an afterlife. Perhaps an afterlife of your choice; you might've earned that heaven. Or perhaps you've earned something else entirely.

It'll be a bit of a journey, though, so you might as well take your time and talk to the other people in your coach. Death knows no place: most of them are strangers, even from faraway worlds. But death knows no time either, so who knows, some of them may be people you know, even if last you knew, they were alive - or long gone.

Oh look, here comes the snack cart.

All the usual:

Post with your character's name and canon in the subject line.
Said character is now dead for whatever reason - canon, AU, what have you. They are on a train with other dead people from many other times, places and worlds.
Characters don't know for a fact where they're headed - just a general awareness that they're going to some kind of afterlife. Whatever they think it is is up to the player.
This meme is built especially for cross-canon interaction, and potentially for threadjacking and group threading - if you're interested, may be a good idea to state as much in your subject line.
Tag around and play nice!

TRIGGER WARNING: Meme obviously deals with death and may deal with other unpleasant themes as a result. Please be cautious.

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Don't - [Grantaire jerks out of Enjolras' reach, still slightly hysterical.] You've been cruel enough, Apollo. You - you can't just.

[He swallows. If this were all a terrible dream, he would be able to deal with it but it's real and solid in a way Grantaire can't argue with.]

Pretend I never said anything. Pretend I'm still the drunkard in the back you despise. Pretend everything is the way it was.

[An Enjolras that's angry with him is easy to deal with, expected even. The quiet contemplation had been unexpected maybe, but nothing he couldn't handle. This? Concern from their esteemed leader? No. It's untenable in Grantaire's mind.]

[That jerking back is like a jostle. It sets the train back properly into focus.

It sets their death back properly into focus.]

Pretend you didn't die for me?

[Surely it has to be acknowledged properly. Surely it has to be actually said.

What's left to hold back?]

Yes.

[It's desperate, still carrying a slight edge of hysteria. He's never been good at seeing the endgame of things, the long term, and that short-sightedness is apparently going to be the death of him.]

Then why tell me?

[This is, at least, familiar frustration and the edge of anger. This is still Enjolras kneeling, but it comes with the same furrowing of brows and rough exhale of air.]

Why tell me you were wrong? Why tell me you see the value in what we tried to do? Why--

[Why pretend to believe in me feels far too cruel for this quiet train, but nothing else comes to replace it.]

It's not my fault you're the only person who can't see the answer! I can't - it's an unreasonable burden to give you if you can't even see the shape of it.

[The only thing worse than being in love with someone and then not knowing, in Grantaire's opinion, is being in love with someone when they know and don't love you back.]

I'm trying to spare you the trouble.

[Arguing is familiar. Arguing is safe. Arguing is worth standing up and taking a step back again.]

That's not what you're trying to do.

[And Enjolras doesn't have the words for it. He's never walked down this path with an actual human being.]

What do you want me to say, Enjolras? It's not like you care about my lonely soul any more than you cared about Marius' or anything else!

[It's a meaningless argument. He knows it's meaningless, that it's avoiding the real issue, but it'll distract attention from what they're actually talking about. Hopefully, at least.]

Or anything else?

[That stings. Oddly, that stings as much for the accusation of not caring about his friends as it does for the hurt of whipping from mild praise of his life's work to blanket admonition of it.]

You care about the end result. You care about the concept of the people, the concept of improving quality of life, and yet you only care about things in the narrow scope of being related to revolution.

[He'd meant what he said: he was wrong about what they would accomplish.

But he also means this: that they didn't accomplish that because this revolution was built on the strength of ideas themselves. They accomplished it through sacrifice. Through luck and, strangely, the inaction of people who didn't participate. History is often written by winners, but the people who witness history's defeats are the people who pen the next chapter.]

The reason I never believed in your revolution is that revolution is a heartless thing. It cares not who it chews up and spits out and you are sometimes too much like revolution, Enjolras.

I care about people.

[It isn't a proud thing. It isn't a happy thing. It simply is, the way death simply is. It's a fact that warms and hurts and needs, by and large, to be kept where Enjolras has spent his life keeping it.]

I just did not let that stop me.

[Would it have been a happy thing to see Combeferre grow old? Would it have been a joyful thing to see Courfeyrac fall in love? Would it have been wonderful to see his dearest friends come together every year and drink like students, blossoming again in one another's company?

Of course it would. Of course it prickles in his chest to know each of them is sitting now on a train like this--possibly this very train.

That doesn't stop the idea of letting them live anything but entirely free from feeling like a cruelty.]

Revolution is nothing without love, Grantaire. That it is not how you would love does not deprive it.

Maybe you should have let it stop you.

[He's not foolish enough to believe that love can solve everything, but he is foolish enough to think that maybe they didn't have to die.]

There's more than one way to change the world. Martyrdom suits you, though.

[It's hard to let go of the arguing. It's hard to let go of honing himself against Grantaire.

But what's it worth, now that they're dead? What's it worth, now that they're both here at the end of their chapter of the revolution?

Thankfully, there's still some forward motion to make. One hand waves dismissively at Grantaire as Enjolras turns to look for a door into the next car of the train.]

What would you know about any of that?

[There are a lot of things that Grantaire could say about that. He could ask what Enjolras means or make some quip about not knowing anything. He could deflect until Enjolras has forgotten the question was asked at all.]

You've never asked how I came to be at one of your meetings. [Grantaire hesitates for a moment.] I know the best spot in Paris to find anything, and Café Musain excels in nothing.

[There was, of course, a little bit of luck involved - one didn't find the best of everything without encountering a lot of mediocre things - but Café Musain was not the best place to drink or eat or anything of the sort. It was, however, the best place to find a revolution, if you were looking for one, and where revolution was a skeptic could be found.]

I didn't arrive by chance.

What, then? Lack of discernment?

[In life, it would have been a sharper thing. In life, after all, Grantaire had only appeared to come fully into the fold in the last few heartbeats.

(And, for all he didn't fully understand it, some piece of Enjolras had known it was not a matter of sudden conviction in the cause. And, for all that had been buzzing in the back of his mind, it had been enough that Grantaire wanted to die for--or perhaps 'with' was the better word--the thing he believed in.)

Enjolras's fingers flex unconsciously where they had last held the other man's as he pauses his search to look back.

In death, it's almost an actual question.]

I arrived looking for what I found. I stayed for lack of discernment.

[That's not quite the truth, obviously. He stayed because he saw Enjolras and for the first time in a long time, felt like he could feel something. Half the time, that something was argumentive but that was infinitely better than nothing at all.]

There aren't many choices for secret, underground revolutionary groups, after all.

But there were choices.

[None of them had met anywhere particularly thrilling, of course. None of them had been much more advanced or contained much more in the way of diversity of opinion. None of them had burned much differently in their ferocity and yearning.

What had been special had been the people. Enjolras knew that without being told.

And, following back over the last few moment (which seemed, somehow, to stretch back over an incredible number of years), he found he didn't need to be told why Grantaire had chosen this group to stumble back to day after day. That's not the right--or interesting--question.]

Why were you looking?

Do you think a skeptic is born that way, or that they become that way when the world fails them? [It's not a philosophical question. There is an actual answer, in this case.] . . . It's not the first time all my friends have died.

[The only difference is this time, he couldn't bear the thought of surviving.]

[Enjolras likes to think that he would have caught that heaviness in his time among the living. He likes to imagine that the pause in his entire being would have been there had they still been standing in the Musain on opposite ends of a table rather than filling the silence of this train car.

There's a flicker of self-indictment for the knowledge that it isn't true. There's another flicker, much stronger, for the fact that he wouldn't have seen the second thought coming either way.

On the barricade, it had been easy and honest to speak of death in the radiance of the future, and a tomb all flooded with the dawn. Here, as the train sways quietly, words take their time to come.

The pause is, certainly, closer to an apology than Enjolras had ever come before.]

I came to Paris intending to escape that sort of - [He swallows the word "nonsense," because that's never been what it is at all.] - situation. I found it anyway, and thought maybe if I -

[He thought maybe they could be dissuaded, this time. That was selfish of him, maybe. It hadn't seemed so at the time.]

It doesn't matter. This time, I was not so lucky as the last.

A bit lucky.

[It's hard to imagine Garntaire the Believer, outside of this limited little window into a very singular devotion. It's hard to imagine a man who had lived and hurt and fought before he had met the Friends, one who had been so broken by loss that he appeared almost an exact foil by the time he knew them.]

You had something worthwhile to believe in.

[Their friends had been worth believing in. That much, at least, had never been controversial. And if Grantaire had died because he believed in one of them?

Well, that was still a good death.

It was, at any rate, the sort of death that set them both here--with more space between them now, but solidly settled into the same space beyond the grasp of life.]

I... [I'm sorry, his mind supplies in a rueful voice like Courfeyrac close at his shoulder. One hand waves physically to brush away the thought.] ...I did not mean to make your belief a hardship.

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Train to the Afterlife Meme

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