Work Text:
It was nothing short of a miracle that no guard so much as lingered on him.
Or perhaps, he mused with a seer’s knowing detachment he has recently developed, it was not a miracle at all. Merely the natural unfolding of a script long since written, each step aligning with an inevitability only he could perceive.
Either way, no one stopped him. There was, after all, an illusion he had woven into the very fabric of this place—one that ensured no one truly saw what did not wish to be seen.
The sterile white corridors stretched endlessly, polished to a clinical sheen that reflected the cold fluorescence overhead. He walked with the idle ease of a man unburdened—hands tucked loosely at his sides, posture relaxed, gaze unfocused in that particular way that suggested belonging in a place so detached. It was an easiness that bordered on languid, as though he were nothing more than a man indulging in a leisurely stroll through a familiar park. Every footstep he took echoed just enough to be heard, yet not enough to invite attention. The polished floors reflected the cold fluorescence above, each footfall echoing just enough to affirm his presence, yet not enough to make it known.
He did not hurry.
To hurry was to invite scrutiny.
Instead, he moved as one who had walked these halls a thousand times before. Taking turns without hesitation. Pausing briefly at intersections as if recalling routine rather than mapping escape. There was a rhythm to it—an understanding of how one should move within these walls. It was that very rhythm that sold the illusion. To any passing observer, there was nothing remarkable about him. Just another figure draped in white, another mind among many, complicit in whatever horrors this place sought to justify and hide.
A pair of personnel passed him by, murmuring about data inconsistencies and recalibration cycles. Neither spared him a second look.
Of course they didn’t.
They weren’t meant to.
To them, he is but another iniquitous scientist among their own. A faceless presence absorbed into the institution’s machinery, as interchangeable as the data they so casually dissected.
The thought alone might have once provoked laughter—almost hysterical in its absurdity.
But alas, he was not Elio here but rather as Dr. Tavel— another man in white with lowered eyes and an unremarkable presence, another cog in a machine that consumed morality and called it progress.
Instead, he simply kept on walking and walking.
Until he came to a sudden stop at a particular hallway devoid of any life and noise.
At long last, he arrived at the objective of his infiltration.
The steel door stood no different from the others—completely unremarkable and featureless, designed to conceal rather than invite curiosity. A terminal blinked patiently at his side, awaiting authorization. Without pause, he produced the clearance ID he had acquired earlier—lifted cleanly from an unsuspecting scientist who would not notice its absence until far too late—and swiped it in one fluid motion. The lock responded without protest, granting him entry as if he had always belonged.
A soft chime answered him.
The door slid open.
Inside, the air smelled of antiseptic and lightly of blood as well. It's an unpleasant match of stench, making him frown.
The room was sleek and minimalist, almost oppressively so, to the point of sterility. It was steeped in darkness, save for the dim, scattered glow of active machinery. Screens flickered in steady rhythms and activity, lines of data cascading endlessly—an artificial constellation of light in an otherwise hollow space. A low hum permeated the space, mechanical and constant, like the steady pulse of something that had never learned to sleep.
At its center stood a cryogenic pod.
It commanded the room without ornament, its presence stark and deliberate. A monument to whatever purpose this place served.
Encased within it was a small figure—a child, no older than seven, perhaps ten at most. Suspended in artificial stillness, they appeared to be asleep, their expression devoid of tension, untouched by the world beyond the glass. There were cables and cords extended from every direction, converging upon the child’s body with clinical precision. Their arms, their legs, even their head—each was fitted with multiple lines, far more than necessary for simple observation. They fed into the surrounding systems, monitoring, recording, extracting. Every signal, every fluctuation, is reduced to data analyzed in computers.
Unperturbed by such a dehumanizing display before him, Elio stepped closer to the pod to study the child in earnest. The child was unconscious—of that, the monitors left no doubt. Neural activity flickered across the screens in steady, regulated patterns, subdued to a level that bordered on stillness. Their gray hair was dull and uneven, clinging lightly to their skin, framing a face drained of color. It was a pallor not of unrest, but of long deprivation. Their body was too slight and small, limbs thin in a way that spoke of neglect and a life deprived of sunlight, of movement, of anything resembling normalcy.
For a brief, unguarded moment, something in his expression softened.
Then, as if remembering where he was, he turned his attention away from the pod and toward the unattended monitoring computers nearby.
The screens welcomed him without resistance, their security either insufficient or irrelevant in the face of the clearance he carried. He began with the child’s file, followed by layers of classified documentation that unfolded as he scrolled. Medical logs and experimental parameters labelling the child as nothing more than a subject organism to be dissected. Predictive models as well observational summaries written in the detached language of science attempting to reach the height of evolution through constant violation of another's anatomy.
He took in the information quickly, eyes moving with practiced efficiency as he absorbed what he could. But even he knew better than to believe it could all be retained by memory. So he did not waste time pretending otherwise. Reaching within his coat, he retrieved a customized USB flash drive and plugged it into the terminal.
There was a slight pause before he initiated download and the machine responded immediately, progress bar beginning its slow, inevitable climb.
Finished with this particular objective, Elio turned his attention back to the child. And for a brief moment, he simply observed them, as though measuring not just their condition, but something far less tangible. The child continued to lay still within the open pod, framed by the faint mist of escaping cryogenic vapor. Up close, the artificial cold no longer felt abstract—it clung to the air, to the skin, to the quiet spaces between breaths. The monitors behind them continued their relentless, indifferent work, but their meaning had already been rendered irrelevant.
He stepped forward to the pod, leaning over to look closely into the child's sleeping visage before his gaze turned elsewhere into the panel. Pressing a sequence of commands into the pod’s control interface, a soft mechanical release hissed through the air.
A thin hiss of pressure escaping into the room, followed by a gentle cascade of fog spilling over the edge like fading breath. The glass panel lifted, revealing the child fully to the outside world for the first time in what felt like an eternity.
Unsurprisingly, the child had woken up— either from the noise or exposure to the open air. Their lashes fluttered, slow and uncertain, as though even the act of opening their eyes required effort beyond instinct. For a moment, there was only confusion—then clarity began to settle in, fragile and incomplete, as they took in the world for what might have been the first time.
Elio knelt down to their level, and without breaking eye contact—took off his white coat, the fabric sliding off his shoulders in a single motion. He leaned forward and carefully draped it over the child, adjusting it so it would not slip from their small frame. The coat swallowed them almost entirely, but it carried warmth the pod no longer provided.
“For now,” he thought to himself with some strange satisfaction bubbling in his chest, “this will do.”
His hand lingered briefly at the edge of the fabric, ensuring it settled properly, before withdrawing.
Then he glanced at his watch to check the time, calculations passing through his mind.
Only a few minutes remained before they would notice anything amiss—before it all collapsed into alarm, and his carefully maintained disguise shattered into pursuit.
It's enough time.
He rose unhurriedly, as though time itself had agreed to wait for him. He returned back to the computer, retrieving the flash drive from the terminal with calm precision, slipping it back into his coat as though nothing about the situation demanded urgency. The screen behind him still flickered with residual data streams, now meaningless without him to interpret them.
Behind him, the child watched with such rapt attention that he felt flattered by their undistracted focus. Though still seated within the opened pod wrapped in his coat far too large for them, they observed him like a baby owl, with a kind of unfiltered attention that belonged to no fear nor understanding. Their golden eyes were soft and somewhat unfocused, its magnetic hue reminding him of a Stellaron—tracking every movement he made as though he were the only stable object in a shifting world.
It was a curiosity unburdened by meaning. He misses being like that—curious and ignorant, unburned by anything as grand as the fate of the universe weighing on his shoulders.
Before the silence could settle too long, a sound cut through it.
“Meow.”
The child’s attention snapped away at once.
From the edge of the room, a black cat stepped into view, its sleek coat catching what little light there was. Its blue eyes gleamed with a strange, knowing sharpness, as if it understood far more than any ordinary animal ever should. The child stared, transfixed, as the cat padded closer without a trace of hesitation.
Elio’s mouth curved into a faint smile. So it seems that his adorable accomplice has finally shown up.
He crossed the distance in a few unhurried steps and crouched, one hand brushing lightly over the cat’s head before resting briefly against the child’s hair again—an absent, grounding gesture more than affection, though it resembled it closely enough to be mistaken.
“Good timing,” he murmured softly, as if the cat had ever been late.
The child tilted their head slightly, gaze flickering between the two of them—man and feline—as though trying to understand the relationship between phenomena that had no explanation yet.
“Come on,” he said softly, as though inviting them on an ordinary afternoon walk rather than an escape from a sealed facility now seconds away from full containment response.
“Let’s go home, shall we?”
His voice carried that strange, lilting quality—low, melodic, almost androgynous in its warmth, the kind of voice that drew attention even when the words themselves were quiet.
It was a command disguised as an invitation. A promise disguised as certainty.
For a moment, the child only stared.
Then the alarm shattered the stillness.
The facility seemed to wake all at once, as if the entire building had been struck by the same jolt of panic. Red lights bled across the room in violent pulses, stripping the sterile white walls of their calm and staining everything with urgency. Footsteps multiplied somewhere beyond the door, first scattered, then organized, then unmistakably desperate.
Voices echoed through the corridor and intercom.
“Code Black. Code Black.”
“Emergency Sector lockdown initiated.”
“Find the intruder.”
Outside, the world was already narrowing into pursuit.
But inside the room, Elio simply extended his hand.
It was not forceful or insistent. He did not speak again, did not hurry them, did not try to bridge the silence with empty reassurances. He only waited, patient and unreadable, giving the child their first true chance to choose.
The child hesitated—just for a breath, just long enough to show that they understood, in whatever limited way they could, that this was a choice at all.
Elio said nothing. He merely stood there, hand outstretched, as if time itself belonged to him and the chaos beyond the door was nothing more than distant weather.
Then, slowly, carefully, the child reached for him.
The moment their fingers met, the air seemed to fold in on itself and the black cat gave a firm, decisive meow, as though answering a call only it could hear.
And then they were gone.
(somewhere far, far away—to a time bygone and forgotten, there once lived another you, before the you that remains now.
a boy runs through an endless field of flowers that sway like a breathing sea beneath a sky too wide to belong to any one world. The wind carries laughter — his, and someone else’s he can no longer place. it tugs at his sleeves as he sprints barefoot through the soft earth.
a tall willow tree stands at the edge of the field, its branches cascading like green water. It watches and remembers the shape of a family that once lived beneath it.
somewhere nearby, a mother knelt.
she gathered her children into her arms as easily as breathing, pulling them close until their laughter softened into something warmer, smaller, safer. their voices overlapped as they clung to her sleeves, to her warmth, their laughter spilling through the air unrestrained.
For a moment, everything is whole and fine.
For a moment, nothing is missing and gone.
it was so warm.
She was so warm.
and the boy—he knows this warmth. he knows it in the way one knows breathing, in the way one does not question the existence of something so fundamental.
It did not occur to you then that this was something that can easily be lost.)
The seer wakes up and there is no field.
Only a vast, quiet emptiness where something once insisted it belonged.
The sensation of running still clings to his limbs—but when he moves, there is nowhere left to run toward. Even the echo of laughter dissolves as soon as he tries to listen for it.
It takes a moment to remember how to breathe, to remember where he is.
A soft meow breaks through the quiet, gentle and grounding. It must have woken when he did.
His hand lifts, slow and unthinking, reaching out to find the source without looking. Fingers brush against soft fur, moving in absent strokes, mind still caught somewhere between sleep and waking.
It was such a nice dream.
He almost feels like it should mean something, but it's not one of his visions so he supposed this one is conjured out of mortal longing instead.
It was never meant to mean anything at all.
Maybe it was only meant to convince you that home was once a real place—
and not merely a story people tell themselves,
a fragile construct built to soften the realization
that they will never reach it again.
His fingers stills against the cat’s fur for the briefest moment.
There is an emptiness where the dream had been.
It was not longing, but not quite grief either.
Just something adjacent to it, an empty space in the heart, shaped like an answer to a question never asked.
The seer stares ahead into the empty space before him, as if something might answer if he waits long enough.
Of course, there is no answer.
You already knew this.
There is no returning to something that no longer exists.
The seer closed his eyes briefly, not in exhaustion, but in acknowledgment.
You are never going back home.