Chapter Text
“Change of clothes… personal documents… keys. Is this all, Mr. Blackquill?” the warden handing him his effects asked as he prepared to leave jail for the last time, albeit not in the direction he had been expecting until today.
A humorless smile formed on Simon Blackquill’s face as he accepted the proffered items. How should I know? He had left these things when they checked him in seven years ago, and they were as foreign to him as the idea that he was now free.
“It will do,” he replied, and the warden cringed at the stiff coolness of his tone. Without another word, the guard turned a key in his panel, pushed a button, and the heavily fortified double doors of the state penitentiary slowly swung open. Head held high, Simon walked out into the cold evening air.
Imperceptibly, he slumped when a metallic sound not unlike that of a breaking church bell signaled that the doors had closed behind him once more.
What now? I was supposed to die tomorrow.
He looked at the useless trinkets in his hands, and then realized that at least one of them might not be entirely without purpose. Most of the keys on the keychain he had just received probably did not fit a lock anymore, but the one with the GYAXA sticker on it could just help him out.
It’s that or sleeping under a bridge.
***
Not having had a chance to freely walk the streets for seven years, Simon was not surprised to find that the city had changed substantially on him. Only half-remembering the way even as it had been back then, by the time he let himself into an apartment in a large building block near the Space Center, it was close to midnight and he had spent hours wandering the deserted streets.
He had never quite understood how Aura could live in this soul depository, but he assumed that, considering her zeal for her work, she only came here to sleep, anyway.
Not anymore, the thought hits him as he stepped over the threshold, pushing the door closed behind him. Aura was not here; she was at the detention center, to await her trial for the hostage situation that had ultimately led to his retrial and exoneration.
Another person suffering because of me. And not just a random person, but his only living relative. Their family had never been a large one, and their father had passed away mere months before Simon took the bar. Leukemia. And their mother… A year and a half after he had been put on death row, the neighbors had found her collapsed in the backyard, dead due to a sudden stroke. At that point, he had not seen her for about a year, as she had abhorred visiting him in jail. He had not even had a chance to say goodbye to her.
His expression became grim. Who knows how much the shame of her son being a self-admitted murderer contributed to her condition?
He switched on the light and found himself once more confronted with the signs that the world around him had moved on while he had been suspended in time. Aura’s place looked nothing like he remembered; the cheap, but well-loved Ikea furniture she had bought when she had first moved here was gone, replaced with the sleek, impersonal plastic of designer furniture.
Simon sat on the violently pink chair facing the window, feeling acutely that he did not belong here, that he was but intruding upon someone else’s life. His reflection in the uselessly small glass table in front of him showed him the face of a stranger: long, shaggy hair shot with premature white which nearly hid his eyes, only serving to highlight the deep, dark shadows underneath. Who am I?
The answer came to him immediately, from a part of himself that felt like it had been poised to strike all day.
For myself and everyone around me, I am poison.
His sister might have been bitter after Metis’ death, but until the hostage situation, at least she had had a life. He recalled how angry she had been after his sentence, not just at the court but also at him for stubbornly clinging to his testimony that he had murdered Dr. Cykes. She had shown up for visiting hours twice a year, her bitterness more and more palpable as time had passed. In her eyes, he should have thrown little Athena to the wolves inhabiting the justice system, as she had been convinced of the girl’s guilt. His existence had served as her reminder that she had lost someone she had loved, and his confession had denied her closure. The actions she had taken during the last couple of days were probably not so much motivated by trying to save her stubborn, useless brother as by attempting to get her revenge on who she believed was Metis’ true murderer. Now she would face the same suspended animation he had undergone, to be spat out again into a world that was foreign to her. His fault.
And Athena… further guilt welled up in his mind. In the end, he had been the one who cost her her mother, no matter whether he had wielded the blade that ended her life or not. As a cocky young prosecutor, he had approached Metis Cykes to benefit from her psychological expertise in the Phantom case; the chase had been a game for him, and he had never seen the danger in his actions until it was too late. Had he not led her assassin right to her door step? Without his carelessness, Athena might have grown to eventually understand her mother’s actions. Yet, Metis had died, and would forever be a barely-remembered stranger for the young woman. That made two families who were ripped apart by his useless bumbling.
Three. It would not do to forget about poor Fulbright, disposed of and replaced by the assassin because Simon had selfishly held on to the Phantom’s psychological profile for all these years, making it desirable for the spy to get close to him in order to reclaim his secrets.
Simon was under no delusions that their apprehending the Phantom today would make a shred of difference in the end; who knew how many international killers and saboteurs-for-hire would step in to replace him? All things considered, it would have been best to give up on catching the spy before ever stepping into the Cykes family’s life.
But even if Simon was generous with himself and conceded that his hunt for the Phantom had been driven by youthful idealism, his continued mistakes in handling the situation had only continued to inflict damage on everyone around him. Had he known when to give up, letting go of the oh-so-precious evidence he had held on to all this time, at least some of all the suffering he, the slow-acting poison for so many people, had caused, lives cut short might have continued.
Why did I hold on to that damn bundle of paper to begin with, anyway?, he asked himself.
Because I thought I could at some point use it to buy myself out of my situation. Because I was too much of a coward to face the consequences of my actions.
Because I couldn’t handle the thought of dying like a man.
Simon’s fist connected with the surface of the glass table, causing the cruel mirror to shatter into thousands of pieces. Momentarily, the searing pain in his hand managed to distract him from the most devastating fact of all: that after everything that had happened, after all the sacrifices on the altar of his hubris, he only now discovered that there was something he feared even more than death.
Life.