Chapter Text
Cougar stares at the dirty nuke in his lap. It’s heavier than it looks like it should be and smells like ozone and the dull metal of a gun never cared for. He can’t feel his legs, but he doesn’t know if that’s the blood loss, a bullet hitting his spine, or the weight of this monstrosity on his lap. He can feel warm trickles of blood pumping in time with his heartbeat down his chest.
It’s getting harder to breathe.
He’d watched Jensen go and now he tries to give him time, enough time to get away (but not enough to turn back). Cougar sits, going slowly numb, counting the seconds.
The clatter of guards’ feet forces the count to stutter to a stop. He can’t remember how long it had taken for Jensen and him to get through the pipe coming in – surely five minutes is enough. It has to be.
He takes hold of the two wires he’d stripped, ready to spark. He’s already made his peace with death. A heavy stone sits in his gut, where he keeps all of the people he couldn’t save and the regrets that he’d never voiced, but the stone feels lighter than it has in months. If he has to die, he thinks, it is good to die taking down Max, taking down the mockery of a country the maniac created.
The guards barge in, guns raised, and Cougar pulls in a breath around blood bubbling into his mouth. He tightens his grip around the wires as the guards begin yelling. They’ve probably seen the nuke in his lap. He doesn’t bother parsing what they’re saying.
He raises the wires, fingers clumsy with blood loss and exhaustion. Luckily, this task doesn’t require dexterity.
(How funny, he thinks in the quiet moment between impulse and action, that killing is so much easier than saving. How much easier pulling the trigger is.)
He coughs around a fresh mouthful of blood. He breathes, “Vayan con Dios, angelitos,” thinking of the smiling faces looking up to him, the trust in their eyes, the way their bodies smelled as they burned.
He brings the wires together.
He feels electricity arc into his hands, a quick spark of pain.
He doesn’t feel the blast.
He dies instantly, a smile on his face, a stone in his gut.
He wakes, and he sees eternity stretching out impossibly around him.
It is beautiful. It is so much more than he could have imagined deserving. He tries to take a step forward.
He cannot move.
He looks down, and his ankles are cuffed, bolted to the ground-that-is-not-but-is. The chain of the shackles is dull and pitted, but strong. He tries again to take a step, and he cannot even raise his foot. He begins to wonder if this is his hell, standing at the edge of Paradise forced to watch it from a distance and never experience its peace.
He thinks that it is fitting. A sniper’s hell, to be stuck forever in the nest, target never arriving, watching-watching-watching.
He summons what he remembers of the sniper’s peace and settles. If this is his Hell, he will not fight it. He deserves this and more, fire and pain like the fate of the children he couldn’t save. If this is all that he must endure… God smiles upon him.
He waits.
Time passes. He does not fidget, and he does not grow tired. His legs never ache, his nose never itches. Nothing distracts him from his contemplation of the eternity he will never be able to grasp, the peace he will never reach.
He doesn’t even blink, he doesn’t think. His breath, if he breathes, is even and measured. His mind will not settle, but the rest of him knows these motions intimately.
As he watches, there is everything before him (and, in the way that eternity is, there is also nothing before him) and then there is something, distinct and solid in the way that nothing else is. He focuses on it and watches it approach.
Them. Them approach.
The being that comes into focus is indescribable. They stand too tall, he knows, and he cannot see their face. Flames swim around their body, and ice threads through their wings. (If they are wings, he cannot tell, nothing is clear and everything is clear. Eternity, he is realizing, is not made for his mind to comprehend, only for him to accept.) All that he knows of the being is that they are kind. He does not know how he knows this.
If he could move, he would be bowing his head. He is not made to witness such divinity, he doesn’t think. The shackles chafe, suddenly, at his ankles.
“Quiet, child,” the being shushes-says-sings. “Be you not afraid. I bring no harm, only news.”
Cougar – Carlos, he thinks, this being will know him as Carlos – stills, but not as the sniper in him stills. Not even as prey stills before the predator. He stills as he used to when he stepped into the cathedral in the D.F. that he visited with his mamá and papá as a child, overcome by the beauty and the holiness around him. He stills.
“Child,” the being sings-hushes-murmurs. “Oh, child, your way has been hard.”
“What is it that you want?” Carlos asks, before realizing the impertinence of interrupting. He feels a blush rise to his cheeks, when he could not feel that he has cheeks before. He wonders why this being, or this moment, makes him feel more real than he has since he first arrived.
The beings laughs-cries-sings (ever singing). “I want to give you a choice.”
“What choice?” Carlos asks. He thinks that he doesn’t have much of a choice, here, with shackles around his ankles and eternity stretching around him.
The flames around the being writhe, overcoming the ice in their wings. Steam writhes for some interminable amount of time and then is gone, and the ice reforms. The being sighs-murmurs-hums, “The choice that will decide your fate. You see, Carlos, you are something that we have rarely seen. You are a good man, and yet your soul weighs itself down to the Pit.”
Carlos blinks. (He can blink, he realizes.) “I…” he starts. He doesn’t know how to say “I am not what you think” to a being that obviously knows him to his core. He cannot believe what the being is saying, nevertheless. He is not a good man.
He has killed; he has caused innocents to die; he has watched children burn and done nothing. The sins weigh on his soul.
The being straightens, as much as it was slumped toward him from before. Carlos doesn’t know how much time has passed. “I will give you a choice, child. You can either go where your soul is pulled to, and punish yourself for eternity, or you can go back.”
“Go… back?” he asks.
“It is allowed,” the being hums-whispers-declares, “For certain souls to return and relive their lives, to right wrongs that set the world off its balance, set their souls too far into guilt to be redeemed.”
Carlos breathes. The air that he breathes now tastes like the air of home, desert after a rain, ozone and wet dirt and the green of flowers. He wonders if redoing his life will even help. He wonders what he could fix. “Will I remember?” he asks.
“To a point,” the being replies-sings-sighs. “Your mind is not made to encompass multiple lives, but the impressions will remain. You will remember what went wrong, and maybe you will remember what goes right.”
Carlos nods and sighs. He pulls Cougar over himself like armor, draws the sniper’s stillness into himself like he once took Communion. (He wonders if that is blasphemy. The being’s swirling ice and fire and wings-that-may-be seem amused and sad and expectant.) “I will go back,” he says. “I am ready, and if I can save…” He shakes his head. “How do I go back?”
The being draws closer. Fire and ice encircle him, and it does not burn. He sees eternity fading around him.
The last thing he hears: “You will not, however, remember this.”
Blackness, tinged with red, swallows him.
He forgets.