Work Text:
Please forgive and let me share with you around the bend
You’re an angel when you sleep
How I want your soul to keep, on and on around the bend
Airy’s head is in pieces on the ground but it doesn’t make anything better.
Liam almost cuts himself on the glass while picking it up, one kind of final “fuck you” from Airy, beyond the grave. He thinks with sickening disappointment that he’ll never know, now, and he wonders if this was intentional, Airy taking the easy way out. Airy doesn’t seem like the kind to leave behind a note, Liam thinks, staring at the pieces of his former tormentor’s body in a pile. Responsibility shoulders its way onto him now as it has the whole time, in places he’s never expected it before.
Digging a grave is harder than he’d hoped, though he eventually finds an approximation of a functional shovel that Airy had kept by his house. By the time Airy is in the ground, it’s started raining. The drizzle feels like it’s seeping into his bones, and his crutches are becoming vaguely slippery in a way that’s decidedly unpleasant. He decides to stop digging for now. He’s got a lot of time to finish it, probably. He makes his way back to Airy’s house, everything that he’s inherited by default.
He goes for the computer, first. If he can figure out how to operate it all — the computer, the mic, the plane — he might actually be able to rescue people. He starts clicking through the website again, hoping to find some sort of answer hidden between all the names and nicknames and locations he’s never even heard of, and some locations that are chillingly familiar. He feels the urge to delete Owen’s page, even his own, maybe, but he needs to keep everything intact. He can’t go accidentally deleting anything that ends up being vital later.
Liam decides to look around for something, anything — a manual, a diary, a suicide note, if he really did kill himself.
It turns out that Airy has more than just rock music in his cassette collection.
He finds the box of them behind his computer in Airy’s strange cave hideout, and wonders if he was paranoid, overly private, or sensitive to light. Maybe all three.
Airy had scripts, too. Not word-for-word ones, though there are scribblings of quotes Liam’s certain were being taken as they were said. The scripts seem to be of what he assumed, hoped, maybe, the contestants would say.
SODA BOTTLE
(Something despondent.)
BACKPACK
(Something selfless.)
MOLDY
(Something negative.)
SCENTY
(Something calming.)
So on and so forth. They seem functionally useless for anything besides making Liam miss everyone even more, and it takes a lot more willpower not to shred them. It was by picking them up Liam had realized the tapes were underneath them.
ONE, PRE-SEASON 2 the one that Liam picked up first reads, scribbled on tape with a sharpie and haphazardly stuck onto the tape. He carefully picks up the cassette player, careful to not worsen its already poor shape, and inserts the tape. Presses play.
“...Hi,” Airy’s voice filters out of the cassette, and Liam’s immediate, knee-jerk reaction is to eject it. He stares at the tape for a second and takes a deep breath, feeling stupid for the visceral reaction — of course they’re recordings of Airy, what else would they be? There’s nobody else here for it to have been, and he doesn’t think Airy was exactly getting radio service here. He steels himself and restarts the tape.
“...Hi,” Airy repeats, speaking exactly like he did when he was still alive. “This is, um. My first thoughts before ONE… 2. The first season was good, but there were areas needing improvement, obviously.” There’s another long, awkward, pause. “The new contestants are the greatest part. I’m really excited…” He doesn’t sound very excited, though with Airy, Liam has no way of knowing. “I hate to admit to it being, um. Rigged. I don’t know if anyone is listening to these… But, I have ideas… places to go with it. First eliminations. Last eliminations, even… Structure for the show.” Airy sighs, and he’s quiet for another moment. For a blissful second, Liam thinks the tape is over.
“Backpack,” Airy says, or rather said , at some point, now played back through the tape recorder in slightly lower quality. It feels like some sort of twisted simulacrum of Liam’s life back on the Plane.
Liam’s entire body freezes at the name, hates that Airy calls him that. Before he has time to collect his racing thoughts, Airy is continuing, “I hope this is Backpack, at least. I figured you would be the one. That, um. You know. Got these.” Liam has to use all the energy in him to not smash the tape recorder in his hands, if he’s even able to. He wants to find out more than anything if he is, but he can’t. He needs to get through these.
“You know,” Airy says from the recording, excitement creeping into his deadpan tone. “I’m kind of your biggest fan.”
Liam can’t stop him from continuing, not really. He does: “I’ve been watching you for so long. I picked you because you reminded me of me. No life outside work. No family left. Meaningless…” Airy trails off, perhaps not wanting to insult Liam by going further, though Liam agrees, deep down. There wasn’t a lot of upward mobility in a cubicle. After an uncomfortably long pause, Airy lets out a small laugh. “It’s a real underdog story. People love that stuff. I— I love that stuff. Uh… It’s why I made ONE.” There’s another too-long pause.
“...We didn’t have someone like you in the first season,” Airy eventually mumbles. “Uh, there was a lack of… central narrative. It needed someone to focus on. And that’s why I chose you, Backpack.”
What? Liam wants to say, but he can’t because Airy’s not here — it makes him angrier than ever at that moment, makes him wish that he’d smashed his head in himself rather than having the ground do it for him, makes him wish he could’ve swung that axe better, that he could’ve just committed. Airy from the tapes continues: “You deserved a second chance. Just like I did.”
Liam can’t stand this self-deprecating shit, the way Airy is living the catharsis of tearing himself down through tearing down Liam. He wonders if there’s a difference to Airy, if he’s embodied Liam as such an audience surrogate that he’s living through him, in a way. Liam’s living Airy’s life now, sleeping and living and suffering in his house, in this world, all by himself. Well, nobody except…
Liam pauses the tape and turns around in the chair back towards the computer, looking at the Plane. There are innocent people trapped there, and here he is doing nothing. He tries to tell himself that it’s not nothing, that he’s gathering information, but he still feels terribly inefficient, at a loss for a real purpose. Even back on the Plane, he had everyone else, and even before here, he had Airy, terrible as he was. He was company. And now…
Liam has nobody.
Not Charlotte or Amelia, certainly not Bryce.
Bryce… Liam tightens his grip around his crutch at the thought. He’s tried not to think about him — tried to combat that feeling in his stomach when he looks at him, the way he felt like he couldn’t defeat Airy without Bryce, the way he felt like he finally could when Bryce was on his side. That hope had been almost tangible in the way they had looked at each other, once Liam had finally gotten through to him. And he understood — feels like crying, now, because all Bryce wanted was to be happy. He hadn’t had that for so long, and neither had Liam, but then Bryce felt like he could actually do something about it, and Liam had dragged him back down with him.
He has no way of knowing if Airy was going to take him no matter what. He probably would’ve, snatched him again while at his job or on the commute home or cooking in his shitty cozy apartment, and they would still be here.
It felt so new and exciting, his adventures with Bryce, like doing something he’d never done for the first time with someone else. Really connecting without the pretexts, getting down to that layer of Bryce that really did want to help. The way Bryce smiled at him. Liam swallows at the memory, still holding back tears.
He wants Bryce here. He wants everyone here, but especially Bryce. To have Bryce comfort him, steady like a rock holding the two of them together, skeptically playing the straight man to Liam’s journey of grandeur. He would do anything to go back, to the two of them in the waiting room, solving the mystery.
Knowledge has brought him nothing. There is no closure for Liam.
The Plane is so small to him, like he could hold it in his hands. He’s trying not to let it get to his head like it certainly did for Airy. Even if he did, it’d be foolish because he can’t actually influence the Plane yet, can’t even figure out how to turn on the microphone that’s sitting right in front of him. He feels like a total idiot, and Airy is posthumously constructed as an evil mastermind, a lone wolf, gone too soon before sharing his secrets. And that’s why he wasn’t really going to kill Airy, right? He told himself that. He told himself he only missed with the axe because really, deep down, he hadn’t wanted to kill Airy. He needed Airy alive , he needed to learn his esoteric process so he could truly separate himself, to deviate in that selfish way unnatural to Airy. Through that he would defeat him, and now…
He’s won, right? Because Airy is gone.
He doesn’t feel like he’s won. And this whole thing has been about winning, hasn’t it? It’s a game. Liam can remember it now, the first moment that the prize had been announced, for a moment he had yearned for it — but for what? So he could wish for a better life? How would he get that? He’s never known what he wants, doesn’t know what would make him happy. He thought Airy’s death would make him happy. Shows how much he knows.
“I thought it’d be fun,” Airy had said, and Liam feels like he’s the testament to the fact that this was truly all an indulgence worth nothing. That all of this, from the moment he woke up in the Plane, was an exercise in futility, down to Airy’s death itself.
Maybe Airy had the right idea, if he really did kill himself.
He takes one last hard look at the plane before resuming the tape.
“A main character is important. It, uh, it tells people who to root for. I want people to root for Backpack. Just like I am…” He trails off as usual, and Liam has to keep himself from crying out, in sadness, in rage, in frustration at his stupid situation because of stupid Airy in the ground dead, wants to bring him back to life just to bury him again.
Airy on the tape takes in a slow breath, and exhales. “All I want for season two is for it to go well. For it to be fun. It’s all I’ve wanted for so long. And I think I’m really close to finally getting it. To getting contestants that actually work. That bother to make the prize worth it.” There’s a noise on the recording like Airy is tapping his microphone base for a few seconds. He stops. “I just want to have a good time.”
The tape cuts out at that, and Liam wants to scream, again: was it really worth it? Worth all the suffering, the misery, Airy’s own eventual pathetically underwhelming death. Of course it wasn’t, Liam thinks, but how would you even begin to quantify it? Don’t we all just want to have a good time? There had been a time in Liam’s life where it seemed like something that he’d reach someday, that happiness that everyone always talks about reaching someday. That if he worked hard enough at his job he’d finally be happy.
He’s not. He’s not even at his job, he’s a million miles in the wrong direction dimensionally,
San Francisco and telemarketing and everything he’d ever known left long behind him. Since the moment he was taken off his bike, it was inevitable.
He would’ve done anything to have another chance to do something. Airy gave it to him. Why does he still feel sick?
He opens the box, and retrieves the next tape from the pile: ONE 2, FIRST CONTEST. Maybe this one will tell him something.
Liam sighs, and presses play on the tape.