and diamonds are forever

Disclaimer: I do not own Black Adam (Movie 2022) or any associated trademarks.

They won.

And Carter feels nothing.

For a moment, in the thrill of the battle and the adrenaline of the rage, the anger propelling him onward, he could forget. Ignore it. Even use it. But it’s over; they won, and he feels nothing.

Waller doesn’t much care for his emotions, and he doesn’t much care for hers. Reports, as callously as he can, because if he lets himself go, if he allows himself room to feel, he won’t function.

It’s his fault, he knows.

When he’s helping with the cleanup, flying people up on piles of rubble so they can search for survivors, or find valuables, or try to get good photos for their news papers, Carter knows it’s his fault. Kent—it’s his fault. Carter knows death, is intimately familiar with it in a way alien to most life-forms, can comprehend far more of nothingness than most can conceive of, and he is not scared. Has not been scared for eons.

But he fears, now. Fears—Kent is gone. Dead. Dr. Fate has moved on, vanished the second the battle was done, and Carter has no way of finding him.

There is only death, and destruction, and annihilation.

The others do not understand. The children are—children. They do not comprehend his loss, and do not understand his grief. And he is grieving, he realizes as he flies over yet another pile of rubble and ruins, smoke drifting on the air and his mouth full of the taste of blood. Whose, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t much care either.

He is grieving, he realizes when he’s settling in for the night and his breaths sound raspy, hitching in his throat. He is grieving, he realizes when he eats dinner and it tastes like ash. He is grieving, he realizes when he finds the last text Kent ever sent him.

He never responded to that text.

Somehow, amongst everything else, that is unbearable.

(Carter spends hours writing out a response. He doesn’t send it; it feels cheap. Like an excuse. Like a way to levy his guilt into something easier, less important. Less vital.)

(Like he doesn’t care, like sending a simple text will fix all his faults.)

(Like Kent would—no.)

In his sorrow, he drowns. The physical exercise—the aching of his muscles, the swelling of his blood, the beating of his heart—is a feeble distraction. After a while, the cleanup becomes muscle memory, and the brief relief of the exertion abandons him, leaves unprotected in the ruthless force of his own emotions.

Carter knows death. He doesn’t fear his own, has no dread left to bear. But this? To be the one left behind? To be the one abandoned, the one who most go onward, still?

This, he can’t.

He is grieving, he realizes when he watches the sunrise from a shattered rooftop, his hands cut open on the stone and rubble, his eyes staring at the sun so long they water. Only then does he blink, only then does he brush a tear away with a dirty nail.

For Carter, there is only death.

And yet he is alive.

THE END