The Universe's Mixer

Aeon was standing behind him, utterly immobile and soundless.

The man, the mark sat on the bench in front of her, calmly and placidly.

His name was John Coffey.

And Aeon Flux had been handed quite the wad of cash to erase him from The City. She didn't know why, and she didn't much care, either.

Look where questions had gotten her last time.

She tilted her head, thoughtfully, as though contemplating the best way to pursue this... this ending of a life. She was soundless, and with her left hand, she slid the safety off the gun that she probably would not need.

The hospital was a good place for John Coffey to be. Not only could he help people all the time, but he couldn't get into trouble. Not that he did a whole lot of the latter, but sometimes he encountered people who weren't so good, and he didn't know what to do about it. It wasn't what anybody else would consider to be trouble, but it was troublesome to him.

Of course, it wasn't long before the hospital had less and less for him to do.

They had managed to keep him under wraps for the most part. The people he helped were too grateful to go blabbing to the media, and the hospital staff loved him. He was kind and quiet. And he was capable of helping them out with the patients they thought they were going to lose. Who was going to say anything? And risk losing this man who did so much for them?

But as the sick people became less and less, they encouraged him to have some time to himself more and more. Which meant leaving the hospital grounds and fending for himself. So far everybody had been lucky, because when he was needed, the hospital was put in front of him. He'd feel the need inside, and back to work he'd go.

Today was a little bit different though. The more he walked, the more the streets were taking him to an empty lot. Like the City didn't want to have him at the hospital anymore. And John Coffey didn't know where he was supposed to be going, nor did he realize that it was the same lot he was seeing. He just kept walking.

He only stopped when his feet were tired. Which made it extremely late in the day. The sun was setting and he could already see some of the night's stars. He smiled up at the sky as he sat on a bench that hadn't been there before.

Simon had brought him to the hospital. It had been a nice walk, on a nice day. There were a lot of birds out, and not too many people in pain. Needing him.

Not along the way, anyway.

John couldn't really remember ever being in a hospital. Simon had said that there were people there who would need him, need help. But he just hadn't expected it to be on such a large scale. From the moment he walked into the door, it was there, all around him. And now that he knew it was here, he knew that he wouldn't be able to ever forget it unless he did something.

He'd walked away from Simon, not listening to the calls and exclamations coming from behind him as he made his way into the hospital. There were a lot of people here, more than half of them needed him. But there were certain ones who needed him more than others. He felt their pain. He felt them calling to him silently.

There was an intersection, he stared at a wall and to his left was the cancer wing. To his right, the burn ward. The pull from both sides was just as strong. For a moment, he didn't know which way to turn. Then he felt it. The blackness of somebody dying.

John Coffey turned right. He moved down the hallway slowly, but with purpose. He found the door of the room where the dying person was. He opened it to the protest of the nurses inside.

"I can help." He said softly. His eyes gaining that glimmer of intelligence.

There wasn't anybody in the room that could hold him back. He was too large, and too determined to be stopped. He could feel the pain from the figure on the bed. It wasn't too late. He had just enough time.

Carefully, John sat on the edge of the bed and looked into the half closed eyes behind bandages.

"It's okay." He told the figure. "You'll be okay."

There was very little skin to be seen. John placed a massive hand as gently as he could on the cheek of the person wrapped up beside him. The eyes opened, fully aware now. Looked directly at him. There was no pain in them. Not now. Not while he was so close. Not while he was sharing like this. He bent forward, placing his face close to the small slit in the bandages where the nose and mouth were, to allow breathing.

And then he inhaled.

Another day, another...was he even earning money? They'd said that the City had moved, that they had all moved with it, but Dr. Simon Tam hadn't had time to notice. He'd been busy doing what he always did, work in the Hospital, fixing people, things, whatever. He hadn't even had time to make that coffee "date," much less time to check on his sister - or was it the other way around? It didn't matter seeing as neither were happening. It wasn't until Nurse Ratchet took pity on the hard-working, socially-challenged doctor by giving him a cup of coffee that didn't look as if it'd belonged to someone else, it was just cold, that Simon realized he might be over doing it.

He took the coffee, signed out, and left, waiting til he was around the corner where hopefully no one would see him to tip out the brown sludge. He kept walking, looking for a park. Parks were good, no matter the time of day. Parks meant calm, quiet, and he had to hope that no one broken or wounded would show up. He was beginning to wonder if people only came in two types - wounded and not so wounded. Or perhaps it was more physical versus mental/spiritual/metaphysical. He groaned, not wanting to think about anything this..deep.

The City was kind, or at least appeared to be, for there was a park. No one would be wounded here, no one would need fixing here. He could sit down, huddle onto a bench, and exist. Or quite possibly fall asleep now that his body had finally stopped moving, which was actually what he did.

River padded to the bedroom window on bare feet and pulled back a purple curtain with a motion far too graceful to be believed in any one else.

As she watched, the building across the street waivered, then sort of imploded and grew back slowly, out of the ground, like a plant on Miracle Grow. Her eyes went wide and dark and shiney, and there were not, by far, enough Mandarin curses for this.

She bounded down the stairs, past Alice Liddell's door and outside, not really sure where she was going.

Everything in the City was a silent scream. She clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes, standing in the middle of the street and almost getting hit by a taxi driven by a cabbie who stopped to gawk at the rearranging cityscape to his left.

Amidst the cries in her mind, and knowing for sure now, beyond anything reasonable, that there was no making sense of this, River heard one train of thought, loud and clear and steady, like a metronome.

And she made her way toward it, navigating around the buildings that waxed and waned and fluxed, calculating, as she went, the odds of one shooting her up into the sky like a star in reverse, should she step down in the wrong spot.

When she found the man she was looking for--not, she mused to herself with a smile, her brother or her sweetheart, not this time--she tapped him gingerly on the shoulder.

"Is it roaring in your head, too?" River asked, eyes looking up at the skyscraper across the street that suddenly ceased existing. She smiled, then, a big gentle smile for the man that had made things in her head less like a car crash and more like a working consciousness.