Jack "Halloween" Stardust

 The Stardust household had fractured that day. The day that Ziggy had made his prediction was the same day that Science had discovered the terrible truth--that Earth was dying. Ziggy's words had been the first of the day, and there was no way that anyone could have known beforehand. A few days later Science had gone to Government, all pale old men with sallow sinking faces, and the news had broken around the world. Jack, and of course Ziggy and Mother and Father, watched in awful terror as the newsmen on ever channel repeated the Government issued news.

Earth was really dying.

Jack and Ziggy were equally broken by the news, though in different ways. Jack chose to hone his skills of survival, leaving home and living from place to place on what he could find. He made up the new words that they would all need soon--because Earth would die first quickly, for five years, and then slowly waste away for decades or centuries. Not many people read the rest of the news Science had brought to the world--that it wouldn't end in a flash of light and thunder, the world would instead end in darkness and a whimper.

Ziggy chose to give the people hope, to tell them to be happy while they could be happy--and to live while they were alive. Each of the brothers saw how people would react to the news, and went their separate ways. Jack of course kept up with what his brother was doing. Ziggy was his little brother, how could he not? His heart broke as his brother, with such a beautiful voice and hands, lost himself. It was almost unconscious, but he made his way closer to where his brother was most often--that way when whatever happened to him, he would be there for him.

They'd left him for dead. The alleyway smelled of cheap beer and blood. Jack knelt and picked up his brother, so tiny with his hair pasted to his head, his lips swollen and his face bloodied. And then there were his hands. His brother's beautiful long-fingered hands, the fingertips habitually covered in calluses from his guitar-strumming ways. Those hands were crushed, bleeding and bent unnaturally. Five fingers were broken, one was missing a nail, and his hands shook still from the memories of trying to defend himself. Jack kissed each of Ziggy's eight fingers and each of his thumbs, and then he kissed his brother's forehead.

Jack walked out of that alley with Ziggy Stardust in his arms. Weird and Gilly were nowhere to be seen, but that didn't matter. They would soon meet their ends for the disappearance of Ziggy--their hands had the savior's blood on them, and his fans would see it no matter how much the two men washed it off.

Only a week later, the Earth shook--the convulsions of a dying planet. Jack nursed his brother back to health, but had trouble convincing Ziggy that what he had done wasn't wrong. Ziggy blamed himself.

Halloween Jack was born when some of Ziggy's followers found them, still needing Ziggy's voice to comfort them. They took his crooked hands--there was only so much Jack had been able to do--and kissed them in the way Jack himself had kissed them only months ago. They were wonderful--two men and a pregnant teenager, and they were wonderful because their faces brought Ziggy to sing once more in his reedy soprano. It was through their faith in Ziggy that Jack realized he had to write these times down--he had to pass on the knowledge of the end of the world, for any who might survive this generation.

He wasn't any good at writing songs, so he turned to Ziggy, and his three believers for help. So it was curled up on the tops of buildings or in small caves of rubble that he wrote the Future Legend, a tale of people who survived no matter what happened. He planned on singing it to the girl's child when it came--it wouldn't do for the child to realize only a generation had passed since the Earth began to die, it was better she thought the world had always been this way in one form or another.

Jack Stardust after that went by Halloween Jack, for the legends he spoke of so pointedly that the people he encountered soon forgot the world they'd lived in before. Instead they chose to remember the world which he sang of, and sat at the feet of the girl and her baby as he told them of the Sweet Things--the women who had to be cared for and fed and didn't it seem so easy to help them out? Didn't they seem so young, and wasn't that just the way of it these days?

Halloween Jack traveled from town to town, almost always found on the highest building he could find, with a broken-handed quiet red-head who murmured to visitors that they were wonderful, a broken-voice coming from a brokenly-smiling mouth. Wrapped around him was a man with only eyes for him, while sitting between the redhead and Halloween Jack was a young family with a little baby named Sweet Grace.

The people eventually forgot Ziggy Stardust, whose only lasting message was that they were wonderful--but after a while that got forgotten too. The people, Jack knew, would eventually forget the people he traveled with, and would eventually forget even him. But he could help them for now, in his own way. Whenever he coaxed someone away from the idea of jumping or giving themselves over to the gangs of Dogs--the Diamonds being particularly vicious to their prey--in hopes of getting food, Ziggy would wake from his daze for a moment. His younger brother's crooked smile would flicker on in that moment, and Jack knew he was doing right.