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shoezuki · 8 months ago

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(this is a mini fic from a segment of my fic 'Doctor, the problem's in my chest' during chapter 6 where Gepard rushes into the Cold Plains to find Sampo and saves him from the fragmentum amalgamation. I had originally planned to have a segment between sampo being injured by the monster and gepard saving him that was from gepards perspective. i scrapped it but wrote it as an extra bit for fun)

Being confined in a closed, restricting space with Sampo Koski has forced Gepard to learn a lot about the conman. Nothing useful, nothing all that remarkable, really. Just… things.

Things like how Sampo knows how to cook, even with limited, shitty ingredients like questionable beef jerky and frozen vegetables. How he eats as if he has been starved for days for every single meal, how he rations out food meticulously and keeps track of supplies in a studious way that would put the Silvermane’s resource management to shame. Or how he knows how to whittle wood with practiced ease, crafts his own bombs and how to repurpose things outside of what they were made for. Gepard learns that Sampo sleeps lightly, too, even if Sampo thinks he’s unaware. Gepard learns that quickly-- when he is shocked awake with nightmares or shifts just the slightest bit in his bed late at night, Sampo’s breathing always goes the slightest bit quieter. Gepard also learns that Sampo’s hands are warm and that Gepard’s tendency to stare makes him skittish.

(He’s been told, many, many, many times that his staring is… creepy. Unnerving. Gepard doesn’t understand how or what he’s doing wrong, but he’s used to people tensing and glancing away, saying he looks too stern. Gepard expects Sampo to say the same, to say his stare is freaky or weird like so many people have before. But he never does.)

It’s these little, mundane, strange things Gepard has learned that causes him to realize something is wrong this time as soon as he wakes up.

The injury and the fever the infection has inspired has been making him sluggish, slow to realize himself and feeling like an alien in his own skin. It takes him a few minutes this time, too, to wake up fully. His head feels heavy like cotton is pressing against the back of his eyes, he feels too hot and too cold at the same time. He’s sweaty and disgusting, shivering under his blankets, but every uncovered inch of skin feels chilled as if the air is made of ice.

Something is wrong. He knows something is wrong before he fully opens his eyes.

The first thing he'd learned about Sampo is that he's made of movement and noise. For someone who slinks around back alleys and evades the Guards with ease, there's a constant restless energy under his skin that has him shifting and talking and waltzing around the small house all the time. Even in his silence, when he thinks Gepard is asleep and and is laying on the sofa late at night or tiptoeing as he peeks through the bedroom door, he’s loud. Sampo’s presence is imprinted on Gepard’s awareness, a constant feeling in the back of his head like a sixth sense. Many, many times Gepard has woken up shocked from subtle nightmares, only to become all-too aware of Sampo laying on the sofa in the other room and clinging to his distant company to calm himself.

Even in his foggy, feverish state, his mind far away from himself and nothing but aching pain and cold-hot shivers consuming him, he wakes up and everything feels wrong. He shuffles, groans and untangles himself from the sweat-damp sheets and blankets he was twisted up in. He rubs at his eyes, tries to focus, tries to listen for Sampo in the other room. “S-Sampo?” He huffs out, his voice raw and his words dragging through his throat. “Sam… Sampo?”

There’s nothing. No response, no sound of movement, no rushed surge of footsteps towards his door as Sampo always does when Gepard barely even thinks to call for him. There’s nothing but the echoing, suffocating silence of simply being completely and utterly alone.

It only takes him a few seconds to panic.

Gepard had seen himself as a prisoner in the beginning, sure that Sampo had some ulterior motive to saving him and tending to him. He’d battled his own thankful relief of being alive with his strange, gnawing guilt and doubt that he even should be. Gepard had found all worry for himself shifted to Sampo, a strange feeling of anxiety and concern for the conman. He’d started to cling to it, pretending to be fine and hiding his delirious mind and fevers to keep that unfamiliar, pinched expression from Sampo’s face.

The monster he’d seen carve through his Guards, echoing their voices as it circled the house, inspired a kind of fear in him he hadn’t experienced before.

He can’t stop thinking about what it would do to Sampo, how it could kill and take the last person with him stranded out in the Cold Plains. He couldn’t stop dreaming of it, of black shards of fragmentum crawling over Sampo’s skin, his clothes, crackling in his voice. He couldn’t stand it, he couldn’t let Sampo be the one to take his place.

Maybe the monster wants Gepard dead, maybe it knows Gepard had been the only one to escape it. Maybe it wants to leave Gepard to fester and fade away, alone with his fever and his infection and his grief. Maybe the monster knows Gepard wouldn’t make it out of here and wants to kill Sampo in his place, the one who saved Gepard, in some twisted sort of revenge.

(If he could think clearly, if he could think of anything other than the bone-chilling, soul-crushing fear that had consumed him in a tidal wave, he’d know none of that made sense. The fragmentum amalgamation was a mindless, lumbering husk of his Silvermane Guards. It acted without thought, dragged itself towards the warm bodies of living creatures, absorbing their life and their flesh into itself.)

Gepard is on his feet without thinking about it, the sudden piercing pain of his broken leg making his head clear the slightest bit. He slips his feet into the old slippers (the one’s Sampo got me, his mind unhelpfully supplies, making his chest feel heavy and tight) and grabs the shoddy crutch off the wall (the one Sampo made. Sampo made it. He made it for me. For me. Where is he?). He huffs, gasps for tight breaths as he shambles out of the room, feeling the temperature rapidly dip the farther he gets from the single remaining geomarrow heater. He squints and scans the room, the small living room and attached kitchenette. The pile of Sampo’s gloves and parka, usually dumped in a mess in the corner by the door, is gone just as Sampo is.

“Sampo?” He croaks out hopelessly, as if the other man will manifest in front of him at the sound of his desperate fear. But there’s no one but him, his heart sinking to his stomach. “Shit… Shit, shit shit!”

Gepard moves as quickly as he can, around the room and towards the door, putting too much weight on his bad leg. He ignores the pain, the constant screaming ache of his wound, and only pauses in front of the door when he stares at his bare, outreached hand.

He spins back around, muffling a sound in the back of his throat. He trips into the kitchen, catching himself on a counter and letting the crutch clatter to the floor as he starts yanking drawers open, tearing through cupboards, shelves, through old dusty silverware and dishware, dust and cobwebs swirling disturbed in the air around him. “C’mon, come on!” He hisses through his teeth, the wound in his side burning as he ducked to look underneath the cabinets. “Where in Qlipoth’s name did he hide it?”

Trying not to scream with his rising fear and frustration, Gepard stops suddenly. He turns and looks back at the old, unused wood stove. He’d watched Sampo a lot, when he didn’t know Gepard was watching, through the cracked open bedroom door. Sampo had sometimes stopped, paused at the wood stove with a hum, or his gaze drifting to it. Gepard recalls hearing the grinding, metallic screech of the heavy iron door opening a few times, usually at night or when Gepard was struggling to sleep through his suffering. Sampo had hovered around and looked into the stove many, many times after Gepard and him argued, after Gepard demanded his gauntlet returned to him so he could march out to his death.

“Idiot,” Gepard mutters to himself, kicking himself for having forgotten. He ignores the ripping feeling in his side as he bends down to grab his crutch, leaning on it as he ambles towards the stove. Getting to his knees he twists the handle, the door of the stove moving with a hefty groan. The inside is black, soot and old ashes making the inside of the wood stove look like a ceaseless black void. It made the gleam of metal stand out and instantly catch his attention.

Ash clings black and grey to his hands as he grabs his gauntlet, hands shaking as he held it in front of him. It felt both heavy and light at the same time, cold metal making his fingers feel numb. The metallic surface, the delicate metal plates making up the fingers and the faintly glowing blue geomarrow protruding from the wrist, are all tarnished with soot. Streaks of black give way under his fingers, staining them black.

It feels familiar, comforting as he puts it on. Gepard stretches his fingers, feeling the grind of the metal joints and the low clattering sounds of metal on metal as he clenches his fist. The feeling of the abnormal cold, a sort of tingling energy pressed to his skin, is something he almost missed. He clenches his fist, feeling frost flare up and swirl around his hand, clinging to the metal gauntlet.

Sampo had disarmed him, taken his gauntlet and only weapon when he’d first dragged Gepard, unconscious and near dead, into this abandoned house. He’d been panicked when he’d first woken up, then furious when Sampo refused to give it back after the monster made its presence known. He understands why for both instances, now; no doubt Gepard would have frozen Sampo solid when he’d first seen the criminal hovering over him, and he would’ve marched into the snow and cold to hunt the monster down if Sampo had given it back to him.

He can’t say it aloud, can’t bear to think about it, but the gauntlet feels… wrong, now. Grim, heavy, a weight digging into his skin and digging down to his bones. He realizes he hadn’t seen it, worn it since he had struggled against the fragmentum amalgamation. He can’t help but imagine the blood of his fallen Guards frozen to his metal fingers.

Gepard doesn’t think of anything else, doesn’t think about the severity of his own actions: he has no shoes besides thin slippers, no coat or weapon; he could barely walk, and not without pain; he had no clue exactly where they were in the Cold Plains, where Sampo could be, if he could find him.

It doesn’t matter, though. He couldn’t do nothing, couldn’t let Sampo remain out there where that thing is. He couldn’t even stand the thought of it, the possibility of Sampo being cut down by the fragmentum amalgamation, absorbed into its form with the Silvermane Guards that Gepard had led to their deaths.

The thought of Sampo being the one to die to the fragmentum amalgamation in his place has Gepard opening the door, not even flinching at the rush of cold as he rushes out into the nothingness.

#sampard #honkai star rail #sampo koski #gepard landau #sampo is technically only mentioned but.#hes there in spirit #death mention #ask to tag #i will post it to ao3 later but i figured im like. puttin it here cuz why not #for the Homies #if i post more sampard things only to tumblr then i shall attract more sampard homies yknow. like pls we need more #more homies on tumblr. PLEASE.#in the bones

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