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sadkachow · 5 months ago

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ahhh i wrote something small (almost 2000 words, so i guess it depends on your definition of small) on this OP, i hope that's alright!!! took some slight inspo from @charatt regarding their comment on the synesthesia beacon making it where Aventurine likely wouldn't recognize his native language, or at least no longer understand it very well. i only went up to where your comic ended, though i may write some more. kind of made up the circumstances surrounding how this meeting would have occured in the first place, but i really hope this turned out well!!!

There is nothing Aventurine is more familiar with than death.

It has followed him around for as long as he can recall, far before he was even granted the name Aventurine, back when he was a child—pure, innocent, free.

He can hardly even remember the first time he watched someone die in front of him. Eventually, all of the bodies begin to blend together, a trail of violence and destruction that follows after him, like a plague.

Sometimes, he can’t help but wonder if he is the infected, or the transmitter. All of his luck comes from somewhere. As a child, he believed it was a blessing from Gaiathra Triclops. His clan told him as much.

Is it really a blessing, if everyone and everything that ever comes near him is withered and rotted away until there is nothing yet, and still, he cannot manage to die?

He thinks he’s a black hole. Perhaps his luck doesn’t come from the Mother Goddess at all, and instead all the rot lives inside of him. Perhaps he just pulls out the life from everyone else, and keeps it all for himself. Everyone always says he’s a selfish bastard, anyway. Who is he to say they’re wrong?

A few deaths stick out to him. His father, his mother. He never watched his sister die, but the day they were torn apart is burned into his mind in the same manner as the brand on his neck.

(Just another reminder he is worth nothing more than 60 copper coins. That even as he works his way up the ladder in the IPC, the stability only remains so long as his usefulness does.)

He remembers countless deaths here and there from different death matches. Watching as they died either by his own hands or as a consequence for his victory.

He remembers murdering his enslaver. He hadn’t known, at the time, that the man was a member of the IPC, but he had soon learned. As it turned out, people in power only turned a blind eye to murder so long as you didn’t attack one of their own. How many people had Aventurine killed before then, how many people had he watched die at the hands of the IPC, but the moment he turned it around on the Senior Manager Aventurine that came before him, he became the threat.

And he’d worked his way out of that too. Made a deal with Jade, and then with Diamond. Because the new Aventurine.

And that had been the greatest murder of them all. The murder of Kakavasha. It was different in a way that the death had been a long and painful one, Kakavasha being chipped away piece by piece, not just by himself but by every single person he encountered along the way. Some barely made a crack, while others ripped off entire chunks at the time.

Except even then, it wasn’t really a murder. That implied that someone was dead, gone forever. Kakavasha was not dead. He would have been, but Aventurine sealed him deep inside of himself instead, never to be seen again. Some days, he would lift up the box, and cradle it close to himself, but he never dared to pry it open.

And so his life in the IPC—in the spotlight, at least, the IPC was a factor in his development much prior, but never before like this—had begun. It was far from easy. The IPC prefers to depict themselves as the better choice. Aventurine knows better. It's slavery, the same kind that marks most of his memories. They may paint over it, repackage themselves, appear all beautiful and covered in bows, but he is familiar with the truth.

A cage is still a cage, even when made out of gold. Or, in his case, out of aventurine.

All of that to say he is no stranger to mortality. And yet, there is no amount of tragedy that could prepare him for what occurs next.

He arrives onto a small planet on his own, as a result of a distress signal, sent by a certain doctor specifically to him. It is not his first time visiting, but he has always arrived to work on some sort of joint project between the two of them (although each visit often ends with the two of them merely “spending time with each other”, even if they claim to reject one another’s companionship).

However, there is no Ratio to greet him when he steps off of his ship and into the garden at the entrance. This would not be unusual, were it not for the fact that even as he steps inside, there is no noise at all. No distant sounds of frustration or classical music playing (Ratio claims it enriches the mind and helps with retaining information—Aventurine thinks he’s just making things up, but the last time he voiced that, he was subjected to a three hour lecture from the good doctor on why music actually is beneficial for human learning, an experience he is not awaiting the recurrence of). The water isn’t even running, so Ratio is not taking a bath, which would be his final assumption supposing that he has run through every prior alternative.

No matter how much Ratio adores human solitude, the doctor never operates in total quiet.

Something is wrong, if it weren’t already obvious from the distress signal.

His hand shifts to the gun holstered at his hip, and he thanks the Mother Goddess that he’d chosen to bring it rather than simply relying on his wits, just in case. He shifts his center of balance, crouching down in order to remain quiet, and begins to creep through the familiar halls. The one beneficial factor of working with Ratio so frequently is that the doctor tends to loathe spending large portions of time surrounded by those he cares little for, and thus many of their meetings tend to take place here, meaning that he knows the layout so well he could navigate it blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back, on threat of death.

By the time he sweeps the third room, Ratio’s art room (filled with statues and paintings, both commissioned and self-made), his suspicion has been raised to extreme levels. How is it that he has found no signs that Ratio is even currently here at all? He nearly moves onto the fourth room when his vision narrows in on the floor in front of him. There is a shadow present on him—one not attached to him nor any of the statues that stand before him. When it shifts, he whirls around, pulling out his gun and aiming it at the woman that stands before him.

She wears a style of clothing painfully familiar to him, even if he can hardly remember the home it came from anymore. She is not the same as she used to be—clear by the gun she holds as well, alongside the eyepatch over her left eye and the much more haunted gaze. Intrinsically, he knows who she is.

His hands drop to his side. There is a ghost in front of him. There must be. He doesn’t want to confront the truth, even as it glares him right in the eyes.

Because the woman standing in front of him is his sister, and Aventurine can’t even remember her name.

She speaks up first, in an accent he hasn’t heard in years. In a language he can barely understand anymore, not since the Synesthesia Beacon was planted in his head, and not when he can’t even recall the last time he chose to speak it, let alone the last time he was allowed.

“Kakavasha… you… thank Gaiathra,” he picks up on, and all he can do is stare blankly. He can’t breathe.

“...Big sis?” he whispers. Why can’t he remember her name? He should be able to, she’s standing right in front of him, and she remembers his, and he thinks that being stabbed in the heart would be less painful.

Her expression twists with something he can only describe as a mixture of disgust and disappointment, and he can’t even blame her. Here she is, somehow miraculously alive and filled with their culture. And here he is, a complete stranger wearing the skin of her brother.

His sister sighs, reaching out to cup his cheek. Were the action not trained out of him, he would flinch. She speaks again, this time in one of the more common languages, one that didn’t die alongside their people.

“You’ve grown up so much, my little Kakavasha…”

“You were dead.” His eyes are wet, and his throat is tight, and he feels like a child all over again, which is an entirely miserable experience, and not one that he is familiar with in the slightest. And yet, seeing his sister reduces him to the habits and emotions he’d long thought to be dead and buried under the piles of bodies that follow him. “You were dead, and I was alone.”

“You must have been through a lot, all by yourself,” his sister murmurs. He is not Kakavasha, has not been in a very long time, but with her right here, he wishes he could be again. “I know why you’re here.”

Why he’s here…? Because of the distress signal? But why is she here? And how did she know he’d be here? This isn’t much like him, normally he is ten steps ahead of any opponent (but he does not think his sister is an opponent. Right?), but currently, he can’t think at all. “...what are you saying?”

“Forgive me, but I had no choice.”

His sister’s eyes close for a moment, and he thinks he can see guilt cross her features. When they open again, they are cold, and Aventurine realizes that maybe he is not the only one who has turned into a stranger over the years.

The room brightens around them, and he is no longer seeing in tunnel vision, so he finally notices the figures standing behind her. Two people he doesn’t recognize, standing and aiming guns at…

The blood drains from his face.

Ratio and Topaz.

They are both restrained, and there is no Numby in sight, but thankfully they appear to be unharmed. Neither look at them, and he quickly realizes it is because they are both unconscious, possibly drugged? If so, maybe the unharmed statement is not as true as he’d initially assumed.

“What did you do to them?” he breathes.

His sister stands in front of him, holding a gun, and holding the two people closest to him hostage. They are two strangers, her on the side of their people, and him standing on the side of their persecutors (or at least appearing to be so). “I’d like to propose a deal, IPC executive.”

RE: Aventurine's sister. I mean, I won't lie, her actually being alive is a twist I've rolled around in my brain alot. Especially with that whole "3k or so Avgins missing" detail. But also worth considering how tragic it would be on her end: she's been missing her little brother, he might be dead (and he was blessed, wasn't he? What does it mean if he's gone too?), who she basically had to be a parent for after their mom died and he was nowhere to be found after that fight with the Katicans. Only, years later, well, this might be more spitballing on my part, but it's seems alot like the Stonehearts are varying degrees of public figures. So, say she spots a very unmistakable face on some news program. As if it wasn't enough that the men in black betrayed them that day, they took their blessed child, made him one of theirs (heartbreaking, that he's been separated and cut off from them, Kakavasha dresses and talks more like they do these days)...

you're so right, i think she'd be against the ipc too

there's so much drama potential here i need someone to write a fic about it

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