#this is a pretty formless thought in my head so details are pretty thin on the ground

[imsodishy]

so it's not remotely a perfect 1:1 or anything, but @stranger-rants talking about Shameless and Billy - Karen Jackson parallels has got me thinking about a harringroveson let's say 'shameless inspired' au with Karen!Billy, Mandy!Eddie, and Lip!Steve, but with waaaaay less out of left field character assassination, and eventual poly instead of dumb bullshit.

Eddie doesn't have as sharp an edge as Mandy, but he does have a familiarity and facility with crime, and I can see him with a big chip on his shoulder about how other people see him but leaning into it nonetheless. (personally I hc his dad as being a kind of Frank type, a lifetime, but largely petty, criminal)

Steve’s not an academic genius, but he’s certainly starved for stable love and slick like Lip, and I think it would be interesting to explore that in a context where he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

[anthemxix]

Fierce deity wars aftermath? :o (I'm sorry if this comes across as demanding or rude, was just excited to see the fic and was curious how what happened after might go, it was really good!)

this isn't rude at all, my friend! i'm flattered you enjoyed my fic enough to ask for a follow-up! thank you ;w;

this picks up right where the previous one left off (here's the first part)

"Injuries?"

"Nothing major."

Voices drift through the dreamless void, which clings to Warriors like cobwebs: wispy, malleable, adhesive.

"Is he awake?"

"Maybe. Not aware, at any rate."

The words seem insubstantial, impossible to grasp, like specks of light.

"Captain? Can you hear me?"

"Time to wake up, Pretty Boy."

Like a borealis, the voices shimmer above him. Though tangible, they shy from his reach.

Warriors concentrates on forcing his eyes open, and his lashes scrape against red cotton.

"Hey, Captain? You with us?"

The stench of death saturates the air, so he must still be on the battlefield. He tries to lift his head, to see his surroundings, but all he glimpses is red.

"Hey. Pretty Boy. You awake?"

Still, he pieces it together by feel. His side is pressed against someone. His head is lolling on their shoulder. Their arm is around his back, fiercely gripping his sleeve.

"Captain, can you look at me?"

He's being held. Huh. That's a nice feeling, being held. Safe. His eyes begin to slip closed again.

"No, Captain. Stay awake. Look at me."

Always one to obey orders, he drags his head around a fraction, searching for the source of the voice. His vision is blurry, but he can see a green tunic, brown hair. The Traveler.

Something cool brushes against his hand. Glass. A bottle. His fingers automatically hook around it. Something warm wraps around his hand, affixes it in place.

"Drink this for me, okay?"

Warriors' bones are infused with lead. He watches the Traveler guide the potion to his mouth, but his body won't cooperate. His throat muscles seize, and he coughs out the liquid. It speckles across the red tunic he's cuddled up against.

"Don't make him choke!" someone outside his line of vision squawks. That's the Sailor. He knows the little Sailor's voice.

"Sorry," Hyrule laments, and cups a hand under Warriors' chin, tilts his head back. Tries again with the bottle.

This time, Warriors downs two gulps before his throat locks up and he coughs out the rest of it.

"You're getting my tunic wet." A gripe, but the grip on his arm tightens, protective. The Vet. That's the Vet, holding him. Red tunic. Right.

A thought emerges from his mental haze. Twilight. Hadn't he been with Twilight? Warriors wishes he could ask, but he's so tired. He closes his eyes again, sinks back into the void where his friends' voices echo around him. It reminds him of being trapped in the Great Fairy's bottle, the way everything is muffled and obscured and looming.

Warriors lets their voices wash over him, idly picking out words when he can and examining them like puzzles in need of solving.

"There's caves that way, half a mile or so."

"He can't walk."

"I can carry him."

"No. Traveler's magic may have stitched your wounds up, but your body still needs time to recover."

"Here, I can do it."

There are hands on him, and he's getting shifted around, and he wishes he could move. Instead, he completely retreats to the empty dark space in his head.

Then the concept of time becomes as ephemeral and elusive as his friends' voices around him.

Sometimes when Warriors opens his eyes, there's sunlight, and sometimes there's only the hazy glow of embers or the flicker of a lantern. He can't shrug off the mental mire that pins him down, can't ever keep his eyes open long enough to fully process where he is or what's going on.

That would feel more disconcerting if not for the constant, comforting presence of his friends. One of them is always right at his side when he wakes. The little Sailor, snuggled against him. Sky, carving wooden figurines. Four, polishing weapons. Even as he slides back into the dreamless dark, he feels safe.

That is, until the dark stops being dreamless.

Memories begin to unravel before him, unspooling into formless shapes and colors. At first, all he can see is blood-drenched chaos; he hears dying screams and clanking weapons, smells copper and iron. Slowly, the memories come into focus, draw together into distinct scenes. He can distinguish certain moments: a lizalfos sliced in half at the waist; a darknut's chopped-off head thunking to the dirt; a bulbin slipping on spilled moblin guts as it tries to run, then shrieking as it gets skewered.

These memories aren't his, per se; they belong to his body. His body, which he can see morph into someone else's. His hands, which are someone else's hands, brandishing a double-helix sword that cuts through monsters with no resistance.

Although Warriors has witnessed much more gruesome atrocities, these memories steep him with burgeoning unease. The violent images burrow under his skin like termites, boring tunnels into him from the inside out, as he watches them play in a loop, over and over. They continuously reignite in the dark like poe lanterns, haunting and undead.

Oblivion shifts from a refuge to a prison. Warriors starts to jolt awake with startled gasps, his terror wrenching him back into consciousness. In these moments, he often finds Time next to him, stroking his hair, murmuring soothing platitudes that Warriors can't hear over his pounding heart.

Once, he lurches awake with a shout, wide-eyed and shuddering as detailed visions of massacre still float through his head. Time gently shushes him, tucks him back into his bedroll, and pulls out the banged-up wooden ocarina he used to play as a child.

Warriors curls up on his side, hearing the distant whispers of rainfall beneath the unfamiliar melody that Time plays. The tune is wistful and haunted, layered with tragedy, like its player. But it massages away the tension rigidifying Warriors' muscles, calms the frantic adrenaline buzzing through his system. When he falls asleep, he doesn't dream anymore.

- - -

Sighing with relief, Warriors slumps back against the door. The past few days, he's managed to stay awake for longer and longer stretches, but constant fatigue still holds him hostage. Finding a town with an inn feels like a miracle, and even though he could easily collapse right here on the floor, he is eager to finally sleep in a real bed.

With effort, he straightens and shrugs off his shield, sword, and bags, depositing them by the nearest bed. The weight of his equipment has never felt so burdensome before; he's concerned that this debilitating exhaustion is atrophying his muscles and permanently docking his stamina.

But like every thought lately, he can't keep hold of his concerns for too long. They slip away from him, and he gladly lets them go, concentrating instead on the unnecessarily arduous task of shucking all his armor.

As he loosens the leather bracers on his arms, Warriors absently scans the compact rented room, which only contains two twin beds and a shabby dresser. He blinks at the dresser mirror, freezing as he registers his reflection.

Armor temporarily forgotten, Warriors strides across the tacky rug and splays his hands on the dresser. Most mornings, he spends what the others consider an unreasonable amount of time fawning over his hair in his hand mirror—personally, he thinks none of them spend enough time on making themselves presentable—but lately, he's forgone that ritual, only casting cursory glances at his reflection to ensure he's not overwhelmingly unkempt.

He hasn't gotten a proper look at himself in days, which is why the sight of the mask's red and blue brands give him such a shock.

Though their colors have already begun to fade, the sharply angled lines remain prominent. No wonder the other heroes, who have been treating him delicately, like he's liable to break, can't look at him without staring at those marks. What do they think, when they see them?

Warriors find them abhorrent. Finds that looking at them triggers unease and discomfort and nausea.

He turns away from the mirror and resumes removing his armor, gracelessly dumping it on the floor and topping the pile with his sloppily folded scarf. As he flops onto the bed, he sighs again, the relief of getting off his feet immediate and encompassing. The mattress is thin and there's a rogue spring jutting into his lower back, but goddesses, does it feel good to lie down.

Lazily, he drapes an arm over his eyes to block out the afternoon sunshine filtering in through the flimsy curtains. He doesn't feel sleepy, exactly, doesn't feel like he'll get dragged into unconscious oblivion like he was for several days right after donning the mask, but he truly is exhausted.

Physical exertion, sparse as it's been, contributes to Warriors’ fatigue. Progress across this Hyrule has been slow; the distance the heroes have covered over the past few days could be crossed, under normal circumstances, in half the time.

Warriors didn’t even walk for much of that distance. He couldn’t. Along with his sluggishness, his legs wobbled like a newborn deer’s and his sense of balance was skewed. Wind continually remained next to him, catching him when he stumbled and preventing him from toppling over.

When walking became too infeasible (and he was too tired to care about pride and dignity), he'd ride Epona. By that point, he'd usually feel so weak and shaky that he would require a boost from Twilight just to mount the horse, and from there it was a perpetual struggle to stay upright.

Fortunately, he's steadier now, able to walk without feeling constantly on the verge of collapse, but the fact that he is not okay is tremendously self-evident.

He hears the door to his room open and close, but he doesn't bother uncovering his eyes. He's certain it's just whoever decided to room with him this time—probably Wind or Legend—dropping their belongings off before venturing into town.

A lengthy moment passes before he recognizes the sound of heavy plate armor clinking. Moving his arm a fraction, he peeks out to see Time shedding his armor, setting it aside with more care than Warriors had mustered.

Warriors blinks in surprise. Time is the last person he expected to see here.

The other heroes' behavior around the Captain is subdued, and they speak to him quietly, like he's an animal prone to startle. They act so sad, he thinks now. Like they're grieving. Like they've lost something.

But Time... He was there for those horrid days when Warriors was drifting in and out of consciousness, trapped in nightmares, but ever since then, he's kept a distance. He won't even look at Warriors most of the time.

It would be unfair for Warriors to be bothered by that, though. Like a coward, he's been reciprocating the cold shoulder treatment, because he can't bear it.

He can't bear thinking about his little Sprite using that cursed mask. How old was the kid when he first used it? And what was the aftermath like for him? Was he alone? Did he have someone to comfort him through the nightmares? To help him walk or tend his wounds?

How many times has Time used this mask for those marks to permanently smirch his face?Is the aftermath of using the mask always this dreadful? What if it's not, because Time has gotten used to the effects of the damn thing?

And if Warriors feels so strange after what must have been mere minutes with the mask on—if he feels like his very essence has been ripped apart and reassembled—if he feels like some of his pieces are missing, or that now there is something new inside him, something he can't quite identify or describe—then how must Time feel, having used the mask for decades?

How does it feel to sacrifice yourself over and over, to let an inconceivable power destroy and rebuild you however it pleases, and then carry that weight alone?

With his armor off, Time turns around and catches Warriors' gaze. His neutral expression doesn't change. "I thought you'd be asleep by now."

Warriors breaks eye contact, repositioning his arm over his eyes. Coward. "I thought you'd be making sure the kids don't set the town ablaze."

"I'm sure the Rancher can handle it."

For some reason, this statement pricks at Warriors' heart. "I know he's your favorite, Old Man, but don't misplace your faith. He can be as much of a troublemaker as the rest of them."

After a long stretch of quiet, Warriors feels the thin mattress sink. He peers under his elbow to see Time sitting at the foot of his bed, leaning forward, elbows on knees. Hands folded, he's looking at the opposite wall, expression still deliberately blank. "Is that what you think?"

"Yeah, I do. Didn't you hear his arson story?"

Time huffs a soft, startled laugh. "No, I meant...you believe he's my favorite?"

Warriors shifts, pulls his arm away from his face. "Well, yeah? It's not up for debate, is it? It's obvious."

"Hmm." Time looks down at his hands, and his mouth flickers between a slight smile and slight frown before settling on the latter. When he speaks again, it's stilted, like a formal recitation. "Captain, I owe you an apology. I've left you to deal with the mask's effects by yourself."

Dragging himself to a sitting position, Warriors says, "That's not true..."

He's suddenly struck by a vague memory of a recent night where he fell asleep as soon as the heroes found a campsite. Tired beyond caring, Warriors had promptly slid off Epona and settled in the dirt a few paces from the horse. Prone on his stomach, he pillowed his head with his arms, despite his bracers digging into his cheeks.

Later, Time roused him, herding him upright. He was still half-asleep, struggling to keep his eyes open, as Time worked on taking off his protective gear piece by piece. Warriors' chainmail had pressed grooves into his torso; it was a relief to have someone else guide the heavy armor over his head and set it aside.

"Come to your bedroll," Time had said softly, and he ushered Warriors into his sleeping mat, which lie ready and waiting. Exponentially more comfortable now, Warriors had dropped off to sleep almost instantly, but still, he registered Time gently tucking the blankets around him.

Weary, Time sighs and rakes a hand through his hair. "It is true. I've been selfish. I shouldn't have left you to figure this out on your own. I know how it feels. How...confusing it is. How strange it is, like your body isn't quite right anymore, or like you're not quite the same. How..."

He flexes his fingers, searching for his words, and a mournful look breaks through his stony facade. "How...broken it makes you feel."

After a silent, somber moment, Warriors shifts to sit next to Time, dropping his bare feet to the warped hardwood. The mattress creaks. He feels another damaged spring jabbing into him.

"I'm sorry that you've always had to handle this alone," Warriors says. A lump hardens in his throat, and he swallows. "I'm so sorry, Sprite."

Time looks at him then, really looks at him. Slowly scans the red and blue lines before re-locking eyes. He smiles, sad and small but genuine, and sets a hand on Warriors' shoulder. "I'm proud of you, you know. I've always been proud of you."

Warmth blossoms in his chest at the unexpected words, and Warriors has to turn away.

"Perhaps you should get some rest." The smile lingers in Time's voice. "We can talk when you wake up."

With Time's hand still on his shoulder, Warriors says, "I can stay up a little longer. I think we have a lot to talk about."

[driflew]

Lucid (adj.)

Lu·cid (/ˈlo͞osəd/)

· showing ability to think clearly, especially in the intervals between periods of confusion or insanity

· (of a dream) experienced with the dreamer feeling awake, aware of dreaming, and able to control events consciously

Dream for April 8, 2021

I can’t think of the last time I wrote about a nightmare in one of these journals. I think it might’ve been in 2020 or 2019, because I don’t think I’ve had one this year. I feel most people would assume lucid dreamers never have nightmares, but that’s not true. They’re rarer, sure, since I can usually just turn them off, but I still have them. I had one last night.

I’ve written plenty about my sleeping problems. It was the same thing as always--The line between “lucid dream” and “awake and confused” is thin, and I was straddling it again. I can’t remember what I was dreaming about, but it was boring enough that I woke myself up a little trying to find something more interesting to dream about, and when I checked my phone clock it was 3:20-something AM. When a dream is boring, there’s nothing to do but wait to pass back out and hope for a better one, so I rolled onto my side to try.

My eye caught on my window. I usually close my curtains before bed, but I forgot to last night. I like to say it’s because the sunlight wakes me up too early in the morning (which is true!), but honestly, I just don’t like being able to see out the window at night.

My window faces my backyard. It’s little, and at the back it gives way to a forest. It’s cute during the day, but at night, it’s all looming shapes and dark splotches. With bad vision and an active imagination, it’s way too easy to see things out there in the dark. Especially when my body’s awake and my head’s still dreaming.

That’s what happened last night. I imagined something out there in the treeline, peering back at my window, and suddenly I’d convinced myself there really was something out there. I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t matter. I just knew it wanted to get to me, and that I didn’t want it to.

That’s the thing about lucid dreaming. It’s not total control of your dreams, just awareness that you’re dreaming. And stuff like this is hard to control, because the less I want to think about it, the more I’m actively doing so. The more that thing in the trees stressed me out, the more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself it was actually there, the more it stressed me out... And I was still half asleep, so this all felt real, even while the part of me that was awake knew better.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was probably a few minutes, but it felt like much longer. I couldn’t stop thinking about it shuffling around in the trees, wanting to come in, until I heard a real sound from the trees. It was the crack of a branch, breaking under a heavy foot.

Now that I’m awake, I can say that it was probably some terribly timed deer, but at that moment, I was convinced the thing had actually started stepping out from the trees, and it was coming.

I got up and closed the curtains. I didn’t see it out there, obviously, but I was afraid to look for too long. Moving around was good, though. It was easier to shake my head of the dream and go back to bed once I’d reminded myself of what was real.

Writing it all down now, it all feels really silly. Nothing like a nice morning to put a bad night into perspective.

Dream for April 9, 2021

I dreamt about that thing again last night. I don’t really have recurring dreams, but I guess my subconscious wasn’t done with it yet. This time, it was inside, at the foot of the stairs, and it was coming up.

I was sort of waking up when the dream came, so I shook my head a little and rolled onto my side to try to clear the dream away. Every time I rolled over, though, my head would just put it back at the bottom of the stairs, and it’d start its climb all over again.

Sometimes, when a dream is particularly unpleasant, I sit up and try to orient myself again. The dream-thing made it about halfway up the stairs, and the dread I felt was nearly suffocating. I sat up, near-frantic as I looked around the room, taking in the details. My room was blurry without my glasses, but still more distinct than the shapeless dream-thing and the memory of the staircase.

I remember taking note of as much of the room as I could, little stuff I couldn’t remember. Stuff like the hazy shapes of my clothes hanging in the closet, or the books on my shelves. Couldn’t make out individual shirts or read any spines, but the patterns were more than I felt I could have come up with in a dream. Granted, when I recall doing that now, the memory is just as fuzzy as a dream would be--My inability to retain finer details is exactly why I did it. It was grounding.

Of course, that only made the creak worse.

A little over halfway up the staircase, there’s a step that always creaks, and at that moment I was sure I heard it. The dream-thing was out there, and was coming.

My body was wide awake, and I thought my head was awake, too. But if my head really was awake, I would have remembered that houses creak at night. So I know I must have been lingering in that dream, letting my imagination get the best of me.

I got up again. It worked to clear my head last time, so I decided to try it again. This time, I locked the door. If I was making the thing up, I could decide the lock was an effective barrier. I told myself that if I locked the door, it couldn’t get in, and I went back to bed.

I didn’t sleep well. Pretty sure I only snagged an hour before the sun came up. I still feel really tired.

It’s silly. I know that. I certainly felt silly about it this morning when I went to get breakfast--Believe it or not, I actually managed to forget all about the dream for a little when I first woke up. Then I tried to leave this morning and walked face first into the door because it didn’t open when I tugged it. My face still sort of stings, but it was pretty funny.

Thinking back, I don’t actually know what the thing looks like. That’s just how it is with dreams, though, isn’t it? At least, that’s how it is with mine. They’re all indistinct, and I just know things, even when they’re formless like that.

Dream for April 10, 2021

It was on the landing last night. It didn’t move this time. It just watched my door. I didn’t see it or hear it, but I felt it.

I tried to think about other things. I flipped through this journal before I went to bed last night, finding old dreams I liked, so I had other things to dream about last night. I couldn’t hold onto any of them for very long. I was too tired to stay focused. My head just kept drifting back to the Thing on the landing.

I got up again. I stopped in front of the door. I thought about the Thing on the landing. For a moment, I entertained the idea of opening the door. I could look out there right then and prove to myself that there was nothing, that my house was as empty as it was every other night, that I was alone.

I pictured opening the door. I pictured the Thing on the landing. I pictured opening the door and looking at the landing, and when I pictured the landing, I pictured...

My fingers closed, not around the handle, but on the lock. I was being irrational, but my courage was asleep. I didn’t want to look out there--I couldn’t! The Thing was out there. I couldn’t let it see me. I couldn’t let it get inside.

I didn’t think much about what I did next. My door opens inwards, so I grabbed the heaviest thing I could lift by myself--my nightstand--and dragged it over to the door. I told myself that the movement would wake me up. I took in as much of the experience as I could. I felt the wood under my hands--chilled slightly, sturdy and unyielding, covered in the faintest ridges making up the pattern of the grain. My arms trembled slightly, a mix of exertion and exhaustion. I narrowly missed my foot when I dropped it down, and I winced with the idea of pain.

I was only validating my fear. Every step I took as I crossed the room with the nightstand made the Thing more real.

It was stupid. It was so stupid. I feel like an idiot now, looking back in the light of day. But all I can think about is how drained I felt after I got back into bed, and how I didn’t get any sleep at all. How I haven’t got much sleep since I first noticed the Thing.

Looking back, I don’t remember what the wood felt like.

Logically, I know that the wood was cold, hard, and bumpy. That’s what all wood feels like. But I can’t feel it now. My hands can feel the rigid plastic pencil and the soft paper of this book, but they can’t feel the table. It felt so real in that moment, but in my head? There’s no real difference between a memory and a dream. How can I tell what during that night was real? I can picture dragging the nightstand. I can picture grabbing the door and opening it. They’re both hazy, draped in the films of tired darkness, poor eyesight, and imagined recollection.

Maybe I did open the door. I know I didn’t, but do I know that? I also knew the Thing was there. It’s so hard to tell. I thought the daylight was supposed to bring clarity.

I just pinched myself. If I were dreaming, that would wake me, right? Except the pain of that gesture is gone now, and all I have is the memory of it. Memory isn’t tangible, it’s not real. It’s fickle, and malleable as any dream. How am I supposed to trust it? How do I know what was real?

I’m going to put the nightstand back at my bedside now.

Dream April 11

I’m breaking my one rule with this book. I never write at night, but I need to write this down now. I’m hoping maybe it will help. I always feel more clear when I’m writing in this book. I feel the pencil in my hand, with the plastic grip I’ve picked apart. I feel the paper under the side of my palms where I’m resting on the open pages. I feel the pattern of the faux-leather cover against the skin of my thighs. I can feel my sheets, soft below me, and the slightly scratchy material of my shirt. I feel the uncomfortable bend in my back where I hunch over this journal. I feel where my thighs stick together, and where my elbows dig into my sides. I feel my eyes as they ache with exhaustion, and from looking at the reading light when I flicked it on. I feel my bangs brushing at my glasses, tickling the skin there. I feel awake. I feel real. I feel the Thing outside my door.

I know it’s there. I don’t hear it moving, and I can’t see its shadow in the crack under my door, but I can feel it, just like I feel my lungs fill and deflate when I breathe. I know it’s out there, right outside the door.

I didn’t lock the door before I went to bed. One last burst of logic. I thought maybe if I didn’t indulge it this time that I wouldn’t have this dream, but I haven’t even fallen asleep. I didn’t fall asleep yesterday, either. I’m starting to wonder if I ever fell asleep--Was I awake this entire time, every time the Thing appeared? I can’t remember.

Did I really move the nightstand yesterday, or lock the door the night before? The nightstand is next to me now, as if it never moved at all. It’s cool to the touch, but when I pull my hand away from it, I don’t remember where in my fingers I felt the grain.

I want to lock the door now, but I can’t. I don’t want it to hear me and realize the door is unlocked. I don’t know what I’d do if I got up and it opened the door. I don’t know what it would do if it opened the door. I don’t want to find out.

The line between “lucid dream” and “awake and confused” is so very thin, as is the line between memory and dream. The intersection of both is where I exist now.

I’m unsure of anything except the exact moment I’m in, knowing only what I can feel.

It’s not making any noise out there. I don’t hear it. I don’t need to. I don’t need to hear my own heart to know it’s beating. I know it’s out there, as surely as I know I’m alive. If I am real, so is the Thing. I can feel my heart, thundering away in my chest, and I can feel that Thing wants to get inside my room. I can feel that it wants to get to me, to my heart. I can feel that it wants to tear the beating thing straight out of my chest.

Some people believe lucid dreaming is awareness, clarity. Some people believe it’s control. I’m neither aware nor clear. Am I in control? I don’t feel it.

I don’t think I’ll be getting any sleep tonight, either.

April 12

There was a scratch on my door, on the outside, under the door handle. That wasn’t there before. I would have noticed something like that, right? Maybe little details escape me sometimes, but I’ve lived here for years. I would have noticed that before.

Which means it was here. It really was here last night.

The lock won’t work. I know it. When I think back to the snap of that branch, and the creak on the stairs, they both feel so significant. A resounding snap, a downed tree shattered under its heel. A long, terrible groan, the wood protesting below a massive weight. What will it do when it gets to me?

I don’t know what I’m up against, but I’ve always had a terrible imagination. I haven’t been able to do anything today but sit and think of snapping, of crushing, of clawing. The longer I think, the worse it becomes. I can’t think about anything else--The more I try to turn my head away, the more I find myself stuck.

My door is open. I can see the scratch. If I can see it, it’s real. When I look down to write, I forget the details. I can’t picture its exact length, or how far away it’s set from the handle. So I leave the door open and I look at it again and again, and I know that it’s real.

I broke my arm once, as a child. I remember lying in the dirt. I remember sobbing, crying for help. I remember staring up at the tree I’d fallen from, unable to move off the ground. I don’t remember the pain. I don’t remember what it felt like to land, or for the bone to snap. Were the trees unclear because the tears blurred my eyes? Or is that my memory?

I see that I wrote last night that I didn’t hear the Thing, but there’s a scratch on the door. The Thing must have left it last night. Wouldn’t I have heard it, like I heard the branch and the stair? I can imagine those. I can imagine the scratching just as clearly. It must have been clawing at the handle. It scratched all night. The noise kept me awake. How could I sleep with all that scratching? I don’t even want to look at the door. With all that scratching, the wood must be gouged all over. I can picture the damage so clearly.

I keep thinking about what it will do when it comes tonight. I put the book down and I stare at my window for hours. There’s a bit of light coming out between the curtains, and it’s fading quickly. I picture the Thing. I still don’t know what it looks like. I know it’s big, and heavy, and it has horrible claws.

I imagine snapping a twig below my heel. I imagine breaking a branch over my knee. I imagine crushing an empty soda can between my hands. I imagine cutting into the stomach of a plush toy. I imagine tearing a wishbone in two. I imagine crushing a bug between my thumb and my index. I imagine rending the leg off of a chicken at dinner. I imagine popping the head off of a doll. I imagine myself. So easily, with so little resistance.

I can’t begin to think about what it will feel like. I doubt I’ll know until it happens.

I don’t imagine I’ll have an entry tomorrow. At the very least, I know I won’t be dreaming.

[thiswasinevitableid]

1. Siren Indruck NSFW, Duck is hauling supplies for the small town of Kepler on a tiny boat. Due to dangerous storms, Duck takes a longer but safer and less traversed route. He doesn’t know he’ll be passing through a Siren’s territory. A siren who is looking for a strong and sturdy mate

Here you go!

Duck never tells anyone what he finds on the beach that day. 

He’s fourteen, looking for useful flotsam and jetsam tossed onto the sand by an ongoing storm. What he finds is an empty boat and a merman, silvery tail impaled with a spear in a piece of driftwood. Each time he tries to free himself, he winces and is unable to pull the weapon from his body. When he sees Duck, his red eyes widen and he bares sharp teeth in a hiss. 

“It’s okay” the boy kneels in the bloody sand, “I ain’t gonna hurt you. Or, uh, this’ll hurt for a sec, but it’ll be better than tryin to ease it out bit by bit.” He grabs the end of the fishing spear and pulls. The merman shrieks, quickly clamping his hands across his mouth as Duck pulls his handkerchief from his pocket to bandage the wound. 

“There, you should be able to-”

The creature is gone with a whip of his tail, sliding down the sand and into the waves. As Duck stands, a strange song floats from the foam for the briefest instant. A seasoned sailor can tell a siren from a normal mer on sight; Duck has never been to sea. It’s weeks later that he wonders what events resulted in the wounded siren and an empty boat. 

-------------------------------

Any other day, Duck would put off this run until the black clouds no longer hung over the horizon. But the supply run last week didn’t come, so the isolated, coastal town of Kepler is running low on, among other things, the medicine needed to treat an illness spreading from house to house. He could put this off until tomorrow, but he won’t sleep well tonight if he does.

The boat loaded, he starts out to sea under unfriendly skies. Today is a day to follow the coastline and then circle Greenbriar Island to reach Kepler, rather than trying for a straight shot.  It’ll double his travel time, but it’s far safer in a storm and no one but a few locals know how to navigate it. Duck takes this route once or twice most years. This summer alone he’s had to take it six times, with today making a seventh. The abnormal number of storms weighs on the minds of coastal residents. Duck tries not to obsess over it, given that it’s solidly out of his control and there’s no use fussing over wind and rain; there’s only getting through them. 

Halfway through his journey, a rogue swell catches the underside of the boat and drags it along a rock, springing a leak in the hull. He ties off on a thin spire of stone, clambering onto a rock to try and repair the damage. It’s not a big leak, but it’ll be trouble if he lets it go. 

As he’s laying awkwardly with water lapping up his legs, a human head rises from the water a few feet from him. Silver hair, red eyes and, when it smiles, very sharp teeth. Harmless mermaids have teeth much like his own, which means he’s alone in the ocean with a fucking siren.

Duck’s learned many things since that day on the beach; how a song can paralyze a man better than poison, how the bite marks on the skin of certain bodies that wash ashore are called siren kisses

The siren begins swimming closer. Duck sighs, “If you’re gonna drown and eat me, can you do it on the way back?”

Red eyes blink, confused, but the siren stays where he is. 

“If I don’t make it to Kepler, lotta folks’ll get sick, some will even die. And I don’t think you got much use for medicine and canned food.”

The siren shakes his head. 

“Glad you understand.” Duck finishes his repairs under watchful eyes. At one point, the siren swims all the way to the rock Duck is perched on, resting his chin on his hands, as if enjoying the view. 

Duck scrambles back into the boat the moment he’s done, but no cold fingers try for his ankles and no splash announces something lunging upwards after him. A cautious glance as he starts the engine finds the siren sitting on the rock, silver-blue tail still half in the water. When he notices Duck looking, he waves. 

The rest of the journey goes as planned, the relief on folks faces when Duck docks worth the peril. When he reaches the siren’s territory on his return, no song tempts him. A lithe shape keeps pace with the boat, fin breaking the surface now and then. When he hits open water, the siren turns back, disappearing from view. 

-----------------------

There are sex dreams, and then there’s whatever the fuck Duck is having right now. Fingers stroke his hair, cling to his shoulders. Kisses coat his face and a voice whispers his name as the speaker offers themself to him again and again. He sees himself tangled with a man, face always just out of focus, who spreads his legs and lips so Duck can sink himself into the heat of his body. The dream is endless and he doesn’t care, doesn’t ever want to wake up. 

Saltwater in his lungs renders that desire useless. He snaps back to consciousness as another wave hits him; he’s up to his neck  in the cove below his house. 

“The fuck?” It’s only his footprints visible in the moonlight in the sand, so no one dumped him here. 

“Oh dear.”

“Jesus!” Duck stumbles back as glowing eyes peer around a rock. It’s the siren from yesterday, swimming purposefully as Duck wades backwards. 

“Look, uh, when I said I wanted you to wait to eat me, I wasn’t bein serious. Or, uh, I was, but I meant I didn’t want to be eaten ever, not just then. It was a, uh, a joke.”

“I am aware.” The siren stops as Duck topples on his ass in the shallow water, “and I am sorry. I, ah, I did not mean to lure you from your bed. I was not aware my mindless singing was enough to wake you. In most futures, you slept until dawn.”

“Uh huh, sure, because sirens are known to just serenade folks without wanting to drown ‘em.” 

“We do it more often than you might think.” The siren sighs, “I came here to keep you safe, and succeeded only in making you afraid.”

Duck, having scooted inelegantly onto dry land, watches the tan upper body of the siren sag. It’s awkward, a word not associated with this kind of mer. That suggests he’s telling the truth. 

“You gonna tell me why you’re playin watchdog at my house?” 

The siren chirps, intrigued, “In all but one future you told me to go away.”

“That’d just leave me with more questions. And so far, you ain’t done anythin other’n watch me; if you say this was an accident, I’m willin to hear you out.”

“Wonderful!” The siren claps his hands together and the tip of his tail flips out of the water. Then he clears his throat and recites, “I am known as Indrid Cold. As you noticed, I am a siren. I am also a gifted seer, artist, and lifeguard when humans are unconscious and thus will not try to kill me for rescuing them. I am an excellent fisher, and well-liked and/or feared by the larger creatures of this coastline. This is why I think I would be an excellent mate.”

“O-kay. Did you call me out here to practice your personals ad?” Duck smirks, charmed by Indrids earnest tone.

“This is not practice. I did a great deal of that earlier today. This is my formal declaration that I would very much like you to be my mate.”

“Ma--hold on.” The images from his near-fatal dream return, “were you singin’ to hit on me?”

Indrid crosses his arms, “For the last time, that song was not for you. It was about you, because I was daydreaming and my formless melody unintentionally conveyed the contents of said daydream into your mind.”

“So everythin in it, all that wild fuckin stuff, that’s stuff you wanna do with me?”

A nod, accompanied by a flash of white light under the water. 

“Why?”

“Because you are strong, and handsome, and capable on the water. I watched your futures yesterday and today and saw you are kind as well, well-liked by other humans but a little lonely at night. You are very nice to that small land-otter that lives in your house.”

“You mean the cat?”

“That’s the word! Yes, you are nice to your cat. You are not brash or cruel, and you look so very nice without a shirt. I...I like you, Duck. You are everything I want in a mate.”

“Feel like I might be missin’ some gills and fins.” He jokes to cover the fact he’s scanning his mind and body for the same dreamy lull he felt during the song. What he finds in it’s place is his ego purring from praise and wondering exactly what a siren would do for his mate.

“There is no rule that says I must choose only my own kind for such activities. I, ah, I know it is strange, given how little we know of each other, but I thought that, ah, since humans will have casual sex with each other maybe we could, or, ah, that is…” He’s watching Duck with such unconcealed hope that the human almost joins him in the water.

“Indrid, I’m real flattered. But I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t point out this feels like a fuckin trap. Pretty easy for you to drag me to my death once we’re, uh, in the middle of things. Not that I’m sayin you would.” He adds when the sirens smile dims. 

“A sensible concern. May I join you on land for a moment? There is something I want to show you.”

Duck pats the sand beside him, eyes following the ripples of Indrid’s tail as he swims, slithers, and slides onto the beach. It reminds Duck of an oarfish, though when Indrid spies him looking the scales flash deep purple. 

“Look there” Indrid points toward the end of the silver ribbon of scales; a round, white scar stares up at Duck. The details of a day over two decades in the past return to him.

“You’re the siren I found when I was a kid.”

“Indeed. I remember you by your eyes, though your face has some echoes of that day in it’s curves. You saved my life, showed me mercy when I expected none. Sirens do not forget a favor, and we do not kill those who once spared us. I will never harm you, even if you turn me away tonight. You will be safe, whether that is in my arms or merely in my territory.”

Duck avoids the stranger sides of life by the sea, citing a lifelong incompatibility with the weird. Turns out all he needed to find his exception to that rule is a handsome siren looking at him like he set the tides in motion. 

The human runs a finger up the sirens tail, sparks of purple and pale blue light igniting in it’s wake. 

“Didn’t know y’all changed colors.” He pets Indrid’s hip and the whole tail lights up this time. 

“I am a deep-sea siren by birth, we use light to communicate emotions.”

“Mind, uh, loopin me in on the conversation?”

“Purple means desire. It’s a common color in mating displays.” Indrid watches Duck’s hand  glide along his scales, and a burst of pale blue reflects across their faces. 

“And that one?”

“Submission.” Indrid murmurs, “it is, ah, not the most desirable color to show. My kind value strength and power; enjoying the opposite is an invitation to mockery.” The siren’s eyes stay downcast, even when Duck smooths silver hair from his face.

“Now, I like to joke as much as the next fella, but that don’t seem like somethin to tease about.”

“No?” Indrid’s gaze flicks onto Duck the instant before the man straddles him. Duck doesn’t even have to push him onto his back; he goes instantly, hands flat on the sand and tail twitching excitedly in the shallows. 

“No. Seems to me a sweet thing like you oughta be takin care of.” 

Indrid snickers, “That is not usually an adjective one uses for meAHahnn” he arches as Duck tugs his hair.

“Let’s get one thing straight, sugar; I decide what you get called. I wanna call you the most perfect creature in the sea, I will. And if I wanna call you a needy little mer who’s good for nothin but gettin fucked into the sand, you’re gonna nod and say ‘yes.’ Understood?”

The blue light flashing up his tail brightens, “Y-yes but, but why do you call me sugar? That is a food.”

Duck giggles, leans down to brush their noses together, “It’s a nickname, call you it because you’re sweet and I can’t wait to get my fill of you.”

“Ohhhh, I see.” 

“You wanna see somethin else?”

“Very much soOH, oh goodness.” Indrid gasps as Duck forces his gaze towards his cock attempting to free itself from his boxers. He grinds on the supple muscle of his tail to take the pressure off, chuckles when the siren whines and tries to kiss his chest. 

“Since you’re the only siren I’d ever even consider fuckin-” Duck pauses as Indrid moans loudly, digging his fingers into the sand, “you gotta show me how to go about it.”

“If, if you just continue as you are a little higher upyes, yes right there” He rolls his hips, purrs with such a blissful expression that Duck is powerless to do anything but kiss him. His affection grows when he notices Indrid clearly restraining his kisses so as not to catch Duck’s mouth or tongue with his sharp teeth. The last guy he fucked shoved his tongue down his throat without any build-up or finesse, and now all he can think is if only Indrid had made his feelings know sooner, Duck could have done away with shitty human dates and had an obedient, eager mer instead. 

“Mmmmm” Indrid licks his lips, runs his fingers up Duck’s sides, “kissing is nice. It is not something sirens often indulge in, so my chances to do it are few and far between.”

“Ain’t that a shame” Duck kisses the corners of his mouth, “lips like these were made to be kissed sore.”

Indrid purrs, wiggling his tail, and Duck looks down to see a slit opening where his clothed cock has been rubbing. 

“Huh. Kinda figured you had-”

“-I have both this and an appendage below it much like your own.”

“Handy.” Duck, in no mood to climb off the purring, otherworldly man, eases the waistband of his damp boxers just under his balls. 

“This, uh, this ain’t gonna actually create a, I mean, I don’t wanna accidentally-”

“Nono, there is no chance of procreation”

“And you’ll be okay with so little of you in the water?”

“Yesyes I will be fine.” Indrid tugs at his hips, bucks his own into the air in frustration. 

“Just checkin’ oh, oh fuck” Indrid is tight and ridged around his dick as it slides in, “fuckin christ, no wonder sailors’ll crash into rocks at the offerin of fuckin a siren, wait, fuck, that was probably rude.”

“I will let it slide” Indrid teases, the end of his tail curling around Duck’s left ankle, “on account of your body is so lovely I would beach myself and die gasping on your doorstep for a chance to touch it.”

“No need for that. All you gotta do is wait here like a good little mer and I’ll fuck you as much as you want.” The slit pulses as Duck slowly fucks in and out, and he knows he’ll have to throw out all his fleshlights after this because nothing will ever compare to the deliciously alien feeling of Indrid around his dick. 

“Do, do not joke about such things.” Indrid whimpers, clinging to his shoulders.

“I ain’t. You wanted a mate, right?”

“Yes, you, so very badly.”

“Well, you got one, and you feel so goddamn good on my cock I ain’t inclined to let you swim off and be someone else’s.”

“I do not want to, I only want you, please, please let me stay.”

Duck stills his hims and the siren writhes as he leans down. The human cups his cheek, “I want you to stay, ‘Drid. I wanna get to know you. Long as you promise you ain’t gonna fuck me unless you want to, and not because you’re scared I’ll turn you loose.”

“I promise.” Indrid initiates the kiss this time, purring when Duck takes his time kissing back. 

“Good. Now that we got that cleared up” Duck sits up, “be a good mate and take what I give you.” He fucks in as hard as he dares, dives back down to kiss Indrid’s lips and throat as the mer’s cock emerges. Duck finds he can grind his ass along the twisting shaft at the same time he drives his own into Indrid’s body, resulting in a wail of pleasure and teeth sinking into his shoulder. 

“Fuck!”

“Sorry!” Indrid squeaks, hiding his face in Duck’s neck, “it, it is a reflex-”

Duck yanks his head back to his shoulder, near the first mark, and holds it down, “Do it again.”

Indrid trills and pain lights up Duck’s body, the perfect counterpoint to the pleasure coursing through him with each roll of their bodies. The siren chirps and moans, nips his arms and ears, slides his tail along his legs as his cock pumps frantically against his ass.

“That’s it sweet thing, cum for me while I fuck you. Show me just what my mate is for.” Duck bites Indrid’s neck and cum splatters the backs of his thighs as Indrid’s repetitions of his name drown out the noise of the waves.  Duck’s orgasm follows fast, sweeps through him like the crescendo of a song carried on the night air. 

Duck stays buried in him well after he’s finished, mind already conjuring images of tying Indrid down in shallow water and keeping his cock warm all day.

“Duck?”

“Yeah, sugar?” 

“I, ah, I need to get back in the water.”

“Oh shit, yeah, sure.” He pulls out, tosses his sea-soaked boxers up the beach as Indrid slides into the sea. Duck wades in, stopping where it’s waist deep as the siren swims lazily circles around him. 

“Such a perfect mate.”

“Glad you still think so.”

Indrid curls up to him, rubbing their cheeks together, “Thank you for indulging me. Do...do you wish me to come back tomorrow? Or to stay tonight? There are no other mers between here and my territory, so there is no reason I cannot count this stretch as mine.”

Duck kisses one of the hickeys blooming on tan skin, “How’s about you stay the night. We got some things to talk about. And, if you’re real good, I might let you fuck me when we’re done.”

Indrid grins, “My dearest one, I believe we have a deal.”

----------------------------------------------

Nowadays, if you ever go near Kepler and the surrounding islands, you may hear people talk about Duck Newton, beloved native son, skilled park ranger, and the only man receive siren kisses and live to tell the tale. 

[tenspontaneite]

Peace Is A Journey (Chapter 20/?)

In which Callum and Ezran finally confront an awful truth.

(Chapter length: 15k. Ao3 link)

Preword: this chapter begins immediately after the end of the Callum, Ezran, and Rayla scene of chapter 19, and builds on mood and context cues from it. If you’ve not reread that scene recently I’d recommend at least scanning its tail end before reading this chapter.

Warnings: Grief, heaviness of mood and theme, general sadness.

---

‘Something’s wrong’, Ezran had said, and: ’Something’s been wrong a while’. And for all that it was true, Callum couldn’t bring himself to think about what that surely meant. He couldn’t bring himself to talk. So he didn’t. Ezran didn’t, either.

They lingered wordless for all the time that Rayla was gone. It would have been silent if not for the shriek and violence of the winds. Callum stared out into the blizzard and felt strangely dizzy as he watched the snow, tracking the twists and spirals of its motion until the brightness of its white burned behind his eyes.

It was less bright now than it had been. Evening was coming, and the sun was starting to go down. His gut twisted as he thought of that, thought of Rayla, out in the storm and the ever-encroaching cold. For once, he didn’t try to tamp down on the worry. He didn’t even try to soothe the anxiety quivering in his fingers. It was better than the alternative.

Ezran was too quiet. Not in a dragon-dazed way – not anymore. He was too alert for that, even clutching the egg to his chest. His eyes were hooded, brows drawn together into a tight furrow. He looked thoughtful, but not in any sort of happy way. His fingers were tight on the shining eggshell of the Dragon Prince, and they trembled.

Callum was aware of the tension building bit-by-bit in his brother’s frame. He knew the signs of Ezran getting worked up about something, getting upset by something. He should have asked. He should have asked, but – he couldn’t. It was like a vice clamped around his throat whenever he so much as considered it. So he sat there in ever-more painful silence, not asking, and not thinking.

He didn’t think about the flags lowered on their posts atop Verdorn, surrounded by the flickering of countless ceremonial flames. He didn’t think about what Rayla had said, before she left. He just considered the state of the fire, and tersely added a few sticks to it, and deliberately did nothing more than worry about how long she’d take to return.

He didn’t ask, and he didn’t speak, and he tried not to think. But even that wasn’t enough, in the end.

Eventually, Ezran’s head jerked up towards the storm, uncanny-bright eyes fixed unerringly in the direction of the ledge. Callum’s stomach churned, torn between relief and unease at the sign, and he stared as well. He stared for a good few minutes before Rayla appeared, a shadow darkening upon the face of the blizzard, cloak and scarves whipping behind her in formless silhouettes of grey. And then she was close enough, stepping away from the ledge, that he saw her in full: shoulders dusted with snow, face wreathed in cloth, and shivering.

He was on his feet and scrambling out of the covers in a second, heart beating shallowly in his throat. His pulse felt thin and thready as he approached her, fearful in some way he didn’t want to put thought to. Instead he rushed to her, tugging on her cloak, leading her stumbling into the conjoined lights of the fire and the egg. “You’re back,” he murmured to her, instead of thinking about what had put the tremor into his fingers, or the look of dread into her eyes. He opened his mouth to say something else, but the words wouldn’t come. It was all too senseless.

“…I’m back.” She repeated, and her voice was very quiet. She wouldn’t quite meet his eyes. Her shoulders, when he went to lift the snow-strewn cloak from them, were hunched and tense. Whatever she’d hoped to escape with her reckless trip out had evidently followed her back. Callum swallowed, and set the cloak aside by the fire, and reached out to pull the scarf down from her face, to tug the wood-harness from her shoulder, to busy himself with anything and everything he could…

Ezran hadn’t spoken. Hadn’t greeted her, or stood, or done anything but stare at her silently, hands still bracketed around a stolen Prince’s egg. That silence was a chill, like an encroaching frost at Callum’s back. The hairs at the back of his neck rose, but he ignored that too. His fingers shook as he put the new firewood aside, and the snow-sodden outer scarf, and then, then-

“Callum,” Rayla murmured to him, still quiet. It was almost chiding, in a gentle way. An admonishment. As though she knew as well as he did that he was prevaricating. As though she knew exactly what he wasn’t thinking of, and was too tired to do the same.

She looked tired. She looked defeated. Slowly, with a cold and breathless dread, Callum let his hands fall away from her scarf, hanging uselessly by his sides. He looked at her, and saw the way she looked back at him. He opened his mouth, but couldn’t say anything. Without quite meaning to, he stepped away, fingers trembling on empty air.

It was only then, in that fraught silence and space, that Ezran finally moved. He straightened – not all at once, but slowly, like it was something he had to work himself up to. When he finally looked up at her, there was something frighteningly decisive about it. Something irrevocable. Looking at him then was like watching the thud of a coffin set down upon its pyre, with nothing left but to wait for the flame. His eyes settled upon her with such a weight that she flinched as though struck.

She met Ezran’s gaze, just for a second. Then she looked away. Her eyes closed, and her hands curled into fists at her sides. When she glanced across at his brother again, there was a resignation to her expression. Dread, too, and a guilt grievous enough it made his breath freeze just to look at her. “Ez?” She voiced, finally, so quietly he almost didn’t hear it.

“Rayla.” His voice trembled around her name. Callum watched, frozen in place, as his brother stared up at her, taking in a long shaky breath as though to brace himself. Finally, unsteadily, he said “I – I’m pretty sure – I think you’ve got something you need to say. Something you’ve needed to say for – maybe a long time.” His eyes, too blue, fixed on hers. He almost seemed to be daring her to deny it. Pleading, even. “Don’t you?”

Her breath shuddered, and he was close enough to hear it. She looked stricken, and couldn’t quite seem to manage to speak. Instead, she nodded, expression tight.

A thread of panic wove its way into Callum’s heart, just enough to thaw his tongue. “I – shouldn’t you be resting?” He asked, a little desperately. It sounded like a plea, even to his own ears. “You just – you just got in from the blizzard. You should sit down, warm up-“

Her hand settled on his shoulder, and his words froze on his breath. She didn’t say anything, just looked at him, but that was enough. He went still again, and the pain in her eyes became just that little bit more terrible. “I’m sorry,” she said, lowly, face drawn like the words hurt her. “I…I kept trying, but…”

Ezran stared up at them, jaw set, skin tinted blue and pale in the dragonlight, the colour making him look starkly ill. It put an unsettling cast on his expression now, wan and full of dread. His eyes were too wide. “I’m right, aren’t I.” He said, and it wasn’t a question. Rayla watched him, painfully resigned, and Callum was still frozen. “You’ve been hiding something. Something important. I just – I keep feeling it, all the time, like you’re guilty, and it’s-“ he stopped, and swallowed, and took a fortifying breath. “You keep feeling like you’re doing something wrong. And what you were saying, earlier-“

“Ez,” Rayla started, but Ezran was talking now, his amassed tension and fear bubbling out of him, like he was afraid to stop now that he’d started. Callum’s eyes flickered unwillingly between them, heart beating sick and fearful, knowing he had to stop them somehow; but he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, like some dark shade had stolen his voice again.

“You keep feeling guilty,” His breath hitched, half way through the words. “A-and – and I’ve been trying not to think about it, but – it’s always, always whenever – it’s about dad,” She flinched, stricken, and he gestured at her as if she’d made some very telling point- “See? It’s – whenever we talk about him, or – or you see him in Callum's book, or anything – you flinch, or you go quiet, and – and you feel so horrible and guilty and I’ve been trying not to think about it but-“

“Ez,” Callum croaked out, finally, almost desperate to – to stop him talking, to make him stop, to take that awful expression off of Rayla’s face and the shaking from his brother’s shoulders and the tight, terrible pit of certainty from his belly.

Ezran trembled, but he didn’t stop. There were tears pooling at the corners of his eyes, but he didn’t stop. Instead, he looked straight ahead at Rayla and- “I’ve been trying not to think about it,” he repeated, slower, and halting, the words thick with half-shed tears. “But it keeps – and you're not saying anything,  and I know you’re hiding something from us, and earlier you said ‘my parents might be dead’, just like that, like ours are - are –“ He trembled, white-lipped. “…And while you were gone I just kept thinking, and – I. I just…" he wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and looked at her. Finally, waveringly, he asked “Rayla? What happened to your other wrist binding?”

She went still. Her eyes closed, almost in time with the harsh rasp of Callum’s breath as he inhaled, because – he remembered that she’d had two at first, of course he did, he didn’t forget details like that. But he hadn’t thought of it, not since he learned what the bindings meant, and that – that was a little too much. Too much to avoid, too much for him to push down with all the other things he’d been trying so hard to ignore, just – too much.

He found himself staring at her, heart in his throat, utterly desperate for any sign, anything, anything at all that would put this horrible thought away, anything that would mean he wouldn’t have to think about it, it wouldn’t be happening, it wouldn’t be real…

Instead, she opened her eyes, and as she looked at them, he saw that they were bright with tears. “I’m sorry.” She whispered, voice choked, and – he was shaking his head, slowly, as if it would change anything- “I’m so sorry.”

“No,” he said, unbidden, the word slipping numbly from his lips as Ezran's expression crumpled. “No, no, Rayla, you can’t – you’re not saying-"

His brother’s arms closed so tightly around the egg that his hands overlapped each other, fingers curling into his sleeves tight and shaking. “Rayla,” his voice was barely a whisper, until it wasn’t. His face contorted with despair. “Just say it. Tell me!”

Her breath shuddered out. When her mouth opened, Callum felt some abortive impulse to stop her, to halt her, but- “I’m sorry.” She said again, utterly miserable and utterly defeated. “He – King Harrow-"

“You can't, “ he repeated, numbly, and her shoulders shook.

“He’s dead.” She forced out, all at once, and then there was no taking the words back. Callum froze, motionless, as Ezran went still with him. For that first, terrible second, it was like the world had halted around them. And then-

Ezran hunched over the egg and wailed. The sound of it was terrible, thin and choked with anguish, and it spun around and around and around in Callum’s head until he was dizzy with it, until his heart was pounding and his vision swimming – he stumbled backwards, and fell, and wasn’t nearly coherent enough to be thankful he’d missed the fire. He just fell, and it was the tears stuttering loose on impact that made him realise he was crying.

“Callum-“ Rayla was saying, voice choked, but he could barely hear her, and his eyes were too full of tears to see much of anything.

He didn’t mean to do it; there suddenly wasn’t enough room in his mind for anything so coherent as intention. But he did it anyway: he pulled himself unsteadily to the side, over the cold stone, reaching out blindly until his fingers hooked in the fabric of his brother’s jacket and pulled him close. Ezran was crying, and Callum had never heard him sob like that, not once, not ever.

A second later, he processed what he’d done, and tugged all the tighter. It returned some sense to his head, if only a little, to blink until his eyes were clear enough to see, to pull his brother closer until the two of them were braced and shaking around the shape of the dragon egg between them. Its light was flickering and stuttering now in time with Ezran’s sobs, as if it was crying with him. Maybe it was, with that connection it had to him. The unborn dragon whose mother had – had ordered it, and he might be crying too.

It hit him then, really hit him, staring through wet eyelashes at the egg of the Dragon Prince. A thin, wounded sound rose and shuddered from his throat, and he hardly noticed Ezran shifting to bury his face in his chest. He was too busy lifting a hand to his face, trembling horribly, and trying to wipe away enough tears that the world might make sense again. He’s dead, Callum thought to himself, numbly. There was no chasing that thought away now. No denying it. If there’d been any hope of denying it, it had passed as soon as he remembered the binding that wasn’t there.

Remembering the binding made him remember Rayla, just enough for him to lift his head, to start noticing things outside himself and his brother and the sobs that passed between them. She’d fallen to her knees, crumpled in on herself, and she was saying something. It was hard to focus past the numb shock, but a few seconds later, he managed: she was saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over again.

Callum wiped his eyes, but a moment later they were full of tears again. He couldn’t seem to stop it. His shoulders hitched and his breath shuddered, and there weren’t any words in the world fit to respond to that senseless apology. What was she saying sorry for? He couldn’t find any sense in it. Through the haze of his thoughts, it seemed more like noise than speech, as meaningless as the ceaseless shriek of the gale.

He stared dully at the blurry ground, feeling his shoulders hitch with his uneven breaths. Ezran curled into his side, and Callum clutched back almost reflexively, mind spinning around half-coherent thoughts. I didn’t want it to be true, he thought, a little senselessly, a little despairingly. He’d thought about the chilling skill of Moonshadow elves at Full Moon, hadn’t he? When she told him about Viatori, and how an entire team had slipped seamlessly through one of the greatest strongholds in the kingdom, he’d thought about it.

The memories just kept chasing themselves around in his head. When he’d tried to reach – reach his dad, when Viren had stolen his voice, the assassins were already there. Too powerful, too ruthless. The Crownguard were supposed to be the most elite warriors the Kingdom had to offer. The Crownguard had foiled countless assassination attempts in the past. The Crownguard were supposed to protect them.

The Crownguard’s bodies had littered the tower floor.

Even then. Even before Callum fled, they’d been strewn everywhere, crumpled and lifeless, right outside the final sanctum of King Harrow. Even without seeing the memorial flames, or the flags lowered for a kingdom’s grief…that had been enough. That had been enough, deep down, for Callum to know how that night had ended. He’d just…

He hadn’t wanted to believe it.

His fingers tightened around Ezran’s shoulder, crumpling the fabric. He could feel the wet of tears where his brother’s face was pressed into his chest, beginning to soak through all the layers of cloth. “…How did it happen?” He found himself asking, hollowly, the words not even feeling like his own. Rayla’s head lifted, though, so he supposed he must have spoken them. She was curled in on herself, miserable, looking so guilty he didn’t know how to respond to it. Emotion churned and twisted in his chest, thick and choking. “…Do you know?” He wondered, then, the taste of the words unbearably bitter. “Do you know how it happened?”

Her mouth opened and closed once, helplessly. Ezran’s head lifted just enough to regard her out of one bleary eye, watching. Listening. “…I,” she tried, and then shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t – I wasn’t there. I just…” She clutched around her right wrist, fingers visibly trembling. “We were just out of the city, when this…”

“It came off.” He guessed, dully, and her chin jerked down in an aborted nod. “And you knew. Right from the start, you knew.”

She looked away. “I kept trying to find a way to tell you.” Her voice was quiet. “I just…couldn’t.”

There was another twist in his gut, then. It felt almost angry. What gave her the right to be so miserable, when it wasn’t her dad? What business did she have being so guilty, when it wasn’t even her fault? The bitterness of it rose in his throat, sharp and acidic, and for a second – for a second, he wanted to be furious with her for being – for not – he wasn’t sure. But…it didn’t happen. Not really. Something burned acrid in his chest, but it wasn’t quite anger. He wasn’t sure what it was.

“…Why not?” Ezran asked, in the first words he’d spoken since – since she’d said it. There was an edge to them. Like he, maybe, had managed a little more anger than Callum had.

“I-“ She hesitated, so miserable, and shook her head again. “I don’t know.”

“You ‘don’t know.’” Ezran repeated, quiet and bitter. “It’s been over a week, Rayla. There were so many times you could have said something.“

“I know.” Her expression crumpled.

“You could have told us. You should have told us!” Ezran’s shoulders heaved with the weight of the breath that shuddered through him, close enough that Callum felt every second of it.

Again, with a choking edge of shame: “I know.”

Ezran’s breath hitched then. “He’s our dad, Rayla,” He said, and his eyes were welling up again with tears. “And he’s dead. Don’t – didn’t we deserve to know that?”

She shook as if every word were an actual physical blow, and – Callum could see, just looking at her, how much she was castigating herself. How much self-loathing she was tearing at herself with. He understood her too deeply to bear, and had to look away. He clutched tightly at his brother and said nothing. “You did,” She managed, and he could hear the sickening guilt in her voice. He shuddered. “I’m sorry. You deserved to know the truth. But…”

“But what, Rayla?” Ezran demanded, with a little more of that anger, and Callum couldn’t help but see the tears falling thickly down his face.

She didn’t try to defend herself. Just hunched in miserably, and…and that, he thought, was enough of that.

“Ez.” Callum murmured, close above his brother’s head, and felt the shudder under his hands. It hadn’t quite been a chide, just…a reminder, maybe. Of what, he wasn’t entirely sure. But it quieted him anyway, and he turned his face away from Rayla again.

“He’s dead, Callum.” Ezran mumbled brokenly, straight into the wool of Callum’s sweater. “Dad’s dead.”

It hurt to hear. It hurt so much. It probably always would. Thinking about mom had never really stopped hurting, after all. And – that was what had happened, wasn’t it? It had happened again. He’d lost another parent. He’d lost another beloved part of his increasingly broken family. Callum closed his eyes, and leaned forwards to press his face into his brother’s hair. The pain in his chest was sharp-edged and cutting, like breathing around broken glass.

He exhaled a shaky, shuddering breath there, feeling Ez tremble against him, and when he looked up again he saw that Rayla had a hand half-lifted towards them, as if she wanted to reach out, but didn’t know if she could. Part of him, very quietly, wanted to be angry with her. The rest of him recognised that there was no point, and just felt tired instead. It wasn’t her fault in any way that mattered, and she was already mad enough at herself for all three of them.

He regarded her wearily for a second, then jerked his chin in a vague sort of ‘come here’ gesture, uncertain he had the energy for anything more. She met his eyes, uncertain until he nodded at her again, and then she crept hesitantly forward. She was reaching out to Ezran’s shoulder when he lifted his head to look at her, as if he’d seen her coming even with his eyes covered.

Ezran looked at her, bleary-eyed through tears, and for a second looked wary and closed-off. Like he didn’t want her to touch him, and might push her away. But then he sighed, and shifted very slightly towards her, and she put her hand down on his shoulder.

That very instant, his expression crumpled. He sobbed, breath hitching into it alarmingly fast. Rayla flinched and seemed about to pull back when Ez turned and hooked the fingers of one hand into her sleeve, tugging at it until she stumbled closer. “Ezran-“ She tried, but he was shaking his head, tears welling so thickly in his eyes that their faint glow refracted through the water, bright and glittering and pale.

“I know,” The words tumbled from his lips, like he couldn’t help it, like he was answering some desperate plea she’d never spoken. “I know, I know why you couldn’t tell us, I – I knew even before you – I just…” He pulled at her sleeve, again, until she shifted closely enough to press a little against his side. A little against Callum’s, too. “It’s not your fault. I’m just…” He shuddered, and then turned fully away from Callum to embrace her this time. “I’m just…it really hurts.”

Her expression as she looked down at Ez had gone so open and vulnerable it hurt to look at. “Ez…” Her voice was thick, and the next time she blinked, it shook tears loose. One of them ran so closely along the outward edge of her pigment it seemed almost to frame it.

“You didn’t want to hurt us.” Ezran mumbled into her shoulder, and a strange spasm of emotion shook over her as Callum watched. Her expression wavered. “You knew it would. You knew it’d have to happen sometime. But…you just – you couldn’t.”

Her shoulders trembled. “You deserved to know.” She said, quiet, still with that edge of shame. “I should have told you.”

“You didn’t want to hurt us.” Callum repeated his brother’s words, quiet, and her head jerked up to look at him. That open, terrible vulnerability was hard to see on her. She always tried so hard to stay composed, and now… “I…understand that.”

He did understand, was the thing. He understood too well. He understood that she cared about them, and knew this would hurt them, and hadn’t been able to bear being the one to hurt them like that. Not until it had been too long, and too late, to avoid any longer. He’d been avoiding it too, after all. Of course he understood.

“I should have told you,” she said again, like she couldn’t get away from it, and he shook his head slowly.

“We already knew.” He admitted aloud, for the first time. “We just…didn’t want to face it, any more than you did.” How many times had he avoided asking? How many times had he deliberately not thought about it? How many times had Ezran deliberately not thought about it, after catching that spark of guilt through Rayla’s skin?

She closed her eyes for a moment, displacing more tears. “I’m sorry.” She said then, instead of I should have told you. “I’m so, so sorry…” Ez burrowed a little more tightly into her sweater, and said nothing.

Callum looked at her, expression so full of shame, the tear-trails on her cheeks glittering in the dragonlight, and his chest hurt somehow even more than it already did. It felt like it would choke him, it hurt so much. He leaned against her, breath trembling, and felt the silent hitch and shake of her shoulders against him. “For what?” He asked quietly, helplessly, when he could finally muster the words. “Rayla, none of this was your fault.”

“I should have told you.” She said, yet again, and when he shook his head at her, “I should have done something.”

That lifted his head further, to look at her better. To see the guilt in her eyes as she averted them from him. “Done what?” For a moment, he had no idea what she could be talking about. But then-

“I should have stopped it.” Her voice was quiet, and it trembled.

…Oh.

Callum looked away, down at the egg bracketed now between all three of them. “You tried.” He said in the end, very softly. “You tried, Rayla.”

She shook her head, violently. “I didn’t-“

“We were there. You tried.” The last word caught in his throat, and then he was crying again, the tears hot on his cheeks in the moment before the storm chilled them. “On that roof, you tried – you told him to stop, to call off the mission. We told him about Zym, but he just…” He shook his head as if in an echo of hers, more slowly. That had been ‘Runaan’, right? Someone who was basically family to her? And she’d fought him. “He didn’t listen.”

Rayla was silent, then. When he looked at her, she seemed struck, eyes wide. She was so pale as to look a little ill.

“He didn’t listen.” Callum repeated, heart hurting. “You had to fight him, Rayla, so he wouldn’t come after us. You tried. You really, really tried, and-“ She was shaking her head again, as if she wanted to interrupt him, as if she wanted to deny it, so he spoke a little louder and a little faster- “And you said! You offered, when I came back from the tower, to – go up there with me, and try again, but-“ He shook, distress making him dizzy, making his throat tighten with nausea. “I said no.”

Maybe he’d already known then that it was too late. After seeing the fallen Crownguard strewn across the stone, after seeing the assault at the tower’s innermost sanctum…maybe he’d known there was no sense in going back. No matter how much he wanted to. But most of all…

“I said no.” He repeated, quiet, and looked down at the egg. Rayla seemed shocked silent, watching him as he spoke, and Ezran had lifted his head to stare across as well. “I said – I don’t remember what I said. But Zym was what mattered the most, and I knew it, and you knew it, and-“ His voice broke. “-And I said no.”

She flinched at that, as if he’d found some way to take the pain of that knowledge and cut her with it, as if she were like Ezran, and could feel it keen as a knife through her skin. As though he’d heard the thought, his brother shifted, blinking miserably up at him. He reached out, and the fingers of one hand hooked into Callum’s sleeve.

“You were right.” He said, quiet and unhappy. Another tear slipped from the corner of his eye. “If we get Zym home, we – we could stop this, for everyone. But…”

Callum reached back, clasping his brother’s hand. “Ez…”

“I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish it – didn’t have to be like this.” His voice twisted into something thick and tearstained, and Callum had a moment to feel ever-more terrible at the sight of the misery on Ezran’s face before he turned his face back into Rayla’s sweater. She hardly seemed to know what to do about it, which would have maybe been funny under literally any other circumstance. Eventually, after some hovering, she curled one arm around his brother’s shoulders, squeezing gently. Her right hand; bereft of any and all assassins’ binds.

“Me too.” She said to him, very quietly, eyes shadowed with pain. He wondered if she was maybe thinking about her parents, too. How they might be dead after all, and in such a terrible way, with no way of her knowing for certain what had become of them. The only way to find out now would be to tear the words from Lord Viren himself, and that-

Callum’s throat tightened, and he shuddered. Discomfort and unease joined the churn of emotion in his stomach, and he felt ill.

He couldn’t help but remember some of the things that Harrow – dad – had said to him, in that last meeting. I’ve done terrible things, and I am responsible for some of those wrongs, and what’s done cannot be undone.

Dad had died full of regret, but determined to face the consequences for the choices he’d made. He’d been so convinced that his death was the only way forwards. He hadn’t even tried to leave, despite knowing full well that the assassins were coming for him. He hadn’t even tried.

Callum had tried. He’d tried to convince him. Tried to reach him, to tell him the truth about the egg so maybe that would change his mind. But it hadn’t been enough, with Viren in the way. And he’d said no when Rayla offered to go with him back into the tower. And now…Harrow was dead.

What else was it he’d said? Take care of your brother? Callum sniffed, and shuffled closer until he could hug Ezran too, squashed against Rayla’s side and the shell of the dragon egg.

“I wonder if he knew.” Ezran said, then, very quietly. The words were still muffled by fabric.

Startled out of his thoughts, Callum looked down at him. “…What?” He asked, bewildered.

“I wonder if dad knew,” Ezran clarified, head lifting a little. The rims of his eyes were ruddy from crying. “About Zym’s egg.”

‘What makes you think he doesn’t already know?’ He remembered, and felt the taste of bile rising in his throat. He shook his head, violently. “He couldn’t.” Callum denied, helplessly. He wanted to say that Harrow wouldn’t have let that happen, but – at the very least, he’d thought Viren had killed the Dragon Prince, right? And he’d let that happen. Throat tight, he went on “If he’d known, he would have – he’d have done something. He could have stopped the attack.”

Ezran didn’t say anything, just blinked at him, slow and unhappy. Eventually: “I hope you’re right.”

He wished he could just ask him, find out the truth – but that was one of the terrible things about this, wasn’t it? He couldn’t, because Harrow was dead. There’d never be any talking to him again. There’d never be any words, or answers, or anything from him again.

Callum’s breath hitched, and then – a second later, he felt a memory hit so hard it was almost like a body-blow. On reflex, he scrambled to check his belt, even knowing there was no sense in it at all, not ten days and however-many changes of clothing too late. A small, wounded noise emerged from his throat, high and upset.

They were looking at him immediately, both reflexively concerned. “Callum?” Rayla spoke, worried, and he squeezed his eyes shut, breaths coming fast with distress.

“I – I had a letter,” He managed, throat so tight he was surprised he could breathe at all. He could feel tears rising in his eyes again, hot and stinging, a pit of anguish taking root in the middle of his chest. “I had a letter, from him, he gave it to me before – the last time I saw him. I was – he said to read it, when he was-“ He stopped, and couldn’t finish, a sound like a gasp choking its way out of him. ‘You’ll know when', he remembered, and – it hurt like a hand had clasped around his heart and twisted-

Ezran’s voice was tentative. “…A letter?”

“It was important.” He recalled, heartbroken, breaths coming too-fast. “It was important, it was – it was supposed to be his last letter to me, but I – I must have dropped it, I don’t-“ He stopped, and tried to think. He’d not had it when they left the castle, or surely they’d have noticed it when they were taking stock of what they had. So, sometime before that… “I must have lost it in the castle.” He recognised, numbly. “When we were running from Claudia, or-“ His eyes flickered across at Rayla.

“Or when you were running from me.” She recognised, with a flash of regret over her face.

He buried his face in his hands, the fabric of the gloves too scratchy on his salt-scoured skin. “I can’t believe it.” He muttered brokenly. “I lost it. His last letter, and – and I lost it.”

Ezran couldn’t seem to find the words to respond to that; there was nothing from his direction but silence. Rayla, though – “I’m sorry, Callum.” She said quietly, and he felt a hand settle on his shoulder. “That’s awful.”

He lowered his hands, just enough to look at her. “I lost it.” He repeated, quieter, and…abruptly, felt so overdrawn with misery that something in him crumpled into silence. His tears stopped, as though some deep well within him had suddenly, finally run dry.

“Maybe someone picked it up.” Ezran said, then, but his voice was very distant. Callum looked at him, and found him blank-faced and numb. Hollow-eyed, like this had been the last straw for him too. One final tragedy, to make things just that little bit too terrible to bear. “Maybe one day we’ll be able to read it.” Despite the words, there was no hint of optimism or hope in his voice. It rang too hollow for that.

Callum shook his head, just a little, and didn’t speak. It was possible, he supposed, but…not terribly likely. And after everything…

He didn’t say anything, the hollowness in his chest expanding until it seemed to steal the voice from him. Ezran didn’t speak either, and didn’t move, still pressed half-into Rayla’s side. She abided by their empty silence, and sat with them, shoulder-to-shoulder, while the fire crackled and the egg’s light flickered and the storm tore around the mountainside. The quiet that held between them was heavy with a bleak, oppressive sort of lethargy.

Eventually, Ezran drew back away from Rayla, and back from Callum as well, until he was sitting up with their hands still trailing back from his shoulders. He hefted the egg fully into his lap again, fingers tightening around the bright shell. His eyelids fluttered, in that familiar way, and his expression twisted as though listening to something painful.

Callum looked at him, and managed to find the energy to speak. “…Is he alright?”

Ez exhaled quietly. “He’s upset.” He admitted. “Because we’re all upset, and I can’t…I can’t stop it from going through me to him. I’m feeling me being unhappy, and you two being unhappy, so he’s feeling it too. He’s so young. He doesn’t know what to do with it all.”

His chest hurt, thinking of Ez having to deal with the grief and turmoil of two other people on top of his own. It wasn’t fair. But he wasn’t sure there was anything to do about it.

“I don’t even know what to do now.” Ezran voiced, soft. “What are we supposed to do, Callum?”

He looked at the egg. “Well,” He started, then trailed off. He shook his head. “I…guess nothing has really changed.” His voice sounded empty even to his own ears. “We’ve got to stop the war. We’ve got to get the Dragon Prince home.” Home, to the Dragon Queen who’d ordered Harrow and Ezran be killed.

Ezran’s eyes returned to the eggshell, reflecting its searing light. “…Yeah.” He said, in the end. “I guess so.”

If he thought anything else, he didn’t say it. Just pulled the egg closer, and leaned in against Callum’s side. He looked exhausted. Drawn-out and weary, like the day and its toil and its grief had taken too heavy a toll on him. It wasn’t a surprise, really. There’d been the storm, and the sheer turmoil of the overburdened dragon egg, and then the talk about Rayla’s parents, and then this. Of course he was tired. Of course he was at the end of his rope. Callum didn’t feel much better off; he could feel the stress and exhaustion burning behind his eyes, until he felt a hair’s breadth from new tears at any given second. He thought he’d still be crying, if he wasn’t so tired.

As if to corroborate Callum’s thoughts, Ez settled in, and his eyes slipped half-closed. “I’m really tired, Callum.” He murmured, shuttered eyes as blank and distant as Callum’s own. “I just want this to stop.”

He didn’t elaborate on what exactly he meant by ‘this’, but he didn’t really need to. Callum exhaled, heavy and slow, and wound an arm around Ezran’s middle to tuck him closer in to his side. “I think we all just need a rest, now.” He said, quiet. “Maybe things will seem better later. Or…at least maybe a bit less terrible.”

Ezran blinked up at him, so slow as to seem lethargic. “Did it get better, before?” He asked, and for a moment, Callum didn’t know what he was talking about. But then- “After mom died?”

Pain stole his breath away. The next moment, he inhaled again, seeing by the minute flinch of his brother’s face that his grief had been marked. “…In a way.” He answered, in the end, and felt all-too-exhausted at the thought of doing it again. Of passing days, and weeks, and months, and enduring the ache of loss until it no longer clawed so incessantly at the insides of his chest. “It does get better. It just...it takes time.”

Ez sighed, as if he’d expected that answer. His eyes, already half-shut, closed all the way. “…I’m glad you’re here, Callum.” He said eventually, head leaning into his shoulder. After that, he didn’t say anything else. He just sat there, a silent huddled form, illuminated by the shine of the egg he still held.

Rayla’s shoulder shuddered briefly against his own. When he looked at her, she seemed to be fighting a losing battle with some nameless agitation. Her expression when she looked at Ezran was pained, and – when he looked across at her, she flinched when he met her eyes. Still guilty, maybe. She opened her mouth as if to speak, hesitated, and after another glance at Ezran shook her head and closed it. In the end she stared over into the fire, shoulders tense and hunched.

He wondered what was wrong with her. What was bothering her now. The intention rose in his chest to ask, but it couldn’t seem to make it all the way. He was abruptly too tired.

The quiet that settled among them then wasn’t a comfortable one. Callum stared into the fire and felt numb, as if the cold of the blizzard were seeping into his ribcage and clutching at his heart. He remembered being out there in the snow, until the chill stole into his limbs and made it harder and harder to move. He felt like that now, even despite the heat of the fire so close by. Like the chill was in his flesh, in his bones, and he’d never move again. If there was any mercy to that cold, it was that it numbed his thoughts too, until his mind ran slow and heavy with apathy.

After a while, though… “Is he asleep?” Rayla’s voice sounded beside him, quiet and just a little surprised. Callum lifted his head to look at her, and then at his brother, whose eyes were closed. His expression remained tight, brows drawn, but there was something about the looseness of his posture and the rhythm of his breathing that Callum recognised.

After a moment, he managed to speak. “Think so.” All things considered, if Ezran had managed to fall asleep now, it would probably be a challenge to wake him up again. Callum nudged him, just a little, and produced no wakeful response whatsoever. “…I guess he crashed.” He reflected on how tired Ez had been even before the day’s troubles got started in earnest. He’d barely slept, hadn’t he? “After everything, I’m really not surprised.”

When he looked over at her, Rayla’s eyes were on Ez, shaded with regret. “I am, a little.” She admitted, still keeping her voice low. “I couldn’t imagine sleeping after all this.”

Slowly, Callum lifted a hand and smoothed it over the back of Ezran’s neck. “He’s just a kid.” His voice came out softer than he expected. “He’s ten. He hardly slept at all last night, and then…” He shook his head, rather than attempt to sum up the day aloud. “He was bound to fall asleep like this at some point. Kids are like that, you know. They keep going and going and then, suddenly…” He nodded demonstratively at his brother.

The face Rayla made conveyed, quite expressively, ‘I’ll take your word for it’. What she actually said was “Makes sense, I suppose.” She watched Ezran’s sleeping face for a few more moments, before her eyes flicked up to his. “Think he’ll wake up if we move him?”

Callum assessed him. “Nah. He’s out.” He eyed Rayla, the barest flicker of interest pushing through the shroud of exhaustion that had settled on him. “What were you thinking?”

“Get him tucked into the covers, with the egg?” She suggested. “Make sure he’s comfy.”

He hummed, and nodded. “Yeah. Sounds good.” He had to work his way up to it. His limbs felt like they were made of lead. But, after some effort, he made himself move, shifting around to support Ezran under his arms. Rayla shuffled over to help, keeping the egg from falling out of his lap as they moved him. In the end they got him tucked into the tent-covers close to the fire with only minor shifts and murmurs on Ezran’s part, the egg’s shine half-blocked by the thick fabric.

Even in sleep, though, Ezran didn’t look relaxed. There was still that fraught tension furrowing his brow, as though heartbreak had followed him into unconsciousness. It hurt to see, but there was nothing Callum could do about it. So he lifted the covers to let Bait go in as well, and then sat back down by the campfire. It felt more like collapsing, really; his body felt so heavy.

Rayla took the opportunity to throw some branches into the fire before she followed suit, shooting him a few hesitant looks before she spoke, as if she wasn’t sure she should be saying anything. “…How’re you feeling?” She asked, looking as though she regretted the words as soon as she spoke them. Sure enough, she shook her head quickly, and muttered “Stupid question, I guess. You don’t have to answer that.”

He lifted his head to look at her, and…despite everything, for whatever reason, he appreciated that she’d asked. It settled something bereft in him; some part of him that was hurting, and lonely, and desperate for comfort. “…Well, I’ve been better.” He said, finally, voice sounding worn even to his own ears.

She glanced side-long at him, looking uncomfortable, and fed another stick into the crackling flames.

Callum watched the fire part and spit around the new fuel, his thoughts flickering in and out of sight like the embers in the ash. “I feel kind of stupid, for how long I was ignoring this.” He said, softly. “There were so many signs. I just…” He sighed, and wiped a hand over his face as if it would help anything. It didn’t, of course. He felt as unhappy and lethargic as before. “I really wish this didn’t have to be real.” He murmured it to himself more than to her, but saw her flinch anyway.

She fidgeted in place, shoulders tense, and then tenser yet when she stole a glance at him. There was an agitated jitter to her fingers when she broke a branch in half, crack, and cast both parts into the flame. He was starting to work his way up to asking her what was wrong, or what was bothering her, when- “I should go.” She muttered tersely, eyes flicking out to the ledge, and he froze.

“What?” He managed, a second later, voice croaking. His heart thudded dully in his chest, too exhausted for any true panic, but awake enough for reflexive fear to move it.

“I should just…go. Give you some space.” She was saying, not even looking at him, leaning back from the fire with the intention of movement written in her every limb, like she was about to spring up at any moment, like she was about to get up and leave. “I shouldn’t – you deserve to have some time alone, right now. And more firewood is always a good thing.”

Terror stuttered into his bloodstream, choking his heart with thorns. “Rayla-“

“I’ll just pop out for a bit. I won’t be long.” Still avoiding his eyes, she pushed herself up, rising to her feet, and…

Callum wasn’t surprised. Not really. Now that he was looking at her, he recognised the tension she was wearing; she wanted to get away. There seemed to be some reflex in her that drove her to hide away whenever she felt vulnerable, or upset, or – any number of things. It was her that wanted to get some space, and maybe she thought he wanted that too, but-

But he didn’t. He didn’t want her to go. He didn’t want her to leave him alone. He never wanted to be alone at times like this. But, sometimes, it happened anyway.

He still remembered the day he’d learnt his mom was dead. Remembered waiting for Harrow in the throne room he’d been led to, uneasy, certain that something was wrong. He remembered every word of what Harrow had told him, like it was burned into his mind by the weight of its pain. He remembered, too, how Harrow had behaved afterwards. Hesitant, and halting, like he wanted to stay but didn’t feel it was his right. He’d comforted Callum for a while, and then left. To allow him some ‘space’.

He hadn’t wanted space. He’d wanted Harrow to stay with him. But he’d not been able to find the words for it then, and so he’d been left alone.

The breath shuddered thickly in his throat, and his hand was trembling horribly when he reached out and clasped it around Rayla’s wrist. “Please,” He managed, the word half-choked with emotion. “Don’t leave.” Then, when she didn’t move: “Please”, again, more desperately.

She stared back at him, looking almost bewildered. A second later, her expression trembled, and for a second, it looked like she might cry. And then-

She sat back down.

She didn’t leave.

The relief was so powerful he could hardly breathe through it. Instead of speaking he closed his eyes, and trembled, and felt his fingers move around Rayla’s wrist as she settled beside him. He could almost feel her hesitance in how she wavered there, shoulder barely brushing his. Uncertain of her welcome, maybe, or uncertain of why he’d been so desperate for her to stay. He wasn’t sure until he opened his eyes and looked at her, and…then, seeing her expression, he thought it was probably both.

“…Thank you.” He mumbled to her, the words sounding almost embarrassingly heartfelt. Her eyes looked just a little wide, as if she was startled.

She studied him uncertainly for a few long seconds, like she had no idea why he’d be thanking her. Like she had no idea why he’d wanted her to stay. He…thought he should feel guilty, for not letting her leave and get some space to clear her own head, even if going into the storm would have been a fairly bad idea. The relief turned a little sour as he thought of that, gut twisting unpleasantly.

“…Sorry.” He offered, eventually, when she hadn’t seemed to manage to find anything to say. Anxiety prickled at the back of his neck as he remembered that – really, they hadn’t known each other that long, it was maybe a bit weird to have begged her not to leave like that, especially when she’d wanted to get away- “I just…really don’t want to be alone, right now.” He excused lamely, feeling abruptly very stupid and very tired. He let go of her wrist and wrung his fingers together, shoulders hunching just a little.

He’d looked away from her, not wanting to see her expression; so the touch at his hand surprised him. He glanced down, startled. She’d reached out, however hesitantly, to put her hand over his own. When he looked up…there wasn’t any of the closed-in tension he’d feared. Instead, she just seemed sad, and there was nothing closed about it. He looked at her and, within moments, felt the anxious twist in his gut ease. “’S alright.” She said, and he was almost too disorientated by emotion to hear her. “Don’t you worry.” Her voice quieted, then. Went gentler, and a little more solemn. “I’ll stay.”

A shudder ran over his shoulders, utterly involuntary. He couldn’t help the depth of the gratitude that shook through him at the words. She was here. She cared. She wasn’t leaving.

Tentatively, and stealing glances at her all the while, he shifted his hand to clasp the one she’d laid upon it. When she made no objection, he settled his fingers solidly between hers and nearly shook with the relief of the contact. Even with the layers of gloves in the way, the solidity of her hand in his own was unimaginably reassuring. “…Thanks.” He mumbled again, and thought he’d have been more self-conscious if he wasn’t so tired. As it was…

The exhausted, numb shroud hadn’t left him. Misery hung over the edges of everything like a stain, and everything left around the borders of the apathy ached with grief. He wasn’t sure that was going to go away any time soon. But even so – it helped, to have her here. It really, really helped.

Her ears were back a bit, as if she were abashed. He wondered, very distantly, when he’d started to understand what elf ear movements meant. Whatever she was feeling, though, the gentle caring in the way she looked at him hadn’t changed. She squeezed his fingers, even, as if to reassure him. “Least I can do.” Her voice was quiet, and maybe just a little guilty.

He didn’t think he had it in him to address that guilt right now, so he just…exhaled, very slowly, and shifted his hand more comfortably around hers. She hadn’t minded the hands, so he thought she wouldn’t mind him leaning on her either. So he did, settling a little against her side, and felt some nameless tension in the back of his head ease a little. He stared into the fire and breathed a little easier.

She didn’t make any move to shift or get up for a long time. She just sat with him. It helped.

It did help. But in the end, it helped in a way that thawed the edges off of some of the numbness, some of the shock. A few times, he found himself trembling as the grief moved through him like melt-water under a glacier. Once, his breath shuddered and his eyes welled with tears again, as if finding new reservoirs to weep from.

Rayla made concerned murmurs at him until he shook his head. “I’m okay. It’s just…” He looked down at their hands. It was her right hand he was holding; the hand that had never been bound long enough to hurt.

Her expression softened into now-familiar sorrow, and she sighed. “I’m sorry, Callum.” She said it in the tones of I’m sorry for your loss, of I’m sorry this happened, and that honest sympathy was what set him off into a true bout of crying again.

His shoulders shook, and his breath hitched, and tears did fall, but it all felt so much more subdued than before. Quiet, even. It was a resigned sort of grief, he thought. Defeated, maybe. As though he’d burned through the powerful, convulsive sobs of before and left only this behind. Whatever it was, it blurred his eyes with tears, and every time he trembled he felt Rayla close by his side.

She didn’t try to stop him, though seeing him cry plainly made her feel awful. She didn’t try to talk to him, either. Maybe she recognised that this was just…crying. Just grief, and it had to spill out somehow. After a few moments of watching him, she shuffled a little closer until she was more solidly braced against his side, and then slipped an arm around his back, pulling him into a silent embrace. He shuddered and let his face fall onto her shoulder, appreciating it more than he could say. She didn’t try to move him, even when he must have been getting her sweater damp, and just…stayed there.

After a while, he pulled back, and just leaned against her side, tiredly displacing a new tear from his eyes every minute or so when he blinked. Those tears stopped eventually, too. In their aftermath he felt even more tired and drained than before. After a long interval of silence, Rayla started glancing between him and the fire. Eventually, she asked “You alright if I go over and tend the fire a bit?”

It shook him out of his exhausted stupor, a little. He glanced at her, and their hands, and though he regretted it even as he spoke, he nodded and said “Yeah, sure.”

She squeezed his hand once more, then let it go. In a second she’d moved away and to the fireside, leaving the space beside him empty. He watched her work to settle that feeling of absence, blinking slowly as she fed twigs and bits of branch into the flames. She got up to get the pot and fill it with the snow piling thickly at the less-sheltered part of their alcove, and he watched the winds pull at her hair and scarf upon the storm’s edge. He watched as she set the pot on the fire, and waited for such a time that she might come and sit beside him again.

“Think Ez is waking up any time soon?” She asked, when the snow had gotten around to melting, and he glanced back at the tent layers. They were still glowing, cyan light filtering out around the seams, and Ezran’s face only partially-visible where he’d burrowed into the covers.

“He’ll either be sleeping another couple hours or another eight.” He answered, after a moment. “There’s not really any in-between with him, once he crashes like that.”

Rayla hummed at that, just a little rueful. “Well, suppose it means he’ll be fresh and ready for if he needs to take a watch shift tonight.”

Abruptly, Callum remembered the concept of fire-watch. Of camp-things, like food and drink and taking care of the fire that kept them alive. Of the fact that it was evening now, and…technically, it was approaching bedtime. After all this, after everything…some things were still the same.

It was a little jarring. It was a little reassuring in a way, too. The thought of routine, as new as that routine might be, was just enough comfort to be worth the effort of following it. Plus, well – some of it just plain needed doing, no matter how exhausted and threadbare and grieving he was. “Need to change your bandages.” He recognised, tiredly, and his eyes slid to her left arm. “Do your hand, too.”

She glanced back at him. “We can leave it tonight, if you’re not up for it.” She offered, quietly. “I can probably manage myself.”

Despite everything, he managed a flicker of indignation. “No need for that.” He muttered at her, annoyed at the thought of her trying to sort her bandages alone, one-handed, because she thought he might be too haggard and downtrodden to help her. “I’ll do it. Just – whenever’s good.”

The barest, faintest hint of a smile twitched at the edges of her lips. “Well. I don’t know. I’ll have to check my schedule.” She said, plainly too tired to make the words sound dry, but the sentiment was there. He sighed quietly, his lips offering the same tiny reciprocal twitch, too tired and too unhappy for humour, but appreciating the gesture nonetheless.

“Once you’re done with that water, then.” He decided, and she glanced at him for a moment before inclining her head. The water was bubbling gently by now; she took the pot from the fire with her hands comprehensively gloved, then refilled all of their jars with it. She left him with a smaller jar while she went and rummaged in the bags – after a minute or so of watching her, he realised she was fetching the scissors and bandages and disinfectant. He wanted to protest that he could get those, but…by then, there wasn’t any point. He was too tired anyway.

The water was warm, and felt good to drink. The heat of it spread through his body from the inside-out, unexpectedly lulling after the day’s trials. When he was done he set the jar aside, pulled his gloves off, shuffled over to where Rayla was waiting, and wordlessly reached to help her out of her layers.

There were quite a few. He’d lost track of how many extra layers they’d all been throwing on in the midst of the storm, and it took a while to get them off without hurting her. Drawing each sleeve over her injured arm required a delicacy and focus that he’d thought was beyond him, in this depth of exhaustion…but somehow, he managed it, and piled each article one-by-one beside the fire. She shuddered as the sweaters came off, and started hunching her shoulders when her arms were finally bared, goosebumps raising over her skin. Even directly beside the fire, it was so cold that she was shivering in earnest by the time he peeled the bandages off.

It was growing dark enough now that he mostly had to depend on the firelight to check on the savage wounds over her upper arm. If there was any mercy, it was that he was still too emotionally exhausted to feel as terrible as he usually did when he looked at them.

Silent, he pressed carefully around the edges, trying to feel at the state of the developing scabs. “Better.” He said at last, quiet, and reached for the disinfectant to wash the area. “Feels more solid now. These probably won’t open up again if you’re careful.”

“Mm.” She watched him, still shivering, as he re-bandaged her arm and then carefully pulled back her collar to check on the shoulder wound. It had never been as bad as the rest, and was doing fine. He replaced the bandage pad that they’d tied onto it, and then sighed.

“Alright, we can get your layers back on now.” He attempted a smile, tired, as she exhaled with relief.

“Oh good.” She grumbled, already snatching at the first item of clothing he’d left by the fire. “I don’t have the energy to be shivering like this. It’s too bloody cold.”

He wondered, for a brief dizzy second, how terrible the cold would be without the fire. With night nearly upon them, and their mountain almost in the middle of the storm…well, there was a reason they’d needed a fire-watch, wasn’t there? Without the fire…they’d probably be dead by now. He reflected on this almost emotionlessly, then moved to help Rayla with her clothes.

A few careful minutes later she was bundled up again, clad in so many layers that her torso seemed a solid mass of cable-knit sweater. Her neck disappeared behind the scarves, and then when her hat returned, her ears mostly vanished too.

He stopped her before she went to re-glove her hands, though, reaching out to touch gingerly at the back of her wrist. “This still needs doing.” He reminded her, exhausted enough that his voice sounded strange and flat to his ears. She glanced at him, frowning.

“…Normally I’d say to leave it, today.” She said, eventually. “But…”

“Ez and Zym loosened your binding a lot earlier.” He guessed, and she nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s…probably the most important time for it.” Briefly, exhaustedly, he closed his eyes. It was more effort to speak than it should have been. “Make sure it…recirculates right, or whatever.” He glanced at her bare hand, now almost entirely a normal colour, and blinked at it tiredly. “At least it should hurt less now.”

She flexed the fingers carefully, and then shifted a little to offer the hand to him. “Feels okay, yeah. Cold, kind of numb. Stiff, but…not really sore.” She offered quietly as his hands settled around hers. Despite everything, her hand actually felt a little warmer than his at the moment – he’d taken his gloves off to help her with her clothes and bandages, and that much time in the open air had chilled them considerably. He hesitated, then shuffled them closer to the heat of the fire.

He checked the bandage around her binding, first. The binding itself was surprisingly loose; while some magical force seemed to prevent it from being moved from its exact spot on her wrist, there was enough room in it now that he thought he could actually slip a finger under it if he tried. It wasn’t visibly squeezing at her wrist at all, and the bruise-dark hue it had left on her hand and arm was gone like it had never existed. The scabs of the sores were healing well. They were still hard and thick-feeling, but he could see the hints of new pink skin starting to grow in from their edges. “I…think you can go without bandages on here, now.” He decided, slowly, and set the bandage aside. “Just be careful not to catch the scabs on anything, I guess.”

She made a face at her wrist, like she found it offensive to look at, and – after a moment, Callum found himself staring too. His eyes fixed unerringly on the strange clasp, and then the silver of the ribbon itself, all-too-aware of what it represented. His breath stuttered for a second, and he closed his eyes, suddenly struggling to breathe around the sharp-edged pain in his chest.

He panted a few times in distress, eyes tightly closed, and didn’t quite manage to move until Rayla’s hand twitched between his own, fingers squeezing gently at his. He exhaled slowly, blinked his eyes open, then turned to wipe his face on his scarf. “Sorry.” He muttered, disoriented by grief, and couldn’t make himself meet her eyes. He was sure of the way she’d be looking at him – guilty, and pained, and sad – and didn’t know if he could handle that right now.

She seemed to hesitate. “Callum…”

“It’s fine.” He said, softly, and repositioned her hand in his, turning it palm-up for him to work. “I’ll just…get this done, and then…” He closed his eyes again, very briefly. “Then, I guess we…wait out the night. Rest, maybe. Somehow.”

It was strange; he was tired enough that the task ahead seemed more exhausting a prospect than it ever had. He wished he could leave it, and just rest. But…at the same time, he was dreading what would come once there was nothing left to do. At least now he had some distraction. Afterwards...there’d be nothing but his grief, and his thoughts, and the bleak prospect of the monumental journey ahead of them. He wasn’t looking forward to it.

“…Somehow.” She echoed lowly, like she felt the impossibility of that as much as he did. She fell quiet, watching with shuttered eyes as he finally started pressing his fingers into her palm. Together, they sat in a silence swallowed by the howl of the wind, and did not speak again.

 ---

 Rayla sat wordless and unmoving for all the time it took Callum to massage some circulation back into her bound hand. It took longer than usual, and she could practically feel the exhaustion dragging at his every motion. She kept wanting to suggest that he stop, and let her handle it, but…somehow, she thought he wouldn’t appreciate that now. So she stayed silent, and watched him, and felt guilt drag its claws viciously through the insides of her chest.

The flesh of her hand ached a bit where he pressed at it. There was a low-level sear to it, a gentle burning soreness, like someone had planted the suggestion of acid within her blood. Compared to the pulsing agony of her upper arm, it was almost pleasant. Finally, he finished, and remanded her hand back to her, and then…shuddered, a little, as he drew his own hands back to his lap and huddled down beside the fire, staring bleakly into its flickering light. He didn’t say anything.

She watched him through the corners of her eyes, heart hurting, throat choked with shame.

Again, as earlier, she felt the urge to – get away, somehow. To go out into the storm again, and give him some room to breathe. But that wasn’t an option, not with the fatal chill of a night-time blizzard waiting for her beyond their shelter. And, besides…

Rayla glanced at him, uneasily, and completed the thought: if earlier had been any indication, he didn’t want that room to breathe. He didn’t want to be left alone. He didn’t want her to leave.

She couldn’t quite wrap her head around it. Any Moonshadow elf would have wanted the solitude. Pain was a private thing; something to be held close and hidden away. Wanting someone with you during a time this terrible…that was shockingly personal. And for all that she knew he was a human, and had different cultural attitudes surrounding this sort of thing…she couldn’t help but feel bewildered, and strangely touched, by the memory of him pleading for her to stay.

She shifted in place, uncomfortable, but held that memory in place to force herself still. He’d asked her to stay, so she would. She owed it to him. It wasn’t as if there was anywhere to go anyway. But…

She had no idea what to do.

Rayla looked at him again, huddling by the fire with his knees up to his chest, eyes downcast, face oddly blank. It hurt, to see him like this. Hurt more to remember her role in doing this to him. She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, and suppressed the agitated reflex in her body that wanted to send her to her feet, to turn her face away, to escape this space full of guilt and shame and other people’s grief.  

Silently, she reflected on that impulse, exhaling almost silently. The sound of the wind drowned it out, and she had no doubt that Callum heard nothing. She opened her eyes and stared at the fire, and acknowledged to herself what was really motivating this ongoing desire to flee: it hurt to be here. It hurt to see him hurt, and to deal with her own shame. Leaving would be easier – if not for the storm – but it would also be cowardice. She’d done enough to hurt him already. Leaving when he’d begged her to stay would be too cruel.

But she didn’t know what to do.

There’d been times in the past where Runaan or Ethari had been having a hard time with something, but they always helped each other through that in private. It had been the same with her parents, though she’d been much younger then. She’d never been the person anyone turned to for comfort before. She’d certainly never had to help anyone through something like this, and – what was she supposed to do? How could she possibly make something like this better?

He wasn’t crying now, maybe, but this almost seemed worse. He was just…silent, and small-looking, and empty-eyed. It was terrible to look at. She wanted to help, but…what could she do? Talking wouldn’t solve this. He’d lost his dad.

Rayla hesitated, gut churning, and reached for one of the jars of water to take a sip while she thought. Callum’s silent form lingered in her peripheral vision, looking painfully lonely in the firelight. She wished she could reach out to him. A second later, startled, she wondered why she thought she couldn’t.

He felt…off-limits, in a way, in the grips of grief like this. It felt private, like something she shouldn’t be seeing, shouldn’t be witness to. It seemed an imposition to so much as be here, let alone reach for him when he’d not asked.

But he had asked for her to stay, hadn’t he? He’d reached for her then. He wasn’t reaching now, but maybe that didn’t necessarily mean he didn’t want contact, or that it wouldn’t help, or…oh, stars, she didn’t know. She exhaled into the warm water of her jar, then set it down. Finally, tentative, she shuffled a short way around the fireside towards him.

Callum’s head jerked up, just a little, at the sight of her approach. It was a faltering motion, as though he were struggling against some terrible weight to so much as move. Hesitantly, she reached out for his shoulder. Slowly, but – he watched her hand with that same blank, exhausted expression, up until it actually touched him, and then something in his face seemed to crumple. He shook all-over, and made a tiny miserable noise, and reached up to clutch at her hand so tightly it almost hurt.

Carefully, she tugged on it, a wordless offer to come closer if he wanted. Expression still trembling like he was somewhere on the verge of tears, he did shuffle over, huddling into her side closely enough he inadvertently elbowed her in the bands of bruising around her waist. She suppressed a wince, shifting to accommodate him more easily, and he took the opportunity to turn his face into her shoulder. His shoulders trembled.

He didn’t make any sound, but she could hear the way his breath was stuttering. He seemed a half-step from crying; too exhausted for actual tears, but upset enough that the motions of sobbing kept moving him anyway. A little awkwardly, she patted him on the shoulder with the hand that wasn’t still gripped in his, feeling very stupid for not realising earlier that this was what she should have been doing all along.

“…Sorry.” He mumbled thickly, and she wondered what he felt he had to keep apologising for. She was the one who should be apologising, but…

“Shush.” She told him, quiet and firm despite the aching of her heart. “Nothing to be sorry for.”

He shuddered again, and huddled a little closer. Tentatively, she put her arm around his back.

Callum spent the better part of the next ten minutes like that, breath hitching unevenly and his shoulders shaking. He never got quite as far as actual crying, but seemed gripped by its surrogate motions anyway. Steadily the shudders grew slower, and weaker, as if he was losing the energy for even that. After a while, he seemed to remember himself, and lifted his head for a moment. In his eyes she saw a faint, tired inkling of self-consciousness as he glanced between her face and her shoulder. “…’S okay?” He questioned.

Slowly, she reached out and smoothed her hand down the hair at the back of his neck. “It’s fine.” She murmured, and he took her at her word. His head lowered.

He still shook against her in stops and starts. It was slow, and faltering, and almost entirely soundless. He looked so terribly exhausted then, shadows dark beneath his eyes, that she thought it was more the tiredness than anything else that finally let him stop. He gradually went still, blinking blearily at the fire, and sighed quietly. Slowly, his eyelids began to flutter closed.

Ten minutes later, Rayla was almost completely certain he’d fallen asleep on her, somehow. It had to be the exhaustion to blame. She couldn’t imagine him managing it otherwise. Heart hurting for him, she made no attempt to move or dislodge him, and sat watching the fire for a long while.

She managed to avoid waking him for the next hour or so, even when taking a drink or tossing sticks into the flames. It felt like it was maybe eight at night by the time she heard movement from the direction of Ezran in the tent-layers, and turned her head to look over her shoulder.

The covers shifted. A low, unhappy sound emanated from within, followed shortly by quiet, broken whimpering. Crying in his sleep, Rayla guessed, and felt choked again with the weight of the guilt.

And then-

Callum, who’d not shifted or woken through a half-dozen incidents of her moving about, blinked his eyes open and lifted his head from her shoulder. “Ez?” He murmured, plainly disorientated, and in his uncoordinated attempt to look around ended up smacking his face straight into the scarves piled around her neck. “Mmph,” He expressed, surprised, and then he straightened up properly and squinted at her. “Rayla?” He questioned, plainly not really awake enough to have his wits about him.

“…You kind of fell asleep on me, for a bit.” She told him, voice quiet a low, her ear twitching in the direction of Ezran and his restless sleep. “Think you only woke up because-“ She hesitated, and glanced over.

“Ezran.” Callum processed, aloud, and struggled and stumbled his way through trying to get to his feet. “Yeah, I – I always wake up if he has bad dreams, I-“ He shook his head, and cut off the words. “I need to go to him.” He said instead, and finally managed to stand up. He’d taken a few wavering steps towards the covers when Ezran surprised them both by shooting upright, breath uneven, a few stray tears bright at the corners of his wide eyes. He stared uncomprehendingly ahead, too recently awoken at first to see them, and then finally his eyes seemed to focus on the shapes by the fire.

“…Callum?” He mumbled, voice strangely shaky. “Rayla? What…” He blinked at them, and then again more slowly as Callum lowered himself down at his side. He looked between her and his brother with a look of slow, terrible understanding. His eyes shuttered, and he lifted his hands up to his face.

“You sounded like you were having a bad dream.” Callum said, tentative, shifting over until he and his brother were side-by-side, pressed close against each other. “…Are you okay?”

Ezran didn’t answer for a long moment. His shoulders hunched and then shook, and he exhaled a thick-sounding breath. “I was dreaming.” He said in the end, almost listlessly, and lowered his hands from his face. “And then…I just…remembered, in the dream, that dad was dead. And it felt like a nightmare, so – I tried to wake up, but-“ He sniffed, and wiped his face on his sleeve. His breath shuddered again, his shoulders heaved…but then, instead of crying, he took a deep breath and seemed to force himself to steadiness. Finally, quiet, he finished the sentence: “But I woke up, and…it’s still real.”

Callum inhaled, a sort of pained breathy gasp, a flinch stuttering over his face. He breathed out shakily, then reached out to his brother on what seemed like reflex, pulling him close.

Ezran didn’t protest, but he did shudder at the contact, turning his face into Callum’s chest and sighing. “This is awful.” He said, very quietly. “I…don’t know what to do. I don’t know how I’m supposed to…I don’t know. I don’t know. I just..” His eyes slipped closed, and most of his face disappeared into his brother’s sweater. His next words were muffled in the fabric. “I’m so tired.”

“…You could go back to sleep?” Callum suggested, soft and unhappy, like he knew how inadequate a comfort that was for something like this. Ezran lifted his head, just enough to look up. Rayla saw the glitter of his eyes brightly in the gloom, too bright by far for how tired they were.

“So could you.” Ez said, plainly. His voice was strangely emotionless. “Would it make anything better?”

Callum flinched again. “…It might.” He said at last, after a long silence. “Sometimes, when things are awful…if you go to sleep, it can feel a bit less terrible in the morning.” Rayla looked at him, and remembered all over again that he’d already gone through something like this before. Years ago he’d lost his mother, and somehow had to live through the pain of that to a time where it started to get better. He’d had to suffer through that, just like he had to suffer through this now.

Rayla shivered, and thought of her own parents, and wondered if she’d have to do the same. She wondered if she, like them, was an orphan of this terrible war. She wondered if she should be mourning.

Ezran glanced out at the sky, dark and snow-torn, and then at the fire. “Morning’s a long way off.” He pointed out, in that same empty voice. “And there’s the fire-watch too.”

“You don’t need to be on the first watch, though.” Callum told him, leaning forwards just enough to rest his chin into his brother’s hair. “You could sleep a good while longer.”

Rayla expected him to shake his head, or disagree, or something. Instead he just blinked, tired and empty-eyed, and said “Okay.”

There was something horribly painful about that acquiescence. Callum seemed to feel it too. He closed his eyes, and pressed a kiss into Ezran’s hair.

Ezran didn’t move or speak as he was lowered back down and tucked into the makeshift bedding. He did reach for the egg, and Bait, pulling both of them against his chest. He laid open-eyed on his side for a minute or so, blinking slowly, then finally let his eyelids shut.

It was a while before he actually fell asleep. Fifteen minutes or more. Rayla sat silent, throat tight, and tended to the fire between glances back at them. Callum stayed beside his brother the whole time, near but not touching, a quiet weary presence in the dark beyond the fire. He was shivering a little by the time he returned, having waited long enough past Ezran’s sleeping that the air had chilled him through. He huddled by the fire and stared empty-eyed at the flames.

Rayla eyed him, and couldn’t think of anything to say. She didn’t think there was anything to say. So instead, she drew on her experience from earlier, and just…shuffled over to him, pressing in until their shoulders butted together. He glanced at her, exhaling slowly, and leaned back. He didn’t speak.

Time passed like that, with little interruption or change. She murmured to him at one point to suggest he go join his brother and sleep, but he just shook his head. So they remained there in silence and watched the fire together through the opening hours of the night. She warmed water periodically and got him to drink, and presented him with pieces of meat, and after a while even went to get some more to cook. It was something to do, after all.

A few times, Callum dozed off on her shoulder again. Never for long, but when she eventually did the same it was another matter entirely. She neither stirred nor dreamed, and woke a long while later to find herself covered in her cloak and curled beside the fire, a bag propped under her head as a pillow. Her body ached terribly as she finally moved, numb with cold and heavy with the pain of her bruises. Disoriented, she pulled on her sense of the Moon to figure out how long it had been. A little more than five hours, apparently.

She sat up, the cloak falling from her shoulders, and found Callum and Ezran sat together by the fire, very close by, the layers of the tent laid over their laps like unusually stiff blankets. They glanced over at her as she blinked at them, frowning. “I…fell asleep?” She concluded, bewildered that she’d not woken. They – or at least Callum – must have laid her down close to the heat of the flames, and put the cloak over her, and fed the fire through those hours…but she’d not stirred. It was unlike her.

“A good while back, yeah.” Callum agreed, voice a low hush, like he was still trying to avoid waking her. He nodded to the now-bare part of their shelter that had previously held the tent-layers. “It’s too cold back there now, so…I thought it’d be better to just let you rest here.”

“It’s too cold anywhere except right next to the fire.” Ezran said, and she saw that the egg was in his lap. That disconcerted her, but she supposed if Callum hadn’t complained it probably wasn’t affecting him too badly. “It woke me up. It was just…too cold to sleep. And then once I was here, Zym was too awake for me to sleep through.”

“You could try again now, though.” Callum pointed out, and received a very level stare for his troubles.

“No.” He said, very simply, like it was so irrefutable a decision it didn’t need to be reinforced with further words. There was that same blank apathy from before in his eyes, but with a little more animus now. He seemed vaguely unimpressed with his brother. “But you should.” He glanced sidelong at Rayla suddenly, and addressed her, saying “He’s not going to sleep, because he doesn’t want me to be awake alone. But you’re awake now. You can tell him to rest, finally.” There was a hint of asperity there, like he’d been trying for hours to change Callum’s mind without success.

She blinked several times to clear her eyes, then pushed herself all the way up, staring across at Callum, who was sat close enough that the bag she’d been sleeping on was against his side. He stared tiredly back, looking appallingly exhausted, with a resigned sort of expression that suggested he knew exactly how this was going to go. “Go to sleep, you dummy.” She told him, exasperated. “The idea of a watch is everyone gets some sleep, you know.”

He sighed. “I’m not sorry.” He said, a little indistinct, like he was exhausted enough to slur the words a little. “Wasn’t gonna leave Ez alone like that. Wouldn’t be right.”

Privately, she agreed with him. Leaving Ez awake alone would have been terrible, so she understood perfectly. But now… “I’ll take care of him.” She promised, phrasing it a little more directly than she might have if she’d been more awake. “So you can sleep. It’s fine.”

He blinked at her, looking painfully relieved. “…Good.” He mumbled, and slid his eyes sideways to the tent-layers, and then the fire. “Should I…?”

She nudged him aside and then pulled the cloak over. Ezran helpfully shoved the tent layers towards her, so she arranged those by the fire and then prodded Callum into place. “Down,” she ordered, and looking a little bewildered, he went. Soon he was curled by the fire in the spot she’d vacated, and she put her own cloak over him. He stared up at her with bleary eyes as she nudged the bag under his head. “Comfy?”

Somehow, he managed something close to a smile, face drawn and wan with exhaustion. “Mm. Very.” He sighed, eyelids fluttering closed. Then, by all appearances, he passed out within a few seconds.

“…He was so stubborn.” Ezran said, into the quiet left by Callum’s abrupt exit from consciousness. “I kept trying to get him to sleep, but he just…wouldn’t.”

Rayla glanced his way, then picked her way over to sit herself by his side. “Apparently you’re not the only one who can be stubborn when you want to be.” She said, a little dryly. She wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to tease him now, after – after he’d learned the truth she’d been hiding, and been hit by the grief of it, but…

He eyed her a little grumpily, but didn’t seem particularly bothered. “I guess.” He looked over at his sleeping brother, and his gaze gentled into something softer. Sadder, too. “…He didn’t have to do that, though. I was fine.”

Her brow furrowed. Slowly, she shook her head. “No, Ez.” She said at last. “It was the right thing to do. You…shouldn’t be alone right now.”

Ezran looked startled at that, eyes flying quickly back to her. He didn’t seem to know what to say for a few seconds, but then…quietly, he reached out to her, waiting until she consented to take his hand. He sighed, looking at their joined hands for a moment. She wondered what he was picking up from her now. Then, finally, his eyes slid up to hers again. “…You’re gonna take care of me, huh.” He said, subdued.

For a second, she didn’t know what he meant – then she remembered what she’d just said to Callum. Her shoulders stiffened a little, uncertainty gripping at her gut. She didn’t know what he thought of her now. Didn’t know what he’d accept from her. But… “Reckon I will, yeah.” She agreed, quietly. “If that’s okay.”

He watched her, silent and almost expressionless, then exhaled minutely. He shuffled into her side and looked away. “You said you’d be my sister, before.” He said finally, and let half-lidded eyes settle on the fire. “So I guess that’s fine.”

The words hurt in a way she somehow hadn’t anticipated. It felt like a stab through her chest; she inhaled sharply around it, touched and guilty and thankful at once. If Ezran felt any echo of it, he didn’t react. He just sighed, huddling against her, and watched the flames.

Full of enough nameless emotion that she couldn’t speak around it, that it choked her, Rayla stayed silent as well. The trust felt like more than she deserved. First Callum, and now Ezran – both of them had, despite everything, reached out to her for comfort. Like they wanted her. Like they needed her, somehow. Even knowing what she’d kept from them, and the role she’d played in their pain, they trusted her like this. It was…humbling. It made her heart clench with shame.

Deliberately – because she didn’t know how much of that Ez would pick up on, and he didn’t need that right now – she turned her thoughts aside and looked out at the storm.

As if reacting to her attention, the clouds flashed in the dark. The thunder that followed was faraway, five seconds removed from the light; the rumble was quiet. Already the storm was passing by. For all its noise and vicious cold, she didn’t think it’d hold them too much longer. Sometime soon, they’d have to leave this place, and deal with whatever waited beyond the blizzard. It was a relief, in a way. This was a place of grief and pain, and she wanted to be free of it. But, at the same time…they had so far to go. The mere thought was wearying.

Rayla closed her eyes for a moment, drawing on what resolve she could muster. It would be fine. Somehow. Within a day they’d have left here…and however long the journey to come really was, they’d take it one step at a time. It wouldn’t always feel like this. It would be okay.

Clinging to that thought, she wound an arm around Ezran’s back, drawing him closer in to her side. He went gladly, turning his face into the knit of her jumper and sighing softly.

Beyond their shelter, the thunder echoed further and further away, but the wind was as harsh a shriek as it had ever been. Its howl followed their vigil through the rest of the night.

 ---

End chapter.

Chapter Notes: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fjPSeB8RRkc_DOw9sxaN5xgY5LwddRV4?usp=sharing

Link to PIAJ chapter notes folder (Google Drive folder including worldbuilding, commentary, medical notes, research notes, and misc notes for all applicable chapters within this section)

This chapter's notes cover: No new worldbuilding notes this chapter. However, there are author’s notes on this chapter’s characterisation, development, and some of the work that went into it.

Timeline: https://docs.google.com/document/d/107eD8zmLAAFBWSOgsLyl8g4pAdQF4EgMh4rpN_m91U4/edit?usp=sharing Link to PIAJ Timeline Google doc ( to be updated as story progresses)

PIAJ Masterpage: https://tenspontaneite.tumblr.com/piaj Link to PIAJ Masterpage on tumblr (containing links to chapters, meta, art, Q&As, and resources) (Link may not work properly on mobile/app)

Author Notes: 

Happy 2021 everyone. We’ve not had the best start to the year, but with luck it’ll be less atrocious than 2020 overall.

Long chapter break again, as you may have noticed. If you don’t check my tumblr and therefore haven’t seen my various personal updates on there – since the last update, I started playing a new instrument, broke several personal writing records, and took around a 15ish day break from writing before Christmas. I had an extremely powerful writing hyperfocus across a good portion of October and November, and churned out a Large Quantity of writing in a different rayllum fanfiction that will not be published.

Personal records broken

Most written in one day: Previously 8200 words, now 9150 Fastest 50k: Previously 11 days, now 9 days

Fastest 100k: Previously unknown*, now 23 days Most written in one month: Previously 88k, now 120k

*The previous record for fastest 100k would have been when I first started writing this story, but I wasn’t keeping detailed records at the time so I’m not sure of the exact date I started writing. I’m relatively certain 23 days breaks it though.

This chapter was kind of a lot of emotional effort to write, not to mention representing the execution of some seriously painful story arrangement logistics, so comments are very much appreciated.

[thesummoningdark]

Okay, while I love everything you write I think for the DVD commentary I'd like a behind-the-scenes look into chapter 3 of At the Edge of the World. The entire fic is lush and gorgeous but I'm a sucker for the bits where Goody and Sam interact, and with the easy, sure steadiness that Billy brings to this experience that's so harrowing for Goody and would love your additional thoughts on either/both. -The Anon Formerly Known As Thrillingest

So this took forever. I’m happy to do more of these DVD commentaries (you can hit me up over on my writing sideblog!) if anyone’s interested, but I’d appreciate it if any further requests are for scenes rather than whole chapters. A chapter takes too long to do.

Anyway, answer below the cut~

When I originally set out to write this fic, the first neural handshake was what I’d actually been prompted to write (as a christmas present for @b-r-a-h iirc). It grew and took on a life of its own in the writing, but even so, that one scene was always going to make or break the whole fic. I spent a lot of time working on getting it just right.

It’s late enough by the time he finally leaves the kwoon that he doesn’t expect to find Sam in his office; he hesitates before going looking for him at all. But the prospect of another night stewing is unbearable. He doesn’t trust himself not to have lost his nerve by morning if he doesn’t commit to this now.

The shatterdome is quiet as he makes his way through. The overhead lights, motion-activated, flare one by one as he passes and settle into a steadily glowing trail behind him. It does nothing to quiet the sick unease simmering under his skin, feeling painfully exposed as his footsteps echo loudly in the silence of the bare corridors. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say. He can’t shake the conviction that there’s no choice he can make here which won’t turn out to have been a horrible mistake.

I was very pleased with the description of the shatterdome late at night, of how the quiet makes Goody feel so much more exposed and on edge. This opening part of the chapter was all about really showing his unease and how trapped he feels by the situation.

He hesitates in front of Sam’s door. Raises his hand; lowers it again.

He takes a deep breath, swears, and knocks.

These two lines work very well as punctuation to the scene, I think, slowing things down and underlining Goody’s hesitation. The short, sharp phrases are very different from how I normally write prose from Goody’s point of view - it’s actually a lot more like how I’d write Billy, oddly enough - but I like the sense it gives of these jerky, aborted movements and Goody second-guessing himself.

There are a few endless moments of silence before the sounds of movement emerge faintly from the other side of the door, a few muffled thumps and the quiet shuffle of footsteps. Goody hears the hollow clunk of the lock sliding back, but somehow it still startles him when the door swings open, his heart in his throat as he takes a step back and meets Sam’s tired eyes.

“I’ll do it,” he says in a rush before Sam can ask why he’s here. Sam regards him solemnly for a long moment before nodding.

“Good.”

“…I have some conditions,” Goody clarifies in a more measured tone, something sick and shocked crawling feverishly over the back of his neck as the magnitude of what he’s just agreed to tries to sink in. He pushes it away.

Sam sighs, and glances up and down the corridor before stepping aside. “Why don’t you come in.”

Writing this fic was the first time I really got to write interactions between Sam and Goody, and honestly, at first it was a little intimidating. Their conversation in the first chapter was the first time I’d ever written Sam period. I pretty much wrote this fic sequentially from start to finish, so by this point I was a lot more comfortable in their dynamic. I really love the ease between them, the sense of history in how well they know each other. A lot goes unspoken in their conversations because of it.

The Marshall’s quarters are larger than most others in the shatterdome, designed with the thought in mind that the occupant would be entertaining visiting dignitaries and the like. Still, it would take an impressive stretch of the definition to call any of the living quarters homey, and Sam’s have a certain barren neatness about them that speaks of a man who doesn’t own enough to clutter them, or spend enough time there to generate other mess. It’s very clearly a space where someone comes to sleep, not to live; there’s a distinct lack of personal touches. Save one.

Tacked to the back of the door is a single photo, unframed and a touch singed along one side, depicting a laughing family. Goody looks at it for a long moment before lowering his eyes out of some vestigial sense of respect. They all have their ghosts.

He sits on one of the spartan sofas, his gaze catching on the neat stacks of files spread out over the coffee table. Some he can identify; repair and maintenance records, duty reports, cadet evaluations. Others he doesn’t recognise at all. It’s truly startling, the amount of paperwork an organisation like the PPDC can generate in a day. “Has no-one ever told you it’s unhealthy to bring your work home with you?” he asks lightly. Sam snorts.

Some nice little set-dressing pieces of characterisation for Sam here. It doesn’t come up in any detail, but I imagine that he would have lost his family in a kaiju attack sometime before meeting Goody/joining the PPDC. That very clear sense of what he’s fighting for and why is something I consider to be pretty central to Sam’s character. I like having the old family photo there as a nod to his backstory - it crops up in the polyamory fill from KTT as well.

His room being fairly spartan is another hint at his character - very focused, all business - but it also handily doubles as a way of reinforcing the uncomfortable nature of Goody’s situation. The scene just wouldn’t feel quite the same if Sam’s quarters were cosy and welcoming.

“You mentioned conditions,” he says, sitting down opposite Goody and reaching for a gently steaming mug.

“Privacy,” Goody replies without hesitation. “And for it to be kept quiet. I’d rather not have an audience for this. And what a failed handshake would do to morale is the last thing the shatterdome needs right now.”

“We can arrange that,” Sam says, giving a nod, and Goody hadn’t even realised he was anticipating a fight until suddenly the tension is flowing out of him at the easy agreement. He sighs and sinks a little deeper into the sofa, scrubbing a weary hand over his face. Some part of him had half been hoping for an argument, for a refusal, but…here they are. For better or for worse, this is happening.

“For the record,” he says, “I’m still not convinced this is going to work.”

Sam considers him for a long moment. “So why agree?”

“Because…” Goody shakes his head, swallowing the sudden bitter taste at the back of his throat, some choking tightness wrapping around his chest. “Because in six months or a year, some green pilot pair riding a shaky drift are going to die in that damn jaeger.” He can see it clear as day from inside and out. The alarms screaming in the red-lit cockpit, the searing shock of the connection being violently severed; the roar of chaos over the radio back in the LOCCENT before everything goes abruptly, horribly silent. “I don’t need another what if to carry around.”

It was important to me in writing the first half of this fic to really work through Goody’s motivations: why he’s initially reluctant, and why he ultimately agrees. The progression from wanting to run from this to being willing to stand and fight even knowing how it’s likely to end for him is a parallel to canon I really wanted to keep. In a way this whole fic is about how he comes to that decision in this particular universe.

“I know the feeling,” Sam says quietly.

Goody gives him a thin, exhausted ghost of a grin. “Remember when we were young and bold and going to live forever?”

Sam snorts and shakes his head. “No.”

Have I mentioned that I really enjoyed writing their interactions?

Perhaps unsurprisingly he doesn’t sleep well that night. He can feel the enormity of the decision he’s just committed to hanging over him, a frozen tidal wave poised to come crashing down if he dares acknowledge it. He dozes restlessly and wakes often to the lingering claws of formless nightmares, a cold sweat on his skin and his heart beating too fast in his chest, fighting his way free of tangled sheets in a panic. The darkness of his quarters is heavy and close.

He finally gives up on sleep entirely sometime before dawn. A few of the night shift are haunting corners of the mess hall; he keeps his head down so as to not inadvertently provoke a conversation through eye contact as he pours himself a coffee and walks out again with tin mug in hand. On autopilot his feet carry him to the gantry behind the loading docks. The ocean is invisible somewhere in the inky blackness below, the steady crash of breaking waves drifting up out of the darkness. The wind plucks at his coat and snatches away the smoke from his cigarette as he exhales, watching clouds scud by above in the pale moonlight.

Slowly the sky starts to lighten, dawn breaking somewhere behind the clouds. Goody flicks away the spent end of his cigarette, sighs, and heads back inside.

I always enjoy writing Goody alone with his thoughts. As I’ve said before, writing from his point of view makes it easy to lend a poetic bent to the prose, and in this kind of context you end up with this lovely evocative melancholy air. Especially when coupled with the imagery of the cold, stormy sea that crops up so much in this fic.

He considers breakfast for token moment, but even the thought of food has the knots in his stomach tightening nauseously; he drops his empty mug off in the slowly-filling mess hall and instead traces the familiar path up to the kwoon. A few diligent souls are already warming up beside the sparring mat. Goody does his best to ignore them as he skirts the opposite edge of the kwoon and makes his way to the door of the attached office.

Billy is sitting at his desk, an empty mess hall tray by his elbow and a mess of papers spread out in front of him. A hint of surprise flickers across his expression as Goody enters.

“Twice in as many days?” He raises his eyebrows. “Did you make some kind of late new year’s resolution?”

Billy’s sense of humour delights me. It’s something we only really see brief glimpses of in canon, but I’ve really enjoyed fleshing it out a little more in writing him. It’s an interesting contrast to Goody, who tends to use a self-deprecating sort of humour to deflect; Billy uses humour in a more pointed way.

Goody chooses not to dignify that with a response. He takes a moment to close the door behind him before taking a deep breath and saying with no preamble, “I agreed to it.”

There’s a drawn out moment of silence.

“…you talked to Chisholm already?” Billy asks, carefully noncommittal. His expression is unreadable.

“Yes.” Goody pauses, his gaze dropping a little as he considers his next words. “….I’ve asked for it to be kept quiet.”

There’s the soft rush of a sigh from the other side of the table, followed by the creak of a chair; Goody glances up to see Billy standing. He circles around and twitches the blinds aside to look out into the kwoon.

“You still don’t think this is going to work,” he says.

Goody gives a small shrug. “I’d rather be prepared if it doesn’t.”

“And if it does?”

Even before they ever actually drift, Billy and Goody know each other very well, and it comes through in the way they talk to each other. Especially about important things. There’s a lot that goes unspoken because it’s already understood. They get straight to the point..which would be the case anyway, I think, but it’s particularly pronounced here because Goody is still in that mode of powering through as much of this as he can before he loses his nerve.

Something icy crawls down Goody’s spine. It seems a touch ridiculous, now he suddenly has cause to admit it aloud, but he honestly hadn’t given any thought to what would come next if they were successful. He hadn’t seriously entertained the possibility that they might be.

If somehow, against all reason and experience this works, if they make it through the joint drop sims and every other test and barrier between them and that conn pod…he’ll be a pilot again. He’ll be back out there facing the kaiju. Just the thought is enough to have the sick stirrings of panic clawing their way up his throat.

It made sense to me that, being so caught up in all the ways the handshake could go wrong and what happens if it does, Goody hadn’t even stopped to seriously consider the possibility that it might succeed, much less think about what he’ll do if it does. He can’t let himself think about what happens if they succeed, because that’s the only outcome worse than failure. If trying to drift again is bad, trying to pilot again is so much worse. He’s found himself backed into a catch-22 where there’s no good outcome, and a lot of what I was trying to do with the first half of this chapter was to really get across his sense of dread.

A firm hand lands on his shoulder and he starts, blinking wide-eyed at Billy, who’s suddenly beside him. His expression is calm, but there’s a spark of something in his eyes that Goody doesn’t know how to read; something implacable and determined, something fierce enough to be alien after so long without allowing himself the luxury of hope.

“Goody,” he says, steady and certain in a way that brooks no disagreement. “We’ll figure it out.”

Goody takes a deep, steadying breath and gives a shaky nod. Billy’s right. What happens will happen, and while he may lack Billy’s confidence that they’ll be equal to whichever challenge comes of it, he can’t let himself get tangled up in anticipating it when it’s going to take everything he has just to get through what’s coming next.

The next few days are nothing but the gnawing unease of anticipation, part of him desperate to have this over and done with, another hopelessly wishing he could put it off indefinitely. It’ll be a relief for it to be over, even if he already knows that relief will be tainted with an old, familiar kind of shame. But to get it over with, he has to get through it, and some nagging voice at the back of his mind is constantly whispering that maybe he can’t. He doesn’t know if he has another handshake left in him. He’s so, so tired of wondering every time if this trip down the rabbit hole will be the one that finally breaks him.

It’s not something I chose to dig into a lot in this fic, but this paragraph right here is actually a very important insight into where Goody’s at in this place in time. It’s not that he doesn’t want to move on from the trauma of losing his copilot, or that he couldn’t do it under the right circumstances, but he’s trapped in this cycle of having to relive it and be traumatised anew every time he tries to enter the drift. He’s in this limbo space where he wants to move on but he can’t. He’s not being allowed to.

In a way, his psychological situation parallels his real life one very neatly. He’s not a pilot any more, but his experience is too useful to waste, so he’s still a part of a jaeger program. The fight his copilot died in was a long time ago, but he can’t heal from it when he’s still having to relieve it. Both leave him in a situation where he can’t do anything to help himself where he is, but he can’t distance himself either.

More than anything else in those achingly empty days, he finds himself seeking out Billy’s company. Perhaps it’s a good sign that the undemanding quiet of Billy’s presence steadies him in a way that not much that doesn’t come in a bottle can these days. But some darker, more pessimistic part of him can’t help but wonder if this is nothing but him savouring the last days of this friendship while he can, before the handshake ruins it.

He feels a pang of guilt for it, occasionally. It seems disloyal even to entertain the thought that Billy wouldn’t be better than that. But he can’t bring himself to believe that anyone could be exposed to the wreckage of his subconscious, and not want to do the smart thing and distance themselves. Lord knows he would if he could.

This comes up a lot in writing their relationship from Goody’s point of view: that he feels it’s a disservice to Billy to think that their relationship is on such a shaky foundation, but he still can’t help but be afraid of it.

The few days they spend waiting seem to last an eternity. But when word finally comes that LOCCENT are ready for them, the only thought in Goody’s head is that an eternity wouldn’t be long enough to let him be ready for this.

The solid warmth of Billy’s shoulder against his is a comfort he desperately needs as they walk into the drivesuit room side by side to be met by a skeleton crew of technicians. He hasn’t set foot in this part of the shatterdome since that last disastrous failed handshake; just the familiar smell of relay gel and oiled metal is enough to have his heart beating faster, a slight tremor shaking through his hands.

Generally it’s a more relaxed process, preparing for a handshake. In a combat drop there would be alarms blaring, the countdown displayed on every screen, running out the seven minutes they have after an event to get into the cockpit and be ready to launch. There’s none of that time pressure here. No rush, although the technicians pride themselves on their speed and efficiency even when it isn’t a matter of life and death. And yet he knows he’s never been this nervous before a combat drop, sick with the anticipation of what’s waiting for him in the conn pod.

He closes his eyes and tunes out the low murmurs of the technicians, clinging to a fragile sense of calm numbness as he lets himself be turned and posed and strapped into the drivesuit. At least there won’t be an audience. Sam has been true to his word about keeping it quiet, hand-picking staff he trusts to run LOCCENT and the drivesuit room, and choosing a time toward the end of the nightshift when the few people still awake will be tired and incurious. However badly this goes, at least he won’t have to deal with stares and whispers following him around the shatterdome for the next week.

The technician at his shoulder gives his backplate one last solid thump and steps away. He sighs, gathers what little courage he has left, and walks forward.

If he thought the drivesuit room was sickeningly familiar, it’s nothing beside the conn pod, the lights of the control panels and the waiting cradle of the command platform. For an endless moment he finds himself frozen in the doorway. He’s never set foot inside Widow Rose before - she was built long after his last drop, and quickly filled by a copilot pair of her own - but knowing that doesn’t help. It’s still horribly, achingly familiar.

Billy nudges his shoulder gently, startling him out of his reverie. He swallows down the pathetic part of him that wants so desperately to find some way, any way of delaying this even if only for a second, and gives a shaky nod. This is happening one way or another. The least he can do is face it with what little dignity he has left.

Obviously any writer’s work is informed by their own experiences, but for me, this part was a lot closer to the bone than most others. In this case I was drawing on my own memories of having to go through with crash escape/sea survival training despite having a massive phobia of water. That feeling of forcing yourself to go through with something you’re desperately afraid of, how badly you want to grab any chance to delay it just a little longer…it definitely stays with you.

“Breathe,” Billy says, low and even. “You’ll get through it.”

“Said the butcher to the cow,” Goody mutters.

Billy huffs a laugh. “I’ll make it quick and painless.”

Despite himself, he can’t help but be lulled a little by Billy’s easy calm, even as he feels a pitiful stab of envy for it. He gives a thin, tired ghost of a smile and nudges Billy’s shoulder lightly in return. If he always would have had to find himself here again, he’s glad at least that it’s Billy here with him. He doesn’t know that he could have faced it with anyone other than Billy by his side.

I really enjoy writing these little exchanges that show how easily they play off of each other, especially in stressful situations. And the lighter flashes of humour that come from their conversations were something the first half of this chapter really needed. 

Harness set for test mode is flashing on the screens as they strap themselves in. Goody’s hands are shaking badly enough to have him fumbling the controllers as he threads his fingers through them, sick unease prickling feverishly over the back of his neck and cold sweat crawling down his skin under the drivesuit. He can feel his heart pounding in his chest, his breath coming fast and shallow; lord only knows what his vitals readout in LOCCENT must look like.

“Pilots on board and ready to connect,” Teddy’s voice filters in tinnily over the comms. Goody sucks in a sharp breath.

“Steady,” Billy murmurs.

“Initiating neural handshake.”

This is mostly an inside joke, of course, but the thought of Teddy as Tendo makes me laugh.

For an endless moment there’s nothing but the visceral rush of sense memory, too quick and tangled to make any sense of, the sudden feeling of everyone opening and unfolding, of the mind flowing out into the space suddenly opened to it. He hears his mother’s voice, sees a fleeting glimpse of her face from a child’s low perspective. Somewhere behind it is another woman’s voice, words in a language he doesn’t speak but somehow understands. A sharp stab of unease; a man’s voice this time, abrupt and angry. Helpless frustration. Silence.

There’s a mirror in front of him and bruises on his face and the taste of blood in his mouth, and pain comes tearing up his flank, alarms blaring in the desperate red pulse of the conn pod emergency lighting, and in the last screaming moments he feels something snap with a brutal whiplash leaving behind nothing, nothing, nothing—

There’s a lot going on here. Some memories, like the image of the red-lit conn pod and the loss of a copilot, are very clearly Goody’s. but a lot of the rest don’t distinctly belong to one or the other - it was a conscious decision on my part to leave it ambiguous which memories are coming from who. I wanted to run with the idea that a flash of memory from one would pull up similar memories from the other, and they’d keep feeding into each other. 

Off the record, the start and the end are Goody, and the middle (everything from another woman’s voice to blood in his mouth) is Billy.

Except that there isn’t nothing. Under it all there’s something solid, an unexpected rock to cling to and keep his head above water while he gasps for air. Just the shock of it, of being caught when he expected to fall, is enough to snap him out of the inward spiral for a precious, fleeting moment. It’s so very little, an eye in the storm of crushing panic. But it’s enough for something warm and steady to wrap in around him, and push back the howling dark.

It’s not the panicked clawing he remembers, the fingers of a doomed attempt to reel him in frantically scrabbling to find purchase on his spiralling subconscious. Instead it’s a mere brush of a touch, nudging him back toward an even keel so gently he might not have noticed it if he hadn’t been waiting for it.

That sea/storm imagery coming up again here. That second paragraph was actually the first part of this scene I wrote, and it’s definitely something I wanted to run with for the whole thing: the idea that rather than trying to keep too tight a rein like previous candidates have tried and failed to do, Billy has a knack for gently nudging Goody at the right moments to keep him from spiralling.

“Billy?” he mumbles uncertainly, his voice cracking. He’s here in the conn pod, but no, the alarms are silent. The lights are a calm, steady blue. The only pain is sense memory.

“Breathe,” Billy says again, just as calm and steady as the lights. “I’ve got you.”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath and slowly exhales. The rabbit hole is right there, aching emptily like a missing tooth, but no sooner do his thoughts drift toward it than they’re steered in another direction; a flashing school of fish easily startled into darting off by a dark shape slowly cruising by below.

With every step he expects to fall. But the connection stays steady, grounding him in the here and now. The jaeger is alive under his hands, and now he’s not so tangled in the cobwebs of painful memory…she feels different from Aura Blue. Lighter. And Billy is right there with him every inch of the way as he slowly settles back into the old familiar feeling of a jaeger’s heart beating with his, filling the drift with the undemanding quiet he’s always associated with Billy’s presence.

I liked the idea that once he’s been steadied enough to stop that spiral before it starts, Goody actually can more or less keep a handle on himself. Once again that reference to a light touch rather than a tight rein comes up, with bonus sea imagery - a flashing school of fish easily startled into darting off by a dark shape slowly cruising by below.

There’s definitely a turning point here: it’s the first time we really see Goody start to focus in on new things, things that are different, rather than the ways in which he’s reminded of painful memories.

Also fun fact, it took me for-fucking-ever to settle on a name for Goody and Sam’s jaeger. In early drafts it was referred to as “Ash” as a placeholder. It was that deleted scene that came out with Goody at the piano which gave me the inspiration to finally pick an actual name for it.

Tentatively he reaches out, testing the shape of their connection. There’s satisfaction radiating from Billy, pride tinged with relief, and— there, sitting at the centre of it all so deceptively unassuming that he scarcely recognises it for what it is, the cold certainty of what this means for them.

His own fears are skittering things, slipping away when his thoughts land on them in daylight; leaving only trails of lingering unease behind until they creep back up on him in the silence of his bunk at night. He half expects this one to do the same, but it doesn’t.

You’re afraid too he thinks, the realisation distant and dazed. He can’t see Billy’s smile, but he feels it. Grim amusement. Fatalism. Acceptance.

This was something I really wanted to put front and centre when they drifted: the idea that Billy knows what this means for them just as well as Goody does, but they handle that knowledge so differently that Goody almost doesn’t recognise it for what it is. Goody is the kind of person who tries to ignore his fears until he can’t any more. He’s not well equipped to get his head around the way Billy can look this in the face and accept it.

Goody says you’re afraid too, but he still isn’t quite grasping it. Billy isn’t afraid of this. Not in the same way Goody is. He knows that stepping into that conn pod together ultimately means dying there, but in his mind, he’s already weighed up the possibility and decided that it’s worth the cost. To paraphrase the original Pacific Rim: they’re all going to die one way or the other. He’d rather die in a jaeger.

Goody hasn’t accepted the inevitability of his own mortality; he’s still caught up in wanting to put it off for as long as possible. Billy has. It’s more important to him to die for something worthwhile than to avoid it for a little longer. When you get right down to it, I think this is probably the most fundamental difference in who they are are people.

The readouts on the screens are all in the green, the conn pod humming around them. “Full alignment,” Teddy’s voice comes again over the comms, static crackling on the line. “Handshake holding steady.”

“Congratulations,” Sam adds. To anyone else he might sound perfectly professional, but Goody knows him well enough to know what ‘self-satisfied’ sounds like on him. He’s sure that the fond exasperation that suffuses the link is wholly his, but the answering flicker of amusement is definitely Billy’s.

There is honestly no interaction between Sam and Goody in this entire fic that I’m not delighted by. There’s always such a sense of history and familiarity between them.

The process of disconnecting and powering down passes in something of a daze. It’s been so long since the last time a handshake ended in anything other than a spiral and an emergency shutdown for him that distance has made the standard procedure unfamiliar. It’s calm, matter of fact; clearly routine for everyone present but him. He barely has the presence of mind to follow what’s happening.

Fortunately, little is required of him other than moving when he’s told. In some kind of stunned trance he allows himself to be led from the conn pod and methodically peeled out of the drivesuit, the murmurs of the technicians and the voices from LOCCENT filtering over the radio so much white noise in his ears. […] 

It honestly wasn’t until I hit the end of the neural handshake scene that it really dawned on me how long it would have been since Goody actually experienced a normal disconnection. It isn’t something we see in Pacific Rim either, so unlike the initial connection (most of the procedure for which I lifted directly from the movie), I didn’t have anything to go on. Fortunately under the circumstances it made sense for Goody to be in a bit of a daze, so I was spared the necessity of getting into specifics.

[…]Everything seems distant and hazy and unreal.

Everything apart from Billy.

It’s momentarily disorienting to turn and see Billy facing him when instinct insists that they should be moving as one. Billy tilts his head, considering; Goody notices himself mirroring the motion half a heartbeat after he does it, the two of them still half in sync as they ride out the echoes of the drift. His heart is still racing, hardly able to believe that they really did it. He hadn’t believed it could ever flow that smooth and easy again. After all this time he’d forgotten what it could be like to slip into a solid, comfortable connection.

They’re close, he realises belatedly; enough so to look odd to outside eyes. So soon after the handshake his instincts don’t even question that of course Billy belongs in his personal space as much as he does himself. A day ago he might have felt exposed under that searching gaze. Now it’s nothing but familiar.

This part got written out of order very early on as well. The image of them moving together, still half in sync, was something I had very clearly in my head when I set out to start writing this, and I wanted to get it down before it faded.

“You could have said something,” Billy says after a long pause.

There’s no point in pretending not to know exactly what he’s talking about. A flush creeps up Goody’s cheeks, but he doesn’t lower his eyes. “It never seemed like a good time,” he replies with a small shrug.

It’s strange to think how recently the idea of having every fleeting want and idle fantasy laid bare would have been mortifying. Here and now, still half in the drift, the idea that Billy knows seems as natural and unremarkable as admitting it to himself in the privacy of his own thoughts. There’s no unease, no knee-jerk revulsion. There’s nothing but slightly startled curiosity, and a trace of what might be cautious interest.

I toyed with a few different ways of approaching this conversation, but ultimately I decided that it would have to be very matter-of-fact. How could it be anything else, when they’ve just been inside each other’s heads? It’s not something that’s explicitly explored in Pacific Rim, but I figured that for a little while right after drifting successfully, you’d still be thinking of your copilot as essentially the same entity as you. 

As it says above, the idea that Billy knows seems as natural and unremarkable as admitting it to himself in the privacy of his own thoughts. It couldn’t work any other way, really, or the whole premise falls apart a little. They both know exactly what they’re talking about, how they both feel about it…the fact that Goody now knows beyond question that while startled Billy isn’t opposed to the idea is definitely helping him keep his cool.

One of the technicians clears her throat, breaking their shared reverie, unfazed as only a long-term drivesuit tech can be when their attention snaps to her in perfect unison. She informs them that the Marshal is expecting them for a debrief, and politely ejects them from the drivesuit room to make the walk to LOCCENT.

“I knew you had another one in you,” is the first thing Sam says, smiling broadly.

Goody huffs a laugh and lets himself be pulled into a hug. “We’ll see,” he replies, noncommittal. “One successful handshake doesn’t mean a combat-ready link.”

Sam shrugs. “We’ll schedule a joint drop sim tomorrow. In the meantime—” He gives a wry grin. “—why don’t you give me five damn minutes to enjoy something going right for once.”

“Yes sir,” Goody replies with an entirely spurious dutiful air, throwing a mock salute.

“Very funny,” Sam says, a hint of a smile curling the corner of his lips. “Go on, get out of here. Both of you. Sleep. You’ve earned it.”

I find something about the phrase politely ejects them inherently hilarious. I also enjoy the image of the techs being utterly unimpressed by all this drift bullshit just through sheer exposure wearing the mystique off of it.

As previously noted, I love writing Sam and Goody interacting, and it was particularly nice to write this conversation. It’s the first one in this fic where they’re both happy and relieved, and it gives it a much lighter feel.

The first hints of the shatterdome waking are starting to drift through the air around them as they make their way back down from LOCCENT; internal lights slowly brightening, footfalls and distant chatter in the air as the oncoming day shift begin the sleepy shuffle from quarters to showers to mess hall. No matter what else may be happening, the rhythm of shifts and rotations carries stubbornly on like the slow beat of some colossal heart.

They get a few glances and mumbled greetings in passing, but no-one seems to pay them much mind. After the last few days of aching uncertainty, it’s an indescribable relief to walk through the halls of the shatterdome with the weight of the handshake off of his mind, with the lingering echoes of Billy’s utter self-confidence bolstering him. It’s a relief to find himself not avoiding anyone’s eyes.

It doesn’t feel real yet. Part of him remains convinced that some other stumbling block up ahead will catch them out, that they’ll trip over a reason why it can’t work when they’re least expecting it. He doesn’t know if he’s afraid of it or hoping for it.

The theme of people coming together to form some joint entity greater than the sum of its parts is, of course, a powerful recurring theme in Pacific Rim. It’s most overt in the copilot pairs, but I wanted to throw in these occasional reminders that even the jaegers themselves are just one part of the greater entity that is the shatterdome itself.

The end of this chapter is probably the lightest and most hopeful in tone of any part of the fic, but Goody is definitely still unsure if he’s really prepared for what success means for them. He doesn’t want to have to go back out there and fight. 

“You’re still not sure about this, are you,” Billy says aloud.

Goody gives a small shrug. “As I said to Sam, compatibility doesn’t necessarily mean a link stable enough for combat.” Keeping the drift steady in the calm, controlled environment of a test handshake is a very different thing to maintaining it under the stress and demanding neural load of combat.

“Tell me you don’t think I can hold it,” Billy says, flat and matter of fact. Goody sighs.

“No,” he says. “No, when you put it like that, I suppose I don’t doubt that you can.”

One of my favourite things about Goody and Billy’s relationship, the thing which drew me to them in the first place, is how much trust there is between them. Goody still isn’t sure that he can do this, but he believes completely that Billy can. And he’s willing to trust that Billy can steady him when he needs it.

As I think I’ve mentioned in previous replies, I do struggle with ending chapters sometimes. In this fic I actually did it differently to how I normally would: I wrote most of the fic as if it was a one-shot, and then went back and divided it up into chapters based on where it felt natural to pause. It was a much easier way of doing it, and I think the transitions from one chapter to the next after are definitely improved by it.

[0bsidian5ire]

Resurrect the Art of Allag (Reverse the Curse of Amon): Chapter 3

Chapter 3: The Eikon

Two days later, Kharagal teleported back to Forgotten Springs. There was one more thing she wanted to experiment with before she started testing out Ifrit-Egi in earnest and she was pretty sure she had to do it in Zanr'ak. She decided she'd gotten close enough when after two days of traveling north, the cliffs of Zanr'ak began jutting out of the Sagolii Dessert and stopped by one of the cliff faces that faced away from Zanr'ak. There she made camp and went over the data she'd gathered one last time.

She pulled out the old leather grimoire she had converted into a research journal of sorts and made sure the facts she'd collected from the Scions about primals fit with what how summoning arts interacted with them. On paper at least, they did. Now it was time to see how far she could push those facts.

Like she had in the Austerity, Kharagal felt out at the aether around her. Instead of tuning her aether to the land's, Kharagal pulled up Ifrit's geometry in her mind's eye and tried to see if she could find a piece of aether in the land that matched Ifrit's aether. What she saw almost broke her concentration. Bardam's Spear! It's huge. Encompassing all of Zanr'ak was Ifrit's geometry. Or at least, she thought it did. The geometry faded off past the range of her mental senses to the north without showing any signs of distorting. To the south, the geometry fractured into formless fire aether. Kharagal herself was in one of the boarder regions of the geometry. No wonder the Amalj'aa think Zanr'ak is sacred.

It was then what she was really seeing hit her. This is not good. One of the overarching themes of Xalea legends about interacting with the beings of the aetherial plane was that if a mortal was aware of them then they were aware of the mortal. When Ifrit had been in the corporeal realm, everyone could see him and vice-versa. Now that he was back in the aetherial realm, it was better not to get his attention.

Before Kharagal could stop concentrating on the aether around her, a deep voice crackled out of the aether of Zanr'ak along with a rush of oppressive heat. Well, this is a surprise! I usually have to search far and wide for those who can truly withstand my flame, but here comes one who has already proven they can face my strength. What do you seek of me?

Nothing. Kharagal was hyper-aware that here in the aether, Ifrit's strength wasn't limited by the amount of aether he had access to. I just wanted to see if an idea would work or not.

Ah. Ifrit's fire flickered closer. So you wished to see if your idea could withstand the fires of implementation. Did it?

Kharagal blinked. That sounded more like the bit of Ifrit-aether in her then the primal she and everyone else had fought. Maybe this aetherial Ifrit liked making things other then itself strong too. A little too well, I think. I didn't mean to actually find you. I wanted to see if I could find a primal's aether in the world if I knew the geometry of it already.

Ifrit laughed around Kharagal in a scattering of sparks. So your idea is a strong one. That is good. Listen closely. You said you can know what a primal's aether looks like. If you know what to look for in the atherial realm, you will find me and my kind everywhere there is aether that looks like us. We are beings of aetherial realm and corporeal realities such as distance matter little to us when we are in our native realm.

Kharagal stared at Ifrit. Why are you telling me this?

Ifrit snorted out a plume of smoke. It has been long since I have rewarded one who has honestly earned their strength. And there are very few souls as strong as yours.

What do you mean by that?

The fire stopped flickering for a moment and then flared back to life. You do not know? The Source of Light does not make gaps in the walls of the souls of weak individuals. Even though another's aether could never fill your soul, it was still you and your companions' strength that broke my hold on the corporeal realm and it takes no small amount of strength to accomplish that. Ifrit's voice was growing fainter. Just know that if we meet again in the corporeal realm, I will be sure to use more of my power. Once the alloy has been proven pure, there is still the need to sharpen it. The heat rolled back, signaling Ifrit's attention was elsewhere.

Kharagal wasted no time in yanking her concentration out of the ather before anything else could happen. She became aware of her body all at once and lost her balance, almost cracking her head on the ground before she caught herself.

"Kharagal," she told herself as she struggled to her feet, "this is the kind of thing Dad said would get you killed if you poked it." I am so lucky nothing worse happened. Nothing worse then getting a primal's attention anyway. She quickly gathered up the remains of her campsite and teleported back to Limsa Lominsa. Kharagal did not want to stay any longer then she had to in what was clearly Ifrit's territory.

After shaking off the shock of traveling from a desert to an ocean in a matter of seconds, Kharagal sent herself though Limsa's aethernet to Mist where her best friend Carmen and her boyfriend, Alex had a house. They had given her a standing invitation to use one of their spare rooms if she ever needed a place to stay. It turned out neither of them were there, which wasn't unusual. When they weren't working with the Scions, Carmen was usually out on Rouge's Guild business and Alex helped the Adventurer's Guild. Kharagal took advantage of the empty house and helped herself to a bath and food from the kitchen before curling up with a detailed analysis of Bio spells in her room. It made for nice light reading.

Several hour later, she was interrupted by Carmen. "So, you're back," said the rouge. Kharagal looked up and saw Carmen leaning against the door frame, sharpening her fingernails with a knife. "Want to go with me to Naldiq & Vymelli's?" said Carmen. "I need to commission some custom daggers."

"Yeah, that sounds great," said Kharagal. Doing something as mundane as ordering daggers with Carmen sounded good after all the esoteric things she'd been up to for the past few days. She put the different variations of the Bloodborn version of Bio II she had been working on and the two women teleported to Limsa.

When they got there, they skipped the aethernet in lieu of walking down Hawker's Ally. "Can't believe I'm saying this, but it feels so good not to not be walkin' around invisible," said Carmen. "This last week was crazy for even me."

Kharagal laughed. "Define crazy." Running into a defeated primal while feeling out aether was hard to beat.

"Well..." Carmen started winding her short honey-blond hair around her finger. "Jacke got word that somethin' weird was goin' on down in Wineport. Turns out we have Domen ninja in Raincatcher Gully. They're tryin' to find another ninja that betrayed them to the Empire."

"Did they show you any of their magic?" Kharagal joked. Confederate and Hingan stories featured ninja with the most outlandish powers, from making clones of themselves to summoning fire-breathing frogs out of thin air.

"Even better; they're teachin' it to me." Carmen's face was all smiles.

Kharagal stared at her. "Wait, they really can do magic?"

Carmen laughed. "Don' know if it's magic like we know it; you'd be a better judge o' that. But I can tell you I can summon a shuriken out o' thin air and throw it at someone for some real damage."

"I'll believe it when I see it." Creating effects out of aether was one thing, it was a simple energy conversion (conceptually anyway). Creating objects would be something else entirely. If such a thing existed of course.

"Fair enough." Carmen elbowed Kharagal. "And what about you? You've been out o' contact for half a month. I know you've been up to somethin'."

"Well, I've been..." Kharagal stopped at that and thought. There was being stupid and then there was being really stupid. Mentioning primals in the middle of Limsa Lominsa was being really stupid. "I'll tell you what I've learned when you show me that shuriken you can summon."

"Don' think I'll believe you?" Carmen teased.

"No, it's just the kind of thing that's really easy to take the wrong way if you don't know enough about it." Kharagal gestured at the busy marketplace around them.

Carmen nodded. "Got it, but you are goin' to tell me later." She gave Kharagal her I-know-where-you-sleep look. Kharagal laughed at it and Carmen joined in with her. They spent the rest of the trip to the Maldiq & Vymelli's gossiping about the latest hauls to come into Limasa whether they came through Melven's Gate or not.

The smithy was warm and loud with the clang and taste of metal in the air. Kharagal leaned against a wall while Carmen talked with one of the smiths about the pair of steel daggers she was commissioning. Out of curiosity, Khargal felt the aether around her. There was the water aether of the sea rolling beneath her, wind aether whipping around the spires above her and and around her in the smithy itself was fire aether shaped like... What are you doing here?!?

I told you distance mattered little to us. Ifrit's voice was a lazy smolder out of the main furnace. And this forge is one of the best I know of. It would be more difficult for me not to be here.

"You okay?" Carmen lightly shook Kharagal's shoulder. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

Kharagal shook her head to clear it. What was she supposed to say? That Brithael and H'naanza kept such a good forge that Ifrit basked in its aether when he wasn't summoned? "I... I'm fine. I just spaced out."

Carmen narrowed her eyes at Kharagal in her I-know-when-things-aren't-adding-up look. "Guess that means we'll be goin' back to the house 'stead of stayin' in Limsa late?"

"Yeah, that would be a good idea." Carmen probably really wanted an explanation now. It would be better to get it over with sooner rather then later. It also meant Kharagal would more then likely get to see how Carmen did that shuriken trick of hers.

When they left, Khargal gave the furnace one last look. Seeing Ifrit in it had been a a shock. On further review it really shouldn't have been. If Ifrit was shaped like a furnace, then that was where he would naturally turn up. Well, not in every furnace... He said this one was one of the best forges, so that means there's forges that aren't as good. So he's probably not in those. Wait... If Ifrit's in furnaces because he's shaped like one and there's multiple primals... what are they usually in when they aren't summoned?

"I know that look," Carmen said. They were almost to the atheryte plaza. "What'd you figure out this time?"

"Why I want to send primals to the Lifestream." It was true. Not only was the Lifestream where they were supposed to be, but it was the only way to get their aether for the Austerity ritual.

"Other then them tryin' to temper us?" Carmen raised an eyebrow at that.

Kharagal nodded. "Even if they didn't try tempering people, I'd still want to send them on." At Carmen's look she added, "It's related to the other thing I'll tell you about."

"I'll be waitin' on that," Carmen said and used the athernet to travel to the residential district.

What is it with rouges and dramatic exits? Kharagal laughed to herself and reached for the aethernet. It was time to figure out what she was going to tell people about Ifrit-Egi. At least she was starting with her best friend who understood that some things didn't need to be shared with everyone. Hopefully Carmen could help her figure out what she didn't have to tell everyone else.

Author’s Notes: In both 1.0 and 2.0, Ifrit knows that there's primals other then him in existence and that there's some people he can't temper because Hydalean is messing with them. Given that it is canon that primals are in the aetherial sea when they aren't summoned, I've got headcanon that's where he learned all that stuff.

It's a known fact that the desire of the people summoning a primal has an effect on how the primal behaves. Which is the canon reason why the primals behave differently in 1.0 vs 2.0. Interestingly, several of the primals behave counter to how the myths about them say they should act...

Originally posted here.

← Ch 2: The Ritual