#where lup is still missing but they just erase the relics instead of Everything

[barry-j-blupjeans]

I think I already sent one in, but here's another one if you don't mind!

44. "That is my choice! My decision to make, not yours! Not anyone else’s! Mine!"  and Taako and Lucretia? :)

I just feel like having my heart shattered again lol

44. "That is my choice! My decision to make, not yours! Not anyone else’s! Mine!"

((random dialogue prompts here - still accepting!!))

--

Lucretia's bed, which usually felt plush and soft, felt like laying on a pile of rocks. The sheets she had loved a few weeks ago were too itchy against her skin and she couldn't position her pillow correctly to actually get any sleep. She had tried stripping the bed, washing everything, switching things around, but it was no use. It wasn't as much as a physical problem, more of a mental one.

Her room was too dark. Lucretia wasn't afraid of the dark, but it was unsettling. The ship's hum was too loud. For the first time in over fifty years, the Voidfish's tank was gone. No bubbles, no lights, no tendrils pressing against the glass, eager to play instead of sleep. Last week, they had moved it into Magnus's room because- because-

Because Lucretia had tried to erase her family's minds. And she had failed.

No. No, she hadn't failed. Her original plan was near-sighted and not thought through well at all. To be completely honest, Lucretia was glad Magnus had walked in as she stood up from her desk with her journal, and not when she had already gone through with everything. Seeing Magnus's face- hopeful, just there to cheer her up, just there to comfort her- had thrown a wrench in her idea that she had carefully tip-toed around. Which is that her family's opinion on all this mattered just as much as hers did, if not more.

Lucretia turned on her lamp and sat up in bed. There was a big empty space where the tank used to be. Along the other wall, the bookshelf that she had carefully combed through was empty.

They trusted her to redact the Relics just fine. But this time, Davenport had sat through it with her and they both ignored her tears as they edited everyone's personal information back in. Last Wednesday, the world below had forgotten all about the Grand Relics. Her family's memories remained.

The hallways of the Starblaster were quiet, but not empty. In the common area, Taako and Barry sat, pouring over more maps and plans and attempts. A terrible part of Lucretia still tried to imagine giving Barry and Taako a break for the ache of it all, but it shut up quickly as they turned her way at the sound of her footsteps and paused.

"I just need some water," Lucretia said. Brave, brave. She had faced a year alone, she could face her brothers. "I'll keep out of your way."

"Good," Taako said, turning back to the maps. Barry didn't say anything, but he turned away, too. Lucretia hurried into the kitchen. She got a glass of water, and then another, even though neither of them made her mouth any less dry. She was sipping on a third when she heard Barry say something about needing to go to bed. Taako responded with something she couldn't hear.

Lucretia washed her cup and set it to dry before going back out. Taako was still sitting there, writing something down in a notebook. He didn't look up.

"Taako..." Lucretia started, not even sure where she was going with it.

"Don't," Taako said tersely.

"I'm sorry," Lucretia said. Taako's shoulders were hunched up like he was scared of her. Or angry at her. She didn't know which one would be worse. He still didn't look up.

"I get it," Taako said, pulling his notebook closer.

"I'm going to bed," Lucretia said needlessly.

"Great," Taako responded. She went around the edge of the room, giving him a wide berth.

"I'm sorry," Lucretia said again at the entrance to the hallway. The grip Taako had on his pencil tightened.

"You don't get to decide my life, Lucretia," he said, finally glancing up at her. His lower lip was trembling slightly. "You don't get to decide when I get to take a break. And you definitely have no say on if I get to remember my sister."

"I know," Lucretia said, voice wobbling a little. "I'm- I'm so sorry, Taako-"

"That's my choice," Taako said tightly. "My decision to make, not yours, not anyone else’s. Mine. Capiche?"

"Capiche," Lucretia repeated. He looked back down at the maps, waving her away. She said a quiet, "good night", and scurried back to her room, throat tight. The water hadn't helped at all.

Her bed was the most uncomfortable thing she had ever slept on that night, but Lucretia doubted that laying on a bed fit for a king would have made her sleep any better.

[skygemspeaks]

what about a taz birdswap au where barry’s the one who disappeared and got sucked into the umbra staff?

taako sees how his loss tears his sister apart, how the consequences of sending the relics into the world is eating his family from the inside out

and so he decides to take matters into his own hands

“i can make it easier for you,” he says to his baby sister. his other half. his heart. “do you trust me?”

“more than i trust myself,” she replies.

taako smiles, allows himself one last kiss on her forehead before he has to say goodbye. he doesn’t know how he’ll survive without her, but he knows she’ll be just fine on her own. she’s always been the more charismatic one, the magnetic one that people couldn’t help but love.

so he sets them all up in their new lives.

lup with her travelling cooking show (”light it up with lup”), magnus in the peaceful town of raven’s roost, merle in a pannite beach dwarf community.

davenport disappears before taako can present him with his own ship, an echo of the starblaster, with all the supplies and crew he needs for his first voyage. it causes taako no end of anxiety over the years, wondering what’s happened to his beloved captain. but he’s always been frighteningly intelligent and capable, taako knows he’ll be fine on his own. (it doesn’t stop taako searching for him every chance he gets).

he tries to set lucretia up in a job at a beautiful little library in neverwinter, but even in those first few moments after the voidfish has erased a century’s worth of memories, she’s startlingly lucid.

she listens to his explanation about her childhood in this bustling town that seems so foreign to her, looks up at the building where he says she’s about to start her dream job, and when he turns to walk away, she calls bullshit on him.

taako realizes in that moment he’s underestimated her. he’d assumed she would be the same timid, shy lucy he’d met at the ipre campus so very long ago. but there’s still echoes of the baby sister he’s come to adore over their time together, the shiny spine she’d developed in her year alone after the judges.

so against his best judgement, he lets her stay with him. he doesn’t inoculate her, because he knows how the absence of their family would gnaw at her heart, the loneliness it would bring. instead, he tells her an edited version of events. he tells her the “official” story about the relics and the red robes.

and for the next decade, the two of them try their very hardest to collect the relics.

they fail.

they establish the Bureau of Balance, and even with the fancy moonbase, the private army of seekers and regulators and reclaimers, they still can’t succeed in collecting any of the relics.

so nearly one year after its creation, taako gives in to lucretia’s gentle suggestions to bring magnus, merle, and lup into the fold.

he sits in his throne room, wearing the ornate robes of Master Director, a delicate cloth veil obscuring his face from the little party of three that stands before him.

“Welcome, the three of you, to the Bureau of Balance,” he says and notices Lup flinch violently at the sound of his voice.

he can see the confusion in her face, the way she takes an involuntary step forward as if drawn to him. and it hurts him. it leaves him so devastated he can barely keep it together. and it’s lucretia, his dear little lucy, who notices. she herds the three out of the throne room and finds someone to show them to their dorm rooms. and she’s the one that comes back to him afterwards and helps put him back together again.

he tries to keep himself distant from the three of them in the coming months, because he can’t bear to see the way lup is drawn to him, the way she seems to know every single one of his tells, even though she doesn’t remember a thing about him.

but he can’t bring himself to do it. he’s missed them all so much, and no matter how much it hurts afterwards, he keeps finding excuses to spend time with them.

this continues until they finally recover the last relic, the animus bell.

this continues until davenport sneaks onto the base with them, somehow immune to the voidfish’s powers, and breaks into his office, inoculating the three of them with junior’s ichor.

and when taako stumbles upon them in his office, sees them all reeling as a century of memories rush back into their minds, there’s a part of him that feels nothing but vicious relief.

then lup looks up at him with tears in her eyes, and anger on her tongue.

she lunges at him with a wordless roar, tearing away his veil and drinking in the sight of her twin for the first time in a decade.

“how DARE you!?” she demands, fingers tangled in his hair, holding his head in a vice-like grip as she forces him to look at her. “you took EVERYTHING from me!” she screams, her voice breaking as she looks at her big brother.

he breaks down sobbing, his hands going up against his will to cover her hands with his.

she pulls him into a crushing hug, sobbing into the crook of his neck. “you can push everyone else away,” she tells him. “but not me. never me.”

“i just wanted to make it easier for you,” he protests with a sob.

“you’re my heart, koko,” she says. “how could i ever survive without you?”

[the-ipre]

Maybe an AU where Davenport wipes everyone’s minds instead of Lucretia?

- Davenport is the captain, and he shouldered responsibility for a hundred years. He started off as a boss and then become a part of the family, but at the end of the year he was still the one they trusted to drive the ship. He was still the one who could finalize votes, and there were times that he certainly took matters into his own hands. It wasn’t an obsession with control or anything like that; instead, he knew that he could fix things, and he had a responsibility to. He was their captain, he was the one who interviewed them for this mission, and it was his job to make things right after a war broke out on the world below them.

- Fisher didn’t trust him as much as it did Lucretia, and he didn’t have her way with words either, but he was used to working through problems. The entire past hundred years had been a series of problem after impossible problem, and when it’s crunch time, Davenport is willing and able to do what it takes. He composes an opera of their adventures, capturing the essence and the bonds but still trying to leave out what made those individuals who they were. It’s tough, because so much of who they became over that century were due to the people they were around, but he kept going. Always, he kept going.

- He wrote letters to them all, a last thing to erase to cut himself off from their memories. For Merle, a love letter, mentioning the moments of their first kiss, and the first time that Merle broke down Davenport’s walls and made him laugh, and the first time that Merle made up his own rules to their card game and Davenport let him because in that moment he had realized that he had fallen in love. To Barry, it was a sincere thank you note, detailing the ways that he could never have made it through if Barry wasn’t there to figure out the why while Davenport worked at the how, touching on one of their journeys to get the light that allowed them to both let their walls down and be honest about the strain they were under. For Taako, he wrote down the cure for scurvy, and the memory of the time that Taako had made him soup and left it outside his door when he was sick, and even though Taako denied making it he knew that the only person who walked around that late at night with those light of footsteps was Taako. To Magnus, he left the countless rescues to be consumed by the Voidfish, along with all of the pranks that Magnus had pulled and Davenport had turned back on him, breaking down that wall between boss and uncle-figure.

- Writing to Lucretia was difficult, because who would he write it to? The quiet girl who he had picked to go on a mission to the stars, who had written down the world even as it fell around her, who stayed up with her veins full of caffeine because she had to remember their plane, she had to write it down so that they wouldn’t be forgotten? Or would he write it to the woman who had lived longer than she ever should have, who had survived against all odds for a year by herself, who had made her relic a way to protect and defend, and who wanted to carry the world’s weight on her shoulders? In the end, it is both: he honors who she has become, but remembers where she came from. At the end of it all, he doesn’t know who she will be, but at this point he is just writing frantically. The others have heard him practicing his songs, and some of them grow suspicious. He has to fix this.

- To Lup, he writes of her bonds. The duet with Barry and their eternal love story, her refusal to back down and stand idly by while a world is killed, and of course, Taako. The other half of her heart, and it breaks his own to know that this will be lost, but it is something that must be done. He bundles up the letters, tied with string, and stacks them on top of the opera that he wrote. Dropping the papers into the Voidfish’s tank to disperse and be erased, he begins to sing.

- Back at the Legato Conservatory, Lucretia did not get splashed with water, and she was never inoculated, and so when those papers are absorbed into Fisher’s jellycap, she forgets. She is with Magnus, and he is carving while she is painting, and for the moment they have found peace. Lup is missing and the world below them tears itself apart, but together they carve, and they paint, and then there comes a moment where Lucretia doesn’t know what she is painting. She turns her head, and doesn’t know the man next to her, and when he looks up, there is no look of recognition in his eyes. Magnus is left in Raven’s Roost, where he will find and lose yet another family, and Lucretia is placed in Goldcliff, where she will write for a newspaper and once again tell other people’s stories.

- Taako goes to talk to Barry on the deck of the ship, looking for Lup, and then everything falls apart. They don’t know the man across from them, and they don’t know the woman that they were just talking about, and Barry is killed as he is thrown from the deck of the ship, and Taako is left standing in the middle of the sky as everything turns to static. This story is the same. Taako is given a stagecoach and a show, and he is given fame and fortune and is always so alone. Barry would have become a professor, Davenport had the teaching job all lined up, but he was unable to control everything, despite his best efforts. Barry continues searching for Lup, and he continues not finding her, and he relentlessly keeps searching.

- Back, many cycles before this day, the crew had been daring each other to take a drink from Fisher’s tank. Davenport had walked up, taken a sip, and left amongst assorted exclamations. On the day this story kicks off, Davenport once again stands in front of the Voidfish’s tank, except this time the only noise is his singing, until the door opens behind him. Merle had heard his partner’s voice and had come in to see how this secret project was going, but as the gnome in front of him turned around, he couldn’t recognize his face. There was a mustache, and eyes that were brimming with tears, and it was as familiar as his own face, but he didn’t know who it was. For once in his life Merle is speechless, and in that moment Davenport decides to be selfish. He had found a community of beach dwarves, one that would certainly welcome Merle among them, but he couldn’t do that anymore. He was cutting away so much from himself, and he had to let himself be selfish, in just this one thing. In the end, Merle became his right-hand command, and while he was more aware of himself than Davenport would have been if he had been erased, there was always something missing. He defined himself by the people around him and the joy that they brought, and when those people were gone he lost something.

- From the start Davenport builds an organization, because that is what he is good at. He can fight toe to toe with any magic user on the planet, but he has always been a delegator on some level, and despite his best efforts he still has something to lose. Merle was told that he had gotten a job that he had applied for, one meant to help save the world, and even if he couldn’t know what he was saving the world from he still agreed. His memory was spotty enough that he didn’t know if he had applied for a job or not, and something about this gnome made him want to trust the guy. At least he doesn’t have to file much paperwork, though, and most of his job seems to be chilling on an unanchored island and acting as HR for all the folks that get hired to do…something that he doesn’t quite know.

- Lucretia and Magnus are both in their thirties when they meet up with Taako to take a certain job, and none of them know each other but they can fight together as easy as breathing, and they can lean on each other even easier, and so they take the job with these strangers. Taako finds an umbrella, the Barry Bluejeans that they met along the way is burned to the ground along with the town of Phandolin, and the three of them are brought to a strange drifting island via flying boats summoned by a lizardfolk woman who introduces herself as Carey. Their story is the same, but shifted to the side just enough that it is their own.

- Merle greets them, and now he finally knows what the organization is searching for, and he doesn’t get why he wasn’t told until now, but he keeps trundling along. He bonds quickly to the three new recruits without knowing why, and when they meet Davenport (who stands on a dias so as not to be loomed over by all the taller folk) he welcomes them to the Institution for the Possession of Ruthless Echoes, or the IPRE for short. They are in search of relics that are little more than thumbprints on the public conscious, and they hope to make the world a better place by confiscating these weapons. Davenport hopes to reconstruct the light and keep running, because running is all that he knew for so long, but as the years pass he doesn’t quite want to run anymore.

- The reclaimers reclaim relics, and Merle works with Davenport, and the first time that Davenport finds himself laughing at something Merle said he feels a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He built up walls, and he did his best to make this different than before, but he can see the cycle happening again. His walls come down, and he laughs, and they kiss on the beach of this floating island, and Davenport’s surety that they will leave this world afterwards isn’t quite so sure anymore. He doesn’t know what he is going to do when the time comes that they all get their memories back, because at this point he knows that it will have to happen someday, but he keeps pushing that back.

- When the Hunger returns and their memories come flooding back, when a world is sung an opera of seven fools who tried their best to save plane after plane, when they hear the six letters to six almost-lost members of a family that was torn apart in an effort to do something good, there is another song lying underneath it all. A repeating seven notes, a note for each bird and two words for the lost child who allowed the Starblaster crew to come back together, and it pulls together the scattered sheets of paper like thread. This, too, is a story that we all know: the people of Faerun are afraid, and then they aren’t, and then they take up arms to protect their homes. The Hunger is cut off from the inside, and the seven birds don’t have to keep running. Finally, they can find a home.

- The others are betrayed, understandably, but most of them do not hold grudges. They may hurt at what was lost, they may hurt at the fact that their captain didn’t trust them to help him with this terrible undertaking, but they stop running. They are a family, and this is a home that they have fought for, and they can not hold grudges in this last life that they will have.

- Davenport is prepared for Merle to…well, he doesn’t know. Turn away? Break things off over what happened? Move on like nothing had happened? Merle, always one to surprise him, does none of those things. He doesn’t run, or separate, or ignore. He remembers both times that they fell in love, after all, and he can certainly admit that what Davenport did was kind of fucked up, but they lived through a hundred years of fucked up. They still have many years left, and he doesn’t want to waste them. All he asks is that Davenport will meet him halfway, that when he stands with a hand outstretched Davenport will take it, and that they can finally, finally make a home. Davenport agrees, of course, and they build a house on an island that never sees the same beach twice.

- An IPRE is built on this planet, the Institute for Planar Research and Exploration hoping to bring Faerun into a new era of technological advancement, and when Davenport gets a letter asking him to take a leadership position he tears it up. He’s good with his life as is, thank you very much, and he’s had enough time in charge. For now, he just wants to live on a beach, go boating when he pleases, and grow old with one Merle Highchurch.