Chapter Text
They often say no one truly made it out of that final battle alive.
A thousand people ready to die. A hundred unprepared to live.
Everyone came out of the battle with their minds scattered, their hearts empty. The community fostered rotten in their absence, and they returned to a past with no one left to fill it. There was a deep festering guilt in the roots of many. For every life they themselves mourned was a life they had taken away from another.
Where do you go when everything you turn to is tainted with the memory of another? How can you possibly stand on the grounds your deceased once trod? You helped with the straps of their armour, you kept them company while they sharpened their blade. You don’t deserve to be here. You don’t deserve to be anywhere for that matter.
The world swallows you whole and spits you out as something different. A metamorphosis of the survivor. Are your teeth sharper? Is there blood caked beneath your nails? You will not gain salvation in your guilt. Weep all you please, but there is no heaven that will open its gates to you.
The earth itself is still beneath his feet. The grass dare not move, the leaves dare not flutter. The whole world sits in silent anticipation, a choir in waiting. A knowledge forbid from mortal eyes. But they all know they will not have to wait long. He will live forever very very soon. In a few minutes in fact, or perhaps at the very edge of eternity. Time matters not to entities who are waiting. There is simply the distance between then and forever.
He stands on the beach as he does every night, except this time, the stars seem to sing to him. They whisper goodbyes, they lighten ever so slightly, to guide his journey. He blinks, hoping they will offer reason to such a solemn departure. Where are they going? Or perhaps it is himself that is leaving.
The world shifts ever so slightly, he stands in the sky, amongst the stars, deep within the earth, in caverns, cities, worlds, dimensions, he becomes nothing and everything all at once and the world stops
for
just
a
moment
in
time.
He wakes up, and for the first time in a while his monotoned world has light.
The grass beneath his feet is soft, the trees serene, flowers scatter the land blowing softly with a calm he hasn’t noticed in the wilderness for a long while. A world that does not know war, does not know mourning.
It is a scarily familiar sight, Saps thinks, taking in the scenery. The trees, the layout, even the direction of the sun matches picture-perfect to his very first moment so very long ago.
He decides he must be dreaming.
His dreams always get worse when he wanders off course, glitchy and static as he moves away from his mind's desired pathway. Instead he walks the same direction as before, letting his feet guide his path from memory.
The bark of the trees seem to lean into his touch like an old friend, and he finds it difficult to sever such a thing, so he decides that this alone will be one moment left untouched. The mushrooms are gentle beneath his fingertips, malleable beneath his fingers, soft indents marked upon them from hands that have learned to hold on and never let go.
He does not know if this dream will slow or quicken time on his way to the mine. He hopes he wakes up before he even reaches it. His worst dreams are always the ones with his old friend in them. Which is most of them.
A rabbit sniffs at his shoes and hops away, a small beetle clings to the cuff of his pants, silently climbing upwards to higher ground. The grass squirms beneath his feet as he walks across, and he stares at the sky above him. The stars are not visible yet, they will not be for a while, but he can feel a tender laughter emanate in the space where they should be. The clouds part above him, and it seems the entire world goes still in anticipation for the moment ahead, not unlike the moment before his dream.
He is reaching the beginning of the mine, so he does not have the time to contemplate the fact that he does not remember ever returning home, let alone falling asleep.
Fluixon stands at the entrance with an assortment of items laid out upon a crafting table. Even in the very beginning he is as regal and cunning as always. His collar used to flutter in the wind, but it’s still now, the wind not daring to move it. How odd of his unconscious mind to change such a thing. Fluixon looks up at his arrival and smiles.
“Saps, good to see you! Seems we both lucked out with the island.” He has the usual charming lilt to his voice, reserved for strangers. It feels unsettling having it pointed back at Saps like this.
Saps’s mouth widens instinctively. He doesn’t feel like smiling, but he does it often, and it is the correct thing to do. It takes a small moment to try and find the correct words as well, when the urge to curl up and die is so incredibly overwhelming.
“You guys have civilizations already? Jeez, we’ve been here for like, barely ten minutes.” Saps laughs as he says it, letting his memory take over responses while he catalogues each detail of Fluxion's face. The purple of his eyes, not soft or docile, instead a gaping void, an expansive galaxy, the promise and threat of eternity. His red dusted cheeks from the labour of mining, the sharp angles of his face, the curve of his lips.
“Ahh, what can I say, people move fast.” Fluixon laughs back. “Care to join us?”
“I’m not one for joining society, think I’ll rough it out in the wilderness, less politics over there.” Saps recites, already anticipating the response.
Fluixon grins. “I meant the mines.”
Saps blinks once, and waits a moment. He’s not entirely sure how long you’re supposed to wait when faking surprise. Anything longer than five seconds is surely too awkward, but if he’s too short with it it’ll be clear he wasn’t actually surprised. It’s a predicament he’s never really had to juggle before. He decides that his contemplation of time is elongating his waiting period, and that he’s likely already passed the realm of the awkward if Fluxion's raised eyebrow means anything.
“Oh. My bad. I would like to take you up on that offer, as matter of fact.”
Fluixon snorts. “You sure about that?”
Well this is disconcerting. The wait time was clearly too long, because that was not the correct response sentence.
A stone pickaxe is thrust into his hands, and Fluixon leads him down the mine.
Luminara is bright and lively in its earliest days, living up to its name. There is a certain clumsiness to the architecture on the first day, everything cluttered, everyone tripping over each other with over eager passion. It’s comforting in a way that pre-war dreams always ignite in Saps.
His eye is naturally drawn to the few who survived the war, he distantly watches as they laugh alongside others, not knowing of the fate soon to befall them. They run like children taking their first steps, innocent in their hope, innocent in their love.
“I cannot believe we got so many diamonds already.” Fluixon holds their haul, loosely swinging it back and forth, grinning.
Saps looks to the sky. It’s bright. The world is bright. There is no sign of the usual fuzzy static that clings to the edges of his dreams. He decides to test the waters.
“Well, you did bring along the master gem finder.” Saps gestures to himself dramatically, flicking his wrist around a few times for good measure. It’s not a sentence he uttered originally, and he glimpses quickly to the sky for static. It just glints at him. He blinks back. How curious this all is.
Flux puts a hand on his shoulder and the whole world falls not cold, but instead uncomfortably warm. “Yes, well, loathe as I am to admit it, you were quite the asset. It’s a shame Luminara won’t have you among its ranks.”
He brandishes his usual grin, not the one for strangers, no. This is the one that’s slightly lopsided, that lifts his cheeks up just a tad too high, that makes his nose scrunch slightly. This is the unpracticed one he reserves for friends. This hand against Saps’s shoulder is a gesture he reserves for allies.
The hand burns like a thousand suns, though he has luckily placed it on the side that is covered by fabric, and not the one with bare skin, otherwise the heat would sink to blood and bone and frankly make a mess.
No, this hand is right in all the wrong ways. In his dreams the touch is always cold, freezing, an icy touch that travels all the way down his aorta into his heart and solidifies it into a translucent chill, never to beat for another again. Here, his touch is excruciatingly hot, burning, scalding, and entirely too real.
Real, real, real. He looks back at the sky and finds it laughing, the trees all wave to him with delight, the world tips on its axis and he is forced to face what the earth had been trying to tell him since the start.
He isn’t dreaming.
This becomes even more apparent when he starts hyperventilating, while Flux tries desperately in his confusion to calm him down.
“Listen, I’m just worried for our island. Their inaction is going to kill us all.”
Saps absentmindedly nails the pillar into the ground, letting the familiar action take over. “It’s actually an archipelago.”
Flux gives him a glare that could kill a man where he stands, and Saps returns it with a bright smile.
“Flux, we’ve got supplies and likely more numbers. What would they even be able to do?”
“You can’t underestimate the enemy.”
Saps give him his own glance, raising his brow. “You haven’t even met them and they’re already the enemy?”
Flux splutters, gesturing his arms out wildly. “They’re making propaganda posters against us!”
“Because they’re scared, and feel shitty about the hand they were dealt, as they have a right to.”
Flux sighs and looks away. Saps turns his eyes to the beach, and the steadily setting sun. After an awkward conversation and a mountain of lies and excuses, they’d moved past the whole breakdown and instead Flux had accompanied Saps to the location of his house. He never built his home this early in his own world, but it seemed fitting to step outside the bounds a little. Now that he’s no longer feeling that burning touch, his reality has faded back into that dream-like expanse he believed he was in prior. He’s still not quite sure where he sits between the conscious world and the sleeping, but either way he is here now and he is going to exist in whatever here is.
Saps glances back at Flux, who is still turned away, his brow furrowed. Saps manoeuvres himself closer to the man and leans his head on his shoulder, hands clasped on his other shoulder. “You shouldn’t think about it, you’ve got a nation to look after.”
Flux looks down at him briefly, before staring at that same sunset. “Someone has to look to the future.”
Saps closes his eyes. “It doesn’t have to be you.”
Flux scrunches his nose.
“You’re going to live in the jungle?”
Saps scoffs at him. “What’s wrong with the jungle?”
Flux's face takes on a disgusted turn as his imagination runs. “Rabid wildlife, constant shadows, you won’t even be able to build anything! The forage is too thick.”
Saps tilts his head, he swears he saw the glint of green in the distance of the cave, but there’s a whole lake of lava in front of him and frankly he does not want to deal with that. Besides, to move further is to move away from this moment, and he wants to soak in the warmth of joy for as long as he can.
He turns back around. “Treehouse society! I’ve always wanted a treehouse.”
He thinks back to the tower he made in the barren wasteland of snow and shudders. Maybe not the best idea.
Everything is as unreal as it felt before, but it’s settled into something nice. Something soothing. Spending time with Flux like this again is almost therapeutic in nature. It lets him reflect on all the good moments he spent with the man before everything went sideways.
He is finally able to see Flux as a person again. It’s been a long time since he was anything but a symbol for the suffering of the islands. But a person standing before him, a being that is breathing in time with his own lungs, talking with the same vocal organs lining his throat, something made of matter, made of flesh and bones and skin and life and meaning. It’s wonderful to break down that wall, when he was so sure it could never be unsewn.
“You’d have people die every day just from fall damage alone.” Flux says, smiling with self satisfaction as he digs out the last bit of diamond from a chain.
Saps reluctantly concedes to this.
“Did you hear there’s a cartel in Cass’s nation?” Saps says lazing on Flux’s bed.
Flux pauses for a moment, before looking at him with confusion. “What, like a mafia? Should I be worried?”
Saps smiles. “It’s Canadian.”
“That does not answer my question.”
Saps rolls over. “It’s fine they just sell drugs or something. Oh, they have maple syrup!”
He lets his thoughts be consumed by thoughts of pancakes and the distant dreams of topping variety.
“God I want it now, can we go?”
“I’m not walking to the coalition just to buy drugs.”
Saps rolls his eyes. “Buzzkill.”
They get five seconds of silence before Flux apparently decides it’s too boring.
“If they’re a cartel, why maple syrup? Do they put something in it?”
Saps sits up. “No no, it’s because no one else can make it, it’s like a specially imported thing — like the mafia!”
Flux gives him a deadpan stare. “We don’t have maple trees.”
Saps contemplates this for a moment. “I wonder where they get it from.”
“Maybe they tap other trees, like oak.”
“But I feel like it’s way more exciting if you’re honest about that! Like hey, screw that maple syrup stuff, we’ve got oak and birch syrup! Now that would be a successful cartel.” Saps rapidly gestures with his hands.
Flux finally lets his mouth shift into a smile and it feels like a victory. “It is a Canadian cartel, they might as well monopolise on the concept.”
“We should just make our own cartel.”
Flux laughs. “Well I am recently unemployed.”
Saps grins back at him and feels like the world has finally shifted into place. “Exactly, no better time than the present.”
The meeting is almost starting again.
Saps checks the roof. He doesn’t want to check the roof, frankly he wants to sit at the seat of the table and breathe and exist with faith. But faith is what killed everyone last time, and he can’t allow himself to be the cause of so many deaths again. There is an endless stream of blood that coats his hands, he will not let another join it.
Gently, he digs a hole in, brushes the gathered dust to the side, and glances in.
There are two rows of stalactites.
Fuck.
Not exactly unexpected, but he honestly was hoping for better.
God this was all so incredibly predictable, he just didn’t let himself see it.
When you’re given a second chance, you sort of expect something to change. Like people will somehow be better, simply because you wish them to be.
But no, you cannot expect others to do it for you, you must change the world yourself.
Or else everything will stagnate.
There is a brief shuffling of leaves behind him, and he turns to find Flux and Seraphim staring at him with dark, dark eyes.
He sort of hopes they’ll just put a blade between his eyes and be done with it, so he doesn’t have to linger on his own stupidity, but Flux always did love a dramatic speech.
“I’m surprised you’d build such a contraption, Saps.” He says, tilting his head.
Saps doesn’t bother trying to run. This is something he must face. He needs to die here.
He walks right up to where the two are standing and just stares. Docile and pathetic, like how Flux wants him to be.
“What would the leaders say when they find this in the very meeting you scheduled today?” He continues, as if Saps cares to hear it.
“Just do it.” Saps murmurs.
Flux doesn’t smile, but he does hum. “Like a lamb to slaughter.”
There are a million words Saps could utter here. Harsh, cruel, angry, sorrowful, lamentable, loving words. But to speak now, it would only feel like an escape, a desperate flee from the reality he must face. He keeps his mouth shut, because if he opens it again he fears he may start screaming or worst of all crying and never be able to stop.
Fluixon gestures towards Seraphim, closing his eyes and turning away.
He feels the gentle caress of a blade against the edge of his neck, and then the world goes cold.