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How this Story Ends
Fandom: Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold
Characters: Fafnir/Flavio, Arianna, Bertrand, minor Chloe
Word count: ~3700
Warnings: ...Death, technically?
Notes: Set out to write postgame reunion fic and... of course it immediately went to a weird and bittersweet place. Unalloyed positivity is so incredibly not my wheelhouse. Oh yeah, and I couldn't think of any other way around Fafnir's lack of canon name and minimal dialogue, so this angst comes with some pretentious second-person bullshit.Damn, I loyally read Homestuck for how many years, and THIS is what gets me to try second person?
You don't remember making the decision to fly out of Ginnungagap. You don't think you decided at all. “Blast through the crumbling ceiling and into low orbit” is not a course of action that, typically, has occurred to you. It did not occur to you then. You only remember... you had to leave. With the Core destroyed, with nowhere to expend the power rushing through you, you burned and you froze and your skin felt too small. You couldn't transform back. This was what you were now, this was all you were, a mass of raw energy on the brink of explosion, and this whole ruin was too small to contain you, you felt the walls pressing in on you, and your bones shook apart and turned into light, your veins unraveled and gushed out a blinding steam -
- well, it felt that way. That isn't what literally happened. You think. For one thing, you're still alive. But who knows. You can survive all kinds of things most people wouldn't.
For instance: crashing into the sea, not long after you came to. Even for you, that wasn't exactly a love tap. You blacked out again at that point. You washed up somewhere and then you lay in the sand, feeling the tides tug at your extremities, while the sun rose and set and rose and set again.
You must've gotten up eventually, because you aren't lying in sand right now. But it's all a haze.
The point is:
Someone is calling your name. (You have a name.)
You're near the bottom of a hill, and a human figure is silhouetted at the top. You turn and squint at them, whoever they are.
“Oh my god,” says the voice. “Can it really – say something! If it's you, you have to answer me. If I'm just seeing things again, then – then -” They turn back and call over their shoulder, “Arianna, hurry! I found – I hope...”
Flavio. It's Flavio. And he is staring at you again, like he can't tear his eyes away. You try to say something, but you don't know what, and it's been so long since you've had any reason to speak that your voice refuses to come out at all. So you wave.
A second figure joins him at the hilltop, this one extremely purple – Arianna – and starts jumping up and down and waving back with both arms. You mount the slope toward them, but as you do, Flavio's posture changes completely. “Dude, what the hell? Don't just wave at me! I haven't seen you in ten months! It's a big deal!” His voice keeps getting louder. Arianna, startled, takes a step back from him. “Would it kill you to take this seriously? You took off without saying goodbye and now you decide to be a smartass about it? What the hell? Do you have any idea what you put us through?”
Coming closer you notice that the blood is rushing to Flavio's face and his hands are trembling, and Arianna is reaching out to try and restrain him. At last you come up even with them, and then you and Flavio simply stare at each other. He goes through four or five facial expressions in the span of seconds, and then he starts to say something, but he stops. His face flushes a deeper red. Then he punches you, and then he turns on his heel and stalks away.
“Oh, my,” says Arianna, a few seconds later. “Are you injured?” You shake your head. “I apologize on Sir Flavio's behalf. He took your departure… quite hard. I know he'll come around once he's calmed down a little.” You think so, too, but you don't have Arianna's absolute confidence. You saw something in his eyes. You and Flavio have never been apart for this long. You don't know what damage it might have done.
But Arianna excitedly links her arm with yours and leads you back. They set up camp in a ruined fortress not far from here, using the crumbling walls and stones for protection, and they've gone out every day to search a new portion of the surrounding areas, systematically. They've been here three days. Arianna tells you they usually relocate after six, sometimes longer if the terrain is hard or the weather is unfavorable. You ask her how they knew when to give up on any given spot, and she goes silent.
“I knew we would find you alive,” she says finally, smiling again, and takes your hand in both of hers. “I always knew.”
The camp is at the top of another hill, with good visibility. You've seen these ruins before, but have had no reason to go back recently. What's the opposite of a coincidence? How did you manage to avoid noticing that your guild has been this close for three days?
Chloe gravely welcomes you back and makes you promise to show her your new and improved transformation. You tell her sure, but you'll need to be in an open space to minimize collateral damage, and her eyes light up.
Bertrand says, “Oh, hey, I was wondering why Flavio came back so pissed off.” He has clearly been awake for less than ten minutes. He frowns. “Wait, that doesn't explain anything. Whatever. Good to have you back, kid,” and he goes back to sleep before anyone can say anything about breaking up camp.
According to Arianna, it's ten days' travel to the nearest town anyway. There's no rush. Maybe you'll set out tomorrow. This expedition has been a success, and now the guild has all the time in the world.
You chat with Arianna and Chloe over lunch (oh, right. You haven't eaten since you left High Lagaard, before you entered Ginnungagap for the last time. You completely forgot that was a thing). It isn't as carefree as it could be - your voice is so rusty that it hurts to speak, you have a hard time remembering how conversations work in the first place, and Flavio's absence casts a pall - but it feels good, in a human way, one you haven't experienced in a long while.
Flavio comes back later in the afternoon with a sack full of wild vegetables and a few canteens of fresh water, and by unspoken agreement you all pretend that he was only foraging this whole time, and definitely not as a pretext to be alone with his emotions. You thank him and he says “Sorry,” which, granted you're out of practice, doesn't sound like the standard response.
After about half an hour of skirting around you and morosely avoiding your eyes, he can't take any more and says, “Can I talk to you? Alone?” You agree, and although the rest of the guild has already withdrawn from you two, sensing this was coming, you walk out with him even farther, to the remains of the fortress's outermost wall.
He leans against the moss-speckled stones and you stand facing him. He says, “Did I hurt you?” Again you shake your head. “Good. But I guess there's not much chance of that, huh? With you being what you are now.” He laughs unconvincingly and looks down at his hand. The first two knuckles are split open. “No way a regular person could put a dent in you.” Why didn't he have Chloe look at that injury? She could have fixed it in half a second. “To think I actually worried you were dead -” His breath hits a snag. He shakes his head and moves his hand out of your view, but you are still thinking about it. You touch your jaw, wondering if he left his own blood there, but your fingers come away clean.
“Arianna says she can feel you,” he says, after a pause. “Because of the mark. This whole time she's been saying, ‘I can tell he's alive, I would know it if anything had happened to him.' But I don't have that. It just - it felt like you were gone.” His voice drops to nearly a whisper. “I was so scared she was wrong. I didn't think we'd ever find you. I only played along because I didn't want to admit it.”
You can see why. What would he have done if he had given up? Having lost you, was he supposed to lose the others too, go back to Midgard alone?
He meets your gaze for the first time since he hit you. “We said we'd all come back together.”
You could explain why you couldn't stay, why you couldn't say goodbye before you left, that you meant those words when you said them and there was no malice in your disappearance. But you don't. It would be like telling him that he's wrong.
You acknowledge the point. You apologize. He stares at you a little longer, then looks away again.
“I'm sorry I punched you,” he says. “But I - it's been months, and there you were, and - you didn't react. I wanted to find you so badly, and I was worried sick that we never would, and you're here just waving and acting like it's nothing. How can you be so casual? Like you just got back from an errand or something! Punching a calamity to death and flying away without leaving a trace, is that really nothing? Did you even miss me? Was it even hard?”
You don't know how to tell him. Or what to tell him in the first place. When you fell from the sky, something in you switched off. You can't say for sure whether you had a single coherent thought between Ginnungagap and now, whether you made any conscious decisions or felt anything at all. Even after you dragged yourself in from shore, you remember a lot of lying on the ground and staring at the sky. The local wildlife was afraid of you, and then curious, but you never reacted to them one way or another. You're not sure you even noticed. It took a long time to transform back into your original shape, and the effort drained you, and at the end you had no idea why you'd done it, why it was important to do it. You think that for all this time you have been no better than half-alive.
The thought hardens into certainty. You have not been yourself, but you are now. And the thought of going back - becoming that mindless automaton again - scares you as few things have. Flavio has saved you. If you did not know enough to miss him in those months, you know now, and you miss him terribly, retroactively.
You can't explain any of this. You try. He looks wounded, and then confused, and then simply sad. You're doing this wrong. You start over. “Stop,” he says. “Please.” You stop midsentence and watch as he straightens. You are afraid he's going to walk away. He closes his eyes and nods slowly, as if he's resolving some kind of debate. He takes two short steps and then embraces you, just as hard as he punched you this morning.
You're together again. Things will be all right. Things cannot possibly fail to be all right now.
Flavio is shaking, and your collar soon grows damp. You do what you've always done - cup your hand behind his head and give him all the time he needs - but the gesture comes with two unpleasant realizations. One: you yourself are the reason he needs it. Two: while you were gone, he wouldn't have turned to anyone else. You hold him the tighter for this, and wonder if it makes you a hypocrite.
At length he says, “Okay. I'm okay,” and gives your shoulder a gentle squeeze, and you let go. Still he leans into you for another few seconds before pushing himself off. He blots his eyes and takes careful sips of water from one of the canteens, trying to quell a fit of hiccups before you rejoin your guildmates.
You both say “Sorry” in unison, and then Flavio starts laughing. You hold hands - his right in your left, a part of you that's still human covering the skin he tore open on your face - for basically the rest of the evening, even when it gets inconvenient.
However warm it is here, right now it's the dead of winter in High Lagaard. You're going back there eventually, to reach the very top of Yggdrasil - this is a settled point - but at the moment all roads leading there will be blocked by snow. You're going back by the scenic route.
It was Arianna who suggested this, but despite months in the Labyrinth her sense of direction has not improved, so it's Flavio and Chloe who've taken over the itinerary (you'll be happy with anything that makes Flavio happy, and you trust his instincts implicitly. Bertrand flat-out doesn't care). Sometimes in the evenings you can hear them arguing over a map. This features many variations on “I don't care how cool it is, it's way too dangerous!” and “I don't like that place. All they have is vegetables.”
More often, though, in the evenings you catch up on what you missed. Arianna relays in detail her last conversations with Hanna and Quona and Abigail and Regina and Cass and Marion and Minister Dubois and Lady Gradriel and anyone else in the city she thinks you might have met even once, even in passing. She assures you that everyone is well and looking forward to your safe return. When she runs out of those stories, she tells you about every “cute” monster the party encountered on their way to find you. Chloe contributes to this too, sometimes pulling out a book to show you illustrations or statistics or grisly legends on the creatures they had to fight to get here. Flavio has the look of someone who is being mildly re-traumatized every single time.
They want you to know everything they do. They want it to be like you were there with them all the while, like you never left. You understand why. So you try to pretend, too.
But one night Bertrand pulls you aside, on some pretext or other, while the rest of your guild sits around the fire debating over what to cook. You realize he's barely spoken to you since they found you. And you remember: you have never had a private conversation with this man that has not immediately gotten weird as hell.
“Kid,” he says, “no one else is gonna tell you this. But if that Overlord asshole was worth his salt, you'll never die. You know what that means, right?” He looks meaningfully back toward the others. Toward Flavio. “You stick around, and someday you're gonna bury him.”
Coldly, you ask him what he's suggesting.
“Nothing, nothing. I mean, you're not me. But I know what I'd do.”
You confirm that you are, indeed, not him.
“Holy shit, don't take it so personally. I'm just saying. If the day comes when you need to disappear, I'll cover for you.” He smiles sardonically. “As long as I haven't disappeared first.”
You don't answer.
“Well, think about it,” he says, defensive, although you didn't argue. “This guild was never going to last. It's all fun and games for now, but eventually Arianna has to go back home and do princess stuff. That's why she's trying to drag this out so long. You really think we couldn't get back to the Labyrinth by now? We're just lollygagging out here because she doesn't want it to end. But it will.” A pause. “Chloe won't stick around, either, once things start coming apart. She's gonna do whatever the hell she wants, and it's going to be amazing” - and you hear the pride in this, which you're sure he would try to disguise if he knew it was there - “but High Lagaard won't be big enough. And she won't wanna be reminded of the good old days right after they end.”
A longer pause.
“Even if we all stayed,” he says. “They'll get old. All three of them.” He snaps his fingers. “Like that, right there, while you watch. You think you can take that? I sure as hell can't.”
You tell him what you think. You think that, even if everyone will die, they're not dead today and they won't be tomorrow. You think that holding people at arm's length forever is no way to live. You think, sure, you won't ever age, but there's no guarantee that something stronger than you won't rise from the sea and kill you next week. You love Flavio. You love your friends. Maybe someday you'll be alone again. That doesn't mean you have to be alone now. You will not start any sooner than you have to.
You love your friends. You won't abandon them again. And you won't go back to being that empty shell, an oblivious piece of the landscape.
Bertrand sighs, and smiles. You can't decide whether or not he's being condescending. Is he just indulging what he sees as your youthful folly? Or does he wish it was still his? “Hey, your funeral,” he says, “or lack thereof. Just remember the offer stands, all right?” And he claps you on the shoulder and goes back to the others, perfectly nonchalant, as if he hadn't just told you he plans to run away.
Someday you will take Flavio's body back to Midgard. You both will have misgivings about the Library as you get older, he because they made Arianna choose you, and you because they spent years calling him a liar. You will each independently reach the conclusion, at some point, that these are awful things to do to children. But the fact remains, and will always remain, that the Library was your first home. The place that brought you together.
So when he dies, you'll go back there with him, one last time. Chloe will meet you there. For an uncharitable moment you'll think, she probably had business with the Library anyway, all that research she's doing. But you will know that you're wrong, that grief is skewing your perceptions. She'll hug you. She will still be tiny; she will still wear enormous hats.
Arianna won't be able to spare the time on such short notice, but her letter will be handwritten. That will matter more than whatever posthumous honors she chooses to bestow on Flavio, although there will be a lot of those.
Bertrand will be lurking around somewhere. No one will have seen him in ten or fifteen years, and he won't show up to the memorial proper, but you'll run into him not long afterward. He won't say “I told you so,” because that would obligate you to fight him on the spot. You will be inclined to fight him anyway. He'll look different than you remember, but not much - maybe his hair will be salted with gray, maybe the frown lines will be deeper, but that's it - and you, for all intents and purposes, will still look eighteen years old. And Flavio will be dead, because he got too old for this life.
You'll tell Bertrand you regret nothing. You'll tell him you would make the same choice again. Despite everything, it will be true. You will hope it was true for Flavio, too.
Someday Flavio will tell you, “If one more person asks me if you're my son, I'll scream and never stop screaming.” Someday someone will ask if you're his grandson. He will not scream. He'll just sort of cave in on himself. From that day on he won't show you any affection with witnesses present. In public your personal space and his will be sharply delineated, and this will creep into private life, too. He will make self-deprecating jokes about being a dirty old man, but they won't be jokes at all, and sometimes he'll push you away for no reason. One time you will hear him crying in another room and be afraid to go to him, because what if you make it worse? This will only happen one time, but it will hurt.
You'll fight, sometimes. You've known Flavio your entire life, and you've always known that somewhere inside him is a bottomless well of resentment. But you will assume that, since you both have good intentions and you both love each other, there's nothing to argue about. You will be wrong.
After every dispute he'll take all the blame, even if he was in the right. He'll insist it's all his fault, he's just dragging you down, sorry you have to deal with this, sorry you have to put up with him, sorry, sorry, sorry. He will believe it every time, and you will know every time that he does believe it, that he is in actual distress - and yet you will start to get tired of talking him through it every time, constantly searching for some reassuring word he will actually buy. As he leans into your shoulder you will catch yourself thinking, “okay, it's been half an hour, can we wrap this up?” and you will feel like a total bastard.
You'll get most of the arguing done in the first half of your relationship; after that you'll both have better strategies for keeping things calm and reasonable and not stepping on anyone's toes, even if you have to talk about something difficult. But sometimes, yes, even then, you will argue. With the person who's supposed to always be on your side. With the person who's supposed to understand you best. You'll fight sometimes.
All of this will happen. But it isn't happening yet.
You've already decided, anyway. You'll take the bad with the good, and hope there's more of the latter. That's all anyone can do. You go back with your friends. You still have a Labyrinth to conquer, for one thing. And after that - who knows?
Characters: Fafnir/Flavio, Arianna, Bertrand, minor Chloe
Word count: ~3700
Warnings: ...Death, technically?
Notes: Set out to write postgame reunion fic and... of course it immediately went to a weird and bittersweet place. Unalloyed positivity is so incredibly not my wheelhouse. Oh yeah, and I couldn't think of any other way around Fafnir's lack of canon name and minimal dialogue, so this angst comes with some pretentious second-person bullshit.
You don't remember making the decision to fly out of Ginnungagap. You don't think you decided at all. “Blast through the crumbling ceiling and into low orbit” is not a course of action that, typically, has occurred to you. It did not occur to you then. You only remember... you had to leave. With the Core destroyed, with nowhere to expend the power rushing through you, you burned and you froze and your skin felt too small. You couldn't transform back. This was what you were now, this was all you were, a mass of raw energy on the brink of explosion, and this whole ruin was too small to contain you, you felt the walls pressing in on you, and your bones shook apart and turned into light, your veins unraveled and gushed out a blinding steam -
- well, it felt that way. That isn't what literally happened. You think. For one thing, you're still alive. But who knows. You can survive all kinds of things most people wouldn't.
For instance: crashing into the sea, not long after you came to. Even for you, that wasn't exactly a love tap. You blacked out again at that point. You washed up somewhere and then you lay in the sand, feeling the tides tug at your extremities, while the sun rose and set and rose and set again.
You must've gotten up eventually, because you aren't lying in sand right now. But it's all a haze.
The point is:
Someone is calling your name. (You have a name.)
You're near the bottom of a hill, and a human figure is silhouetted at the top. You turn and squint at them, whoever they are.
“Oh my god,” says the voice. “Can it really – say something! If it's you, you have to answer me. If I'm just seeing things again, then – then -” They turn back and call over their shoulder, “Arianna, hurry! I found – I hope...”
Flavio. It's Flavio. And he is staring at you again, like he can't tear his eyes away. You try to say something, but you don't know what, and it's been so long since you've had any reason to speak that your voice refuses to come out at all. So you wave.
A second figure joins him at the hilltop, this one extremely purple – Arianna – and starts jumping up and down and waving back with both arms. You mount the slope toward them, but as you do, Flavio's posture changes completely. “Dude, what the hell? Don't just wave at me! I haven't seen you in ten months! It's a big deal!” His voice keeps getting louder. Arianna, startled, takes a step back from him. “Would it kill you to take this seriously? You took off without saying goodbye and now you decide to be a smartass about it? What the hell? Do you have any idea what you put us through?”
Coming closer you notice that the blood is rushing to Flavio's face and his hands are trembling, and Arianna is reaching out to try and restrain him. At last you come up even with them, and then you and Flavio simply stare at each other. He goes through four or five facial expressions in the span of seconds, and then he starts to say something, but he stops. His face flushes a deeper red. Then he punches you, and then he turns on his heel and stalks away.
“Oh, my,” says Arianna, a few seconds later. “Are you injured?” You shake your head. “I apologize on Sir Flavio's behalf. He took your departure… quite hard. I know he'll come around once he's calmed down a little.” You think so, too, but you don't have Arianna's absolute confidence. You saw something in his eyes. You and Flavio have never been apart for this long. You don't know what damage it might have done.
But Arianna excitedly links her arm with yours and leads you back. They set up camp in a ruined fortress not far from here, using the crumbling walls and stones for protection, and they've gone out every day to search a new portion of the surrounding areas, systematically. They've been here three days. Arianna tells you they usually relocate after six, sometimes longer if the terrain is hard or the weather is unfavorable. You ask her how they knew when to give up on any given spot, and she goes silent.
“I knew we would find you alive,” she says finally, smiling again, and takes your hand in both of hers. “I always knew.”
The camp is at the top of another hill, with good visibility. You've seen these ruins before, but have had no reason to go back recently. What's the opposite of a coincidence? How did you manage to avoid noticing that your guild has been this close for three days?
Chloe gravely welcomes you back and makes you promise to show her your new and improved transformation. You tell her sure, but you'll need to be in an open space to minimize collateral damage, and her eyes light up.
Bertrand says, “Oh, hey, I was wondering why Flavio came back so pissed off.” He has clearly been awake for less than ten minutes. He frowns. “Wait, that doesn't explain anything. Whatever. Good to have you back, kid,” and he goes back to sleep before anyone can say anything about breaking up camp.
According to Arianna, it's ten days' travel to the nearest town anyway. There's no rush. Maybe you'll set out tomorrow. This expedition has been a success, and now the guild has all the time in the world.
You chat with Arianna and Chloe over lunch (oh, right. You haven't eaten since you left High Lagaard, before you entered Ginnungagap for the last time. You completely forgot that was a thing). It isn't as carefree as it could be - your voice is so rusty that it hurts to speak, you have a hard time remembering how conversations work in the first place, and Flavio's absence casts a pall - but it feels good, in a human way, one you haven't experienced in a long while.
Flavio comes back later in the afternoon with a sack full of wild vegetables and a few canteens of fresh water, and by unspoken agreement you all pretend that he was only foraging this whole time, and definitely not as a pretext to be alone with his emotions. You thank him and he says “Sorry,” which, granted you're out of practice, doesn't sound like the standard response.
After about half an hour of skirting around you and morosely avoiding your eyes, he can't take any more and says, “Can I talk to you? Alone?” You agree, and although the rest of the guild has already withdrawn from you two, sensing this was coming, you walk out with him even farther, to the remains of the fortress's outermost wall.
He leans against the moss-speckled stones and you stand facing him. He says, “Did I hurt you?” Again you shake your head. “Good. But I guess there's not much chance of that, huh? With you being what you are now.” He laughs unconvincingly and looks down at his hand. The first two knuckles are split open. “No way a regular person could put a dent in you.” Why didn't he have Chloe look at that injury? She could have fixed it in half a second. “To think I actually worried you were dead -” His breath hits a snag. He shakes his head and moves his hand out of your view, but you are still thinking about it. You touch your jaw, wondering if he left his own blood there, but your fingers come away clean.
“Arianna says she can feel you,” he says, after a pause. “Because of the mark. This whole time she's been saying, ‘I can tell he's alive, I would know it if anything had happened to him.' But I don't have that. It just - it felt like you were gone.” His voice drops to nearly a whisper. “I was so scared she was wrong. I didn't think we'd ever find you. I only played along because I didn't want to admit it.”
You can see why. What would he have done if he had given up? Having lost you, was he supposed to lose the others too, go back to Midgard alone?
He meets your gaze for the first time since he hit you. “We said we'd all come back together.”
You could explain why you couldn't stay, why you couldn't say goodbye before you left, that you meant those words when you said them and there was no malice in your disappearance. But you don't. It would be like telling him that he's wrong.
You acknowledge the point. You apologize. He stares at you a little longer, then looks away again.
“I'm sorry I punched you,” he says. “But I - it's been months, and there you were, and - you didn't react. I wanted to find you so badly, and I was worried sick that we never would, and you're here just waving and acting like it's nothing. How can you be so casual? Like you just got back from an errand or something! Punching a calamity to death and flying away without leaving a trace, is that really nothing? Did you even miss me? Was it even hard?”
You don't know how to tell him. Or what to tell him in the first place. When you fell from the sky, something in you switched off. You can't say for sure whether you had a single coherent thought between Ginnungagap and now, whether you made any conscious decisions or felt anything at all. Even after you dragged yourself in from shore, you remember a lot of lying on the ground and staring at the sky. The local wildlife was afraid of you, and then curious, but you never reacted to them one way or another. You're not sure you even noticed. It took a long time to transform back into your original shape, and the effort drained you, and at the end you had no idea why you'd done it, why it was important to do it. You think that for all this time you have been no better than half-alive.
The thought hardens into certainty. You have not been yourself, but you are now. And the thought of going back - becoming that mindless automaton again - scares you as few things have. Flavio has saved you. If you did not know enough to miss him in those months, you know now, and you miss him terribly, retroactively.
You can't explain any of this. You try. He looks wounded, and then confused, and then simply sad. You're doing this wrong. You start over. “Stop,” he says. “Please.” You stop midsentence and watch as he straightens. You are afraid he's going to walk away. He closes his eyes and nods slowly, as if he's resolving some kind of debate. He takes two short steps and then embraces you, just as hard as he punched you this morning.
You're together again. Things will be all right. Things cannot possibly fail to be all right now.
Flavio is shaking, and your collar soon grows damp. You do what you've always done - cup your hand behind his head and give him all the time he needs - but the gesture comes with two unpleasant realizations. One: you yourself are the reason he needs it. Two: while you were gone, he wouldn't have turned to anyone else. You hold him the tighter for this, and wonder if it makes you a hypocrite.
At length he says, “Okay. I'm okay,” and gives your shoulder a gentle squeeze, and you let go. Still he leans into you for another few seconds before pushing himself off. He blots his eyes and takes careful sips of water from one of the canteens, trying to quell a fit of hiccups before you rejoin your guildmates.
You both say “Sorry” in unison, and then Flavio starts laughing. You hold hands - his right in your left, a part of you that's still human covering the skin he tore open on your face - for basically the rest of the evening, even when it gets inconvenient.
However warm it is here, right now it's the dead of winter in High Lagaard. You're going back there eventually, to reach the very top of Yggdrasil - this is a settled point - but at the moment all roads leading there will be blocked by snow. You're going back by the scenic route.
It was Arianna who suggested this, but despite months in the Labyrinth her sense of direction has not improved, so it's Flavio and Chloe who've taken over the itinerary (you'll be happy with anything that makes Flavio happy, and you trust his instincts implicitly. Bertrand flat-out doesn't care). Sometimes in the evenings you can hear them arguing over a map. This features many variations on “I don't care how cool it is, it's way too dangerous!” and “I don't like that place. All they have is vegetables.”
More often, though, in the evenings you catch up on what you missed. Arianna relays in detail her last conversations with Hanna and Quona and Abigail and Regina and Cass and Marion and Minister Dubois and Lady Gradriel and anyone else in the city she thinks you might have met even once, even in passing. She assures you that everyone is well and looking forward to your safe return. When she runs out of those stories, she tells you about every “cute” monster the party encountered on their way to find you. Chloe contributes to this too, sometimes pulling out a book to show you illustrations or statistics or grisly legends on the creatures they had to fight to get here. Flavio has the look of someone who is being mildly re-traumatized every single time.
They want you to know everything they do. They want it to be like you were there with them all the while, like you never left. You understand why. So you try to pretend, too.
But one night Bertrand pulls you aside, on some pretext or other, while the rest of your guild sits around the fire debating over what to cook. You realize he's barely spoken to you since they found you. And you remember: you have never had a private conversation with this man that has not immediately gotten weird as hell.
“Kid,” he says, “no one else is gonna tell you this. But if that Overlord asshole was worth his salt, you'll never die. You know what that means, right?” He looks meaningfully back toward the others. Toward Flavio. “You stick around, and someday you're gonna bury him.”
Coldly, you ask him what he's suggesting.
“Nothing, nothing. I mean, you're not me. But I know what I'd do.”
You confirm that you are, indeed, not him.
“Holy shit, don't take it so personally. I'm just saying. If the day comes when you need to disappear, I'll cover for you.” He smiles sardonically. “As long as I haven't disappeared first.”
You don't answer.
“Well, think about it,” he says, defensive, although you didn't argue. “This guild was never going to last. It's all fun and games for now, but eventually Arianna has to go back home and do princess stuff. That's why she's trying to drag this out so long. You really think we couldn't get back to the Labyrinth by now? We're just lollygagging out here because she doesn't want it to end. But it will.” A pause. “Chloe won't stick around, either, once things start coming apart. She's gonna do whatever the hell she wants, and it's going to be amazing” - and you hear the pride in this, which you're sure he would try to disguise if he knew it was there - “but High Lagaard won't be big enough. And she won't wanna be reminded of the good old days right after they end.”
A longer pause.
“Even if we all stayed,” he says. “They'll get old. All three of them.” He snaps his fingers. “Like that, right there, while you watch. You think you can take that? I sure as hell can't.”
You tell him what you think. You think that, even if everyone will die, they're not dead today and they won't be tomorrow. You think that holding people at arm's length forever is no way to live. You think, sure, you won't ever age, but there's no guarantee that something stronger than you won't rise from the sea and kill you next week. You love Flavio. You love your friends. Maybe someday you'll be alone again. That doesn't mean you have to be alone now. You will not start any sooner than you have to.
You love your friends. You won't abandon them again. And you won't go back to being that empty shell, an oblivious piece of the landscape.
Bertrand sighs, and smiles. You can't decide whether or not he's being condescending. Is he just indulging what he sees as your youthful folly? Or does he wish it was still his? “Hey, your funeral,” he says, “or lack thereof. Just remember the offer stands, all right?” And he claps you on the shoulder and goes back to the others, perfectly nonchalant, as if he hadn't just told you he plans to run away.
Someday you will take Flavio's body back to Midgard. You both will have misgivings about the Library as you get older, he because they made Arianna choose you, and you because they spent years calling him a liar. You will each independently reach the conclusion, at some point, that these are awful things to do to children. But the fact remains, and will always remain, that the Library was your first home. The place that brought you together.
So when he dies, you'll go back there with him, one last time. Chloe will meet you there. For an uncharitable moment you'll think, she probably had business with the Library anyway, all that research she's doing. But you will know that you're wrong, that grief is skewing your perceptions. She'll hug you. She will still be tiny; she will still wear enormous hats.
Arianna won't be able to spare the time on such short notice, but her letter will be handwritten. That will matter more than whatever posthumous honors she chooses to bestow on Flavio, although there will be a lot of those.
Bertrand will be lurking around somewhere. No one will have seen him in ten or fifteen years, and he won't show up to the memorial proper, but you'll run into him not long afterward. He won't say “I told you so,” because that would obligate you to fight him on the spot. You will be inclined to fight him anyway. He'll look different than you remember, but not much - maybe his hair will be salted with gray, maybe the frown lines will be deeper, but that's it - and you, for all intents and purposes, will still look eighteen years old. And Flavio will be dead, because he got too old for this life.
You'll tell Bertrand you regret nothing. You'll tell him you would make the same choice again. Despite everything, it will be true. You will hope it was true for Flavio, too.
Someday Flavio will tell you, “If one more person asks me if you're my son, I'll scream and never stop screaming.” Someday someone will ask if you're his grandson. He will not scream. He'll just sort of cave in on himself. From that day on he won't show you any affection with witnesses present. In public your personal space and his will be sharply delineated, and this will creep into private life, too. He will make self-deprecating jokes about being a dirty old man, but they won't be jokes at all, and sometimes he'll push you away for no reason. One time you will hear him crying in another room and be afraid to go to him, because what if you make it worse? This will only happen one time, but it will hurt.
You'll fight, sometimes. You've known Flavio your entire life, and you've always known that somewhere inside him is a bottomless well of resentment. But you will assume that, since you both have good intentions and you both love each other, there's nothing to argue about. You will be wrong.
After every dispute he'll take all the blame, even if he was in the right. He'll insist it's all his fault, he's just dragging you down, sorry you have to deal with this, sorry you have to put up with him, sorry, sorry, sorry. He will believe it every time, and you will know every time that he does believe it, that he is in actual distress - and yet you will start to get tired of talking him through it every time, constantly searching for some reassuring word he will actually buy. As he leans into your shoulder you will catch yourself thinking, “okay, it's been half an hour, can we wrap this up?” and you will feel like a total bastard.
You'll get most of the arguing done in the first half of your relationship; after that you'll both have better strategies for keeping things calm and reasonable and not stepping on anyone's toes, even if you have to talk about something difficult. But sometimes, yes, even then, you will argue. With the person who's supposed to always be on your side. With the person who's supposed to understand you best. You'll fight sometimes.
All of this will happen. But it isn't happening yet.
You've already decided, anyway. You'll take the bad with the good, and hope there's more of the latter. That's all anyone can do. You go back with your friends. You still have a Labyrinth to conquer, for one thing. And after that - who knows?