Chapter Text
The room is dark when Auruim jolts awake with a snort, thrusting himself up out of the pillow he’d been facedown in to blink blearily at the familiar shadows. He knows this room. Even in the dark, he tells himself, he’s not lost. There’s nothing to fear in the dark. This is a lie, but if he says it enough it could become true.
He painstakingly begins shifting and rolling onto his back, his right arm asleep and tingling from being pinned beneath him most of the night. To his left, the sleeping figure beside him stirs, rolling over to face him. The copper glow of his face and neck does little to help Auruim see past the oppressive (and just admit it: a bit frightening) shadows of the suite, but it’s a comforting shape, a familiar glow. “Are you okay?” Canach asks, moving closer to him, still half asleep as he snuggles up. He reaches for the blankets without looking, pulling them back up over them both. Auruim’s glad; he’s chilled for some reason, despite his racing pulse. He’s in a cold sweat, clammy and damp all over his naked body. His right arm still tingles painfully, useless to try to move.
Canach kisses his neck and face, his prickly mustache scratching at Auruim’s jaw, his cheek, his upper lip when the kisses move to his mouth. It’s a familiar, calming sort of itch that he has no desire to chase away; instead he pushes closer too, seeking more contact.
“I had that same dream again,” Auruim admits as Canach strokes his forehead, rubbing away the nightmare. It feels bad to admit it, this weakness. The words are sour in his mouth.
“The one where you can’t wake up?” Canach asks, rubbing circles on his forehead to soothe him.
“Mmmh…” His eyelids flutter closed when Canach leans in to kiss him again on the temple.
“You’re awake now, dear heart.”
“It’s scary,” he murmurs, and his voice is small in the pitch black of the room. He waits for Canach’s glow to brighten again before he trusts himself to speak again. “I get so scared that it’s real, and what if I’m asleep and don’t know it…”
“Shh, shh… it’s okay, Auru.”
It’s hard to keep his eyes open in the dark of night like this. He leans into Canach, pressing his face into the other sylvari’s neck. “It’s just a dream,” he hears Canach tell him through the haze of encroaching sleep. His thumb strokes Auruim’s shoulder over and over, gentle and familiar. “Just sleep, my dear.”
“Are you almost ready to go?” Alba asks him, come morning. Auruim shrugs. He didn’t sleep well. Plus he doesn’t want to go. His hope is that if he’s obstinate and moody enough, Alba will let him stay at camp, rather than making him go with.
It's hard to explain why. He doesn’t really even know what Alba’s doing today, just that he’s got some kind of diplomatic meeting to attend with important people, and that he doesn’t want to be there. He can’t ask what the meeting is for, or Alba may mistake his question for interest, or worse, excitement. He eyes the soggy gruel of Pact Breakfast silently instead, hungry but unwilling to chew so much so early in the morning.
“Auruim.” Alba’s waiting for an answer. He glances up, face caught somewhere between a taut grimace and a furrowed pout. He feels bad. He feels like crying, that’s all. He’s not sure why. Alba holds eye contact for a long moment, his face hard to decipher, but sighs and looks away.
“You’re coming with me,” Alba says sternly, before he can get any words out of his mouth.
“I don’t want to,” he chokes out finally. It’s so hard to speak, he finds. He has trouble forming words more often than not, more trouble than he’d ever had before the jungle. He talks slowly, carefully, and that’s why people think he’s so stupid– that’s not the issue right now, or even the reason he’s struggling, but it’s all still true. “I don’t. Want. To. Go,” he grits out, pressing his fists against his closed eyes while Alba and the unforgiving Pact gruel stare him down.
“You don’t even know where we’re going.”
“I don’t want to go, I want to stay here with everyone else! You can’t make me leave.”
“Auruim…”
“I don’t want to go,” he moans, grinding the heels of his palms against his eyelids.
“Don’t act like this,” Alba sighs, putting a hand out towards him. Auruim recoils from the touch to his shoulder with a sob, lowering himself to hunch over the table.
“Auruim, please. Come on. There’s no one to watch you today.”
“Don’t make me go…”
“I need you to come with me so I know that you’re safe. Okay? I can’t ask Bourbon to keep an eye on you all the time, he’s got other things he needs to do… he's coming today too. And Meisi’s… gone.” Alba sits down at his right, facing away from the table, stroking his wet cheek.
“Why… Why won’t he stay with me?”
“They’ve got other things to do, Auru. Please stop crying. Tell me what this is really about.” Auruim lifts his head slowly, hiccuping. “I know you don’t feel this strongly about going to a meeting. What happened?”
Auruim sniffles wetly, holding still as Alba wipes his face. “I don’t feel good. I don’t want to…”
Alba’s getting annoyed. He can feel it. There’s a thick, static tension in the air, like lightning about to strike at him, burning him up to nothing. But he doesn’t say anything. He’s trying to wait Auruim out, to ride out his tantrum so that he has no energy left to argue by the time it’s time for them to leave camp.
“I’m tired,” he tries.
“I know you are,” Alba sighs, reaching for him again, ignoring his flinch away to pull him against his chest in a hug. “You were having nightmares all night.”
It’s not a surprise to hear. He has those dreams more often than not. Dreams where horrifying things happen, where people aren’t quite right… Things twist and turn ugly and he has to force himself awake, like pushing something thick and wet through a fine mesh. It doesn’t want to go through, no matter how hard you try to force it to– his mind and body fight against him in those dreams, try to keep him trapped in the terrors, unable to move, unable to call out for help.
“We can spend some time together after. Okay? Just you and me,” Alba promises. “Just for a couple of hours, Auru…”
“Okay,” he relents quietly, leaning into the Commander. Just a couple hours, then.
Bourbon’s there, when they reach the hall. Auruim’s glad for that. He doesn’t dislike Bourbon… maybe at first. Not anymore. Bourbon’s kind to him, even when he’s not deserving of it, and patient. And careful.
Auruim knows he’s being dragged along as a preventative measure, to keep him in the periphery of Alba’s vision so that he doesn’t come back to hell at the Pact camp. He regrets this, that people don’t trust him. Can’t trust him. Sure enough, if he were there, he’d be starting something, inevitably. It feels bad, being untrustworthy, but being watched doesn’t have the desired effect either. He’s itching to do something. Smash something. Burn something. Hit someone for a reaction. He doesn’t know why he does these things. He stays back, sitting at the far end of the side of the room where Alba can see him, but where he’s out of the way for the diplomats to proceed.
It’s lonely in the corner. He wishes someone could have come with him… Ven, or Lio… He misses them all, suddenly, sitting by himself, picking at the carved wooden design on the back of the sofa with his nails as he waits. He should have brought something to do, at least. Maybe some paper to write a letter, or draw…
But he can’t see well, anyway, and he’s not putting glasses on in front of these clowns. They’d mock him behind polite looks. Smile snidely. Sneer.
An hour in, he’s slumped into the couch, still meticulously destroying the wood of the sofa when Bourbon approaches, hands in his pockets. Auruim glances up at him, catching the edges of the smile offered. Bourbon doesn’t wait for an invitation to sit. He also doesn’t say a thing about the scratches in the polished, now badly chipped wood.
“Pretty boring, huh,” he asks. Auruim shrugs. “I hate these things,” Bourbon admits quietly. “I don’t get human politics.”
You are human, Auruim thinks, but he doesn’t say that because it’s cruel. People only trot that out to make Bourbon sad. Same as they only ever bring up bandits or Aetherblades around him to hurt his feelings. Everyone acts like they don’t know that it stings for him like a gaping wound when they do that, but Auruim knows. Auruim knows what it is to be hurt like that.
Auruim hasn’t been paying attention, though he could probably listen in on the dull, slow conversation across the room. “Alba said it’s going to run over,” Bourbon says apologetically. Auruim exhales through his nose, a deep sigh. Of course it is. Humans love to hear themselves when they speak. “I can take you back to camp,” Bourbon offers, “or we could head to Arborstone…”
He shrugs again. It doesn’t matter. Alba promised, but Alba lies all the time anyway. “You wanna go home?” Bourbon asks. He rolls his shoulders again, turning his head away to hide his burning eyes. Bourbon waits a minute for him to respond, but he’s just tearing up worse, wiping at his face in distress. He won’t be seen crying in front of the politicians, he tells himself. He’s better than that, he tells himself more sternly. He shudders with a quiet sob, squeezing his eyes shut, and Bourbon gently puts a hand on his bicep, trying to pull him to his feet. “Alright, let’s go.”
He does want to go home, but it’s only once across the room that he’s able to realize the feeling. He wants to see people that he loves, people he cares about. He’s so sick of political droning, like a vicious white noise behind a curtain of rotten milk in his mind. Alba glances at them as they pass to exit and offers an apologetic smile. Auruim tries not to look at him at all.
“Do you remember the ████rd██ █o███,” Bourbon asks when they’re out of the room and walking down the hall. Auruim slows to a stop.
“The ████r?” he asks. Bourbon doesn’t stop walking. He has to jog to catch back up. “What ███e█?” He doesn’t know what Bourbon said. He didn’t hear it right. Somehow he knows the shape of the words in his mouth anyway.
“…You don’t have to worry about it,” Bourbon says quietly.
“Was there a █████?” Auruim asks, brow furrowed as they walk. Their footsteps echo on the polished marble floor, two uneven staccatos overlapping. He doesn’t remember a █████. It feels significant somehow, but it can’t be important if he doesn’t remember it at all. “Was I there?”
“There was,” Bourbon says. “You were. But you were really sick.”
“I don’t remember it.”
“That’s okay. That’s enough. Let’s get you home.”
“You should go back to sleep,” Venasis says, and Auruim forces his eyes open, lifting his head from the table.
“I’m up,” he mumbles, rubbing at his eyes, wiping away the gunk of sleep. Darlio glances at him and huffs in amusem*nt, looking away. “What.”
“You’ve got food on your face, sh*t head.”
“Shut– shut up, I’m saving it.”
“Why are you so tired,” Venasis asks, standing at the head of the table to his right. Auruim shrugs, resting his elbow on the tabletop and leaning his forehead into his fist.
“Slept like sh*t.”
“You were kicking all night,” Darlio says, mouth full.
“Good,” Auruim sneers, and Darlio kicks him under the table. He kicks back twice as hard, properly evoking the reaction he wants. Venasis pulls Darlionia off him after a minute of rolling around on the ground together, kicking and biting. She seems less amused than either of them are, and launches right back into it as Auruim sits down again.
“Does Deidre know?”
“What?” Auruim asks, breathless and laughing.
“Does Deidre know you’re not sleeping right?”
“No,” Auruim huffs, annoyed again instantly. “He doesn’t need to kn– that’s stupid. He doesn’t. Why would he care?” Darlio kicks him again and darts away, but Venasis puts a hand out to stop Auruim from giving chase.
“She’s a medic. Go talk to her,” Venasis says firmly.
“Why?” Auruim groans. “He’ll get all…”
He trails off, looking between the two of them, seeking support, or at least the right words to say. “She’ll get worried,” he mumbles finally, embarrassed.
“I’m not saying that,” Darlio snarls at someone not in the conversation, then louder, “shut the f*ck up. Shut up!” Venasis glances at him, then back to Auruim. Her gaze doesn’t waver.
“Fine,” he snaps. “Fine. I’ll tell her. She’s not going to know what to do.”
“Tell her anyway,” Ven says, and Auruim turns to storm off and find Deidre. He leaves them there, walking with urgency through the Pact camp. He can’t seem to find the medical tent, somehow. The camp winds and curves in on itself, endlessly looping, closed tent after closed tent and still no Deidre. He’s just so exhausted. It’s so frustrating, and now that he’s away from Lio and Ven he feels like bursting into tears over it, like all his strength has been sucked right out of him, leaving nothing good behind.
“Auruim?” Deidre asks, when he’s been glaring tearily at the path for some time. “Are you okay? You’re… making people nervous.”
“I can’t sleep,” he tells her without a preamble, not looking up from the dirt.
“Well, it‘s daytime. You should wait until tonight.” She takes his arm, trying to lead him off the path to the tent. “Come on. Come sit down. Talk to me.”
The medical tent is dark. Auruim sits on one of the wobbly little stools while Deidre lights a lamp and comes back over. “What’s going on?” She prompts. Auruim stares at the floor of the tent, vision going blurry.
“I’m scared. Every time I fall asleep, I’m scared I won’t wake up.”
Deidre takes a minute before responding. “You know that’s silly,” she chides him gently. “Why wouldn’t you? You’re healthy, you have people that love you…”
“I’m scared.”
“You like being here, don’t you?”
“I want to go home,” Auruim whines, rubbing his eyes. Outside the tent, the camp becomes noisy suddenly; people laughing, music playing. He sniffs, lifting his head slightly, looking towards the tent flap, illuminated from the outside. Shadows of people prance by.
“But there’s a festival today,” Deidre says lightly. “You want to stay and have fun, don’t you? You’re happy.” Auruim groans, clutching his head. He has a headache. “Auru…”
He sinks from his seat to the floor, hands seeking her skirt. “Why are you doing this,” Deidre sighs at him, pushing his hands away from their skirt. Auruim grabs right back at it, bunching the fabric and twisting, burying his pinched face in it. She hisses. “Stop it. There’s a festival! You need to be happy.”
“I’m trying,” he gasps, hands tight in the fabric. “I’m trying to talk to you, please don’t make me go.”
“Talk then,” she snaps, annoyed, and Auruim sucks in a shuddering breath to force it all out.
“I’m so tired… I’m so tired all the time, and I never wake up. I feel heavy, and I taste like rot, and I beg it please, please leave me, but it lives in me. It goes where I go… I can’t keep carrying it, but I don’t know how to shove it off and no one will tell me what to do, and I’m scared…”
Deidre is silent for a minute, letting him cry in the dark tent, face in the crumpled fabric of her skirt. The festival outside sounds faraway, as if the tent wall is made of a thick veil of dreams, not canvas. Deidre pulls him away again and he lifts his head slowly, sluggishly, eyes still wet, to look up at them, seeking.
“Why should I care,” Deidre asks flatly. “Why should anyone?”
He stares up at them for a long moment, trying to understand. Maybe he missed something. “I’m tired,” he says again, struggling with the words. “I’m trying, I’m tired. It feels so heavy.”
“I don’t care.”
“It tastes rotten inside me. And it hurts, the more I sit here. The more it eats me.”
“I don’t care.”
“Why?” Auruim asks, squeezing his eyes shut. “Why not?”
“I think we’d all be happier if you just stayed asleep.”
Auruim opens his eyes. “I had that same dream again,” Alba informs him, scooting closer. He can’t control the heavy recoil, the full-body flinch away from him. He knows this room, white and overflowing with morning light. “What’s wrong?” Alba asks, but Auruim can’t look at him. Not head-on. He can’t force his eyes past the halo of light to confirm it’s really Alba, so how can he be sure? “Auru?”
“It’s okay to sleep,” Meisi tells him, not looking up from his paperwork.
“Where did he go,” Auruim raspy, throat tight.
“You can stay here.”
“I don’t want to stay here,” he chokes, and chokes again after the words are out, unable to inhale again. His throat closes.
“You’re worried for nothing,” Canach says, kissing his forehead. The room is pitch black. He can’t see a thing. He waits for Canach’s familiar copper glow to illuminate the darkness, but it doesn’t come. Nothing penetrates the night. “You have nothing to be afraid of. You’re safe here.”
“I’m scared,” he admits, gasping in a lungful of black air. No one answers from the other end of the darkness. He chokes and gasps, forcing out words. “Hello? I’m scared. Is anyone there?”
“Do you remember the ██z██d’█ ███e█,” Bourbon asks wearily, back to him. The hallway stretches past him with no end in sight.
“No,” Auruim says, voice shaking. “Bourbon where are we?”
“It’s fine if you don’t.”
“What happened in the █████,” Auruim demands, vision blurry as he hurries towards his turned back. He rushes forward and Bourbon doesn’t move, but he gets no closer. The distance between them is the same. “Please tell me. What happened? Am I going to make it back?”
“It’s better if you don’t.”
“Please,” he begs, palms against the closed door. “Please, let me out. I want to come back.”
There are voices on the other side, blurry and indistinct like the noise from the backroom of a dying party. They seem familiar. He doesn’t know who any of them are. He presses his forehead to the old wood, eyes shut to try to make out what they’re saying. “Please let me come back,” he cries into the empty darkness. The door doesn’t answer him. What does he do with this sadness? What does he do with his fear? Where can he throw it so it won’t return? “Please let me out,” he begs again, voice echoing in the black.
“Hello?” A voice calls back. Auruim flinches away from it, pressing himself against the door. “Who’s there?”
“Who are you,” he shoots back defensively, tucked against the exit.
“Nobody. Who are you?”
“Auruim,” he says, trying the doorknob. It doesn’t move. The voice in the darkness doesn’t respond at first. When it does, it sounds incredulous, baffled.
“The kid in the Tower?”
“What?” Auruim asks after a long, dark minute.
“You… you’ve been in here a long time, haven’t you?”
“I’m scared,” he tells the voice. “I want out.”
“You’ve gotta wake up, kid.”
Auruim shoves away from him, gasping, and Alba stares at him. Or maybe it’s not Alba. He can’t see him, he can’t look at him. The hand that comes after him, seeking, it doesn’t seem like Alba’s hand. It’s not shaped right.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Auruim cries, yanking on the doorknob.
“You need to wake up. People are waiting on you.”
“I don’t know what you mean!”
“No need to shout,” Aeris says, sounding bored. He thinks it’s her. It could be her, but he can’t tell anymore. He doesn’t know these shapes, these people. Every time he moves it throbs, and the taste creeps back onto his tongue.
“I want to go home,” he says, and tries to force himself to see her, to see if it is her, but the haze blocks everything out as soon as he tries.
“You’ve been asleep for a long time, kiddo,” the voice says steadily as he howls, pounding at the door with his fist. “You need to open your eyes.”
“I don’t know how,” he admits, sobbing with his cheek pressed to the wood.
“We’ll get you there.”
“Just stay asleep,” someone says. “Okay? Stay here with me. With us.”
“But I want to go,” he says, twisting to try to pull his hand away. He doesn’t know who has the other end. His arm throbs with pain. “Let go of me. No, let me go.”
“No,” it says, tugging and ripping at his hand, his arm, up into his shoulder, his chest. “No.”
“It’s eating me,” he sobs, “it’s eating me inside.”
“It’s gonna be okay, Auruim, but you have to wake up.”
“How!” He yells pounding his fist against the door, then his head. It throbs. It throbs. It throbs. “I’m trying! I want to! I’m trying!”
No answer comes. “I’m trying, I’m trying to wake up, I want to go home,” he moans, “please don't leave me here…”
“I won't leave you, sweetheart.”
Someone says nothing in the room with white morning light. Auruim holds his breath, afraid to move. It's not Alba, he knows now. He tries to curl his fingers, to check if his arm is there, but he can't feel anything. He can't see through the haze, but he feels it shift.
“Who are you,” Auruim asks, then hiccups, hand still on the doorknob.
“I'm Glaz.”
“Why are you here?”
“The Wizards locked me up. I'm a friend of Bourbon’s.”
“You know Bourbon?” he sniffs.
“I know Bourbon.”
“I want to go home,” he says to something with its back turned. It hurts to look at. He struggles to decipher its form. “Please.”
It doesn't move. It makes no response. “Can I go home?”
Something moves. A leg picks up a sharp, careful claw, and three others do the same as it turns to look at him. He remembers this. It was smaller, before.
“I am not finished,” it says.
“It won't let me go,” he groans, head heavy, eyelids heavy, every part of him weighing down, but he does not let go of the doorknob. He cannot let go.
“You have to fight it. It's you or that thing, one of you can live,” Glaz says. “You want out, don't you? You want to go home?”
“I wanna go home,” he keens softly.
“Why do you want out so badly?” it asks as it paces around him. His skin prickles as it passes behind him, out of his line of vision. He can't move to follow it. Its voice hurts under his skin. “I have provided for you. I have given you plenty to sustain yourself on, until I have finished.”
“You're eating me,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You're killing me.”
“Most would not have been so kind to you for your end, giving you visions of love, of home.”
“But you'll kill me.”
“My nature is to kill and eat.”
“I don't want to die.”
“Neither do I,” it says, pacing back into his line of sight.
“I don't know how,” Auruim says, shuddering with the effort of holding onto the knob. “Glaz, I don't think I can do it.”
“You can.”
“It's killing me,” he says quietly, unable to summon a larger voice. “I'm going to die.”
Glaz doesn't answer. Auruim’s head sinks until his chin rests on his chest.
“Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog?”
“No,” he admits, as it circles to the left again.
“A scorpion asks a frog for a ride across the river. But midway there, the scorpion stings the frog, and they both drown. The frog asks the scorpion why it would doom them both. They could have lived, both of them. The frog could have declined, of course. And the scorpion could have refrained, but as it tells the frog, “it is in my nature.””
“I don't understand.”
“Or the frog could have taken a dive and swam away, and the scorpion would have drowned alone. Or the scorpion could have dragged the frog to land and snipped its legs off. But that would be just cruel, don't you think? Making something suffer unnecessarily before death, all alone? I've been kind to you. I've made you happy until the end.”
“I want to go home,” Auruim says. “I want to wake up.”
“I've given you people who can love you. People you can love back.”
“Fight it!” Glaz yells, but he can’t lift his head. “You’ve got to fight it or it’ll all have been for nothing!”
“‘m trying,” he mumbles, struggling to find the shapes of words.
“It’s a very peaceful way to go,” it says. “It’s like going to sleep.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” he says as it comes closer. “Please. I don’t want this.”
“It is in my nature,” it says, lifting a claw from the ground. The space between them vanishes.
“I had that same dream again,” he says dully, blinking white spots out of his vision. “I… Hello?”
There’s no one else. It’s just him and the room of white light, sheer curtains billowing in some unknown breeze from a window that isn’t there.
“Hello?” he says again, pushing the covers off to climb out of bed. “Is anyone there?”
He can hear the breeze, and the curtains move as if blown into the white light, but he feels nothing.
“Is it just me?”
He waits. Something has to be coming, he thinks. Eventually it’ll reach this room, and then he’ll go somewhere else.
He waits.
Nothing changes.
