Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Fred’s hologram slowly refracted then began to glow and hover over the ancient pedestal in bright clean blue light— too calm a contrast for the complete ruin around it.

“Hello, Xara,” he said, his arms planted firmly at his sides.

You could hear the grimness in his voice, clearly not wanting to convey the message that he recorded.

Romeo went deadly still, his murderous energy even taking a pause. His levitating feet quickly finding the floor, the energy around him seems to even stop its own hypnotic red fractals in its tracks. Even his own breathing— it was hard to do even that.

It was like the words had intruded deep inside him and forcefully pressed against a deep gash that had already been split open too many times in his past. The look almost humanized him again.

His trembling hand now remained half-raised, red static comes alive around his fingers— but spurts out in broken, uncertain threads, but even that looked wrong now. The energy felt smaller. Less certain of itself, now devoid of the arrogance it was summoned upon.

Fred’s expression was painfully soft in that impossible, prerecorded way that made it hurt all the more worse.

Romeo was brutally reminded of his terrible sin— seeing his gentle face again. He finds himself being painfully and involuntarily reminded of *the* sound that haunts him even now—

the sound his dear friend made when his life expired at his hand.

“If you’re seeing this, my dear friend—” Fred continued, his voice a slap back to reality, it almost felt like he was talking to him again…

“then I’m afraid the worst has happened. I know… I know… you kept telling me this would happen— I don’t know why I never listen to you…” he darkly chuckled, as a temporary smile entered his face as fast as it left.

Petra, who lied half collapsed painfully on the bridge with blood streaked through her ginger hair, made a look fueled by incomprehensible emotions.

Jack still had one hand death clamped over his leaking side right above his hip bone and the other one shakily braced against the stone just to keep himself upright.

Radar was on his knees at the terminal, one hand still carefully over the gored side of his face, blood continues to gush and pour through his fingers and quickly down his wrist in hot red streams.

Fred kept speaking, unaware. Forever in complete ignorance.

“I really hoped this wouldn’t be needed. I hoped you’d get here before Romeo could do something irreversible. But judging by how we’re here— I can only imagine what the case could be…”

Romeo’s face changed. Not all at once. First the chilling blankness. Then, the crack of disbelief. Then quickly into something much worse, something almost young, horribly wounded and disturbing to witness on him.

“Fred…?”

The name came out small. Weak. Powerless.

Fred’s hologram didn’t falter. It never could.

“The gauntlet inside this terminal is a failsafe of my creation,” he said, voice quiet with reminiscence and heavy with regret.

“ I gave it the ability to make Romeo normal again. I didn’t want to kill him. I don’t think I could’ve if I wanted too. I made it to punish him by stopping him from doing any more damage.”

A beat.

“It may take more than one hit— I’m so sorry for that.”

Romeo’s breathing sharpened. He felt his anger rising and welling in his chest, hearing about himself from the third person—

Static suddenly flickered under his skin, faster and uglier now. The vibrant red light around him now shone less like power and more like something quickly tearing loose at the seams.

Ironically, Fred looked almost pained when he said the next part.

“No matter how impossible he’s become. No matter what he’s done. I made this so it didn’t have to end in his death.”

Romeo felt the blood drain from his body, his chest felt heavy like it was replaced with lead.

“No,” he whispered, and the word broke apart on the way out.

Fred’s gaze stayed gentle. He still smiled.

“He’s still my friend.”

The last line was almost too soft to hear.

“Good luck, Xara. I think you might need it.”

His form then flickered— then disappeared entirely. The area around it seemed darker now, less illuminated.

Romeo turned. A hard, abrupt movement toward Xara’s body, as if confirming all his worst fears. The body still lying there made the whole thing worse. Harder to deny that it ever happened.

That was the moment when whatever was human left inside him started to fracture. A silent, ugly fracture that spread through his expression and into the red light around him.

Radar saw the opening first. The opportunity— the hope glinted in his one good eye.

He was half-blind, blood still painfully running out of the ruined side of his face and down onto his jaw, one hand now pressed hard over the wound. But his remaining eye had to be locked onto the pedestal.

The gauntlet. The gold sparkling in the lights.

Jack saw him move automatically, like a puppet with mechanical strings— he tried to say something, but his voice caught on his own pain before the word could even form.

Radar took a few steps and then tripped— he strained to push himself up.

It was an ugly process. Petra and Jack could barely watch the awkwardness as he slipped again immediately on the blood slicking the terminal, but surprisingly caught himself against the console. Leaving a red smear across the glowing symbols when his hand slid.

He reached for the pedestal with the kind of careful desperation that only comes when there is no time to question being careful at all.

His aching fingers shook so hard while grabbing it, he nearly missed it. Then he grabbed the gauntlet. The metal was way heavier than it looked. The blood all over his hand and sleeve made it slippery to put on.

He pathetically caught it against his chest, breathing hard, staring at it like he couldn’t quite believe it was real.

Romeo snapped out of his temporary catatonic daze and his head snapped toward his direction like a hawk who found food. His eyes narrowed predatorily, the grief in his face quickly condensed into fury.

“*You*” he said, and now there was no performance left in his voice at all. Just raw, ugly hatred. Leaking everywhere.

“You don’t get to take that from me.” His voice rang with a deadly finality,

Radar swallowed hard. Feeling his own fear wanting to paralyze him. He looked terrified. He was terrified. But he had the gauntlet now, and there was no way back out of this.

The bridge shuddered again.

Lukas barely saw any of them. He was still shakily bent over Jesse. He did not hear any of the commotions. He wouldn’t bring himself to. Because Jesse had gone eerily quiet beneath him.

Lukas felt a grim sense of realization seeping before himself before he truly grasped it.

The hand he had been holding so tightly was gradually losing warmth, and Jesse’s head tilted against his shoulder with a terrible, exhausted weight. His eyes slowly began to lull close…

“No.” Lukas whispered quietly, denying the universe and what is currently happening right in front of him.

His whole body went rigid with terrible understanding as he registered Jesse’s now closed eyes.

“No, no!— Jesse?” Lukas frantically shook Jesse awake,

Jesse’s eyes jolted open, brown, and so dim it hurt.

“Im— so— kinda cold,” he murmured, still downplaying his own feelings for Lukas’s sake. His voice was thin. Barely there.

Lukas’s breath hitched so hard it stung the back of his throat, completely raw from sobbing.

“No,” he said again, faster now, panicking and shaking.

“you’re— you’re gonna be just fine, you’re— I’ve got you, I’ve got you—”

Jesse’s mouth moved faintly. Almost a smile. Maybe not.

“You know how this ends.” He drew a labored breath,

Lukas froze, he felt his veins sting with an enveloping coldness. Jesse swallowed more blood, and the motion visibly hurt. His lashes fluttered with a cold sweat,

“I can’t…” he started, then had to stop to breathe.

“I can’t really feel my hands.”

Lukas’s chest caved in. He squeezed Jesse’s hands instinctively, then pressing them hard between his palms like he could force the life back into him.

“That’s okay— that’s okay, you’re fine, just— just stay with me as long as you can, Jess—”

Jesse looked at him for a long second. There was so much in that look Lukas couldn’t bear.

Fear, yes. And pain, but also something else. Like a grim but peaceful acceptance. Something that looked a lot like Jesse deciding, right then and there, to spend little time he had left on making Lukas stay strong.

He needed to.

“Lukas.”

Lukas’s head snapped out of his spiral and looked down to meet his lowering eyes. Jesse’s voice is weaker now. Still, it was steady enough to stop him.

“You’re doing that thing again—“ Jesse coughed wetly,

Lukas blinked, frantic and confused, and unable to think past the pooling blood that soaked in his hands.

How it kept him disturbingly warm.

“What thing?”

“That one where you think,” Jesse whispered,

“if you deny it enough, it won’t happen.”

Lukas’s mouth opened. Nothing came out. Lukas’s face burned with shame, how predictable he is.

Jesse’s hand twitched weakly in his.

“It’s happening,” he said softly.

The words cut like a dull knife. Lukas shook his head at once, tears already spilling over.

“No. Please, don’t— don’t say that, don’t—”

Jesse’s eyes stayed on him.

“I’m scared,” Lukas whispered before he could stop himself.

It came out broken and childlike and humiliating in its honesty.

Because how dare *he* say he’s scared right now?

Jesse’s mouth moved in the ghost of a smile.

“That’s— okay,” he breathed.

Lukas stared at him, horrified. Jesse’s fingers twitched faintly against his wrist, a fraction of his normal strength.

“Means that I really mattered to you.”

That should have helped. It only made Lukas shake harder with devastation— the only thing keeping him from openly sobbing is that he wants to spend Jesse’s last moments not selfishly.

Jesse kept going, because Jesse always kept going when Lukas started to fall apart— plus it kept him awake.

“I was so angry at you when you left,” he said quietly.

Lukas’s face crumpled with shame.

“I know.”

“No,” Jesse grasped— like that wasn’t the right word to use, and the faintest hint of urgency pushed through the weakness.

“Not just angry.”

He swallowed. That clearly hurt.

“I kept thinking…” His voice thinned, but he pushed through it. “I thought I had to protect you from it. From him. Like if I just kept quiet and dealt with it on my own, you wouldn’t get hurt.”

He let out a weak, uneven breath.

“But I needed you. And I didn’t say anything. I just… listened to him instead.”

Lukas’s breath caught painfully. ‘He needed me…’ he ruminated,

“Jesse— you shouldn’t have got to decide that…”

“No.” Jesse’s voice was almost a whisper now.

“I know. I know you were scared.”

Lukas shook his head harder.

“I should never have left you there.”

“You came back,” Jesse said.

The certainty in it was so soft, so devastating, that Lukas almost stopped breathing.

“You came back,” Jesse repeated.

“You always do.”

Lukas’s shoulders shook. His forehead lowered until it touched Jesse’s.

“I’m here,” he whispered, as if saying it quietly enough might keep it from breaking. “I’m here. I’m here.”

Jesse’s eyes stayed on him. There was something in them Lukas didn’t want to name. Then Jesse breathed in sharply and went suddenly rigid with pain.

An agonizing, violent cough tore through him.

Lukas jerked, trying to catch him as Jesse folded forward against his arm, one hand sliding uselessly down Lukas’s sleeve.

“Jesse—!”

He coughed again.

And then the blood came.

It flooded out of him in a wet, awful burst, hot and dark and far too much, spilling over his chin and throat and Lukas’s wrist. Jesse made a choking sound, another cough, and then more blood surged out of him.

Lukas’s stomach turned at the gruesome sight:

“It’s— it’s alright… I’ve got you—” he tries to comfort but can barely veil his distress.

He carefully hauled Jesse upright in panic, one hand behind his neck, the other braced at his shoulder, trying to keep him from choking on his own blood.

He tried not to move him too much, trying not to think about the fact that the wound in his abdomen was still there and still catastrophic and how they only have minutes until that becomes the thing that killed him.

Jesse coughed so hard it hurt to watch. After a moment, the coughing stopped. He sagged tiredly in Lukas’s arms. Barely breathing. Barely there.

Lukas’s whole body went rigid while hold Jesse’s fading body.

“No,” he whispered, voice already collapsing, trying to deny reality that’s quickly setting in.

“No, no, no— Jesse, stay with me, please— just a bit longer…”

Jesse’s eyes flickered open again. Exhausted.

He looked tired. wrecked. So very exhausted. No longer monstrous nor possessed Jesse that he was just a few hours ago. He was just himself, all used up and dying in Lukas’s arms.

And somehow he still found a pathetic amount of strength to turn his gaze back to Lukas. Guess it’s that hero’s arrogance that Romeo talked about so long ago…

His mouth moved around a faint, almost apologetic smile.

“I was kind of hoping,” he whispered, and had to stop to breathe because even that hurt,

“that I’d get a little more time. With you..”

Lukas made a broken sound that was half sob, half refusal.

“No,” he choked. “No, this can’t be happening— you can’t do that, please don’t—”

Jesse’s fingers twitched. Like he doesn’t want to hear the word.

Die. Death. Leave. Go. Whatever word he was gonna use, he didn’t want to hear it.

“I’m sorry I kept my feelings a secret for so long,” he said, and Lukas’s face went white.

The words came out slow, frayed at the edges, but they were painfully clear.

“We would’ve had more time... got a cat together…” he laughs absently, clearly slowly becoming more delusional from the blood loss.

And Lukas stared at him in disbelief. His eyes mourning the future that they could’ve had. Both of them were.

Jesse’s eyelids fluttered. Lukas’s breath snagged at the sigh of seeing his eyes close. Lukas’s eyes flooded instantly and he shook him awake again. The pain jolting him awake.

Jesse watched him, exhausted and painfully distant. He smiled mischievously,

“I wanted to get— married..”

Lukas made a sound that didn’t belong to any language. He put his free hand, hovering over his mouth.

“Oh my God.”

Jesse’s thumb moved weakly over Lukas’s wrist.

“It’s stupid, I know…” he murmured.

Lukas shook his head so hard it almost hurt.

“No. No, it’s not—”

Jesse gave the smallest, sickest little breath that might once have been a laugh.

“I was just so embarrassed that I cared about you that much,” he admitted. “I never wanted to ruin our friendship… God, how much time I wasted...”

Lukas looked at him like he had been stabbed. Jesse kept speaking because now that he had started, he seemed unable to stop. It seemed to be keeping him awake.

“I thought if I got good at not needing anyone,” he whispered,

“then nothing could hurt me like that again.”

His eyes closed for a second. When they opened, they looked so much dimmer.

“That didn’t work out as you can see…”

It was such a Jesse thing to say, and Lukas almost broke on the spot. Jesse’s breathing had gone shallow again, thin and hitching at the edges.

Then he looked at Lukas, really looked, as if he needed to be sure Lukas was still there before he said the next thing.

“I’m actually scared to die.”

The words were barely there.

Lukas stopped breathing. He didn’t know how to respond.

Not because he didn’t understand. Because he did, painfully so. Jesse has had so many near death experiences… no one has ever even bothered to see how Jesse felt, asked if he was ever scared.

It made Lukas remind himself that this wasn’t about him. Not really. Not in the way his panic kept trying to make it.

Jesse was scared.

Jesse was scared to die.

And Lukas—

Lukas had spent the whole time making it selfishly about him. His grip loosened for a second before he forced it steady again.

Then he bent closer, giving Jesse a kiss on his bloodstained lips.

“I know,” he whispered, coming away with blood on his lips and the words came out rough and shaking but quieter than before. Slower.

“I know. I’m here.”

Jesse looked at him, glassy and trembling.
Lukas swallowed hard, strengthening his resolve.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Jesse’s breathing stuttered. That seemed to help more than anything else had. A tiny bit of the tension in his face eased.

‘Lukas was always the steady one.’ Jesse thought happily, the tears stung his eyes.

Jesse’s mouth trembled.

“I don’t want to—” He stopped, swallowed, and immediately winced.

“I don’t wanna die.”

The honesty of it hit Lukas so hard he thought it might split him open. He nodded once, fast, tears falling before he could stop them.

“I know,” he whispered. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do without you, Jesse...”

Jesse’s fingers twitched weakly in his grip. Lukas wiped Jesse’s tears before they could even leave his eye.

“Don’t grieve me forever— promise me you’ll live…” he trailed off, clearly forgetting the rest of his sentence, a fog now becoming tangible in his glossy eyes.

That destroyed him. Lukas let out a tiny, broken breath that was close enough to a laugh to count.

“I’ll try.”

Then Jesse’s breathing went shallow again. A long, thin exhale. It was a peaceful second of quiet… And the blood surged back into his mouth.

It came all at once. Too much to manage. A terrible, wet rush that made him cough and choke and fold in Lukas’s arms all over again.

Lukas caught him tighter on instinct.

“Jesse—!”

Jesse dragged in a gasping breath through the blood and shook hard against him.

Jesse’s mouth was already stained dark. He coughed again. Blood burst out of him in a horrible, final surge.

Lukas stared at it, horrified, unable to move. Dried blood began to crust on his lips.

Jesse was shaking. His eyes were barely open now. But he was still here long enough to say the next thing.

Lukas bent closer, voice breaking apart.

“Jesse—”

“I love you,”

Jesse whispered. Interrupting whatever Lukas was about to say.

The words were so small and final and devastating that Lukas felt them like a physical blow. His face was filled with despair.

“I love you too,” he choked out immediately, voice wrecked.

“I love you, I love you, I—”

Jesse’s mouth trembled. And then he broke eye contact, and didn’t bother to regain it. For a second he looked almost peaceful.

Then, very softly, half-conscious and slipping away by inches and staring at the sky filled with stars. Filled with the cold wind in a void of a foreign dimension.

“I’m finally gonna see Reuben again.”

The words were barely there. But they felt so final. Slurred and fading.

And then—

Jesse exhaled. Softly. Then his battered body finally went limp in Lukas’s arms. His eyes forever trained upon the sky.

The weight could be felt instantly. Lukas went deadly still.

Waiting for another breath. Another twitch.

*Anything*.

But as time passed nothing came. The only noise he could hear was his own breathing.

“Jesse?”

His voice cracked on the name. He shook him once, very carefully at first, then harder.

“Jesse.”

His hand slid up to Jesse’s face. Cold already. So cold. Like the hand of death has already caressed this body.

“No.”

The word came out small.

“No, no, no—”

He pressed his forehead against Jesse’s, breath coming fast and uneven again, but there was nothing to match it now.

No breath against his skin. No response.

Just agonizing stillness. The bridge shuddered again, hard enough to rattle them both. He still held Jesse still like the shake would hurt him.

Lukas didn’t even notice he did that. He couldn’t. He felt like he was a thousand miles away, like he was underwater.

After an indiscernible amount of time, He unhanded Jesse’s hands and slowly put them on the floor. He tried to back up and his hand slipped against the blood-slicked satchel at his side and caught on something hard inside.

For a second, he didn’t react.

His fingers fumbled into the bag and dragged out the carved object Xara had dropped.

It lay dull and gold in his palm, tiny emerald eyes staring up at him like it was taunting him. Useless. It wasn’t even a question. Now slicked with blood due to Lukas’s hands.

He looked at Jesse’s body. And then in the direction of Xara’s.

At how still they both lied. He looked back at Jesse.

His face once filled with life, is now forever idle and locked in that look of painful acceptance of his own demise.

his body no longer reacted to anything at all. his chest no longer rises or lowers to take in oxygen. He is now a husk of skin that used to be teeming with life and opportunity.

The cold that began to encapsulate his form. Representing the blow of wind that extinguishes the candle of life.

Lukas felt a part of himself die right there and then. His tears dried, as he felt an overwhelming numbness began to take over. He closed Jesse’s eyes, to let him finally have his peace.

Then, because there was nothing left in him but refusal and grief, he tried to press the random object into Jesse’s hand.

It slipped in the blood.

He caught it before it could hit the bridge. His fingers shook harder as he completely and silently began to shut down.

He took Jesse’s hand in both of his own and forced the object back into it, curling Jesse’s fingers around it because Jesse could not do it himself.

There was something unbearable about how little resistance there was. Lukas’s forehead dropped to Jesse’s knuckles.

Silence.

Nothing happened.

The object stayed cold. Dull. And painfully useless. He hated himself for even trying.

The bridge groaned again somewhere far away. Stone cracked. Something collapsed into the void with a distant, echoing break.

Lukas didn’t move. Didn’t look up. Didn’t breathe right. Variating between hyperventilating and then having to remember to breathe from the overwhelming numbness.

The world could end right there and he wouldn’t have noticed.

“MOVE—!”

The distant shout tore through everything.

Lukas didn’t react, he couldn’t take his eyes off his now dead hero… and lover.

He wonders what could’ve been…
_______________
The bridge shook violently, everyone could feel it in their injuries. A collective seething of pain could be heard from the group, earning a cruel laugh from Romeo.

Radar stumbled, barely catching himself on the edge of the terminal, one hand still clamped over the ruined side of his face. Blood slipped through his fingers, dripping onto the stone in uneven streaks.

Romeo wasn’t still anymore. Whatever that pause had been— whatever Fred had done to him— that flash of humanity… it was gone.

Or worse. Corrupted and mutated.

He stood there shaking, red static tearing through his body in jagged, unstable bursts. His breathing was uneven. Wrong. His eyes locked onto Radar with something feral and truly malicious behind them. His smile was enough to paralyze him still.

“You think that changes anything?” He snapped, pointing at the gauntlet, his smile a complete contrast to his tone. His voice subtly cracked in a way that made it sound like he was quickly spiraling.

Radar swallowed. Gauging the insanity that now oozes from him, making him extremely dangerous and unpredictable— as if he wasn’t before.

His grip tightened on the gauntlet.

“I don’t— I don’t know,” he admitted, breath shaking.

“But I’m not letting you keep doing this.” He said with borrowed resolve and courage.

Romeo laughed. It came out harsh and humiliating.

“You don’t get a say in that.”

“You insistent pest.”

He moved—

Fast. Couldn’t even blink.

Radar barely had time to react before Romeo was on him, one hand slamming into his throat and driving him back hard enough that the air punched out of his lungs.

His back hit stone. Hard. It knocked all the wind out of Radar, who was now struggling to breathe under the crushing force of Romeo’s grip.

The gauntlet nearly slipped in his grip. He clenched his hand to ensure it wouldn’t fall to the floor.

Romeo lifted him like he weighed nothing. He carried him high in the air, radars legs now hanging uselessly but kicking desperately.

His fingers tighten around his throat, nail digging into flesh. Blood now staining Romeo’s nails.

Radar choked, both hands flying up to claw at Romeo’s wrist and hand, the gauntlet knocking uselessly against his arm.

He couldn’t breathe.

His vision blurred at the edges. He made noises he didn’t know he could make, whining in agony.

“Pathetic,” Romeo hissed, dragging him higher.

“You think you can fix this? You think you can take anything from me—”

Radar threw a desperate punch with the hand that contained the gauntlet, interrupting Romeo’s monolouge. The gauntlet nearly fell in the process, but it connected.

It made a sickening sound of metal hitting the cheekbone. But the magical whirring of the artifact was unmistakable, whatever Radar did… it worked.

Petra lunged forward, ready for the backlash of that impulsive but impressive attack.

“Let him go!”

Her sword struck, but the hit barely made Romeo flinch. He shoved her back with a violent burst of static that sent her skidding across the fractured bridge.

Jack tried next, half-running, half-falling into the swing—

Romeo didn’t even look at him. His head raised to meet Radars eye.

A flick of his hand sent Jack crashing sideways into the terminal, the impact knocking the breath out of him in a broken gasp.

A bone could be heard breaking from the impact.

Radar’s fingers went weak from the sound. He looked into Romeo’s eyes, and seen—

Pure rage.

His body sagged in Romeo’s grip. Romeo laughed and rubbed the place where radar punched.

“Turns out you can throw a punch…”

The gauntlet slipped—

“That was your last. Enjoy the feeling of courage… one last time.”

Radar whimpered before he felt Romeo’s hand grip his throat even tighter with newfound inhuman strength.

Red static crackled around Romeo’s hand, which burned and stung the skin on Radar’s neck.

Radar felt his vocal cord being crushed, he started to taste blood in his mouth.

He looked to Petra and Jack for a final help but they were just too injured… they can barely even stand. He felt himself running out of time, and with his last breath before he suffered the same fate as Xara, he thought (since he can’t speak)

“I’m so sorry, Jesse…”

Radar felt his body going limp and darkness fill his vision.

The last sight of Romeo smiling over his body, utterly satisfied at his suffering…

And then—

A bright light that blinded everyone.

It didn’t explode nor crack. It just… appeared. A sudden, quiet bloom from somewhere behind them.

So warm. So wrong. So impossible.

Romeo froze, his smiled being wiped clean off his face.

His grip faltered, allowing Radar oxygen that he desperately needed.

“What—” Romeo sputtered.

He slowly turned towards the direction of the flash. His eyes wide with disbelief and a realization that nobody shared.

“That’s not—”

His voice dropped, something raw breaking through it. Like all of his work has been eviscerated right in front of him.

“That can’t be—”

His hand loosened completely. Releasing Radar from his grip that kept him suspended mid-air.

Radar fell fast to the floor, not ready for the impact.

He hit the ground hard and wrong, as the sickening sound of his ankle taking most of the impact could be heard.

That sound— that snap of bone breaking, it reminds people of their own mortality. How pathetically weak our bodies are.

Radar coughing violently as air finally forced its way back into his lungs in ragged, painful gasps. He quickly tried to stand but fell pathetically to the ground.

He didn’t understand, but he knew that he didn’t have time to be injured. He didn’t look back at the flash or at Romeo. Didn’t need to.

He just grabbed the heavy golden gauntlet. Forced himself up, no matter how painful it is.

Romeo was still staring, dumbfounded. Still distracted… and shaken from the impossibility.

Radar moved excruciatingly slow and steadily towards Romeo’s back and lunged. The swing was painfully sloppy. Unsteady. Everything in his body screamed at him to stop, but he didn’t.

The gauntlet connected again. Gold and red static flared.

Romeo screamed in pain. The sound tore out of him raw and unfiltered as the magic around him shattered outward, flickering violently.

He staggered. Actually staggered.

Radar nearly collapsed with the effort, barely managing to keep his footing as the bridge cracked beneath them. He forced himself forward again. Another hit. Much weaker. And much messier.

But it landed.

Romeo reeled, grabbing at his own arm like he could rip the damage out of himself.

“You!— you don’t— understand— what you’re—” he choked, voice breaking apart with the rest of him.

Radar didn’t answer. He didn’t bother to reply to him. He didn’t deserve it after everything he’s done. He just lifted the gauntlet again.

One more. That was all he had left in him.

He swung. It hit.

And something in Romeo gave way. He screamed as the last of his powers were stripped from his body. The red light flickered pathetically.

Then it all collapsed.

All that immense and godly power… Gone. For a second, he just stood there. Helpless. They all felt it too. They all stared at Romeo, at his human form.

Breathing fast as he’s cornered. Humanity filled his body. And so did the feeling of being utterly confused.

They all subtly marveled at Romeo’s normalcy, his red hair and goatee… he looks like a normal person. If only they didn’t know the truth. If they all didn’t suffer at his hands.

Romeo looked at his hands, at the color of them. Then he looked up at the rest of group, at their broken and battered bodies… and a look crossed his face. The emotion was imperceptible.

He took a unsure step in Radar’s direction and Radar visibly took two steps back.

He looked around like someone was gonna help him. But it’s far too late for that now. His regretful eyes tear up and his voice breaks as he mumbles…

“I’m so…”

No one can hear the rest though, and they never will. Whatever he said will be forever lost to time. the world answered for him though.

It finished his unheard sentence.

The bridge shook one last time and suddenly split open with a violent quake of the ground. The shaking brought even Romeo to his knees, and it threw the injured group to the floor.

A deep, violent crack tore through the terminal space as the structure above them finally gave out. They heard a cracking sound of something breaking up above.

Romeo looked up too late. He didn’t even have time to move. Or scream…

A huge slab of glowing stone and fractured terminal framework tore loose and fell from the ceiling. The debris struck him with a deafening crunch that seemed to echo through the whole space.

silence.

Then blood, pooling slowly beneath the wreckage.

Jack turned away immediately and looked like he might have been sick. Petra stared for one second and then shoved it down so hard it barely had time to exist in her mind.

Radar just lay there groaning on the bridge, panting through pain, his ankle useless beneath him. The gauntlet still on his arm.

He looked at Petra and Jack, wondering what to do next…
________________
Lukas didn’t move.

He was still bent over Jesse’s dead body. Still holding his hand. With that stupid artifact… Like he was still alive, just sleeping. He refused to feel the biting cold enveloping his hand.

He hadn’t even noticed the light.

Then—

A flicker. So small Lukas almost missed it. A thin seam of gold-green light opening somewhere in Jesse’s hand.

He froze and his breath stopped. The carved object— still curled uselessly in Jesse’s fingers— began to warm.

Then it splits into a blinding light.

Gold-green, sudden and bright, spilling out between Jesse’s fingers and over Lukas’s hands, over Jesse’s body, over the blood slicked across the bridge.

The light filled the space around them for one impossible second.

The blood stopped pouring through the wound, although it didn’t heal it closed or completely. But that’s enough. Enough that Lukas felt it instantly, the sudden end to that awful, impossible rush. The wound in Jesse’s abdomen pulled inward, sealing just enough to hold.

Lukas’s eyes went wide as he felt his heart stop in anticipation. His whole body locked up as he was waiting for something to happen.

Then Jesse sucked in a ragged breath. His body jerked in Lukas’s arms as he coughed, wet and weak and alive.

‘Alive…’

‘Alive?’

‘He’s alive!’

Lukas stared. His brain completely taken his body over as he tries to work out how the impossible just happened. His face had gone blank with shock.

Then the relief hit him so hard he nearly folded in half around the body in his arms.

“He’s—” he whispered, voice cracking apart— but smiling ear to ear.

“He’s alive.”

Then reality hit him all at once, sharp and terrible and immediate. Wiping the smile straight off his face.

The world was still collapsing around them, and Jesse was still mortally wounded. And they were still here. In this hostile dimension.

He didn’t even hear the footsteps running in his direction that stopped right over him. He looked up from Jesse’s bloody body and sees the group.

He looked up at Petra. Looked at Jack. Then at Radar with the gauntlet and the ruined eye and the broken ankle.

“Move,” Petra said, voice harsh and shaking but somehow still there.

“We’re getting out of here. Now.”

Nobody argued. Lukas got one arm under Jesse’s back, the other under his legs, and lifted him close against his chest.

Jesse made a tiny sound of injury against his shoulder. Lukas’s jaw clenched so hard it trembled.

“Don’t talk,” he whispered to a stirring Jesse, not because he was angry, but because he could not survive anymore of this and still keep moving.

He started forward with the rest of the group. All of them at varying speeds due to their extensive injuries. The bridge shook again. A huge section of it split behind them with a deafening crack and fell away into the dark.

Jack swore and staggered as Petra grabbed his arm and hauled him along before he could topple after it. Radar limped beside them with one hand over his face, and the other still clenched around the gauntlet, breathing hard through blood and shock.

The world still kept trying to kill them. It felt like Romeo’s vengeance still haunted them even now.

A glowing beam shattered overhead, raining sparks and stone fragments across the bridge. Petra threw herself sideways and took the worst of it across her shoulder. Jack stumbled, nearly going down. Radar ducked too late and caught a sharp edge across his already ruined side, hissing through his teeth.

Lukas kept moving.

He didn’t stop for anything. Not even his lungs screaming for air or the exhaustion that now completely sets over his body.

He had Jesse in his arms, Jesse breathing too shallow and too weak to still be alive, and if he stopped now, they would both die here in the wreckage of the terminal world.

The portal was just ahead. But it looked too far away. The bridge lurched again, hard enough to nearly throw him off his feet. But he barely caught himself, pressed Jesse tighter to his chest, and kept going.

Behind them, the space where Romeo had died collapsed inward with a deep, rumbling groan, debris falling into the void in chunks.

The void swallowed a section of bridge behind them in one brutal, cracking break.

Petra looked back.

Xara’s body was there for one second— too still, too far gone already to save— before the stone under her carcass gave way, and the debris buried her in a surge of collapsing light and blackness.

Her face changed as she seen the blood stain the rocks as they hit her body before the collapse. The grief gave her lungs no room to breathe.

‘Not here.’ She told herself,

Just a grim, helpless kind of self-assurance.

“She’s gone,” she said, voice rough and broken and gone quiet at the end.

No one answered. There was nothing to say at Xara’s body lost under the collapsing bridge. Or at the dreadful wreckage that claimed the bodies of the admins. And not the impossible fact of Jesse miraculously being alive after he suffered a mortal wound.

That would have to wait. If there even was a later, it would have to wait.

Another crack split the bridge in front of them.

Petra dragged Jack over it by brute force. Radar almost slipped, caught himself at the last second on a broken pillar, and kept moving— teeth clenched. Lukas stepped over the gap with Jesse clutching tight against him, and for one terrible second the edge of the bridge crumbled under his boot.

His stomach dropped. He caught himself. Kept going.

“Don’t you stop,” Petra barked hoarsely at the group behind her. A voice raw from blood and smoke and fear.

No one answered. The portal shimmered ahead in the wreckage.

All they had to do was get there.

Just get there— they were so damn close. Just one more step. Then another.

Behind them, the terminal world split open with one last massive groan, and the bridge they had been standing on a moment earlier vanished into the dark.

Nobody didn’t look back.

Lukas only tightened his grip on Jesse and ran into the portal that took them there.
_____________

The portal brutally spat them out in a blur of blue light and a rush of air so hard it felt like being thrown back into the world. It quickly destabilized behind them, rendering it useless.

Lukas hit the ground on one knee and immediately reached for Jesse again before he even knew where they were.

Jesse was still in his arms.

Actually alive. But still too weak to look it. His skin paled in a way that made Lukas’s stomach twist with dread.

Around them, everything was noise at first. The release of the breath that they were all holding, the relaxing of all the tense muscles.

Petra finally collapsing to one side with a sharp, pained seethe of pain. Jack landing hard and immediately swearing through sorely clenched teeth.

Radar stumbling out half-bent, one hand still clamped over the ruined side of his face, the gauntlet hanging on his arm like something he wasn’t sure he was allowed to keep carrying.

For one second nobody spoke.

It was just the sound of their own heavy breathing. Their pain that now hit them like a freight train because the adrenaline wore off. The shock of what the hell just happened slowly dawning on the room.

Lukas holding Jesse like his hands couldn’t remember how to let go. Jesse made the smallest, tired sound against his shoulder.

Lukas jolted and looked down at him.

“You’re okay,” he said immediately, eyes scanning him up and down—

“You’re okay. You’re here.”

Jesse blinked at him sluggishly, barely able to keep his eyes open.

Lukas felt an instant relief wash over him, seeing Jesse’s body actually moving. He chillingly recalled when Jesse’s body was lifeless just moments ago.

He shuddered at the thought of a life without Jesse. It terrified in a way that felt too deep to name. Because Jesse had been *dead*.

Lukas had held him cold—

felt the pulse leave his body.

Had waited and watched nothing happen. Felt the hope die in his heart.

And then when that light had come, impossible, quiet and strange, and Jesse had breathed life into his own body again.

It had not fixed the fear ironically… Not even a little.

Petra was the first to force herself up enough to look around.

“We need to go to an apothecary,” she said, voice rough and raw.

“Now.”

Jack nodded once, although he looked pale enough that he might pass out if he moved too fast or wrong.

Radar just swallowed down some residual blood and broke away from a mirror in the room he found himself next to—

He was staring at the ruined side of his face before forcing himself to stand a little straighter.

Nobody argued… When they got to the apothecary, it turned into chaos again.

The healers helped Jesse when they got there first.

They had to. He was the closest to death, despite his resurrection.

Lukas did not trust anyone else to carry him. He did not trust anyone else’s hands. He did not trust the idea that if he looked away for one second, Jesse would vanish into something worse than the portal had already given them back.

So he carried him.

Carefully. So carefully. Like Jesse was made of glass and smoke and the last good thing he had left.

Jesse’s weight against him felt wrong in a different way now.

Not gone, cold or even limp and heavy.

Just weak. So spent. And completely exhausted..,

Lukas kept checking his face, his breathing, his pulse at the wrist every few seconds like he was afraid the world realize it made a mistake and take him while nobody was looking.

Bandages. Potions. Clean cloth. Water. Someone pulling chairs out of the way. Someone else asking too many questions at once.

“What happened?”

“How long has he been—…”

The healer had barely gotten Jesse settled before she made a low sound under her breath and leaned closer, eyes narrowing at the wound that had finally stopped spilling blood.

“Well,” she muttered, more to herself than anyone else,

“you guys were very lucky.”

Petra looked up sharply from where she’d been half-sitting, half-collapsing into a chair.

“Lucky?”

The healer gave her a look, then glanced back down at Jesse. At his gaping wound in his exposed abdomen.

“A Totem of Undying,” she said, like that should have been obvious.

“There’s no way Jesse would have survived this. He should’ve be dead long ago with a wound this fatal..”

The room went quiet as the girl and her helpers continued to work on the injured around them.. Lukas went still. His eyes dropped to the hand where the carved object had been. And realization suddenly hit him.

Xara.

That thing. That artifact.

The one he’d grabbed on reflex without even looking at it. She had been trying to survive when Romeo had been crushing the life out of her.

His stomach twisted at the dot’s connecting.

‘Oh god.’

That was what it had been. That was what she had been carrying before she dropped it mid air. It wasn’t useless. It had been the last thing she could do to preserve her own life.

The healers— interrupting Lukas’s train of thought, pulling fresh cloth and telling someone to get more clean water. Lukas could barely hear her over the sudden roar in his head.

For one second he just stared at his own hands. Remembered the shape of that item.

Then Jesse made a small, strained sound from the bed, and everything in Lukas snapped back into place.

The healer was already pressing a hand to Jesse’s side again.

“He needs attention now. Don’t stand there looking like that— help me with this bandage please.”

Lukas moved immediately.

Because whatever else this was, whatever else had just happened, Jesse was still here and still injured and still needed them.

And Xara—

Xara would have to wait inside the grief where she unfortunately belonged. Jesse was laid down gently, and the healer continued to work. Petra sat down hard nearby, breathing through pain, one hand at her neck. Her shoulder looked terrible. Her head even worse. Blood had dried into her hair and she didn’t seem to have noticed.

Jack had to be talked into sitting down before he fell over. His side was wrapped badly at first, then better after someone actually took over and insisted on doing it properly. He kept trying to laugh things off and failing halfway through every sentence.

Radar was the one Lukas could barely look at without feeling sick.

His eye. The blood. The way he kept blinking through the pain and still trying to help like that was somehow his duty.

He looked so much younger now. Now his one eye now tinged with trauma and fear Lukas stood there for a while with his hands still completely stained and his body too quiet.

He looked almost untouched compared to the others. That was the worst part.

That he could stand. That his hands still worked. That his lungs still filled painlessly.

That he was able to help while everybody else was being held together with cloth and stubbornness and pain. He felt guilty for it in a way that made his throat ache.

Like the universe had made a mistake and he had somehow been the one it forgot.

tired and bruised and barely able to keep his eyes open, Jesse noticed.

“You’re hovering,” he murmured once, voice thin and so quiet.

Lukas looked down at him immediately.

“What?”

Jesse’s mouth twitched, almost a smile.

“Let them do their job, Lukas.”

Lukas let out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh and almost a sob and probably neither. He finally sat down beside the bed.

Jesse’s hand shifted weakly and brushed against his sleeve. That sent a familiar shock through Lukas that made him go still all over again.

He hated how fragile the room felt after everything.

Hated how easy it was for his mind to keep going back to the bridge, to Jesse’s body going limp, to the cold.

Every time Jesse’s eyes fluttered shut for too long, Lukas found his heart dropped to the floor. Time stopped feeling linear after that…

Petra getting furious when someone tried to tell her to rest. Jack pretending that he was fine while still groaning in pain when he moves.

Radar sitting there with his good eye on the floor and his bad side wrapped in bloodstained cloth, trying not to look at his own reflection in a mirrored spoon. Jesse drifting in and out of sleep.

Lukas never leaving any of their sides.

Days passed. Then even more. Enough time that the worst of the panic settled into something lower and more constant.

Jesse was still weak for a long time.

He slept a lot at first.

Woke up scared and confused sometimes.

Thrashed and grabbed for Lukas without thinking when the pain and flashbacks got too bad.

That one hurt Lukas every time, because it reminded him of how close he had come to losing him for real.

The wound from the totem closed enough that it no longer poured blood, but it left Jesse pale and sore and shaky for far longer than anyone wanted to admit.

He had to stay in bed. Be fed something light at first. Helped up the stairs.

Had to be constantly reminded that he was not dying every time his heartbeat sped up from a nightmare.

Lukas never got used to the quiet after. He just learned to live around it.

Radar’s recovery was its own kind of brutal.

He had to relearn how to move with one eye gone the way it was gone, he had to relearn distance, had to relearn balance, walk with a crutch for longer than his pride ever wanted him to because the ankle had taken such a nasty impact in the final battle that it refused to cooperate for weeks.

He joked much less after that. The tiredness in him became the sort that sat deep in his bones.

Jack’s side took ages to heal properly.

He got cranky about it, then even more cranky when everyone laughed, then finally quieter when he realized no one was actually laughing at him.

Petra made sure of that, just to keep his spirits up. She kept telling him to stop being so dramatic, which was counterintuitive. That made her even more irritatingly smug about it.

She herself had the longest list of injuries that sounded smaller than they were.

A bad concussion. A damaged shoulder. Neck bruising that took *forever* to fade. Deep cuts and scrapes. Pain that kept showing up at the worst possible moments and reminding her just how close she had come to never getting back up again.

She never talked about it unless someone else did first. She didn’t like to admittedly…

Stella came by once with a crutch of her own, still recovering from her injury, and somehow that made the whole room feel even more real.

Because she walked in looking like she’d barely escaped her own damage, looked at the apothecary full of bruised, bloodied idiots, took in Jesse who was pale in bed— remembering the last time she had seen him…

she then looked to Radar’s ruined face and Jack’s bandaged side and Petra’s stubborn posture as she tries to hide her aches and pains. She notices Lukas sitting so close to Jesse he might as well have been glued there—

and just stopped. Stella snorted softly and leaned on her crutch.

“Well,” she said, dry as dust.

“The Order of the Stone looks absolutely terrible.”

Jack laughed. Petra rolled her eyes. Radar made a face torn between waning to laugh and cry at the same time.

And Lukas, despite everything, felt something in him loosen just a little.

Because she was here. Because everybody was still here. Because they were all damaged, and alive, and somehow still making space for one another anyway.

It felt like home. And he hadn’t felt like this for a long long time.

The town itself took much longer. Beacon Town did not heal all at once. It repaired slowly in layers.

First the obvious things.

Collapsed boards replaced. Broken stone reset. Damaged windows mended. Lanterns replaced and relit one by one. People coming back out into the square after too many days of staying inside and living afraid.

Then the less visible things.

The hesitation… with Jesse.

The way people still flinched when they had to ask Jesse for too much. The way the townspeople still looked up at the him sometimes like it might come back. Like Romeo would come back. The way they spoke a little softer to Jesse, as if volume itself might send him off the handle.

But Beacon Town was good at surviving. At adapting. They learned quickly that their leader was back.

That was the thing about it. That’s what made Beacontown so special.

It had been broken before— some would even say beyond repair. But it had also been rebuilt before. Brick by brick.

And this time, it had people in it who knew exactly what it meant to keep going when you were tired enough to fall apart completely.

So it did.

It healed. Persevered. Slowly and messily.

But realistically.

And it began to look alive again. Teeming with life and vibrancy. The apothecary stopped feeling like a war room after a while.

The beds were still there, but not all occupied.

The bandages eventually came off. The bruises finally faded.

Radar stopped needing help every five seconds, he learned how to take care of himself and even stand up for himself, which he treated as if it were a personal victory.

Jack’s arm stopped hurting enough to make him complain to Nurm every time he moved it.

Petra started sitting on windowsills again instead of chairs, which was as close to “fine” as she ever got.

Jesse got stronger. It took a long time for that to be the case. But that one day he sat up on his own and Lukas had to look away for half a second because the relief was so sharp it almost hurt.

Lukas was there for all of it.

Every single part. Every bad day. Every splitting headache. Every long silence and horrible vivid flashback to the moment he took his own last breath.

Every time Jesse’s hand found his without looking and held on like he was checking that the world was still where he left it.

And the worst part of all of it was that Lukas was still the one who looked the most untouched.

He knew it. Everybody knew it.

It made him sick to his stomach.

So he helped clean. Helped carry things. Helped bring food and water and blankets and medicine and tools and whatever else the others needed.

He was useful. Or at least tried to be

Which was somehow not the same thing as okay.

When he sat beside Jesse’s bed at night, he would sometimes stare at his own hands and think about how absurd it was that they could still move after all that.

After everything he had just seen. After Jesse dying in them. After holding him cold.

Then seeing him breathe again. He still had trouble believing it sometimes.

That Jesse was alive. That they were all alive. They survived. That this was not some cruel trick that would be taken back the second he blinked.

Jesse noticed that too. He always noticed Lukas when Lukas thought he wasn’t being noticed.

It took a while, but eventually Jesse reached up one day and touched Lukas’s wrist lightly and said, very softly,

“You can breathe now, you know.”

Lukas had just stared at him. Jesse had looked tired and a little amused and very, very real.

That nearly broke him.

Instead, Lukas sat down at the edge of the bed and pressed his forehead to Jesse’s hand like he had done on the bridge, only this time there was no blood between them.

Only warmth. Only the world, still here.

The last thing that truly settled was Lukas’s guilt. It never disappeared. It just changed shape. Became less sharp and accusing. Like a scar that will never heal.

And then one day, much later, when the sun was low and Beacon Town was glowing gold through the windows, he stood beside Jesse and looked out at what they had made it through.

The town was alive. People were in the streets. Lanterns were lit. Laughter carried up through the square.

Someone was fixing something on a roof. Someone else was planting flowers. Children were running where there had once only been fear.

Beacon Town was not perfect.

But it was whole enough to be beautiful.

Lukas stood there with Jesse beside him and felt, for the first time in a long time, that the future was not something waiting to take someone from him.

It was something they were walking into together. Jesse leaned lightly into his side. Lukas turned his head.

Jesse looked so tired still. Softer now.

But smiling. Just a little.

And Lukas, who had spent so long bracing for the worst, finally let himself believe in the best.

The last shot was Beacon Town in the evening light… gold on the roofs, lanterns glowing warm in the square, people moving through the streets like they belonged there again.

Like they had chosen to stay.

Like the world, for once, had chosen them back.

And this time, it was enough.