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The second time Drifter slammed their fist and the spiral began again, it was a halfway marvelous thing. Not for them, of course, but also for them. Kind of. A long while later, they would talk to the kid, and find out they weren’t the only one having an out-of-body self-experience.
(“I thought I was a Warframe, for a long time. Or, I guess, I thought I was in the Warframe. Like, you know. No Transference-y things.”
Somehow, this was what Drifter considered nonsensical. “What? Really?”
“I was asleep! Didn’t know that either, though.”
“Eyes wide shut, huh.”
“Like you were any better,” said the kid, tossing an energy restore their way for later. “You didn’t even know you were the king of your world.”
Drifter could’ve flung the energy restore at the back of the kid’s head like a dinner plate. They didn’t.
But they thought about it.)
So Dominus Thrax smacked the shit out of his throne, and off they went again. When it first happened, Drifter almost threw up over the side of their floating island. They forgot to be nauseated after a few spirals. And a few spirals after that, they got used to it. Some spirals later, they had a sword in their stomach, so the nausea wasn’t really the highest priority anyway.
(The other thing the kid could have said, instead of calling them the king of their own world, is: You killed yourself over and over and over again.)
They’re sitting with Lotus and the kid before heading off to play champion. Duviri spirals on without them for now. They’ll have to check in sooner than later; the residents are still their responsibility, even if they’re not…really…people? But that gets into that fun spot of ruminating, well then what does that make you? Are you a person, or just something manifested from your own worst nightmares once upon a time?
So, anyway, they’re going to go check on Duviri’s folks soon. Tomorrow, probably. Before they head out.
They’re brought back to the moment when the kid’s voice raises. Something about Transference, about a recent mission. Delight rings true in the kid’s voice as they explain what they accomplished, some leap of faith conquered, some piece of expertise unturned. That isn’t what caught Drifter’s eye, though, even if they’re gesturing about like they’re Bombastine himself. It’s how Lotus is listening so very closely, her full attention and smile turned to what the kid is saying, that makes Drifter pause.
Drifter doesn’t get those sort of looks from her. She reserves her prideful headpats for the kid. They get it. Sure. They’re not really a kid, but they are. Right? Give the walking war machine kid some headpats.
But it still… it still just…
Abruptly, Drifter stands and knees the table so hard it knocks askew some pieces on their forgotten game of komi. “Ooh, think I hear Nora playing my song,” they say, and leave.
Their curled-up fist tap-tap-taps absently against the outside of their thigh as they walk away.
A blade in the back. A fist slammed.
A stab through the shoulder. A fist slammed.
A slice across the neck. A fist slammed.
Again, again, again.
At least falling off the Kaithe was something new—
A fist slammed.
The very first time Drifter slammed their fist to the floor, it was in the Zariman.
That was how Duviri began, after all. Alone, with nothing but screams and howls for company. Nightmares. Wrong-things, all twisted shadows and horrors just out of sight. The Void’s siren song, calling, and only warnings ringing in their ears to keep their dead eyes looking out to the endless space beyond.
No crying, or the Void may taste your tears and make an ocean out of every drop until you’re all dried out. No laughing, or the Void may snatch the hitching breath from your lungs and everything else, too. No panic, or the Void will give you something to be afraid of.
Nobody had prepared for loneliness. The Orokin hadn’t ever imagined the ship going ghost and zombie on every living being on it. There were so many people, it was a damned colony ship, what excuse was there for being lonely? Oops, sorry, everyone’s dead or gone or something worse now. The Zariman wasn’t empty, but it was in every way that mattered. Except for the poor little Drifter.
Don’t dream up imaginary friends seemed like a good rule to follow given the Void’s penchant for conceptual embodiment, but how else does somebody shut and lock the door on nagging, bleeding loneliness?
They remembered being just so fucking lonely. And they’d been lonely for so long. If they were going to start hearing voices, they might as well start pretending their hallucinations were familiar characters.
Odd weeping sounds from another room? “Luscinia,” Drifter called, “it’s fine, I promise. Just take it easy. Deep breaths.”
Chairs thrown against windows, Void manifestations shattering glass? “Loduuun,” sang Drifter disapprovingly. “Come on. We talked about this.”
Laughter, trying to pull Drifter away from the little bit of light they could tease out of a lamp? “Mathila, come over here if you’ve got a good joke.”
It only worked for so long. Crunched into a small little corner of a schoolroom, Drifter rotted. The binding of their Tales of Duviri book was falling apart, and they were too. They were reading it yet again. Always, again. Because, see:
In a good story, there was a hero. The hero found something for themselves and saved everyone and that was how it went, off to something better. The hero had a happy ending. Maybe even an epilogue. If they were really lucky, a sequel.
Not every hero, though. This hero was alone, with no one to save them; alone, with the scratching of hungry claws outside to keep them company; alone, with the Void calling, with mom and dad’s blood on their hands, with nothing left —
Laughter turned to sobs and terror, and fury into gritty, miserable envy, and they slammed their fist to the red-stained floor as their carefully crafted dam broke into pieces, and they just fucking wished.
And the Void answered with a kingdom where they couldn’t be alone.
“Who saves the hero?” Drifter asks.
The Hex all look up, except for Amir, who just tips his head faintly closer while he continues tapping away at the device in his hands. Sprawled across their food court sanctuary, they all seem to give the question some thought. Drifter waits.
“That a brain teaser or something?” Quincy says first.
“I do love a good philosophical exercise,” along drifts Eleanor’s voice, at the same time Aoi asks, “What sort of story is it?”
Drifter purses their lips. Taps the table. “Any story. It’s just something I think about sometimes. Like — the Caliber Chicks. Right?” That gets Amir’s full attention. “If Anna Ki gets ahold of them, who saves them?”
“They save themselves, duh,” Amir says the second that Drifter’s finished their sentence. “Didn’t you see the comic last year that was released with the limited edition…oh, oh, ohhhh. No, you wouldn’t have seen that, huh. Sorry, sorry! It feels like you’ve been here ages with us—”
Eleanor’s voice is wry in their head: “Well, if you ever have a chance to time travel again, now you know when to aim for. What’s one more year after…however many you jumped past?” Drifter’s careful not to think any particular thoughts, not that they think Eleanor would go digging. But there was a twinge of something in that first response of hers, and Drifter knows better than to bring it up here.
Besides that, there’s more than one Nightingale trying to parse them. Arthur’s watching Drifter, pensive. Drifter holds his gaze and sips their can of soda from a straw.
From where she’s counting her medkits, Lettie answers with a dry tone, “Who saves the hero, babas?” She sucks her teeth. “The medic.”
Quincy snorts; Aoi smiles and rolls her eyes. Drifter gives her a thumbs up for the answer, because, technically, yeah, that’s right. Sure. Let it be. They let the back-and-forth fade into something else, and after that, conversation takes off in a half-dozen directions. What’s tomorrow look like? Where was Scaldra spotted creeping up to last? The Techrot, is it contained enough for the civilians they’ve secured in safehouses? What’s for dinner? Okay, pizza, what’s on the pizza?
Arthur’s still watching them. Drifter pretends not to notice.
Sometimes, Drifter got to the meat of it all before Thrax did. Sometimes, the spiral was bad enough on a go around that, well —
Well. Immortality is a bitch.
You killed yourself over and over and over again.
Drifter imagines sometimes when they see their own bare skin that there will be nothing but scar tissue, that they’re just a molded-raw mess beneath their clothes, the only things left of them bone and marred flesh. It’s a surprise every time they take off their shirt that there’s not a hundred different stab wounds.The body’s supposed to keep the score.
Maybe it does, in its own weird ways: sometimes, their right arm doesn’t even feel like theirs. Sometimes they blink and it still looks like Lotus’s. Only sometimes, though.
When they wake up in the mornings, sun streaming in through the windows of the backroom, Höllvania summer in full glory, it takes a moment to remember. Even with the bed warm, even with the background noise of domesticity…They spent half an eternity in darkness, and another half of an eternity in a fantasy world. One foot in each place. Even in Höllvania and the least lonely they’ve ever been, it takes time to recalibrate every now and again.
And sometimes, Drifter’s hand itches while it’s curled into a fist.
Better not to think about it.
Then there was the most recent time they slammed their hand to the floor with Albrecht’s Lex-fucking-Prime bullet in their body. It wasn’t even the worst end to a spiral they’d had, if that was all it was.
Yet…seeing the Hex all die like that, hearing the Indifference talk about them like that…
Drifter didn’t even know they had it in them at first. Since Duviri, they hadn’t tried. The Void can do any number of weird, wacky things, but however they got spat out of it with Lotus hadn’t left them any hints to their own abilities. The Warframes, Transference, they’d always thought that was just the kid’s power, and by stepping into their house, or timeline, or universe or whatever, they’d picked it up like a nifty trick, not that it was truly theirs.
Maybe it was just the taste of blood in their mouth again that made them think it was just like old times, spitting red on Thrax’s pretty tiles. Maybe it was the agonizing thought of losing the first real and not imaginary friends (loosely, okay) they’d had in eons that made them lift their heavy arm —
And their fist hit the ground.
When it all spiraled back and the Hex (alive! well! as well as they’d been before dying horrifically) looked at them like — like that, they wondered what the hell else they had up their sleeve.
A couple of nights later, Drifter’s patrolling the streets near the mall with Arthur, and Arthur, out of the blue and with utterly no warning, says, “Nobody.”
Drifter can only stare blankly for a moment before popping out of their Warframe with at least some measure of grace. They learned Warframe Transference quicker than they picked up Kaithe riding, at least. “You can’t go around saying cryptic shit when I’m all Warframed up,” Drifter says, wringing out their hands. The kid has an easier time of it; even after all this time, Drifter still feels the phantom touch of the Warframe’s form like a ghost of an afterimage.
“Your answer to your question,” Arthur says, breezing past the reply. “You asked who saves the hero. Nobody.”
It wasn’t as if Drifter expected that through asking their question they’d hear any other answer but that one, which they already know is the truth. There’s no stories where the hero needs saving. That’s why they’re the hero. The hero does all the saving, and if it’s not Young Adult fiction then maybe they get laid with a fade-to-black, then they go home. If they don’t do any saving, they’re not a hero. And if they die, they’re a heroic martyr. Easy. Formulaic. Also, unrealistic.
But it still pinches something in their chest to hear it spoken out loud.
“Congratulations,” Drifter says. “You got it in one. I’ll buy your next vending machine indulgence for you.”
They go to return to their frame, but something stops them: Arthur grabs their shoulder. He holds them there for one hovering moment, and says with a low-burning seriousness, “Wait. I said it was your answer.”
Drifter tosses him a confused look and does a valiant job at pretending to be unaffected by how close Arthur’s gotten. “What are you talking about?”
Arthur lets go of their shoulder, slow but sure. His fingers brush against their arm on the way down and almost linger. It’s a near thing. “You think no one saves the hero,” Arthur says next. “That’s your answer to your own question. I have a different one.”
Drifter’s still standing there like a statue in front of their Warframe, as if Arthur’s touch froze them solid. All they can do is shift slowly to face him. “Is this a conversation that should wait for…not out here?” they say, carefully.
“It’s one that waited too long,” Arthur admits, a grim little smile joining his words. “And something I’ve found with you is that if I wait to tell you something, there’s no guarantee I won’t be interrupted by, oh, magical earthquakes that summon entire condos into the back of the mall.”
“Hey, that only happened once.”
Arthur’s dubious expression quiets them, at least long enough for Arthur to respond with light exasperation. “I’m not cornering you, you know. If you don’t want to hear it, you don’t have to.”
Drifter knows they’re being dodgy and difficult just as much as they know that Arthur is the worst person in the entire Hex to talk about a concept as impractical as heroes. Somehow, he’s also the one person whose answer Drifter might want the most. This realization hits like a dizzy headache right as they reach out to their Warframe.
They can’t bring themselves to Transference back. The rarity and shine of what Arthur is offering is too compelling. Something threatens to come loose in their chest, but they pause anyway, and finally turn back around to face Arthur.
“Alright. Shoot.”
Arthur smiles. There’s a real glint of something in his eye like he’s pleased, but Drifter can still see the tension in his shoulders clear as day. “‘Who saves the hero’, you asked. It’s a question I’ve asked myself. I’ve seen people who I consider a hero…disappear…in but a moment. No amount of heroic effort can save someone from an ugly end.”
He looks up at the buildings surrounding them, at the clear skies above. Drifter follows his gaze. Soon it will turn right back around to fall, and winter will come, and snow will blanket the city and leave it cold and quiet. And Drifter will be here, spiraling on and on again.
“I can’t speak for every hero,” Arthur says eventually. Drifter looks at him again, watches how his lips press together in brief consideration of whatever heavy words come next. “But these people here consider us heroes, or something close enough to it that we can’t argue, though Eleanor has certainly tried. And we were saved by you.”
“I didn’t save you guys,” Drifter argues, their voice weak and distant to their own ears. This was not in their bingo card. “I watched, and then I just showed you what you could do. You all did it yourselves. You saved – you saved yourselves.” Like the Caliber Chicks, they don’t say.
Arthur looks back at them then, and an expression crosses his face unlike any Drifter has seen. It’s something still fond but frustrated, too. In any other circumstance, they’d think it’s a little cute.
Pointedly, Arthur finishes, “My answer to your question. A hero saves a hero.”
Something’s torn loose from Drifter’s chest, upward, caught in their throat – a laugh, a sob, a scoff, a swear; it could be any of those and all of them at once. They twitch when Arthur touches their arm again, but he doesn’t let go so easily this time.
“Maybe I did corner you, just a little,” Arthur says with a deceptive lightness. “But I thought you needed to hear it. I won’t apologize.”
Drifter could sway in the wind, they’re so light and unmoored. Arthur’s touch is more an anchor than he knows. That one spot of contact is the only thing that would keep their feet on the ground if the breeze kicked up. They lift their opposite arm and close their own hold over his wrist, swallowing tight over the feeling in their throat.
That gives them the clarity enough to recognize what that tension was in Arthur’s shoulders, and why it’s now gone.
“If I needed to hear it,” they tell him, “then you needed to say it.”
Arthur’s eyes widen just a fraction enough that Drifter knows they’re right, and their hand doesn’t even itch to slam down.
When Drifter crawled out of Duviri and into the War that waited in the real world, they almost went right back. The devil you know, and all that.
The only thing to do was to keep moving. There were people helpless and lost spread through the system, War raging on, and no heroes to be found. Lotus helped them climb out, Teshin helped them remember themselves, and so, short of simply laying down and dying, they had to do something.
They’d been tired for so long. They were tired then, too.
They traded lonely for tired, and realized they were two sides of the same coin in the end.
Arthur stops them before they can slither away when they finish their patrol together. “I’m going to overstep again and ask you to join me for a drink,” he says, already jostling the six-pack in the air.
“We’re even now, A,” Drifter tells him, but crosses the floor anyway to join him. “You got one good emotional gut punch in, I got the other. We even tied while taking out Techrot.”
“You’re a dirty liar,” Arthur says dryly. “Don’t patronize me. I watched you work.”
“Alright, so maybe I was a couple hundred higher.” Drifter smiles. It doesn’t feel like putting on a mask. “C’mon. Backroom?”
The mall is big, but not big enough for this. If Arthur wants to spend more time together, it’s because Drifter’s made the right moves and said the right things. They were half-worried after earlier that Arthur was going to go brood alone on the mall rooftop or something with just the moon and stars for company, because it sounds like something he’d do. But no, instead, he’s asking them for drinks.
And Drifter doesn’t want to be alone yet, so they welcome him into the backroom and they both get comfortable on the couch, with Höllvania’s deep night outside the windows, and the stadium lights distantly illuminating the sky.
The first drink is more ragging on each other for the patrol. The second involves Drifter ruthlessly pulling trivia about history out of Arthur. By the third and final pair of drinks, Drifter is not so warmly loose to do anything impulsive, but they are calculating their odds.
This line of thought is what dominates their last drink with Arthur, as they blurt, “If I fuck up, I can’t just reset it all.”
Arthur pauses where he lounges on the opposite side of the couch. “Mate, that’s a…maybe, five drinks in sort of topic, isn’t it?”
“You should’ve brought two six-packs then.” Drifter slides lower into the cushions. They could touch Arthur’s thigh if they moved their foot just a little more.
“I’ve been roasted enough tonight,” Arthur says primly. “What was that, about resetting it all?”
He doesn’t even sound uncomfortable about it. That’s the benefit of a man with his experience, Drifter supposes. Can always push emotion off to the side and get to the point. Drifter is still thinking of pushing their foot against his thigh, or sliding their leg over his lap. He’d touched them twice on patrol today. Surely, they could just…
“It was my impression you could, in fact, ‘just’ do that,” Arthur prompts. “You did once, already.”
“I mean, I could,” Drifter says, glancing up. Arthur doesn’t let anything slip on his face. “But I also think I could do it right now if I wanted to.”
“Would you want to?”
The question comes so quickly that it makes Drifter sit up, their back against the arm of the couch. “No.”
But it comes a beat late.
Arthur doesn’t have to point it out; he sips the last of his beer, and leaves Drifter to fumble the fragile thing between them.
“No, that is…no, I wouldn’t want to. But I think of it. If I fuck it up badly enough, who wouldn’t want a second chance? I’ve had thousands of chances to live, and I’ve fucked up a lot of those.” Drifter’s light as a feather again, gripping the chair of the couch and their empty bottle. They’re floating, outside of themselves, as they go on: “So if I fuck up…this…” Arthur is staring at them again, so intently that Drifter feels pinned. They wet their lips. “I could spin it back and go again. And I don’t know if you would even know it.”
Arthur stretches his arm over the back of the couch. Drifter goes from a fixation on his lap to a fixation on his fingers, so close that they could touch if they could pry their right hand off from their emotional support glass bottle.
“I’ve wondered if you have, actually,” Arthur says then. “I guess that’s my answer.”
“You could have asked.”
“Would you have told me if you had?”
Drifter’s mouth opens, then closes. They say nothing. Is it wrong that just in a hypothetical world where they’ve hit the rewind button, they would want to keep it to themselves? They put their empty bottle to the side, their legs drawn up, their heartbeat in their ears.
Arthur hums. “You’re a terrifying person to want to be close to, you know that?”
There’s a nearly hysteric laugh bubbling up out of Drifter now. It’s impossible to stop. “You do a good job of keeping me at arms’ length.”
“You’re a kingdom’s ruler, a time traveler, wearer of fifty-and-then-some different war machines to choose the one that suits your fancy, and capable of changing up our reality without any of our say so,” Arthur responds blandly. “You’re the only thing within a hundred miles, short of a nuke, that can reliably kill any of us. And you can get in my head.”
With all that laid out, Drifter can barely find it in them to mumble, “Only if you let me in.”
“And maybe even if I don’t,” adds Arthur. “Forgive me for being cautious. It’s been a very, very bad year. It’s been…difficult not to expect the worst yet again.”
“I wouldn’t,” Drifter insists, and winces to add, “Probably. I probably wouldn’t. I just really, really don’t want to fuck it up. I don’t want to be alone again, it’s fucking hard, Arthur, I –”
Arthur catches hold of their right hand, and Drifter goes cold all over to find they’ve bunched their fingers into a fist. A meaningful look passes from Arthur to Drifter’s owlish eyes, and Drifter swallows.
“...Listen,” they say, and breathe. “I’m just trying…to write a better story for myself. And that means writing the best story for everyone else, too.”
“By crossing out whole chapters?” Arthur’s thumb rubs across their knuckles.
“Only when strictly necessary.” Drifter smiles, wan. “And you know about that one.”
Arthur’s still touching across their knuckles, three back-and-forth motions in, when he says, “If a fuck up was going to happen, I’d like to think we’d both recognize the fuck up coming before it affected this.”
Drifter tugs to see if their hand will come free. Arthur won’t let it. That emboldens them to lean forward. “What’s ‘this’, first of all?”
Arthur gives them a sideways glance. “Something important enough that we’re talking about it.”
“Playing coy doesn’t suit you.” Drifter slides closer, hand still in Arthur’s. “I can tell you what I want, but you just said you’re terrified of me. So. Ball’s in your court.”
“I said it was terrifying to want to be close to you,” Arthur protests, but, oh, even if it’s a little awkward, he’s letting go of their hand to wrap an arm around their shoulders instead, pulling them close. Drifter’s side gets all nestled up alongside Arthur’s, and they tuck their face against his shoulder.
If Drifter closes their eyes, they can feel their own heartbeat in their fingertips, all the way down to their toes, and along the line of their bodies touching.
“You could get rid of me, and this, so easily,” Arthur says, softer. “If you ended things, I would understand. The world’s gone to shit, I barely understand what I am anymore, and you could go back home in a blink.”
“Can’t end something that’s barely begun,” Drifter says, light, even if they feel like they could come apart at the seams. “...But I wouldn’t.”
“I believe you.” Arthur turns his face to them. His stubble brushes right against their forehead when they dare to look up to face him. Ooh, it’s nice. “I do. So believe me when…when I tell you, if you come even a little close to thinking you should run it back again. You come to me first. You talk to me first.”
“And then you’ll talk me off the cliff?”
“I’ll tie your hands up first, and then persuade you thoroughly to consider rethinking.”
It’s said with such seriousness that Drifter’s reaction feels delayed for what Arthur is suggesting – and he has such a straight face about it, but they’re close enough that Drifter knows his cheeks are just a little more flush than they should be.
A smile spreads slowly across their face. “That’s a five drinks in sort of topic, isn’t it?” they say with drawled satisfaction, just to see the flush deepen.
When they twist around and lean up just enough to kiss him, Arthur catches the wrist of their right hand, with his thumb soft against their pulse point.
No need for it really, even if Drifter does want to run this one back. Just for fun.