Work Text:
Darkness. It is not all D has ever known. They remind themselves of that as they drift through the deep.
Back then, while with their kind, there had been light and colour, movement and detail. There were distinct divides where one thing ended and another began. Until there wasn’t, and D was separated from the others and dropped into nothingness.
Now, disconnection. It doesn’t matter the direction D travels, as there’s nothing but desolate emptiness and an infinite dilemma: keep drifting, sending signals to their kind (I’m here! Find me, please…) or desist with their desperate search?
Then, in their kind’s dimension, doors opened, destinations glanced through those temporary dilations. They’d dive through in their droves to explore what the universe deigned to deliver. They delighted in worlds borne of thoughts and dreams, enough to develop mountains or drain oceans through mere desire.
Now, a stark difference. Absence leaves D distraught. They draw their arm close to cradle themselves. They swing, a self-soothing pendulum facing down eternity. They drift, and drift, and…
One day, D will be distracted by a dim glow: delicate threads draping the dark. They may declare it delusion, not the light of distant galaxies dispensed across eons, over millennia.
Then, their kind were drawn to sites of devotion, often derelict by the time they discovered them, persisting only as proof that those who designed them once existed. They found the desiccated debris of life on worlds that could no longer sustain it, and with a melancholic gratitude, used the combined power of their bond to return to their dimension, glad it would always be a place they could call home.
Now, D keeps dispatching their signals, keeps drifting into the unknown, determined that, one day, they might detect something besides darkness, might sense another reaching back.