#hhhhhooo boy this is a heavy one folks

[lichlover]

Idk if you’ve done this but: taako just keeps doing dangerous stuff(probably with lup if we’re being real) because his boyfriend is death and it’s no biggie if he dies

tread carefully for discussion of death and suicidal ideation!

There’d been a world that had ended like this, in fire and brimstone and ash clogging up his lungs, clouding his eyes and making it impossible to think, or breathe, or do anything other than wait for the ceiling above him to come plummeting down and turn his bones to dust.

He’d laughed about it on the cycle that followed—“C’mon, Lulu, you’ve gotta admit to the irony there.”

“There were children in there, Taako,” was all she’d said.

“Dead children,” he’d replied, a little too sharply, and the ice that coated his voice provided momentary reprieve from the burning, screaming memory of what had only been seconds ago.

Except this isn’t a memory. He’s far too familiar with the liminal, off-kilter sensations that chase after him in his worst flashbacks, turning the world around him into the dredges of an unreliable recollection; scenery that shifts as suddenly as he does. This isn’t the paralyzing stillness of a night terror that holds him in stasis, pressing through his chest and slowly crushing him alive. He feels the wood beneath him burning through his shirt, and crumpling under his weight, and he can’t move.  He can’t move and everything is burning and the world is ending.

The world is ending, and Taako laughs.

He wheezes into the blackened air, wracked with shuddering fits of mirth and a whirlwind hysteria that would sweep him off his feet if he wasn’t already on the ground. “Well,” he rasps, “we’ll get ’em next time, won’t we? Adios and—“ Taako’s ribcage rattles in a violent, wrenching cough. “And—and sayonara, right?”

He’s—

He saying goodbye but the world isn’t ending, he’s—

He’s made a terrible miscalculation—

What happens next doesn’t fill his vision with light.

Instead, what happens next grabs his collar and drags him headlong into a space that shifts, tilts, and ripples with iridescence. In the next moment, Taako’s lungs are assaulted with fresh air, and he gags and chokes on it; has to turn on his side and hack up congealed smoke. The ground is cool and hard beneath him. Tile. He’s on someone’s floor. And there’s a voice shouting in the background; high, sharp, piercing through the ringing in his ears.

The world isn’t ending. He’s not back on the Starblaster. In fact, he knows this tile, because he’d had it installed himself; it is, after all, the only acceptable flooring for a decent kitchen. And now someone’s on their knees next to him and talking to him, lifting him up, but all he can think about is what a nice shade the ceiling is and how it really opens up the space. There’s a light fixture above him that he recognizes, too, because he’d insisted on it during their first furniture shopping trip. It’s a little gaudy, and slightly too glitzy for an otherwise nondescript apartment, but that too is a work in progress.

And he knows this because—

Taako tries to pull in another breath and realizes it’s getting harder, and he knows what that means, which is that he’s about to waste an afternoon backed up at the offices of the astral plane. Except that makes entirely no sense, because none of this matters—he’s going to reform in hours, if not minutes. Rewind. Reset. The universe will knit him back together, free of scars and burns and the pressure of too much smoke clogging his lungs.

And he knows this because—

He isn’t allowed to finish his train of thought, because a melody drifts overhead and Taako’s eyes grow leaden, weighed down by the promise of sleep. It’s an easy temptation to succumb to. He’s exhausted, and his body even moreso, and regardless of however he dies this cycle he deserves a little R&R. And that’s when something twinges in his gut—wrong, wrong, it whispers, like it knows something he doesn’t. But he ignores it. He lets the song sweep him away, further into unconsciousness.

“Rest, love,” says a man’s voice overhead.

And Taako falls.

“He was just—I mean, shit, he was just lying there, Kravitz. He could’ve gotten up and he just didn’t. I had to drag him to the fuckin’ rift, and he looked like—he didn’t even know I was there.”

“He wasn’t flashing back, was he?”

“No way for me to tell. But if he was, I just… it was a bad one. The building was coming down around us and he didn’t make a move.”

Their voices filter through a thick soup of awareness, muddled and viscous and clinging to him as he fights his way into wakefulness. Taako’s head is light. He tries to sit up and the world starts to spin, so he settles for pushing himself up into a semi-recline. The room around him is still moving like a supercharged Fantasy Tilt-A-Whirl, but this time he can pick out colors and textures—the art on the walls around him, for instance, and the silk of the chaise beneath him. The chaise he and Kravitz had picked out together. The one he’d approved after a heated discussion over the pros and cons of extended sofas.

He’s home.

Taako goes to open his mouth, to say something clever—or literally anything, for that matter, to prove to himself he hasn’t gone and gotten his vocal cords incinerated—but all that comes out is a strangled, grating sound that scrapes against his throat. Immediately the two vaguely fuzzy figures at the other end of the room are on their feet. “Thank the gods,” says Kravitz, and he’s the first to reach Taako’s side, looking faint with relief. “Oh, Taako. We were so worried.”

“Yeah. About that.” Lup’s smile pulls taut across her face as she grabs Kravitz’s arm. She leans in to murmur to him, and Taako’s ears twitch, straining to listen in. “He’s not lucid, y’know? That healer dosed him up with enough potions to knock out an army. We’re not gonna get anything out of ’im even if we do play good cop, pissed-off cop. And believe me, I intend to interrogate the fuck outta him when he’s back to being himself.”

“Oh, hell,” Taako drawls in their general direction. “Somebody’s in trouble. And that, uh, somebody is me. I dunno why I said it like that.”

Lup’s head snaps back around in his direction, and they scrutinize him with bone-deep exhaustion in their faces. He wants to tell them exactly what had happened, that his mind just flaked sometimes and it was nothing more than that, but when he goes to speak the words trip and get tangled up in each other before they can escape. He’s not lucid, Lup had said. Taako’s brain knows what this means, but for the life of him he can’t piece together the implications.

“Oh, c’mon, Lulu,” he says, reaching towards her with a loose hand. “Give it to me—heh—give it to me straight. What’d I… what’d I do this time, huh?”

Lup’s jaw is set, which he knows means she’s angry, but he can’t bring himself to worry about it. “Taako,” she starts, and then, “babe. You, uh… you chose a real bad time to take a nap. Do you remember anything about that?”

He does. “Sure,” Taako slurs. “ ’S, uh… Cycle 61? It was when—when everything was on fire, tha’s it.”

His sister sits back like he’s shoved her. “Cycle 61,” she says to Kravitz. “We, uh… we died together in that one. End of the year, world was going to shit, I went in to try and get some kids out of a burning building. Taako went in after me. We both took in a lotta smoke, I got crushed… I think he did too. It just came down on top of us.”

Kravitz goes pale, and it sticks with razor-sharp clarity through the haze in Taako’s mind. He’s made his boyfriend worry, and lucid or not, Taako knows there’s nothing he hates more. “Hey,” he says, reaching out for Kravitz’s arm. “Hey. Hey. ’S fine. No big deal. ’M all fine now, see? Taako’s all in one piece. Doesn’t matter anyway.”

“What doesn’t matter?” Kravitz catches his meandering hand in one cool palm.

“Oh, y’know,” says Taako. “Dyin’. No… no big deal, right? No big deal during the, uh… the century, no big deal now. Gotta pretty sweet deal when your—your future mother-in-law’s life ’n death ‘n your boyfriend’s gotta handle on alla that, right?”

He’s more than pleased with his line of reasoning there, but Kravitz’s eyes flick to Lup, who’s looking more disturbed by the second. “He was flashing back to the century,” she says. “I thought that was why he wasn’t doing jack shit, but he—Taako, honey, do you remember what we were doing back there? In the burning building?”

Something about spell components. He tries to say so, and it comes out as painfully garbled, but Lup seems like she gets the gist. “He’s got the basics,” she murmurs. “Flashback seems like it’s over, which is good, but…”

“You said he’s not lucid. He might not know what he’s saying.”

“If this were anybody else I’d agree with you, but Taako’s a fucking liar on his best days. If he’s not talking nonsense there’s a good chance he’s telling the gods-given truth.” Lup kneads her forehead with two fingers. “So this isn’t just about the flashback. You dumbass. Taako, what happens when you die?”

“Hachi-machi,” Taako manages, through what feels like a mouthful of cotton. “Tha’s a real deep question, isn’t it?”

“You know what I mean.”

He shoots her a lazy smirk. “Easy. Kick it, drop in on the family, shake up the astral plane. Rinse ’n repeat, back in time for dinner. No… no big deal, ’s what I said. Who cares?”

“Taako,” says Kravitz. He’s not quite meeting Taako’s lazy stare, training his eyes instead on the rings stacked on Taako’s fingers. “Acting as an emissary of the Raven Queen comes with—with its benefits, of course, but if you die, you—you die. I can’t barter with the passage of life and death.”

“Yeah,” says Lup, and she looks furious all over again, simmering with frustration that rolls off her in waves. “So when you pull dumb shit like that—”

“Okay, he’s—he’s high off his—”

“No. He’s talking like—I mean, ‘Who cares’? I thought he was past that. I thought we were all past that. The only reason I agree to do dangerous shit with him anymore is because I trust him, but he’s not—he’s not who I left behind, okay? Treating death like it’s a joke—I mean I get he hasn’t exactly had conventional experiences with it, but this shouldn’t be—it shouldn’t be happening, okay? It shouldn’t—“

She stands up, and the sudden movement sends ripples through Taako’s field of vision, and—well, that’s not normal. Lup presses the heels of her hands to her eyes and breathes out, and he can see her shoulders shaking.

“Fuck,” she mutters into her sleeves. “I’m sorry. It’s been…”

“A rough day,” Kravitz finishes. “I know.”

“You’re a doll.” Lup sighs and looks back at the kitchen. “I’m gonna make everybody some coffee, and, uh… I guess try and get in contact with Merle. Dunno when his adventure thing is ending, but it’s worth a go, I guess. Mocha for you?”

He gives her an affirming smile, and she returns it with a weaker, distinctly un-Lup-like grin before she retreats to the kitchen. Kravitz stays with Taako, thumbing over his knuckles and watching his face with something that walks the line between confusion and knife’s edge concern. And Taako hates it—he knows he hates it, that this is wrong, that he’s made Kravitz worry for no reason. But the reassurances don’t come. Instead he shifts on his side and says, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Lup makes fuckin’ terrible coffee.”

A choked laugh drifts from the kitchen adjacent. Kravitz’s smile morphs into something exhausted but endeared. “She doesn’t need to know that.”

“I think… she already does. She’s real smart, y’know.” Taako’s eyelids are starting to flutter again. “I think she’s upset with me.”

“She’s worried,” says Kravitz. “We both were. You were in bad shape.”

“Yeah, but…” He takes in a soft breath, and his hand begins to loosen in Kravitz’s. “Doesn’t matter, right? N’worries?”

And then the world dissolves into a thick, liquid film, and it drags him down, further from the light and the bitter aroma of burnt coffee and Kravitz’s hand around his. Far from the burning, screaming memory. Far from the century and the flashbacks that cling to him like a layer of cold sweat. Far from the voice that drifts overhead and tells him You do know we’d miss you terribly, don’t you? We care about you—we love you, Taako…

And Taako falls.