#the way he comes running the second WoL sneezes

[sunnythanalan]

... and they meet again where it all began..

[bookbornexiv]

the sea at the bottom of the sea

(wol and hythlodaeus check out azem’s apartment. warning: unedited and full of shadowbringers spoilers up to 5.5, despite which i clearly retained absolutely zero knowledge of any lore)

You heard it sitting on the docks south of Wright, a fishing rod in your hands and sea-spray salting your dangling feet and the mad cries of gulls in your hair; a story told through mouthfuls of sandwich by one dock worker to another, drifting to you like a thin thread of destiny over the pounding heartbeat of the sea in your ears and in your bones. You were thinking about fish and other such things, you had your eyes half shut to better feel the sun's warm kiss on your face. To better ignore that you should probably be actually doing or preparing for some important duty right now instead. To better forget that there was something you came here to remember.

"There's a sea at the bottom of the sea, and another sea at the bottom of that sea, and another sea at the bottom of that one. But below all of that, if you swim hard enough, you might see a city..."

You can see it now on the back of your eyelids, the shadows of spires and spirals like arms unfurling to welcome you, that city at the bottom of the sea. But you know it's not really a city, that the tale-telling dock workers are right. What looks like a city is just another sea, emptied of water and filled instead with memories so fluid, anyone could be forgiven for thinking them the real thing.

And you find yourself wondering, what's at the bottom of that?

*

You find, without much surprise, Hythlodaeus waiting in the lobby of the building when you eventually locate it. You fold your arms as you crane your neck back to gaze accusingly into his masked face. You really could have used his help three or four bells ago, at the front desk of the city council, or at any of the departments they eventually relayed you to like a ping-pong ball. At any of the points in time which you found yourself explaining over and over again, to a different face wearing a very slightly different mask, that you didn't have any identifying documents, you didn't have any legal or law enforcement credentials, but all you wanted to know and didn't see the harm in them telling you was Azem's mailing address. A PO box would have been fine. Finally, your patience wearing thin, you had to withdraw and hide in a back alley to surreptitiously make some coffee biscuits on your portable stove, craft a cute little paper box to put them in, and then - wearing your most winsome smile and the Amaurotine robes you'd kept from the first time you'd been run around doing errands here - rocked up to the concierge of the first residential building you could find, intending to say you had a cookie delivery for Azem but you'd forgotten the unit number exactly. To your crestfallen surprise, the lobby is entirely empty of staff and residents alike, and only Hythlodaeus is there, beaming at you in your cleverness.

"I didn't do anything," you say.

"Azem was always moving. When you're never in town and very charming but also very bad at arranging for bills and rent to be paid on time, you can't keep a place for long," Hythlodaeus explains. "Landlords get fed up and somehow Emet-Selch or I would end up with the eviction notice, we'd have to come around to make sure everything was safely put away in storage for the time being... Azem never even remembered how to get to any of them either. You're doing better. Very impressive."

You give him the box of biscuits. You're not sure how he's going to get any use out of them, but he looks delighted anyway, and tucks it carefully away somewhere in his robes.

"Shall we go up? You'll need me to press the lift buttons. You can't reach them."

You also end up needing his help to reach the lock on the apartment door, which you are completely unsurprised to find out he has a spare key to. For a moment, as he fumbles with the stiff lock, you find yourself backing up a little bit, holding your breath, as if that locked door were a rock over the mouth of a volcano already in the throes of an eruption. Later you'll ask yourself why you were so nervous, so anxious, what you were thinking you might see when he opened that door. For now your mind is a blank - one that, mercifully, remains so as Hythlodaeus wiggles the doorknob free and pushes the door open. "Welcome!" he says, brandishing one long arm gracefully to usher you in. "Watch your step. And your hands."

You don't take a step towards the open doorway. "Watch out for what? For cubus? Did Azem keep cubus as pets?"

"No, no, I mean it might be dusty. I don't remember if anyone arranged for weekly cleaning."

You finally let go of that long breath you had been holding. Dust you can deal with. You are the Warrior of Darkness. The Warrior of Darkness. The Warr- You clear your head, nod gratefully at Hythlodaeus and step past him, into the apartment.

It honestly is a bit of a disappointment. If you hadn't known the occupant of this unit to be a person of fairly major importance and influence on, like, an international scale, then you might have thought it pretty neat in a sterile, showroom kind of way. High ceilings and big glass windows and sleepy beige and grey accents on sleek and featureless furnishings, generic abstract paintings alongside boring black shelves on the walls, and lush plastic plants scattered about as if the designer had run out of ideas and just slapped a wall planter here or a flowerpot there to hide chipped varnish or distract from a glaringly empty spot. It isn't particularly dusty, or at least, the recreator of this physical illusion had neglected to include it, so it couldn't have been a terribly integral part of the experience. You wonder vaguely if Emet-Selch - if Hades - had been tempted to improve upon the reality of the past, even for just a little. You imagine him sneezing violently as he walked in, lifetimes ago, planets ago. The hood flying back off his head, him stomping around irritably resolving to do something about it. Does this count as doing something about it? Leaving the dust out of his recreation of a place he would have had absolutely no reason to come back to? Had he been tempted to come back to it?

"I don't know," Hythlodaeus says, as if he can read your mind. "I mean, I know what you're thinking. You're wondering if - if a memory of Azem might be here." There are more closed doors, leading out from this main room; there's a sliding door to a balcony, but you don't see anyone on the other side of that at least. "If everything was remembered into being so faithfully, so perfectly, then surely, you think, one of the most important people in this city should be here too. How could one of the Fourteen be forgotten? By another of the Fourteen, no less?" His masked face tilts to regard you in a way you want to interpret as tenderly, even though you can read absolutely nothing from its smooth, blank surface. "You're free to look. I'll just dust everything a bit and check the bathrooms. You know there's always a pipe leaking or something when you're not around to see to it."

He leaves you, disappearing into a small room which, you assume, is not hiding a snoring recreation of Azem, since he makes no startled exclamation. You think you know him well enough by now that he'd pop back out again, all excited, and wave you over to come look at Azem, if he'd found anything. If he'd found his new, old friend.. You breathe a little easier and muster up the courage to step forward, poke at a stack of books that looked like they were lifted out of the box they'd been stored in and plonked down upon a low shelf to never move again until the next time Azem forgot to settle the rent. You can't actually reach most of the stuff in here, but there's nothing that you actually feel worth taking a second look at, let alone trying to climb the bookshelves for. No portraits of loved ones, masked or unmasked, no trinkets or souvenirs one might have expected of a constant traveler, nothing that looked like a notebook or journal or even a grocery list. Nothing personal. It looks and feels like a place that had been carefully arranged to look homely and welcoming, but in reality is no one's home. You do eventually climb the coffee table and stand upon it, looking around, trying to imagine yourself about ten times taller, to no avail. No skull-splitting flash of light, no rush of memories, no sense of deja vu assaults you as the Echo had seen fit to do everywhere else. This place doesn't mean anything to you. Perhaps it never had.

You sit on the table, shoulders slumping a little, and wait for Hythlodaeus to come back. He looks at you, goes to the kitchen and re-emerges with two cups of tea, although the cup he plonks down in front of you might better serve you as a bath than a beverage. You sit on the balcony together and eat the coffee biscuits, Hythlodaeus pinching each one delicately between thumb and forefinger as one might pick up a grain of sand, and craning his neck back as he lifts it to his mouth so you never quite see the face below his mask. When you look down into the box and find it empty, Hythlodaeus says they were delicious. You remember making six biscuits and you remember eating six biscuits. But you don't mention it. It has been such a peaceful afternoon.

"Did you find what you were hoping to find here?"

You shrug.

"I suppose we can't always find what we set out to find," Hythlodaeus says. "But sometimes, you know, you find something you absolutely weren't expecting or even thinking to find. Sometimes it's something you had no idea could even exist. That's what Azem always said traveling was like, you know? It can happen even at home, but I suppose when you're on the way to somewhere else every day, it happens all the time."

You point out that that unknown 'something' could be something as bad as it could be nice. But, you concede, it's probably better to be prepared for it to be bad, while hoping for it to be nice. Otherwise, you can't imagine that anyone would ever want to leave one place for another.

"That is something Azem would say," Hythlodaeus says with great satisfaction. "You know, I think we never quite managed to meet up here and have a chat like this. It's nice to be able to sit here and talk nonsense together at last."

You look at him, wondering if a crack might have appeared on his mask somewhere, if something in this city is programmed, triggered, coded to unravel the minute someone finally acknowledges who you are and who you were in the same breath - the new old you, the old new you. You can't say in words what exactly you're expecting. Perhaps you'll hear your true name, Azem's true name, perhaps even spoken in Emet-Selch's voice rumbling from the speakers in the walls, from the waves high above the city's spires. Perhaps you want the city to crack and crumble and fall to pieces around you, only to reveal the true city at the bottom of this remembered city, the city at the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the sea. Perhaps all you want, every time you return here, is to truly be home.

"I'll finish your tea, if you're not going to drink it."

Hythlodaeus puts the cups away when he's done, wipes the crumbs from the empty box and deposits it gently in a massive bin. You make a mental note to come back and check on it later. Can a remembered garbage disposal or recycling system actually dispose of very real cardboard, made from real pulp from real branches you cut yourself, a world away - fourteen worlds away? - in the quiet forests of the North Shroud?

"Did you know Azem wasn't going to be here?" you ask him, later, when you've taken the lift back down to the building's lobby. He is poised to see you off, standing at the exact spot he was waiting to welcome you in, long limbs arranged in exactly the same position. You wonder how much longer this simulation of Amaurot, sundered from its creator, will stand, can pretend to function, pretend to live. Is it beginning to loop things to conserve resources? Is that even close to a guess at how this place works?

"I wasn't sure," Hythlodaeus replies. "We didn't open any of the other doors, after all. And Emet-Selch complained about Azem being absent almost as equally as he complained about Azem... Perhaps he felt it was more true to memory not to recreate Azem in Amaurot. Perhaps he was stubborn enough that he didn't care and did it anyway... In the old days I'd have offered to bet on the outcome. But these aren't the old days any more and anyway, you're here."

"I am," you agree. "But I gotta go."

He lifts a hand to wave you goodbye. For a moment your heart leaps to your teeth, but it's not the same way you remember Emet-Selch waving at all. But it's also, excruciatingly, bone-meltingly painful and endearing and wonderful all at once. You don't want to stop looking at him, and you don't want to leave. And yet, and yet, and yet, you find your feet turning and then you're facing the doors, walking out into the emerald light of the sea-sky over Emet-Selch's Amaurot.

*

It turns out there really is a city at the bottom of the sea at the bottom of the sea, but it's not your city any more.

[fistsoflightning]

lingering fears

there are simply some things that never truly disappear.

                          gatheredfates’ [30 day WOL challenge] | prompt: tomorrow

if anything this is my Peak Bullshit, if i had to pick out one fic that was the Top of my Bullshit. also, thank you to @to-the-voiceless​ for letting me subject haruki to this silly lilycat? he’s a Mess? anyways! slice of life content go!

a’dewah had waved syhrwyda and duscha goodnight from the floor of the basement library when the chronometer hanging delicately above elwin’s forge had read two bells to midnight, the golden bells chiming in time with syhrwyda’s little laugh. it was only slightly past when he usually retired for the night, so they hadn’t looked too closely into the fading darkness to a’dewah’s expression, playfully teasing him for being such a bookworm despite being the only two sharlayan scholars in the house.

(in hindsight, he probably should have asked one of them to stay, considering how his mind oh so loved to wander in the dark, stumbling upon landmines of memories until a’dewah finds his hands shaking hard enough to make turning on the miniature orchestrion beside him difficult.)

so when haruki stumbles headfirst into the walls separating the library and sitting room from the occupied bedrooms looking like an owl, a’dewah finds that the chronometer reads four bells past midnight. he’s clutching one of a’dewah’s pillows, the cloudsilk cover bunched up beneath his fingers as haruki rubs his eyes, squinting past the gentle blue light of the floral lamp after regaining his bearings.

“dewah, what’re you doing up? was about to go ask duscha if he’d seen you,” haruki mumbles, poorly stifling a yawn into his pillow. not the smartest of plans, really; duscha was much more of a fluffy, unshakeable cushion this late at night, and even all of haruki’s (currently missing) energy would have failed to rouse duscha from his spot among the comatose.

a’dewah can’t find the heart to tell him i had a nightmare where you detested me and i didn’t want to wake you over it, so instead he says, “i figured out what the problem with the… the enchantments i was testing earlier was, and i didn’t want to forget it, so i—” he makes a wide sweeping motion to the mess of books and parchment in front of him. “—er, have this mess now. it’s kept me awake.” it’s not so much a lie as it is a half-truth (he really did figure out how to enchant the new flowers he’d grown upon his return from the first in a last ditch effort to stay awake), but something in his stomach drops anyways, guilt feeding into his already spiraling control.

he makes some noise of ambivalent agreement—a mumbled ‘mhm’ of sorts—and steps over a’dewah’s fortress of tomes and scrolls to the clear spot beside him. a’dewah’s pillow looks… well, a little strangled, but otherwise haruki seems alright, leaving a’dewah wondering just when he woke up. haruki had convinced him to take a “nap” late that afternoon, so it wasn’t unreasonable for him to be awake… but it couldn’t stop him from worrying, now could it.

as soon as haruki gets himself situated by a’dewah’s side, he leans in, grabs a’dewah’s hand (that is currently clenched and resting on top of a small drawing), squints carefully at a’dewah’s face, and calmly says, “you’re lying.”

his ears absolutely do not flatten at that. “what—how—ruki, are you sure you—you’re completely awake?”

“yep, sure am,” haruki yawns, which is a sure sign that he’s an absolute liar if not for the strength of his grip around a’dewah’s clenched hand. “you probably don’t notice, but… well, you can’t see it, but here—” haruki reaches over with his free hand to poke lightly at the corner of his right eye, tracing down his lower eyelid to where the small scar sits perfectly vertical over it. “—whenever you lie, it kinda twitches and tenses up. plus; you start to stammer, which is both cute and your biggest nervous habit.”

“i—that’s.” a’dewah blankly stares into the slowly blurring parchment still in his lap while haruki yawns yet again (really, he should have just kept sleeping, especially since he and mune were going to see the moonfire faire fireworks in a few suns), because how was he on par with elwin on catching tells and his stammering is cute and it’s incredibly dark does he have some sort of night vision—

at some point during his slow descent into anxious madness, haruki had scooted over from a’dewah’s side to right behind him, one arm wriggling under his and the other over his shoulder, holding him firmly in place as haruki carefully nuzzles his horn next to a’dewah’s torn ear. the motion is so filled with reassurance, kindness, love that a’dewah stops thinking enough to melt into haruki’s chest, but not enough to stop him from jamming whatever semblance of purring was climbing up his throat back down. he is not prepared for the teasing that will come out of that, not this late at night… or early in the morning.

“there’s the soft, relaxed you,” haruki mumbles quietly, his face close enough to a’dewah’s ears to be clear despite the soft tone. “you were so tense i thought you might strain something. now that you’re not, though, d’you mind…”

“if you’re sure you want to hear it,” a’dewah sighs. resisting the urge to curl into himself is only second in difficulty to not feeling utterly sick by what he readies himself to say. “it’s just a silly nightmare, really; we were sitting in the one garden, k-kinda like this, just talking. it was nice until dream-you started to—he said things that weren’t really… well, you, like that you hated me and—and you n-ne…”

he finds himself just short on courage to say you never loved me because how selfish and hurtful would that be, to tell someone who loves you so much that they’d come looking for you in the middle of the night that the twisted, broken, and scared part of you was convinced you hated them? to say that you couldn’t trust them with your heart because they might actually break it even if that isn’t who they are at all? haruki would never say that, not for a joke and never for real; he’d somehow kept loving a’dewah even after all the waiting and worrying he was subjected to.

but, his mind whispers traitorously as haruki inhales slowly by his ear. a’dewah screws his eyes shut, letting his back tense up again as one of haruki’s arms moves to cradle his cheek. just because he wouldn’t now doesn’t mean he couldn’t later and what if he’s just tricking you like all—

“hey,” haruki says, knocking a’dewah from whatever number thought spiral this was of the night when he turns a’dewah’s head to meet his eyes. “breathe, sunshine; i’ve known you long enough to remember when your hair turned white. i don’t think i could hate you for being afraid.”

“s-sure,” a’dewah says, even if he doesn’t fully believe it and it sounds like he’s lying again. he breathes anyways, broken heart strangling itself inside his chest as he nearly chokes on air.

haruki’s eyes scrunch up at the corners in pity as he somehow pulls a’dewah closer, thumb tracing up his cheek to wipe just under a’dewah’s burning eyes and oh gods he’s crying isn’t he why is he like this. he nearly pulls out of haruki’s touch to curl up into the smallest ball he can, but haruki leans forward first, tilting his head carefully so he doesn’t gore a’dewah on his horns.

“i’ll love you today—” haruki presses a kiss to a’dewah’s forehead. “ —and tomorrow—” a second, on the bridge of his nose. “ —and tomorrow—” a third on the scar trailing down his cheek and a’dewah pushes him away this time to bury his face in his hands since he can already feel the flush spreading across his face.

“ruki, that’s just…” he trails off, still being peppered with kisses in his hair, because of course he’d know just what was haunting him. his eyes are still screwed shut and hot but his heart feels full and stong, untwisting itself under “you shouldn’t have to reassure me all the time but—how are you so…so—” kind, caring, observant, bold—

a’dewah stops stammering in time to sneeze; a quiet thing, drowned out under the soft hum of the miniature orchestrion playing next to them, but with haruki’s arms wrapped around his chest and the way his ears had shot back up in surprise…  

honestly, he should have expected haruki’s reaction.

“i—ruki i wasn’t done writing—don’t knock over that pile, those are dusch— wait put me down!”

“nope! now that we’ve cleared that up, time for bed,” haruki says triumphantly, his energy finally regained from cuddling as if that were a proper form of rest. before he knows it, haruki’s cradling his legs and back atop the pillow he’d dragged from a’dewah’s bedroom and swiftly picking him up before he can even try to stop his absolute menace of a boyfriend. “and this time, no leaving—wake me up next time dream-me is all weird, okay?”

“...mhm, but—the books and the parchment and the orchestrion—”

“whoever wakes up first can deal with the orchestrion, and the mess won’t go anywhere, sunshine. i’ll help you clean up, tomorrow.” haruki shifts his arm to put a hand on a’dewah’s head, fingers running over his ear in a soothing scratch. he says tomorrow like a promise, so warm and sure that a’dewah stops fighting back, content to let the drowsiness he’s been warding off catch up as haruki quietly walks back to a’dewah’s room.

he must have been more tired from gardening yesterday than he thought; he barely reacts when haruki gently rolls him off the pillow into bed, nor when he’s jostled around to be lying on top of haruki instead of the bed, a blanket wrapped around his waist. honestly, he really should go clean off his facepaint, but the warmth of the blanket and haruki’s arms combined make the executive decision to stay here before his brain catches up.

he does, however, escape sleep long enough to talk, especially since one thing is still bothering him. “hey, ruki?”

“...something still up?” haruki yawns into his fist, and from here a’dewah can see the dark circles beginning under his eyes. gods, he hoped he didn’t keep him awake and that it’d only been a few short minutes since haruki came and found him.

“i was thinking… why did you come look for me? it’s the middle of the night.” or too early for the morning, but that was all perspective.

“i thought…” haruki pauses, and his next breath comes out as a resigned sigh. “i thought you left—farther than i could follow, kind of left.”

a’dewah’s breath catches, if only a bit, since that was a turn of phrase sometimes reserved for the dead. he knows he couldn’t have gone and died in a single night, but the thought of leaving haruki wondering if a’dewah was even alive makes his stomach turn; they’d both already had their fair share of dead family for a lifetime.

haruki resumes tracing idle patterns into a’dewah’s back without really waiting for any response as a’dewah quietly remembers that, well, he did leave haruki without a word for over a year and then told him he didn’t have any grasp on when, how, or if he’d be coming back. that alone would be enough to send him into a fit, so… maybe he wasn’t the only one with nightmares, between the two of them.

“never again, not if i can help it,” a’dewah promises in whispers, as if the gods were listening and if they heard would do everything to prove him wrong. he’ll fight hydaelyn if it means keeping it, sacrilege be damned. “you’ll just, well, have to wait a few moons before you can safely follow me, since…”

“garlemald, right,” haruki says with a crescent-moon grin, his eyes warm and glowing with golden light, as if he were staring right at the sun falling past the horizon and the sunlight was smiling back. belatedly, a’dewah realizes that haruki is staring right at his face, which in any other circumstance wouldn’t be such a problem but he just compared himself to the sun like who would honestly do that—

he pulls the throw blanket over his head, curls a bit into himself and squeaks out, “g’night ruki love you!”

“love you more, dewah.”  haruki whispers back, even though his warm chuckle and a hand combing through his hair is more than enough of a response. he doesn’t even try to pull the blanket from his head, merely closing his eyes and drifting off. his hands don’t move from where they’re rested under a’dewah’s cardigan, warmth defined and seeping through the thin shirt like a soft brand.

once a’dewah’s fairly certain that haruki’s fully asleep, he shifts around enough so he can twine his tail carefully around haruki’s, finally letting sleep take him while he prays that he wakes up first tomorrow.