Chapter Text
"Ow."
Damas snorted and jabbed his recruit in the ribs. "Told you to keep your guard up."
Jak swatted his hand away with a halfhearted grumble, but didn't argue. He'd gotten cocky during that spar and he knew it. Usually, he had Daxter on his shoulder to watch his back, but this time, he'd had to fight solo. Today, Sig had taken Daxter -- at the king's insistence, no less -- to get him fitted for an ottsel-sized gun. There was supposed to be a heavy thunderstorm moving in some time that week, and Sig wanted to get at least the gunbelt completed before he had to work on storm preparations. Daxter had been fine with that, but it left Jak maneuvering around the rocks in the throne room sans backup in a mostly futile attempt to land a hit on Damas.
Admittedly, both Jak and Daxter had been giddy with excitement about the prospect of Daxter getting a customized weapon. Not only would Daxter be able to join the fight more often, and from safer distances, he could snipe enemies sneaking up on Jak! More than that -- so much more valuable than that -- it was a declaration as loud as cannonfire that Daxter was a person , and that he mattered to the city. Sure, it was more of a "if you get killed that's one less person to protect Spargus" kind of thing, but outside of Tess, Jak didn't know anyone who had ever gone out of their way to provide adaptations and accommodations for his best friend, even before he was transformed.
"Jak, are you listening to me?" Damas demanded.
The owl-eyed look Jak gave him in return answered his question. He sighed and rolled his eyes.
"Maybe I hit you in the head too hard."
Jak reached back and felt the back of his head. "Well there's no lumps, and I'm not bleeding so...probably not?"
As though beseeching the heavens for patience, Damas turned his eyes skyward and shook his head. He pushed Jak towards the stairs leading towards his throne and went to dig a health pack out of one of the boxes around the chamber.
"Sit. And take those goggles off."
He didn't really want to sit down, but Jak obliged with only a perfunctory eye roll. He let the warmth of the stones soothe his aching muscles and watched Damas move around the throne room. It wasn't every day Jak met someone who could beat him in hand-to-hand combat without difficulty. That was both nerve-wracking and inspiring at the same time. That combo move Damas had pulled at the end of the fight had laid Jak out flat when he’d been in full dark form!
"When are you gonna teach me that pole vault thing you did with the staff?" Jak asked as Damas finally produced the health pack.
"When you can stay on your feet ten consecutive minutes in a spar without me braining you," Damas answered. And if he was a tiny bit smug, that was his business.
Jak chuckled and accepted the health pack. "Wish I'd been able to do something like that in Mar's Tomb last year. Those stupid spike pillars took so much time!"
As he applied the green eco to his head and arms, he shook his head. “Who even
designed
those things? They literally have no point except to cause problems!”
"Mar's Tomb?" Damas asked, growing unusually quiet. "When were you in Mar's Tomb?"
Jak froze for a second.
He'd told the king about his time in Haven -- most of it -- and how he'd come to be abandoned in the desert as an exile. But he had studiously avoided saying anything about Mar, or the Precursor Oracles, or any kind of prophecy. For once, he wanted to be just another teenager. To be part of teams , and not the sole “hero”. Even if he didn’t always get along with the native Spargan teens in his “squad” during training, he liked not standing out from the crowd. He needed the freedom of not having the world dropped on his shoulders every other day.
"You told me before that you and your...past self…? Had been taken to Precursor ruins by the Underground."
"Um." Jak shifted his weight and picked at a scar uncomfortably. "It's a ruin now . The Baron made sure of that."
"Ah." Damas nodded, relaxing a fraction. "So he blasted the doors open. I should have expected that; it sounds exactly like something he'd do."
It did sound like something Praxis would have done, really. It just wasn't exactly what had happened. For a moment, Jak considered letting sleeping crocodogs lie and allowing Damas to believe that. But that seemed well, wrong , after he'd accepted Jak's story of time loops and alternate selves without calling him delusional or a liar.
"He actually blasted the back wall out. I was kind of pissed, to be honest," Jak admitted. "I busted my butt to put the golden Seal back together and get that door open, and he just wrecked the place anyway."
Damas went rigid beside him. A sideways glance revealed white knuckles against the stone, and fingers digging into the sand. "What do you mean you got the door open?"
Crap. Too late to back out now, I guess. In for an orb, in for a power cell.
Jak gritted his teeth and hoped against hope that this admission wouldn’t get him treated differently. Or at least, not
worse.
"I…well, I mean. Dax and I hunted down the pieces of the Seal, I put them together, and then found this…light tower thing that opened the way to the tomb. I got the door open. Technically they wanted the kid -- little me -- to go in, not me," Jak said slowly. A nervous pang tugged at his lungs, and he found himself awkwardly looking for something to do with his hands. "Since he hadn't been pumped all full of dark eco, I guess Kor figured the Precursors would like him more than me."
The poor kid had been so scared. Well, Jak supposed it was more accurate to admit that he had been so scared. It was hard to pull childhood memories free from the murk of the last two years these days, but the terror of that moment? Jak remembered that.
He pulled the amulet from his pocket and let it just sit in his palm, slightly out of view of Damas. The warm metal eased some of his disquiet, as it often did. It was something familiar that anchored him to the past, no matter how messed up he got. A reminder on his darkest days that he used to be that innocent little kid.
"Where did you get that?" Damas suddenly demanded. He reached out as if he were going to take the amulet.
Startled, Jak yanked his hand away and held it out of reach. "I've kinda… always had it? I mean, except when Count Veger stole it the day I was exiled, but a friend gave it back to me at the oasis."
He wasn't sure how he felt about the way Damas was acting. Was he going to try to take his amulet too?
"You- you had that as a child?"
"Yes? My kid self never took it off until Samos took him to Sandover. He gave it to me." Jak huffed and watched the light play off the surface of the metal. "To "protect" me. That's what the kid wanted. Which...I guess it does, actually, since I can open eco vents with it."
He held it up for Damas to see and gave it a humorless little shake. “It’s not consistent though. Daxter can’t use it. The sage can’t either. It really only opens stuff when I use it.”
After a long, tense, silence, Damas breathlessly rasped, "And you...faced the Trial of Manhood, you said?"
Jak grimaced. "Yeah...Little me would've died . I don't know what the Underground was thinking, but I wasn't going to let them...I mean, I didn't know it was me at the time, but I was still pissed. All that for the stupid Precursor Stone. It wasn't worth a kid's life."
He sighed and ran his thumb over the Seal. "Made it worse when people started acting like I was Mar's Heir or some crap after that."
Damas made a strangled sound.
"It's messed up, right?"
Jak cleared his throat sharply to dispel the ache in his throat. He hadn't cried since he was twelve, and he wasn't about to start now.
"Calling me "Heir of Haven", "hero" or whatever, when a week ago I was only good for suicide missions nobody else wanted. Gushing about how "important" and "special" that little kid was, when the Metalhead leader tricked 'em into planning the whole time to throw him into the Trials and just cross their fingers that maybe he'd survive long enough to find their weapon for them. Maybe that’s the real reason the Council wanted me gone so bad: I was old enough to get through Mar’s stupid booby-traps and live . Doesn’t really look good if people are calling a mutant killing machine your city’s heir, I get it, honestly."
He avoided Damas's eyes. It didn't matter that the man had taken his story of Rift Gates at face value. When he heard the rest of this story he would stop believing Jak, surely. It sounded like delusions of grandeur: a tale that was, in and of itself, unbelievable.
Jak stared down at the amulet as he turned it over and over in his hands, letting his eyes unfocus until the reddish metal became blurry.
"And...and I know it's not even actually me they care about. It's the kid I used to be. Their ticket to a throne, if you believe that crap. It's better than being a puppet king, but I- I wish I could've stopped them from sending the kid back 300 years. You know? He's safe there, but… They're just going to start this mess all over again."
He laughed, bitter and harsh. "No wonder the sage was always so distant. He didn't want to get attached when he knew he-"
His face went slack. "...he...he knew -"
Jak felt like he was collapsing in on himself. He curled over the amulet and fought the ache in his face and throat with every bit of stubbornness he had. But in the face of what he'd just realized, he was fighting a losing battle. Every moment of his time in the Dark Warrior program, every detail of Errol's face rose to the forefront of his mind, bringing with them all the shame, all the terror and pain and rage of those two years.
Jak could feel Damas stirring next to him, but he couldn't look up. Couldn't even move, now. If he shifted even a little, he'd break, he knew it.
"Precursors. He knew," he whispered numbly. "Samos knew what Praxis would do to me. He...he knew! He took me back to Sandover and pretended I belonged there, and the whole time-!" Now he felt the dark eco bubbling up, twisting his horror into a palpable rage that seemed to sprout like the horns pushing through his skin. "The whole time he knew I was going to be their expendable Dark Eco Freak. He knew I was going to go through hell again and again and again! For that freaking Precursor rock!"
"Stop." Damas's voice was strained, frayed at the edges. "No more, Jak."
And there it was: Damas had reached the limits of his tolerance, just as he'd always known would happen. No matter that he'd tried so hard to convince himself that Damas really did believe him. He'd either pushed it too far, or the only leader he respected had finally realized what a monster he was.
He tried to apologize. He tried to dredge up his usual closed-off front to protect himself. Wasn't his dark form supposed to help him do that? Why wasn't his rage shielding him from the pain?
Jak wouldn't remember until later that anger was not the only emotion dark eco gravitated towards; merely one of the most potent.
And anguish was just as strong.
And now a fanged, clawed, beast of a boy with corpse-white skin curled into himself on the edge of the stair, unable to control the raw keening that poured out of him.
He had never been more than a means to an end, had he? Nobody’s son, a convenient orphan with nobody who cared enough to say “you’re expecting too much from him”. Just a pawn, a handy tool to operate ancient technology since whatever unfortunate souls birthed him were probably killed by Praxis long ago. That was probably a mercy, in a way. Whoever his parents had been, they would never have to see what their child had been twisted into.
Jak desperately hoped they hadn't been the early experiments that didn't survive the Dark Warrior Program.
When the dark eco reserves in his body had exhausted themselves, Jak felt like he was going to throw up. He was weary, and worn down. Too bad he'd probably just won himself a free expulsion from the throne room: he would have liked to just lay down on the warm stone stairs and sleep. It took a moment to clear his vision enough to see his shaking hands still wrapped around his amulet.
The cynical side of him warned that now that Damas knew about that, he'd probably start telling Jak to unlock eco vents like the Havenites.
Daxter couldn't get back from training with Sig soon enough. Maybe Jak needed to just go back to letting his best friend speak for him. Speaking for himself only led to trouble.
Now mortification flooded in on the wings of exhaustion. Some Spargan he'd turned out to be, freaking out and spilling his guts like that. He didn’t even do that with Daxter! Even if by some miracle Damas believed a word he'd said, he'd probably never take him seriously again.
"Sorry," he ground out as he hastily wiped his eyes. "I didn't mean to morph like- I mean, I wasn't planning to- Can we uh...pretend this didn't happen?"
Damas rose stiffly. "No," he answered in a curiously flat tone, "We cannot."
He wasn't looking at Jak.
Jak's heart sank.
In spite of his earlier resolve, he found himself on the verge of panic.
"I can control it, I swear, Damas. I don't just freak out like that when I'm not in battle! Look, I won't bring it up again."
"Give me the amulet."
Damas still wasn't looking at him, but his hand was outstretched.
Reflexively, Jak's fingers tightened on the Seal. "...what?"
Damas finally looked at him, but his face was blank and unreadable. "The Seal , Jak. Give it to me."
Jak pulled it close to his chest. "You won't be able to use it or anything, it only works for me. I don't know why."
The king took a step closer and Jak fought the urge to scramble backwards.
"That was not a request, boy. I need you to give me the amulet. Now ."
Something had changed in the way Damas carried himself. The hidden affectionate side he'd been gradually revealing had vanished, leaving a cold and stern monarch in their wake. He was tense, like he was expecting a fight.
No, not cold.
Closer inspection revealed that he looked not cold, but…desperate. And desperate men were dangerous.
Jak stumbled to his feet and backed away. "No. No, this is all I have. This is my only link to who I used to be. Nobody's taking that again!" He swallowed hard. "Not even you."
Damas advanced a step, and Jak saw that his hands were shaking, barely noticeably. Why was he demanding the amulet? What did he know that Jak didn't? Why was everyone keeping secrets from him?
"You don't know how important this is, boy. What it may mean. You don't even know if it's real!" Damas insisted. Somehow, the fact that his voice was still low and level was more intimidating than if he'd shouted.
"What do you mean 'if it's real' ?" Jak demanded, "You think Veger swapped it for a fake or a tracker or something? I opened a freaking dark eco vent with this thing. Of course it's real!"
"Let me be the judge of that." Damas held out his hand again. "Don't...don't fight me, Jak. I need to know. I need proof."
What was so important about the hell he'd lived through that Damas needed proof of it happening? Unless he was convinced that maybe Veger had bugged it, which would only sort of make sense.
"Why do you care?" Jak demanded. "Why does everyone but me know about this stuff?!"
Something wasn't adding up.
His back hit the pillar, and for the first time Jak realized he'd been retreating. Maybe his instincts knew something he didn't, because Jak never backed down from a challenge.
"Tell me who gave you the amulet, Jak."
It wasn't a question. It was a command.
"I told you: the little kid version of myself," Jak snarled to cover how unsettled he was, "And yeah , I'm well aware of how impossible that sounds, trust me."
Damas was becoming more agitated, which couldn't possibly be a good thing. "No. Not why you have it now . Where did you get the amulet. It did not spring into existence out of nothing. Who originally gave it to you? Where did you find it?"
Oh. At least he didn't seem to think Jak was lying about the time loop, or something stupid like that. But he clearly knew more about the amulet than he was saying.
Which meant that it was very possible that he knew more about the House of Mar than he was saying. Who had Damas been before his own exile from Haven? Had he-
Had he known something about Jak’s family before Praxis usurped the throne? (If the Underground had told the truth, at least, if Jak really
was
related to whoever had ruled the city before.)
Jak frowned and opened his hand to look at the amulet again. "I...I don't know. I was like, four . And I didn't even learn to speak out loud until a year ago, so it's not like I'd told anyone before."
When he locked eyes with Damas this time, Jak saw a shadow haunting the king's face that he didn't remember. Maybe it had always been there, and Jak simply hadn't noticed it, or maybe he'd triggered it with his stupid, stupid, outburst. Either way, he couldn't help feeling that he didn't want to ask. It was something to do with his child self, with his past. He knew that. But what if the answer was more painful than not knowing?
"You-" Damas looked away for a breath, almost as if he was trying to compose himself, then looked back. "You did not speak as a child?"
"Uh, no. No, Daxter always translated for me." Jak shrugged. "I used to sign, kinda like this old seer in Haven, but nobody in Sandover did. Sorta fell out of practice."
He tried to feign indifference, and ignore the panic steadily building up in his lungs.
He needed to find Daxter. He couldn't have this conversation alone. Whatever was coming, he couldn't handle it yet.
Damas opened his mouth to speak again, but the shrill tone of a proximity alert interrupted them both. The king moved to the window and squinted out at the horizon before cursing softly.
"Storm's inbound, ahead of schedule," he warned. "Precursors blood, that thing's moving fast! I need to alert the city before it makes landfall. Jak, make sure Kleiver locked down the turret and tell Merit he’s in charge of placing sandbags around the stables. If the waves come too far up the shore, we could have more than flooding to deal with."
Relieved to have an excuse to escape the stifling atmosphere of the throne room, Jak only nodded and headed for the lift. He hadn't made it four steps before Damas cleared his throat.
"The amulet, Jak."
"It's mine." Jak stuffed it into his pocket defiantly.
Damas strode down the steps. He wasn't moving near as carefully now. There was open desperation in his body language.
"I will return it to you after you've checked the turret," he said. When Jak didn't move, he sucked in a slow, steady breath.
"I need you to trust me, Jak, as your king if nothing else," he said, almost gently. "I don't...I don't know how to explain it to you. Not yet. But it is very, very important."
The thought of handing over the amulet went against every instinct Jak had. He tried to reason with himself that he'd been alright with Ashelin holding onto it, and he trusted Damas far more than he trusted Ashelin Praxis. But then, he knew that if he'd known Ashelin had his amulet, he wouldn't have been happy about it. The city always took from him, after all, and very rarely did it willingly return anything.
He's lying. He won't give it back. And even if he does, he'll just want you to use it to his benefit-
No! Damas is different. Damas is nothing like the others!
Jak clenched his teeth and let the battle between hope and experience play out in his mind. Finally, he forced himself to take the amulet back out of his pocket. With an unsteady hand, he held it out.
"Take it now before I change my mind," he said through gritted teeth, "and swear on your bones you'll return it."
As if fearing he would retract the offer immediately, Damas snatched the Seal from Jak's hand. Immediately, Jak missed its comforting weight. He closed his eyes and inhaled, trying to steady his nerves. When he opened them, Damas was watching him. The look in his eyes was still haunted and indecipherable, but some of the tension had gone out of his body.
"Thank you," Damas said quietly. "I swear on that which I hold most dear that I will return this...amulet to you."
The words seemed almost to stick in his throat, but he pushed through them nonetheless. "I...it may be nothing. I may be...mistaken. But if this device operates as you say it does, then I will need to speak to your sage immediately."
There was an undercurrent in Damas's words that promised danger -- the same tone he'd had when he had confronted Ridge for insulting Jak in the market. Jak felt his eyebrows rise up, but couldn't muster up enough emotion to be concerned.
"You gonna leave him in one piece?" he asked.
"That," said Damas, "will depend very much on how he answers my questions."