Chapter 1: Where the Heart Is
Summary:
Ninten watches a memory in the making during a sunny morning of Lucas and Claus playing in the yard.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
It was like…
It was a curious feeling. Ninten couldn’t identify it.
Ninten yawned, watching Claus and, of course, Lucas: they were playing together with Boney in their family’s backyard under the late morning sun. The newness of having a sun again was still a novelty to all of them. Even if one slightly paler than the norm, while in its early stages.
Ninten could work on that. Eventually. For now, though, he’d conceded to Claus (privately) that he could probably stand to reserve his PSI a bit while Lucas was content and didn’t need anything.
Ninten felt too drained for physical activity, even if he was able to get up and walk around again. He reluctantly declined to join the twins and opted to spend his time observing instead. He chose a distant perch atop the homestead’s precarious cliffside fence, clambering up to sit at the spot where it bordered the furthest section of Flint’s yard.
It was a curious feeling.
Ninten pondered just what ‘it’ was, which tickled at the corners of his mind, or maybe his heart. He wondered whether it was something that had originated from himself or Lucas.
Inheriting a heart from someone (through whatever hackneyed, last-minute psionic magic mix had accomplished the Needles’ creation in the first place) turned out to make distinguishing whose feelings were whose…confusing. Ninten had learned as much in the week or so that had passed since waking up to the sight of the last Needle—and in turn, his future—in Lucas’s hands.
In all that time Ninten still hadn’t thought of a satisfactory way to explain to Lucas or the remaining people around him why there had only been Ninten and not some terrible, island-size dragon of darkness beneath the earth that triggered their apocalypse. Such had been the expectation they held, from whatever legends had apparently survived Ninten while he slept their predecessors’ past away. That mystery among others was a headache he didn’t know how to begin to parse. He couldn’t say he trusted his own memory leading to the end of his last conscious moments before mere days ago too well, and besides…
Frankly, Ninten could put off the task of detangling something that might well be buried for good anyway as long as time permitted, thank you very much. He didn’t want to spend a nice day thinking about dragons.
Instead Ninten dwelled on the mystery of what exactly was nagging at him while he watched Lucas and Claus idly from the fence. The mystery-feeling was far softer than anything that drove him to action, not even unpleasant, though he knew it’d annoy him a fair bit if the sensation faded away before he could pinpoint it.
At the very least Ninten thought he’d worked out it wasn’t Lucas’s heartstrings working now that were tugging the strings of his own. Lucas was currently engaged what seemed to be a hundred percent with his brother and Boney, and by every indicator Ninten could glean from him, overjoyed to a nearly painful degree over it. Lucas’s emotions and pangs of the heart usually projected themselves more powerfully and without ambiguity than whatever…whatever it was at the corners of Ninten’s mind.
(Even uncertainty in Lucas, more common than it ought to be, reflected onto Ninten’s conscious as something that felt refreshingly honest and direct, for a worry over known unknowns. He really was a good kid.)
So that ruled him out. The unknown gnawing at Ninten continued as he watched the two boys across the yard tussle against each other playfully and throw wood sticks for Boney, shouting for its own sake and acting like kids. Ninten was growing to know the boys better the longer he lived in their home. And he just couldn’t shake nor identify the strange, nostalgic sense he got about them that grew stronger the longer he watched.
It was like…
…
…Oh. Right.
Ninten swung his legs back and forth. He was too agitated with racing thoughts to mind his balance on the fence for now, despite the cliff at his back. He turned over the realization of what he’d recognized carefully in his mind.
If he had to name it…Ninten supposed he might describe the strange feeing as a sense as though he were, right now, turning through the pages of a family photo book: one that was maybe titled, “Lucas’s Growing-Up Album”; or even, “Lucas and Claus’s Growing-Up Album,” if the twins being born together would end up sharing one one.
With a pang, Ninten recalled that his own sisters had shared theirs.
Lucas and Claus giggled madly as they played, mannerisms exaggerated far beyond what either teenager (any teenager, Ninten thought as he tried to think back on the people he’d known) usually expressed, and giddy. For all the world they really might have been little kids. A reversion in time to how they’d probably been before so many, horrific unexplained disasters Ninten was still parsing out had turned both boys hurt and a little hardened inside and…well, in Claus’s case…
At least Ninten’s hold over the islands could extend to the power to restore the other boy to flesh and blood. Ninten shuddered.
He counted and then thought of nothing for a while as he’d been taught for meditation, letting time pass as he worked his mind through the skin-crawling thoughts. Once calm again Ninten back to watching the twins, both very much alive and whole and for all the world looking far happier than he’d ever seen them (in the short time he’d known them, at least). The overmuch innocence in that laughter and gleeful joy Ninten observed, over such a simple game of fetch with a pouting Boney, both Lucas and Claus look like…like…
Yes, they did seem right now to be so much younger children than they actually were. Ninten pondered this unhurriedly; not that he had much choice, with so much of his strength of mind pouring into the earth they had to live on that he still suffered the physical aching of its growing pains as well. Occasionally he saw the other two boys stop for a breather in the yard, then grin conspiratorially at each other and break from their game to run back inside the house and try to pull their mother out by the hand. Again, like smaller kids than they were, they petulantly begged Hinawa to come out with them as well, to join.
Ninten snickered behind his hand.
With exasperation that was more fond than felt, Hinawa continually insisted to them (with admonitions too soft to be heard as such) that they were interrupting her letter-writing, that she was trying to finish a message she was sending to her father. Surely they knew she had promised to finish it by the afternoon, and that that was soon approaching—and didn’t they want her to have time before that, to make lunch for everyone early? That way it’d be ready whenever the boys grew tired of running around, and whenever their father got home if he decided to return home midday from his visit to the village square to check in on all their neighbors…
And so on.
Ninten felt he could see a fairly good image of the children Lucas and Claus had been before their disasters started. Same for their gently laughing mother preserved with them in a sunny morning that had somehow been transplanted to the present from that era too. All three imprinted on a newfound recording of the imagined past, playing out in the here and now as if on a homemade VHS tape…
There was even an eerie kind of ‘family video’ quality to the scene he couldn’t deny. Ninten closed his eyes, but still all but physically saw as he watched them that particular, grainy quality of footage on a tape that had aged with time and degraded in fidelity, for having had been played and repeated so many times.
It was like…
No.
It all but was a memory. Wasn’t it? In every sense, but in that it was happening now. And perhaps that was what had tugged at him so oddly. Because—
Because to have a moment like this shared after the fact? by a reminiscing child or overeager parent? that was one thing. But this was just unfolding, in the making, and so Ninten felt quite self-consciously that he was intruding—inserting himself into a stranger’s family photograph. Butting in on a moment with the quality of a cherished, a happy memory that ought to stay between a parent and her children.
Memories of the kind that people clung to for years or decades, or…or longer, if they had that long.
(Ninten knew with a wrench in his gut that some did.)
It could be a baby book. A string of polaroids from a family vacation. An errant snapshot, or photograph framed on the mantle, or an instant photo developed and pinned with magnets on the refrigerator.
A diary.
A music box.
A fishhook carved from onyx-black agate.
Memories of happy times in a family that didn’t have to stay that way. Mementos people kept, because even if they might degrade in quality…they never could in importance.
Intruder, Ninten repeated again warningly in his own mind to himself. But he did not move from where he sat watching, with that curious feeling clawing in him on the fence.
The twins, their mother; the put-upon arguments of brothers just happy to be able to reach out and touch the other to know him safe. Boney pawing good-naturedly at them all. Part of it felt too authentic to be a re-enactment. Ninten realized he was smiling, despite his torn-up worries about what he was looking in on: and yes, that pure joy surely was Lucas’s. The blond boy was so earnest and determined and open that his relief and joy felt like a blaze impossibly bright and pure in Ninten’s chest. And it hurt.
Hurt like the smile stretching Claus’s face into the smile he wore matching his brother’s because Ninten could read without Telepathy that the older twin was so happy that he didn’t even realize how scared he was in that moment that this was all just some mechanical simulation or a dream.
Both twins were too caught up in one another and in their home and their mother and in how much they had missed this, had so synchronously to have missed and needed it to be real for one last morning, to be even the slightest bit self-conscious that they were acting as goofily as toddlers instead of teenagers.
Ninten knew they deserved this moment, and he tried to focus on the happiness instead of the feeling of don’t belong, not yours, intruder. He tried to let the happiness settle in him and take root until his thoughts were elsewhere, on a memory of how he’d had an album of moments like this for himself that his parents had kept for him when Ninten was a baby. Cataloged milestones, mostly taken by his mother, telling a story of a treasured and by appearances unremarkable childhood. Small moments that branched from the mementos to the events they represented in Ninten’s mind…
Playtime with the family dog. Exasperation from a mother who was less than thrilled at her son making so much trouble, yet then love and hugs and soft laughter at his anticipation of favorite meals. And his siblings, his—
Oh, his sisters.
He’d been five. And it had not been just one; not a brother or sister to split his childhood memories into halves with as another set of siblings left to two might have done. Twins, of course, so very like the boys in the yard that Ninten wished selfishly for a moment he could tear his eyes away from them so he wouldn’t have to think about—
(Ninten had never forgotten the memory of meeting those two new lives now part of his at once in the Mother’s Day hospital. Identical faces forming mirrored images. A pair of cribs resting side by side: impossible to differentiate, terribly fussy from infancy through early childhood, tiny tiny things Ninten ached to hold and protect and love forever and ever so much out of some brotherly instinct that compelled him always to rush to where they were every time they so much as cried or made some noise that even his mother was wise enough to ignore, else the world might turn malevolent and hurt them hurt his baby sisters or take them away from him before they were big enough he could explain properly how much they meant to him that he loved them—
—and then, because the world had done no such thing, toddler twin girls. So much alike, one fearful and the other practical-minded but both adoring and both kind and sweet. Girls with the same faces. Only the colors swapped.)
Minnie and Mimmie could have passed for Lucas in Claus any day, Ninten thought as he returned to himself with a very sharp pain in his heart that could have been Lucas’s joy being too intense for the poor boy to handle after the pain he was used to, or merely Ninten’s reminiscence of loss being just what it was. Ninten could for all the world be watching some memory of his own past, similar enough to this present-day facsimile of it. Imagine two girls playing with poor and tired Mick who had gamely tolerated Ninten’s babyhood but couldn’t make heads or tails of two eager girls at once with all his energy no matter how good Minnie and Mimmie’s intentions.
No. No, Ninten loved them, he thought with a sudden anger against the pain. He wouldn’t let time make his little sisters into thoughts like wounds that hurt. It could be—Ninten could think of this the other way around.
Just a moment of simple fantasy, he reasoned. Ninten could replace the world around him with an image of the past or at least let the laughter of Lucas and Claus and Boney in his ears be a mirror to somewhere else in time. Ninten wouldn’t be intruding that way, either. Ninten let memories carry him away, calmer now as Lucas’s heart loosened its grip on his.
He eased his grip on the wooden fence and leaned back as much as his diminished strength allowed, let himself have the memory. Not the gone-hurt-lost part, but the reason that it had ever been important.
(Two girls playing tag in the front yard. A barking dog that had raised Ninten probably near as much as Carol had, for the ease even a very young Ninten could always escape her watch. Twins sipping milk at the table. Hugs, cups of orange juice, ribs once a week, calls in the night for big brother if one of the girls had a nightmare, two mirrored faces always together, always underfoot, and his mother around them.)
It was like…
Ninten kicked back and looked up at the blue sky, long moments passing before his face eased into another smile that was his own.
Nice times then; nice times now. He’d been a lucky kid, he reflected.
Ninten really was.
It was like…
He smiled faintly with closed eyes craning his neck up toward the newborn sun.
It was almost, almost like…
Ninten let go of his thoughts. Felt them scatter to the wind as he tuned in to the subtle shifting of the earth below.
Eventually, Hinawa called the boys in for her lunchtime specialty. Omelets, the fluffy kind Lucas liked so much.
Ninten had lost track of time altogether by then. He blinked over in the direction of the yard again. He watched as first Claus, then Lucas—no, because Claus actually stopped at the door to wait for the other to catch up before going in—raced to the doorway and toward the kitchen inside. Ninten’s mouth twitched at the corners watching Hinawa turn in the doorway, trying in vain to scold them for startling her, but the boys were already long gone.
A tired, panting Boney trailed grumbling behind, and the image elicited a quick, stifled snort of laughter from Ninten. He felt warm and light in his heart at the memory of his Mick.
It was a nice thing, really, to see his new friends having a day like this. Lucas and Claus both were so desperately in need of happiness, Ninten reflected more even than a restored home or a world to live in. It was good to have a day where they were both relaxed and Hinawa as well, even with Flint still out of the house to ignore the villagers’ insistence they could do without his (needed) advisement in rebuilding Tazmily.
Ninten hadn’t planned to move from his sky-watching spot once the two boys and Boney were off to enjoy their lunch. However, a voice calling his name startled him halfway before he could return his gaze back to the clouds.
“Ninten!”
Ninten blinked again, surprised to speechlessness. Hinawa stood waiting in the doorway, hands on her hips. She watched Ninten who was frozen atop the cliffside fence at furthest back edge of the yard, her posture and stance both clearly expectant.
It was too far to tell, but Ninten though he saw a crinkle of mirth—maybe also, a trace of sympathy, some sadness perhaps for something she saw in him he did not recognize—in the corners of Hinawa’s eyes. As if she recognized something familiar and funny and a little pitiable in his baffled look the way his own mother might have once upon a time.
She stood waiting.
But, he’d…he’d waited first. To give her and her sons the space for their moment, that snapshot or family photo in a happy morning. Ninten knew Lucas and certainly the remainder of his family had to be needing it. Ninten could only feel Lucas’s heart but it was full of love but then pain that was intense, often not in ways that Ninten could make any sense of despite feeling torn apart by grief in the other’s nightmares more evenings than not.
Yet, other hurts that plagued the blond boy especially in sleep were so familiar. And Lucas had been through hell and back, had lost his brother had lost his mother had found his wish to have them—
Ninten stared at Hinawa and a hundred memories flickered through his mind.
It was…oh, it was like…
(Welcome home Ninten she’d called, arms open for him and waiting oh, my baby, come here, you must be famished, you must be so exhausted. Two smiling, perfect mirror faces of little girls in pink and red flanked her on either side, both girls crying in relief and happiness that he was home like he’d promised, that he was safe, wasn’t hurt or dead or lost like they had worried. Happy barking echoed around the three in excited running circles, his dog’s oft-complained about retiring age forgotten in his excitement and pride and he felt it reached the doorway love all of them grateful awed love relief how love.
This, every bit of this, was all Ninten wanted in the world. A moment, just this. The only sight in this world world or the universe that could keep Ninten for even one more instant away from what he’d longed for since emerging from Holy Loly. And that was what would come after this as soon as he could let go of them again, the moment Ninten could at last at last untangle himself and upstairs and finally take a moment, just a moment to rest his eyes…
And then and only then at last fulfill the stern promise he’d made to himself back then. And cry. And cry, and cry…)
Ninten felt more than controlled his body tumbling off the fence, scraping his knees on the way down albeit without feeling any pain. He wobbled his way upright again, eyes still bound watching Hinawa. She was still waiting.
He wasn’t hers—he wasn’t, but—
Okay.
Heck what was he doing. Ninten wasn’t about to go around refusing small miracles. Bits of offered kindness that he hadn’t even thought to hope for. Known he wanted.
Dreamlike, he stood. Ninten’s thoughts drifted away.
Without conscious thought he realized himself already walking toward the doorway where the twins had gone up into the house. He made his way toward Hinawa and their family’s open home feeling lightheaded on legs that walked without his conscious thought, as if caught in some apparition, or a dream of his own design.
Notes:
…i’m not great at fix-it fic but at least there’s hugging planned EVERYONE GETS A HUG EVENTUALLY
Chapter 2: When It’s Love That Hurts (Part I)
Summary:
Claus can’t sleep, and Ninten doesn’t need to. Unfortunately for the latter Lucas’s heart isn’t ready to let his twin venture into the night alone.
Notes:
This one's a two-shot, because I'd like to keep the chapters a bit shorter if I can. And this way it can also be split between Ninten's POV and Claus's, which will be after this part.
Chapter Text
The new nights in Tazmily were deep and dark. With a sun once again in place to rise and fall and create a cycle of day and nighttime, the people in the village found their ability to see inexplicably in the absence of light had disappeared. Ninten had no explanation for this, and shrugged it off as unimportant amid the villagers' grumblings. He suspected it had something to do with some heretofore unknown property of light waves, or maybe human eyesight, which he'd ignored in science classes a couple of lifetimes ago.
Ninten himself had no problems navigating the dark. His grasp of his own psionic signature (which was pretty much the stuff of everything here, save the other humans) was keen enough to know the shape of his surroundings without sight.
He still wouldn't have missed the conspicuous sound of a mattress creaking near him, though. Or the shuffling of blankets from Claus's side of the bed.
Ninten also wouldn't have been unable to hear the noise even from padded footsteps, followed by various shelves being drawn open and closed from the boys' dresser. Finally he heard the rustling-fabric noise of a person getting dressed. The person wasn't Lucas.
Too comfortable in bed and drained from lingering weakness to sit up, Ninten instead watched without bothering to hide his stare in the dark from where he lay as Claus slipped on his shoes and tied them before standing up straight. The red-haired boy glanced about the large bedroom furtively, but ultimately turned toward the front door. That meant he was going outside.
Ninten still didn't bother to hide his stare in the pervasive darkness, was almost hoping in fact that Claus would pick up on it. But whether or not Claus was aware of Ninten watching the redhead did stop at entryway of the boys' room and pause.
Claus stood and glanced back over his shoulders for a few long seconds, maybe checking to see whether Lucas or Ninten had stirred. Ninten debated breaking the relative silence and saying something out loud, to let the other boy know he was awake, but before he had made up his mind Claus seemed to settle his resolve first and strode purposefully out of the room.
Ninten all but groaned. He listened as Claus moved out of sight and was met with the sound of the house's front door opening slowly and then closing again (kind of a pointless gesture, without a doorknob, but Ninten supposed it was better than not even trying). He'd predicted as much when he first heard Claus get out of bed, but had hoped the other boy wouldn't prove him right.
Likelihood of any danger to be found aside, Ninten knew beyond any doubt from the week they'd been acquainted that Lucas wouldn't sit by idly at the thought of his brother sneaking out in the dead of night alone. If anything, he'd be worried. He'd certainly want someone to go after Claus, if not himself.
Beside Ninten in bed, Lucas snored faintly. Ninten didn't feel like waking him.
He didn't feel particularly like getting out of bed to spy on Lucas's brother, either. But if it was one or the other…Ninten supposed that following Claus was the lesser of two evils. Ninten didn't want the twins to get into a confrontation.
If anything he hoped he could make sure Claus got back before Lucas woke up entirely, so that the latter never had to know about it. Ninten wanted Lucas to be happy.
Ninten…kind of didn't have a choice, wanting Lucas to be happy. Or at least in acting in the interest of things Ninten knew made Lucas happy.
Ninten couldn't help but feel his first stirrings of real, genuine resentment over that fact; which, like puppet strings, dragged him now unwillingly from the boys' bed and over to the dresser following in Claus's earlier footsteps.
Ninten rummaged through the drawers in search of clothes and shoes of the twins' he could wear that'd fit. He tried to stay optimistic, as he always had.
It was easy at least to remind himself that maybe, on his own, Ninten might well have decided to go out after a point anyway to check on Claus himself. Ninten cared about the red-haired boy's safety and peace of mind too. Not to mention that it was a distinct possibility Claus had actually wanted to be followed—he'd paused a long time waiting at the door, after all; and as Ninten turned over in his mind while getting dressed, he hadn't exactly made any secret of the fact to the twins that he didn't sleep at night.
And Ninten didn't need the sleep, either. Truth be told he had nothing better to do now but lay in bed in silence and conserve his strength while the night hours passed. Exhaustion to Ninten at this point was a matter of PSI drain making his brain sluggish, spreading out to the rest of him, and little else.
But still.
It still just…it seemed unfair, Ninten thought unhappily, pulling on a pair of shoes that Lucas had dug up for him earlier and tying the laces.
No, not Ninten's own predicament, as it were. He had accepted the terms of that.
(If he were being honest, it was fair to say he'd as good as brought it upon himself. He'd known, or he should have known the risks.)
No, this was about what he was setting off to do on Lucas's behalf. It seemed to Ninten that it was just poor sport to follow someone in the dead of the night that had gone through the trouble of sneaking out to begin with, to have a moment alone.
And really, did Claus need a chaperone just to go out by himself just because it was dark? Who was Ninten to decide?
Well, he'd walked himself right into that one, hadn't he? he reflected glumly.
He was Lucas's.
Ninten finished dressing as slowly as he could to at least give the red-haired twin a head start. Once that was done, Ninten headed out the bedroom for the front door.
He'd stopped to pat Boney on the head outside the house, and been answered by the canine rumbling sounds of the half-sleeping dog confusing him first for Lucas, then Claus. To the imagined visage of the latter Boney yawned out a complaint about having assumed he was only dreaming Claus when he came by earlier, and that Claus should wake him up the first time if he needed Boney to take him for a walk so late.
Even when they got things straightened out Ninten's heart had warmed fondly when Boney offered to walk him, too, guessing Ninten right on the third try. Boney had sensed correctly despite his sleepy state that Ninten was also headed for Sunshine Forest. Ninten assured the half-asleep dog that he didn't need any help finding Claus, and it was fine for Boney to go back to sleep.
After Ninten had set out into the woods, though, it wasn't long before he was wondering whether he should have brought Boney with him after all. The walk was longer than Ninten would have liked, and Claus it seemed hadn't been wasting time using the head start been given. Normally, long hikes didn't bother Ninten (far from it), but for whatever reason—even now after a week or so into the world's recreation—Ninten still had next to no psionic strength left to draw on beyond what it took for his brain to keep his body working.
From there, unfortunately, physical strength and endurance drained all the more quickly and easily. And he was getting tired of it in more ways than one.
For protection or out of habit he'd grabbed on a whim an abandoned stick of Lucas's that lay near the doghouse on his way off from the house. After a mile or two's trek into the forest Ninten was regretting that decision as well, the weight bothersome. He hadn't seen anything fun to do with the makeshift weapon, or signs of danger, though in all honesty he hadn't looked. He was too busy keeping an ear out for Claus.
Not that he had to after the first half mile, at least in the sense of knowing which direction to head: that had become obvious after Ninten tripped a couple of times over fallen trees while following a series of sounds from far ahead of crashing timber in the woods. Almost as soon as he found the start of the telltale felled tree-lined path that otherwise would have been concerning, Ninten took note of a rough pattern and trace of familiar psionic signature in the way the trunk ends were shredded.
Feeling better for knowing that Claus at least had his PSI in reserves enough to make a mess, Ninten gave himself a few minutes' rest at the base of one of the fallen trees, breathing heavily. Ninten wasn't worried so long as he could still hear the sound of trees falling distantly once every couple of minutes. They were far enough out into the woods that nobody from the village would hear, though any animals smart enough to keep their skin would know to keep their distance. Ninten eyed the freshly fallen trees torn down indiscriminately with PK Love and wondered what purpose Claus had for destroying them.
He wondered if Claus knew himself.
Chapter 3: When It’s Love That Hurts (Part II)
Summary:
A struggling Claus and newly arrived Ninten find themselves with some unexpected company of sorts in the forest.
Notes:
poor claus
Chapter Text
It was pretty hard to navigate Sunshine Forest in the dark. Claus hadn’t troubled himself over trying to avoid getting scraped up by the underbrush and small tree branches or about bruising on the bigger ones; he’d been through worse. His only concern from the outset had been making sure there weren’t any animals in his path.
Though by now, after he’d trekked this far into the forest, they’d have to be pretty stupid to hang around.
Claus tried PK Love α!
Bright lines of blue materialized in the air and then hardened into patterns, slamming outward in all directions. The attack hit the nearest line of standing trees and left them dented with marks left in the same shape, trunks crumpled at an angle too slight to knock them over. He’d need to use a stronger version for that, but he’d been at this for a while already. He’d knocked over dozens of trees without feeling much better for the result.
Eyebrows furrowed, Claus approached the nearest tree he’d struck and put a palm to the tattered bark, feeling for something he couldn’t name. Some…evidence, maybe, that could betray the truth of what his eyes were telling him.
PK Love.
The Magypsies had told Lucas it was special. King P, Fassad; even had told—well, not Claus. Never Claus, but did tell the him that wasn’t (and Claus felt a flare of PSI surge behind his eyes in a panic of retaliation, bit it back down, down again) just how the possession of such a rare and wondrous PSI made him special.
And it sounded special, didn’t it? Wasn’t love…love was supposed to be…
Claus stared blankly at the shredded wood beneath his hand. He then glanced backward for a moment at the dark space in the woods where he knew so many full-grown trees lay felled from a stronger version of the same power.
PK Love was an attack.
But it was more than that. All the supposedly miraculous PSI did, aside from whatever purpose the Needles had served, was destroy. Its final form especially was terrible in its power: PK Love Ω obliterated, dealing a world of hurt upon anything and everything that stood as a target in the way of the user. It hurt people.
And now, for the first time since regaining his life and his senses in not quite that order, Claus wanted badly to know the reason. To know how—why—could something named for love itself be such a terrible force of destruction?
Or was it? Doubt gnawed at him. He thought of the trees he’d just blindly destroyed in his fit of…rage (because he didn’t hurt, he’d never hurt, he took action) under the pretext of testing his own PSI potential in a human body as well as some half-baked excuse to himself about clearing more timber for the villagers come morning.
But that wasn’t really why Claus had done it was it. Shame burned in his gut as he thought of how much forest he’d needlessly destroyed and how many animals he’d doubtless frightened in his…
In his anger. Because he knew it couldn’t have been anything else that drove others to hurt people.
And from there the gnawing worry finally took root: the bleak thought that after so long not being human, was Claus even truly incapable of comprehending love anymore? Was that way his PK Love was so twisted and destructive?
Had his disappearance and awful transformation into—into the him that wasn’t, done the same to even Lucas’s PSI to warp his PK Love to nearly the same degree?
Were they both irreparably damaged, somehow, because of what Claus had done to their family after his mother’s sacrifice?
And. He closed his eyes and swallowed back something hot and painful that he tried to think was some swell of PSI instead of tears.
Was that was the real reason it hurt so badly sometimes, just being near the people he cherished enough to die for?
The people he should feel nothing but gratitude and joy to see alive sometimes?
Why did he keep waiting on pins and needles on a strange, unshakable thought that they would someday just as quickly disappear again—and him, Claus, with them too?
He felt sick. Angry at himself; useless for feeling this way and not being able to say anything in the daylight hours, when none of it was brimming at the surface.
If anything, it ought to be the other memories that hurt. And that was it. The very worst part of all of this.
How the memories of the him that wasn’t, they never felt—if anything, that they were the only memories he had without this—
“Claus!”
Claus started. At the now-familiar voice of warning, his macabre thoughts vanished instantly and he whipped around looking for the source.
He found himself faced instead with a pair of floating eyeballs waiting at his back.
He stared. The eyes stared. Then, they blinked at him once, and narrowed themselves into what was unmistakably a scowl.
Claus was dumbfounded. He took an unthinking step backward and gave a few hard blinks to try and reassess just what he was looking at. The eyeballs continued staring.
Then they attacked.
“Yeeesh!” Claus yelped inelegantly as the hovering eyeball creature closed the distance to lightly ram his front. Claus tumbled backward and somehow regained his footing with a little difficulty after being hit just hard enough to lose his balance. “What in the—?”
“Ah! Sorry, Claus,” a breathless voice said at his right.
Claus jerked away from the glaring eyeballs to see a disheveled Ninten, forgotten until that moment, running up to stand beside him. The shorter boy was holding a stick of Lucas’s in both hands, and looked ready for combat. Ninten was sweating and looking short of breath, but he grinned.
“My bad!” he panted. The boy’s expression was cheerful despite this apology, even mischievous. “Was tryin’ to warn you, before it got in a sneak attack, but…hey, ’s still just a Swoosh! No problem, right?”
The red-haired boy stared at him, incredulous. Claus looked over to the pair of hovering eyeballs glaring at them. Its lashes fluttered uselessly while the boys spoke, waiting for them to attack before it moved again.
“A what,” he spat at Ninten, and gestured to the eyes wildly.
“Swoosh.” Ninten seemed oddly cheerful about this. He gave the old stick in his hands a few practice swings midair as if to warm himself up for some morning exercise. “Or, well, ‘Watcher,’ if you want to be technical about it? I like Swoosh better because of the eyelashes. And how they’re always flying around, see?”
“I see a monster living in our forest again,” Claus snapped. He glared at Ninten, whose grin faltered. “When did that happen! Why?” Unbidden, an anxious voice in the back of Claus’s mind pressed on, unspoken: is this a new kind of chimera?
“It’s not a chimera,” Ninten said immediately, as if reading Claus’s mind. The black-haired boy looked worried, though. “…You’ve really never seen one before?”
“They’ve never existed here before!”
Ninten’s smile dropped. “That’s weird,” he muttered, refocusing on the floating eyes dead ahead of them. His own eyes narrowed. “I wouldn’t have thought they’d be rare…I mean, I noticed some others running away from where you were just now. So that means these ones are somehow smart enough to tell a strong opponent when they see—aieep! A-Ah, one sec.”
The Swoosh had flown in again upon Ninten. Apparently it was tired of waiting for either boy to make a move. Ninten swung his stick down hard on it, which (to Claus’s surprise) immediately ended the fight.
“Huh,” Claus said, watching the defeated Swoosh flutter woozily back into the air and then fly away. “Guess they really aren’t strong, yeah.”
Oddly he couldn’t help feel a twinge of resentment that he hadn’t even had a chance to draw his own weapon, or use any PSI on the monster.
At least, if there was going to be a fight anyway, he reasoned.
Ninten looked at Claus with an anxious-looking grin. Claus was taken aback by the worry in the other boy’s eyes that the smile belied.
“Um. Are there really not supposed to be Swoosh monsters in this forest? Like, at all?” Ninten asked.
Claus looked the other over carefully, something stopping him from snapping back an immediate retort. As steady as Ninten’s hand had been swinging his weapon moments ago, Claus could see now there were signals of physical weakness in the way the black-haired boy held himself. Ninten was breathing heavily and his legs trembled. He held eye contact with Claus firmly all the same, expression searching and concerned.
Claus jerked his head to break eye contact in belated remembrance of caution they had to consider, and glanced around despite the futility of trying to see further than his own arms’ length in the dark. Weak or not, he didn’t want to be faced down with any more of those creepy eyeballs if he could help it.
Or so he told himself. His knuckles itched, toward the borrowed knife tucked hidden away still in his belt, and he ignored the feeling.
“Short answer, yes,” he said to Ninten’s question, mind racing still at the implications of what they had just fought off. Organics, animals, those Claus could handle seeing move around these parts and rearing to fight every once in a while.
Not eyes. Not something out of a nightmare, or a weird fantasy. Claus told Ninten as much. Then for good measure, added firmly, “There have never been any monsters like that here. In fact…
“Before…Before the Pigmasks? There were no monsters in either Sunshine Woods or anywhere near Tazmily. Period.” Claus gave Ninten a hard look, daring the other to accuse him of lying. Claus was certain, though. There had never been more than an occasional aggressive animal or plant roaming about in Sunshine Forest. Nothing like a Swoosh, or a Watcher, or whatever it was called; even after they had come.
Not in the living knowledge of either Claus himself, or…or him.
The him that hadn’t been himself. The him that hadn’t been Claus.
He would have remembered for certain. His memories were devoid of all emotion, of all unconscious association, yet they were clearer and more accurate to the minutest detail even now than Claus’s had ever been.
So, no, as far as—don’t dwell on it, he scolded himself silently with gritted teeth, focus—as far as either of what he’d been remembered, until today there’d not been anything in living memory that could be outright described as monstrous or unnatural in these woods before the arrival of King P.
And even then. What had come after—were.
Mechanical. Chimera. Either. Both–
Him.
(Lied. Him—one the other not
one the other not one not the other no no
–Mother?
no. no Lucas no Claus? no no no no
no? no but
neither no more Claus no no wait. Mother? M
…Mother.
–Home.)
Claus shuddered and opened his eyes. His vision swam as the seconds sped back up to when was now and he came back to himself and where he was and who he was with and why.
Ninten was even now opening his mouth, eyes concerned. Claus, not wanting to deal with anything the other boy was prepared to ask, cut him off in a far testier voice and perhaps needing someone, anyone else to take to task:
“And before I ask just what you think you’re doing, following me out here—” –and whether or not you had anything to do with this– “—let’s go find someplace safe from any more of those things.”
Without another word Claus stalked off in the last direction where he’d walked from, judging by the familiar PSI spelling fallen trees that lined the way. Left with little recourse, a gasping, startled Ninten was left to stumble clumsily and half-blind in Claus’s wake as best the asthmatic boy could keep up.
Luckily (perhaps) for them both the walk was quiet, giving uneasy emotions time plenty to quiet and settle at ease. Claus held onto his agitation longer than necessary before slowing his walk even after Ninten had caught up to him on his own, the taller keeping his eye out for monsters, new and unfamiliar alike.
Fortunately (perhaps, or perhaps not, mutinously thought the part of Claus that felt the psionic sparks of so-called Love, like as not broken anyway, pulsing behind his temples), as with the animals that had fled Claus’s path indiscriminately for their own sake on the way in, these new monsters too sensed danger enough to steer clear of Claus and his companion by a wide margin as the boys made their back toward Tazmily without words through the silent wood.