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if i ask for too much

Summary:

Surely he would adjust eventually. Surely. Whatever piece of him remembered would eventually work out that it wasn’t coming back, and give up on waiting for it.

It couldn’t keep getting worse forever, after all. Could it?

Notes:

this one's a twofer of request fills from a prompt list: "yearning for them when they're not around"/"hugging them as they're crying"! i might eventually add a couple more to this one bc BOY do i love poking around in ingo's brain for Problems and i feel like those are all related enough to work as a single post.

Chapter Text

So Emmet missed his brother. This was obvious to anyone who'd ever met him before. Or anyone possessing eyes.

 

Neither of them did well with alone. They never had. For short periods of time, sure, with well-defined starts and ends to be planned around, okay—but. Well, case in point: it would be far more practical to stagger their mandated vacation days, so that there was always at least one boss on the subway. Or to divide responsibilities so anything that called them away only called one of them away. But they didn't. Because it would make everything more difficult, or defeat the whole point of a vacation as in rest: they both vastly preferred to stay, at the very least, within reach whenever possible.

 

And now something had taken Ingo away, under dubious and alarming circumstances, and it was unclear when it would return him. So yes. He was functioning—he kept everything in order, helped organize the analysis and rerouted lines away from the danger zone and maintained the subway's daily expected functions and et cetera—but he was... ragged around the edges. Because there was that constant jagged splinter in his side, the unavoidable awareness of a loss of a very important structural support: Ingo was not available. Even if he wanted him, he wouldn't be able to find him.

 

The worst part was knowing that somewhere else, in some other reality or wherever he'd been taken, Ingo must have been struggling through the same thing. And that was painful. Knowing his twin was somewhere unreachable, alone and hurting, and there was nothing he could do to help.

 


 

Clearly being a Warden was... lonely. Isolated. But to be entirely honest, Ingo hadn't really noted much of a difference, himself.

 

Even back in the Pearl Settlement, everyone was so far away. As if they were on the other side of... some sort of barrier, or gap, and try as he might he couldn't bridge it to reach them. Or maybe it was that he wasn't trying, not very hard. Was he?

 

It didn't seem to matter. Or if he understood why it mattered—intellectually, at least—he couldn't bring himself to care anyway. Building all those new connections, laying new tracks, for what?

 

He didn't want to get comfortable, maybe. Maybe that was it.

 

Or couldn't get comfortable. There was some kind of misalignment between him and the rest of the world, that much was obvious. Some counterbalance he kept expecting and then not finding, leaving him stranded and off-kilter and unstable.

 

Or in plainer language—he wanted something. There must have been something, something fundamental, that he'd relied on, if its absence made him wake in tears from dreams he couldn't remember but that filled him with that undefinable sense of loss.

 

Surely he would adjust eventually. Surely. Whatever piece of him remembered would eventually work out that it wasn't coming back, and give up on waiting for it.

 

It couldn't keep getting worse forever, after all. Could it?