Chapter Text
"Can you read over my book when we get back home?"
If Wemmbu knew those could have been Eggchan's last words, he would have said yes. He knew himself well enough to know that he'd hesitate for a second—his time was better spent on polishing his maces than dizzying himself with endless lines of history he couldn't care less about. However, he had watched Eggchan empty crates of inkwells and diamonds alike in only a week's time to fill in the shelves of his archive. If he didn't owe his attention to his best friend, he owed it to all those sleepless nights and the ache in Eggchan's wrist.
It was so easy for Wemmbu to believe that he had all the time in the world to get to it. He and Eggchan had nothing else to run from within the last month. He couldn't tell the settled ashes of the Invisible Mafia and the Law apart from the dirt anymore, and the militias that Arachnid had scrounged together to stitch together his kingdom couldn't kick up any dust of their own if they tried. The armies had tripped over their armor and tangled their fingers in the bowstrings when Wemmbu had stormed in.
Today was supposed to be a breath of fresh air from the stagnant lives they had known for the last two months. Wemmbu could stretch out his arms with the weight of his maces again, and Eggchan could document the sculk-infested kingdom while he sat behind the bars and listened for the sound of fractured bones. And once they had killed every echo in the cavern, the two of them would return to what they now called their normal lives.
It was odd for Wemmbu to call his "normal" life peaceful. The hollow of the tree he lived in felt so much more fragile around him, more like a paper-wrapped cocoon than sturdy oaken bark. He would have half-expected himself to grow restless with bloodlust, but once he had gotten a taste of the slow-passing hours and the smell of honey outside his door, he didn't want to know anything else besides peace.
It was why he had rushed Egg out of the castle so quickly without checking their surroundings first. All Wemmbu had thought about all day was his cot tied between the jagged tiers of his tree, where he could sleep until noon without his fingers curled around Gambit's handle. Nothing about it would change—the cot's strings would never snap and the pillow would never get any flatter. Eggchan wouldn't be any farther or any less immersed in his manuscripts for the days to come, either. Wemmbu would have tomorrow and the rest of their lives to visit Eggchan's archive, only a few steps away, and read over his book.
It was why the word "no" was already in his throat. He didn't know when it had made its home on the roof of his mouth, seeped into the ridges. Selfishness added a drawl of informality to the undertone of his voice, and as irritating as it was, it was a necessary evil. Wemmbu had only been beyond selfishness once, and it was the reason why no one but Eggchan ever fully met his eye now. "No" made him the closest thing to human that he could be.
The word had only been halfway out of his throat before it flatlined at the same time as Eggchan's heart.
Wemmbu should have smelled the gunpowder laced into the cave's stale air. His orbital strike cannons had made him too familiar with it: the foul stench of sulfur masked the charcoal's earthy tones too well. It usually made his eyes water from a single breath of it, but he had blamed the cave's dust for the tears brimming in his eyes.
He didn't hear the sizzle ahead until the explosion ricocheted off the wall. He knew railguns well enough to know that they only had half a second. To do what was the question, but really, every choice ended in death either way. It was a matter of whether he wanted to die now or another day. Wemmbu had managed great feats in only half a second before—if the wind fared well and he had rockets to spare, he could kill someone and have the time to dust off his armor.
He turned his head, and the entirety of the underground kingdom blurred into a mesh of bulbous teal and crusted gray. By the time his vision had stilled on the maw of the cavern ahead, the streamline of the arrow had grazed the bridge of his nose.
Maybe he had gotten rusty. His knees tended to lock up when he didn't have anything to run from or to introduce to Gambit and Crucible. The days were so quiet without a real threat to make Wemmbu wonder if he'd even live long enough to see the week bleed out on the horizon on Saturday night. It wasn't as if Eggchan were dragging him on any adventures, either; Wemmbu spent most of his day rearranging his own base or leaving a mess in Eggchan's. The hours of sitting in the archive and thumbing through the frayed pages of whatever book caught his eye had dampened his hearing and slowed down the flow of his blood.
At first, he would doze off and awake in a cold sweat at the faintest crackle of a page's turn behind the bookshelves. Typically, Eggchan would have to rush in from the archive's labyrinth to calm Wemmbu's shouts of his name as he'd grasp the air for Gambit and push over the bookshelves for where the noise was hiding. As of late, however, Wemmbu had woken up to creaks in the floorboards and waited for Eggchan's loafers to enter his periphery.
"Rusty" wouldn't hurt him. The ambushes and thousand-person armies were inconveniences at best. Even in Sculk Civilization, Wemmbu was fine with working with stiff joints: one snap of a fishing pole or a leap into the air, and his inconveniences would become another tally to his name. He could tank the traps and longswords for as long as he needed to polish himself back up again. Death wouldn't want a cheap trick to write his eulogy in blood, anyway.
"Rusty" wouldn't hurt Eggchan, either. It would kill him so quickly that it would be painless.
Something rang in Wemmbu's ear. It wasn't the typical tinnitus that flooded in after his orbital strikes shook the earth. It screeched and thundered at the same time—a chorus of untuned yet pitchless strings and a timpani's roar, somehow both in harmony while they swallowed each other. It deafened him so intensely that he believed that it was silence.
He hadn't ever seen Eggchan so pale before. His fair complexion aside, he was too stolid to let his feelings make themselves known on his face before his words could defend him. Neither a day in the sun nor a splash of hot water could usher the slightest flush to his cheeks. Now, the color that should have been in his face was now blooming like a carnation on his shoulder.
The only other vibrant color Wemmbu could see in the glow of the soulfire light was Eggchan's eyes. Wemmbu didn't like the idea of their names being embedded into history, but he had seen in a traveler's stray journals that they had written of Eggchan as "the one with eyes of sapphire." Wemmbu had almost torn his side open laughing at it; he doubted that someone who looked like they were born yesterday had ever seen the more precious gems in person. If his memory served him correctly, every sapphire had been harvested from the earth in Era Two for the empires' rising heirs. Now, they probably sat shattered beneath dust-laden ruins or locked deep inside the Nether Vault.
As trite as the traveler's tale was, there was a reason why it had stuck with Wemmbu all of this time. Eggchan's eyes were the closest thing to sapphires that anyone would get to see. It almost made him look like he was still alive.
The handle of the lantern slipped from his hand so he could catch Eggchan before he collapsed, and for only a second, he could see everything around them. The sculk infesting the stone floor grew darker and purple as they soaked in the falling droplets of blood. The arrow's end was bound with the silken strings from the cobwebs, coiled around a raven's feather. Spikes of crimson crept up the stick of the arrow like red maples reaching for the moon.
And, just beneath his lash line, green and gold. He only saw the sparks flicker in the snares of the spiderwebs before the flame snuffed out with a clatter of iron.
Wemmbu fumbled in the darkness to find Eggchan's hand. When he found his forearm, he lifted it up, and he shivered when he saw the outline of his limp hand. He should have been moving by now—totems never took this long to revive someone.
Wemmbu's hands clambered all the way up to his wrist and rolled down the cuffs of Eggchan's sleeves. His thumb curled around his wrist and pressed deep into the skin, and he waited.
The ringing stilled. The pulse of his own blood rushed from his head to his fingertips. It thundered so loudly in his temples that he couldn't hear the whispers that fell from his cracked lips. He'd never know if those were prayers or curses to gods that may as well not exist.
Three seconds. It was more than just three seconds too long—it was three seconds that shouldn't have existed at all. It was Wemmbu's place to test the bounds of life and death and push them until he was beyond either. He had known the chill of Death so many times that he would make a point to greet It before his totem kick-started his heart again and the thick, stifling air rushed back into his lungs.
Eggchan was supposed to be doing anything else—writing himself to blindness in his book or saying something so melodramatic that it made Wemmbu's nose scrunch—than being caught in the crossfire. Eggchan was utterly harmless to a fault, but that should have been his sole safeguard when Wemmbu was the one to fall. If anyone were dead right now, it should have been Eggchan doing the waiting.
He considered shifting his thumb elsewhere, but he locked his knuckle into place. He didn't want to miss it and make the world think that he wasn't waiting for it: waiting for Eggchan's eyes to flutter open and his voice to croak as if he had woken from a fitful sleep, just waiting for Eggchan to come back. From all he knew about Death, he knew how It never hesitated to take the ones It believed no one would miss.
Maybe Wemmbu should have tried sooner to prove it wrong.
Three seconds, then a pulse.