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It’s amazing, what the voidfish can take.
For example: You were once standing in an empty mess hall, trying to teach something to a boy. In your grasp, an umbrella, a second-hand wand that you’ve never quite understood but that’s never actively worked against you before, shuddered and tingled and blasted three letters into an empty stretch of wall. You have to admit, it looked pretty cool, but it wasn’t a spell you cast, and you had no idea what it was supposed to mean. Ell you pea, LUP. It was a nothing-word to you then, a half-assed syllable. It scared that boy half to death, and you had no idea why.
But if you could’ve remembered - you would’ve known the whole time. You know hand-me-downs only come from older siblings. You would’ve known exactly what set her off, and you would have laughed; she would’ve been trying to make you laugh - maybe drawn a dick, or something, instead of desperately screaming her own name.
But then, that’s only if she even felt the need to say anything at all. Because if you could’ve remembered, you would have known.
—
“Can I talk to you about something?”
You fix Lup with a Look as she slides too, too casually out of her cabin. “Nope. Sure can’t. I’m not talking this year.”
She rolls her eyes. “That wasn’t funny when Davenport did it and it isn’t funny now.”
“Oh come on,” you counter, “it was pretty funny when Davenport did it.”
She laughs. “You’re right. Anyway, cut the shit though. I’m trying to be serious.” She is, you can tell - she’s perched now by the big starboard window, looking out into the icy plains of this world you’ve ended up in, round seventy-seven of who knows how many, in the end. (Only Merle, Magnus, and Barry have been fool enough to go outside in the sub-zero temperatures; the rest of you are quite content to conserve your energy and observe the glistening snows from indoors.) She’s gazing straight out, instead of meeting your eyes, so something must be eating her pretty bad. You sit down on the ledge next to her and plop your feet abruptly in her lap.
“Shoot, compadre.”
It’s a long time before she works her way around to saying anything, though. She picks something off the toe of one of your booties, keeps staring out at some point on the frosty horizon. Finally - “Barry and I want to have a child.”
You’re lucky you manage to not kick her right in the jaw. “Okay, I gotta tell you, glad I wasn’t drinking anything on that one. You wanna come again?”
“Did I stutter? A baby, Taako.” She gives you a Look, this time, and shit, she is serious.
Your brow furrows, and your gaze flicks down to…her lap, with your feet still in it. You feel like a huge asshole literally as soon as it happens, because she definitely notices. Still - “Can you even have a baby?”
“Barry thinks we can do it,” she says. “Lucretia’s got a lot of arcane literature stockpiled, if we can just - like, combine the right shit with the right other shit - he’s got a plan, and it looks risky as hell, but, I don’t know, pretty solid.” She says that a lot - Barry thinks. Her eyes might as well turn into little hearts every time. They’re so in love it’s disgusting, and it only took Barry forty-three years to wear her down.
(No, that’s giving Barry too much credit, probably. Lup was done for even before the Starblaster hit the air; if he’d actually had to work for it, he’d probably be climbing that hill till he died.)
You’re not feeling great about the whole thing, and you’re sure it shows on your face. You say it again - “Lup. Look at me. Can you even have a baby?”
“Taako - ”
“Here?” The wheels in your head have gone from stalled-out to racing all over the place, and all the very clear reasons why this is a horrible idea are catching up with you, whirring to the forefront. “Lup, our whole shit resets once a year, we go back to - exactly how we were, if you’re pregnant - ”
“So then we obviously conceive fairly early on in a cycle so that the child is born before we have to worry about that problem.”
“But then the thing is fresh out the oven, maybe a couple months old and then just - poof when things get wiggly again!”
“You don’t know that,” Lup says, frowning. “We’ve collected some invaluable junk from these other planes before we had to dip, and a lot of the time it’s stuck around even if we revert to - ”
“Yeah but that’s - things. Items. Goods. A sword or a sofa, my dude, not a living being.” You’re staring at each other, now, both breathing a little harder. Her leg is jiggling antsy under yours. And you can tell - everything you’re saying, she and Barry have already said to themselves a dozen times or more, probably. She’s had an answer for everything you’ve thrown at her and she looks - terrified, but determined. Still - a lot of the time. You’re having a hard time hanging this heavy a commitment on the hook of a lot of the time.
“I just,” she says at last. “I want something happy. Babies are happy, right?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t want to end up like Merle.”
You wince, hard, but you still try to laugh it off. “Listen, no one is as sad as Merle. But I mean like, pathetic-sad, not unhappy-sad. I don’t think it’s possible for you to be that totally, completely sad.”
She does laugh, a little more.
“Look, chase your bliss, dollface,” you say. “Is that what you wanted me to say? That I’m super-stoked to be wacky gay uncle Taako?” You sit up a little more, suddenly. “Because now that I’m saying it out loud, I kind of super am?”
She punches you teasingly in the arm. It hurts, a lot. She’s been hanging out with Magnus too much. “No, jackass, I’m not asking for your blessing. I’m asking for your help.”
The weight of that settles hard between your shoulders. You swing your feet down out of her lap, and scoot closer to her on the bench, almost hip-to-hip now, as she continues. “It’s a lot of transmutation, to get the last steps of this chicanery to stick. Your wheelhouse, not mine. It’d be way better for me if you got in on it.”
You shake your head, staring at the floor, just the tiniest increments of movement without stopping for a while. God, there are so many variables - and she has to know that, right? Lup isn’t stupid, even if she does want to have a baby while you’re all trapped in a year-long space-time loop and the kid will never know its grandparents because the whole reality you’re all from is just gone, god, gone -
You squeeze your eyes shut, sigh, recline nonchalantly against the chilly window. “Look, okay, put me down for a ‘maybe,’ but if I have to see Barold naked a single time, I’m outskis.”
She cackles; and when a snowball smacks the outside of the window right behind your head, making the two of you leap halfway off the bench before realizing it’s just Barry outside fucking with you, you both laugh even harder. She cocks an eyebrow in your direction, a sign-language you’ve known since birth means what the hell, am I right? You wink back, cast as hardcore a warming charm on yourself as you can manage, and follow your idiot sister out into the snow.
—
It’s a few more “years” before Lup brings it up again, though. You think maybe she and Barry are still working on whatever spells they need to pull together to get the physical side of things gucci; as far as you can tell, they haven’t mentioned the idea to anyone else but you. You can take a hint, and keep it on the down-low, too. It’s not your news to break.
As more “time” passes, though, you can tell she’s getting kind of hung up on it. You notice as your other crewmates, in turn, seem to be let in on the plan. Almost everyone has the exact same qualms as you, and while Barry is piss-poor at trying to explain themselves, Lup shoots everyone down in a way that’s almost comical, now that it’s not happening to you. Magnus especially seems super excited about having a kid on board. Magnus is basically a big kid himself, sometimes, even after eighty “years.” You’re almost thankful for it, except for how fucking annoying it is sometimes.
“I just wish we had a way to know,” Lup says one night, sounding the closest you’ve ever heard her to scared. “If we had something we could test it on…ugh, this blows.”
She’s right - it’s been several cycles since you were in a realm with like, animals or people. In one plane everything - even the life forms - was made from wisps of vapor, wind spirits and will-o’-the-wisps moving through a world of gas. The one before that was completely barren rock and ash - the Hunger got there before you did, your paths criss-crossing in a way they so rarely do. And the one before that, all the people on the planet were already dead, and the whole world was occupied by ghosts. That was actually kind of a fun one, all things considered. But none of them conducive to the kind of intel-collecting that Lup needs for this…personal project. (Meanwhile, Barry and Lucretia are losing their minds. Nerds.) Not knowing if the child would survive a hard-reset at the end of a cycle is still the biggest question mark in her plan. At this point, you’d kill to just see like, a shitty goblin somewhere.
It’s year ninety, now - the years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ - and when the Starblaster regenerates, drifting down to the prime material plane, they find it absolutely covered in thick, impenetrable lightning storms. Davenport can’t even land the ship, and with glum shrugs, you and the rest of the crew resign yourself to what has now been your fifth cycle ever of being stuck out in space instead of touching down on the planet. You’re not looking forward to just bumming around the ship for a year, especially with Lup in such low spirits. Maybe you’ll try to spend a lot of time meditating, or something. Maybe you’ll whip up that new chili recipe you keep saying you’re gonna try.
Magnus and Merle get antsy, though, and by fake August, they’ve talked Davenport into trying again. You’re almost, almost planetside when the ship just gets fucking wrecked by this lightning, and - yep, you’re pretty sure all seven of you died, because the next thing you know, you’re back in your reset position, a pose you could honestly strike in your sleep by this point. Shoulder-to-shoulder with Lup, staring out the front window of the ship, one hand bracing your hat to your head, the other hovering on your wand ready to quick-draw. You shake yourself mentally; thank god your whole body resets, or your arms would probably be permanently cramped in these positions.
Lup groans, and then so do you, as the killer headache of being re-knit into creation slaps you like a tequila hangover. Magnus falls to the floor dramatically - he looks as done as you feel. And now it’s year ninety-one.
“All right, fuck this, I’m going to bed all year, and wake me up if we happen to hit like, a beach planet,” you say, throwing your hat over Magnus’s slumped face. “Taako out.”
Barry and Davenport are already poring over the Starblaster’s readout. “There’s been some damage to the ship,” says the captain. “The bond engine. That lightning - ”
Magnus sits up. “What the hell,” he says. “Doesn’t it just - regenerate itself? Same as it always does with us?”
“I don’t - ” Barry swallows nervously. “I don’t know if it was ever meant to be able to keep doing that over such a long period of time.” You can hear the air quotes around 'time’ in his voice - it’s a tic you’ve all developed, you’ll probably never shake it now - but there’s no joke in his tone. “Especially on cycles like that, where we all die, it’s taking a lot out of the engine. Whatever’s allowing us to cheat fate like this and keep going…it probably won’t be able to give us infinite redos.” He’s looking right at Lup, now, and you have to look away. It’s making you sick in more ways than one.
“Take us down, I guess,” says Magnus, “and I’ll see what I can do with what we’ve got.”
It’s not a beach planet, unfortunately. But there is a shitton of really good food, and you and Lup get super, super drunk every night for about a week, so it isn’t all bad. Magnus and Davenport assess the damage on the engine; it’s better than you thought, but much worse than is ideal.
You’re going to have to try harder than ever to like, not die, which inevitably means that the universe is going to try harder than ever to kill you.
—
No one dies in year ninety-one, though, and you move on to ninety-two, ninety-three. The engine stays slightly shitty; the Hunger stays just one step behind you, the light one step ahead. This new plane doesn’t quite have the handle on arcana yet, and you, Lup, and Merle go out into some of the bigger cities and make a crazy amount of money doing like, magic 101. Cantrips are blowing these fools’ minds.
Lup still hasn’t brought the baby thing back up again. Well, not to you - you imagine she and Barry talk about it a lot, almost obsessively, even. She was regaling him with the tales of the exploits you guys just pulled when the conversation turned soft, and you stopped being able to overhear it from your position in the next room over. You’re sure that’s where the conversation turned - and the next thing you hear confirms it.
“Ew, what, are you serious?” she demands, laughing.
“It’s a family name!” he insists.
“God I hope I have a girl, there is no way I am saddling a kid with that, gotta dodge the hell out of that bullet.“
"We Bluejeanses have always been humble folk, y'know,” he says, fake-loftily. “I’m the first in a long, long line to step away from modest means and pursue something crazy like this instead of, like, farming. And now all the Bluejeanses are gone! Who’s gonna carry on that legacy?”
“My family’s gone too, and you don’t see me trying to give my hypothetical son the worst names in the universe - ”
You bang on the wall between you with your elbow. “Your family is right here, and if you think you’re naming your firstborn anything but Taako you are fooling yourselves my friends,” you shout at them, and Lup snorts with laughter. “Regardless of gender!” you add. They’re both laughing now, and then their voices drop down low again, and you get back into the book you’re reading, which you just picked up from this world in an effort to learn more.
It’s hard to focus, though. You can’t help but think about how - nice, it was, to hear them laughing, even if they were kind of arguing. Their arguing is all in fun, at least. It’s not like…like the other arguing. Which - you’ve heard a lot of that lately, too, and you’ll be relieved when the others get it out of their systems, and you can go back to all being bleak and depressed-but-never-defeated together like civilized people.
The Hunger always finds you, whether you fight about it or not.
In ninety-five, everyone takes it upon themselves to celebrate your-and-Lup’s 200th birthday. “Birthday,” in air quotes, anyway - your bodies still haven’t aged beyond where they were the day you escaped, not with the Starblaster’s clockwork resetting, with Magnus’s recurring black eye. Still, you’re the first to hit two hundred since Merle did about forty cycles back, and if this were like, real normal reality, you imagine you’d be making a pretty big deal about it. The biggest problem honestly is that Lup wants banana cake and you’re dead-set on chocolate.
“What about banana-chocolate?” asks Magnus, presumably thinking he’s helping. But Lup hollers, and you slap a hand to your heart almost so quickly it hurts, because like - no.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she says.
“What kind of garbage - ”
“Do you really think we’d ever - ”
“This sin against flavor profiles, this child’s disaster creation - ”
“Whoa, okay, okay,” says Magnus, throwing his hands up and looking at you both like you’re a little insane, which is honestly rich coming from a lunatic who suggests chocolate and banana together. Like you’re four years old, dumping every sugary topping you can find into one big ice cream sundae until it tastes like nothing but sweet, syrupy garbage.
In the end, you make Lup a banana cake and she makes you a chocolate pie and everyone eats both, because they’re both fucking amazing, naturally. All seven of you sit around the table and bask in each other’s company in a way you so rarely do any more, not after the years and years of losing steam and clinging desperately to anything that breaks up the monotony of cycling through, and you have a little wine and toast to the idea of being two hundred fucking years old. It’s not super long for an elf, but for an elf who’s trapped in what at times feels like a literal hellscape, it seems pretty damn good.
Even Merle’s having a good time, laughing and doing a bad impression of the shitty king you all swindled twelve or fourteen planes ago, who’s going down in Lucretia’s books as one of the zaniest characters so far. You’ve been worried about Merle ever since that breakdown he had in the late forties, early fifties or so, when he just…quit. He’s a man of faith, after all, and you don’t blame him for having a hard time believing that his god, or any god, would choose this fate for the seven of you. He had sort of a - crisis. He spent way, way too many cycles just abandoning all hope and throwing himself destructively into anything that would pass his way. You wouldn’t call it suicide, necessarily, but - well, Merle’s definitely died more times than any of you have, now. He searched for any deity who would help - tried Marthammor Duin for a hot, unsuccessful second, almost sold himself on Istus at one point - but it all came back to Pan, in the end. He made it back on track, but he’s never quite been the same, after that, and it’s an elephant in the room sometimes. How lost he got for a while there. How easily it could have happened to any one of you, in a life like this.
You wonder what it must be like to have that much faith in anything but yourself.
You look at your sister.
She’s looking at Barry, and smiling, and Magnus is looking at the two of them, and smiling. Lucretia’s eating another slice of your baller banana cake. Davenport is conjuring tiny fireworks into the shape of horses and dancing them across the table, making one stop and take an illusory piss onto Merle’s plate. Everyone’s wearing stupid paper crowns with 200s on them. You feel like - maybe this is what a family was supposed to be. You feel like - it wouldn’t be too terrible, too fucking weird, to bring a child into a family like this.
Lup’s gaze turns from Barry to you, and she mouths, happy birthday.
—
In ninety-six, you find the jellyfish.
Let’s be super fucking clear on this - you find the jellyfish. The ship has finally come down on your oft-wished-for beach planet, and while it’s not a sandy tropical paradise, the glittering crystal shorelines and caves do have an eerie, geometric beauty to them that’s honestly your aesthetic to a T. The waters are all warm and clear, and with your Cloak of the Manta Ray, you have no problem traversing their depths, looking for like. Anything. Seriously anything at all other than these sweet geodes and twisting coral formations that are the only things you can see for miles and miles. The moonlight off the crystals off the water is trippy and hypnotizing. Barry, who obviously can’t wear his glasses into the water, can’t even handle it.
You, Lup, and Magnus are the best swimmers, so you’ve been doing most of the scouting, but - according to your internal clock, which has got the whole thing basically down to a science at this point, regardless of how individual planar planets decide to keep track of time - this cycle is creeping up on “over.” It’s been months and months of beautiful, crystalline nothingness. Until today.
You kick to the surface as fast as you can, and have your stone of far speech to your mouth before you’ve even sucked in your first breath of air. “Holy shit, my dudes, bring the car around!” You saw it, and it saw you - a jellyfish the size of a hot air balloon, with what looks like an entire universe of sparkly shit swirling around in its jelliest part, and if there’s just one, dope, but with the way it darted off when it saw you - not in fear, but almost like it was fetching something - you’re betting there’s a lot more where that came from. “Seriously, get a bead on my location and get everyone down here, you are all gonna wanna see this.”
You don’t wait for the others, just trust the Starblaster’s technology to get them to you, and instead you dive back down to pursue the jellyfish. It’s the first organic life you’ve seen on the whole planet, and it is a fucking doozy. You can’t let it lose you. You follow it to an underwater grotto cave thing, a place where there’s air you can pop up into but that you couldn’t see from the surface before.
In the cave are fourteen jellyfish, including the one you saw, which seems to be about middling-average in terms of size.
In the cave is also the light of creation.
You rocket up onto a sharp outcropping in the cave, throw your cloak off, and run in a circle with your arms flung up in victory. You’re soaking wet and you don’t care, because you just won the fucking jackpot. You could kiss a jellyfish right now. You found it.
And about half a day later, the Hunger finds it too.
You, Lup, and Magnus are good enough swimmers to make it back to Davenport on the Starblaster, alive. The jellyfish, crazy enough, follow you, seemingly capable of swimming through thin air just as easily as their shimmering waters, and the very first one you saw makes it in through the ship’s hatch alongside the three of you, with a smaller, greener one zipping in next to it too. Barry sinks like a stone as soon as he takes one hit from those sickening tendrils, and Lup screams. Merle and Lucretia aren’t far behind.
Funnily enough, it never gets easier.
But space and time and bond reknit themselves, and the four of you are rejoined by the three of them in hardly any time at all. And what’s more - the jellyfish are there with you, even after the reset. You’re not sure what to do with them, what they eat, how they function, but they’ve taken to Magnus especially - animals love Magnus, and like, they’re animals, you guess - but they’re here. They didn’t disappear when the universe went jiggly, when you shifted, back to position on the bridge of the ship, shoulder-to-shoulder with Lup, clutching your hat, fingering your wand. Painfully familiar.
Lup breaks from her starting position and rushes to Barry, clutching him close. They kiss honestly like, more deeply than you ever needed to see your sister kissing anyone, ew, and then very resolutely, they both turn and look at you.
If these sparkly void jellyfish survived the reboot, it’s highly likely their baby will, too.
It’s ninety-seven, now, and it’s time.
—
In the end, you don’t have to see Barry naked, thank god. You do have to see your sister naked, but it’s only from the waist down, and it’s nothing you’ve never seen before, when she was showing off the ways she’d made magic changes to her body, centuries ago when she’d first started to do all that. Whatever she’s been doing with Barry, magic-wise, has shaped it up even better, actually. They just need you for one last ritual before they feel like the womb (ew, ew, what a word) will be like, installed well enough.
“Hachi machi,” you whisper as Barry shows you what they’ve cooked up. Because yeah, thank god they asked for your help with this; the runes are making you go cross-eyed just to think about, you can’t imagine your evocationista sister and sad sack sorcerer Barold trying to wrap their untrained brains around this kind of transmutation. It’s almost enough to make you want to strip down to your underwear, too. You settle for melodramatically rolling your sleeves up, and tying your hair back in a wimpy little ponytail. You’re already sweating.
“You good, fam?” asks Lup, lying on her back on a day-bed you scored at some bougie planet sixty years or more ago, her Lounge Furniture of choice made up to be as comfy as possible for this terrible process.
“Yeah, I’m just gonna - take a minute. You can put your shorts back on or whatever. Tell you what, why don’t we sleep on this one, we can regroup tomorrow - ”
“Suck it up, wizard boy,” says Barry.
Lup giggles, semi-hysterical. “Hey. Hey Taako. Transmutation. Ahh? Aaaahhh? Traaansmutation. Get it?” She waggles her eyebrows absurdly, folding her arms behind her head. You laugh a little, too, but it’s more like a desperate squawk. How many hundreds of thousands of times has Lup made that joke? It’s still her. It’s Lup. Okay, deep breath, you’ve got this.
You stick your wand in your mouth for a second while your hands twist and fold into a flurry of arcane arrangements - it’s not part of their plan they’ve concocted, it’s mostly to cover your own ass. Then with the wand proper, you start the long, complicated string of runes they’ve outlined, tracing them in the air above Lup’s abdomen, paying obsessive, fanatical attention to each and every stroke and particle on the sequence of characters. At one point you start humming, a low nonsense-note; Lup whistles back, in counterpoint, out of tune with you in a tiny, jarring cacophony. It feels super grody, and kind of grounds you to reality. Okay. Okay.
If everything’s been laid out correctly, the last three runes of this sequence should brand themselves into Lup’s skin, starting below her navel and reading straight down toward her uhhh equipment. Then - and you are so leaving for this part, that’s all Barry - there’s a potion they’ll pour down…in there, and if it extinguishes the burning runes from the inside out, that’s how they’ll know it’s worked. Then presumably they’re going to bone all night until they conceive a demented BLupjeans baby, and that’s your cue to volunteer for the first reconnaissance shift on whatever world 97 has turned out to be and get as far away from the Starblaster as possible.
You creep up onto the end. Your left hand is shaking, but you force your right hand steady, tracing the last three runes just centimeters from her skin.
The first one sticks. Lup hisses through her teeth when it starts to burn. She chokes out, “It’s lit.” You can’t find it in yourself to laugh.
The second one sticks, further down her pelvis.
The third one sticks.
You exhale a humongo breath you didn’t realize you were holding. You’re done. The part you’re responsible for is over.
“I can take it from here,” says Barry, clapping you hard on the shoulder in a way only straight guys ever do, ever. You usually hate it. Right now you don’t, though; you feel in it exactly what you’re meant to feel, which is that this chucklefuck, right here, is the only other man alive who could ever even come close to loving your sister as much as you do. You should rest your hand over his, share some kind of manly determined gaze with him, build a bond to pump into that engine.
You holler, “Yeah, no shit, my guy!” and bolt from the room, perfectly content to never spend that long looking at your sister’s junk ever again.
—
Here’s the cool part: Lup gets pregnant. Everything goes exactly according to the plan that she and Barry laid out - they really did think everything through, nail this down in the exact way they needed to. You suppose they’ve been planning it for at least twenty “years,” now, so it would super suck if it didn’t work.
Here’s the pretty not cool part: Pregnant Lup is boring as hell.
Your ninety-seventh reality is pretty chill - not too different from your own, really, except everyone is about two inches tall and you have to lie down on your stomachs to talk to anybody and learn any kind of info. There’s a cool orc dude that’s been willing to ride on your shoulders and help you all out, though. Except for Lup; after about three months, she’s puking a lot, and doesn’t really want to leave the ship.
“Seriously?” she gripes to you one night. “I have to get the garbage parts of mom biology, too? This blows.”
“In for a penny in for a pound I guess,” you answer. But you can tell - she’s loving it. And she’s perfectly content to lean on any excuse to not do fucking anything. She is still your sister, after all.
So for cycle ninety-seven Lup holds down the fort on the Starblaster, maintaining her defensive wards around the light of creation, and getting ready to have a baby. You spend a lot of time in the miniature cities and towns of the continent you landed on, learning some teeny-tiny arcana that packs a ridiculously huge punch when scaled up to someone your size; it makes you think of like, how ants can lift dozens of times their own weight. And because Lup won’t leave the ship, you bring it back to her.
“Hot damn!” she crows as you cast a fireball the size of a corn kernel that blows up like it’s the size of a rain barrel. You spend the afternoon teaching it to her, but every time, she pulls her punches. She’s more than halfway along now, though you can barely see it in her stomach. She assures you that that’s normal for how they’ve had to do this.
At least Lup has company; Lucretia, like always, doesn’t leave the ship much either if she doesn’t have to. She’s been spending a lot of her time studying the jellyfish - the voidfish, you’re calling them now, thank you Magnus for that pithy moniker - trying to figure out what their whole deal is. It sucks that you only managed to get one on board with you. Weirdly, Lucretia swears she has a record of you bringing two, a small one and a big one. But that makes absolutely no sense to you - you can barely even wrap your head around the idea - and anyway, there’s no sign of a small one anywhere. Maybe the big one ate it or something. It would explain how it’s still alive, considering you still have no idea what the fuck those things eat, or need. Good thing Lucretia’s on the case, you figure.
Barry, in contrast, has gone almost hyperactive. He’s scrounging every village for more information, more knowledge, more firepower for when the Hunger finds you - he’s often four or five steps ahead of the rest of you, way out in front, almost recklessly pursuing his own improvement. You’ve all gone through phases like this over the “years”; knowing you can’t super die makes you feel invincible, so why stop and consider the consequences? You try to remind him that dying in this cycle before his child is born is probably not a cool move, but other than that, you let him go. It’s not as if you could stop him.
Instead, you do what you always do: Try to find that subtle, manageable balance between staying on top of your game and preparing for the worst, and staying as chill and non-anxious as possible in the face of, like, impending disaster. You and Davenport start planning a party for when the gang hits a hundred cycles, as if that isn’t morbid enough; but the bond engine still isn’t doing so hot, even with the light of creation on board, and you’re almost starting to worry that you guys won’t even make it to one hundred.
You laugh out loud, defeated. Yeah, no big deal, just my own calamitous doom, friendos!
It’s enough to keep you up at night, sleeping even less than your elf physiology lets you normally, and it’s probably about three in the morning when you stumble into the Starblaster’s kitchen looking for something fun to do. Pancakes, maybe? You could go for some breakfast food. You’ve been in so many realities where pancakes didn’t exist, and that is a crying shame.
But you’ve got company: Lup is already there, already making pancakes. “Whoa, twins,” you gasp out, and she looks at you and grins, but then you catch sight of the pan.
“Hold on, I’m sorry, what?” Her pancakes are full of both chocolate chips and sliced bananas, which is the most disgusting thing you can think of right now in your exhausted state. Surely there are nastier things, but they’re not coming to you.
“I know, right?” she says, laughing. “It’s the baby. She’s all about it. Never thought I’d see the day, but mama gots a craving.” She pops a stray banana slice into her mouth, waves a hand to magically flip the pancake over on the griddle.
You hop up to sit on the counter next to her. “She, huh?”
“God I hope so,” says Lup. “Our deal is kind of I get to name it if it’s a girl, and Barry gets to name it if it’s a boy, and I cannot tell you how stupid his names are. He wants to name it after someone in his family, and they’re all things like Reginald and Eugene and Archibald or whatever.”
“Gross,” you agree.
“The thing is,” she admits, “I like, barely have any ideas for a name at all. I thought I could do the family thing, too, but all I can come up with is Aunt Sofie, which is honestly just kind of - totally lame? No child of mine, you know? We don’t exactly have a lot to pull from like he does.”
“I’m telling you, just name her Taako,” you say, kicking your feet into the cabinets. “It’s a lovely name.”
“It’s not bad,” she says, winking. She slides the pancake off onto a plate. “I can do some with no banana, if you want.”
“God, yes, don’t try to feed me that filth.”
You eat pancakes with your sister. It’s the most normal, chill thing you’ve done in almost twenty “years.” It’s cliche as hell, but she’s doing that - pregnant lady glowing thing, almost to the point of being literal, lighting up the whole kitchen with her laugh and her vehement gestures. The whole baby business has kind of sucked the wind out of her sails, vis-à-vis your usual snarky bullshit, but you’re suddenly so, so thankful that when the whole universe went to shit, when everybody lost everything, you at least got to keep her. Merle had dozens of dwarf siblings, you know, and Barry’s family was pretty big too. You don’t think Davenport was an only child either. You can’t fathom what that would’ve been like, to lose those people. A reality with no Lup is unthinkable.
You feel like you can super, super understand why she and Barry wanted to have this kid, even if it is making her an old softy.
You joke each other in circles for almost an hour, until all the pancakes are gone. You get on a tear where you start cursing each other out in every language you’ve picked up over the last ninety-five years, from the animal grunting of that very first cycle to that bizarre, mushy one you learned somewhere in the sixties - Français. You think about cracking open some sweet wine, but Lup reminds you that this baby is half-human, and will probably get fucked up somehow if she drinks alcohol while it’s in there. Stupid. So, once you clean up the kitchen - let’s be real, Lup cleans it up, you don’t give a fuck any more - you turn and head to bed, hoping to get a few hours of meditative shuteye before the day ahead, when you and Merle are gonna desecrate a few tiny, tiny tombs in the name of Science™.
On your way back to your room, you pass - Lucretia, in the hall, heading from her own room up to where the voidfish has been living. Her arms are full of bundles of paper, which is nothing new, but god, don’t humans have to sleep? Like, for real? These cycles where everyone is tweaking always kind of stress you out.
“Eat a pancake, my dude,” you mutter to her as you walk by.
—
The cycle is almost over, and everyone is tweaking.
It seems like there’s another argument every day. Lucretia and Magnus have kind of figured out how to feed the voidfish, and keep it alive: it thrives on information, on content, and once it’s sucked up your poem or your useless factoid, you - forget it. That piece of your memory just gets deleted like someone slapped fuzzy white-out all over it, and you can’t get it back until you drink some kind of fluid that the voidfish secretes from its jelly skin. (The shit is nasty straight-up; diluting it with a shitton of water or juice makes it go down easier, and doesn’t seem to change its effects.) Lucretia figured this out by testing the process on Barry - without telling him. Tensions are mad, mad high.
(There was a second voidfish, though. It died shortly after they boarded the ship, and the first one ate it. Or like, subsumed its corpse up into its own jelly body? You’re not a biologist, man.)
Davenport’s pissed at Lucretia, Lucretia is pissed at Barry, and honestly you wish they would all just piss off. They’re harshing your vibe, and your super-pregnant sister’s vibe, and both of those things are kind of inexcusable.
The thing is, even Lup is caught in this nasty cycle. It’s hard to ignore when your bedrooms share a wall.
“…What did you just say to me?” says Barry, his raspy voice gone ice-cold. Oh, shit.
“I’m just - I’m just saying,” says Lup, placating. “The bond between a parent and child might just be the fuckin’ - strongest thing in the universe - ”
“So you wanted to have a baby so we could fix the ship?” Oh, shit. The bond engine is as bad as it ever was, not getting worse but certainly not getting better, and if that’s a way to spruce it up - huh. Yeah, too bad Barold sound pretty furious about it.
“Well it couldn’t fucking hurt!” Lup yells. “I love you, I love our goddamn son, but if there could be multiple benefits to this - ”
“Listen to yourself!” says Barry. “'Multiple benefits’? Beyond the benefit of, I don’t know, the miracle of life? The first and probably last new person that our destroyed planet will ever have produced?”
“I am trying to save other planets from meeting that same fate, you assclown!” says Lup. “We need this engine to keep working so that we like, I-D-K, don’t die?”
“This is a lot to fucking take in, Lup. Lemme just try to wrap my fucking head around it.”
“You do that, Bluejeans. Take as much freaking time as you need.”
It’s acidic and badass; it’s honestly the most like herself your sister has sounded in months. And as uckie as the arguing has made you feel, the subject matter kind of warms your fucking heart. Lup is pragmatic. She’s looking at the baby thing from every possible beneficial angle beyond just like, having a cute little fat half-human chilling, and of course she’s thinking of the future of the whole ship. Of all of you.
If this thing splits in half, you figure, it’s gonna be Barry versus Lucretia. The Hunger is crawling up your asses every second you spend not blasting it to shit, and everyone is coming up with more and more outlandish plans to try to get it to back off. Sooner or later someone’s is gonna get picked as the best one, and whoever’s plan doesn’t get picked is gonna be furious. You can see it now - Magnus standing with Lucretia, fearing change, reluctant to stray from what’s been working so far (though “working” is a very loose definition). Barry and Davenport, trying to grasp at any straw they can to keep the future of the Starblaster on track. Merle trying to get everyone to calm the fuck down, and only making it worse, because no one can truly take him seriously any more.
You were thinking before that Lup would just like - automatically side with her baby daddy. It kind of sucked, because you were so used to being able to automatically count Lup on your side, and watching her put him first kind of makes your stomach turn. But hearing her arguing with him - taking a strong stand against him - is honestly pretty reassuring. Maybe this thing won’t crumble to shit after all, or if it does, maybe there will still be a way to crawl back out of the wreckage.
God, the arguing sets your whole skeleton on edge, though. You crank up your oil diffuser until your room smells like a whole forest full of stuff, and refocus your nail-painting efforts. You’re not getting involved in that shit. You’re good out here.
—
“SHE’S HAVING THE BABY!!!”
Your stone of far speech is blowing up, and you make a hasty apology to your tiny orc buddy as you set him down - probably less gently than you could have - and start booking it back to the ship. Barry and Lucretia, in a rare moment of unity, are both yelling excitedly at the rest of you, with Merle immediately throwing in his unrequested medical advice trying to keep things under control until he gets there, but Barry is like look I’ve learned a thing or two in the past ninety-seven years and Magnus is like I’ve delivered a ton of farm animals! and you don’t care, you just don’t care, you want to see your nephew, and you want Lup to come out the other side in one piece.
She’s still got a little scarring on her stomach from that ritual you did, and every time you catch sight of it you grimace involuntarily. You’re not gonna feel like you got off scot-free until this kid pops out and looks like a beautiful, messy blend of your gorgeous sister and her hideous boyfriend, and not some kind of freak of arcana who gets suffocated by his own slime.
It’s a full twenty minutes before you’re all reassembled at her bedside: Barry at one shoulder, you at the other. Merle and Magnus down near her feet, using their combined but still somewhat limited experience to try to ease the process along. Davenport is casting a numbing spell to help with the pain - oh yeah, these things are supposed to hurt a lot, aren’t they - and Lucretia, diligent as ever, is chronicling the entire thing for posterity. And it’s trippy, because like, posterity is right there.
The light of creation is in the room, and you shoot Lup a Look about it, twin-style. She grins, answering you through gritted teeth.
“It just - seemed like the right thing to do?” she says. “It sound stupid, but like - the baby wanted it to be here?” She gasps, groans, heaves harder with muscles she built herself. “I figure, with Barry’s nerd science brain and my - my dope magic skills, this kid is gonna be the smartest, most badass baby that’s ever been born, so maybe we should start - exposing him early.”
“Works for me,” you tell her.
He’s born, and he’s beautiful - looks more human than elf, but more like Lup than like Barry, somehow. Barry names him, and Lup was right - it’s a real bad name. You can’t help but feel like - yeah, it’s Lup and Barry’s baby, but it’s kind of all of your baby. This messy, beat-up ship is a family now, whether you like it or not. That kid’s gonna have more uncles than he knows what to do with.
(You still get to be wacky gay uncle Taako, though. And everyone knows that’s the best uncle.)
Then, four days later, the Hunger catches up with you, and you book it out of there as fast as you can, watching the teeny-tiny people of this reality disappear into its darkness, even as you do everything you can to try to harness the light of creation back at it, blasting with every spell you’ve all learned, channeling fire and divinity and pure maternal instinct. Still it pursues you. But the baby makes it through the reset - after a moment of sheer panic, you hear him crying from another chamber, and your sister finds him lying on the bed where he was born, grasping out for her. She clutches him to her chest and cries a little, too, because that was the final test, and the four of you - your nephew, your sister, her boyfriend, and you - have passed.
And like -
Everything after this point can stay forgotten, as far as you’re concerned. You don’t need to remember it.
When the schism happens. When you really don’t make it to one hundred, in the end, but slam hard into plane ninety-nine with a busted engine and don’t know why, what’s breaking you down, what’s wrecking your shit, how the Hunger has managed this even in the face of the seven - the eight of you - having the strongest bonds any living being has probably ever had with each other, ever, on account of living up each other’s asses for nearly a century. When it does come down to Lucretia versus Barry, shakes down to three against three with you as the tiebreaker vote, and you just yell fuck it! and throw your hands up and let them do whatever they want, you don’t care, you’re just trying to not die, to not lose your sister and your nephew, and you go along with the plan but Lucretia - Lucretia, the lonely journal-keeper, breaks bad, when the voidfish has its baby and you do forget, you forget so much, all of it -
You don’t need to remember the rest of it.
But about nine years later, you drink, and you do.
And the thing is? You know exactly what happened to that genius baby with the horrible, horrible name.
—
It’s funny, what the voidfish takes.
For example: You were once standing in an empty mess hall, trying to teach something to a boy. He appreciated you taking the time, and brought you some cookies for your troubles, and while the texture was brilliantly executed, they literally had no flavor, crumbling to flaky nothingness in your mouth. You were amazed that someone so smart could fuck up so hard; it was almost like the flavor had been erased straight out of them. When the umbrella freaked out and blasted them to bits, you felt bad, but you weren’t exactly sad to see them go.
But if you could’ve remembered - you would have tasted them. Instead of no flavor, you would have tasted the worst flavor, bittersweet chocolate blending with cloying banana in a way that would’ve made you gag. And then a split-second later: panic. Memories you couldn’t divorce from this flavor, not in a hundred years. A concerned look on that boy’s face, as he tried to figure out what was wrong with you.
“Chocolate and banana, huh?” you’d say. “Pretty gross.”
“Sorry, sir,” he’d say. “Do you not like them? It’s - it’s always been my favorite, I was just following a recipe I got from - ”
“Your mother, yeah.” And that would confuse the poor kid even more, but you’d refuse to explain. You would’ve known, but there would’ve been no reason to burden the boy with knowing, too.
He’d probably figure it out on his own eventually, anyway.