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“How could you forget Lup?”
Looking in a mirror is weird now.
Sometimes, when he’s tired or high or drunk, Taako will catch his own reflection in the corner of his eye and for a half a fucking second he thinks it’s her. It’s an elated moment before the memories come crashing back. Lup’s gone – he’s the reason her bones are ashes.
He looks different too, after Wonderland.
Even now that he remembers her, he can only see her for a split second in his own face. Her freckles used to show more than his. (She didn’t try to hide them.) Now his are splattered dark across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, spreading wildly across his shoulders and chest and knees and no bit of him is safe anymore.
He can’t see her in his face but he can see her on his skin – a constant reminder of what he just straight up fucked up.
“What’s different about us?”
“I have more freckles.”
“No one’s gonna notice that. We’re interchangeable.”
“Then we use that to our advantage.”
His night terrors are updated now, like a new season of a shitty TV show that should be long dead.
He remembers events that happened in the long past, now shed with new light. He remembers the fight they had in the city of robots, the desperation in Lup’s eyes in her need to keep the city alive. Her need to not sink to the level of the Hunger.
It’s probably not that weird, even though he’s only realizing it now, that their individual outlooks on The Taako Experience reflected in their views on the lives of the general population.
She walked in on him once.
(He only let it happen once.)
She’s desperate for him to survive.
He understood while she was alive.
This doesn’t mean he doesn’t still have the old nightmares.
The ones where people eat his food and immediately die, choking on their own blood. The ones where he poisons an entire town. The ones where the poison is inherent in his being, his bloodstream, deep into his core it’s his fault, no matter who actually poisoned the food.
What’s worse are the ones with Sazed.
His smile and his laugh and his hands, how big they are and what they can do and how Taako still wakes up sometimes feeling them around his throat, cutting off his air.
If she was there, the whole Sazed thing wouldn’t have happened.
She’d have told Taako off immediately, for letting himself be pushed around by such a tool.
She would’ve run the show with him.
He wouldn’t have been so alone.
She’s still with him somehow.
Taako knows enough about arcana to know there’s something more to the umbra-staff, some integral part of it is connected to him and only him, and that part has to be Lup. It needs to be.
He’s gonna bring her back.