Work Text:
There's a universe out there where our love was enough to keep us.
There's a universe where I don't feed our love to the Voidfish, and you are still here. Some other plane. Another life. Another century. If I steal away on the ship and leave, I might fly to you and recover what I've taken and hidden myself. Long gone.
You're a heap on the floor, lit only by the indigo light of our precious tank. I remember the hours spent pressed to the glass as your eyes close and you curse my unknown name.
Blank eyes. Blank words. What? Where? How? Each broken question breaks me. Who?
And the meeting of my fingers on your face is familiar to me. Unforgotten.
I walk you to Raven's Roost. I do not kiss you goodbye. You do not know who I am.
Fisher cries, and cries, and cries. I know better now. You do not know who I am.
It's loneliest in the beginning. I find company in the Millers, in our intellectual pursuits, but it's not the same. You cannot replace your family of a century with a family you've only just met. I write. I try to remember you. I try to remember why I did this.
It's my fault.
I find the staff and keep it close. My fault, the destruction it caused. My fault. Our fault.
Wonderland steals the soul from within me. I have never ached so deeply for years I should have already lived. I look in the mirror and I do not recognize myself. Long gone. I know it's better this way. I do not know who I am.
I sit on the throne of the Bureau of Balance; it's taking too long. We're spending so much time on things we don't need.
But what do you need?
I need my friends. I need my friends. I need my friends.
I need my family.
I need my love. You.
You're all long gone. You're scattered to the Faerun wind to live lives worthy of your silver souls. I ache for you, alone, clutching my staff. I ache for you and your happiness and your best days. I ache for you and your new lives and loves and joys and sorrows and your old age.
I ache as the symphony of happiness I thought to compose for you crumbles.
It rains when I visit the ruins of Raven's Roost. I feel older, still.
Long gone.
The century I stole from you waits at my shoulder, like a specter, a ghost of some other life I forgot to forget. The shadow it casts is heavy and ink-black. I feel its weight within me, settling in for the decade with all my new aches. Long gone. Days stretch into months into years and I find myself clinging to my journals for dear life as your memory starts to leave me. Is this what it felt like for you? The terror of forgetting your face, your voice, the way you made me feel. No amount of work I do will make you come back faster.
As I take the egg from Fisher's tank, I feel your anger with me. It's the only way. Please, forgive me. I'm so sorry. Forgive me.
And finally, things shift. Finally, I bring you in. Finally, finally, finally, I bring you home to me and I'm waiting by the window and I'm wringing my hands and my legs are shaking and I hear your voice through the door.
And everything stops.
And there you are, tired-eyed, laughing, Madam Director, you say, and it's so foreign to my mind. You do not know who I am. It's then that I realize: I do not know who you are. I've never seen you like this. I've never seen you so old. I spent one hundred years reveling in our youth like a song we played on repeat, repeat, repeat, just one more just one more just play it one more time and I promise we'll play another song. The cup. The staff. The nail in the coffin. I changed our song.
You forgot the words.
My fault. Our fault. My fault. Our fault. My fault my fault myfaultmyfaultmyfault.
I send you to Rockport, to Goldcliff, to the Lab, to Refuge, and each time you return I feel the familiar swell of relief and pride that, for just a moment, banishes the ghost I've been choking on in my sleep. We are fixing what we created.
Every day, the Hunger looms closer. I wonder, privately, how long I am to keep you in the dark.
Fisher's child waits in my private sanctum, tendrils around the last duck you carved for me.
Forgive me.
I send you to Wonderland in all my guilt. It's the only way. I fear what will happen within the walls. Will you lose twenty years like me? Will you lose what few precious memories you have left? Will you even come home? This is the price we pay for what we have done unto the world, without the world's permission.
Twelve years ago, you stumble somewhere outside of Refuge, terrified of what you've created.
Thirty years ago, we are elsewhere. I am kissing you. There is no talk of relics. As you place your lips against mine, you know who I am.
Long gone.
You don't return from Wonderland. I am wrought with grief that I cannot show. How could you do this how could you let this happen you killed him you killed him you led him right into his death—even Merle and Taako seem to take it in stride, and how how how could you let this happen? Lucretia, what have you done? What does it matter now?
I think, as I clutch to my staff to hold my shaking legs: if I had any better sense, I would run from the Hunger one more time, if only to see your black eye. Crooked smile. The room spins as Angus watches the relic that's (not) being destroyed and Taako and Merle are asking to go into my office and I just don't care anymore because what is the point of keeping this all a secret if you're gone and you're never coming home.
The hunger arrives. It's not unfamiliar.
They drink the ichor before I can stop them. I fear for what they will say.
I cry, knowing we won't have the reunion I spent a decade waiting for. Long gone. Long gone. Forgive me, Magnus.
I tell them it's too much at once but it's too late. Their eyes are blank, then tearful, then angry. But they're home, they'll forgive me, they'll understand what I had to do. I know you'd understand what I had to do. I had to do this. I had to. I couldn't watch you all crumble beneath the weight of what we'd done. I could shoulder the specter, the demons, the Light, the Hunger, I had to, I had to, I had to do this to protect you like you protected me.
I need my friends.
My family.
My love.
They're here but you're long gone. All the cycles you died early, it didn't prepare me for this agonizing permanence.
Taako's gaze hurts the worst. Lup. Barry. Davenport. Merle. Taako. Magnus. I'm so sorry.
There's a universe out there where our love was enough to keep us.
It is not here.
Gods, I wish it was.
The century's ghost looms on all of us in the room, now. Heavy and ink-black as the Hunger itself.
And you burst through the doors of the dome, running, grinning, with that stupid, flaming sword. Cleaner now, a little younger now. I know, with confidence, who you are. I cannot stop the smile that bursts from me, the tears that stream down my face at the sight of you, of Magnus, oh Magnus, come home again where I'd thought you were lost, forever, long gone.
I hand you the ichor, and I wait.