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He picks at a scab on the side of his leg, leaning over it to get a better view, barefoot and shirtless. The skin is pink and shiny underneath, not completely healed, and Lup grimaces.
“Stop that,” she chides, pulling his hand away from his leg.
Without glancing up, without missing a single beat, he mutters, “You’re not my mom,” and goes back to peeling back the patch of dried blood. He gets it off, wincing and then flicking it away. Blood beads out of the place he’d torn it off from.
“Look,” he says, leaning back on his hands so he can lift his leg up to show her.
She pushes it back down. “Yeah, I know, you’re bleeding. You should have listened to me.”
“No,” he argues, annoyed that she’s misunderstood him. “It’s cool.”
It’s not. It’s stupid. But he’s a little kid, and she can tell that he’s just trying to have an argument for whatever reason, so she leaves it there, refusing to take the bait.
He presses down on the wound, smears the blood up his leg in a slow trail.
“Do you want to go swimming?” Lup asks.
He looks at her. “How can we do that?”
She points outwards. “There’s a river.”
“Oh,” he says, looking out at the moving water, and they are sitting on rocks on the shoreline, sunlight cast across the water, sun in his hair. “Yeah, I want to go swimming.”
He stands up. The shore is made up of small rocks, and he teeters as he steps forward, trying not to get cut on any of the pointy ones. When his feet are in the water, he glances back at Lup.
“Are you coming?” he asks, a silhouette before the sun.
Lup stares at him. He’s so familiar. Too-big teeth and pointy elbows and choppy, chin-length hair. He’d cut his own hair, or maybe she’d done it for him, with scissors that were dull and too big in her hands. And some parts of him are smudged, like his eyes. She can’t remember what his eyes look like, right now. That itches.
She runs a hand through her own unkempt hair. “Yeah, okay.”
Lup steps forward. She doesn’t bother with taking her jacket off or putting her hair up. They play rock-paper-scissors to see who has to go under first, and Lup loses, so she dives in. The water makes everything feel heavier. Not in a bad way, though.
“Your turn,” she tells him.
He frowns at the water. “It’s cold.”
Lup rolls her eyes. “Are you scared of a little water?” she taunts.
He frowns at her, arms crossing around his middle. “That trick's not gonna work on me.”
“Whatever. Get in or I’ll push you,” she threatens, tilting back into the water, clearly making no move to go after him.
He grumbles, and then she can hear him stomping, splashing through the water until he reaches her. When she glances over at him, for a second, he isn’t there. Just a weird twist of light, sun filtering through something invisible. In a one-snap moment, the sun begins to set, and he is floating in the water beside her, skin and hair and all. Except, if he opened his mouth, she isn’t sure she would see a tongue or throat. If there’s anything on the inside at all or just dust.
“Why are you saying that?” he asks like he's hearing her thoughts. He probably is, in fact.
Lup hums. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
“We’re the same age,” he counters, exasperated, like what he’s saying should be obvious.
“Not anymore,” she points out.
He jumps up instead of responding, takes a gulp of air and pinches his nose, and then he sinks down under the water. Lup counts fifteen seconds before he comes back up for air, wet hair sopping down into his eyes.
“You can do better than that,” she implores.
“I wasn’t trying to hold my breath.” He pushes his hair back. “What do you mean ‘not anymore?’”
“Well,” says Lup, “you died.”
Taako frowns. “Is that how that works?”
He goes under again. It’s just as well, because she doesn’t know how to answer his question. She waits, counts ten seconds, and when he comes back, he’s different.
“I don’t know if that’s how that works,” he tells her, older. Older, but still not the same age as her, because she doesn’t know what that would look like anymore.
“It would look like this,” he says. “Come on, it hasn’t been that long. Don’t be overdramatic.”
“You’re overdramatic,” she grumbles.
“Yeah, but that’s my thing. I own it. You’re just being dumb.”
Lup rolls over in the water and lunges for him. He yelps and splashes her, but she grabs a fistful of his long, wet hair and pulls.
“Ow, what the fuck--" he grabs her and shoves her head under the water. She can still breathe for some reason, but she clambers to pull herself back up anyway. They smack and shove and splash each other, and she can hear him laughing.
And then the sun is gone and the moon is up. Taako is back on the shore, sitting on his rock with his knees drawn up, and he’s watching her. He’s dry. Lup swims over, stands on the pebbles and wrings her hair out before she joins him. They lace their fingers instinctively as she sits down. It’s quiet for a long time before he asks her a question.
“Are you sad?”
What a dumb question. “Why would I be sad?”
“Because I died, goofus.”
“You’re right here," Lup tells him.
She squeezes his fingers. Looks down at their hands. He needs to trim his fingernails.
“They’re long on purpose,” he mutters.
“Long nails are inconvenient.” She picks up his hand with a sigh, examines the nails more closely. “At least paint them. Commit to the aesthetic.”
“You paint them.”
“I will. Later.” She puts his hand back down and looks at him. “Are you sad?”
Taako frowns. “That’s-- I don’t know how to answer that.”
“Okay. Fair enough.” She leans back, one hand still covering his, and looks out on the water. Something makes her frown. Maybe she is sad, after all.
“Hey,” says Taako. “You know-- it didn’t hurt.”
Lup feels small. She feels like hiding under a blanket and staying very, very still and quiet, like if she stops taking oxygen for a moment, it’ll be a little bit like she isn’t real.
“You should know that,” he says. “I want you to know that.”
“Really?” she asks quietly.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
And so she knows it. She doesn't know what to do with it, though.
Taako stands up and walks to the water, standing where it comes up to his ankles. She knows that his hair is long, and blond, and his nails are long. But she can’t remember what his eyes look like.
Barry tells it once, and he tells it like this: dozing off over his map on the deck of the Starblaster. Discussing with Taako, in quiet voices, what their next plans should be. Where they should go. And then-- fuzz. Something gnawing at the outside part of his brain, working its way in. He remembers trying to picture Lup’s face, and the lines being so smudged, and he remembers trying to hang onto his memories, but they were like-- being momentarily distracted from a train of thought and then forgetting it entirely. Like a word on the tip of your tongue that you just can’t reach.
He remembers the flood of panic, standing up and gripping Taako’s jacket, begging Taako to kill him, and he remembers the growing fear and confusion in Taako’s eyes-- he had been crying, Barry remembers, and he remembers falling, the sinking in his stomach, he remembers Taako screaming hysterically, no, no, no-- leaning just a little too far over the railing-- and he remembers coming out in his lich form and seeing something familiar and terrible and permanent on the ground beside him.
Lucretia tells it a few different ways, a few different times.
She tells them once when Magnus, Barry and Merle have just been inoculated by the second Voidfish, and Magnus interrupts her as she’s beginning to explain everything to ask, “Hang on, where’s Taako?”
She apologizes over and over when Lup bursts out screaming from the Umbrastaff; she cries and cries as the rest of them try to keep Lup anchored.
“I should’ve been more careful,” Lucretia says later, into her hands. Lup does not have the energy to reassure her. She can’t say no, don’t blame yourself. She can’t say I forgive you, nor can she say it was just an accident.
It would be more honest to agree with her, but Lup doesn’t have the energy for that either.
They assume he must’ve just… panicked. Davenport understands especially. He would’ve done anything to make it stop, too.
She should be more excited about getting her body back.
Lup climbs out of the gooey vat, all clumsy limbs and slippery hands and feet, to where Barry is waiting with a towel. He smiles and kisses her forehead, not minding that he gets goop all over himself, and she turns to the cheap, full-length mirror he’d brought for her. Watches herself, naked save for the towel she clutches around herself like a shawl, legs trembling. She sees herself frowning and puts a stop to that for Barry’s sake, but all she can think is that she has too much hair, too tangled, too long.
Their room on the Starblaster still has a lot of his old stuff.
She gathers armfuls of his clothes, intending to take them home with her, but they are too much to carry all at once and so she just. Drops them. Kneels. Picks up a lilac sweatshirt of his-- she remembers it, Taako wore this on rainy days and early mornings, it was a little too big and he always had the sleeves pulled over his hands, fingers poking out the ends, and the hems got a little frayed from being tugged around so much.
It used to smell like him. After twelve years, it just smells like… dust.
Barry finds her ten minutes later, keeled over, burying her face in the sweatshirt of all things, wailing into it. He holds her and kisses her and doesn’t say anything because there is nothing to say. Later, he helps her carry the clothes back home with them. She doesn’t take the sweatshirt off for three days, and the only reason she does is to get all the hair off, after she cuts her braid away in clumps in the bathroom mirror.
“Lucretia thinks it’s her fault.”
They’re on the Starblaster, high up, up in the air, too high to see the ground. Too high to even tell which world they’re on. Their legs are slotted through the bars of the railing, and Lup is kicking hers back and forth. Taako keeps still, forehead pressed against the rail, looking down.
He frowns. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Neither do I,” says Lup. “I just wanted to say it.”
“Well… okay, I guess.”
The railing vanishes. Taako pushes off.
She watches him fall for a moment. “Is it weird if I bring you flowers?” she asks.
“No? I mean, I don’t care.”
“I haven’t done that yet. It seems like-- I don’t know if you’d like that or not.”
“Well, it’s not really for me, is it?” he says as she leans over to see him better.
“I guess that’s true.” Her fingers clench and bend against the edge of the ship. He’s too far away, now.
“Hey, can I come with you?” she asks, a little desperate and trying not to show it.
He doesn’t answer. Lup hugs her middle, bent over, waiting.
She does bring him flowers. He’s got a small grave out by the field where the Starblaster used to be parked. Barry comes with her, and they stand in front of his little wooden grave marker and she gets oil on her hands from where her fingers are crushing the stalks.
They aren’t even proper flowers. They’ve all been picked from the same field he’s buried in, and some of them are probably weeds. She puts them down-- purple and green and white. Some of them get jostled away by the breeze.
“I don’t have anything to say,” says Lup.
Barry places a hand between her shoulder blades. “That’s okay.” A moment later, “Is it okay if I…?”
“Oh, yeah, go for it,” Lup encourages, taking a step back.
Barry clears his throat.
“Um. Hi, Taako,” he says. “I hope you’re doing okay. We… it’s been a. A long few months, huh? Well. Longer than that, but.” He glances at Lup. “Anyway. I’m... really sorry. I know I've said that before, but I think it'll always be true. You're-- well, I don't know where you were when we defeated the Hunger, or if you even experienced that day or anything, but... you're a hero now. You were before, but now everyone knows it. And I know everyone is thinking about you, bud.”
“We miss you,” he says, stepping back and taking Lup’s hand.
She leans into him.
“Keep still,” Lup murmurs, maneuvering his pinky finger, trying to keep it steady so she can paint the nail. The polish is light purple. Lilac. He’s already done hers the same color, so they match.
“I am still. Don’t blame me if you’ve forgotten how to do this.” Taako blows lightly on the nails of the hand she’s already done. They’re in the back of a wagon, the likes of which they haven’t seen since they were children. The back of it is open and rain is pouring heavy and fast. There are yellow cantrip lights above them, the only source of luminescence for miles.
“I haven’t forgotten anything.” She finishes the coat, blows gently on it before releasing his hand. He waves his hands around to help the polish dry.
“Careful,” she says. "Don't smudge it."
He rolls his eyes. “Natch.”
Taako lies back on the blankets covering the wood floor, hands in the air in front of his face. She settles down beside him, splays her fingers out beside his, and they lean their heads together as they examine their nails.
“It’s a good color,” he notes.
“Yeah.”
He turns his head to look at her and drops his hands down to his stomach. She follows suit.
“You’re tired,” he murmurs, frowning a little.
She snorts, looking back up to the ceiling. “Taako, I--”
“What?”
“I don’t know if I’m ever going to be not tired,” she admits. “I think… you took a lot of things with you, babe.”
“Don’t say that,” he mutters. “You can go to sleep, if you want.”
“I can’t,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because when I wake up-- fuck.” She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I feel like you’re not gonna be here anymore,” she whispers.
“Shut up,” he says, propping himself up on one elbow. “Lulu-- here.” He takes her hand, maneuvering carefully as he interlaces their fingers, so as not to ruin their nails. She laughs softly.
“Don’t let go,” he says, reciting their most important rule. “Just-- don’t let go, yeah?”
“Yeah,” she whispers.
“You can rest,” he murmurs to her. "You can."
They lie, curled up on a patch of blankets on the floor, and Lup closes her eyes. Outside, the earth is the same color as the sky.
Lup holds on tight.