Archive of Our Own

• ---- ---

Night falls, and you glow like a beacon in the dark. 

“Where are they?” you whisper, unable to help but ask, as your eyes anxiously scan the dune-studded horizon. “They should’ve found us by now.” 

“They will,” the person next to you says, a purple explosion of light spilling out of one of their eyes. “They’ll see. They’ll make it.” 

You aren’t sure why you trust their voice so deeply, but there’s an indelible reason here that speaks to a history you can’t recall. 

“You’re responsible for all of them,” you muse, not looking your companion in the eye. “You’re a fixed point. That’s why you’re so sure they’ll find us.” 

“I don’t know if that’s true anymore,” she admits, voice soft and rough with exhaustion. “But missing memory can’t take away everything.”

You look down at your hand, and at the band of gold around the fourth finger. The tiny turquoise stone in the center catches traces of the miniature aurora coming from your skin. 

“I think I’m married,” you blurt, and your companion laughs gently. 

“You are,” he says. “I nearly was too, once.” 

“I don’t think she’s here,” you say slowly, as though your sentences are glass sculptures that need extra care so as not to shatter. “But I know she’s real.” 

You remember a beach. Lanterns on the sand. A ring that matches yours, a smooth brown hand holding your glowing one, a doorway between an old home and a new one.

The figure next to you stirs, their purple glare sweeping the horizon once more. “That’s the same way I know the rest of the team will find us. Sometimes you know things are true even if you can’t remember why.” 

“D’you… think she knows I didn’t forget her?” Your voice lands heavy and clumsy in the air. 

“She knows,” they say with a reassuring smile, not taking their eyes off of the farthest dune they can see. “Don’t you worry. She knows.” 

“Thank you.” You nod and smile and grip their hand as your eyes swim with tears. “Um… d’you know what your name is?” 

Your companion laughs, short and pleasant. “No idea.” 

“Good,” you reply, weak with relief. “Me neither.” 

Night falls like a velvet curtain cut from the sky before the others find you. They appear from over the dunes, some alone and some clustered in groups, and they run to you. You know them as they tangle their arms around you, sand-tossed and tired. No sandstorm or solar flare or trick of the sky could have stopped your light from reaching them. You’re certain of this now, as you’re caught in embrace after embrace.

The great wooden sandship is unfazed by the journey it took to get here, nor by the weight of weary feet climbing back aboard the deck, and it creaks with exhausted relief at the reunion of its crew. You wait until every single one of the others stands aboard the deck before you even set foot on the ramp. 

The night winds stir the sky as the captain walks down to you and places xir hands proudly on your shoulders.

“There’s not much light to sail by out here,” xe says, with a broad beaming grin and a green twinkle in xir one visible eye. “Well done, beacon of the sands. Guiding everyone.” 

You climb the ramp, the captain’s hand on your arm and the stinging whips of wind at your back, and you sink into the comfort of the sturdy golden ring around your finger. You picture again the smile and the laugh and the warmth from the other side of a matching set, and you pray to a sun that no longer exists that the beacon of the sands will glow bright enough to reach her.

• --- ------ 

You shouldn’t be here.

You know this even as you feel yourself forget your own name. These letters, blank as they may be, don’t belong on the roster of this scattered team. 

Something in you, certain as the dead sun, tells you that this was meant to be temporary. And yet here you are. Anchored to something that no longer exists. 

This is unfamiliar; you aren’t reeling at the sky the way the people around you are. Instead you feel cavernous, hollow and uncertain. This was an exchange. You came here to learn, and the thing you came here to learn from is dead. 

It explodes in a million colors in the sky, and it is dead. 

There’s a taste of a place on your tongue that you cannot remember, but it’s home. That much you know. It’s a far different place from this one, and one that stretches on forever. You’ve tried to count the forevers before and failed. 

You sent someone there when you came here, and you hope he isn’t as lost as you, but your hope has to be earned. It has to be researched and planned and dissected for flaws. And you have no reason to believe this shell of a sun managed to escape destruction, even in a place with as countless realities as the one you hail from.

A desert died long ago, and a place with a maw and tongue of its own took its spot. Perhaps that new place tasted home in the death of its predecessor. 

You wouldn’t know. You shouldn’t be here.

• ------ --------

He wakes up under a sky of purple stars. They peer down without judgment at the wanderers in the sand, again and again as the days spin steadily by. 

In between his dreams, the sandship skims over a surface deceptively smooth under the warped gleam of the supernova. This half-tantrum, half-funeral-rite in the sky casts erratic spikes of pink and blue and green and red down across the sand; it is a child with a fist full of colored pencils, and this desert is the final canvas that will ever bear its desperate mark.

He knows all about desperate marks. Those Merlin-driving-Excalibur-into-the-stone moments that occasionally result in great storied monuments, and more often result simply in broken blades and the gawking scars they carve in their wake. He still bears the shards of one grand god’s finale, although those old wounds have mostly seamed over. There are times in his dreams when he still pulls splinters of peanut carapace from his skin. There are times in his dreams when he still bears the shrapnel of a dead deity piercing his fur under the warm pressure of his teammates hugging him as though they may never get to again. There are times in his dreams when he cannot swing the bat. He cannot swing without shrinking away. Shrinking, unsteady and desperate, as his chances slip by one by one.

The sun is flinching. That’s what’s happening here, he realizes as his team sails steady across the sand, the nameless and immutable captain at the helm. It remembers dying, and it does not want to do so again.

In between his dreams, the team takes the field. They play games as though the league weren’t walking tightrope on an event horizon. They play as though there’s a simple championship at stake, and they swing and hit and run the bases even as the rules of the game are torn from the pages of the very book that once cost this story the ignorant bliss of its prologue.

In between his dreams, he doesn’t flinch. The time for that has passed, and the scars buried in his fur are a reminder now that he doesn’t need to shrink away. He is no longer a cautionary piece of history. Here at the end of the world, history has decided to close its eyes. It lets them all play on and sail on, nameless and unobserved on their sprint to tip the scales.

When they land -- when the colors of the erupting sun fall long and furious upon his face up close -- he will not flinch. He will not stare into the face of a new dying god and give her the satisfaction of shrinking before the old one.

His teammates ask him if he’s ready, and he promises he is. He grips their hands and puts gentle arms around their shoulders and understands that he is part of a family, even if the gusts of desert wind have stripped the tree bare of its leaves.

In his dreams, he still cannot help but flinch; it is not so easily undone. In his dreams, he swallows fear like shards of glass and remembers the day his team was crushed under the heel of a punishing god. But in between his dreams, he and his team will close history’s eyes on this one. Her mark will not be a monument, nor will it be a horrid gash across a once-grand landscape. It will be nameless chaos scrawled desperately in leftover gold, and any scars she claws into the ground will soon be erased by the storms that sculpt and resculpt the dunes. 

He waits to imagine her face when she expects him to cower, and he doesn’t. He will not bear the mark of her memory like he’s born those of eras past. Purple stars that match the sky gleam from under his skin, and he waits on the deck to imagine her face when she sees him -- carrying the witnessing of all her spectacle --

-- as he stares her in her gold-plated eyes and watches her forget.

• --- ----

The world is ending.

The doorbell rings. A regular shoulders their way through the door of the Seven Helleven, and you aren’t there. You aren’t there, but you always hear the bell, no matter how far away it sounds.

“Usual today?” you’d ask your customer, if you were there. He’d nod, and you’d ring him up for a bucket-sized pineapple slushie and a bag of tortilla chips. He’d buy gum at the last second, frowning in hesitation for a moment before, because he always does. 

The version of you still on the clock sweeps a mop across the floor of the shop after closing, broken lightbulb above the door still flickering even though you changed it less than a week before. The window you watch the sunset out of every day now boasts a staging of its death, pinpoints of rainbow radiating out in all directions like light scattered across the surface of a CD. 

You could watch the world ending from behind this counter every day, and your regulars would keep coming through the door. You’d know. You’d hear the bell ring, no matter where you ended up. 

The world is ending, and the light show of its finale looks as exhausted as you feel.

You’re standing on the deck of the sandship listening to the bell greet a far-off customer when someone grins sideways up at you. She winks through a pair of neon pink heart-shaped glasses, and a pair of wicked-sharp fangs peek out from her smile. You know her, although you can’t remember where you’ve met.

“You alright there?” she asks, chewing on an intricate gold pendant she always wears around her neck. “You’re spaced.” 

You nod. “Two places at once.” 

She tosses her braids back and huffs a dramatic, sympathetic sigh. “Aren’t we all.” 

You know what she means, and what she means isn’t the same thing you mean. But she means well, and you’re too tired to correct her. You can’t explain to her what it’s like to owe your soul to a place that isn’t your home, particularly not when that place (and all the others for that matter) are teetering on the gullet of a black hole set on consuming everything in its path. 

She glances up at the sky; the blue pulsar rays in the distance frame a single purple star, which has a name that you’re not sure you’ve ever known. But the captain knows xir stars, and when the lonely purple sun passes between the pulsar beams, it’s game time. 

“Play ball,” your friend says with a half-smile, and tosses you the bat you’ve only just realized she’s holding. 

You catch it, and you’re out on the field. 

When you step up to bat, you keep picturing a world that no longer exists. Yet your little shop with the bell and the broken light and the flickering sign outside still stands amidst all the nothing. Your regulars still come through the door, and you still ring them up for their usual. You watch replays of sunsets in the windows, and you wonder why the end of the world spared you. 

Your bat hits the ball with a metallic clang, and you take off running in between the sounds of the bell.

When the game ends, so does the world. 

Maybe. You don’t know. 

The bell rings again, you toss your bat into the shadows, and you punch in for the night shift.

• ------- ------

I love you in languages grown from the ground;

I love you when love cannot be written down; 

I know not our names, nor this place that we're in; 

I know not our names but I know where we've been. 

Anemone for the place we left behind;

Begonia for warning of what we would find;

Sunflower for the one caught in the pyre;

Echeveria for the home spit from the fire;

Tulips of yellow for grins in the sun;

Iris for hoping for championships won;

Rue for the fated precognitive three;

Daffodil for the alternates called by decree;

Ivy for teammates who grow under pressure;

Oak for an extra home run for good measure;

Marigold for those the umpires burned;

Laurel for past friends triumphant returned;

Cyclamen for each the shadows have taken;

Thyme for the promise they won’t be forsaken;

Hollyhock for our great climb up the mound;

Bay tree for all of us champions crowned;

Poppy for hands entwined after a loss;

Tansy for turning our blades towards the boss;

Gladiolus to hold our resolve as we run; 

Asphodel for what became of the sun;

Dill for the horrors we players will face;

Edelweiss for our return to this place;

Rhododendron for leaving, valerian steady;

Willow for dying, although we were ready.

Zinnia as we for past teammates glow;

Yarrow for swearing we won’t let them go;

Forget-me-not flowers, to… what were these for? 

I love you, I love you:

I’ll see you once more.

• ---- ------ 

Where are we? 

What happened to us?

What are we doing here?  

You don’t ask questions to the stars, because the stars never answer. 

You know this, although you don’t remember learning it. But it has never stopped you searching for answers anyway. 

On your search for Polaris, you remember being found. You remember lying in a place where the sky continued past the ground, and where you would reach down to find the sand only to be met with more stars instead. You remember a green-haired menace and a grinning girl with a crown of sunflowers helping you up from the ground, and you remember noticing how the stars cling to their feet. You remember their hands each gripping one of yours as they walk you back with them, laughing and introducing themselves with names you can’t recall and nodding as you speak to them with an array of flashing spectral signs. 

On your search for Deneb, you remember a peppy girl with a leather jacket and flawlessly curled hair twirling you in front of a mirror as your reflection reveals that she’s thrown a matching jacket around your shoulders. A sun is pinned on the lapel, and you feel at home.

On your search for Antares, you remember grief. You remember sobbing without sound. You remember the one with the orange vest holding you steady even as her own world threatens collapse. You remember walking into a cavernous hall of blue and resting your hands steady against the cold pillars, scattered names in blue listed in a banner of solemn pride on the wall. 

On your search for Betelgeuse, You remember signing underwater to a smiling figure of bright flame, laughing at the impossible nature of him being submerged.

On your search for Alpha Centauri, you remember an amorphous orange creature blinking in confusion as it tries and fails to grip one of your spectral arms, and you remember nodding and explaining how some of your hands can be held and some can’t. 

On your search for Arcturus, you remember celebration, as the quiet human one with the shadowed face and the green one with flowers and vines in her hair lift you up onto their shoulders with joyful shouts of victory.

On your search for Aldebaran, you remember shadows, and the stony walls of a place you know well, and the smiles and jabs of those you met there. They’re all here now, even though you’re certain that some have never seen the light before. 

You watch your team as they greet one another with confusion and relief, and you watch the handprints you leave on the sand as you stand up. You know this negative space. It wasn’t always negative. Long ago, it was once simply the place you stood and watched the sky turn furious.

Where are we? 

What happened to us?

I love you all.

What are we doing here?  

You’ve learned not to ask questions to the stars, but the gaps between them always know more than they let on.

• -------- --------

For the first time since its death, Moab apologizes.

She wishes it wouldn’t. Too much time has passed, and she’s grown far too accustomed to the weight of its memory. That place is its own grave and its own monument, and yet a walking pillar of that monument has always been part of her.

She’s always thought it silly to apologize for dying. 

“Do you ever wish you’d forgotten me like the rest?” it asks, and she shakes her head. 

“Someone had to remember.” 

“I hear voices now,” it says, voice broken open with wonder. “Not just yours. I hear… people. Songs. They remember me now.” 

He doesn’t know how long it will last, but it seems cruel to deny this fragment of history its last stand.

“It was a matter of time,” he says gently, rubbing sand from the wisps of his beard. The reflective orange of his vest catches the sunlight and tosses it back towards the sky. “You couldn’t have stayed lost forever.” 

“Will you forget now?” it asks back. “Now that the others remember? Will you… let me go?” 

They laugh, exhausted. The others all mill about the dunes, bewildered recognition dawning in violet-hued eyes. 

“You worry too much,” they chide. 

Moab, I am not your sole bearer anymore. I can finally wash the sand from my eyes . 

“Forgive me.” If a memory could bow its head, it would have. “You have carried my soul with you for far too long.” 

“Forgive me ,” she replies, as purple stars begin to pinprick the sky. “But I have never been your only family.” 

• ---- -------

She burns again, and she doesn’t know why.  

It clings at her skin like scorching glue, and she cries out loud even as the vines around her arms wind tightly in comfort. 

“Make it stop,” she whispers, voice raw and muffled by the grit-filled wind. “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.” 

Desperate and terrified, a pair of purple flaming hands hover around hers, unable to make contact. 

“You’re not burning,” the other voice begs, purple flame flickering with spikes of emotion as he speaks. “I promise you, you’re not burning.” 

“This is how it felt before,” she cries, teeth gritting. "Why am I dying again?” 

The fiery purple hands blaze brighter, and with one finger, they begin to trace a pattern in the sand. The shape of a leaf unfurls out from a stem, and the stem climbs to meet the round face of a sunflower, tilted reverent and ravenous up to the sky. 

“Look,” the voice behind the hands says. “You don’t know my name, but I know you trust me. I know I trust you. So you need to look up.” 

The flame ringing his hands is purple and white and furious, but the heat is gentle. The warmth doesn’t scorch.

She moves her own hands closer, her breathing still coming in unsteady gasps. This is a voice she knows. This is a warmth she knows. A warmth that doesn’t burn unless it wants to. 

“Look up,” they say. “Please.” 

So she does. 

The light from the sky no longer burns, and her arms explode with pressure as new, spring-green vines and leaves tug themselves up through her skin towards the dying sun. Petals unfurl from blossoms ringing her wrists and ankles, deep purple instead of the golden yellow she knows so well. 

The wave of light that hits her feels like she’s swallowing the sky. Like someone cracked a glow-stick in her stomach, and now she’s gleaming from the inside out, furious with hunger. Desperately drinking in what’s left of the supernova’s rays.

“What’s happening to me?” she asks, breathless between gulps of sun, and the figure beside her grips her hands in theirs.

“You’re not burning,” they promise, flaring with pride. “You’re growing.”

• ------ ------

The punishing heat here digs its corners into hearts. Lays its weight upon conscience. Draws bones dry over time. 

She is a building block and a failed foundation at once, and this desert knows it. Why else would it be so desperately trying to drag her down into the sand? 

Anything is better than looking at the prismatic corpse in the sky.

She stares down at her hands instead, buried halfway into the skin of this dune, and she wills the sand to tell her what it wants.

This terrain obeys no one, but there was a time where it would have at least given her a nod. This maker, craftsperson, spinner of mineral nature. That was the promise she would make; the metal or stone or bone would not obey, and she would not ask it to. It would simply acknowledge a willingness to change, and she’d coax it to become what it most felt drawn to be.

Her patron is dead and so is her worthiness to bear that gift. This sand is still and deep and she is undeserving of its will.

The sword on her back burns heavy, and she draws it out to examine her work. Black-silver, reflective, with the spectrum of colors from the supernova above swimming like heat-haze ghosts in its gleaming surface. 

She’d made this the day she joined the team. This metal had craved sharpness and strength, reverence and balance, and just enough ability to reflect and share its glory. 

She’d been so proud to glance down and see her own eyes mirrored in the blade.

She plunges the tip of the sword into the sand with a swift, furious motion, and panic grips her chest as her dead god watches from above. 

“I can’t do it,” she whispers, mortified. Hoping none of the others see her like this. There's nothing to show for any of it. For whether she was meant to be a part of any of this at all. "I can't do anything to prove I was here." 

Her dead god neither sees the trail of footprints she’s left behind on her trek up the dune, nor would it have cared to remind her, if it had the voice to do so.

• ------ ---- 

You climb through the dunes with the light of a dying sun hitting your eyes.

Eyes . Two of them. You’re so accustomed to seeing from just one, and yet now you peer out from behind two, the world here rendered in such mundane depth. 

Others stand around you, and you cannot assign them names. You recognize them as they orient themselves, bracing gentle hands against one anothers’ wrists and tugging each other up from sitting. You are in a sea of sand with a groaning wooden ship and a crew of people you’ve known for years -- some, decades -- and yet you cannot name them any more easily than you can name the missing thing about yourself.

Something is missing; you know it because you feel warm. Too warm. Something is missing like a pulled tooth.

Where is the voice in your head? 

You remember a version of you long ago, sitting in sands just like these and seeing the world just as you see it now, voiceless apart from your own thoughts. You have never been her before, and yet you remember her now as clearly as you can see the purple sky meet the horizon. 

You remember a joyful, brassy laugh drifting from an old portable radio. You remember the curve of a scythe under the cozy-cold light of the familiar moon. You remember sharp teeth, a crooked smile, and unruly shocks of neon green hair. You remember a hand gripping yours, warm and smooth and steady with a low mechanical hum. You remember a feather in the air, drifting on the current of an umpire’s snarl as the edges curl to ash. You remember a flame, white-hot from a distance yet soothing and warm on your skin when you sit close. 

You watch the grief from afar with both eyes instead of just one; you remember them all, and yet you don’t know what to call them. 

The voice in your head would have known. But the voice in your head isn't here. 

For a seer of what is to come, there is so much you have forgotten.

• ------- -------- 

There is an etching on the wall that cannot be deciphered; letters are replaced with dashes. Bricks are scored with a language stolen from memory. Walls boast banners woven with nonsense words. 

No history can be read here. But no history can tell you what these walls can. If you listen, the castle speaks of those it makes a home for. 

It speaks in a hook by the door, perfectly fitted to hold a stop sign. 

It speaks in a cavernous garden, stacked mighty and tall with trees that stretch toward the light from the glass atrium roof, and a spot by the door where a yellow pair of rubber boots can always be found.

It speaks in a sprawling blue pool in a quiet, sunny room, with a diving board and a hot tub and a portal to a beach in Miami.

It speaks in a snarling smithy that coughs out flames to rival those of a dragon, and in the tools that fit the blacksmith’s hand as though they were made to promise her that she belongs.

It speaks in a sunny rooftop spire with sprawling sunflower mosaics, tiles cool on the skin even under the angriest heat.

It speaks in endless hooks for hats, in secret doors that lead to gardens, in telescopes and haunted boats and lamps that burn forever. It speaks in libraries of plants, in hidden rooms for stolen shoes, in jungle gyms for cats and in ovens that whistle old tunes to pass the time. 

It speaks in a radio that never breaks, and in a scythe hung proudly on a wall. A disc burned from the echoes of seasons past. A broken bat in gold and blue. A brass bell on a red ribbon by the door. A retired pink license plate bordered in flame. 

There is no map, and yet no one gets lost. The corridors always lead to the heart, where the soul of this place sits prouder than any gilded throne. It is a home, and it loves those it makes a home for. 

No history can be read here, but it needs not be read to be remembered. If you wander the halls, you will find it anyway. So much of history is just love that leaves a trace.

• ----- --------

They say home is where you hang your hat, and you have more hats than most.

You’ve grown tired of searching the desert. The dunes all look the same, and they are not your home. There is a ring on your finger, and you don’t know the name of the person who bears the matching one, but you can picture him in your mind: shadowy eyes, shaggy dark hair, and the kindest smile. 

You picture him far away from you, somewhere blue and deep and dim. Somewhere his shadowy eyes blend with the shadows themselves. You picture him with his hand in yours, and your mind reels with the impossibility of it. 

There is a band on your wrist woven with a playful row of shapes like dinosaur spines, and you don’t know the name of the one who inspired it, but you can picture her in your mind. Tall, guarded, speaking often as if only to herself.

You picture her in pink. You picture her with a sharp grin and sharper claws, waving at you from across the mound. You picture her on the other side of the universe. 

Home is where you hang your hat, and this is not your home. 

But this is your team, and your team knows how to build a home from what never should have been one in the first place.

So you hang up your hat. It is blue, with gold trim and constellations splashed across the velvet.

You hang up your hat. It is tall and mossy green, with small red toadstools stitched near the base.

You hang up your hat. It is woven from reeds found in a garden; you spent that day talking to a shard of wood planted in the ground. Thorns and clematis flowers wound loops around it, promising it would never be wrenched free. You swore you would return whenever you could, and you spent those days guiding shreds of cattail reed in leaps and dives over one another.

You hang up your hat. It is golden and silly and bright, pulled from a child’s magic set.

You hang up your hat. It is light brown, stitched with sunflowers and dragonflies, and it still bears the smudge of dirt and the dust of pine needles from the day you fell from a tree in a soundless forest.

You hang up your hat. It is a broken traffic cone you found scorched in the road somewhere. The man with the shadowy eyes couldn’t help but laugh at it, and you wish you remembered his name so you could laugh back.

You hang up your hat. It is dark purple with swirls of teal, and the brim is shredded with teeth marks; you would give this to the sharp one who shares your name, and she would chew the brim and giggle as you’d pretend to scold her.

You hang up your hat. It is turquoise, with an orange and gold slice of pie adorning the front. Every facet of you wears this one with pride.  

Home is where you hang your hat. The crossing guard with the purple gleam in her eye rests a hand on your arm, and the walking spout of fire with a smile that rivals sunlight leans gently against your shoulder without burning. 

You have more hats than most, and this home will do for now.