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George remembers XD calling it the power of kings.
“Swear to make me whole,” he’d said, with his golden eyes and pockmarked skin, “and the power of kings will be yours to wield as you see fit.”
“I swear,” George had said, heart not fully into it.
“Then the contract is sealed,” XD had told him. A burst of searing brightness soon followed, burning itself into George’s retinas. At the time, he’d immediately felt regret over agreeing to such a risky thing—but as time passed and XD hung around to laugh at and guide him, almost ethereal, as though he was just barely above this plane of existence…
George had figured it out, eventually. Now, he uses the power to pass the days quietly; whenever someone looks too close or too confrontational, all he has to do is meet their gaze and say, “Sleep.”
It’s a simple tool, but effective enough. He assumed his safety was assured beyond anyone else’s, especially with XD’s lingering watch.
Except.
He cannot tell a FLEIJA missile—Snowchester’s nuclear fucking warhead—to sleep.
All he can do is watch, like everyone else: the snippet of footage salvaged from the destruction, the tiny speck of a pixel blurring across the screen before it erupted into a sphere of glistening light and roaring power, ripping out a circular chunk of the earth and vaporizing everything in a fifty-kilometer radius. The prison, flattened; the community house, gouged out existence.
Maybe it was foolhardiness that drove George to walk to the crater’s edge, just a day after.
It’s been months since he last spoke with Sapnap, but he knows clear as day that he’d taken up residence in the mushroom town of Kinoko. A cheeky little resistance town, quiet enough to be overlooked but determined not to be mowed down and absorbed into the unrighteous L’Manburg empire the way the Greater SMP had been.
XD had gone to visit Sapnap, saying he needed to give his other contractors attention, but don’t worry, George, you’re still my favorite.
Don’t believe me? Hey—okay, okay. How about this? I’ll tell you a secret. One that I haven’t told anybody, ever. That’ll prove that I’m your best friend, right? And you’re my best contractor! Alright?
Alright. My name is—
Kinoko is just over forty kilometers away from the epicenter.
Was, technically. George stands on the cliff overlooking the crater now, thinking about the way he’d woken to the feeling of something tugging at his heart, thinking about how XD had sworn that he could not die.
Sapnap was never the type to make such promises. He wasn’t the type to stray far from his new home, either, not with his newfound husband starting to struggle with memory.
George tries to picture their house. A nice little wooden thing, tiled with slivers of fungal matter. Maybe they had a lamp by the door, and a flower patch out front. Maybe they had a ring hung over their door for their lost beloved, who fell to the siren song of the president’s smooth words.
It’s easy to picture. His eyes blur, smearing out all the ash-grey and burnt-black, and he refuses to acknowledge the unshed tears that sting against his vision.
“Hey!” someone shouts, and George startles out of his thoughts to the sight of gleaming netherite drawing closer, armored guards turning his way.
He even recognizes one of them. The prison’s grave warden, flanked by guards and a commander in duck-feather yellow.
“What are you doing here?” the warden demands, and George shrugs at him. His guess is as good as George’s. “You’re not allowed to be here,” the warden continues. “This is L’Manburg territory, and… scene of interest. Only Pandora’s guards are allowed.”
The police division. Funny, that. George would’ve assumed this fell under Snowchester’s purview, with them being the science faction that developed that thing to begin with.
There’s a low whine of power, and purple light flashes along with several weapons that seem to slide out of nowhere.
“We’re going to have to take you in,” the warden says.
George says, through the hot tears streaking down his cheek, “Are you?”
There is a bird in George’s eye, wings stretching out in furious crimson as it wakes, growing, strengthening—
“Dream,” he says, a call and a command.
—and it sails into their eyes like a piercing arrow, a sigil burned into their skulls, as its twin flickers into existence in George’s other eye.
The Warden and his guards collapse, dead asleep.
George can feel them, the edges of their minds tied to him by the power of his Geass. Any other day, he would have given them oblivion and left, cutting their slumber short once he was safely returned home.
But today is not any day. Today is FLEIJA’s detonation and XD—no, Dream and Sapnap’s deaths, and George can see nothing but the soft vulnerability of his enemies and the sharpness of his own frothing fury.
He yanks at their minds, at flashing ruby-red of his power. They put up no resistance as he fills their sleep with thorns and blood and desperation and grief, malice snapping at their heels, loved ones screaming in flame and weapons coming alive to tear into them, steel fangs ripping open their chests to flay their lungs and bleed their hearts into the open air, hate and death and heat and the earth itself in fury at the wound engraved into it and the lives lost to it and the blood shed over it and—
“Well done,” says the voice of a dead man.
George, blind with fury, feels his power reach without looking to take that mind and force it to sleep as well…
Only to bounce right off.
“Oh, come on now,” says XD, says Dream, wearing a feral fucking grin, the same sigil in crimson red glittering across his face like a particularly odd scar. “I told you, this kind of thing doesn’t work on me.”
“The Geass?” George says, over the roaring of his heart. “Or, you know. Death?”
“Both,” says Dream.
“Sap—”
“He’s fine. Told you I needed to check on my contractors, didn’t—” and he gets no further as George picks up a rock and throws it at him. “—aw, were you worried?”
“I’m going home,” George declares, and turns around to stomp away, flushed and angry for—for—at everything, honestly.
He’s stopped by Dream swinging around with a slightly less manic smirk. “So you don’t want to hear about how Karl granted my wish and Sapnap planned a way to usurp the awful evil thing that is the empire growing on lands that are our birthright?” he says, innocently.
“No,” George lies.
“Tough luck. Anyway, Karl’s power is—”