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She’s so cold.
She’s only ever been warm, spirited, silly, vibrant, alive -
The planet, this unholy creche, is burning around him. Fires wrench from its core as the gargantuan hand reaches up as if to rip the stars themselves from the sky. Millions have already died - but she - she, she, she -
She isn’t supposed to be dead. She can’t die. She can’t. He’d burn the universe down for her, but now it’s too late.
Druig holds Makkari closer to his chest and screams loud enough to drown out the Emergence.
He gasps awake, drenched in cold sweat.
If they’re meant to be perfect beings, automatons from the World Forge, Druig still hasn’t figured out why it is that they can sweat. And bleed. And break.
And die.
The Domo drifts through open space. They’re en route to the World Forge, following Eros’s directions to save the rest of their family. The prettyboy is probably gambling with Pip somewhere, playing games rigged for him to always win.
Druig hasn’t seen Thena for over two full Earth-days (he wonders how long it will take for his body to stop expecting things to work on a Sol schedule).
Makkari is -
She’s asleep, next to him. Druig turns on his side, mouth dry from his nightmare. He wonders if, even in sleep, she can sense the pulse of his heart, how it’s thudding in his chest. He can’t seem to shake the dread he’d felt in that terrible dream.
It felt - real. It had felt so real. In the dream, her skin had taken on the ashy-metal pallor he’d seen on Gilgamesh on that day where Ikaris’s treachery had stolen another life. In the dream, her bright eyes were dull and unseeing. Her miraculous heart was still under his hands. Her beautiful mind was no longer whirring, a familiar point of light in the busy cosmos of thought he was forced to tread every day.
It’s enough to make him sick.
He can’t mind-bend it away. No cosmic energy can wipe the thought from his own head. Druig wants to scream again; he’d do anything, risk anything, lose anything, to make sure that never happens.
Makkari isn’t moving. She’s asleep, Druig reasons. It’s not strange to be still in sleep; but, he’s slept next to her for the last four terrible, wondrous nights (wondrous because she has agreed to share her bed with him; terrible because the loss of Ajak, Gilgamesh, and even Ikaris weighs so heavily on them, and their friends are still so far out of reach). Makkari does not stay still, even in sleep. Her eyes seem to rove behind her eyelids as she dozes; her nose twitches; her feet shift and kick (bruising his shin more than once); she rolls enough to be called an avalanche.
But Makkari isn’t moving.
Dread seizes him. Druig leans forward, shifting across their thin sleeping pallet. He tilts his head, his ear towards her chest, trying to listen for her heartbeat, the sound of her breath, anything at all -
There’s a light tug on his hair.
He looks up; Makkari is smiling at him, sleepy. Confused. Druig shifts so that he’s sitting upright, and Makkari yawns and props herself up to look at him.
“Are you alright?” She signs, one eye still squinted shut as she wakes up. He feels guilty for stirring her awake, but the relief he feels, so potent after the terror of his nightmare … well, it’s a heady drug.
“I am now, my beautiful Makkari,” he tells her, hoping she doesn’t notice how badly his hands are shaking as he signs to her.
She notices. Makkari sits up more, folding her legs underneath her. She scoots forward until her knees press against his. “What is it?”
“I-” His hands still. Druig ducks his head, shaking it. Makkari leans forward until her head touches his, and he breathes into the contact, trying to stop the shaking.
“You are the only thing in the universe to me,” he finally manages to say. He looks up at her when he does, even though it hurts to see the double-image of her dead in his arms, lingering from the nightmare. “If I lost you-”
“If.” Makkari emphasizes the word, smiling a little. “And I don’t want to lose you either.”
“If I lose you, I lose myself,” he tells her sadly. He hates how true it feels.
Makkari frowns at him. She sits back, something steely in her eyes. “If I die, or you lose me, or whatever it is you’re afraid of: you are forbidden from … from going too far. From hurting people. From making another cult.”
Druig opens his mouth to protest, but Makkari shakes her head.
“No more cults!” She brings her thumb between her index and middle finger forcefully at the end of the word. “No! I forbid it. I will - I will haunt you.”
“You’ll haunt me?” Druig laughs a little, despite the heaviness in his gut. “A speedy ghost - now that’s actually pretty frightenin’, beautiful.”
“It is.” Makkari looks pleased at his lighter expression. She touches the dimple in his cheek, and his heart stutters for a different reason. “Think about it. You won’t be able to get away from me.”
“I don’t think I’d ever want to get away from you,” Druig murmurs; he holds his hands out when he’s done signing, and Makkari places her hands in his. He kisses each knuckle of each hand slowly, deliberately.
Her skin is warm beneath his lips. Druig closes his eyes and tells himself to be brave, like the woman he loves.
The Deviant’s spike rips outward at the wrong moment. It catches her in the side; she stumbles out of her faster-than-sound speed. She falls.
There are other Deviants then, surrounding her. Druig screams, runs from his hiding place, shoves his way into the fray, but the Deviants - their minds are too unevolved. There are no thoughts for him to manipulate.
He can only sense their biological urges. Their need to dominate. Their bloodlust.
“No,” he’s screaming, “No, no, no-” Screaming and screaming for the woman he loves, who can’t hear him screaming for her, doesn’t know that he’s trying to get to her. Druig hates it, hates how weak he is, hates that he has no weapon, no real ability to fight, only to control in an effort to stabilize the non-Deviant life forms on this wretched planet, with its hideous purple skies and stinking, cloudy-grey waters -
“Makkari!” He screams as a Deviant pins him, then another.
There are jets of light in the distance. Ikaris must be holding off Deviants from the village, having arrived from wherever-the-fuck-it-was that he was hiding the last week. The cavalry's arrived.
Too late for Druig. Too late for Makkari. Too late for them.
“Makkari.” Druig coughs. It’s wet and cold. The world is growing dim. He wants to look at her one last time, he wants her to be the last thing he sees. The ground rumbles horribly beneath him, around him, he’s shaking to pieces even as the Deviant strikes its killing blow -
Druig jolts, blinking rapidly.
Makkari is above him, her head wreathed in a halo of light. Gone are the screams of battle, the acrid smell of himself burning, the purple, dying sky.
They’re on the Domo, and Makkari is shaking him desperately.
“You were crying,” she signs rapidly, looking distraught. There are tears in her eyes. Druig sits up, and she moves with him, giving him room to shift and adjust until they’re sitting facing one another. “You were scared, you wouldn’t wake up - Druig, what happened?”
He doesn’t know how to tell her how he saw them both die. He doesn’t know how to phrase it, doesn’t know how to seem anything but shattered.
“A bad dream, beautiful.” He wipes a hand down his face before signing, “just a bad dream. That’s all.”
“You were screaming.” Makkari shakes her head, not happy with his answer. “You looked scared, Druig, you were lashing out in your sleep, it’s what woke me-”
Druig turns cold. He was ...
“Did I hit you?” He asks, his terror surging again and turning into something more like self-loathing. “Shit, Makkari, did I-”
“No.” Makkari shakes her head. He isn’t sure he believes her. “I’m fine, Druig, I am. But please, tell me what’s wrong. You’ve been having bad dreams for days now.”
He has. It’s his fifth such dream: Makkari has died in every one; Sersi died in three; Kingo has died in two; now Druig has died once. With what he saw in the last one, a planet he has no waking memory of, Druig’s mind is putting together a thought, hazily.
Mahd-W’yry.
Memories of past lives, crashing into him. Threatening to pull him under. Drive him mad, to the point where he’ll take it out on his loved ones.
His loved one. Makkari.
Druig has never felt ill in his long, long life; he thinks he’ll throw up, now. How human. He shoves backward, intending to stand from the pallet and run from the room, to get far away so he can’t hurt the one person he swore to himself to only treasure, only cherish, only love.
Makkari wraps small fingers around his wrist as if she were the one who could read minds. He freezes and stares at her, wondering if she can see his thoughts whirring through his eyes.
“I want to hold you,” she signs. “If you can’t tell me … I still want to hold you.”
She lies behind him and wraps wiry arms around his chest; her palm presses to where his heart still thunders.
“I love you,” Druig whispers into the dark room.
His eyes burn with tears; if he has the Mahd-W’yry, it would be better for him to leave. Thena is dangerous with her weapons, but he’ll be nothing short of destruction itself. He feels ill, terrified, at the thought of bending Makkari’s mind if he Forgets in the future.
Makkari squeezes her arms a little tighter around him. Druig breathes in and out, trying to settle into the embrace. Before he can lose the courage, he forms the sign for I love you, and tucks it under her palm so she can feel the shape of it.
A kiss on the back of his neck is his answer.
He wakes from the next nightmare and forces his heart to calm.
Makkari is asleep next to him, unbothered by the shifting of the pallet as he stands and walks for the exit, swiftly.
He needs to leave.
He had a weapon in his hands in the last dream; he was stabbing and slashing with a rage he’s only come close to once in this lifetime, the rage he’d felt when Ajak wouldn’t put an end to the genoicde at Tenochtitlan.
If there’d been a real weapon - if the nightmare had overcome him when awake -
There are already so many things Druig cannot forgive himself for. If he hurt Makkari, the scales would be forever tipped. He could never return from that.
Druig wanders the Domo, wondering if he can convince Eros to put him in the airlock and eject him into space. He might not die, but he certainly won’t last out there. Collisions with suns and other celestial objects - hazards of drifting in the cosmos.
Eros would probably be far too happy to oblige. Smug prick. Druig almost doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
As he wanders, he senses the familiar hum and spiky bursts of Thena’s mind. Druig rounds the corner and spots her leaning against the starviewer. Her brow is beaded with sweat. Her eyes are clear.
“Hello, Druig.” She greets him without looking up. Probably sensed his gait, terrifying warrior that she is.
“Hello.” He stands next to her, feeling oddly fraternal with someone he only rarely spoke to even when things were good between the Eternals.
“Can’t sleep either?”
“No.” Druig clears his throat. “I - I’ve been seeing things, Thena.” When she doesn’t prod, he adds, “Past lives.”
“Does Makkari know?”
He presses his lips together and shakes his head, ashamed. Ashamed for hiding from Makkari. Ashamed for how terrifying his dreams are, what it hints of in his mind.
“What did you see tonight?”
Druig haltingly tells her about the pile of Deviants they’d fought through; the unexpected surge of them, how they’d ripped through the walls even as the Emergence erupted beneath them -
“Pleione-5,” Thena says distantly. She smiles slightly and tilts her head at him. “I suppose I should apologize.”
“You fought bravely that day, from what I could see.” Druig frowns at her. “You always fight bravely, Thena. No matter the shape of the fight.”
“You’re kinder than you used to be.” Thena chuckles a little and rubs her slender hand up her thin, muscular forearm. Her eyes drift out in their focus. “No. I am sorry that you seem to be seeing my dreams.”
“Oh?” Druig hadn’t thought about that. “You’ve been dreamin’ of-”
“Our past lives. Yes. I wonder if the Uni-Mind forged a deeper connection between our thoughts. I’ve been able to Remember so much more since the Emergence. My connection with you and your abilities must have stabilized the fractures Arishem caused before our last resurrection. But I still have memories of our time on these past planet-forges. My mind processes them when I am asleep; it must call out to your mind, which then summons the buried memories of your own time in past lives.” Thena sighs, eyes still distant. “For that I am sorry.”
“But I died,” Druig says bluntly. “In the dreams - Makkari … Makkari died too.” He forces himself to say it aloud.
“She did,” Thena acknowledges. Her smile is sadder now, and she looks fully at him. “You did as well. I died a number of times, if it’s any consolation.”
“So we can be-”
“Resurrected. Yes. A benefit of being not truly alive. The World Forge can bring us back, again and again. Ajak. Ikaris. Even my darling Gilgamesh. Their minds might not be the same, but … we will see them again. I am sure of it.”
Something crumples in Druig’s chest. It feels like both relief and exhaustion.
“I don’t have Mahd-W’yry?”
“I’m hardly able to make that diagnosis either way,” Thena tells him, amused. “But if you do experience the symptoms, I am more than able to keep you in check.” A blade of light flashes in her hand.
Druig only smiles at her. He nods in farewell and heads back to his sleeping quarters.
Makkari stirs as he slips back into bed.
“Another bad dream?” She asks, frowning at him.
He kisses her forehead, then her nose before answering. “Yes. But it is only a dream.”
He wraps his arms around the woman he loves and drifts off, the Domo surging ever forward through the stars.