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It has been nearly two millennia since Hamid has seen his friends.
Years longer, for some; Grizzop died mere hours after they all fell, and Azu followed a few years later. She saved so many in return, but it hurt. It still hurts.
Sasha lived--oh, Sasha lived--but a human’s lifespan is a blink of one giant eye, to a dragon.
Hamid has tried to remember them, despite the way every one of those years weighs heavy on his memory.
He has remembered the shape of Azu’s armor, adorned with roses; the colors that Sasha never wore, always all in black and daggers that match; the look in Grizzop’s eyes, always weighing, measuring, finding lack; even his own disdain for practical clothing, something he’d painfully unlearned.
He’d forgotten Azu’s scars, and the way one tusk had broken, leaving her face artfully roguish; the set of Sasha’s shoulders, beaten down but always ready, always steady despite it all; Grizzop’s ease with his bow, ready and willing to fight anything and everything that might come Sasha’s way; Hamid’s own face, still young, still only partially draconic.
His eyes. His eyes, brown, not glowing orange.
Hamid--Apophis, now, but oh, to hear his true name spoken--shrinks himself down to meet them, in a visage carefully shaped to be not too familiar, and bids them speak.
They ask for a boon he knows he will grant; they ask for a boon he himself has already been granted, so many, many years ago.
The chance to speak to them is both a blessing and a curse. He cannot help but embrace it.
“Your words are appreciated,” he tells Azu. She speaks little in his presence, but what she does say is honest. Bolstering her confidence in herself, encouraging her on her journey as a young paladin of Aphrodite… this is the least he can do for her. This is the least he can do to repay her for everything that she has done for him; for everything that she will do for him.
“I would ask your counsel,” he says to Grizzop; nothing Hamid could say would matter to him, but the question gives weight to Grizzop’s work, his experience in the world. The honor in that recognition is, perhaps, not something Grizzop would ask for, but it is what Apophis can give.
“You have proven yourself beyond irreplaceable,” he tells Sasha, as she materializes out of the shadows. It’s as if light runs from her, afraid of her knives in the dark. He’d never forgotten that about her, but remembering her penchant for stealth and seeing her hide in an empty room are two very different things. Two very different feelings.
“You wear your heritage well,” Hamid tells his own self, and oh, now this is a feeling.
If Apophis could cry, he would. If he could laugh without frightening them out of their wits, he would. He does not know what he would do, if he could do either of these things.
His heart beats in time with his younger self’s own, off-pace and fragile with emotion, though its cause is so distant as to be alien. Forget Gideon, Hamid wants to scream at himself. Forget the guilt that blinds you. Cherish those around you while you still have them as more than bodies in the ground. While they still know you as more than a distant dragon, an arbiter of fate.
He cannot warn them, his friends, his future-past self. They will fall in the future, and they will die in the past. Hamid dares not risk tearing the fabric of time, the very weft and warp of the universe, with incautious hands that spend more time with claws than fingers, with sharp words whispered between sharper fangs.
It is so very hard, to wield the power he carries with anything akin to grace. He tries, the way Grizzop told him to, he tries and he tries and he tries, but…
Hamid does not know whether Azu and Grizzop and Sasha would be proud of him, if they could know who he is, now. Who he has always been and who he will become, one and the same.
Apophis, as that is how Hamid must, must think of himself, assumes his dragon form, and watches his friends walk away with everything they’ve asked for, and his heart besides.
Do the Fates, he wonders, that wicked trio whose pantheon much of the Meritocratic world worships--did they laugh, weaving this future-past for one young halfling?
Or did they cry? Did their tears drip onto the loom of the universe, darkening the strands of fate itself? Did they feel even some of his own terrible heart-wrenching grief, to stand so near and yet so far away from the ones that he still holds so very, very dear?
Apophis cannot give voice to the breaking of Hamid’s heart. Dragons--Meritocrats--do not allow themselves grief. They do not allow themselves to be vulnerable, to be seen, in any form. They cannot be public with their emotions, and still appear impartial to the lives and deaths of those over which they rule.
Apophis keens to the stars above Cairo, a screaming, silent cry, and does not weep.