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It’s happening again.
This one feels worse than any other time this has happened. Fulgur needs him, and Uki can’t ignore that. Or at least he needs something. It’s hard to say if Uki is able to provide that something, but he has to try.
He can hear the echoes of Fulgur’s memories from down the hall. Blurred, half-remembered shouts and the smell of blood dripping down twisted steel… He wouldn’t listen in on any of it if he had the choice.
The night is quiet and still, but to Uki the knock on the door barely registers over the now impossible-to-ignore screams resounding from Fulgur’s mind within the room. Usually he does better than this at keeping the memories down — he must be sleeping, or freshly awoken from a nightmare. Then something drops from the chorus of noise, and Uki realizes that until a moment ago there’d been another set of footsteps pacing inside, almost imperceptible under the onslaught of voices and sensations.
“Fuu-fuu-chan?” Uki starts soft. There’s a long silence that he tolerates, patient. Maybe half a minute passes before the pacing starts up again, which Uki takes to mean that Fulgur doesn’t plan on answering him. Uki isn’t even the one who’d had a nightmare, and he still has to take a deep breath before he speaks again.
“Do you want to tell me why I just saw a dead Alban in your head?”
He doesn’t mean to, Uki knows — but knowing doesn’t keep him from wincing when the reaction in Fulgur's thoughts is practically a scream.
NO. No, I don’t want to tell you. I won’t.
“Can you open the door, at least?” Uki tries again. “I can stay out here, but I know you don’t usually want me to read you, so…”
The door swings open before he’s even done, Fulgur finally letting Uki see for himself that he almost certainly has just woken up from a nightmare — his eyes are heavy with bags, dressed only in sweatpants and a tank top. His exposed skin shines with a thin layer of sweat in what little light manages to reach him. It’s not difficult to imagine how he must’ve been tossing and turning in his sleep before stumbling out of his unkempt bed just minutes ago.
The dark space beyond Fulgur is stiflingly hot, but there’s something cold about it, somehow. The moonlight from his window struggles to illuminate anything past the bedside desk, and the shadows seem to yawn around a man who looks and feels more uncertain than Uki can ever remember. It’s lonely and scary and sad.
Uki steps inside without a second thought.
The door shuts behind him, enclosing them alone together in the oppressive darkness. Uki feels more than sees Fulgur open his mouth like he’s struggling for words. Closes it again. Turns away from him.
Then Uki catches another flash of a familiar face amidst the wordless memories.
“What does any of that mean?” he asks. “You knew another Alban, before?”
The way Fulgur works his jaw in silence is enough of an answer, even without the echoes of agony and manic laughter and death resounding from somewhere in Fulgur's past.
Uki definitely has some questions about that, but they’ll have to wait. He says nothing, just watches as Fulgur composes himself with some difficulty, though the looming terrors in his mind don’t quiet at all. Purposely listening in isn’t something Uki does too often, but something about the way Fulgur’s back is hunched so much more than usual tells him he shouldn’t block it out like he usually would.
He gets the feeling this is something about Fulgur he should understand, even though he will not like what he finds.
Uki’s careful not to pry too deep, but even from a few small glimpses the boy Fulgur remembers is wrong. His eyes are too wide and wild, the spite in his voice too vicious, the cackle too hysterical. It’s more than a little uncanny, after having gotten so used to their Alban and the way his bright laugh could light up any room. But even through the wrongness it’s still unmistakably Alban, and it’s hard not to flinch away when his demise splatters messily across the whole of the other memories again, as if even the boy’s face is meant to be buried and forgotten. In the present, Fulgur shudders.
Then he jerks in shock when Uki’s hands clasp his jaw, cupping his cheeks and forcing him to look straight ahead. He blinks like he’s waking up a second time, and there’s something in his face that’s more lost than Uki ever thought he could be.
“Hey. Fuu-fuu-chan. I’m right here. Eyes on me, got it?”
Despite meeting Uki’s gaze, Fulgur’s expression is distant, and it only takes a moment to understand why. His eyes have gone silver, and he is not looking at Uki.
A sigh of relief escapes Fulgur almost automatically, and the warmth ghosts over Uki’s face. In his mind, Uki sees what he’s seeing: their phantom thief curled up, expression peaceful in sleep, pixelated and filtered through the cameras Fulgur had hidden around the household in places he thought they’d never notice.
“Hey, don’t ignore me. He’s fine,” Uki murmurs, pinching Fulgur’s cheek to bring him back. Fulgur’s eyebrow twitches and irises grow dull, but he refocuses, pulling his face out of Uki’s hands. If he’s surprised or bothered that Uki knows about the surveillance he doesn’t give any indication of it.
It’s so slight, most people wouldn’t be able to tell, but Fulgur’s still shaken as he makes his way to sit on the edge of his bed. After a moment he begins to breathe steadier, like knowing Alban is here and not dead — not torn to pieces by the ghosts of what might have once been, or come to life from one of the monsters that live within Fulgur — was what he needed to come back from wherever his mind had drifted to.
“I’ll stay here with you until you feel like you can go back to sleep, okay?”
There’s no acknowledgement from Fulgur, but he allows Uki to sit down beside him, and that is enough for now.
“It'll be okay,” Uki tells him, turning to gaze out the window at the moon as if it will tell him what he can do to banish the phantoms of the future haunting the space between them. Fulgur doesn’t make a sound. “Even if you don’t believe me right now, I know we’ll be okay. We have time.”
In the glimmers through the darkness, Fulgur can see the future.
Not really, or at least not in the way Uki can; he does not receive visions of what might be. He doesn’t have to. He’s lived it and tasted it and bled into the fabric of its make and he does not need to be told by magic or premonitions or God that the world as they know it will end.
The only thing he needs to do is wait.
The future is a threat and a promise. Too distant to see with the naked eye yet it’s hurtling toward them, unstoppable as a train, inevitable as the sunrise. Sometimes, in the night, he can almost smell the silicone and metal.
He can see the future, and it’s the scariest fucking thing he’s ever felt.
Coping with the apocalypse and its subsequent recovery period, he’s found recently, was much easier to do when it was in the past. He cannot think for too long on the vastness of what is coming. The world is immense, unimaginably so, yet still it is doomed. Each time he lets his mind wander too far, he is reminded with every person around him of just how much life is currently thriving across the surface of this planet. He is reminded of how many will choke on ash and smog someday.
As long as he has been a Legatus he’s been able to crush his problems in a fist, the pieces that would crack and flutter out of his fingers in scraps no longer anything he needed to worry about. No longer a threat.
Now? He’s not sure what to do with the idea that the descendants of the people at the grocery store who teach him the secret to finding the ripest watermelon, or the people who sneak him extra flowers for his bouquet as they tie the ribbon around it, or the people who let him say hello to their dog even when it’s raining will die younger and younger as the poison in the earth and air and water sink ever deeper into their cells.
They have time, in a sense. Fulgur and the people he now knows and cares for will never see the rise of The Republic, but knowing it’s a long ways off from their present does nothing to ease the foreboding sensation of sand trickling out of an hourglass. They have so little time, and Fulgur does not know if it could ever be enough.
There’s nothing to grasp here, nothing he can crush or kill or even touch. There is no threat to deal with. And there is nowhere to run.