Chapter Text
Subaru wakes up.
Which is weird, because he had reached his goal, and he was under the impression that, if he reached his goal, everything would be over. So why the fuck isn’t it? Why is he still there? Why, why, why on God’s green wherever, is he still in this godforsaken world, when he should have been cremated with it? The kingdom burned, as it should have, and now here it is again, intact and smiling mockingly at him.
Oh, and knowing his luck, everyone who got in his way before is still here, too. Great. Fucking fantastic.
What's he gonna do? The same, over and over again, expecting something new to happen? What was the definition of insanity, again?
Subaru kicks the wall until his foot breaks, and then bashes his head into it until that breaks, too.
When he wakes up again, he's in the exact same place. One of his many dead, dusty hideouts, where the only sound that can be heard all day is Blue's incessant sobbing and mumbling. And yep, there it is now. Must be early on if he's still behind bars. Still crying. Still spending all his days crying and mumbling and muttering and singing brokenly to himself like a blinded bird in a cage and—
Subaru violently throws his Gospel at the bars before he even realises it: " Shut up! "
The crying stops like someone shut off a radio. Blue instead opts to stare blankly ahead, with the face of someone who simply doesn't have enough of themselves left to produce a coherent thought. Is it terror or numbness?
Subaru doesn't care. At least the sobs aren't grating at his ears anymore. He sits, rather grumpily, on a chair half-eaten by termites. It's fine, though. It won't collapse for another week, if the previous timelines' general knowledge still applies, which it usually does. That chair will collapse next week. The month after the chair collapses, the Knight Julius will die. And three months after he dies, the fire will start.
And only one of those things isn't Subaru's fault.
He giggles to himself a little. He's kinda looking forward to it, after all. He's irritated that he has to do all that again, but there's something charming in the last dying gasps of something insignificant to himself but so precious to someone else. There is something fascinating in the way people act like crazed, wild animals once the flames of the end are at their heels.
He ponders for a second. What if he just tried something else? A flood instead of a fire. A knife instead of poison. The chair will still collapse in a week.
The chair collapses in a week, and Julius dies in a month, and the kingdom falls in four.
Perfect. He might as well get creative with it.
Insanity may be doing the same thing and expecting different results, sure. If that's the case, all he has to do is switch it up a little. Have fun, perhaps.
Do a little better, do a little worse.
Yes, he's worked so hard for so long that a vacation of sorts is simply too enticing to pass up. A playground, maybe. Some way to let off steam.
He giggles to himself.
God help those poor bastards, because Pride certainly won’t.