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Regis Altare kills him faster than he can blink.
It’s one of those things, Dez thinks, when you think you’ve figured everything out but you haven’t, and now the consequences are coming to bite you in the ass. Or wrap their fingers around your neck.
If he’s generous, which he is, he’d say he at least said, “Urk,” before he died, and maybe he heard Altare laugh in that way-too-deceptively-gentle way the demon-lord-god-king-whatever did, but that’s it.
Just like that, he’s gone.
It isn’t always this way.
Sometimes, Dez gets to him first.
Sometimes, he’d be talking to Altare and Altare would be nice for once (“For once?!” Altare would protest. “I’m always nice. I’m such a nice person, you take that back.”) – too nice, even – and Dezmond can’t stand it. He can’t stand not knowing which one of them is going to die first, so he takes matters into his own hands.
“Dez, no, wait,” the hero-villain-whatever would laugh like he always did, always too cheerful even though he knows what is coming. He’s felt the fatal grip of Dezmond’s gloves more times than anyone else and Dez is coming at him with a vengeance. “Please, I still have so much I want to do! The world needs me!”
“Next time.” Dezmond would say, because he knew there was no leaving this guy alone. “Godspeed, you dumbfuck.”
And of course, stupid Regis Altare would laugh even in the face of death.
There’s always a next time.
He’d be in another day, in another place, and Altare would still wander straight into his life because they were inexplicably bound by the act of killing each other. Violence buddies. Maim mates. Whatever they are.
He can’t put a name to it, because nobody in the history of everything (as far as he knows, and really, what does he know) has ever been in this situation where they’re best friends with someone who kills them and who they kill to return the favor.
Over and over and over.
Altare jokes that he is perhaps a snail from one hypothetical story (and doesn’t Altare just love his hypotheticals) that would chase Dezmond to the ends of the earth and kill him if they touched, and Dez can only in full confidence claim that he will touch that fucking snail so that it’d be his damn turn to be the snail and kill him back. It’s the universe’s worst game of tag.
“You’ll find me, then?” Altare asks, as though Dezmond has a choice.
“Fuck off.” He says, and crushes his tiny little body to death. When Ves or Axey drop by, he’ll have his clone ready so nobody expects a thing.
But Dezmond will know. Dezmond always knows.
What he doesn’t know is when they’ll be able to stop.
In the beginning, things had been normal.
Well, ‘normal’ for the “Great” Magni Dezmond, anyway. It’s all relative. Maybe there is no such thing as normal.
He’d had a guild pre-TEMPUS before it all went to shit, and in the wake of the depressive spiral he’d sunk into after losing them, he had become exceedingly more unhinged. Experiment after experiment, potion after potion. The fumes fiddled with his brain chemistry, and he kept making more to try and reverse it.
Reversal is something he’s not come to terms with.
There has to be an undo button on this life, he thinks. There has to be a way to go back.
(He couldn’t have lost his guild for nothing. They couldn’t have left him all alone in this world for nothing.)
So he tries, and he tries, and he invents copium which makes the grief more tolerable, but he markets it as a satirical drug because no fucking adventurer will ever acknowledge something as stupid as feelings.
(This, of course, is before he meets Regis Altare. Before he meets TEMPUS.)
He gets money. He makes more. Adventurers continue to take a dose to stop feeling a goddamn thing.
And Magni Dezmond has stopped feeling a goddamn thing himself. There’s a dark chasm where his heart used to be.
Given that, it’s not like he had been particularly sane when accepting the invitation to join Guild TEMPUS, but he hadn’t been a serial killer (can you be a serial killer if the people you kill are just different versions of the same person, he wonders) nor had he been that big on killing in general (as much as he liked to pretend and fantasize about blood and death and explosions).
He had been a coward, for lack of better terms.
TEMPUS didn’t know what to do with him, at first.
He’d run at the first sign of danger, often getting the brunt of Axel’s anger (but Axey-boy was always equally quick to forgive), and Vesper just found him hilarious (which, in hindsight, makes Vesper seem like the unhinged one, which he is, but on an entirely different level from Dezmond, where you don’t realize how off-the-rails he is until you’re too far to go back).
“Who laughs at being abandoned?” He’d ask Vesper, who would tilt his head in question. “I’m hightailing it outta there, you’re down a healer, and all you do is laugh.”
“Your screams are funny. I can’t help it.” Vesper tells him, as though that’s a normal thing to say. “I think you might be the funniest man alive.”
“I’m just glad nobody got hurt,” Altare would add. “Though I am a little mad at you for running away again.”
Bettel, a man just like him — a coward — would sometimes try and argue his case, saying, “It’s just basic self-preservation, man. Let him off. Have you seen what this world is capable of?”
(The point is moot when it comes to Bettel, though, who experiences the world entirely differently to everyone else due to having the worst luck Dezmond has ever seen.)
Flayon takes the opposite angle, sticking out his tongue. “We’re a team so we should stick together, no matter what! Haven’t you learnt that by now?!”
“Chill, Flayon,” Hakka rests a hand on his shoulder. “It’s like Leader said. Nobody got hurt.”
“That’s what matters.” Shinri’s rumbling voice reaffirms the notion. “We’ll regroup and think about what to improve next time. As long as we’re all safe.”
“And as long as anyone who fucks with us knows they’re fucking with the wrong people,” Axel nods, slamming his fist to his chest.
“See?” Dezmond addresses Altare, eyebrow raised. He doesn’t mean to provoke him, nor does he want to. He just wants to prove that they’re all in good rapport. That his escape wasn’t disloyalty. That everything was fine. “Everyone’s cool with it. It’s cool. Just let it be.”
“Fine.” Altare would say, as though he hadn’t pardoned Dezmond already. “But I won’t go easy on you if it happens again.”
Dezmond doesn’t mention that he inevitably will.
He knows why Altare killed him, at least once. He’d even call it justified.
“Traitor,” Altare spits out, green eyes flaring. “Traitor. Traitor.”
Dez can’t deny this. His allegiances have been shaky since he lost his last guild. It had been hard for him to trust again. He may not have ever trusted again. Being a part of TEMPUS did not mean putting the guild before himself.
“How could you do this to us, Dez?”
Somewhere along the castle halls, he remembers Axel’s body lying bloodied and prone. The potion he had slipped the gladiator left him vulnerable to attack, left him at the mercy of the corrupted beasts that came for him. He remembers leading Ves straight into an ambush and then making a run for it. He remembers Vesper’s look of horror like it’s etched into his skull.
Vanguard was supposed to keep watch, but he had already long set plans to take care of them before they could even get close.
Bettel, trapped under rubble. He’d get his own damn self killed easy enough, Dezmond just had to make sure it was permanent. Hakka, the idiot, sacrificing himself to save Shinri, because the exorcist is always charging forward without thinking. Flayon, useless without the R-TRUS, swallowed by darkness when Shinri gets possessed and Hakka isn’t there to help him.
Dezmond knows them all like the back of his hand, and that is why it all pans out word-by-word and play-by-play to his genius little plan.
He remembers Bettel’s chilling scream as he begged him to help him up, remembers Flayon dashing after the jester after being knocked clean into the air, and from a distance, being unable to distinguish his crimson hair from his blood.
He remembers Hakka shouting, in order, Bettsy! Machi! No! The growl in his voice had been masking the fear, which now bubbled to the surface as he screamed his throat raw. SHINRI!
He remembers Shinri staring at the wreckage with a soulless look in his eyes.
Shinri’s weakness had been losing Hakka – the two had always been close from their ventures in Xenokuni, and the fact that it was Hakka that had protected him must have broken the ronin’s heart irreparably. There’s no other way his strong countenance could have been possessed so quickly thereafter.
Dezmond knows that. Dezmond made sure it happened that way.
He remembers Axel telling him to run too, his orange fists flailing helplessly as he said, “Just make it to Altare, please, Magni, just cover Altare, I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine –”
He still trusted him, then, the idiot.
He remembers seeing Altare at the end of the hallway, flickering like a flame, blood dripping from his lips as he looks at Dezmond, expression unreadable.
By that point, it was clear Altare knew what he had done.
He remembers betraying the guild.
“Aren’t we friends?”
It’s such a juvenile question, but it’s comforting, in a way, to think that Altare still considers them friends even now.
Altare’s light armor is crumbling. Dez made sure to hex it thoroughly before the quest, and if he wears it any longer, he’ll go down with it. He knows that Altare knows this, too.
“Dez,” Altare whispers, angry tears beading in the corner of his eyes like splintering little cracks in the clearest sea glass. “How could you?”
Dezmond wishes he knew. He wishes he could explain how the paranoia consumed him, how he couldn’t sleep without thinking the closest thing he had to friends would only let him down in the end.
Ironically, what he feared the most was that they’d take his life before he had finished with what he had set out to do, and yet he forgets, then, that Altare loves Guild TEMPUS more than he loves anything else in the world and it is this love that he’s taken away from him, and it’s this love that shatters his heart to the point where his fearless leader raises his blade with tears streaming down his face, grief-stricken and hurt and hollow.
“How could you?” He whispers, barely audible.
“Can’t say.” Dezmond replies. He closes his eyes.
That is the first time Altare kills him.
He thinks Altare tries to end this cycle, sometimes, which is why he’s so damn reckless.
“Aww, you were worried about me,” he grins, a mischievous glint in his eyes, despite the way his hoodie is soaked through with blood and Dezmond momentarily forgets his leader is supposed to be wearing white. “It’s good to see you, Dezzy-Wezzy.”
“Shut up, you idiot,” Dez presses his forehead against his chest, which is heaving with exertion. His potions are more for hurting than they are healing, but he doesn’t have a choice. His hands scramble to whip up something – anything – that might help. He doesn’t think he has enough time. “How could you let someone else kill you?”
“My bad,” he’s so close that he can feel the vibration of Altare’s laughter. “I’ll wait for you, next time.”
If there is a next time, Dez thinks, before he realizes the fact that Altare is still clinging to life beneath him is their chance. He has to act now.
He rustles through his pocket for his dagger. It’s all he has. No potion is faster than a knife to the heart.
“This is gonna hurt.” He mutters, showing Altare the glint of the blade as his leader smiles weakly back at him. He wishes he wouldn’t. “Hold your breath.”
“As long as it’s you,” Altare whispers, voice straining as if he needs to let Dez hear his words. “I don’t mind.”
Dezmond lifts his dagger and takes aim.
The truth is, this cycle moves not because their fates are entwined — that fanciful shit does not bode well with a man of science and questionable alchemy such as the “Great” Magni Dezmond — but because there’s a pulse deep in their souls that burns for vengeance.
The first time Altare had killed him, his grief had consumed him whole. He had been horrified by his own actions, crying day and night by Dezmond’s body as he gathered up the pieces that the rest of the guild left behind. Maddened by his pain, a lone hero sits amongst corpses of both enemies and friends and sobs.
Calm, sweet, lovely, kind Altare is left behind as a young man battered with nightmares and cold sweats takes his place.
“Vesper, please,” he’d talk to the shreds of a black tome, as though the torn pages could talk back.
“Axel,” he’d hold chains to his chest like rosary beads. “Say something. Please.”
“Bettel, you better fucking respond, asshole,” he’d say with more vitriol, looking out at an empty stage. He didn’t even get to see Vanguard before they died. “Flayon, my love, my dear Hakka, Shinri… Shinri…”
Dezmond has been through this before — he’s been the last survivor of a total guild eradication — so he gets it.
For a week, Altare tries everything to bring them back. He tries the potions, the spells, the items, the prayers. He sits beside Dezmond’s body and drapes him in flowers.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you!” He’d scream into the mountainous ravine at the crack of dawn. Any living soul would call it a disturbance, but there’s no reasoning with the guilt of surviving. “I’m sorry! Come back! Please!”
He keeps Dezmond’s glove cloak, and Axel’s tails and Vesper’s rapier and holds them close to his body. Shinri’s jacket, Bettel’s hat. Hakka’s hairpin, and bits of the R-TRUS because he couldn’t find Flayon’s body. It’s cold in the night but he doesn’t care.
Dezmond doesn’t know why he knows all this, because he’d been well dead at the time, so maybe he’s projecting or maybe he’s a ghost, but it’s that same series of events that led them into this ongoing battle to the death in the first place.
The revival ritual he conducted was wrong.
Magic that had been forbidden because no hero, no adventurer, no commoner or king, should ever have the ability to disturb the dead.
Dezmond still does not know the details, but he knows what Altare did had resulted in their being bound to this cruel, inescapable curse.
Perhaps Altare had been mad at him, and that vengeance had given him a blade, or perhaps whatever forbidden magic he sought out to revive Guild TEMPUS had given him a fair punishment that he had graciously allowed Dez to share.
The thing is, if they don’t kill each other, the others get killed.
Dezmond saw it with his own eyes, when he refused to kill Altare the first time after his betrayal — not knowing any reason for cutting the wound any deeper.
It had started with Vesper coughing up blood, and then Axel losing strength in his legs. Dez had smashed potions together to try and slow the effects but he had no idea what he was dealing with.
He had begged on his knees for Altare to forgive him, but Altare had just placed his gun in the alchemist’s hands.
“Do it again, traitor.” Altare told him. “Finish me off, like you did with everyone else. It’s the only way.”
Forever branded a traitor, the cycle had began.
“It’s the only way.”
His reluctance continues for iterations.
He has no motivation to kill Altare but simple duty, and it’s a messy job with no rewards, and everyone in the guild always hates him afterwards so he doesn’t know why he bothers.
(He knows damn well why he bothers. Because he cares about them. Because this is the only way.)
That’s before he discovers the truth about Altare. The truth about the curse.
The truth that comes when he fucking kills them all.
Kills them all except one.
“What the actual fuck, Altare?”
Dezmond holds Vesper’s rapier in one mechanical hand and one of Hakka’s spears in another. Altare deftly avoids each one.
“You’re too slow, Dez,” he hovers around the alchemist with a playful smirk, red horns glistening and glistening like ruby red shards in the light. “You didn’t finish me off, now look what’s happened.”
“Why did you do this to us?” Dezmond asks, infuriated. “Why didn’t you just move on? You think we wouldn’t have been better off dead if this was what being alive is about?”
“Don’t lie to me,” he sings and his red, red eyes throw Dezmond off-kilter like he’s in a sinking boat in the middle of an ocean.
He misses the green, he misses the times when the worst of his worries were if he’d get a sick tummy from eating Axel’s cooking. Not even his singing voice sounds the same.
This Altare is mocking, this Altare is cold.
“You would never let anything get in the way of what you wanted. Not even death. What changed, Dez?”
“You–!” With the strength of his additional arms he latches onto Altare’s legs, trying to drag him to the ground. He bashes the blunt end of each weapon against his head, but all it does is send sparks flying off his horns. “You did this on purpose! You want me to hate you! You want me to get mad at you enough to kill you! So I wouldn't hold back anymore! Why do you always think of other people before yourself!?”
Altare flings him into the nearest wall and Dezmond feels it so hard his metal arms singe and snap into pieces. His nerves sear with the shock of his shattered arms, but he has little time to recover. He sees Altare’s shadow loom over him.
He gets why Axel couldn’t deal the final blow. Altare’s face has always been far too kind – even when his eyes are cruel, and even when his sweet blue features turn red. The slimy, bouncy creatures (that are usually just as docile and friendly as their master, usually just as gracious as Regis Altare, the hero of Elysium) turn red with crimson rage.
Dezmond’s fingers twitch as he grabs for Vesper’s rapier, the only thing he can reach.
Vesper, he thinks to himself. Give me strength. Let me win this.
The demon god king Regis Altare smiles. “What’s wrong, Dez? Praying to Vesper before you join him?”
It’s bait, of course, and Dezmond is furious enough to fall for it. He knows the guild like the back of his hand, and Altare does, too. Altare knows how to ensnare him, knows how to push Dezmond to every limit. It's how he improves him, and how he corrupts him, too.
“You bastard,” Dez hisses, weapon already poised. He may not be a strong man, but he will not stop at anything to be victorious. After all, he has nothing left to lose. The only precious thing left is floating right above him with a chillingly deceptive smirk and there’s nothing else he can do to save it. “I’ll kill you!”
He no longer feels remorse after that.
Altare’s more resistant to death than he is, and it’s a fact that Dezmond hates, because he’s the type of guy that needs to be better than everyone in every way he can be, and there’s no way to improve at being better at being killed.
“Dez,” his leader murmurs. This time it’s a sword, long and sharp and deadly. Dezmond has gotten better at killing, at least, if he’s not allowed to be the best at being killed. “Stop it. It hurts.”
“That’s the point.”
“Please.” He beckons Dez with those big, green eyes of his. “Dezzy-Wezzy-Wezzy. You’re squashing me with your bodacious booty.”
“Good. Stay squashed.”
He thinks Altare must have tried every tactic under the sun.
“You know, I think you’re beautiful,” Altare says, as if that’s a normal thing to say to someone that’s got a sword to his neck. “You’re so hardworking and talented. I really admire you.”
“Don’t pull this shit.” Dez inches the blade closer. This, too, is familiar. Sometimes, Altare will try to charm himself out of death. A weaker Dezmond would have folded, but he’s seen this happen too many times for it to matter. “You won’t get a happy ending just because you’re nice to me, smartass.”
“Can’t say I didn’t try.” Altare sighs, but there’s a smile that lingers. Dez can tell the snarky compliment is getting to his head. Damn brat. He always chooses to focus on the itty bitty details. “You think I’m smart?”
“I think you need to shut up.” The blade touches his throat but does not yet draw blood.
Altare’s smile falters.
“You don’t have to do this, Dez. We can choose to change our fates. We can find a way out. You can choose not to kill me.”
“And, what? Let you win?”
“Dez,” Altare says quietly. It is not a plea or a demand, but something vaguely in between. “Haven’t you had enough of this?”
The truth is that he hasn’t.
Some part of him revels in that brief moment of power. When he’s in control of the narrative. There’s a consistency to this cycle that almost feels at home to him.
There’s a comfort to knowing that it all ends when one of them dies and they get another chance to live their lives with knowledge of what came before — in this, they get a glimpse of immortality.
He wonders if that’s what makes him a bad person.
“You’re not a bad person.” Altare swings his feet over the side of the short cliff and Dez bites back a remark about his feet not being able to touch the ground. It’s childish. It’s petty. It’s exactly the kind of stupid that his leader brings out in him.
“I betrayed you first.” Dez points out instead.
“Yeah, and then I betrayed you back. We got even.” Altare shrugs. “I think we’re still even on everything now.”
“I would have thought you wanted to win.”
“Not when it comes to this.”
“When does it end, huh?” His question is critical. “When does it end, Altare? If death doesn’t end it, what will?”
“Who knows,” his leader hums, knocking his shoulder lightly into Dezmond. “Maybe we’re stuck like this forever.”
“What if I just didn’t find you?”
“I’d be lonely.”
“That sounds like your own problem.”
“Guild TEMPUS would be without an alchemist.”
“You’d find someone else.”
“It wouldn’t be the same.” Altare looks over to him and Dez tries with all his spite not to look away. “I always try to find you. Even if I know what comes next.”
“Well, I need you out of my life so I can live my life.” He tells him gruffly.
“You can’t live without TEMPUS.” Altare says. It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. “Sometimes, you don’t even join your last guild. You just come straight to me.”
Dezmond takes a swig of copium, the sweet taste burning on his tongue. “Stop deluding yourself, man. It’s just a coincidence. A coinkydink, if you will.”
The air is still as he searches his leader’s face.
There’s no hint of malice, no ghost of a lie. He’s honest as honest can be. He has such a punchable little face, but at least it’s a familiar one.
As long as it’s you. In this life or the next. Dezmond thinks. I don’t think I mind, either.
“Any last words?” He says instead.
“Promise you won’t run from this anymore?” Altare asks hopefully, the lilt of a laugh on his tongue. “Otherwise, it’ll be my turn so watch out.”
Dez can only laugh back.
Maybe next time Altare will end it for both of them.
Maybe it’ll be a joke they tell at dinner parties.
Maybe he’ll live to finally see Northern Elysium with Axel, and decipher those ancient scrolls with Vesper. Maybe he’ll finally see Bettel run a show without a single tomato thrown, and maybe he’ll convince Flayon to let him eat sushi off his stomach – just once, just once.
Maybe he’ll get Hakka to teach him how to sweet-talk in Spanish, and Shinri to teach him to have a stomach of steel when it comes to anything that falls under the horror genre (or just how to make really fucking good coffee that’s not, like, sludgey in consistency).
Maybe he’ll get to spoil Altare on his birthday, because they always seem to miss the damn event due to the whole “killing each other” thing coming first. He stubbornly keeps buying the same gift every life just in case he can get it into his leader’s fidgety little hands.
They’ve suffered enough lifetimes that he’d forgive him if he chose to find peace, but if he wants to keep playing this game, Magni Dezmond will be prepared.
“I’m not going to let you kill me that easily.”
After all, he will always be part of Guild TEMPUS. In every single lifetime, he will find them.
Altare grins. “Bye-bye, Dez! See you next time!”
He brings the dagger down.