Archive of Our Own ^beta

Pac is kind.

Which is – dreadful to realise. Makes everything more complicated. Because now – now, it's not so easy to ignore him; not so easy to pretend he doesn't know what's going on.

“Etoiles, whoa! That was, like, crazy! Like – what?”

The field is empty, the last monster having been killed not even a minute ago. The marks left by its body falling to the ground just before it disintegrated are still very much visible; Etoiles can hear its screams echoing against his tympanic cavity as loudly as if it were still there – still baring its teeth to tear him apart.

Even with his eyes closed, things keep falling.

“I mean, I just did my job,” he says.

He goes for a laid-back attitude, affects composure by leaning on the handle of his scythe. The blood dripping from the steel only makes him flinch a little, but it's his breathing, heavy and laboured and definitely not calm at all that gives the whole thing away: he could've lost his life back then.

Everything seems erratic these days. Attacks are becoming more frequent and the mobs are always stronger than the previous strike. He has the feeling he's being targeted, and it's not so exciting anymore.

“Yep. That's it. My job,” he repeats, his speech rate slightly faster than usual. "Just another day at the office."

His eyes follow the thin crimson streak that is seeping through the grass as he speaks. The sight of it unsettles him more than it should, but he's not exactly sure why.

It's just – the sudden raids used to make him ecstatic. Euphoric, even. Diverted the penchant for self-sabotage nestled in his core. He'd do somersaults, backflips and shit whenever a monster randomly popped up before him, because, fucking finally – his mind could focus on beating up something other than himself. But now –

He's – bothered. Distressed. Can't show it, though.

You're the bodyguard, after all.

“I'm sure killing thirty mobs in a row is not part of security's job,” Pac chirps. “It's like – the army's or something.” Even now, he has the grace to humour him – of course he does.

Etoiles' half-laugh fades into the gleeful screams of the other islanders. “You're a legend, Pac. But now you're just flattering me.”

Letting out an exaggerated sigh, he swings his scythe over his shoulder. Looks up to the sky, where the sun's slowly disappearing behind the leaves of the dark oaks surrounding them.

Better leave this place before dusk. Nightmares at their door if they don't.

Oh, but he's so fucking tired.

“Well, ahem. Maybe –”

Etoiles' gaze falls back on the man speaking in front of him, and his eyes catch the last rays of light on Pac's face. The red colour splashing his cheeks looks nothing like the blood staining his soles; a bit more like a line of code gone wrong. Etoiles shouldn't find solace in that. (And yet.)

“Maybe someone needs to.” A fleeting look, a scratch on the back of the neck; Pac's an ellipsis that always leaves him wondering if there's something more to it.

A series of a million ready-made replies scroll through Etoiles' head. There are many excuses he can find to hide the trouble he's feeling now: the rush of the moment, the pretence of being out of breath. But none of these would explain why he suddenly has to overcome the urge to grab a piece of his skin and peel it apart.

“Ah, thank you, man. But I don't think I deserve all the praise. Philza helped a lot too,” he says lightly.

At least he's good at that. Good at not disturbing the air around him, taking so, so little space not to be seen as what he is: an intruder. Someone they'd all be better off without. They've never said it, not to his face, but he knows – he's draped in a far too large shadow that obscures every place he goes.

Still – people are nice to him. They welcome him into the conversation on the rare times he decides that avoiding social contact for too long is probably not healthy, and they only ignore him four times out of ten. They gladly coo at the new weapons he's showing off because they know he's fishing for some compliments. They give him stuff when he asks. They're nice.

“Philza did great,” Pac concedes. “But I wanted to tell you. You were amazing. Really, I mean it.”

There's a private smile haunting his lips that short-circuits all the wires Etoiles's made from sentence structures.

Etoiles doesn't know what to do with himself. If it were someone else – Antoine, Kameto, fuck, even Forever – he'd brush it off. Scoff, snarl, bite, stop it, man, what's next, you're going to suck my dick or what?

Others, he'd stroke their ego right back,

thank you, thank you, you're amazing too, here, take this, take this,

shower them with diamonds, gapples, emeralds –

anything to shut them up in the most courteous way and hide the fact that he has to < externalise/delete/sanitise > what lands too close to his focal point.

But this is Pac he's facing here. Pac, who is kind, like, real kind. That requires reactions he's never been trained for. Because – kindness and niceness are two different things altogether. Belong to completely separate reference frames.

Etoiles's not an expert, but he's developed a theory or two about that. He likes to ponder over everything, and he has a lot of time to. When he wanders alone in the wild, when it gets really, really dark and the outside starts to look an awful lot like the pitch-black matter nibbling at his brain, he thinks – about life and death, and the myriads of things that link the two together. He thinks about the Federation, about the eggs, the island and what it means to belong somewhere.

He thinks about nice people, sometimes. The way they probably gloat over the fact that they're nice. He pictures them looking at themselves in the mirror every morning and beaming at their reflection, wearing the shiny teeth and fucking crinkled eyes of nice people. He thinks they're nice because they want people to call them nice. And they always expect something in return.

Pac is nothing like that. He doesn't talk to him just because he has to comply with some sort of mechanical politeness – he talks to him because he actually wants to. Wants to spend time with him. It doesn't make much sense, but nothing that Pac does really do.

(Etoiles's tried to understand. He's shaped the island into a closed system that he can analyse, every component a piece that can be dismantled and dissected. He's got a mind for it: finding the tooth that blocks the entire gear train. But Pac remains the one elusive variable in an ocean of constants.)

“Also. Your – your hair,” Pac adds tentatively. “It looks good like that. Just so you know. Very warrior-y.”

Then, a beat later, “Do you look the same after a dungeon?”

Etoiles squints behind his mask. His forehead's wet, white strands sticking to his skin because of the sweat, and his clothes are all crumpled. He must look like shit, he knows he does, and yet – in the reflection glistening over Pac's eyes, he sees no trace of ugliness.

Something glitches on the left side of his chest. This can't be good. He usually goes out of his way to keep things light and pretend not to get any attempt at – whatever Pac's doing. Flirting. Going for his guts. But Pac's becoming bolder, and it's making him feel more on edge than thirty codes combined.

“I don't know? I guess Mike did a nice job with the haircut,” he says, and thinks stupid, stupid, stupid. The words disconnect as soon as they go past his tongue, a defect threatening to freeze his brain. Fuck, he has to leave before he's damaged for good.

He takes out his warp stone with a trembling hand and an equally shaking BPM. Mumbles something like okayyy, man, nice talking to you but I gotta go, of course he'll come back later, see you. A last concealed nod, and he teleports to his base. He's not sure Pac's even heard him.

Not his proudest moment, but, shit.

People on the island are nice.

Pac is kind.

Etoiles is neither of those two.

—

Pac likes him.

Etoiles knows this as certainly as he knows Pac will never tell him. Sees it in the stares. The stuttering. The excited movements of the hands that trace the same three words over and over again without ever spelling them out.

It's a bit sickening – how Pac is generous in that way, and how he gives his love freely without even waiting for something as small as a palm that touches back.

He'd say: “Whoa, your stuff is incredible. You're really impressive.”

Or: “Pomme is so lucky to have a father as strong as you to teach her PVP.”

Or: “You're so kind, I don't have the words to thank you.” (A stupid thing to say because Etoiles is not kind.)

But this – he won't tell him.

He probably thinks he's doing Etoiles a favour by keeping quiet, but the truth is – it's too much for him to bear. He doesn't deserve this – this unconditional trust that expands beyond any system he's so carefully defined and disrupts the rotation of all the gears.

So perhaps Pac's not as kind as he thought. Perhaps he's cruel, and merciless, and a little mean.

He could put an end to it, maybe. Tell Pac he doesn't feel that way so that they can both move on from whatever this is, but, please, you're the best, let's stay friends.

But Etoiles's a shitty person. One of the selfish kind. And he needs the attention – needs to hear that he's done well, and that he's liked. Needs to know that one person on the island will care if he disappears completely.

He's not sure if he likes being with Pac so much as he hates losing the convenience of having him around.

It's not – it's not like Pac drives the shadow away when he's there. He doesn't. Doesn't make him forget about its weight either. But in his presence, the heaviness does not seem so bad after all.

And the scary thing is – Pac probably knows this too.

—

“Oh, you are very blind,” is the first thing Pac says after putting on his glasses.

They're alone, which means they're at a party, but they're standing a few feet away from the rest of the group. Etoiles avoids facing Pac on his own as much as he can. Only talks to him during these kinds of gatherings, where there are people around to use as an excuse to escape – hey, they could be eavesdropping – wait, BadBoy's calling. The method may verge on borderline cowardice, but it's never failed him so far.

He's aware of how maniac this all sounds. He doesn't like it either, but he wouldn't have to do to this if it wasn't for the whole Pac-liking-him problem. Because – it's one thing to be the focus of someone's attention; it's quite another to come to terms with it. And Etoiles can't even begin to fathom it.

“Yeah, yeah, I can't see shit without them. Can I have them back, now?” he asks tamely, off-beat humour laced with seriousness, because he has no idea how else he's supposed to act around Pac when it's just the two of them together.

With other people nearby, it's easy to stay on the light side of the conversation. Easy not to stray too far from the pre-set instruction sequence, where all is safe and nothing hurts; Etoiles holds every option close to his fingertips, ready to activate them without having to think twice about it.

But when they're alone – he has to carefully plan each action step. Choose the right buttons to push. The right tone to use. It's a constant exercise in maintaining a certain balance between not giving Pac any hope while still keeping him entertained.

There. This is where the tricky part lies: the possibility of Pac losing interest in him terrifies him a little.

“I don't know, I really enjoy the feeling. It's like I'm high. Like I've stepped into another dimension or something,” Pac singsongs as he moves even further away from the group, which makes Etoiles pinch the bridge of his nose.

In retrospect, he can only blame himself for this course of events. He did let this happen. One minute they were chatting with the others by the bonfire – fuck, they weren't even talking to each other, but then – Pac turned to him and asked him about his glasses.

Now, Etoiles had practically forgotten he had them on. He doesn't wear them very often, prefers the comfort of the black mask that hides half of his face (but also, ergonomic matters – he's a fighter before anything else). The point is: Etoiles was taken by surprise, and he was the one who was dumb enough to blurt out, “Do you want to try them out?”

So – Pac fluttering his eyes at the question, glancing at Mike before beaming right at him – he should have expected it. Should have anticipated the deference tainted with excitement when Pac took the frames he had put in his hands, and how he wouldn't just wear them but insist on conducting an experiment in actu – because, you see, Etoliê, I'm a scientist.

And Etoiles couldn't argue with that; he'd resolved to follow him, watching Pac from afar as the latter discovered a new world made of blurry vines and vibrating jungle trees.

“You know what would be cool?” Pac asks, suddenly stopping in the middle of a clearing.

They've been walking for a good couple of minutes, reducing the bonfire to a speck of gold in the distance. Etoiles tries not to see it as a crisis situation.

“It'd be great you let me wear your glasses once we do a dungeon. I think I'd spot aaaall the hidden chests with those on – wait, are those strawberry candies?”

Letting out a satisfied a-ha!, Pac crouches down to inspect the poppies at his feet. He puts on a really good show, Etoiles must admit – peering more closely at the red petals and pretending hard not to care about what he just said, like this is just another insignificant thought uttered oh-so spontaneously.

And Etoiles's not an idiot. He recognises what Pac's doing, what he wants to hear. Pac's a crafter, just like him. And where Etoiles puts painstaking effort into building defences out of algorithms, Pac works with meticulous precision to erode them one by one.

Somehow, Etoiles still has enough control not to give him exactly what he's waiting for.

“But, Pac, I have a question,” he eludes. “Why, why are you acting like this is the first time you see someone wearing prescription glasses? You go 'Wow, this is the strangest thing I've seen in my whole life' like your best friend doesn't exist?”

He mentally high-fives himself for this move.

Yeah, he's quite proud of that one.

Pac shakes his head and gets up. “It's different with Mike. He's asthmatic.”

“…You mean astigmatic?”

“Yes, yes, that,” Pac nods eagerly. “I mean, sure, his sight is bad. But yours? Pretty terrible if you ask me.”

This earns him a genuine laugh from Etoiles. “Oh, bah, great. So, I'm kind enough to lend you my glasses, but all you do in return is criticise me? Okay, okay, bah, I'll just go fuck myself th–”

But the rest of the sentence just – breaks down – when Pac. Leans closer to him. Takes off the glasses and puts them back on Etoiles' nose.

A symphony of 422-error alarms erupts inside his brain.

He needs to find a panic room. Right now.

“Are you blushing?” Pac's head is slightly tilted to his left. Fuck him, honestly.

“What?” Etoiles sneers. “I have green skin, of course I'm not blushing.”

Pac hums, and the slight vibrato in his voice makes Etoiles want to bite into a dark iron ingot.

They don't do this. Touch. Get close to each other. He's got no buttons to press for this scenario. He's fucking helpless without his tools, it's mortifying. Has to fight back the impulse to take out his shovel, dig deep beneath him and bury himself ten or twenty blocks underneath the surface.

Pac's lower lip juts out almost imperceptibly.

“You would face ten binary entities all alone without any totem,” he muses.

Still not retracting, still not taking a step back.

Etoiles swallows, hard. There might be approximately sixteen centimetres, four millimetres and seven micrometres between their two faces and Pac. Won't. Flinch.

“You would go to war against the Federation to save those who matter to you,” he goes on, steadfast and immobile. Only his pupils are moving, searching for something on Etoiles' face. His eyes are so big, Etoiles wonders if they see the shadow hovering above him. Wonders if Pac's at least a bit frightened by the sight of it.

He looks over his own shoulder just in time to spot the tip of a black membrane curling up against itself.

He thinks he can hear someone sigh.

“But you won't hold my gaze for more than three seconds,” Pac concludes.

And it sounds so vulnerable, so disgustingly definitive – Etoiles' eyebrows shoot up. Probably because he hadn't braced himself for something this straightforward. But then again, it's Pac he's dealing with.

He feels the shadow tighten around his neck at an unbearably slow pace.

He could prove Pac wrong. Defy him, chin up. But he's nothing if not a disaster in the making, and he's getting – a little choked up, literally.

“Euh, I think the others are starting to eat,” he says lamely, when they both know they're too far to hear anything.

He might become a pro at it: slipping away from intangible fears and monsters without claws.

—

Etoiles doesn't bother to sharpen the blade as he waits for Forever to come. To do so would imply he sees it as more than a joke, and this must all remain very unserious. He won't hold any grudge – he won't. Swear.

He's just – a bit upset, that's it. He knew he wouldn't win the elections (being pessimistic really is the trick to prevent disappointment) but – getting less than thirty percent of the votes stings a little. He doesn't know what he did wrong, honestly.

Or rather: he doesn't know what more he could have done.

Like – he'd given people all the resources they needed. He'd protected the eggs. He'd fought the code. Three times. And he'd excelled at the game of playing nice. But it wasn't enough. He wasn't enough.

He sends the message, and believes seventy percent of it.

A part of him is convinced that they could run down the simulation a thousand times more and he would lose in every case still. No matter how hard he'd try, the others would probably never fully trust him anyway. And he can't even resent them for that: he lives in a flesh that is not as – alive – as them. Everything he does has the words “not human enough” plastered all over it, each of his actions being either too much or off the mark.

Meaning: < unreliable/unsafe/unfit >. Nature can be unforgiving like that.

Etoiles snickers at that: guilt tripping does feel kind of good.

He should be ashamed to resort to such a device, but it's either that or he'll get too much in his head. He already senses the shadow seeping inside his body through cracks carved by self-doubt and bitterness, feels it webbing threads over his skull to silently guide his path towards destruction; if he needs to get a little nasty to contain its further expansion, so be it. He'll get a kick out of making the others feel bad about what they've done in the meantime. King him.

< externalise/delete/sanitise >

The reflection he sees glistening on the blade wears a lopsided grin.

He's doing them a favour, really.

He could play it cool, bottle up his emotions instead and let them consume him from within – let the shadow unfurl in secret if he wanted. He has the sword and he has the hand; it would be so easy to become the villain. Burn down the favelas, kill all the eggs – I thought N.I.N.H.O would hold out a bit longer, Mr President. Let the code take over – see if he cares.

All it'd take is a system reboot, some adjustments to the settings. More features of a killer; less of a pushover. It would be a matter of seconds – he wouldn't feel anything, and it all fucking makes him want to scream with frustration because he knows he will never flip the switch.

Call him merciful or call him gutless: he's spent too much time fighting the shadow to give up now. It wouldn't be – logical. Or rational.

At any rate, he's always liked danger better when it's directed at himself.

He's about to head down to the dungeon he's localised on his map (scythe: check; spite: check) when a string of notifications pop up, signalling he's received four new messages in a row.

He raises his brows as he discovers who the sender is.

If Etoiles's embarrassed by the chuckle that escapes his lips, the light buzz pulsing through his body all the while nullifies the humiliation tenfold.

Maybe he'll spare Pac as long as he's busy being an asshole.

—

“You know there's a high chance we'll never do a dungeon together, right?”

It's meant to sound casual. Like trivial talk at the coffee machine, or words exchanged at the crosswalk just before the lights turn green; a silent agreement that what is being said right now will be forgotten the minute you both walk out of the place.

Don't think about it too much.

Don't waste your breath.

Etoiles shifts three times on the dead trunk they're sitting on and fails miserably to do just that.

“Like – a hiiiigh chance,” he adds. “At least a ninety percent chance.”

They're alone – again. But like, really alone. Something that is happening more and more regularly; Pac, him and the void, the setting becoming all too familiar.

Etoiles is as pleased by this recurring occurrence as he is terrified of it. It doesn't make him want to step out of his own skin anymore, but the alternative is just as disturbing. It's like his body has acclimatised to a virus that shouldn't even be there, and redesigned itself to accommodate it. Which is bound to lead to a false sense of security.

Saying shit like this is just one evidence among many.

Pac sits up a bit straighter. “I mean, yes? Well, no. I – uh. I don't –”

Etoiles watches as he swings one leg after the other, awkwardness apparent in each move he makes. Ten attempts at sentences go by and Pac doesn't reach the end of a single one.

This is weird. Wasn't always so. Takes Etoiles back to a time when he was the one leading the conversation and would fluster Pac at every thing he did without even meaning to. All firewalls were working perfectly fine, back then.

Strangely enough, the prospect of going back to this configuration doesn't settle well in his stomach.

“It's not because I don't want to!” he's quick to explain, and his eyes are pleading, please smile again.

He bites the inside of his cheek – hard. He should leave it there. But –

“Well, part of me doesn't want to, I guess. I just don't like the idea of people knowing,” he adds, and he immediately sees how it's going to go, how he'll get bogged down in muddy explanations he won't be able to get out of. “They all expect it and it's overwhelming. You know, when everyone says 'hey, you should do this', and this is the only thing you can hear, and you feel like you have no space left in your brain to think for yourself?”

His hands tighten against the rotten wood. He has to – make sure he still has some grip on the compact world. The bark presses into his palms, scratches his skin and yet he feels nothing but his head; overheating.

Perhaps, then, this – talking, letting all out – is the only means his body has found to regulate the temperature: by ejecting the burning issue. Because he just. Can't shut the fuck up. He avoided the topic for so long, filed it in the Do Not Touch section of his read-only memory, but now that he's taken it out of its dusty corner, it's like – all the data he's worked so hard to cautiously assemble and organise is flowing and flowing out of his mouth unchecked – scattering all over the place with no way to keep track of it.

He's the first-class passenger of a bullshit train that is derailing off course at breakneck speed. The crash is inevitable.

“This is how I feel sometimes. Most of the time.”

In the brief moment between the rails and the wall, the image of Pomme and Richas flashes to his mind. He wonders where they are. He swears they were there not too long ago – remembers that this is why Pac and he met up in the first place, yes!, it was to watch over the eggs and complete their daily quests. Surely he wouldn't have gone down this road if they hadn't left. He would've kept playing hide-and-seek, or whatever they were doing – he would've kept his mouth shut. So this really is their fault, in a way.

When Pomme and Richas come back, he'll break them in pieces and throw the remains on the ground. Maybe this will teach him how to walk on eggshells, at last.

But shit – Baghera will kill him for that joke, no doubt.

“And also. There's Mike. That would be weird for you without him, no?” he says very fast just before the –

Screeching. Collision. Burn.

Etoiles purses his lips, waits for the blow. But Pac only giggles.

“How dare you insinuate I am not my own person?”

He stretches out his arms behind himself on the trunk, and Etoiles knows from his tone that he's half joking, but it's the half that isn't that reminds him just how not casual this conversation actually is.

There's hesitancy in that one; Etoiles understands the underlying vulnerability sugarcoated by Pac's brightness. Recognises it as his own.

It hadn't occurred to him that, in laying out his concerns in broad daylight, his stupid feelings would bruise someone else in the process; that his own crash would cause collateral damage. But the possibility that he hurt Pac is unacceptable.

He leans back, his worry melting into something gentle. He wants to reassure Pac, but not in the same way he does with everyone, asserting, guys, don't panic, it's easy, I got that covered before drawing his sword and chopping down monsters. This is a want that comes from a place that is more private, more personal – before that, only Pomme made him feel this way.

“I'm sorry! Of course, of course you are. I don't know why I said that.”

And: “I guess I'm just scared you won't like it,” he admits. “We've talked about doing this dungeon so many times, you'd probably be disappointed if you saw it.”

He's aware of how hypocritical it sounds. He's explored dungeons with the others before, and he never gave it so much as a second thought. But it's not the same – it wasn't with him. There's a difference between these dungeons and this dungeon.

He can't tell him that.

Even with his gaze fixed on the trees before them, he knows Pac's tilting his head. (Since the glasses incident, Etoiles's discovered he tends to do that a lot.) Trying not to glance at him, he listens to fabric rustling and sliding as Pac brings his prosthetic leg closer to his chest, rests his chin on the metallic knee and stares.

It bothers Etoiles a little, how even when he's talking rubbish, Pac listens to him with care, with intent. Like Etoiles's explaining how when you look at the nearest star in the sky, you see it as it was four years ago because that's how long it takes for its light to reach your eyes, or something.

“I don't think I would,” Pac says eventually.

The contrast between his voice, upbeat and inconsequential, and the depth of his words takes Etoiles aback; manages to make him look back at Pac.

He seems a lot less tense now, if the roundness around his eyes that is so very Pac is any indication. But there's still half a second's hang-up betrayed by a neck spasm when he swallows.

Etoiles doesn't let his gaze linger too long around the curve.

“You don't understand,” he mutters. “I'm not talking about an actual dun– what I'm saying is –”

“I know what you're saying. And I'm telling you. I wouldn't feel disappointed.”

During his journey into the night, Etoiles's had time to make the dark his own. Sees the shadow almost everywhere he goes.

Yet, at this moment, how deeply his vision appears stained by the shades of a blue hoodie.

—

Pac is older than him – he tends to forget that. There's a year of difference between them. It's not much but it still counts. When it comes to mending cuts, it counts.

So Pac's been around longer than Etoiles; meaning that he's been more hurt than him. It's math. Maybe he's lost more people too. Watched them die before his eyes, buried them in hostile lands. Wondered how, after everything that happened, he managed to survive.

It doesn't really matter now.

What matters is: Pac knows the importance of taking care of the living.

That's something far removed from Etoiles' realm of consideration. And he knows a lot of things: the hottest pepper on the Scoville Scale; the exact coordinates for Point Nemo; the name of the first nomadic capital of the Mongol Empire, and how even though he's got a list of past mistakes the size of Interstate 95, there's still someone that awaits for him at the end of the road – he's got a database for at least 1,127 subjects like these ones.

Etoiles knows a lot of things. But the living matter – body tissue, cells, heart – is not part of it.

After all, his mission's always been death, both as an executioner and as a fugitive. He's never had to fret about what comes after. Kill or die: everything stops when the fight is over. Only blood remains.

So he's good at crafting weapons to kill. He's good at slaying mobs. But healing – not so much.

“I promise you, it's nothing. Just a scratch.”

His mouth aches at every word it forms. His mind feels a little cloudy, and he only faintly hears Pac opening the doors of the upper cabinets one after another from the other side of the bathroom, searching for whatever he needs among all the vials Mike and he have amassed over the last few months.

Etoiles' teeth sink into his lower lip. If he hadn't been hurting this much, he would've probably panicked at the idea of being here – in Pac's house, that is (which is as much Mike's, but right now, Pac's magnitude is swallowing up everything else).

In Pac's house, then, sitting on the edge of Pac's bathtub.

And sure, they've now met in private a good amount of times. So being with Pac alone isn't the problem here. The problem is – whenever it happened, it was always outside. Read: in the open, where mobility isn't restricted. Where there's enough space between the trees for Etoiles to < run/escape/vanish >.

Not that he's felt the need to recently – he hasn't for weeks. Still, it's good to have an exit route, just in case everything goes to shit.

But in this bathroom –

He's surrounded by walls, sleek and cold, that don't let you get a grip on it. He's spotted one (one!) window, high up near the ceiling, and it seems to open only halfway, just enough to let out the steam. Then there's the door, of course, but Pac's in the way; and even if Etoiles manages to get out of the room, there'd still be more – more rooms, more corridors, more doors.

He's trapped, in the most matryoshkan kind of way. And it's alarming because – he can't bring himself to worry about it. Not when every organism in his body is screaming < pain/pain/pain >.

“Okayyy, I got everything, I think!” Pac says, head emerging triumphantly from a cabinet and hands full of small bottles and cotton pads.

Etoiles eyes him suspiciously as he places everything he's found at the foot of the bathtub. He's pretty sure that whatever Pac's got in mind for him will hurt like a bitch, and he has to remind himself that he's walked in there willingly – even if his will was partly unconscious and fright-induced.

He holds back a groan when a new twinge of pain shoots up to his shoulder. From the corner of his eye, he spots a half-millimetre-deep tear the size of a diamond stretching across his left forearm. Courtesy of a zombie, if he remembers correctly.

Which is ridiculous, and frankly – a bit shameful. Zombies aren't even in the top ten of the most dangerous creatures in the island.

The dungeon was a bitch, though. A lot of mobs to fight and nothing to loot. Etoiles made the mistake of underestimating it. Didn't take enough potions of healing with him, discarded his shield. Let the monsters come too close.

He'd resisted, at first; the unreleased anger he thought he'd got rid of had kicked in and kept him moving, fuelled by a dash of self-depreciation. He had fought, because that's what he was good at: cleaning dungeons. And if that was taken away from him, he wouldn't have anything else to claim as his own. This was inconceivable.

He only had two hearts left when he realised he wouldn't make it to the top floor alive.

“Alright, let's clean the bruise first,” Pac announces, holding a bar of soap.

“But you use alcohol for that, no?” Etoiles grimaces.

Pac shakes his head. “We need to wash the dirt and bacteria first. Anything else would only damage the skin and increase the risk of infection.”

Under Etoiles' wide-eyed gaze, he chuckles. “When you're as clumsy as I am and prone to hurt yourself, this is like, basic knowledge to acquire. Plus, I already told you I was a scientist.”

Etoiles can only nod as Pac rolls up his torn sleeve and starts rubbing wet soap against his skin.

Pac's hands are desperately soft; Etoiles wouldn't have guessed, given how much time he spends building stuff. He cleans his wound with a carefulness that could bend dark metal, and he mutters excuses each time Etoiles winces. Shoots him an apologetic look at every twitch. Etoiles wants to tell him he's the one who should feel sorry the most; sorry for barging in here, he wants to say, sorry for being such a mess and wetting the bathroom tiles.

In the small mist of condensation, with his glasses fogging up by the minute, it's difficult to rearrange his thoughts into something legible; the blur spreads out from the dungeon door to this bathroom. He remembers that he needed someone's help. He remembers Mike opening the door, raising an eyebrow when he saw him and calling for Pac. He remembers the ache.

What he doesn't remember is choosing Pac. Why, of all people, he decided to knock at his place. He wants to believe it was a decision motivated by reason only: Pac had already lost a limb, and he was still fine with it – he would know better than anyone how to treat injuries.

But that would be a bold, fat lie: Etoiles would have chosen Pac anyway. And if he doesn't remember it, it's probably because the option has somehow made its way into his system and engraved itself in it – he had simply executed the process without thinking. Perfect body memory.

“You know, if I were with you in this dungeon, I wouldn't have let that happen.”

Pac's applied a clean gauze against the bruise, and his words are as firm as his grip on Etoiles' arm.

Etoiles looks at him, and Pac looks right back. There's a confident gravity in his eyes, like he's daring Etoiles to deny it.

Funny, Etoiles thinks, because it's a side of Pac that he isn't familiar with. In the few months he's spent getting to know him, he's discovered how cheerful, sweet and caring Pac is. And he knows how flirtatious, mischievous and cunning he can be. But not – not this. It makes him realise there's probably a dozen of other dimensions of Pac he doesn't have any idea of, and it's humbling in the most terrifying definition of the term.

“Oh, yeah? Name ten mobs you can find in a dungeon first.”

“What? Are you really trying to gatekeep dungeons right now?” Pac brings his hand to his chest, his face the perfect picture of offence. They share an amused smile.

So that's a thing they do now, Etoiles supposes – sharing dungeon jokes. He tries not to delve too much into what it could mean.

“Do you bleed water?”

Pac instantly bites his lip, like he regrets asking this. “Sorry, I – I don't mean to pry. It's just – when I washed your cuts, I saw –”

“Yes, yes,” Etoiles shrugs. “Being an anthropomorphic cucumber does that to people sometimes.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

“Is it weird?” Etoiles asks hesitantly.

“Why would it be weird?”

“You know. Not very human.”

Through his fogged-up glasses, Etoiles sees the many shapes of Pac shift and deviate for half a minute before coming together into a single sentence. “I don't know, you feel very human to me.”

He goes silent again, and Etoiles feels like he's turned into a giant temple throbbing inside the bathroom.

“How can you say that?” he murmurs.

He blinks, surprised at himself for having said that out loud. Awkwardly explains, “All I did was giving you some stuff. And it's so, so easy for me to do that, to craft things and hand it out to everyone – not just you – everyone, but you keep everything I give you like some sort of sacred relics.”

His fingers thread through his hair wearily. The shadow, forgotten and relegated to a corner, is looming against the walls. It might take him away any minute. Or maybe he'll implode before that.

“And it's not like you even need these weapons in the first place," he continues. "I saw you fight, Pac. In the dungeon with all the others, you didn't die, not once. So how can you say I feel human to you when I'm, at most, a dropper of useless items?”

He's gone through and through this question in his head only to find out he couldn't be satisfied with a vague this-is-just-how-it-is answer anymore. It's not logical – not for him, not for someone who feels compelled to always prove his worth to everyone, to provide for others so he can finally be acknowledged as a person.

Pac doesn't even need him, and yet, it's under his gaze that Etoiles feels the most validated; the inconsistency is excruciating. 

Pac's hands fiddle with the pockets of his trousers.“You make me happy,” he says at last, like it all comes down to this. “There's not much to it.”

“A taser could make you happy, and it's not exactly human,” Etoiles mumbles.

Pockets. Trousers. Frustrated, frustrated sigh.

“You're looking for answers, but I don't have any," Pac tries. "I don't – analyse stuff like you do. Like – I just see your name pop up and it makes me feel giddy, and I can't explain it.” A pause. “Wait. This is embarrassing. Pretend I didn't say that.”

He pulls on the two drawstrings of his sweatshirt to tighten the hood and hide his face behind it.

Etoiles laughs. Then, after a while, offers a faint: “Thank you for the dressing, man.”

“Yeah, well, you know. I'd do it any time,” is the reply that comes out of the hood.

Etoiles feels his cheeks heating up at that.

He's always leaned more towards a Dostoevskean way of thinking – convinced that happiness could only come from suffering; close brushes with death and narrow escapes. He's spilled his guts so many times on the floor because of it, and it took several hours and several years for him to figure out happiness could also be this: this certainty that someone braver than him will pick them up and stitch them back together again.

He's glad Pac can't see him right now.

—

“That's for me?”

Pac's eyes grow two sizes bigger the instant Etoiles shows up at his door. Etoiles nods, the new sword he's crafted shining brightly against the first light of dawn.

Pac slides his thumb along the edge. “And it's sharpness… huh…”

“Six. This time, it's really six.”

“Wow, thank you so much,” Pac giggles. “But why are you giving me this?”

Etoiles lifts his mask just enough to flash him a playfully-raised brow. He bites back a smile, hardly managing to contain his dizziness. It oozes from every one of his pores, anyway.

“Well,” he says. “If you're coming to a dungeon with me, you better be prepared.”

He hands him the weapon, a mute let's go? piercing the exchange. The handle's turned towards Pac's hoodie and the point right at his own chest; the answer silently waits in the space of their palms.

Pac takes the sword and grins.