Chapter Text
“Aventurine, are you afraid of God?”
“No. But I’m afraid of you.”
“Let me tell you a little story, Mr Aventurine. It’s a little outlandish, but perhaps it’ll entertain you.”
Outside the casino, in a little quieter back alley, clean despite its wooden crates and metal parts, Aventurine encounters you. Your uniform says Dreamweaver and your physical appearance says, well, NPC. There’s almost nothing remarkable about you, but the black hole-like gravity that you somehow emanate as you dangles lollipop inside your mouth.
“I thought you didn’t like sweet,” Aventurine brandishes his confident smirk, recalling the occasion where he heard you asking the bartender to served you anything but sweet cocktails.
“Wow. You remember me.”
Aventurine’s smirk melts. “I’ve yet to see anyone so sad in Penacony.”
You glance at him, blinking slowly.
“Maybe you need sugar.”
“This is unsweetened peppermint cough drop—with stick.”
“Pity. Are you having a cold?” Aventurine turns his head to look at you. No one is sick inside the dream.
“No. I just—“
But there’s no continuation of what you started.
“I came from a place called Earth, Mr Aventurine. Have you ever heard of it?”
Aventurine blinks, “No.”
“Well.”
“What happened to Earth?” Aventurine’s brain jogs the memory of his own homeland…
“It cannibalised itself,” you finally, slowly, move your head to stare back into his eyes, giving him shivers. “But that’s a given, considering my kind kept repressing our loving, kind instinct for profit.”
“So you’re another Last of Your Kind, then?” Aventurine smirks again, though his lips slightly trembles.
But you don’t answer that question.
“I have to go back to my minimum wage work,” you say and leave.
*)*
Throughout the course of several weeks, he finds his way to that back alley, where sometimes you’d seem pissed to see him, sometimes you look… relieved.
“Do you not like me?” Aventurine decides to just ask.
“You’re too similar to me—and to my kind; deeply, deeply insecure. We thought that by getting things and keep betting—keep gambling—we’d be safe. But that is not the way, Mr Aventurine. That is why God punishes me to never end.”
“Surely, there is no ‘God’? Aeon, might be…”
“It’s not like I mind,” you pull the cough drop-lollipop outside your mouth, “At some point, maybe after a billion of billion years, I’ll feel punished enough I’ll finally crawl out of this state. But that time is yet to come.”
“Well. Good luck to your long journey… [your name].”
“How do you know my name?”
“It’s on your staff ID on your chest sometimes.”
“My. I’m flattered,” you look at him, touched and heartbroken at the same time.
(In that moment, at the heightened nanosecond that is also a suspended, never-ending forever, he's seeing you and you are seeing him. The pain and the pleasure mingles, one, and perhaps never been separate to begin with; two sides of the same coin. In that moment, a connection was made, as he gazes at you and wonders...
Why do you like like you want to cry and laugh out of joy so much?)
And that is the very look Aventurine thinks back as he steps into his final stage in Penacony.
… Where are you?
Are you going to be fine?
Will you miss him and the time you both shared in that back alley?
Are you really going to live for that long?
Will he see you again, some other time, somehow…?
But, hey, he met you.
Sometimes, some people breeze past you like a cool wind over your sweat; very much welcomed, but only last a blink of an eye.
*)*
So, then, he steps into the black hole.
He can almost feels the light of the aventurine stone disappears in the realm he left behind.
Yet, the very person who stands before him, a leap away, is you.
“It’s… not possible for you to be here,” Aventurine gulps, his eyes wide, “Did Acheron also send you here?”
You shake your head. “No. But God did.”
“’God’…? Again? Surely your God cannot be this powerful.”
“Unfortunately,” you sigh and stand up, pulling an empty white plastic stick where your cough drop resided, “But you better eat.”
“Eat?!” Aventurine raises his eyebrows.
“Aren’t you hungry? Death isn’t easy for anyone. But… that wasn’t so bad, was it?” you, finally, give him a smile after those long weeks of his work in Penacony.
And it feels like coming home.
He shakes his head and smiles, too.
“No.
“No, it wasn’t so bad.”