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No one is needed.
Not really,
People are wanted, missed, wished for even, but needed? Oscar considered the mere idea of it laughable. “Need” is too intense of a word to be used to refer to someone else, “need” is for basic necessities, for survival and no one is that irreplaceable.
Sometimes, in the rare not as bad days, Wilde would think of Grizzop in a normal non self-destructive way and maybe he would even smile a bit, wonky and sincere, thinking about how their view on needs might’ve been the one thing the two of them agreed on.
Or could have agreed on.
He never actually knew Grizzop that well and for all the goblin talked and lived for practicality he was also deep down a very caring person with a big soft heart, paladins and their goodness or something. Not to mention Grizzop was full of surprises and especially good at catching Wilde off guard.
Besides, they would not actually have agreed. After all, Oscar believed in “need as a means for survival” as much as he did any of his other motos and “absolute truths”. So not at all.
Because maybe he had always been impractical, maybe he had always been an idealist, a poet first and a meritocratic agent second. Maybe his true nature - or as close as he would ever get to one - was in the lover of small pleasures, of finesse, on his belief in the value of pretty useless things and his knowledge of how they could be turned into powerful statements when used the right way. And maybe he had needed people before, kept needing them even after they left (by death’s hand or just … going away).
If so, that meant his mottos had to be lies, and while the bard was a certified liar, he was not one for pointless lies. Yes, he played with the truth often enough but his purposeful ambiguity, his fantastical tales and pretty falsities all had some form of end goal. In this case the objective was clear: a lovely cover up to distract and protect him from the painful truth that he wasn’t needed.
No. That’s not the real actual truth either.
He isn’t stupid. He spent most of his life followed by the sound of different people in different times going “Oscar, Oscar, Oscar”. Mostly by people that didn’t like him (he preferred to be disliked, he would say to himself, when you are disliked it is easier to lie because no one actually cares that much). There were always requests, someone needs help to study for a text or a presentation (or more likely they wanted to cheat from him), someone needs him to handle a team, to go on a mission again and again and again, to decrypt messages, to save the world. And he does it, because someone has too.
Oscar knows he is needed but only as long as the need is followed by “for something”. No one needs him for his sole presence, it is not about him, they ask him first because he is hardworking and will say “yes” for pretty much anything but if he had disappeared … people would just look for someone else.
No one needs him and very few people even tolerate him even less like him and he is fine, really, is okay, he is fine, he is always fine.
And still.
Zolf looks at him and it’s not fine. Wilde needs in the way that it is pathetic and ridiculous because the world is ending and they are all going to die and Oscar needs Zolf except Oscar’s needs are meaningless and there is no time for them anyway. So he bottles it all up and keeps going.
And still.
Zolf follows him into the afterlife and everything feels like an uncertain goodbye. Oscar has wanted to rest for so long, to just let someone else deal with everything, to stop.
And still.
Zolf tells him he needs him and Oscar doesn’t feel the necessity of asking “for what”. There is no mission and no replacements, Zolf Smith needs Oscar Wilde. Wilde thinks he would distrust this if it came from someone else, doubt he can just need and be needed, that someone not only likes him, not only wants him around but has him as a reason to keep going. But it’s Zolf so Oscar doesn’t. The cleric would be the one weird bastard to need him. So he comes back. How could he not?
Zolf needs him.
.
Wilde wakes up in a soft bed with the vague notion of an important conversation he just can’t remember and a weird sense of hope, a lack of desperation. Zolf is by his side (reading a Cambell because of course he is) and it feels right in way very little things still do. His hair is white and he has none of his previous scars and it sounds almost poetic because he doesn’t feel the same anyway, has a vague notion that something important has changed.
It’s still poetic as he and Zolf walk in the snow moments before dawn and he smiles because he missed looking at things and finding poetry in it. Zolf tells him he died and that he came back. Zolf tells him he came back because Zolf needed him. Zolf needs him. It made sense in the afterlife and still does. To need and be needed. Wilde feels giddy. For the first time in the last two years he fully believes it’s going to be alright in the end. They got this.