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Dying at your hand isn’t the worst way to go, Aledar figures. He could’ve been taken years ago by the corrupted hordes or the undead roaming the dark forests, quietly and inconsequentially, but this is almost noble. To die for and by the hand of his first partner. To join Elphie and Lucio.
He’s become the kind of death he’d only read about. It’s quite an honor.
Death isn’t gentle, nor is she peaceful. She takes him in a blinding flash of white and plunges him into a pitch-black darkness without warning, and Aledar can only assume she watches in amusement as he sinks further down.
He reaches out towards something. Towards nothing. Towards anything.
Stars blink on until the sky is covered in light. The caravan jolts to a stop.
Aledar wants to scream. Wants to run up to Tasim and kiss him senseless. Wants to go back to Fruma and forget any of this ever happened. But the ability eludes him.
Instead, he turns a smile on you (but it’s not really you, is it? The person before him is unfamiliar, unknowable) and, with bright cheer that he hasn’t felt in years, declares, “well, nothing to do but keep moving!”
He takes his own advice.
-
He tries his best. Loves Tasim a little harder, a little sooner. Pushes himself further, to the sky islands, to Corkus. Learns more. Grows stronger.
Tries to talk Elphie out of the mission.
She’s always been determined. Stubborn to a fault. It’s the trait that caused half of the orcish conflict, the trait that endeared her to him. Perhaps there were no circumstances that would’ve let him talk her down.
But, then again.
Aledar moves without wanting to when he’s around you. Spells tear their way out of him. He hears himself talk before his words ever pass through his mind.
The third time he relives his life, he resigns himself to the fact that he’s a speck in the grand scheme of things, an accessory to the destiny you’ve been thrown into. It’s humiliating. It’s maddening.
He bursts at the seams with rage. He wants to shake you down, ask why you don’t change things. Why you don’t rebuke God. Why you let Tasim slip from his grasp. Why you let him die, over and over.
Instead, he lets Elphaba ask you to join them on the mission to the expanse, again and again.
-
Through the haze of his hatred, Aledar still feels the mind-numbing pain of missing you. When you’re around, he’s not himself. And you’re never quite the same.
-
Aledar’s had to fight to be the great mage he is. His magic’s a small flame by nature, dwarfed by Tasim’s bonfire and your red giant, and it doesn’t come quite naturally, doesn’t bend to his will like it’s supposed to. It’s strong only because he nurtured it, trained it.
He trained as an assassin, too, once, when his most powerful spells wouldn’t come.
Magic is intuitive, he once read. It changes itself for the spirit of the wielder, assigning them a class long before they choose to pick up a weapon or perform a spell. Perhaps Aledar’s more of an assassin. Perhaps it’s an affront to nature for him to be a mage.
He spends one lifetime flinging knives and finds a chasm in his soul where his purest and more powerful magic once sat.
He desperately misses daggers, though, when he switches back to wands.
By his tenth lifetime, he starts carrying both.
-
“Tasim,” he prods experimentally, “you’ll never leave me, right?” It’s the night before Tasim disappears on him, and Aledar’s quite sick of his sort-of lover in some timelines leaving him.
“Of course not. Why would I?”
“I don’t know, Tasim. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Admittedly, that’s a lie. Aledar’s lived quite a few lives without Tasim.
Tasim still leaves, though. Still only runs into Aledar by pure accident, on the same occasions he always does.
Aledar supposes he knows where he stands with him. It doesn’t hurt any less than it did the first time.
-
By the sixteenth time he plays this charade, he realizes how bone-crushingly lonely it must feel to have the world revolve around you.
Not to mention that hating you has grown quite tiring.
The next smile he shoots you, predetermined as it might be, is genuine.
-
Aledar can’t look at Elphie with anything other than guilt anymore.
He’s got an inkling of your grand destiny, the sinking feeling of being the pawn to your king, but Elphie’s disposal cannot be necessary. He feels maybe it’s the time loop talking when he thinks her death’s on him, but he can never quite shake the suspicion. The weight of her inevitable death is heavy. He bears it tearfully.
-
Aledar wishes, idly and to no avail, you two didn’t have to fall apart without Tasim.
He knows it in the pit of his heart that he can’t seek you out, that the same invisible hand that forces lines out of him would keep him rooted in place if he even tried to catch up to you. Perhaps what bothers him is that he doesn’t want to.
He already has to face that look in your eyes you’ve always saved just for him, a one-sided attempt at closeness he’s never been able to reciprocate. He doesn’t think he can handle that gleam of guilt when Tasim disappears. It betrays something- causation or involvement- that he can’t quite stand.
He doesn’t fundamentally hate you anymore. Whether he can forgive you is a different issue entirely.
-
The thing about being forced to replay the same chess match by the gods is that, eventually, the game has to end.
Aledar’s eyes open for the billionth time not to the destruction of the caravan but to mind-numbing pain and the unsightly view of the silent expanse.
He wakes up to you, perhaps the you from any of his timelines or perhaps an amalgamation of you all, colder than he’s ever seen you but unmistakably there for him. He wakes up to Tasim, older and broader and rougher around the edges, his beard unkempt, his eyes sunken and bloodshot and still glistening with barely-repressed hope.
All isn’t quite as it should be yet. But, Aledar figures, you’re all getting there.