Work Text:
“–ey? Stay with me… don’t close your eyes…”
He’s being jostled harshly, sending pain lancing through his body, hot as fire. He doesn’t understand. Where…?
“...Can’t… I have to set you down for a sec, okay?”
The world, which had only just now become a smear of color, suddenly tilts. Against his back presses something hard. The contact is somehow overpowering, and he chokes with it, even as the movement rips a new wave of pain along his nerves. He feels himself listing to the right.
A broad hand clasps his shoulder and pulls him straight again. He blinks, confused. The blur before him begins to focus.
“Rex…?” The name barely escapes Shulk’s mouth. Rex smiles weakly, though it seems to pain him. Shulk, for the first time, notices the smear of red covering his eye, so dark it nearly shines black. There’s an odd divot where his eye should be. “You’re hurt…”
He tries to reach out, but nothing happens. Yes, he’s raising his arm, he can feel it, yet in his sight there is nothing reaching for Rex’s face. Shulk turns his head to see what’s wrong, but once again Red stops him, the skin of his hand rough against his cheek.
“Shulk…” Rex says. “Don’t look.”
His awareness is seeping back in, a dreadfully slow drip.
“Why?” He asks. He’s remembering… there was a light, encircling a figure. “...Is it bad?”
Rex doesn’t answer. He’s starting to list himself, side to side like a boat on the water. His lips are drawn back in a hard grimace, his eye unfocusing. Suddenly, he turns and claps a hand over his mouth, retching. Shulk gets up to help him — at least, he tries to. As soon as he gets his feet under him he overbalances and careens back to the earth.
For a fraction of a second, it’s quiet. Blades of grass tickle his face.
Then pain erupts from his right, a fierce core of agony that laces up and down his body faster than lightning. Shulk thinks he must scream, but he can’t hear anything anymore. His arm–! It feels like there’s something shredding it from the inside out. He tries to hold it, but there’s nothing there anymore. His left hand presents him with a palm coated in blood.
The drip turns into a torrent. Shulk remembers.
Alvis… no.
But the realization is given no time to settle as a thud sounds beside him. Rex had fallen to his hands and knees and was now vomiting onto the grass. Blood drips off his ruined eye to join it.
Shulk chokes, trying to say something, though he’s not sure what. The sound catches Rex’s attention either way. He wipes his mouth then crawls to Shulk’s side, laying there.
“What a sorry lot we are,” he rasps. Shulk, through the haze that’s beginning to creep back into his mind, is inclined to agree.
“Rex,” Shulk says, barely a whisper. “I… don’t think I can walk.”
Rex laughs, more of a huff, really. “Yeah. I’d know. Been carrying ya… for a while now.”
Shulk remains very still. If he just doesn’t move, then the pain is almost manageable. His vision is growing blurry again. He realizes, in some far away place, that he’s lost a lot of blood.
He can’t help it. His eyes slip shut.
+++
Light pours from the figure, silhouetted against its holy radiance. Its wings move idly at its back, unhurried. Sound is muffled, and the edges of his vision are warped…
But that blade in its hand chokes him as though he’s been run through.
“Alvis… Alvis!”
His voice echoes. His body won’t quite listen to him. It moves as though through water.
The figure by his side regards him with both determination and pity, though his words are spoken without sound.
A hard knot of something he can barely define twists in his chest. With a grimace he raises his own blade. The ethereal light increases in answer, its pressure crushing him.
Gone. Then far too close. A flash of his eyes. For a second, he thinks he almost sees Alvis–
He falls to his knees screaming. His right is warm and very, very wet. The pain is so great it registers on some separate scale, past his comprehension. Beside him, that other figure falls too. He can see the blood arc from his face in slow motion, the droplets still pulled by the gravity of an invisible slash.
A vision… It must be a vision. Yes, only that could explain this disaster.
I can change it, he thinks. Please…
+++
Warmth encircles him. Soft, airy light. He breathes slowly, coming to.
Shulk is staring up at a canvas roof. He manages to turn his head ever so slightly, looking to his left. There are many bottles, pliers, a scalpel. Bandages, too. Some lie unspooled on the floor, soaked in dark stains.
Blood…
He remembers his vision with an electric shock of adrenaline. He can't be lying here. He needs to get up. There’s still time, surely, there’s still time.
Shulk rips the sheets off his body and swings his legs out of the cot. Except, the first part doesn’t happen, and he ends up tangled, his momentum carrying him too far forward. He falls against a nightstand, just barely able to remain standing. He tears his legs free of the sheets — why is he sweating so much? Why does he feel so sick? No, there’s no time. Where is… Where…
“Shulk!”
Footsteps behind him. Shulk turns, then nearly retches as the world keeps turning, on and on.
“Jeez, I step out for just a second!”
Heavy hands steady him, guiding him gently back to sit on the cot. Shulk doesn’t have the strength to protest. His mouth is dry as a desert, and his throat feels like it was sandpapered.
“Stop…” he rasps. “I have to… I saw it…”
“Saw what?”
Shulk’s breathing hitches. He squeezes his eyes shut.
“...The future.”
The hand rubbing a comforting circle against his back stills.
“Shulk,” the voice says. Rex’s voice. “What do you mean?”
It replays against his eyelids again, those wings swaying like the bows of an ancient tree, that face; obscured by light.
“We lose,” he breathes. “Rex, I have to stop it–”
“Shulk.” Now his name is said gently, but with command. “Open your eyes.”
With a monumental effort, he does.
Rex’s face comes into focus. His chin is unshaven, and his eyes are bagged– his… eye. Just the one eye. The other is tightly wrapped in bandages.
“You were just having a nightmare,” Rex tells him. “Of… of something that already happened.”
Shulk finds his left hand drifting to his right, where he now realizes he won’t find anything. The dissonance hurts his head. He feels his arm there, but when he looks, it is severed at the shoulder, wrapped just as tightly as Rex’s eye.
Thoughts start to creep up on him with black, spindly legs. How is he going to get dressed? How is he going to write? How is he going to fight?
He’s crying, Shulk realizes distantly. Wordlessly, Rex pulls him close, Shulk’s tears soaking into his shirt. And if Shulk feels Rex’s shoulders trembling too? Well, he keeps it to himself.
After what could’ve been hours, but might’ve been only minutes, Rex speaks again. With his face pressed against Rex’s chest, Shulk can feel the bass of his voice resonating.
“What did you mean,” he starts. “By sayin’ you saw the future?”
Shulk pulls away, licking his lips.
“I… with the monado, I could– he would give me–”
A new wave of emotion chokes him, and he can’t get the words out.
“Shh,” Rex comforts. “It’s okay. Tell me another time.”
Rex eases Shulk back into the cot, stepping aside to pick up the sheets left on the floor and draping them back over his body. Shulk can feel himself slipping again. He struggles to stay awake. He doesn’t want to see it again.
Rex sits on the edge of his bed. Shulk traces the worn lines of his remaining eye. He looks exhausted.
“Rex,” Shulk says. “What are we going to do?”
Rex shakes his head. “We’ll find a way.”
Shulk huffs a laugh, though it sends pain shooting up his arm. Whatever painkillers he’d been given must be wearing off.
“You sound just like him…” Shulk says.
Rex raises a brow. “Like who?”
His eyelids feel heavy as lead. “My mentor,” he murmurs. “Dunban. I always… wished to be like him…”
Memories press for attention. Dunban’s gentle, weary smile. His ease with a blade. His hands holding Shulk after the monado burned him, the right twisted with scars.
“...I guess I got what I wanted.”