Work Text:
Everyone is the villain in someone else's story.
Lukey had heard that expression many times over his life, and each time he had heard it he thought it was a pathetic excuse to try to downplay the role bad actors took in making everyone around them miserable. It was ultimately a self-serving way to shove off taking accountability, and to try to make themselves feel better.
Until he ran into Roscumber.
And fully without his intention, permission, or consent he had become one of the main villains in her story. A late addition to the cast list, it seemed to him when he had been penciled in. He recalled desperately trying to find the reason he had been thrown into that role, but it had eluded him until he watched a court jester behead a King, and then be whisked away from the realm, never to return. There had been an anticipated vacancy, so it seemed. He was just filling in, per whatever higher power was pulling the strings in all their lives. Ros needed an enemy. He had apparently fit the appropriate bill. Done.
From what he had been gathering, both before and after Owen’s departure, he had rather large shoes to fill. Not that anyone had seen fit to warn him, mind you. Owen had been a master of manipulation, pulling strings here, there, and everywhere he pleased to achieve his final goal. Which included keeping the detail of his imminent departure a secret until the last moment. It seemed that it was fate that he asked Owen for his hat after the King had been killed, a symbolic passing of the torch that he hadn’t understood the full weight of until much later. And while Lukey might not have visualized himself as the perfect person to slip into that role, more and more often he found himself embracing it. He had been given no other option, so why keep trying to stop the stone that was so determined to keep rolling down the hill?
And more to the point, Ros already hated him. So it wasn’t like there was any way to back out of it now that he was there.
Not only did she hate him, she had done so since the moment she saw him. In fact he hadn’t even known about the bad blood between the factions when he had entered the realm, he barely even knew what factions were. He certainly had no biases, or notions about them. And then she killed him. Without warning, without hesitating, and without any remorse. The most frustrating part was that everyone, even members of his own faction, seemed to think that he should just accept it.
‘She was having a difficult time, Lukey! You must understand.’ They would all say to him. Yes, he was always supposed to be the understanding one. He was supposed to just endure her anger because the faction SHE had pushed him into had given her a hard time long before he had arrived.
Of course, she pretended to accept him when they were around the mutuals that she wanted to maintain her image for. Yellow couldn’t actually be blatantly oppressive in front of the other common folk. Otherwise she either ignored him flat out or made it clear that her willingness to endure his presence was paper thin on her good days only.
And that was perfectly acceptable to him. Because it allowed him to keep her separate from his work. No one even bothered to ask him to include her on her behalf because she had made the situation between them so toxic.
Lukey threw himself into his work, and kept himself holed up in his lab, partially because it was free of Ros and her drama. Carrying on with his efforts and his work to help Pangi and cure him of the corruption had been his way to show his friends that he wasn’t just a day old donut or a hamster. He could produce results, and lock in when it mattered. And he hadn’t done it just to prove himself, but because he truly cared about his friends. And despite what Ros seemed to think, she did not have a monopoly on caring about Pangi and Aimsey. She also made it clear that she was resentful of the fact that she was left out of the process to help them. Every time he showed up to whisk away her favorite people to go to his lab there was always a comment about wanting to be included.
It was rather annoying, since if she had shown him kindness at any point maybe he would have considered it. Clearly, she wanted to be involved in what he was doing, probably only because it included her friends which she was horribly possessive of. Despite that desire, it wasn’t enough to make her cease her hostility towards him. And to Lukey that was the perfect encapsulation of what Ros’s problem was.
She was entirely lacking in self awareness.
It hadn’t seemed to occur to her that her own actions were the entire basis for her exclusion. How was Lukey supposed to trust her? And more to the point, why would he trust her? The delicate nature of their work meant there was little room for error, and Ros was unpredictable, emotional, and reactionary. She was not reliable, and he had worried that if he had tried to bring her in she would let her fears influence her actions. He had to make the call that her feelings were not worth the success of the operation.
His greatest fear was that if he had revealed the new lab to her, he would wake up one morning to find she had destroyed everything in some misguided attempt to save the others from him. Or that she would give away their secret location and someone else would come and do the dirty work for her. Someone like Zam wouldn’t care about the specifics if it meant getting one over on Green. Pili would jump at the chance to sabotage them as well, though for very different reasons.
So yes, he was purposefully keeping her out. He would save her friends when she couldn’t, and she would never acknowledge it. But that was fine, it wasn’t for her. It was for them, and himself. Not everything needed to center around Ros, no matter what Yellow tried to tell her.
Maybe her attitude was more to do with inconsistent expectations. Ros was the center of Yellow Kingdom, but she was just another face to the other factions. At worst she was an enemy. But she seemed to think her position and stature carried through the realm. That everyone had to acknowledge her, appreciate her, be her champion, and protect her from every slight and inconvenience. But she didn’t deserve that. Not to him, not after all that had happened. He had tried to give her respect. He had tried giving her space. He had tried giving her understanding.
Lukey would give her nothing more.
Ironically, he was the only one who had the ability to explain everything about the Null to her. And, perhaps, if he did it would finally open a dialog between them and help mend fences. He was sure that everyone around them desired that outcome. Hell, there was a time that he even wanted it. Back when he thought there might be some benefit to redeeming himself in her eyes he had even gone to Aimsey to ask their advice. Now he didn’t think it was worth the effort. She was so intent on holding grudges and burning bridges in her anger that even if he tried to establish some good will between them he didn’t believe it would last for long. Why fight to walk around on eggshells?
Further, if he brought her to the Null would she even give him the chance to explain? Would she even be willing to hear him out? Or would she immediately turn on him, and attempt to kill him again? He was betting on the latter.
To be frank, he also didn’t believe she had earned the right to hear his story. These were his memories, and his past after all. He wasn’t keen on having her examine each one with a fine tooth comb, looking for reasons to keep hating him. And he was sure she would find plenty. So if nothing would change why even bother? She certainly had no right to the information, and giving her confirmation that she had been correct about him, even in a small way, would make her worse to him than she already was. And he was over being her punching bag.
And part of that was not accepting that he had any part to play in her blowing up the castle. Or accepting that Green was at fault. She had made that decision on her own for whatever reasons she cooked up in her head. It had nothing to do with them, and everything to do with the fact that she couldn't lock in and hold it together.
In this world you did what you needed to do to survive. You stuck with your faction. You played your part. You got stronger. You helped out.
Lukey had to admit, if only to himself, that he didn't think it was all of that Ros was struggling with. It was the holding things together when it got hard part. And if he was being charitable in this case he could admit that he imagined things for her had to be pretty tough. He hadn't experienced being alone yet. Not like she had. There wasn't a group of people expecting him to maintain the faction's position while they were off doing other things. He was just Lukey, the hamster who couldn't remember to keep his helmet on half the time. Pangi or Bad were always there with him to fall back on when he inevitably messed up or wasn’t certain what to do.
He assumed at one point it had been like that for Ros. She had to have had her faction around her consistently in the early days.
That was the problem with Kingdoms and Empires, the sun eventually set on their reign. Ros was living through the end of her Kingdom, the fall of the great power. And that had to be painful. It had to be excruciating.
And she was going at it alone.
Ros had never struck him as the type to want to be alone, even for a little while. She was constantly seeking out her friends, and clinging on to them. Her possessive nature was nearly toxic in its intensity, but most people seemed to find it charming for some reason. Maybe he would think differently if she had been possessive about him. Maybe he could admit just a little that he might have wanted someone as loyal as Ros for a friend.
But he wasn't here to be her friend. He was here to show her that someone else had everything she wanted. He had a faction that helped him. He was seen as capable by his friends for helping make the cure. He was close to some of the people she valued most. And worst of all, he wasn't miserable like she was.
He was happy. He was maybe even joyful. Whimsical, even.
So when he was messing around with Pangi in the ruins of the castle, and they were laughing and scamming the voices in their heads he couldn’t help but be a little annoyed about it when she showed up trying to trauma dump all over them. For someone who liked to talk about joy and whimsy a lot she sure had her own way of ruining it for others. It was such a tired song and dance routine at this point. How was he meant to stay feeling sorry for her when she showed up and proved she didn't deserve his empathy in the slightest?
‘Green was mean. Green was evil. Green griefed the castle. Green hates Yellow. Green always kills us’
He just didn’t care anymore, to borrow her favorite phrase. In fact, he had never really cared about the tiff between the factions. He had only invested his attention in it because it had kept resulting in him being targeted. Unless he was in mortal peril, he didn’t want to waste his time on it.
So he had done what he thought Owen would have wanted, he spoke over Ros, kept laughing, and showed her that just because she was miserable didn’t mean others had to be. He actually imagined she was jealous, and was trying to ruin their fun because of it. Pangi hadn’t invited her to come sell plots with him. Had he? She wasn’t laughing and giggling with Pangi and Aimsey, he was. Even Aimsey couldn't help but want to play along with them.
But not Ros.
Ros was angry. She was bitter. She was resentful. And here he and Pangi were, experiencing joy and whimsy in the ruins of the castle that had once represented Ros’s joy and whimsy. He liked to think that somewhere Owen was looking down on him in approval. Somewhere Owen knew what he was doing, and knew how angry Ros was, and he was laughing. In that moment he had earned Owen’s hat.
He had rejected taking accountability for her pain in order to embrace his joy with Pangi. That was the thing Lukey had learned about experiencing Joy. You actually had to have it in your heart, and then you had to make the choice to be joyful. You had to look for the fun and silly things in life and hold onto them, grow them, nurture them. Joy wasn’t a feeling you found, it was a feeling you fought for. Joy wasn’t something you put in a jar to save for later. It was something you indulged in while you had it, because you knew it wasn’t always going to be there.
He wished he could tell Ros that she wasn’t fighting to have her joy and whimsy here in the present moment. She was mourning the joy and whimsy she had in the past. And how can you find new joy in life when you are so stuck on what had been? Life was hard, but it was a lot harder when you kept looking over your shoulder back at what you had to leave behind.
She had literally blown up her castle rather than make new joyful memories in it. And somehow she felt she was justified in turning it on Green. Ros claimed she had done it on her own, but somehow her reasons always came around to Green. The stock Yellow justification. Wasn’t she tired of that? Wasn’t she sick of holding grudges and always being angry? Wouldn’t it have been better to just be friends? Was it insane of him to think that could have been an option for her?
In another world where Ros hadn’t targeted him and they had been friends he likes to think that she would have been a lot happier. Even just in that moment with the plots. Because he would have gotten her in on the scam. He would have tried to have her laughing too. And maybe them being friends would have saved her far earlier, before the situation with the castle had a chance to go sideways. He would have offered to clean the sand off her castle and yelled at Bad for giving her grief. She would have never needed to blow up her castle. She could have come down to his lab, and ranted at him about it, and then they would have pulled a prank on Bad that wouldn’t have caused issues with Pangi. Bad would have woken up, pretended to be mad at them, and then they would all laugh about it. He and Pangi and Ros and Aimsey could have gone on a double date, and laughed about the whole situation together. They could have experienced more joy and whimsy together.
That’s how things should have happened. They should have been friends. She should have never killed him that day. He should have never taken the Jesters hat, and been casted as her mid-season enemy. Lukey could have adored her, and been one of her biggest defenders. Because he had seen how she was with her friends. She was kind, helpful, and uplifting. The type of person that you wanted to stand with, and protect. It had always been obvious to him why others had been her friend, he just had never been on the benefitting end of it himself. But he knows he would have been a great friend to her in return. He could have helped her where he could, and he could have asked for her help too. The person he could be if he had someone who didn’t just call him a hamster. And he’d like to think he could have helped her learn to speak up for herself. Lukey was good at talking, it was one of his biggest strengths. He could have helped her practice like he had with others in the past. Wouldn’t she have been more confident with Aimey, Pangi, and himself behind her? He didn’t think it was as crazy as it seemed on first pass.
Instead, Ros was alone.
He had noticed over his time in the realm that she didn’t have a lot of people to laugh with. And the small number he had seen her start with had rapidly dwindled. Of course she was often around people, but he didn’t see her laughing with them the way she would with those she was close to. How was she supposed to find new joy in her life if no one was around for her to find it with?
Part of him wondered if she had been on Green if she would have had more friends. Or if she had been on Blue or Purple, anything but Yellow. As much as she claimed that Green had killed her joy and whimsy, he actually thought it was yellow that had sucked it all out of her.
From his casual observations he had gathered that she was under a lot of pressure. Her being alone aside, she was their only active builder. Foolish and Zam could build, but they refused to. From what Bad had told him, Foolish was actually a prodigious builder, but he had retired. Washed his hands of it. So there was no one to help her build up the Kingdom the way everyone expected. Kingdoms needed infrastructure, and expansions as their Kingdom grew. Yellow had long ago stagnated.
And that too was something he had noticed. Everyone on Yellow had these huge expectations for themselves, but they hadn’t done anything noteworthy in a significant amount of time. All of their members, save Sneeg, had fallen off of the power climb. Even Water had risen above Zam. Clown was getting farther down the list every week. Foolish was embarrassingly low after his reset. Not that they had to be powerful, but where was the effort?
And speaking of the King. It seemed to him that most of the conflicts between Green and Yellow were simply conflicts between Bad and Foolish, and the rest of them were bystanders and collateral damage. He didn’t personally take any great offense to it. In fact he found it rather entertaining, Bad was always up to something and he was always free to participate if he was around. But there was never any pressure, Bad would never force him to do anything except grind. Ros, however, seemed to take it as a personal insult against herself when Bad went after Foolish in their little games.
Forgive him, but he couldn’t understand why she felt it necessary to insert herself into the matters of those two. Lukey also thought that it was rather short sighted of her. There was a clear history between them, including tension that made him and Pangi look downright PG. Why would she think getting in between them would work in her favor? The few times he had observed it, Ros had come out worse off than Foolish had. If she had paid any kind of attention to them she would know that they were clearly not normal people, and had lived extended lives around each other. This was ‘above their pay grade’ and frankly, no one's business.
Beyond that. In his humble opinion, if Foolish was truly the leader that Yellow deserved then he needed to do a better job of protecting his subjects from his personal and private conflicts. Because right now he was failing in his duties.
Owen had been right about the King. He had been right about a lot of things. Including that getting under Ros’s skin was easy. Ros made it too easy. She wrote his scripts and included all the necessary footnotes to continue to make her life miserable. Owen had played her time after time and she tripped over herself trying to get back at him. And that was her problem.
She refused to learn from her mistakes. And everything she had done wrong with Owen, she was doing wrong with him. She was constantly feeling wronged, but couldn’t manage proper communication, and exploded in anger instead of having actual talks that could help solve her problems. Even when she screamed. Even when she yelled and lashed out her cries went ignored. And it was because she refused to listen back. She wanted to be heard but she didn’t want to hear, because she wanted to be right. She could never admit she might play a part in the blame, or that what might have happened had an explanation that she didn’t approve of. And that made it impossible to reason with her. How could you have a productive exchange with someone who would declare ‘I don’t even care anymore,’ and go flying off.
Ros could never admit that maybe she was wrong, or that someone had a valid point, especially if she didn’t like that person. All she had was excuse after excuse after excuse that she or someone she favored got to be terrible and awful because at some point and time someone else had been horrible to her or them. And he wanted so badly to shout at her that maybe in the grand scheme of Yellow vs Green her one wrong wasn’t erased because she had a long list of Green’s offenses she could rattle off. She didn’t get to write off the wrongs of the people she cared about because they had suffered in the past. Everyone had suffered. They had all done horrible things to each other. Everyone had been wronged in some way.
But maybe he was wrong about her. Maybe everyone in Green was just wicked, and the scourges of the realm. And maybe it would have been the decent thing to not kick Ros while she was so obviously and blatantly down. Perhaps messing around in the castle ruins had been poking her wounds a little too hard and they should have been more tactful and respectful in that moment. Sure…
The issue with that was it just wasn’t his role to be the respectful one. He was her villain, hand picked by her, and he would be doing a disservice to Owen’s memory if he didn’t take every opportunity that she hand delivered him on a silver platter to get under her skin. She wasn’t his friend, despite how he might have wished they could have been.
When he and Aimsey had been sitting in the lab, talking about Pangi and Ros he had swallowed down most of his misgivings about getting them to speak again because he knew how both of them were. But he had been shell shocked that Aimsey thought HE and Ros should have a sit down conversation. While he understood that to Aimsey in particular it might have helped them and their relationship, but he thought they were deluding themselves about it. He didn’t fit into Ros’s fantasy world, and he knew if she could she would wish him away forever.
Unfortunately for her, the cost of his permanent departure would be far higher than a dead King. She had gotten lucky with Owen. She wouldn’t be so lucky with him.
In the end, he supposed his and Ros’s fates had already been written in his mind. He wouldn’t reject offers to fix things, but he also wasn’t going to reach out with the olive branch.
After all, it was up to her to hand him a different script if she wanted him to play a different role.