Work Text:
The Chosen One.
It had a nice ring to it, it was romanticised by all. Stories, songs, tapestries and everything else that came with the title. The one prophesied to slay the great evil. The hero, more an image than a person.
That’s what Zam is: an image, a figure foretold to be and do great things. Not a person anymore. A person didn’t suffer sleepless nights hidden in foliage because there was always, always someone or other trying to kill them. A person wasn’t told to leave everything and everyone behind in the name of fate. Of destiny.
If this was destiny, Zam didn’t want it. He doesn’t want it. There's nothing he wants less actually.
Because now Pangi is dead. Dead because ‘it was foretold by the heavens.’ Dead , killed, murdered. All because of a fate Zam doesn’t want and a fate Pangi was dragged into.
He can almost hear it; Pangi, the tragic death Zam had to overcome. The tragedy, another figure. The tragedy, not Pangi. A side character, not his best friend.
The deaths were supposed to motivate the hero, but Zam doesn't feel any of that motivation arranging flowers around his friend, covering the blood.
If he tries, he can convince himself Pangi's only asleep. That he’ll wake up despite pallor and cold skin. Despite the blood smothered in marigolds.
Zam wants to grieve, he wants to cry. He wants to lay beside his best friend and wait for him to wake up and tell him it's okay, it's okay, he’ll heal, it's okay.
Except it’s not okay and he won’t wake up. Pangi’s gone, and Zam feels like a kid again, asking why mom wasn’t waking up. Before he understood death, before he’d learned she wasn’t waking up, and never would again.
It was the tragic backstory. It’s Zam’s life.
He doesn’t care about whatever ‘great evil’ he’s been told to fix. He wishes he could say he never did. But then, who wouldn’t be excited at the prospect? Who wouldn’t be excited at being told they’re the chosen, the important, the special, the hero?
Now he wants nothing more than to join his friends,wreathed in flowers like the arrow, hidden beneath roots, didn’t exist, didn’t kill him before Zam knew what was happening. He wants fate to die, like how it killed more than it saved.
It’s night, Zam hasn’t moved. He should, he knows he should, but maybe it’s out of spite that he won’t. He’s sick of destiny and losing people. He’s sick like he has the plague in his bones, writhing and twisting and eating away all he has.
The dead don’t feel that, do they? Did Pangi still feel that arrow, wherever he is now, wherever the dead go?
It’s a cycle in Zam’s brain now. Distraction, only to go back to what feels like an intensified grief, which in turn keeps leading to almost obsessively reorientating the flowers, smoothing them out and nudging them around.
He can’t stop, he won't stop.
He can’t go on, he won’t go on.
He can't leave, he won’t leave.
Too many ‘can’t’s and ‘won’t’s, no ‘can’s, no ‘will’s. He just can’t, something inside won’t let him. He’s rooted in the ground, in the dirt, grass, leaves, and sticks of the forest.
When a star passes overhead, seen only by the light illuminating the ground, Zam wishes for something nobody would: to be ordinary. To go back to the simple village life.
Back when he’d wished to be special. It’s ironic, now; it’s now the last thing he wants.
Wow, he really is just a loop, isn't he? Repeating everything, being too stubborn to do what heroes do.
But Zam isn’t a hero, he’s Zam. He's himself and he’s trapped.
Is he trapped? Is it possible to get out?
He doesn’t know, but there has to be.
Right?
Zam stares at Pangi, cold and gone, beside him. What if he can join him? Surely fate can’t alter death. Death meant there wasn’t anything to alter.
The dead never came back. It’s a fact, it’s agreed upon by all. Even stories and plays agree on that one.
Trying to bring back the dead is a fool’s errand. That’s agreed upon too. It’s pointless, there isn’t a way to bring back souls. Bodies maybe, but not souls, never souls.
Death is safe, even fate can’t change that. If it could, Zam would’ve heard about it, and he wouldn’t be sitting in the nighttime chill. He’d be hunting down whatever decides fate and forcing it to bring Pangi back. “Choose your own fate,” as the nomad groups say.
And he would be choosing his own fate, either way. Through force, or through a fallback plan. A safety net.
Or maybe he’s being stupid, like how the sun and moon chase each other, unaware it’s futile. Maybe he’s following a desperate hope, just as pointless as that eternal chase.
Or maybe he is onto something. Maybe for once, he’s outsmarting rather than being outsmarted. Well, not outsmarted so much as having consequence after consequence for doing what he thinks is the right thing, but the point stands.
Killing himself isn’t something Pangi would’ve wanted, but Zam wants it. He just wants to get out. Out and away from the world and a prophecy he was forced into.
Maybe he’ll see Pangi, wherever the dead go. If they go somewhere, nobody actually knows. Zam guesses he’ll find out.
Holding his sword, still crusted with blood, feels weird. It’s nothing new, he’s been fighting a lot, and has the blisters and calluses to prove it. Maybe it’s because he’s holding it for a different reason. Not for protection, but to inflict harm upon himself.
It could still be protection, he thinks. Protection from fate and destiny and a stupid fucking profacy. That counts, right? Right.
Staring at his sword in the moonlight is like staring death in the face. Zam isn’t scared, surprisingly. He’s feared death the whole journey and had feared it before that, but none of that is there anymore.
He doesn’t feel anything, actually. His chest is empty, a true charity now. The persistent buzz isn’t under his skin anymore, and all he feels is the numbness of the cold spreading through his limbs.
Positioning the sword was easy too. He’s killed enough by now to know where to angle it— just beneath his collarbone. He’s gripping the hilt harder now, numb fingers feeling loose on the leather.
Zam stares at Pangi, and whispers an apology. An apology for many things. An apology for dragging him into everything, for his death, for killing himself in response, for not being able to make it and keep going without him.
Zam’s apologizing like it’s a prayer, the post script of a letter. He’s apologizing to his best friend, the only friend he could rely on.
Zam apologizes even as he thrusts the sword straight into his heart, barely registering beyond a burning and crimson immediately staining his clothes.
And then he’s using what little time he has left to lay next to Pangi and the flowers.
Zam dies with his best friend, and he wasn’t afraid.
(When he wakes up to someone standing over him, to sun and a breeze, all he feels is numb failure. He’s sorry, he really is. He’s sorry and he leaves his best friend on the forest floor.)