Work Text:
Arguably, there is still life around the castle.
There are the farms, and there are the constructs, and there are the mooshrooms. Well. Two constructs. There had only been one, after Gilbert melted again, but some sick sense of sentimentality made Rythian put him together again. He’s the one tending to the animals, now. Gods only know where Johnny Iron’s gotten to. The dogs are there, too, though Willow has been around less and less. Ghost has taken it upon himself to guard the area when Rythian’s out. He appreciates the sentiment.
Still, the castle almost feels like a dead thing. There are no meals made in the kitchen. There are no late-night conversations. There are no stories told around the living room while a record croons on the player. Rythian keeps the doors to the master bedroom shut. The curtains around the four-poster bed remain drawn.
It’s fine. It’s fine, he tells himself. He doesn’t need her. He doesn’t need the castle’s beating heart, the thing that made him feel human, he doesn’t need her. What he needs is to focus. He just needs to focus. He’d gotten distracted, he tells himself. He’d been so focused on her, on what she wanted to do, on following her whims and silly ideas and plots to make him smile, that he’d almost forgotten about why he was out here in the first place. About his goals. About the Queen and how she could attack at any moment. He needs to be ready for that moment. He needs to focus.
There are days where he doesn’t eat. Not consciously, but the Life Stone keeps him nourished. There are days where he doesn’t sleep, but he didn’t get much sleep in the End, either. There are days where he vanishes into his workshop and only emerges days later, newest weapon now perfected. There are days where he leaves Ghost in charge and takes to the mountains, finding a good place to test out his newest toys and leaving with that mountain’s worth of EMC stored in his transmutation tablet. It feels like a waste, destroying that much land that quickly, especially since the condenser creates enough Red Matter to last lifetimes, but Rythian can’t bring himself to care. He needs to make sure everything works. He needs to be able to protect himself.
When he does sleep, it’s in the guest room. When he does sleep, it’s on the ground in the lab, under the glow of the monitors showing her status. When he does sleep, he dreams of her, and how he’d apologize the moment he saw her face.
Scared Status: High. Location: Brown Mushroom Enclave. Notes: Oh my gosh.