Chapter Text
The first flakes of snow had begun to fall. Winter bled the server of its colour, blanketed all in the oppressive silence that came with it, and worn paths, the world he knew so well, disappeared beneath the veil of white.
Wemmbu hated the silence, the cold, all of it. The way the world accommodated Egg’s disappearance so easily, as though there had always been space for it, as though it had always been a perceivable future.
The cold rears to meet him the moment he steps out, bore into his very bones, slices between his ribs and settles, a glacial thing lodged in the cavity of his chest. He cannot fully draw breath with it.
His first instinct was to burn. To melt the frost, fracture the stillness, shatter the suffocating quiet that draped, like a burial cloth, over the world. To scorch the snow back into the soil, until it remembered the paths they used to walk. Until the world remembered warmth, until it remembered him, until it gave back the one thing it took.
He almost does, give in. In the hazy, bleeding days that came in the prelude of winter, he is barely aware of the time he spends, storming Capital city, the Law’s multiple strongholds, streets that laid to ruin in his wake. Gambit no longer sang. Beneath the rusting metal, caked and crusted with blood, it screamed. It screamed that the world was unfair, it screamed that Egg did not deserve this, it screamed until Wemmbu’s voice gave out with it.
He can’t help it, that winter froze the very liquid in his veins and laid rime over his heart — if he even had one. After all, Wemmbu was a violent creature.
But there was no joy in it now. No thrill that came with felling hundreds of soldiers, no satisfaction in driving his blade into LettuceK’s officers. It was only proving he was what they had always known and expected him to be.
(Loppezz tells him this was all she had ever expected of him.
Sargelaw tells him to spare his brother (he does not).
Godofwar tells him he is the strongest he has ever fought.
Oroboros tells him they should have killed him when they first caught him.
Deputy_Ace tells him he’s sorry.)
He has never once fought that assumption, never tried to prove there was something softer beneath the ice. What would have been the point? A sheep born with wolf’s blood soaked into its snow white fleece would never convince the flock otherwise. It smelt of wolf, of stains that would never fully wash out. Others had named it a wolf long before it had even bore his teeth. So who could be surprised (who even pretended to be), when it finally did?
He tears into Lettuce when he finds him, Gambit comes down with all the pain and hatred that froze along with the ice in his veins, and the weight in his chest he may have called heart. It was easy, with no Egg to worry about, or hold him back. Gambit comes down even as Lettuce musters the last of his soldiers (they all fall before him anyway), as arrows pierce his skin and Executioner meets him in reply.
When the red haze glazing his vision finally fades, what remained was a body crumpled at his feet, a bloody, broken body slumped against the wall, a very caracal-shaped indent stamped behind him. His own panting finally becomes apparent, breaths coming out fast, ragged and embarrassingly human. Green eyes meet purple, both their bodies marked with wounds that never quite became the final one; slashes and stabs that layered over each other as evidence of their hatred.
Despite this, Lettuce lifts his chin defiantly, unwilling to give Wemmbu the mercy of surrender.
One blow, and that was all it would take. The leader of the Law, fallen at the hands of the malicious demon that plagued this server. What a narrative.
That was how it was supposed to go. This was his fate, something he had to do — what everyone knew he would do — even if he knows Egg wouldn’t really have wanted this.
By a quietly crackling fire in The End, two bodies pressed close to fight away the aching cold. White feathers wrapped around his abdomen, hair tickling his cheek from where Egg has tucked himself into the hollow of his shoulder. A bundle of white, blue and purple. A mix of himself and Egg. He was allowed to let his invis fade here. He was safe here.
He allowed himself to be pulled in, shifted and nudged until Egg finally finds that spot where they slot together, perfectly and thoughtlessly, two pieces of the same puzzle. He lets himself relax, allows the rumble in Egg’s chest to steady him.
“Is this really The Great and All Powerful Wemmbu?” Egg asks. A question? A joke? Wemmbu opens his mouth to answer.
No. No, it wasn’t.
This was just Wemmbu.
The sounds of battle finish dying around him, fading with the adrenaline that had flooded his bloodstream. It leaves behind the pain that had rushed in to take its place, sharp and pulsing with the blood that drained from his wounds in every heartbeat. For the first time, he does not try to outrun it, it does not vanish, and he does not expect it to. Pain is acceptable. It was proof what he had — and lost — was real.
Pain was the last thing he had tying himself to Egg, and all he really had left to remind him.
That this was not the kind of narrative he wanted.
That neither rage nor mercy could fix what was already broken.
That despite this, Wemmbu too, could be kind.
Slowly, he lays down his mace.
LettuceK, eyes squinted shut in anticipation for the final blow, cracks open a lid at the sinking sound of metal on snow. Gambit was on the ground, half buried. Winter was eager in its reclamation of all things abandoned. Wemmbu stands over him with an expression he cannot quite read. What was it, disgust? Anger? What were his intentions here? And Lettuce had prided himself on his ability to read people.
Wemmbu had always been a creature of edges; a demon in the old sense of the word. Mercurial and bright in the ruin he left behind, taking what he pleased and sparing completely on a whim. To LettuceK, he had been everything disorder incarnate. Danger, a canine without a leash. This too, was probably one of his whims.
“Well you look like you’ve seen better days.” He says, snidely, because he refuses to let Wemmbu have this.
“So have you.” The demon replies too easily.
To Lettuce, winter has always been calming. It was austerity, discipline, cutting away the unnecessary, and burying whatever rot that came with the past. Winter brought to a server plagued by corruption the purity of untouched snow and undisturbed nights. At least, that was what he believed.
Winter was what Lettuce had always believed himself to be, measured and cold enough to do what was necessary that lesser men could not. He strove to bring it to the best of his ability. Some order enforced, if it had to be.
He was none of that now, of course, because in this field of unbroken white, under a sky leeched of colour and in the deathly quiet of a winter that wasn’t his, devoid of even the sounds of struggle, the leader of the Law was so, so small.
LettuceK would rather die than admit that. “I would not say so. What’s stopping me from killing you right here?” It is a foolish question. He knows it even as he asks it. Blood seeps stubborn and dark beneath him. It steams for a breath before the air leeches the heat away. His body has already made its decision; his spirit is simply waiting to follow. But it was a question he must ask anyway, because a leader like Lettuce does not beg for mercy, and pride is the last regiment that does not desert.
His provocation is swatted away as expected, as one would a fly, or something lesser. “You wished you could.” Wemmbu says flatly.
Whom have you when your army scatters?
Whom have you when no one remains to echo your convictions back to you?
Whom have you when there is no one left who stands beside you as an equal?
A line etches itself between his brows, “You think I’m afraid of you?”
“No.” Wemmbu answers, “I think you’re just as sick of this as I am.” (Maybe. If Lettuce was even a little bit of the man he so claimed to be. If Wemmbu could be even a little bit more like Egg—)
Lettuce blinks, then laughs. Or tries to. There’s a tremor he cannot quite suppress. Shock, perhaps, that the man before him was still capable of converse. That the wintry winds have scoured away the heat and irrationality of anger, and left in their wake more discussion than he was willing to have with one of the most wanted players on the server.
That manic laughter quickly fades, leaving his lips pulled in a snarl, fur bristling and his ears pressed entirely against his head. “Sick?” He spat, “That’s it? You slaughtered your way through half the server, burned my Law to ash, just to tell me you’re sick of it?” Blood pools warm and metallic on his tongue. He swallows most of it and chokes on what was left. “Don’t fuck with me! Do you feel nothing at all?”
Because if a demon can tire of bloodshed, if a beast can sheathe its claws, then what of LettuceK? What did that make him?
Fires must be ringed with stone, and wolves driven from the fold. It was simple when a demon behaved like one. But a villain who when, at the height of vengeance, stayed his hand was no villain at all. This was just a man.
And men were far harder to condemn.
“You of all people don’t get to ask me that” Wemmbu’s restraint fractures visibly and briefly as Lettuce raises his voice. Not exactly loud, but the edge definitely sharper, and his fingers twitch toward his sword. It was muscle memory, for mercy clearly did not come to him as easily as it did the one currently buried beneath the earth. Lettuce makes a mental note of that, because of course he does.
“You. All of you. What right do you have when you all brought this upon yourselves—.”
“I do”, Lettuce interjects smoothly, “after everything you’ve done.”
Wemmbu, much to his surprise, actually pauses to look around. And there he sees himself, reflected and warped where blood gathered in shallow pools trampled into the earth. In the glassy eyes of fallen soldiers that stared, vacantly, at nothing, he sees the last thing they saw then.
A little incredulously, he echoes, “Everything I’ve done.”
Lettuce does not miss this opportunity. “Look around you.” He twists the blade deeper. Wemmbu will prove he is what he always has been. (Because if he does not, the evil the Law so desperately fought against might have just been a mirror.)”These people died because of you.”
“Egg died because of you.”
One moment Wemmbu is still, but the next his hand is fisted in Lettuce’s collar. Hauling him up and slamming his back into the stone hard enough to drive the air from his lungs. Fingers tightened with restraint stretched too thin, a wild look in the eyes that stared past him.
Wolf. He thinks, and lets his body go slack. There was nothing here for him anymore. Lettuce waits for the inevitable, for the narrative to complete itself.
It never comes. The sweet embrace of death never finds him, as before long he is released. The grip loosens, and he is abruptly dropped to the ground. Snow cushions his landing, alive and tinged with both melt and blood.
Wemmbu turns away first, shoulders stiff. Distantly, he hears the demon(?) spit, “Say that name again, and I will forget why I stopped.”
“You knew this would happen the moment you touched him.” The words come apart as Wemmbu speaks them, an accusation? No. That’s not right, none of this was Lettuce’s fault. “You knew and you did it anyway. Was this a part of your plan?”
His breath comes out in pieces, but Wemmbu refuses to cry over this, at least not in front of Lettuce. “Did you account for this when you killed Egg? When you killed my only friend?”
It was. Lettuce had mulled over the possibility, turned it over between his fingers, but figured it was worth the sacrifice. What was one life, or two, against the peace of the server? What was everyone he’s threatened, tortured or killed, against the death of Wemmbu? It was entirely reasonable. Necessary, even. But that did not matter now, in the end, it was a failure so great it was laughable.
Peace for this server would never come, Egg would still be dead and Wemmbu would still be here, staring at him as though his world had split open and Lettuce stood at the fault line.
Wemmbu’s anger does not vanish so much as it burns itself to embers.
“Hey.” He eventually says, head tilted and studying him with an expression that did not look as though it belonged to a deranged criminal.
He considers if it was below him to reply, then mutters, “what?”
“Is this your home?”
“What?”
“The Law. Is this your home?”
What kind of question was that? There was no audience here, no need to coat the words that slip out, a little too sharply. “Don’t be ridiculous.” He doesn’t think of two figures, their backs turned to him, but their presence steady. He focuses instead on the cold seeping through his back. On dying faster, if it must come to that. It felt better than entertaining this — wherever this conversation was heading.
Sentiment clouds judgement, and you can not lead with a soft heart. Thus he had thought to forgo it until the server became safe, and became a place everyone could enjoy. Or at least, he told himself that.
Peace. He had defined it so often it was engraved into his mind. Peace meant being in control, making sure that all unpredictable factors were accounted for, contained, or eliminated. There would be no demons running amok, or criminal organisations lurking in the shadows. It would all be alright as long as Lettuce had the power. He would stabilize this server, bring to a close the long lasting era of suffering. And who could he trust but himself with such a monumental task?
He does not ask why the snow around him ran red, or why the peace in the making felt so unbearably empty. Do not reflect on things when they are over. “They all chose to be here, they knew the risks.” Death was a contract they all signed in good faith, the only right ending for pawns. Winter took indiscriminately; wolves, sheep and shepherds alike.
Wemmbu didn’t believe him in the slightest, neither of them did. It is a mercy he does not choose to mention it. “So did he.” Wemmbu says instead, “so did I. Egg was my home.” His footing wavers a little, a hand pressed briefly to his side. A wound not quite closed, but at least he could admit this much.
Lettuce does not meet Wemmbu’s eyes, for he would only see himself in them. Neither of them said the obvious, that the ruins they stood in were of the same shape. That pain was a language they both understood. In the end, they all bled red.
What foolishness. he thinks, that Wemmbu wore his weakness on his sleeve. To name someone your home, to tether yourself so completely was reckless, sentimental and worst of all weak. But despite everything he was so openly admitting to, Lettuce could not find it in him to retaliate. Perhaps he was tired, and Wemmbu was right.
“I… am angry.” Wemmbu continues. More than that. Anger was too small a word for what he felt. Hatred that boiled in his blood for so long, for the bounty inked beside his name, the first time the server decided what he was before he could decide for himself. His first betrayal. He is grateful that the falling snow cools it down, numbs his hands so he cannot feel the blood on them. “I hate you.” Wemmbu announces, “For everything you are and everything you’ve done to me. To Egg. I hate you for taking away our future. I hate that I wasn’t there to stop you.”
Regret, or something like it. It coiled inwards, feeding on itself. Because Wemmbu speaks of hate as though it were the other side of love. Because he grieves loudly, without restraint or apology.
Lettuce feels a hairline crack in the ice. He could — should seize this moment, reduce it and reassert some kind of control over the situation. Yet his words come out too thin, carrying none of the hurt they should.
“You’re really pathetic right now, aren’t you?” We aren’t so different, you and I.
Loppezz, Deputy_Ace, everyone. I will be seeing you soon.
Snow falls unceremoniously around him, he raises his head in defiance against the coming winter. The flakes fall on his lashes, melt and sting. He meets Wemmbu’s eyes one last time.
“So I have taken away your home.” The symmetry pleased him. That loss must answer loss, pain must justify pain. The world, if it is to be governed at all, must obey some principle of balance. Equivalent exchange. “And you too, have taken something of mine.”
And then he smiles, eyes curved in that infuriating crescent that even now, still held something back. It made Wemmbu want nothing more than to drive his blade through him, if only for the last time. To carve the verdict into flesh forever. But there was no point in that, Lettuce would never learn that lives could not be measured and traded, and homes not conquered and reclaimed like territories on a map.
Lettuce’s words were even with the calmness he performs. “Though you seem to have taken more than that, I suppose you’d call this even?” Then, I shall be meeting you in hell, Wemmbu.
Then the caracal convulses, abrupt and graceless. It breaks the careful composure he clung onto, blood foams at the corner of his mouth. Claws rake into the snow, trying to find some sort of purchase. Not the architect of the most feared regime on the server, not the one who had sent hundreds — thousands to their graves. Wemmbu watches all of that shatter and fade.
No, he thinks, we are not even. Time will turn blood from red to rust, and from rust to black. It will soften your name into something arguable, and the people will call your actions redeemable. You have always found new meaning, rebuilt from ruins over and over again. But from me you have taken something that I can no longer rebuild, something I will never find again. And from this consequence you have ran, far too easily.
The tremors will grow softer, snow will gather in the grooves carved by his claws. The light in his eyes will dim and his shape will slacken into something unremarkable.
LettuceK was no more.
And there was no way to go chasing what has already slipped beyond the edges of this world, no way to rebuild what has already been burnt so completely to ash he no longer remembered its shape.
Where am I to put this? The smouldering coals of what was once fury that burned hot and bright, now sat heavy and dormant. Something warm trickles between shattered plates of armour, reminding him that he was, inconveniently, still alive. What do I do now?
Could death bring him salvation? His hands tighten around his sword. It would be easy to close the distance between here and wherever Egg had gone.
No, definitely not, for he had always been bound for hellfire and damnation. Where he was going would be no place for a reunion. No, Egg had gone to someplace softer, with wide skies and clouds as white as fresh fallen snow, a place the darkness does not touch, where the air is warm without burning. That kind of place would not take kindly to him.
Or, he thought, Egg was watching over him.
Wemmbu sways faintly as he leaves behind the wreckage of what once was the Law. He presses a hand to his side, and finds warmth there, seeping through. A trail of red drags behind him. It threads through the earth, a crimson thread unspooling itself across the snow, accompanied only by the hollow sound of his own breathing and the beat of a heart that refused to stop when it should have. Proof he was not as unbreakable as he had thought. It was alright, it meant he was no monster.
(Gods, he hoped Egg was watching over him.)
He and Egg sit by the river, or, it looked like a river. A form torrential but controlled, its shape malleable under his will. The surface is obedient, pliant as silk beneath his gaze, but the depths beneath hums with something vaster than he could ever hope to command. It is a force far older than him. In it, the Wemmbu civilisation, the farlands, the end. Histories dissolve into nothingness and reform as starlight. Egg has his fishing rod out, as he always does, he casts it into the cosmos reflected upon the waters surface.
A dream, he knew. This must be a dream. He had known that the outside was cold, that the snow had not stopped falling. When he wakes, there will be no weight pressed into his side, no quiet breathing to anchor him. He should not be allowed this, knew he should never feel this warmth again, that this sight should be nothing but nostalgic. Bittersweet.
Wemmbu has always had nightmares, things he ran from in life changed their form and pursued him in his sleep, and he in it was defenceless, helpless to do anything but squeeze his eyes shut and will the scene to fade. Today, he does not break the illusion. The riverbed is alight with the glow of stars and the meandering light of fireflies. The flow and ebb of the river against the bank bringing with it tiny pieces of the night sky, the countless universes and possibilities that existed within this space.
In this dream he was small, smaller than he had ever allowed himself to be. In this dream he was crying, one hand tightened around the sleeve of Egg’s suit, the material impossibly real between his fingers. He holds as though scared the seraphim would simply disappear the moment he let go, swept away in the river’s currents. In this dream he screams, breaks the silence of the universe to beg, beg Egg to stay, let him stay just a little longer.
Please, please come back to me. Come home.
Egg sets the line down on his knees, his hands finding Wemmbu’s as he had a million times before, in darker, far more dangerous places. Then Egg smiles, and when he speaks, his voice carries the sound of wind and the chime of bells.
“Don’t worry yourself too much,” he laughs, with that easy calm that had often surfaced in obsidian cages and battles they had no business surviving. It had driven him up a wall, then, and it most certainly wasn’t any less infuriating now. “You’re always like this.”
Well, yeah, duh. Usually for appropriate reasons. Wemmbu almost retorts, but the giddy feeling in his chest is too bright, too buoyant to let it through. He swallows the words and lets the silence stretch, but Egg seems to hear them anyway. His shoulder nudges lightly against Wemmbu’s as he continues,
“In time, we will definitely meet again. So—”
“Won’t you wait for me?”
His line tugs, once, twice, and Egg reaches for the rod again. From the depths, he reels in something, something brilliant and changing. It rises without resistance, without so much as a splash when it breaks the surface, and fits perfectly into the cradle of his palm. A star, Wemmbu realises, Egg has caught a star.
The light from it spills over their hands, over their faces, erasing every shadow it touches. Egg lifts it between them, and for a moment, he could almost believe the world was complete again, that this pain was survivable. Wemmbu leans closer without meaning to.
But this too must fade, as all dreams do. The scene crumbles, fireflies wink out and stars dissolve into ash, quickly swept by the roaring river. It wells up to meet him, the water to his fire, and Wemmbu closes his eyes.
He wakes alone, frost had claimed half of his body in the time he slept. He almost expects warmth, a wing thrown carelessly over his ribs, the faint rustle of feathers. There was nothing. That was hardly a surprise.
Wemmbu sits up slowly, and the ice fractures and falls from where it had clung to him overnight. He brushes it off his shoulders, his legs, his hair, and the hollow where something else used to rest against him. He redoes his bandages, tests the set of his shoulder, double checks his inventory. Totems, potions, weapons, all aligned in their usual spots. Everything, almost everything, exactly where it should be.
Hope was a pointless feeling for something that had already so completely slipped between his fingers. But it flutters in his chest anyway, something to warm him through the winter. It waits for him to give it the smallest spark to justify its existence.
— If he could believe the fabric between his fingers was real. If he could believe the hands that held his were real.
Patience was a virtue borne of the frost of winter, of the trees that awaited the coming of spring, of the creatures that lay dormant beneath the snow. And this time, of all times, Wemmbu must be patient.
So he adjusts the straps of his armour, shakes off the last wisps of cold, and steps forward.
Wemmbu waits.