Chapter Text
“Yo, Flame,” murmurs the awful purple thing that’s tailing him. “Ain't that your boy?”
And isn’t it just.
Lomedy stands so perfectly still next to Lettuce that Flame wonders if he hasn’t just fallen asleep or maybe died standing up. So stock-straight in Law armor; in white and gold over black, shimmering netherite, his arms locked behind his back and staring absently at nothing.
“Flame?” Wemmbu nudges him, quietly. They’re watching from the rafters, cloaked well in invis, ready to kill Lettuce as he scribbles something on a piece of paper below, as they had planned--if not for the untimely appearance of Flame's dear, traitorous friend. “Y’know, your farmer chungy? Isn’t that him? What’s he doing with Lettuce? Oh, is this like a hostage thing, dude? Heh. What goes around comes around. This is what you get for hostaging my chungy so many t—”
“Don’t,” Flame says.
His voice is light; light enough, anyway, not harsh or heavy, but Wemmbu shuts his mouth instantly. For a second, Flame wonders why. He had tried to sound nonchalant—and he was also doing a great job of not choking out Wemmbu, which has, for the last hour, really seemed like the most expedient option.
Wemmbu blows air out through his teeth. “Okay,” he says. “Uh, you’re smoking, by the way. Don’t blow our invis.”
Ah. That’d do it.
He hadn’t even realized; there’s a ribbon of steam trailing upwards from his gritted teeth.
Flame slaps a hand over his mouth. The smoke stops.
He takes a couple of deep breaths.
Inner peace is a difficult thing to acquire. Itz seemed to have it in spades; an easy sort of calmness that Flame admired. Maybe that’s just what happens when you reach the peak; when there’s nowhere to go but back down the mountain and guide others up.
Or maybe Flame’s just bad at being nonchalant.
“Should we…?” Wemmbu starts, and then stops, uncertain. It’s very strange. Wemmbu is never uncertain. “Do I need to, like…”
“Spit it out, dude,” Flame hisses, just under his breath, and a spark flies from his mouth. Oops.
“Do I gotta be careful for him or careful of him, bro,” Wemmbu asks, at last. “Like, is he gonna try to slime me out or do I need to slime out Lettuce before he slimes out your guy.”
Flame digs his blunt fingernails into his palm. It’s a necessary question, but he still wants to punch Wemmbu’s lights out for asking.
“Lomedy’s a traitor,” he says. It’s supposed to be the only thing he says; an easy, simple way to wrap it up, but he’s a stupid sentimental fool and so he can’t help but add: “Don’t hurt him, though, he’s—”
He can’t see Wemmbu’s face, but he imagines he’s probably raising an exasperated eyebrow in the silence.
“Fragile,” Flame finishes, lamely. “He’s not a fighter.”
“Why’s Letty got him working bodyguard duty, then?” Wemmbu asks, and Flame wishes he knew.
No, he does know.
But if he thinks about it too hard he might set this windowsill on fire.
“It doesn’t matter, bro,” Flame mutters. “Can we get this over with, please?”
“Whatever,” Wemmbu sighs, and must, invisibly, roll his eyes, but Flame doesn’t see it. He does, however, hear the tell-tale shuffling of Wemmbu rustling up what he knows is a stab-shot from within his cloak, and Flame grabs at where he thinks Wemmbu’s arm probably is.
“What the hell do you think fragile means, idiot?” he hisses.
“He’s in netherite,” Wemmbu snaps back. “He’d be fine. You just said he was a traitor.”
“Doesn’t mean I want him dead,” Flame says, entirely unsure if it's the truth.
“Oh, come on,” whines Wemmbu. “I haven’t blown anything up in like half an hour. I’m getting bor—”
“You guys can come out now,” says Lettuce, from behind his desk, and the two of them freeze in place like bumbling idiots and not the terrifyingly competent fighters they are.
“Oh, oh, okay,” Wemmbu mutters, at last, slipping on his netherite and dropping down from the window. “Hell, sure, whatever.”
“This is all your fault, bro,” Flame sighs, as he does the same.
He aims for something casual and unbothered and cool but the way his gaze snaps so immediately to Lomedy is anything but.
His best friend just stares off; dead-eyed, at nothing. So still. How is he possibly so still? He doesn’t even shift in shame, he just stares there at nothing at nothing at nothing.
God, Lomedy won’t even look at him.
“What do you want?” Lettuce sighs. He, too, stays staring at his paperwork, but at least with Lettuce, Flame knows it’s a power thing.
“Uh, to kill you, bro,” Wemmbu starts, to his side. This is where Flame is supposed to join in and make fun of Lettuce for a bit before they jump him but he just genuinely cannot focus.
Lomedy looks like a stranger. It’s weird, because not all that much has really changed. The white-and-gold almost suits him. He wears gold all the time, anyway; he can see the hem of his friend’s favorite white undershirt poking out from underneath his pitch-black netherite; hell, his boots are still muddy with farm soil. Even his laurel crown is still in place, shimming in his curly black hair.
Not much has changed at all, but—his face is just…
His expression is totally slack; his eyes are dead. Like a stranger. Like a dead fish possessing the body of his animate, bright best friend; his kind, loyal, gentle companion who sang to the sprouts in the early morning and smiled like the sun itself was behind his teeth. Dead to all the world; deafened by his hatred of Flame.
“Yo,” Wemmbu says. “Yo, dude, Earth to Flame? Lock in, buddy.” Their invis has flickered out by now, and the sudden visibility has Flame feeling strangely vulnerable.
“Oh,” murmurs Lettuce. “I see. I get what’s dis-trac-ting you.” He punctuates each sing-song syllable of the word with a movement; standing up from his chair, stepping over, and draping himself over Lomedy’s armored shoulder. “My new bodyguard. First day on the job, you know? So be nice to him, boys.”
In and out. Inner peace. The zone. Itz talked a lot about the zone. He talked a lot about restraint. Flame digs his fingernails into his palms and thinks that he's going to be really good at restraint by the time this is over.
“I don’t care about that,” he gets out, through gritted teeth. He’s not sure how believable it really is because he really actually does care quite a bit. He cares so much, in fact, that it’s superheating the air around him.
Lettuce just looks him up and down; the unnerving vertical slits of his pupils darting from him to Wemmbu and back again. “Oh, yeah, uh-huh. Very nonchalant. I can tell. Bodyguard,” he purrs, turning back to Lomedy, strange, silent, still-hasn’t-said-a-thing Lomedy. “Is this man bothering you?”
At last, Lomedy shows some kind of a reaction. He turns to look at Lettuce, slightly; tilts his head like he’s confused.
Lettuce grimaces—just for a split second—before his awful carnivore’s smirk comes back. “Oh,” he murmurs. “Hold on, you’ve got something riiiight—here.”
Which is when Lettuce stares Flame dead in the eyes while he runs one of his brutally long claws through Lomedy’s hair—picks out nothing—and then pats Lomedy on the head. Like some kind of dog. And Lomedy barely reacts to any of it. Like it’s normal.
“Oop,” Lettuce starts, in reaction to whatever the hell Flame looks like right now. He’s not sure because he’s never been this angry in his entire life. Maybe he's holding his sword. He'll need to be holding his sword for the kinds of things he's going to do to Lettuce. “Hold on, I wouldn’t do anything like that. Lomedy doesn’t want to fight—do you, Lomedy?”
“No,” Lomedy mumbles. It’s the first thing he’s said this whole time. His friend’s voice is as smooth and as ringing and as gently sweet as always but it’s strangely hoarse right now, like he’s been—
Crying.
And he can’t even look at Flame. The wave of shame washes over him and spins to anger and finally settles on a strange kind of grief so fast he almost feels a little dizzy.
“See?” Lettuce tuts. “No. Weren’t you two friends, at one point? You know, before? Flame, you should really reconsider. Lomedy came to his senses, and now he’s one of the hardest working guards we have here in the Law.”
“Um,” Wemmbu starts, before Flame shoots him a look that could kill and maybe would once this whole nightmare is over, and he shuts his mouth.
“If you just turned yourself in,” LettuceK continues, smoothly, trailing one long claw along Lomedy’s armored shoulder; tracing the line of his gold-and-white Law trims. “We could work something out. Rehabilitation. Visiting hours. Maybe I could even have this one—” and he taps Lomedy’s armor. “Stand watch outside your cell. Something like a sleepover, hm?”
Something like a sleepover. He’s gonna need to make Lettuce into a rug. Or like a pair of mittens, or something. This is—and the way Lomedy shuddered when Lettuce said he would make him stand guard outside of Flame’s prison cell—was that disgust? At the idea of even being near Flame? No--that's--no. Flame didn’t do anything to deserve this kind of hatred.
“Shut it,” he hisses to Lettuce, and then, to Lomedy. “You—Lomedy. Are you seriously working for Lettuce? Lettuce? I—I’m sorry I led them to your farm, but they’re the ones who destroyed it! I did nothing wrong! I’m just trying to play on the fucking server like anybody else!”
By the end of it, he’s shouting, and it makes Lomedy look at him—really look at him—finally look at him—and pale and take the smallest of steps back.
“Oh, look,” Lettuce coos, all fake concern, ushering Lomedy away to the door. His friend goes, without another word, stumbling slightly. “You scared him. C’mon, Flame, it’s his first day. You really ought to be nicer.” His voice drops down into something less patronizing; a little more brutal. “Is this really how you treat your friends?”
“That’s no friend of mine,” Flame sneers. It’s an ugly sound and it’s an ugly word and he’s not sure he means half of it but if he doesn’t say it he’ll die. “I don’t have any friends who wear that uniform.”
Lomedy’s back is turned to him, so he doesn’t even get to see his reaction. Nothing, probably, nothing, again; that cold and cruel absence of any emotion; that dead-fish stranger-stare.
The doors swing shut. Lomedy is gone. Lettuce is just standing there.
“That’s mean,” Lettuce chirps, primly. “Poor Lomedy. He’s just trying to do the right thing, you know?”
Flame counts to thirty in his head. That’s enough time for Lomedy to get away or go to the guard rooms or whatever the fuck he does. Once he reaches that number, he turns to Wemmbu—who looks equally horrified and stricken and annoyed—and he says to him—
“Wemmbu.”
The man in question nods; perfectly, implausibly quiet, for once.
“Please stabshot that man,” Flame finishes. It’s perhaps the politest he’s ever been—certainly the politest he’s ever been to Wemmbu.
Lettuce’s eyes get wide for about a split second before his totem’s popping and there's a massive crater through his HQ and he’s launched somewhere around a billion blocks into the sky. Gone; for now.
“That was fucked up,” Wemmbu mutters, to Flame. “What just happened, there, I mean–”
“Don’t,” Flame says, and Wemmbu, blessedly, doesn’t.
“I,” Flame starts, pausing for effect and to keep himself sane. “Am going to go make that guy wish he was banned.”
“Cool,” says Wemmbu, evenly. “Right. Yeah. Okay. Let’s get it.”
“Great,” Flame says. He relishes the way fire flickers on his tongue; satisfyingly wrathful and pleasingly vicious, and then he slams a windburst at his feet and rockets upwards to go find where Lettuce ended up after getting blown sky-high.
Because if he’s finding that fucking cat then he’s on his way to fighting and if he’s fighting he’s not thinking and if he’s not thinking then Flame can’t replay over and over again in his mind Lomedy’s ruler-straight spine and his heavy netherite and Lettuce’s long brutal claws; can’t replay how his best friend—his only friend—has betrayed him utterly and completely.
It’s the first time Flame sees his best friend since he abandoned him at his farm, overrun by the forces of the Law.
It's not the last.
He catches glimpses of the traitor after the fact; across the battlefield time and time again; always at Lettuce’s side, like the good little soldier he is; a ghostly flash of white and gold and black. Flame hurls a few insults his way, shouts a bit, but, of course, he gets nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing—
Nothing until the Great War at the Northern Council, when, through the soot and the dust floating up and the hundreds dying all around him he catches sight of a lone figure standing perfectly still in the chaos—some statue looking upwards at the sky—his laurel crown glimmering in the filtered-out sun.
It’s enough to make him stumble; enough to make him stop; enough to make him remember, for just a second, that moment in Lettuce’s office so long ago; enough to resurrect the memory of Lomedy’s golden, dead-fish eyes.
Then Jaden emerges from the dust with the heavy part of his stolen mace held high above the still frame of his traitorous best friend and the battle becomes background static as Lomedy drops like a rock and it all melts away.