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The air split open with a sound like tearing silk.
Wemmbu pulled, and stumbled forward, catching himself on his knees against cold concrete, gasping. The room was small—grey walls, a single fluorescent tube buzzing overhead, no windows, no door he could see. The kind of room that felt less like it had been built and more like it had simply decided to exist out of spite.
He pressed a hand to his chest, felt his heart slamming against his ribs. Okay. Okay. You're alive. Calm the fuck down.
The concrete was cold, and he could feel the faint, sick thrum of whatever had just happened still vibrating somewhere, like that particular moment of travel that never got easier no matter how many times it happened to you.
His tail had gone rigid with the shock of arrival. He forced it to relax.
Deep breath. You have been in worse rooms. You have been in worse situations. This is just a weird concrete box with bad lighting and no door, you're fine, you're—
"What the—"
He spun around.
There was another person across the room. Same grey walls reflected in wide, terrified eyes. Same cape, the fabric catching the fluorescent light at the same angle. Same jaw. Same nose. Same tiara catching the light with that same slight tilt he'd never managed to correct. Same tail, which was currently doing the exact same rigid, alarmed thing his was doing.
Except for the eyes.
They were what Wemmbu's used to be—normal eyes. The kind of eyes he'd had before a month of chasing invisibility through potions had started doing something slow and irreversible to his blood.
The man was staring at him.
Wemmbu was staring back.
For a long moment, neither of them breathed. The fluorescent light buzzed. A pipe somewhere in the walls issued a single, indifferent knock, as if registering its own confusion at the situation, then went silent again. Somewhere in the walls, something dripped once.
Then,
"DUDE, WHO ARE YOU?!"
Wemmbu tried to reach for his mace, realised there was nothing under his belt—he'd come through the pull without his gear, great, fantastic, amazing—and scrambled backward until his shoulders hit the wall, palms flat against the concrete, claws scraping brief shallow lines before he caught himself and forced the retraction instinct back down. The wall was smooth and cold and offered no comfort whatsoever. His breathing had gone sharp and shallow. Okay. Okay. The other person also looks scared. That's—that's something. That's either reassuring or terrible, depending.
"WHO AM I?!" the other man bellowed from across the room, and then caught himself, visibly, the way Wemmbu recognised because it was the same thing he did—that particular self-interruption when you realised you'd already started the wrong sentence. "Who are you?! Why do you look like that?!"
"Like what?" Wemmbu managed.
"Like me!"
"You look like me, you—" His tail flicked hard, once, to the side. "What is happening?! What is this room, where is the door, why are you—"
"I don't know any of that either!" the other man shouted back. "I have been standing in this room for four minutes, alone, trying to figure out where the door is, and now you materialize out of thin air wearing my face—"
"It's my face, it was my face first—"
"You have black eyes!" The other jabbed a finger across the room at him. "That's—that is not my face, bro, I don't know what timeline you're from but you look—"
"Would you stop pointing at me like that—"
"I'm pointing because you're pointing!"
They were both pointing. They both looked down at their own outstretched hands simultaneously, and then—because apparently the universe had a very specific sense of humour—their tails both did the same slow, involuntary flick at the same time, that particular gesture that meant I am deeply unsettled and I want everyone around me to know it.
A horrible, stretched moment of mutual recognition.
Their tails both immediately stilled.
"Stop doing that," Wemmbu hissed.
"I'm not doing anything! You stop doing that—"
"I got here first!"
"That is absolutely not how this works!" The other Wemmbu jabbed a finger across the room at him again, apparently unable to help it. "I have been standing in this room for four minutes, alone, trying to figure out where the door is, and now you materialize out of thin air wearing my face and start yelling at me like I'm the problem—"
"You are the problem, you're a person who looks exactly like me and I don't know why—"
"I don't know why either!"
"Then why are you acting like I'm wrong?!"
"Because you look wrong!"
Wemmbu stopped. "I—bro, what?"
"You have black eyes!" The other jabbed a finger at his own face for emphasis, at his perfectly normal, purple-iris eyes, like he needed to illustrate the contrast. "That's weird as hell, dude! There's no way another version of me was out here smoking crack, is there? Like please tell me that's not what happened."
"First of all, rude," Wemmbu said flatly. "Second of all, I have not been smoking anything. At all. Not even close." He was aware, dimly, that his retractable claws had partially extended again during the argument and he made himself pull them back. "The eyes are a whole different thing."
"Then why do you look like that, bro?" Came the response, sharp and deeply suspicious, the exact tone Wemmbu recognised as the one he used when he already knew he wasn't going to like the answer and was asking anyway just to have it confirmed.
"It's a long story, alright?"
The other Wemmbu crossed his arms. His tail was doing that slow, considered sweep that meant he was actually paying attention even if he looked irritated. "We are literally trapped in a room with no door," he said. "I have time."
"...Fair point." Wemmbu looked at the ceiling—the buzzing fluorescent tube, the grey expanse of concrete above it—then back down. His tail settled into that same slow sweep. "Alright. Sit down."
"I'm not sitting down, you sit down—"
"I'm already against the wall, where do you want me to go—"
"Fine," Past-Wemmbu said, and sat down. Not gracefully—just folded at the knees and dropped onto the cold concrete with the particular decisiveness of someone who had decided that if they were going to be irritated, they were going to be irritated at floor level. "Talk."
For a moment, Wemmbu just looked at his ‘past’ self across the grey room. The eyes looking back at him. The thing he used to be. There was something strange about it—not painful, not exactly, just strange, like looking at a photograph and being unable to remember what it had felt like to be the person in it.
"Invisibility potions," he answered.
Past-Wemmbu stared at him. "What about them."
"That's the answer. To the eyes."
Silence. The pipe knocked once. Past-Wemmbu's tail had gone very still.
"...How many."
"A lot."
"How many is a lot, bro."
He exhaled through his nose, tail flicking with a particular resigned irritation. "Two hundred. Give or take. Per day."
"Per day," Past-Wemmbu repeated.
"Per day."
"For how long."
"Month. About a month."
Past-Wemmbu put his face in his hands. The sound he made was low and muffled and not quite a groan but not quite anything else either. It was not the reaction of a man receiving new information so much as a man receiving a confirmation of his worst fears about himself—the thing you always sort of suspected you were capable of, finally showing up with receipts.
"Bro," he said, muffled through his palms.
"I know."
"Bro."
"I know, man."
"Two hundred."
"Give or take. Sometimes more." Wemmbu glanced down at his own hands, at the faint tracery of something dark moving beneath the skin where the veins ran—the purple-black of blood that had been doing strange things since the potions had started accumulating in a way that the body, even his body, even a demon hybrid's body, wasn't really designed to process.
Past-Wemmbu had lifted his face from his hands and was staring at him. "Two hundred."
"Minimum. Sometimes more if I needed to stay under longer."
"Per day."
"You said that already."
"I'm saying it again because it hasn't stopped being insane!" Past-Wemmbu gestured widely at nothing, at the grey walls, at the general concept of the universe and its choices. "What were you even—why were you staying invisible for that long? What could possibly—"
"Fake death arc," Wemmbu said.
Past-Wemmbu's mouth opened, then closed.
"I faked my death," Wemmbu said casually, before he could respond, in the tone of someone delivering news that sounds more dramatic than it felt at the time. "Wanted to experience the server for myself. Properly. Just—be there, you know? Without the whole thing of being me. Two weeks in, the eyes started going. Purple first, just the iris."
He gestured at his own face. "Then darker. Kept going darker every few days. Now they're black. Like, fully." He paused.
The silence that followed was a particular quality of silence—the kind that had weight to it, that meant the other person was doing something more complicated than just processing information.
"That's—" Past-Wemmbu stopped. Started again, more carefully. "That's a lot."
"Yeah."
"Why." It wasn't an accusation. It was just the question, flat and direct, the way they asked things when they wanted the real answer and not the deflection. "Like—why did you need to that badly? The whole fake death thing, the two hundred potions a day, why."
Wemmbu was quiet for long enough that the pipe in the wall knocked once, like it was checking in. He looked at his hands again. The dark veins. The claws, fully retracted now, the skin smooth over the knuckles where the recessed tips sat beneath.
"I just needed to, okay?," he said finally. "Felt like the right call at the time. Needed to just—exist in a space without it being a whole thing." A beat. "You know how it gets."
"Yeah," Past-Wemmbu agreed quietly. "I know how it gets."
Neither of them said anything else about it. That was the thing about talking to yourself, Wemmbu thought—some things didn't need explaining all the way through. Some things got there on their own.
Past-Wemmbu's voice went careful. "Where was Egg while all this was happening."
"He was stuck in the End dimension, like the chungus he is." Wemmbu waved his question off, tail flicking. "Which honestly worked out, because if he'd been around he would have made way more chaos." He waved a hand lazily.
Past-Wemmbu watched him a moment longer, that look he recognised—the one that meant he was deciding whether to push something. He apparently decided against it, at least for now, because instead he asked, "Mane."
"What about him."
"I'm being trained by him right now. Currently. In my timeline." He paused, shoulders shifting against the concrete wall. "Should I trust him?"
The question sat in the room between them.
Wemmbu looked at his past self and felt the memory press close—the specific, accumulated weight of everything that word contained. He let it come, briefly. The way that training had felt. The sharpness of it. The moments where he'd been absolutely certain, fully convinced in the way only a version of himself could be, that he knew better.
Lost cause.
He thought about Egg's face, in that particular moment he kept coming back to, when he asked if Mane was coming back and the silence lasted just slightly too long.
He thought about what it might have cost, if he'd listened earlier. If he'd swallowed the argument and just trusted the person who had been doing this longer.
"Yeah," he said. "Trust him."
"Even if—"
"Even if he's hard on you." Wemmbu's voice was even, smooth, the particular evenness of something that had already been settled in him. "Even if it feels like he thinks you can't cut it. He thinks you can. He's just not great at saying that part out loud." A beat. "The other part he says very clearly, yeah."
Past-Wemmbu snorted. "He really does not hold back."
"He really does not." Something almost fond moved through Wemmbu's expression.
"So when he warns you about something," Wemmbu said, and his voice went quieter, settled into something more deliberate, "and you think you know better—you don't. Okay? You just don't. That's not me being down on us, that's just—" He looked at his hands again. The dark veins. "Trust him. Even if it costs you something. Even if it costs you—" He stopped. Seemed to decide something. "Just trust him. Don't make me tell you this a second time."
Past-Wemmbu looked at Wemmbu's hands too—following the line of his gaze without seeming to mean to—and then back up at his face. He nodded, slow and serious. No smart comment. No deflection. Just the nod.
"Okay," he said.
"Good," Wemmbu said.
The conversation had gone somewhere quieter after that.
Past-Wemmbu had his legs stretched out in front of him now, shoulders back against the wall, looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone who had run out of immediate problems to argue about.
Wemmbu had his arms resting on his knees, tail moving in a slow, idle arc.
The fluorescent light buzzed. Neither of them was in a hurry to fill the silence—you didn't feel the same obligation to perform sociability when the person you were sitting with already knew every deflection you had.
"You're different," Past-Wemmbu said, to the ceiling.
Wemmbu glanced over. "What?"
"You're different." Past-Wemmbu lowered his gaze from the ceiling and looked at him directly. "Like—not just the eyes. You're different. Something's different about how you're—" He gestured vaguely, trying to describe something that apparently didn't have a clean word.
"I'm you from the future, of course I'm—"
"No, I mean—" Past-Wemmbu frowned, searching for the words with a focus that meant he was actually trying to get it right. "You're softer."
Wemmbu stared at the other.
"You're not—" Past-Wemmbu cut off again, frustrated, the way they both got when language wasn't cooperating with what they actually meant.
He gestured again, more specifically, pointing loosely at Wemmbu's posture. "You went for the wall. When I startled you. You went defensive, not—you didn't reach for something to fight with. You went backwards."
"I didn't have anything to fight with, dude," Wemmbu pointed out. "Came through without my gear."
"Doesn't matter. That's not what I'm talking about." Past-Wemmbu was watching him with attention. "Before—the way I am right now—first instinct would've been offensive, even unarmed. Even scared. But you went back. That's not—" He paused. "That's not us."
"Used to be," Wemmbu agreed.
"So what happened."
There was a version of this conversation where Wemmbu told him everything.
He thought about that version, briefly—the full accounting, all of it, the whole sequence of events and people and moments that had done the work of changing something structural about how he moved through the world. The names. The specific gravity of each thing.
He decided against it. Not because it was too much, but because some things had to arrive in their own order. You couldn't front-load the understanding. It didn't work.
"Character development," Wemmbu said simply, tail lazily swishing.
Past-Wemmbu stopped. "...What?"
"Character development." Wemmbu met his eyes, perfectly calm. "That's it. That's the whole answer."
A long pause.
"Character development," Past-Wemmbu repeated, in the tone of a man tasting an unfamiliar word and not entirely sure what to do with it.
"Yep."
"That's all you're giving me."
"That's all there is." Wemmbu shrugged, and there was something almost comfortable in it—the ease of someone who had already made peace with the thing being described. "Things happened. People happened. I changed. It happens to everyone eventually, dude. Even us.”
Past-Wemmbu stared at him for another long moment. Some things had to be arrived at on their own timeline, in their own order. Even he knew that.
"Egg," Past-Wemmbu started after a moment of silence.
Wemmbu glanced over. "What about him."
"Is he still—" Past-Wemmbu paused, appeared to cycle through several options and then abandoned all of them in favour of accuracy. "Is he still an idiot?"
Wemmbu's mouth twitched. The corner of it, just slightly. "Define idiot."
"You know exactly what I mean."
"I really do." Wemmbu grinned, "Yeah. Still the biggest chungus I've ever encountered in my entire life, bro. Zero change. Absolutely zero growth in that specific department. I think he's actually gotten worse, which—I don't know how he managed it, I genuinely don't know how that's physically possible—"
Past-Wemmbu let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Thank god."
"Right?!" Wemmbu started laughing, and it was sudden and real, the kind that came from somewhere more genuine than just finding something funny. "I don't know how, I don't think it should be possible, but he managed it, dude. He went looking for more idiot and he found it. He found more idiot than there was before. That's—that's a kind of achievement, honestly."
"That is so completely—"
"So completely him, I know, I know—" Wemmbu was shaking his head, still laughing, the way you laughed at someone you'd known long enough that the exasperation and the affection had fully fused into the same feeling and you couldn't tell them apart anymore. "He lives through sheer force of chungus. That's the whole thing. That's been the whole thing since day one."
"It should not work as often as it does."
"It really, really should not. And yet." Wemmbu spread his hands. "Still my best friend though. After everything. All of it." The laughter softened, the way it did when it ran into something real underneath it. "We're good. Me and Egg are still good."
Past-Wemmbu smiled. "Good."
"Yeah." Wemmbu leaned his head back against the wall. Something in his voice went warm in a way it hadn't been earlier in the conversation, something that had loosened as the time passed and the room had stopped feeling as hostile. "Still the chungus I've always known. After everything that happened. After all of it. Still exactly him." A pause. "Wouldn't have it any other way, honestly. I've thought about it. I wouldn't."
They sat with that for a moment. It was, against all odds, comfortable—two versions of the same person in a concrete room with no door, having found the least strange part of the conversation was talking about their mutual best friend's spectacular and consistent idiocy. There was something grounding about it. Something that worked as an anchor.
Then Past-Wemmbu said, "Zam."
"What about him?," Wemmbu said.
"You still got that grudge?"
Wemmbu made a sound. Short and strange and sitting somewhere between a laugh and something he couldn't quite name—that sound that meant a thing was complicated in a way that had made peace with itself.
"We got thrown in a prison together," he said.
Past-Wemmbu blinked. "Sorry?"
"Captured. Both of us." Wemmbu looked at the ceiling. "Different circumstances, different routes to the same bad situation." A beat. "You know how she is. Even after everything I'd done to the empire—even after all of it—she's still—"
"Still Zam."
"Still Zam, yeah. Exactly." His tail moved. "He could've made that situation significantly worse for me but he didn't. And I—" He paused, seemed to be choosing words with some care. "I'd already done significant damage to something she'd built her whole thing around, right? And she didn't—she wasn't—" He stopped again. "It was what it was."
"And you made it out."
"We made it out. Together." Wemmbu looked at his past self. "Which—yeah. I know. After I destroyed the empire. I know."
"That's—" Past-Wemmbu seemed genuinely lost for words, which was an experience neither of them had often. "How do you just—how does that even work?”
"I didn't say it wasn't a whole thing," Wemmbu cut in. "It was absolutely a whole thing. There were several moments where it nearly fell apart. I almost said something stupid at least twice." His tail hit the hard floor with a soft thump as it fidgeted.
"You," Past-Wemmbu said, lifting an eyebrow.
"Me, yeah, I know, it's a pattern, bro, I'm aware." Wemmbu flicked his tail. "But we made it out. And the grudge is still there—I'm not gonna pretend it isn't. Probably always will be, in some form.”
"That's very mature of you," Past-Wemmbu said, in a tone that was approximately forty percent sincere.
"I told you," Wemmbu grinned, without missing a beat. "Character development."
"Right, right." Past-Wemmbu waved a hand. "The mysterious character development.”
"I'm not being cryptic on purpose, dude. I just—some things you have to get there yourself. You know that. You know exactly how it works. If I just told you everything—"
"I wouldn't believe it," Past-Wemmbu finished, slowly. He looked at the wall, then back at Wemmbu. "Yeah. Fair."
"I can tell you it works out," Wemmbu hummed. "Some of it. Not all of it—some of it genuinely sucks, bro, I'm not gonna lie to you about that—but it works out."
Past-Wemmbu was quiet for a moment. "It works out," he repeated.
"Yeah."
"Is that enough?"
Wemmbu considered it honestly, the way you could only consider a thing honestly when you already knew the answer.
"Yeah.”
"Hey," Past-Wemmbu said.
Wemmbu looked over.
"You good? Like. Actually."
The room was very quiet. Wemmbu’s tail moved slowly. His claws were retracted and his hands were still and somewhere in the concrete around them the pipes were silent for once, as if they'd also decided this was worth paying attention to.
He thought of all the things that would happen to him that this version didn't know of yet. Flamefrags. LettuceK. Snow Civilisation. Rejoice.
All the people who were going to end up mattering in ways he hadn't anticipated when they first arrived.
"Getting there," he said.