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Thomas dreams of that awful day more than he cares to admit.
He had never truly learned what had caused that accident. There were whispers of landmine explosions, or rebel artillery, or more horrifyingly, a flubbed assassination attempt on the youngest, most vulnerable member of the Aculon royal family. He’d stopped asking, because Thomas knew from a very young age that agonizing over the ‘whys’ of the mortal coil would simply garrote him. What mattered more is the concrete, measurable plans in the aftermath, a means of moving forward. What mattered to him was that Flux was alive.
It went something like this: Thomas had just freshly turned thirteen when he was finally permitted to see Flux after whatever had transpired. The latter laid in a hospital cot in the castle’s private wing; exhausted but very much alive. IV drips and tubes sprouted from his skin in weed-like overgrowth. It nearly made him throw up.
Flux had his head turned away from Thomas, eyes trained in the distance from high arching windows. The sky and mountain ranges were an indistinguishable shade of gray in the horizon, save for the dotted fires marking a smattering of Aculon skirmishes.
And Thomas sprinted to his bedside, sobbing unabashedly. He looped his arms around Flux and a tangle of tubes as carefully as he could and kissed the crown of his head; uncaring of how Flux would probably push him away without hesitation, if he had the strength to, too elated at seeing his friend alive.
He’s alive, thank Ish he’s alive.
He remembered that this was the first time Flux had ever held him back. Slowly, Flux reached around Thomas, feebly gripping the back of his shirt. Something warm, and sweet drips from his chest to his gut.
It was only then, a cold tidal wave of horror crashing over him, did Thomas realise that Flux only had a single arm around him.
The adjustment to a new convention of living is an abysmally rocky ordeal.
Flux exists in a perpetual state of frustration over the neural and reaction time lag between his overworked brain and the newfound severance of a limb. He complains of phantom pains, itches and discomfort in an arm that was no longer attached to his body, and while Thomas could not fathom it, he knows it’s worse for Flux.
Flux’s resistance to help is immediate and violent; he snarls at any and all attempts to help him accommodate for a new reality. Living is enshrouded by a strife Flux is ill-prepared for.
Thomas is stunned to experience that this vitriol extended to himself, as well.
At first, Flux resisted any and all of Thomas’ attempts at helping him, shoving Thomas away in favour of doing whatever menial task by himself if only to prove he could, messy and infantile. While Thomas knows Flux well enough that he abhorred being coddled, Thomas couldn’t help but do so when Flux could barely dress or feed himself without a world of difficulty.
It’s not like Thomas knew why he kept trying when all Flux did was resist, either. Maybe it was their proximity in age that inspired a sense of duty in him, or maybe more selfishly, he wanted to be the one to catch Flux as the life he knew was ripped from underneath him like carpet; to take a closer look at the helplessness of a boy who always seemed so infallible.
Secretly, maybe he reveled in how Flux has to rely on him even with the latter's constant lashing out. And the more Thomas imposed, the more Flux’s anger eroded into compliance as it dawned onto Flux that rehabilitation is going to be a long, tenuous journey - he had no choice but to accept there was little he could do unassisted now. The pill goes down bitter and dry.
“Let me do that for you,” Thomas said, wiping stray sauce from the side of Flux’s mouth with his own shirt sleeve. While Flux has slowly improved in relearning most basic acts of living with his non-dominant hand, all of them remained to be clumsy affairs. Thomas readjusts Flux’s grip on a spoonful of stew, helping him guide it to his mouth.
“You don’t have to do that,” Flux had muttered, eyebrows bunched together, scowling.
“I want to.” All he knew is that he meant something now, and even if Flux did not completely accept it, he did permit it. There is no beginning and end between them when Thomas is slowly cementing himself as an extension of Flux, whether he likes it or not.
“You need me, no?” Flux asks. He tilts his head expectantly, eyebrows knit, eyes absolutely unreadable. A scary expression on an adult, even more terrifying on a fourteen year old.
It catches Thomas so off guard his grip on the spoon loosens, and it clatters against the ground. He could’ve sworn it’s the other way around. But the more he thinks about it, the more obvious it becomes - while Flux needs Thomas to live, Thomas needs Flux to survive, to feel needed. His entire existence hinges itself on caring for Flux if only to prove his usefulness.
“You’re all I need, Flux.”
Flux smiles. Thomas emerges from the chrysalis a perfectly resolute right hand man.
At sixteen, Flux catalogs every pitying glance thrown his way, tells Thomas with a holy rage in his eyes that the retribution they’d receive by his hands would be righteous, that they’d regret ever looking down on him.
The balance they hold is currently fragile, but neither of them are stupid - it dawns onto Flux with an exhilarating triumphance that his loyalty made Thomas a willing wind up doll to Flux’s ideas as long as the latter twisted his gears just right. It’s dizzyingly exciting for the both of them, to use and be used, to push and pull at each other with reckless abandon.
The line between dependence and love is one they carelessly trample.
Thomas simply nods, marveling at the sunburning rage of a boy who thinks himself deity, and asks, “If you could ask for anything, what would it be?”
Flux snorts, and with a grimace, spits, “My fucking arm back.”
They’re only eighteen when Flux is finally fitted with a prosthetic arm, in no small thanks to Thomas’ near savant aptitude for chainmail and redstone engineering.
Thomas hefts the mechanical arm onto a table next to where Flux sits upright in a hospital cot, aligning the ball joint shoulder port with the puckered stump of Flux’s right arm.
Frankly, the prosthetic was stunning; Thomas’ chest swells with pride as he admires his most exemplary work gleaming gunmetal and silver under starkly bright sunlight. A fine and intricate feat of redstone and prosthetic engineering that took Thomas the better half of two years to learn and perfect. He’d spent nearly half of that ensuring that the mechanical substitute would be a perfect mirror facsimile of Flux’s existing arm.
But as beautiful as it is, the precision required to make it usable meant that it would be significantly heavier than a flesh-and-blood arm. Getting it as lightweight as it is now was several months of material and calculation evaluation in itself. Still, Thomas prides himself in the fact that this, in every way, is his magnus opus, and that Flux would be the one to receive it.
“It'll hurt really bad when the redstone and your body’s nerves fuse,” Thomas warns. “Do you have something to bite down on?”
He’d seen it several times over the course of his prosthetic redstone engineering studies, that moment when the flesh and mechanical are forced into cohabitation, synapses to electric current. The agonized screaming terrified him so badly the first time he’d heard it, he’d nearly abandoned prosthetic redstone engineering as a whole. The re-attachment process is nothing to scoff at, rendered even more complicated with Flux’s comparative younger age than majority of the late-twenties clientele this is normally permitted to; Flux is just a teenager and the added weight would profusely stunt his body’s development beyond repair.
But whatever Flux wanted, he got, and this is where they find themselves now.
An undeniable look of fear flashed across Flux’s features, before fixing themselves into the frigid neutrality Flux typically armours himself with. “And I have to be conscious during this?”
Thomas tries for a consoling smile. “‘fraid so. Your brain needs to be fully awake to process it.”
He shrugs, picking at the skin around his thumb. “Then I can just bite down on my good arm. It’s fine.”
“You’ll hurt yourself.” Thomas tries to ignore the nonchalant swing of his feet Flux gives at the prospect of self-inflicted bodily harm. A thought strikes, and he suggests, “You can bite down on my shoulder,” without realising what he’s just said.
Flux narrows his eyes, jaw slack in mortification. “You’re joking. I’d rip a chunk out.”
“Well, I haven’t been building these muscles for nothing,” Thomas quips, though there’s little he can do to mask the heat rising to his ears. His attempt at lightening the mood lands, thankfully, and Flux rolls his eyes with a shake of his head.
“Whatever. It’s your funeral.”
Slowly, Thomas leans forward, so that Flux could rest his chin on the slope of Thomas’ shoulder. The angle and reach around is a little awkward, but endurable when Flux’s warm breath against his ear starts growing ragged; Flux’s fearful anticipation spurs a newfound focus in Thomas.
This is for Flux. It’s always been for Flux. There’s no permissible margin of error allowed, even when Flux pressed against him like this is making his gut burn. He has no choice but to do this right, he reminds himself, taking a breath to try to ease the jack rabbit pace of his heart. This was hardly the first time he’d performed this procedure, but it was by far the most significant.
“I’ll count us down,” Thomas whispers. A dying yelp is caught in Flux’s throat; words are abandoned for a hesitant nod. He’s scared. Silky black strands tickle against Thomas’ neck; the smell of pine from Flux’s cologne is a rogue note against the background of antiseptic and machine oil. With the vestiges of his strength, he grits his teeth, forces the stump of Flux’s shoulder into the prosthetic’s ball joint, and braces for what’s to come.
When redstone meets nerve, Flux lockjaws through Thomas’ plainclothes right into the meat of his shoulder, a barely muffled, shrill scream-sob erupting from his throat that nearly deafens Thomas in one ear. It’s terrifying, almost inhuman in how it sends shockwaves rippling through Thomas’ thoracic cavity down to his toes. The sound itself is too anguished for Thomas to bear, the electric sting of Flux’s nails raking down his back for purchase and the animalistic clench of teeth in flesh are more than what he can handle.
Tears prickle in his eyes, but he holds Flux, until screaming peters to exhaustion and spent writhing as Flux’s body tentatively accepts a phantom limb as its own.
It takes several more minutes before Flux is able to twitch each finger of his newly attached mechanical arm, and it's about all he can manage before he promptly slumps forward and collapses against Thomas’ chest.
“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” Thomas murmurs soothingly against the shell of Flux’s ear, fingers combing through the tangles in his black hair. His shirt clings to him with sweat. Exhausted, but alive, and well.
That night, Thomas looks at himself in the small, clouded mirror in his room, at the bite shaped bruise on his shoulder, wincing as he prods the mottled purpled-red until the sharp sting blots into the background of his sensation. All that’s left is the tender memory of Flux burrowed in his shoulder.
This is proof, Thomas reminds his reflection. This is what it's meant to be.
Many would call Thomas a polymath, something he’d brush off with a modest wave of his hand, but it’s true. Thomas spends the next years picking up and honing skills with a drive that suggests he always has something to prove, an effortlessness that implies that it comes easy. Constant comparison keeps him vigilant and sharp and ever-evolving as the seasons that pass.
Engineering, hand-to-hand combat, ranged weaponry, politics, law, the art of charming - each one a notch in his belt. A man with a million winning smiles. All so Flux has one less thing to worry about.
“Thomas? He’s worth his weight in gold and more,” he overhears Flux say to a Luminaran council member.
Pride swells in his chest. Of course he is. He has to be. Especially with how tenuous his position as Flux’s right hand man becomes with the introduction of one crushingly beautiful individual, called Saparata.
They’re in the midst of resource gathering for Saparata’s “summer house” (Thomas nearly rolls his eyes to the back of his head, when Flux asks him to help) when Thomas has to sit back against a tree trunk for a second, muscles sore and acidic. He’s still acclimating to Pandora's suffocating heat, his curls matted against his forehead with sweat.
Catching his breath, he lets himself watch Saparata work, those nimble fingered hands sifting through raw materials and dirt. His nails are cut short, clean. Thomas wonders if there’s as much blood on Saparata’s hands as there is on his.
They were similar in some way, Thomas cautiously observes - makers, builders. They’re men for the common good, after all. Saparata is one of those rare individuals, too honest and obviously good willed in how he befriends Pandora denizens with an ease that renders Thomas ersatz. If it were any other person, Thomas would consider this immutable optimism indicative of someone who hadn’t experienced enough strife to be anything but fairweather, but he knows this isn't true of Saparata.
Unfortunately, these qualities tied with the fact that it was Flux of all people that introduced them, only make Thomas want to understand him more. And he hates it.
“Thomas!” Saparata calls out a toothless, but admonishing edge to it. It sounds song-like when he says it. Something bright and airy, so unlike how Flux wields his name like a scalpel. Thomas bristles. “You work too hard. Like, Flux seriously runs you ragged. Take a damn break sometime. We’ll go swimming or get drunk or… something. It’s on me since you’ve been helping.”
“He doesn’t. I work hard because I want to.” And he dryly adds: “And no, I’m busy.” Thomas’ tone is clipped and terse as he takes Saparata’s olive branch and grinds it to dust under the heel of his boot. He makes a point of not looking at Saparata, instead picking at the dirt behind his nails.
“Suit yourself, man,” Saparata shrugs, straightening his back and wiping a sheen of sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve under the blazing sun. His white hair catches in the balmy breeze, sending errant strands drifting like spider silk.
Even from here, Thomas can see his back muscles ripple under the gauzy material of his shirt, can’t stop himself from both admiring and sizing up Saparata for a fight. Irritation bubbles in his gut, volcanic - it’s no fucking wonder Flux is so taken by Saparata when Thomas can barely reign in his own emotions.
Thomas swallows thickly, but is too transfixed to look away.
Saparata looks back, shoots him a coy grin. “I look good shirtless, though, just so you know. In case you change your mind about swimming.”
Something about barometric pressure changes makes Flux’s bad arm burn like hell; in many ways, having a bunker underwater was both clever strategic move and an absolute nightmare for Flux to manage.
This was one of the many strains that heavy prosthetic had on Flux’s body. The lopsided weight and re-learning to spar and fight was an ongoing but fruitless endeavour that often left Flux coughing up blood as a consequence of the strain he forced his body to endure.
Endurance. It’s always just a little more, a little further, a little harder with Flux. It’s a blessing Thomas is there to do the dirty work for Flux. Not that Thomas has any gripes with that.
Nowadays, Flux seldom verbalizes the perpetual discomfort he finds himself in, but a lifetime of friendship has made Thomas attuned to these tells.
Today seems one of those days, as Flux reclines at the head seat of the Conspiracy bunker’s central meeting room. The two of them work alongside each other, alone as far as members of the Conspiracy go, making slow work the neverending paperwork they’re both saddled with. Not to mention, Flux had returned significantly later than usual, moody and quiet.
(Secretly: Thomas seethes over how this has become a regular occurrence. How he just knows instinctually where Flux has been.)
Flux is massaging circles into his shoulder, with an occasional sharp, pained inhale punctuating the melody of ocean waves crashing against the bunker walls. A consequence of his own rushed attempts at rehabilitating his arm. Out of the corner of his eye, Thomas watches Flux’s face contort in pain.
“Here, let me do it for you,” Thomas offers, chair screeching against deepslate as he gets up and makes his way over to Flux.
Habitually, Flux obliges, slipping off the purple velvet cape cocooning him in a rumpled mess. Flux undoes the first few buttons of his shirt, just enough to expose a pale segment of skin from his shoulder to his chest. He’s not even looking up from his paperwork, simply accepting what’s been placed before him. It’s a far cry from the venomous rage that Flux embodied when they were teenagers when Thomas so much as offered to help him eat.
Carefully, delicately, Thomas presses and squeezes at the tender, swollen flesh around Flux’s shoulder, where the shoulder joint meets metal. A sharp relieved hiss escapes Flux’s lips as he leans back into Thomas’ touch, long lashes fluttering closed. It’s gratifying, makes Thomas wonder how else he could elicit the same reaction.
“We can review those redstone schematics one more time before tomorrow, if you’d like,” Thomas suggests. Flux’s black hair is longer, brushing against his collarbone now and sweeping over Thomas’ hands as they kneed at Flux’s shoulders.
Flux’s eyes open, morning glories in the dimness. "I trust your handiwork, Thomas." A pause, as Flux reaches over and tugs Thomas closer by the neck of his scarf. "Not getting cold feet on me, are you?"
Thomas can’t help but grin. "Of course not."
"Thought so." Smug, self-satisfied as he lets go. It’s a look Flux wears well.
"It's a shame for Saparata, really. That sort of blind optimism would've gotten him killed here anyways." Thomas is careful in whittling what he can out of Flux. Not that it matters against someone as reticent as Flux.
"The island will be thankful when they see we’re right. Saps is simply… Collateral.” Evasive as ever.
Thomas cannot fathom why Flux is so determined to make Saparata the perfect scapegoat. Or rather: he simply won’t acknowledge why.
He doesn’t ask where Flux has been all day before this. He doesn’t ask about the trail of faded mauve kiss marks blossoming like spring on Flux’s pale skin every time Flux thinks he’s subtle about how late he comes back some nights, the weight behind how Flux holds the name Saps in his mouth, that whatever is going on between Flux and Saparata is sending him into spirals.
What Thomas feels towards Saparata is something entirely unnamable, but with some work, he could understand how Flux's newfound obsession with Saparata festered into a fever practically overnight.
But what he does know, with crushing certainty, is how much he wants a taste of Saparata, too, if only to gauge how much sweeter Saparata tastes in comparison to Thomas. Measure the margin between them, see what about Saparata makes Flux tick the way he does, and calculate the cruelest way to tear Saparata apart and have him all at the same time. Figure out exactly what he needs to do to earn his place back.
He resents the obvious spotlight Flux shone on Saparata, resents how Saparata’s very existence threatens to drive a wedge between him and Flux, resents that he was dreadfully also not immune to whatever spell Saparata had cast on Flux.
Thomas wants Saparata carnally almost as badly as he wants to kill him.
Nights become staring at the phosphenes and half-redacted film reels unfurling behind his eyelids of Saparata and Flux lying together, hands tangled in the other’s hair, mouths pressed on each other, just as he and Flux often found themselves. Wondering if Saparata held Flux this way or that way, how Saparata succeeds where Thomas must obviously falter if Flux’s fixation is anything to suggest, tracing imaginary touches like a heat map. Inferiority, he learns for the first time, is bitterly encompassing.
Is falling short even possible, when Thomas had spent the better half of his life at Flux’s side? That he’d taken care of Flux for the better half of their lives, that Thomas had fucking learned prosthetic engineering in a bid to grant Flux some semblance of autonomy back? It agonizes Thomas to no end.
He assuages himself with the fact that by noon tomorrow, Saparata will be nothing but a ghost to himself and Flux, and he will be liberated.
There’s no remorse in Thomas’ heart when he thinks of those nights again, declawed and sitting in a damp jail cell. Come this time tomorrow, he will be dead, and yet, he isn’t interested in consoling himself with something softer, fonder. No. He replays it in his head, re-evaluating every piece of evidence that the man he loved was never truly, completely his, with the perpetrator sitting on the other side of Thomas’ jail cell.
Begrudgingly, Saparata is still beautiful even with the new weariness etching his features, no doubt partly caused by Thomas. It's a petty respite.
Saparata sits a foot away from the bars, chin resting on a closed fist as he crouches on a too-small stool, moonlight casting austere shadows across his fine features. Thomas has his temple pressed against the bars of his cell, face slid into a careful glare. Stick your hand in, his face says. Promise I won’t bite your fingers off. He almost feels like a lion in an enclosure.
The bars are spaced wide enough that Thomas could probably slip a hand through and throttle Saparata if they weren’t bound behind his back. All he had on him is a carefully concealed golden apple which, while valuable, offered him no help on a self defence front. He is at Saparata's mercy.
“What the fuck did you get out of doing this to me?” Saparata’s voice, jagged and heavy, cuts through the silence.
“Oh, fuck off. I didn’t do it to spite you. I did it because I believed in Flux,” Thomas spits.
“And now we’re both here. Funny how that worked.”
Thomas doesn’t deign to respond. Instead, he bites his tongue, scoots over and bids to ignore Saparata. He’s all acid and shrapnel, the death of all his closest friends like an open gash stinging his brain. Saparata should be the last person he wants to see.
Without warning, Saparata lunges through the bars and grabs Thomas by his hair, slamming his forehead against the metal bars. He groans, a painful crack over his left eye and a steady stream of warm crimson trickling over his eye. His quickening pulse sends new waves of pain coursing through his face. Thomas strains against his handcuffs hard enough to bruise, itching to punch, to grab, to strangle.
What comes next severs it all at the bud, if only just for a moment. With an unchartered tenderness, Saparata’s thumb brushes against the Thomas' curls, and Thomas sighs hot and shaky before he can catch himself. A shiver of vertigo crackles down his spine.
The rage in both of them recedes for a shared briefness, as if being pulled out of a trance, as it dawns onto them that their faces are barely an inch away from each other. They’re so, so close, their glittering breaths mingling before dissipating into the stale air. For the first time, his heart shuddering in his ribcage, does Thomas realise how pretty Saparata’s eyes are, how they gleam and sparkle like the midnight sky above. How they pull him in. If the startling furrow of Saparata’s eyebrows are anything to go by, the sentiment is painfully mutual.
It’s fucked beyond belief how badly Thomas wants to kiss Saparata just once before he’s a dead man. Like the last gift Flux had bestowed upon him before dying was carrying the legacy that is obsessing over Saparata.
In their shared mind’s eye, a vision forms in perfect clarity; of Saparata pulling at Thomas’ hair until his scalp burns and their mouths pressing together, of a kiss that tastes like iron and rot, of vivisection, of death, of openly moaning the name of a soon-to-be ghost and tongue slipping past rows of pearlescent teeth.
And then what? What would even remain of them once they had devoured each other whole? What were they without Flux suspended between them?
As quickly as a tender touch comes, Saparata retracts his hand, sneers, and marches up the cobblestone staircase out of Thomas’ jail cell. Glowering, Thomas watches him and his lantern disappear into a pinprick high above.
And as Thomas’ eye starts to swell shut, he holds that memory of Saparata with a hunger reserved for death row inmates: the last sweetness the world would ever grant him.
One day in the near future, Saparata will lie in bed and swipe his thumb against his own chapped bottom lip and attempt to stitch this desire into the tapestry of his memory until Thomas’ mouth is every bit as warm and angry and real as Flux’s once was. With enough work, he can fabricate it into reality, if only the one inside his head.
One day, he will decide to call this feeling regret.
Death, to Thomas, is running back to the bunker and finding a trail of ants leading to a half bitten apple Rotation had forgotten about that morning and the feather in Snowbird’s stupid hat trampled under foot and Gotoga’s redstone schematics strewn across the floor and Seraphim’s and Newkids’ silver-blue swords gleaming under the amber glow of a lantern Flux had left on. It’s everything. It’s nothing.
His soul, amorphous and transparent, drifts quietly down rivers of aether before the effects of the golden apple he’d eaten unceremoniously plucks and crams him back into his broken body.
Golden skeins mend bone fragments and cranial fluid back together, where dripstone had smashed him open. His skull is a broken teacup being held together by gold lacquer, his brain barely contained, the courtroom jury’s ensuing cacophony threatening to shatter him all over again. His soul struggles against the sharp edges. It hurts, it hurts.
But he wants the last laugh. Go out on his own terms. Let everyone pry his dogma from cold dead fingers. Tell what was left of the world that it was all for the greater good, that he regrets nothing when he goes out with a smile.
He keels over onto the cobblestone under him, in a stomach churning puddle of crimson and his own white-grey brain matter. And the smell hits him, bitter and hot and metallic against the sun-warmed cobblestone. Bile rises and he retches, body seizing and clenching like a steel trap. He’s almost thankful for how hazy his vision is while his body struggles to make sense of the painful work of resurrection.
“Kill me. Do it again,” the voice doesn’t seem like his own. Too animalistic, guttural, snarling like a bad dog. This is not the pleasantly smiling smooth talker that prosecuted Saparata all those months ago.
This time, Saparata will succeed. With an uncharacteristic resignation, Thomas wonders if this is how Flux felt, knowing the end was before him in that arena. His eyes flicker to Saparata towering above him, outline dark and hazy against the warm sun. Angel of death.
Perhaps it is karma that both he and Flux are to die by Saparata’s kind hands. There they are again - nimble, and thin, the same hands that cradled Flux’s lifeless body right after killing him, the same ones Thomas is fated to die by, too.
Saparata recoils, hard. The look on his face is an indescribable kaleidoscope of horror, fear, resolution, resentment, and maybe, maybe, a smidge of something almost kind. “Thomas,” Saparata’s voice breaks. Maybe it’s wish fulfillment, but it almost sounds mournful. “Start praying.”
Thomas does not. It’s so, so bright.