Chapter Text
Saps turns around to the aseptic hallway and its vast redness. Ish grins at him, never leaving his desk, never letting his eyes fall elsewhere.
“You promise?”
“We made a deal,” he won’t stop tapping his fingers against the surface. “A contract.”
“A contract,” Saps repeats in a soft murmur. There’s something dark — muddy — slowly seeping through every carefully constructed layer he’s built. His hand falls on the door handle. His head is too full and too empty all at the same time.
“Bring back the real Fluixon,” Ish smiles, like always. And Saps wishes he could throw up, like always.
“Do so and then, only then...”
“My world will come back,” he whispers, leaving Ish’s amused chuckle behind for the pitch-black unknown. Saps closes his eyes for a moment, gulps a couple of regrets down while others rush to his fingers and make them quiver. The quietness of the red hallway disappears. Soon, so does the thick smell of wet soil and decay.
He’s sitting somewhere, a sun-kissed corridor, walls white and impersonal. The hospital gown doesn’t suit him. The glass reflects a pale, clammy mess, and Saps wishes he could just dig his nails deep into those cheeks and tear away whatever horrible mask he’s forcefully wearing. But he can’t do that, and he can’t run back, and he can’t ask for help. So Saps gets up from his seat, awkward steps till his palms are pressed against the window, and takes his deepest breath in a while.
The breeze dances around the pine trees outside. It teases leaves, lifts forgotten scraps of paper, and joyfully plays with the hair of some patients taking a walk.
There are tall, imposing mountains guarding them. — Maybe this is where his Flux is, the one he remembers, is hiding. Maybe he ran very, very far away from all the politics and took refuge in one of those bland rooms and the hope of rehabilitation.
"Maybe…" Saps whispers to himself, twisting a piece of hair with his fingers. Flux — his Flux — called out that nervous habit, once. His other hand finds the inside of his pocket without thinking — there's something there, small and dry, petals he doesn't remember picking. He doesn't look at it. He just holds on.
—
“Do I make you uncomfortable, Saps?” with his princely smile plastered on, with his inquisitive eyes, his sometimes lost eyes, with Saps’s heart in his still hands. And Sap’s ‘no’ was louder than necessary, to which Flux replied with another smirk. Less plastic.
“You always do that, you know, when you’re being crushed by thoughts.”
Saps’s words were all stuck in his throat at the time. All his answers and questions, lying at the bottom of a well he had personally sealed shut. He only watched as Flux left, watched as he let out a sigh and opened the door, watched as Flux, tight shoulders, murmured a soft, almost unintelligible,
“sometimes, I wish…”
—
He blinks once. Twice. There are nurses idly chatting near a vending machine.
What was Flux’s wish, anyway?
He spots a counter right ahead, past the sequence of unremarkable doors and curious, half-dead plants. Saps ignores how the nurse sitting behind it looks eerily similar to Cass.
“Excuse me,” he coughs. The woman’s big, warm eyes dart from the folder in her hands to his face, and Saps thinks there’s a comforting kindness in her smile. Flux would hate it. He doesn’t. So he beams back.
“Saps!” She gets up from her seat and laughs.
“Are you finally feeling better? I was quite sad when I didn’t see you wandering around these past few days.”
Cass — who is not really his Cass, but looks like her — closes her soft eyes for a moment, as if letting herself fall deep into the past. Saps studies the subtle anguish in her expression.
“Thank you for thinking of me,” he smiles. The thought of confessing he has no recollection of her or this place crosses his mind for a bit. But when he asks himself what Fluixon Aculon would do in that situation, as if Saparata Theira weren’t a leader, a natural born charmer, he finds his answer in those little games they used to play, where Flux would pretend to trust him with all his heart and Saps would play along for the sake of whatever they had.
“You don’t have to thank me,” Cass shakes her head, then her gaze softens even further. “He was also worried about you, you know. The doctor. You’re always laughing, always full of sunshine, so it was a shock when you…”
Saps doesn’t miss how her smile melts into a tight line, how miserable she suddenly looks. He wants to ask more, discover all about himself in this reality, but something in Cass’s expression has him thinking about that thick, putrid darkness he felt before. The horrid feeling contaminating the blood in his veins. They’re standing on fragile glass. One wrong word and they’d both smash to the ground, guts on the walls.
“I’m sorry,” it’s the only thing he can mutter. He wonders if he’s able to retain his other self’s feelings and if that’s why his heart is drowning in guilt all of a sudden.
“It’s okay,” she says, even though he can tell it’s not. “Oh! Right, do you need something, Saps?”
He’s quiet for a moment. He nods. “I’m looking for… Flux. Fluixon Aculon.”
Cass raises her eyebrows in apparent surprise. “I thought you saw him earlier?”
“You didn’t sneak out of your room again, did you?” she laughs, and Saps has to frantically rummage in his head to find a better mask, one to hide his now confused, intrigued self. “Did you miss his scolding that much?”
Oh, that’s interesting. That’s something to chuckle at. So even in this alternate universe, far away or maybe not from his own, Fluixon scolds him. Dares to scold him, perhaps the same way he does, back in their reality, when he is only listening to the adrenaline in his veins.
“It seems I did,” Saps breathes out, hand in his hair.
Cass glows. There’s an empathy in her expression that he can’t fully understand. “I think you’ll find him right ahead. He’s very busy, as usual, but I’m sure he doesn’t mind seeing your face.”
Saps thanks her, smiles brightly, then wonders what a patient would be busy with in that lonely, sterile mass of white. He keeps playing with the thought in his head as he strides forward, straight back. It’s only when his gaze falls on a familiar figure that his feet slow down, then come to a sudden halt.
Fluixon Aculon is busy, Saps realizes, because he’s not a patient — he’s a doctor.
Even as he scolds someone, one hand on his hip, clipboard in the other, Fluixon Aculon is composed in that particular way Saps has always found infuriating—as if disorder were something that happened to other people. The white coat suits him, Saps thinks. So does the small ponytail keeping his silky hair hostage, and even the shadow of a tiring week—life on his face.
Saps doesn’t move forward. He can’t. He’s stuck there, a few steps away from this Flux who is so familiar, but that he has never seen before, so beautiful. And somehow, he realizes Ish’s words are only making sense now, only cementing in his brain now, after he has already been in this reality for a bit, after already meeting what he’s now sure was the Cass of this world. The thought is debilitating.
—
“Lives are a fascinating thing,” Ish chuckled. Those huge, dark eyes burning marks on his skin. “Vast and full of possibilities. One might be the hero and the villain at the same time, but in different stories. How amusing.”
“Flux,” Saps’s hands were fists at his sides, tightening at every shaky breath. “How will I recognize Flux? How will I find him?”
“The answer lies in your bond.”
Ish looked at him as if he already had all the secrets he needed, locked in some obvious corner of his aching mind. But Saps didn’t, he was sure of it. He was, because he had tried looking, over and over again, desperately, until begging Ish to spare him a crumble of clarity was all he could do. In the vast redness, his lungs cried for air.
“What if I can’t find him, in the end?”
Ish smiled again.
—
“... What the hell are you doing here?”
Saps looks away from the sad little plant he didn’t even realize he was studying, lost eyes quickly rushing to Flux’s face, Flux’s hair, Flux’s irritatingly white coat, and stupid, stupid tie. To Sap’s displeasure, he’s taller than him, in this antiseptic-smelling reality.
“Saparata, who told you you could already run around? God,” Flux — maybe his Flux — brings a hand to his forehead, messes with his bangs for a moment. Saps is quiet.
“Saparata,” he says, stern. “Go back to your room. Now.”
And then Saps tilts his head to the side, a shit-eating grin blooming on his lips. It comes naturally, at this point. “Why?”
Flux widens his eyes in disbelief. Or maybe it’s irritation.
“Why? Why? Because I’m your doctor, Saparata, and you have already burned whatever scrap of patience I had left days ago, with your little stunt.”
Flux grimaces. He takes a deep sigh, bites his lip, and Saps wonders if that’s his way of locking away unwanted feelings.
“... Let’s go. I’ll take you back. You’re still my patient, after all.”
Oh, so you’re the one she was talking about. His patient, Flux said. The scolding, then that guilty look. Those soft, soft eyes. He’s the worried doctor Cass mentioned before. The one whose pain and frustration should have surprised the Saps of this reality, he thinks she implied, but that now have him raising an eyebrow in amusement.
He has seen Flux’s worried expression before, heard his gentle ’don’t overwork yourself, Saps’ and ’look after yourself’ more than once, but this is different — this is raw.
He watches as Flux, a few steps ahead, can’t help but tense under his thoughts. Watches as he turns back to Saps, from time to time, as if to make sure he hasn’t disappeared into thin air, that he’s still alive. He watches as Flux lets out a sigh and opens the door of a small room, and doesn’t say anything. Not this time. So tense, Saps thinks he could break him with a whisper.
“You were still sleeping when I checked on you early this morning,” he explains, nodding to the only bed in the room. “I didn’t expect to see you up already. I was surprised.”
And while Saps sits down on it, carefully studying Flux’s movements as he grabs a chair nearby, “I know you’ve only talked to Doctor Schpood for these past few days, but I…”
Not even his greatest mask could hide the shadows lingering in Sap’s eyes for a moment, or the way his mouth contorts. His shoulders shake, it’s subtle, but he gulps down the feeling before it could fully bloom, before it could become something much darker and harder to suppress. Like always.
That’s a trauma for another day.
Flux doesn’t miss the change, but seems afraid to ask. That’s so unusual of him, it makes Saps’s heart shiver.
“... You can talk to me, too, if you want. I will listen. I can— whatever you need,” he lowers his head slightly. “In my capacity, of course.”
Saps has to bite his tongue. He’s not sure if the sudden tension he’s feeling comes from the other Saps — the patient, the wanderer of these stale halls — or from his own need to know more, to dig, the way he always does. Cass’s tone was a curious little thing, but he could still take a step back. Flux’s gentle worry is insane, and it makes Saps desperately want to burrow his nails into those perfect shoulders of his, still so tense, until Flux is exhausted enough to open up and let him devour whatever he can find. He shakes his head. It’s a crazy train of thought.
“Flux?” he says, tone cautious, eyes glued to the wrinkles on his sheets. White sheets. White and impersonal, like everything else in that little bleak room, they’re stuck in.
“Yes?” Flux immediately looks up, not surprised by the lack of formality. They must be used to it in this world.
“Why do you sound guilty?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Saps notices how Flux stiffens even further, as if carrying the weight of every sin of the universe on his tired shoulders. Those exhausted purple eyes widen in surprise for a moment, look away, look at him again. That fatigue hides no hatred. In his world — maybe their world — Flux is always so full of rage, it forces Saps to take a deep breath, at times. It just grabs at Saps’s lungs, somehow, even when he knows — he can see — Flux is trying his best to push it down, to hide it, hide it, so no one will perceive it, no one will perceive him. Except Saps always can.
“I… should have been more attentive, Saparata,” this Flux breathes out. There are rays of sunshine kissing his face. “You were… struggling, I was aware, yet apparently I had miscalculated to what extent.”
Saps shrugs. “You can’t always notice every little thing. I’m alright,” he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is not his story. He shouldn’t speak, but the urge is debilitating. This is not his story. It’s not.
“No,” and Flux is back to that stern tone, all of a sudden. “No, I have to. I had to. I’m supposed to help you, Saparata. I failed.”
“Doctors can’t fix everything.”
“I have to,” Flux raises his voice a bit. Saps — maybe the Saps of this reality, too — flinches.
“When I saw you back then, I…” he shoves his face in his hands and falls into an uncomfortable silence. The way he moves, talks, and breathes makes Saps feel like he’s watching a man stab himself in the chest over and over, for the pure entertainment of his audience.
“Flux,” he begins, the uncertainty of his voice painting him more human than phantom. The man in front of him, this delicate intricacy of nerves, could be dragged down by the gentlest touch. Saps knows. And yet he wants to dig, dig, dig, in that way his own Flux once called ‘unnerving’ and ‘relentless’, making Saps laugh. But he wasn’t wrong, and they both knew. “Flux,” he says, again,
“I’m sorry, my memories are not really making sense. I think my head will explode soon.”
At that, Flux’s gaze naturally runs to his eyes, like a rabbit unknowingly facing the hunter’s trap.
“Can you remind me what happened? Please.”
Flux’s lips part for a moment, as if shocked, as if lost in thought. He’s so beautiful like this, Saps thinks. Sitting on that chair, not too close yet not too far. Half-hiding in shadows, half-kissed by the sun. Drowning, but also afloat. Glorious and innocent, in his own complicated way.
"You… had a crisis, Saparata. It happened days ago. We found you on the roof,” he has to take a short breath. He has to gulp something down. Pain, a voice tells Saps. “We still don’t know how you got access to it, by the way. My gut tells me you pulled one of your usual tricks and stole the keys from the nurses’ station. We didn’t find them on you, though…”
The counter. Saps thinks back to Cass’s face, at that pain he saw, he felt, but still assumed more superficial than this growing fog he can observe all around them. She was probably blaming herself, not acting fast enough. Like the Cass in his world, and maybe in every other one, too.
“What was I doing on the roof…?”
Flux frowns. It doesn’t look like he wants to answer, but he does so anyway, and Saps wonders why. His Flux wouldn’t. His Flux would stay quiet. He would smile, cold, and stay really, really quiet.
“You tried to end your life, Saparata. You tried to jump. You wouldn’t listen to Schpood or me, even after we were able to pin you down, so we had to sedate you,” Flux lowers his gaze. “... I’m sorry.”
Saps is not surprised. He wishes he were, and there’s a fraction of time, a millisecond, where he’s overwhelmed by this horrible guilt, because how could he not even flinch at those words? How could he find the scenario Flux described reasonable? This little horror picture just making sense in his mind. As if Saps weren’t the same person fighting every moment of his existence, even now, to save himself.
He realizes he has been shivering for who knows how long only when Flux shakes his shoulder, dissipating the fog away.
“Saparata,” he says, with that warm voice Flux so rarely uses. “You’re okay now, it’s alright. You’re okay.”
Saps doesn’t believe him, for some reason, but takes a deep breath anyway. He falls back behind his mask, quietly, under the burning, unusual empathy in Flux’s eyes. It’s a bit unnerving. He watches the hand on his shoulder retreat, but linger in the air for a moment, as if considering whether or not it should leave him alone. When it does, they let themselves rest under the soft sunshine, in silence. Saps misses Flux’s touch.
“Listen, I’m sorry for avoiding you that day,” Flux says after a while, cautious, graceful.
He shakes his head. “What do you mean?”
Flux furrows his brows. There’s concern. “That day, Saps, you… said you wanted to talk about something. You said it was important, and I still avoided you. I just…” he pinches the bridge of his nose, eyes shut tight. “I was considering putting you into Schpood’s hands, as per his request. It made me angry. I couldn’t face you.”
Flux hangs his head low and crosses his arms. “The look in your eyes… I could tell it was urgent, yet I…”
Saps bites his lip, has to fight the urge to grab Flux’s forearm. He doesn’t know what the Saparata Theria of this reality wanted to say. He wishes he could reassure this Flux, tell him it was nothing important, but he doesn’t know if it’s the truth, and he doesn’t want to lie — because it’s not his story. It’s not.
The Saps of this world is probably stopping him, his pained breaths in their lungs, his hands holding them down on that wrinkly clean bed.
“Doctor Schpood will be in charge of you, starting next week,” Flux is at the door, now, his fingers shallowly gripping the handle. “I… think it’s for the best. He’s much more skilled than I am, I’m sure he’ll be able to give you the proper care you need.”
He doesn’t turn back. Saps wishes he would. He prays. He waits.
“... Saps?”
He still waits. He almost begs.
“Yes?”
Saps doesn’t want him to leave, not again, not like this.
“Why did you…?”
He knows what Flux is asking. It burns. “I’m not sure,” and it’s true. He doesn’t — wouldn’t — really have a reason to jump, not in this life, aside from the existential anguish, the constant anxiety and fear of abandonment. But that’s routine, it doesn’t count. The other Saps would agree.
“I see.”
He can picture a faint smile on Flux’s face. When the door opens and then closes once again, he is overwhelmed by a sudden emptiness. His gaze wanders to the window, to that pretty blue sky that the glass keeps away from him. This room, with its perfectly bleak walls and perfectly sad furniture, feels so lonely it’s suffocating.
He figures this is not his Flux, after all — but Ish never said Flux could remember their world, so what if? What if this man who was standing in front of him, this Fluixon Aculon, who was apparently a stern doctor, a beautiful guy in a stupid coat, were really the man he was looking for? What if Flux, maybe because of some unknown rule of the universe, maybe led by his own stubborn sense of self-preservation, convinced himself this had always been his true reality?
There’s a sudden loud ringing in his ears. Sirens in pain, unsustainable. He moves to the door, guided by the debilitating urge to rush outside. His head is being crushed by some invisible force, and he can’t stop it, he can’t, he couldn’t. There are daggers stabbing his brain, over and over, each hit sending an electric shock down his spine.
When Saps closes his eyes, gasping, dying, all he can see in the ink-black void is the sadness in Flux’s tense shoulders.
He finds himself ungraciously splayed on the ground.
“Welcome back,” Ish chuckles. “Has this trip helped you in your endeavor?”
Saps blinks once. Twice. He gets up with ease, the antiseptic smell of that hospital — that Flux — still stuck to his hair, to his fingers and lungs.
“I don’t know,” he says, distractedly twisting a piece of hair. “I met him, but… I’m not sure it was Flux.”
Ish’s smile is distressing. Saps is reminded of the last thought he left in that barren room.
“Can he— can this Flux forget his identity?” he starts, tentatively. “Can he… convince himself of being someone else?”
He thinks back to the warmth in the doctor’s voice.
“I wonder,” Ish grins. “You should soon find out.”
And when Ish laughs again, for what has been an uncomfortable amount of times, Saps tells himself he’s probably being bullshitted. He wants his world back.
So Saps sighs and turns to face the hallway behind him. That vast madness of red, with its numerous black doors and the thick smell of death. He wonders if he’ll spend the rest of his days there. He quickly pushes the thought away, deep somewhere, like he always does with anything that could hurt.
“What is this place, again?”
Ish lets his chin rest on his long fingers. “This is a realm between life and death, reality and illusion. A place not many can access — but you have the key with you, don’t you?”
Does he?
“I have this feeling I have already heard your answer before, more than once. Why?”
Ish smiles. Saps can only frown.
He shrugs and walks to the next door. It’s not like he can do anything else. It’s not like he can run away from the void. The hospital door, he notices, is now painted white. Convenient, at least.
“Alright,” Saps closes his eyes, again, and leaves the overwhelming smell of death behind, again.