Chapter Text
“Hey, I’m ho–”
Viren stops mid-sentence, and stares.
Aaravos looks up from the yarn explosion in his hands. He tries to wave, but his fingers are caught in the mess, too. The knitting needles are tangled just below them.
Viren sets the bag of groceries down on the table.
“I have questions,” he ventures.
“I was… creating,” Aaravos says stiffly.
“Creating what, exactly?” Viren raises an eyebrow as he reaches down to unlace his boots.
“A… rectangle?”
Aaravos holds up the mess of yarn as best he can with his tangled hands. It is not a rectangle.
Viren nods solemnly, and puts his boots on the mat by the door. “Do you want me to untangle you?” he asks, trying not to laugh.
“No, it’s–” Aaravos stops, looks down at his hands once more. “Please,” he sighs.
Viren makes his way around the table and sits down beside him on the sofa. “Hand,” he says.
Aaravos freezes, just for a second, then slowly extends one of his hands. Viren takes it and begins undoing the knots, trying very hard not to notice how the elf’s hand feels in his.
He pretends not to notice the tiny smile Aaravos gives him, the one he never shows anyone else.
*record scratch*
*freeze frame*
Viren: So you’re probably wondering how we got here.
Aaravos: And that is my part of the story. Give me the recording thing.
Viren: …What?
Aaravos: The recording thing. The… bowl. That collects sounds.
Viren: It’s an enchanted fruit bowl, love.
Aaravos: Yes. The enchanted fruit bowl. Give it to me.
Viren: sighs This is my life now. Here, have the enchanted– CALLUM! GET OFF THAT!
A very loud crash sounds through the room, accompanied by the distinct sound of receding footsteps. Something scrapes against the floor. The recording crackles.
Aaravos: chuckles Viren dropped the enchanted fruit bowl. Callum is on the rope swing. He is too heavy for the rope swing. This is irrelevant to the story.
CROAK
Aaravos, muffled: Boots, kindly remove your face from the fruit bowl.
More croaking accompanied by scraping sounds.
Aaravos: Boots' face has been removed from the fruit bowl. I should tell my part before I am interrupted again.
The first time Viren dies, it’s little more than a setback.
They’re winning, the dragons, the Queen’s army prevailing even after all the effort he and the Mage went through to bolster their own. Most of the fighters on their side are dead, wounded or in chains.
The moonshadow girl and the human skymage are atop the Stormspire. They’re talking to Viren. Then they’re fighting.
Then they’re falling.
The skymage grows wings. An ancient spell, that one, and very difficult. Surprising, really, that he managed to use it at all, let alone fly with it straight away.
Regardless, he saves the girl. They fly away, disappearing into the clouds above.
Viren falls.
Aaravos doesn’t see his body hit the ground.
That doesn’t stop him feeling it – a deep jolt in his bones, one that reverberates through his whole body as though he himself had plummeted from the mountain.
He should not have felt it.
He doesn’t know why he felt it. Viren was a tool, nothing more. Replaceable. Not special. Not important, though he made himself out to be. Not anything.
And yet–
Aaravos finds himself leading Claudia to the body. Preserving it while she finds the components for the spell she’ll need to bring him back.
She’s so sure of him, the girl. So convinced that he’s in the right, that every word he says is absolute truth.
It would be nice, he thinks, if he could say the same about himself.
He shouldn’t have felt Viren’s death. He doesn’t know why he did.
It scares him.
Exactly two years after his death, Viren gasps back to life.
Aaravos feels it, the moment his heart restarts. He… hadn’t been aware he could feel it, before. But now that it is back, he takes a strange comfort in it.
This is new. He does not know what to do with it.
He watches from afar as Claudia shows her father around their new hideout, introduces him to her boyfriend, Terry.
Viren is… obviously displeased with this new development in his daughter’s life. It’s quite funny, really, how much he openly despises the young Earthblood boy while the elf is oblivious.
Claudia is all nerves and excitement, telling Viren about how they have to find Aaravos’ prison within thirty days so that he can stay permanently alive. Viren nods along, yes of course, time is of the essence.
But he’s a different man now.
The girl can’t tell, and the boy has never met him before. But Aaravos notices.
He sees how the ex-mage’s self-confidence has wavered, his surety in his own abilities diminished. How he seems not to be questing for power, or life, but for enjoyment. To finish his life before it ends for the second time.
Aaravos tries, one final time, to appeal to him on the last day.
“You could live,” he says, his whole willpower focused on keeping his hands from shaking. “You could stay. You journey does not have to end here.”
Viren eyes the knife with distaste.
“Yes,” he says. “It does.”
Claudia performs the spell anyway.
Viren walks away.
He leaves her sobbing, curled up in the sigil she’s drawn in the sand with the butterfly’s blood. Aaravos’ heart clenches.
Viren should not be alive.
Is it wrong, then, to be glad that he is?
A few days after he leaves, Claudia breaks down.
“I lost everything,” she sobs. “He’s gone because of what I’ve done. I can’t–”
Her voice cuts out, giving way to tears.
“I’ll free you,” she chokes. “Like I promised. And then…” She hiccoughs. “Then I’m going.”
True to her word, she casts the spell.
It has been so long, since Aaravos has felt the wind in his hair. Since he has seen anything except the cramped interior of his prison, the mocking face of the Dragon King staring at him from the mirror in the corner.
And then, when the King died, Viren’s face.
Claudia hesitates, looks back over her shoulder before she leaves.
“You’re not going to stop me?” she asks hesitantly.
It would be so easy. To bind her soul to him forever, make her his eternal servant, forced to do his bidding.
But she is so young. And she reminds him of her.
“No,” he says. “I won’t.”
She wraps her arms around him. He’d forgotten, in the lonely centuries since his imprisonment, how good it felt to be held.
“Thank you,” she breathes in his ear.
Then she’s gone, along with young Terry.
He’s alone again.
For some reason, he finds himself seeking out Viren’s heartbeat.
He leaves behind his twenty-foot-tall Startouch Titan form in favour of a regular human body, wanders the streets of Katolis like any other mortal. Occasionally, he’ll spot the mage in the bakery, or perusing the display in the window of a shop.
Viren is… interesting, he decides. He’s one of the few humans Aaravos has met who has patterns in his heartbeat - no random fluctuations, just a set routine for how fast it beats and when.
Without meaning to, he finds himself keeping track. Viren’s heartbeat picks up when he’s in public, slows when he’s at home, even more when he reads. It’s oddly endearing, he thinks.
Why does he feel endeared?
He’s not sure he wants to know. Over the millennia he’s walked this earth, he’s come to realise that sometimes the answer is worse than the question.
Regardless, Viren’s is a heartbeat that is comforting to him.
Katolis is on fire.
Aaravos knows this because he’s in the middle of it, running from the flames just like all the other citizens of the kingdom. He hurdles over a burning beam.
Not high enough. His cloak catches fire. He stifles a shriek, yanking the cloak off his body and stamping on it.
He leaves the garment. He can get another cloak tomorrow. It will be years, decades, before he can get another body.
Frantically, he casts his mind out, searching for the one heartbeat that he desperately wants to carry on hearing. Viren’s.
He finds it, near the castle.
Something is wrong.
His heart should be racing like a startled deer, keeping him moving, keeping him alive. Instead, it’s slowing down. Stuttering. Weak–
Gone.
Aaravos feels it, the moment his heart stops. And the crushing emptiness that comes with its departure.
He hadn’t realised before how much he’s come to rely on that steady pulse.
Somehow, he finds himself next to where it beat for the last time. Viren lies on his back, eyes open and empty, limbs sprawled. His once-immaculate robes are torn and filthy.
Loosely clutched in his hand is the bone-white staff, the one that always seemed to be his favourite object.
Someone is screaming.
It takes Aaravos a minute to realise that it is him.
He doesn’t remember falling to his knees. He only knows that he is crying, almost as much as he did for Leola, tears dripping onto Viren’s chest.
Leola. Claudia. Viren.
Two gone forever. One unreachable. All three leaving him completely, unbearably alone.
“Come back,” he chokes. His voice hangs in the air, thin, cracked, and utterly useless.
Nothing answers him except the roar of the burning city.