Work Text:
“Are you okay?”
Mydeimos looks up from the peerless squared tiles only to face a pale-haired man whose smile he immediately dislikes. Another Okheman, he sneers, offering him his unwanted pity.
Mydeimos’ hands are too full to accept it. They’re soiled palms, filled with his people’s lives, both those he’s managed to save and those he was forced to take. Weighty; still he holds onto them despite his own station. They’re all he has left.
Here, he has nothing. Okhema, jarringly distant from the chaos looming over his homeland, far from the abandoned, cold corpse of his father and the strings of prayers offered to a mad god, harmonizing in the dry air like an organ.
Okhema, where the people busied themselves about mundane matters and had no interest in war nor battle. No clue about the feeling of the dirt and blood and cracking fingernails digging shallow graves. Okhema, alien, with its day that lasted forever and its birds that always chirped happily.
He’s homesick for a home he’s never lived in. He’s not okay.
“What is it to you?” he replies. The man before him is dressed in pale colors. White and blue shades, a hopeful sky. Mydeimos doesn’t need to look at his own self to know he’s stained red with blood; that the two of them are estranged worlds that should never collide.
“You’re wounded,” the stranger continues. Unaware that it’s not Mydeimos’ body, but his pride that has taken the greater blow. It shattered and plunged into frailer parts of himself like broken shards of a blade. “I was simply worried.” Worried. Mydei sneers.
He crosses his arms, determined to reject this city; its people; its morals; its solemn statues looking down on him from their marble pedestals. The Flame-Chase. The man in front of him.
“Take your pity and your concerns and leave.”
The order falls flat. He has no authority here. He has nothing.
The blue-eyed guy smiles still, undeterred. He forages through his long fancy coat and pulls out a paper bag from here, all crumpled and dirty, its bottom greased. He places it next to Mydeimos’ knee before the prince can react, still exhausted from his long march from Kremnos to here, and then backs off before he can be told to.
“I thought you might be hungry.”
Mydeimos squints, ignoring his stomach’s pleas as a delicious smell arises from the paper bag. He’s not some lost child who needs to be fed and looked after. He’s a prince, a warrior. A patricider. His stomach twists and turns with both hunger and disgust. “And who are you?”
It’s meant to be haughty, insulting; it only comes out as extremely worn-out, like the soles of a man who walks with no home to return to.
“I’m Phainon.” Mydeimos’ hand clasps atop of the bag, the claws of his gauntlet ripping through thin paper as easy as if it were flesh. “We might see each other again soon.”
Mydei hopes not, but Phainon has already left before he can voice the thought, so he sighs, long and hard and unhelping. He waits at his spot without seeing anyone, and when he’s tired from waiting and from being angry about it, he relents and opens the bag.
Stacked at the bottom of it are three fruits, soft plum-looking things he has never seen before. They look similar to a sugary fruit they have at home, one that can only be gathered once it falls from the very highest branches of the tree it grows on into its lower, largest leaves. His mother used to bring him a handful at the end of each month, neatly ordered on a glass plate, like a reward for seeing it through.
These are soft and warm to the touch. They smell as good as they look; like orchards and sugar and childhood days. Like he’s traveled down a long road, and he doesn’t have to run anymore.
He misses home; misses her. Misses the person he used to be. He takes a bite, teeth sinking into skin.
Juice spills and trickles down his chin like blood.
He’s graciously offered a cage to stay in. Spacious apartments he feels the urge to tear apart, knock the furniture over and punch holes in the walls, until the bland Okheman’s architecture is painted in his own rage. He spends most of his time outside, on missions or above the Okheman rooftops and the bumble of its streets.
They called him one of theirs — a Chrysos Heir, as if he needed another title and responsibility to bear. Then they called him Mydei, and just like that he was baptized and born anew, leaving behind Mydeimos and the unspeakable things he had done.
He refused to get acquainted yet he remembered all of their names.
There were the three midgets, Tribbie, Trianne… Trinnon, he manages to remember. They’re overly friendly most of the time, in a child-like, genuine sort of way he’s not used to.
Similar to what he imagines having younger siblings being, except judging from the way everyone refers to them as ‘Master’ they’re probably much older than them, maybe older than even the city’s guardian.
Aglaea, he recalls. She’s shrouded in a thick air of mystery he can’t quite see through, golden strings peeking out of it, holding discombobulated puppets across the city like a spider web dipping and laid under the eternal sun of Okhema. She reminds him of a counselor his father had, a man who only spoke in low murmurs of tragedies yet to come and of oaths to break. He doesn’t like her because of this, and because when he catches his reflection in her glassy green eyes he looks powerless and angry. Marred with death, And Death, she’s here too.
Castorice is her name. She’s the one he feels most comfortable around, ironically. She speaks of simple things in a quiet voice. Her purple butterflies almost make dying appear soothing. It still is strange. Not the strangest of them all, though.
The strangest of them all is the boy. The one who talks to him like they’re friends, like they’re close, with an always-ready smile and an easygoing attitude. Phai-non. It rolls off the tongue oddly when Mydei pronounces it, his accent thicker and unlike theirs, and he wonders how jarring it must sound to others, so he says it once, to himself, clumsily, twice— still wrong, and he decides angrily that he won’t ever say it again.
The boy tries to save him. Mydei calls him ‘Deliverer’ to alleviate how humiliated he feels. It’s a fitting moniker written in prophetic ink, and when Phainon stills for a split second when he hears it, Mydeimos understands he’s hit a vulnerable nerve.
Phainon’s mask doesn’t crack the following time, smiling as if it was only a joke shared between the two of them. Mydeimos continues using the nickname. It’s easier than Phainon’s actual name, and it gets under his skin a little. Getting back at Phainon for having done the right thing satisfies him in a sick and twisted way, even though he’s not able to spell out why, like poking a flimsy olive branch into a pitch black lake and observing the water ripple, wondering what lies underneath. In the grand scheme of things, it matters very little.
That’s what he tells himself, anyways.
He’s argumentative and cheeky, for a guy who’s supposedly their boy savior. A so-called hero. Somehow it suits him better, this childish behavior, more than this play-pretend face he’s got sewn-on; the one with the obviously fake smile Mydei wants to tear to shreds.
They argue and bicker and try to prove each other wrong, try to be each other’s better. It helps, somehow. With a rival in sight and a sword in hand, Mydei can’t afford to waver and reach out for the things he’s left behind.
He remembers something his mother said about the world moving forward even if he remained still, and he understands, now, because there are two unmoving bodies in Castum Kremnos rotting away more with every wasted day, and the world had never stopped to allow him the right to mourn.
Soon, he’ll return to the land he fled from and spill blood again. He’ll slay the god who betrayed him and all of his people. It’s his birthright, and the only thing he’s got left to his name. Revenge and death. It’s what he thinks of when he aches for the days to pass by a little slower, rotting from revenge and anguish.
This, and proving Phainon he’s worth something.
“Say, have I wronged you in any way?”
Mydei spares a glance at Phainon (Phai-non) as they're walking through the empty streets of Okhema, headed back to this place he can’t bring himself to call home. Today’s been a long day of fighting, and fighting, and fighting some more to protect this city that isn't even his from monsters made of rock and limestone, whose bodies don’t shed blood when pierced through.
He vividly remembers the feeling of it. His father, wide-eyed, the warmth of his mother still lingering on his knotted fingers like a wedding ring.
Curse you, Mydeimos.
He feels wrong all over.
“Why do you ask?” He can’t reply ‘No,’ because Phainon does slight him. The gentle warmth of his eyes, the quiet touches that insist on bruising through the loneliness. The steady presence at his side that he’s never asked for. He has to hate it.
“I was just wondering,” Phainon says, in this unbothered way of speaking, light and free and hopeful. “Since you go out of your way to avoid saying my name.”
Mydei still practices saying it before he gives into slumber, alone in his apartments, muttering it like some curse. Like a prayer, yet Mydei doesn’t pray anymore, having forsaken his gods. It’s infuriating, that he still hasn't gotten it right after weeks of trying, and how easily it crawled under his skin as well, this urge to say it properly, perfectly, as if it was the only thing that mattered, and what a small thing it is. He closes his fists and faces forward into the never-ending day.
“Don't flatter yourself,” he replies. Words have meaning. Names have power. Mydeimos, son of Gorgo. Mydeimos, the Undying. Mydei. Phainon. “Deliverer.”
They never bring it up again. They settle into a dynamic where Mydei slings nicknames at him; calls him ‘Deliverer’ and ‘He’ and ‘Idiot’ and ‘Snowy’, mockingly, when Tribbie does, and they pretend it’s normal.
Enough nicknames, added to the ones he only uses in the confines in his head, to last an eternity without his real name having to leave his lips, and still the ghost of it always howls in the back of his throat. Begging to be let out.
He stops his nocturnal practices when no amount of cold water jugs poured into it ease the sour taste in his mouth, nor wash away the seven letters unwilling to leave. Sticking just like his accent does.
He’s fine, like this, alone. He doesn’t have anything or anyone he can lose anymore. He’s fine, but sometimes, in the darkness of his room, he wishes there was a name he could call out to.
“This here is Mydei,” is how Phainon introduces him to the travelers from beyond the sky, far too friendly, far too proud, for Mydei’s who’s done absolutely nothing to deserve such treatment.
He knows, were the situation reversed, he wouldn’t be able to give Phainon the same merit. It stings deep within; how close he sees them stand, how easily they talk to each other, as if they’d been friends for years already. How far away he is.
He wonders if they could have been like that, too, if he hadn’t wasted time building up towering walls around an empty castle. He huffs his chest and mocks them, with that dimming pride that’s the only thing he’s got left. Keeps pretending he’s okay.
Praying to a god and slaying it are strangely similar, in how they both end up offering little to no gratification. Mydei breathes out through destructive wrath, through blows that dislocate his body and strikes that impale him, stealing the life away from him so he can be reborn more flawed.
Nikador is a grand, yet easy name. It’s easy to remember, to say, and to worship. It’s easy to scream, with what little space remains in his lungs and with the overflowing hatred that has consumed him ever since he’s left.
It’s a name that carries centuries of his people in each of its letters, and their prayers, and their hopes, and he calls it out as if he could fulfill them all in their steads, if only.
It’s a name he’s said over and over, in look-alike days and the nights that echoed them. Mouth filled with blood and bones breaking, he still says it perfectly.
It’s a name that never bears any answer, no matter how many times Mydei’s vocal cords stretch and tear as he roars, trapped in this never-ending fight and still, so, so, alone. He won’t tire, even if he’s tired. Won’t die, even if he’s giving up. So he won’t. So he screams, even when no sound comes out, even when he’s back there, underwater.
So he desperately hopes he hasn’t been abandoned, and that someone will save him.
He’s used to this wretched thing called death. It doesn’t terrify him anymore. He’s journeyed through its darkness enough times to know his eyes will open after they’ve stayed shut long enough.
He opens them to someone he’s held a little too close to his heart being wounded a little too close to the heart, and he hears strangers calling out a name he’s never dared say aloud as his eyes lock with Phainon’s, and the world dreadfully, finally, stops for a little while.
It must have, since his heart stops beating with each second. Since it’s impossible to believe the world would carry on without its savior.
I’ll give a thousand more lives if I can spare his, he prays to the very god whose blood is spilling on his hands, And a thousand more to hear him say my name again. He strikes forth to not lose himself in what could have been something. Teeth clenching and hoping as short-lived slumber comes again that he won’t lose something dear to him in that very castle again.
That he’ll get one more chance, with his hands full of his sins and of the tears he’s failed to retain, to reach out to save someone he cares for.
Mydei still says it wrong. The consonants roll off his tongue improperly, the word shaky in his mouth for three millions different reasons.
Phainon doesn’t seem to mind. He grins and tells Mydei to say it again. When he does, Phainon’s eyes crinkle like the ocean when the sun shines upon it.
It feels a little like home.