Chapter Text
Yellow lists against their slipshod arrangement of sticks and logs, generously called a lean-to, and sighs.
Halfheartedly, he fans himself with his broad hat, skin itching under the tackiness of dried sweat. Though the sun was sinking down in the sky, the day’s hot humidity hung in the air like a blanket over the forest’s poor inhabitants. The rest of their group had ceded the day to the temperature hours ago; only Yellow had stuck it out, and all he had to show for it was his shirt sticking to his back, uncomfortably damp all over.
Their quest is often unavailing, chasing their tails in search of clues or leads, or embarking on wild goose chases through the broad lands of the kingdom. But at least when they were working together, it wouldn’t feel as pointless.
It’s days like these, where any sort of progress feels as far from reach as the sun itself, that leave Yellow restless, unable to accept the stagnation. They leave his fingers twitchy against the smooth leather of his holsters, aching for something as hazy and unreal as summer’s mirage. Like there’s something he’s supposed to be doing, something calling to him from just outside his sightline.
He sighs, rolling his shoulders out. The only remedy, he finds, is piling in with the rest of the flowers, letting their easy companionship smooth the sharp edges of his tension.
Flowery, Seth and Green were crowded around a spread of papers near the ashes of their old firepit. Orange and Aqua, presumably, have opted to nap the day away inside their tent without anything else to do; the rest of them still have plans to make, resources to gather, steps towards the culmination of their orders. Though Yellow was coming back empty-handed, he could still hope the other flowers had made something meaningful of the miserable day.
As he approaches, Green lifts their head and gives him a wave. Seth doesn’t respond– they seem almost catatonic, so engrossed in their tactics– so Yellow folds himself down beside them, sitting cross-legged to peer over at the papers.
This, at least, rouses a response from Seth, as they whip around to slap Yellow away, which he dodges smoothly.
“Back up,” they grumble, still waving a hand in his direction in the hope of warding him off. “Your stupid hat blocks the light.”
“Aw, sorry Seth,” Yellow says sincerely, and drops his hat over a log they had pulled over with hopes of using as a seat, before realising that everyone preferred huddling together on the ground instead. “What’re you up to?”
He always likes to ask, even though he never understands the answers they give, too full of intellectual-type jargon to mean anything to Yellow.
Today is no different, with Seth proclaiming that “it’s really rather simple” before launching into an explanation which Yellow immediately loses. He catches Green’s eye, and they shrug and shake their head, also lost.
Flowery must notice their bemusement, because he leans over to Yellow behind Seth’s back and shows him a thoroughly annotated diagram of what appears to be a normal feather.
“There’s word this is how this knight’s been getting around,” Flowery says quietly, while Seth continues to explain, mostly to themselves. “How they manage to cause so much chaos in so little time. It seems to augment their movement.”
“Huh,” Yellow says, taking the paper and looking it over. “How ‘bout that.” Most of the annotations are borderline unreadable, penned in Seth’s messy scrawl, and the technical explanation is beyond him, but Yellow can get the gist– it lets them move quicker. To evade better.
He frowns. If this knight has something that lets them move faster and for longer, how are they supposed to track it down?
“So?” Seth asks, having rounded on Yellow after presumably finishing their explanation at some point after Yellow had stopped listening. “What do you think?”
“I’m thinkin’” Yellow says, “it’s gonna be awful hard to catch ‘em if they’ve got something like that.”
“Ugh, it’s like you weren’t even listening,” Seth scoffs, and Yellow can only grin in apology. “We don’t know they’ve got one of those, it’s just speculation. And even if they do, there’s more than one, so we can just get one as well and chase after them.”
“Oh,” Yellow says, thinking privately that the word ‘just’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. “Where do we get one?”
Seth doesn’t answer, mouth creasing into a frown, so Flowery picks up where they left off.
“No one knows. No one’s seen one in a long time.”
Yellow doesn’t have anything to say to that, and the conversation lapses into silence, broken only by the fluttering of paper in the evening’s light breeze.
Suddenly, a piercing shriek splits the still night air.
Yellow is on his feet in a moment, hand jumping instinctively towards his holster. Images flash before his eyes, of innocents in trouble, of criminals causing havoc, of, angel forbid, the knight, close enough to bring chaos yet still out of their reach.
Something cries out again, and then again, this time accompanied by a torrent of– wingbeats, growing slowly louder.
Yellow tips his head back to look up at the darkening sky as it’s overrun by a flurry of white wings. A flock of swans, flying, raucously, towards their evening perch.
He lets the tension bleed out of him, flopping back down beside the rest of the flowers.
“Ha!” Seth points at him teasingly. “Were you seriously about to start shooting at a couple of birds?”
Yellow huffs, self conscious. “They sure sounded pretty threatenin’,” he defends. “And it’s good to be ready for anythin’.”
“Sure,” Seth needles, “and when those birds come to tear up our camp while we sleep I’m sure we’ll all be sorry we doubted you.”
“It’s not like I’m scared of the birds,” Yellow tries, before realising that he isn’t escaping Seth’s teasing and decides to change tactics. He flicks their glasses instead. “I’m surprised you could even tell they were birds. Thought they’d just look like a big white cloud to you.”
Seth whacks his hand away. “I’m farsighted, idiot,” they huff, which clarifies nothing to Yellow, “and I love birds. Of course I could tell what they were. They were swans, by the way, if you’re curious, which you never are– cygnus olor, the mute swan, one of the oldest species of birds still living–”
“The feather,” Flowery says, interrupting Seth before they can begin some sort of rant on the native bird population. The other flowers turn around to see him with a single long, white feather trapped between his thumb and forefinger, catching the sun’s dying rays.
He looks up at them, locking eyes with Yellow. “It’s just like the Petal Feather. Nearly the same.”
“Huh,” Yellow says, not following whatever Flowery seems to be implying.
The other flower continues, staring unblinkingly at Yellow, “You should follow them. Perhaps they have some connection to the feather. To the knight.”
“H-huh?” Yellow stammers, reeling. “The– birds?”
“What? Why would a bunch of swans have anything to do with the Petal Feather?” Seth says, although their voice seems to fade into the background. Flowery has that quality; when his attention is focused on you, the rest of the world seems to melt away around it.
“You should,” Flowery repeats. “Maybe this is what you’ve been waiting for. The thing you’ve been waiting to find.”
Yellow isn’t exactly sure how he knows about that, about his persistent restlessness, the itch like hot coal against the soles of his boots that wills him to keep moving forward. But it’s well known there’s no use hiding anything from Flowery.
“Awright,” Yellow says, rising. “I s’pose I’ll go after them.”
Seth’s protests of “what? Why would he need to do that? The Petal Feather is literally not a normal bird feather?” quiet behind him as he ducks into the brush and away from camp. Seth might think they know better, but Yellow has learnt that Flowery’s instruction never leads them wrong.
The calls of the swans still echo off in the distance, quieter but still in range, and Yellow follows them, picking his way between trees and over bushes as the forest thickens around him.
The swans lead him away from civilisation. Their camp was within a few miles of a border village, in case any trouble emerged while they were near enough to help. This was the opposite direction, though, where the sunny pasture and light woodland slowly morphed into dense thickets and tree cover dense enough to block out the evening sun completely.
Yellow was lucky his skills in tracking were so finely honed, otherwise he would have found himself lost almost immediately in the forest’s confusing maze.
The birds, at least, aren’t exactly subtle. Alongside their cacophonous sound, a sparse trail of white feathers, stark against the dark underbrush, leads him in deeper.
Unfortunately, he can’t afford to take his time; the birds are fast, unrestricted in the sky, and Yellow finds himself running along, barely ducking under a few low-hanging boughs. A bramble snags his jeans, and he feels something rip as he tears himself free; he curses under his breath, mourning his nice, pristine jeans.
They had been new, a boon alongside the mission they’d been assigned, a gift by Asgore himself.
The thought of their king lets Yellow double down, tucking in his shoulders to weave through the forest more effectively. He knows what he’s doing this for, and he won’t fail their king when he has such a perfect chance to bring him justice.
Between the sound of his boots skidding against the thick, wet blanket of leaves on the ground, and the rustle of leaves in every direction, Yellow almost misses the moment the sound of the swans disappears.
He stumbles to a stop, flinging his arm out to slap against a tree to break his momentum. He stands and listens carefully, and worries, for a moment, that he might have lost them, too slow to keep up.
Then he hears it, quiet but still there, as a single swan calls out, and another responds. It’s hardly the roar of earlier, and no longer does the sound of beating wings follow it.
Yellow lets his grin split across his face. They must have landed.
He starts moving again, no longer sprinting but picking his way carefully between the trees, quieting the sound of his boots against soft soil to hide his approach. It’d be a waste to send the swans flying again after only just being able to track them down.
Time seems to move at a glacial pace as he eases slowly forward. Sometimes the quiet of the forest stands just long enough to make him nervous, the possibility of having lost the direction and now creeping in endless circles darkening the back of his mind until a call rings out to confirm he’s moving in the right direction.
Gratifyingly, the call is louder every time. He’s getting closer.
He knows he’s made it when soft blue light finally begins to filter through the trees again. The sun has set, now, the moon beginning to creep steadily across the sky, and the treeline thins just enough for dappled light to illuminate the last few metres of thicket before him.
The thrill of making it distracts him enough to let his boot scuff the leaf litter noisily, sending a small wave of dead leaves spraying up by his toe. The sound rings out like a gunshot in the quiet, or at least it feels like it does to Yellow; he curses under his breath and ducks quickly behind a large bush. He holds his breath, lets it burn against his lungs while he waits for the sound of the swans being disturbed, of flying away and leaving him empty-handed.
It doesn’t come. Slowly, Yellow begins to rise from where he’s crouched, steadying himself with one hand on a tree trunk while he leans around the cover of the bush.
The scene before him leaves him gasping for air a second time in less than a minute. It’s more than picturesque; an enormous lake shines like glass, hemmed in on every side by thick woodland and reflecting perfectly the moon’s slow rise through a sky spattered with so many stars it seems impossible. He can even see the arc of colour bleeding through, what Seth had described as another galaxy; Yellow couldn’t remember its name, only that it had upset Orange for the rest of the evening. Milk-something.
The picture is perfectly uninterrupted, without any small islands or reed clusters disturbing the lake’s perfect mirror; or, it would be, except for the swans.
Hundreds dot the water’s surface, mirroring the sky’s constellations in patterns of their own. They float placidly, heads tucked between their feathers, almost unrecognisable as the torrent of noise and movement from earlier in the evening. He can even see a few small, young swans curled up beside the adults; one is sleeping on an older swan’s back.
The sight of it is almost enough to distract him. He’s lost in awe of it for more than a few minutes before he can bring himself back to reality. He had followed the birds for a reason– Flowery had wanted him to find… something. A clue, or a sign. What was he looking for?
Like a prayer answered, a lone swan flutters out of the sky, winding in elegant circles through the air before landing soundlessly in the centre of the lake. It stays there, unmoving for a moment, long, slender neck craned up to where the moon’s light dances across its blindingly white feathers. The stillness after it lands feels as if the whole lake holds its breath.
And then the bird begins to change.
At first, Yellow thinks the bird is lifting its wings, letting it appear larger, but surely, the swan’s form begins to– swell, almost, monochrome white feathers obscuring the reality of the movement. Yellow can only lean further forward, oblivious to the burn in his thighs at his half-squatted position as he stares, transfixed.
The sight is swallowed by a flurry of white feathers, seeming to spin in circles, around and around, before beginning to slough off, finally scattering into the wind, each dancing its own slow arcs towards the surface of the pond. In their wake is revealed a single man, crouched low with his arms tucked around his knees standing on the surface of the water.
He wears an elaborate white outfit; Yellow can barely distinguish his dress from the feathers still swirling around him. He can barely make out a voluminous white skirt, fanning out at his waist underneath a sleek white leotard. Feathers crown the edges of the fabric, shining starkly against the deep blue of his skin.
Slowly, the man unfurls himself, sending more feathers pirouetting through the air with the movement. He stands straight, lifting both arms into the air and bringing a single foot forward in front of him, with his head angled downward. Like this, Yellow can make out white flats with ribbons wrapping up the man’s calves, and feathers crowning his light hair. Pale lashes fan out against his sharp cheekbones.
Yellow has no idea how long he stands– both the man at the centre of the lake, and himself, unwilling to disturb the striking tableau before him.
Suddenly, the man’s head snaps up, and he begins to dance.