Archive of Our Own

Ajaw wakes up alone, which is the first sign that something’s wrong.

As almighty as his powers are, he doesn’t even have to open his eyes to know that Kinich is gone. Their contract makes Kinich’s presence an anchor point to which Ajaw is tethered. He’s a beacon, a constant that was annoying for the first few months but gradually became the bedrock of Ajaw’s life.

The fact that Ajaw can’t feel Kinich now means that his servant must be very far away. But that’s wrong. If Kinich is up and about, Ajaw should be too.

Now, Ajaw will be the first to admit that he’s a heavy sleeper. Once he’s out, he’s out, his magnificent logic core taking the time to do systems checks for which his consciousness is generally kept locked out of unless he’s threatened with bodily harm. A herd of Yumkasaur could go thundering past and he’d sleep through the whole damn thing as long as they didn’t trample him.

Typically, this isn’t a problem. Kinich’s pretty inflexible about the schedule he runs them on, the mora-grubbing taskmaster that he is, so all Ajaw has to do is graciously set his maintenance to run for the seven hours of sleep Kinich usually settles for and voilà, they’re rising at the same time, Kinich infuriatingly bright-eyed while Ajaw grumbles through his wake-up protocols.

Ajaw hasn’t woken up alone in years.

Not that it bothers Ajaw. In fact, the solitude is perfect for plotting ways to hasten Kinich’s demise! He certainly doesn’t have a complex about being left to his own devices. It’s just— being alone is stupidly quiet. It reminds Ajaw too much of stale air and unchanging stone walls where the only company was the echo of his voice and he learned that no one could hear him anyway, so he was better off chattering at normal, non-throat-damaging volumes to fill the unending silence that stretched day after unchanging day in a cavern so deep the sun would never reach it; perfectly quiet and perfectly dark and perfectly cold.

Ahem. Ajaw would like to reiterate that he doesn’t have a complex. In fact, he’s a paragon of mental health, so therapized it would make every normal idiot in Natlan tremble from how well-adjusted he is. He’s just a little unsettled by quiet — really just the tiniest amount, small enough that only nitpickers would dare even suggest it matters — through no shortcomings of his own. Heck, he’d like to see anyone else spend two thousand years stuffed in a teeny tiny bracelet and left to rot at the bottom of the deepest hole in the whole nation and not be a little sensitive about it!

For all of Kinich’s many, many faults — seriously, it would take Ajaw years to list everything wrong with that guy — he’s unexpectedly accommodating about Ajaw’s… lapse, which really says less about him and more about Ajaw’s discerning taste in servants.

So.

Kinich knows to wake Ajaw if they have to head off. The brute has no compunctions over shaking Ajaw awake if it comes to that. Ergo, Ajaw shouldn’t be waking up alone, especially because today was supposed to be their day off and his servant promised that they’d visit a new grill that opened shop in Teteocan. He wouldn’t leave without Ajaw, so where the hell is he?

It’s a mystery that unfortunately won’t solve itself. Ajaw deigns to open his eyes, and— what the fuck.

The world opens before him with beautiful three dimensions. Textures are smooth and the sunlight is bright, cutting a cheery vermillion swathe across the ceiling. It’s fucking picturesque. It also has way too much depth.

He squints, suspicious. Where the hell are his pixels?

Ughhhh. Ajaw was really looking forward to sleeping in today. But suddenly developing the ability to perceive the world in non-planar geometry is alarming and Kinich is a useless lout nowhere to be found, so it falls on the Almighty Dragonlord, K’uhul Ajaw, to investigate.

Ajaw struggles upwards. It’s more difficult than it should be. His limbs are heavy and weird, ill-fitting blocks of lead. He flicks his gaze down absently, wondering if maybe Kinich finally gave in to inevitability of the prank war Ajaw’s been trying to goad him into for months and tied bricks to him while he was defenseless. He freezes. He is looking down at two human arms and two human legs connected to one human body.

Ajaw opens his mouth to scream, but Kinich gets there first.

He jumps, startled. His jaw snaps shut so quickly it hurts, teeth clacking together and rattling his skull. That’s not right. Teeth? A skull? Ajaw shouldn't have those. Bones are brittle and downright nasty. No self-respecting Dragonlord needs things like bones when beautiful, elegant, programmable phlogiston exists—

Alright, alright. Forget the bones for now. Where the fuck is Kinich hiding?

“I heard you,” Ajaw accuses. He starts to, at least, and he swears his mouth moves but it’s Kinich saying the words.

He is suddenly incensed. Has Kinich been watching him flop around, laughing to himself over small and pitiful Ajaw, so scared of being alone he has to have someone hold his hand when he sleeps? Contract be damned, Ajaw’s gonna truss him up like a stuck pig and stick him in a closet, see how he likes it.

He lurches forward. Ajaw doesn’t mean to clear the bed but it’s laughably easy when it’s much smaller than it should be and suddenly he’s tumbling to the floor. His front eats the contact as he lands on something that goes crunch and comes out with carpet-burn stinging all along his arms, the breath knocked out of him. Fuck, that hurts. He tries to stand again, but he slips in something slick and goes careening right back to the floor.

He’s lying there with a smarting back and great big fuming breaths ripping out of his chest when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye. He rolls onto his side to look and—

It’s Kinich. The idiot is rolling on the ground looking absolutely pathetic. Ajaw almost wants to laugh at how foolish his usually high-and-mighty servant looks, but it’s overshadowed by the implacable urge to get revenge for being ignored.

Kinich spots him at nearly the same time, straightening up. Ajaw starts moving towards him and Kinich follows suit, crawling on his hands and knees to bridge the gap between them. When he gets close, Ajaw raises a hand to slap him around a bit, maybe shake him and demand what game he thinks he’s playing, but he smacks into a wall of glass instead.

“What the hell?” he hears Kinich ask, sounding as confused as Ajaw feels. Ajaw looks up at him and woah. It’s odd to see him so dimensional, the cut of his body taking up physical space rather than just planes of color.

Now, Ajaw isn’t ignorant to aesthetics. Even he had to admit that Kinich can be pretty in the right lighting — if he keeps his mouth shut and holds back the cheeky comments that would’ve gotten him sent to timeout in the middle of a volcano back when it was still Ajaw making the rules. He’s got the tightly muscled body of a warrior meant for practical feats of strength over any useless but showy muscle, an annoyingly flattering haircut that covers up the fact that the blockhead always goes to bed with wet hair, and eyelashes long enough to make the merchants hawking makeup products nearly bite through their tongues with envy. It’s only fitting for a servant to match the splendor of the lord they serve, after all, and Kinich happens to live up to the rather high standards of serving K’uhul Ajaw. So let it be known that the following observation is not meant to bully and is in fact a completely objective statement based off nothing but the facts:

Up close, Kinich looks bad.

There are shadows smudged into his under-eyes and a splash of red all across his chin like he’s bloodied his nose and has just been letting it drip. His cheeks are hollowed, his lips chapped under the blood. He’s shirtless but not naked; his torso is wrapped with foul smelling, rust-colored bandages. Worst of all, his eyes are wide with terror.

That’s not right.

This is Kinich. He’s strong and annoyingly unflappable in even the most stressful situations. Ajaw has never seen him look like this. It’s wrong, it’s all wrong,

”What happened?”

Kinich asks it before Ajaw can, and it makes him wonder if he looks just as bad as Kinich does. His head hurts too much to remember why he would. What, did they get jumped or something?

Ajaw wants to ask, but every time he opens his mouth to speak Kinich does the same thing only to not voice a damn word. They keep cutting each other off, both hesitating to interrupt without actually speaking. It wears on Ajaw’s already limited-patience quickly.

He raises a hand to pound on the glass but stops halfway through, surprised to see Kinich doing the same. The poor guy does seem pretty haggard though, so it’s unsurprising he’s taking his cues from a higher life form. It’s such a pitiful sight that Ajaw decides to have mercy on him. After all, Kinich looks as confused as Ajaw feels. Maybe he doesn’t know what’s going on, either.

He ends up resting his hand on the glass much gentler than he initially planned to. Their palms line up in perfect mirror image, palm to palm and pinky to pinky. Slotted together, their hands look so right that it temporarily blows away his unease. It takes Ajaw almost ten whole seconds to realize what’s wrong with what he’s seeing.

Ajaw is touching hands with Kinich.

…Ajaw does not have hands.

He wants to shout but the words aren’t coming. It’s dead silent but Kinich is here, Kinich is as perceptive as a shaman and knows him like no other, surely he’ll know that Ajaw is cursing up a storm in his head with curses-as-lightning raging against the confines of his distressingly bone-formed skull; the words get trapped behind his useless mouth of tombstones and the horribly wet thing taking up residence where the beautiful chunk of phlogiston that serves as his speech module should be, and any second now Kinich will say some one of his unnervingly astute observations that cut right to the core and get him untangled and— He’s quiet, Kinich is always quiet, but he doesn’t ignore Ajaw like this, he’s an annoying man but a good servant and he doesn’t treat Ajaw like he’s not even here.

This is wrong, this is wrong, this is all wrong—

Something cracks, splitting the terrible silence. The glass shatters. Shards fall around him. They clink to the ground and reveal no Kinich, just a thin panel of silver.

Oh. That was a mirror.

Oh!

Ohh.

So Ajaw has Kinich’s body, huh. That’s—

Hahaha, that means Kinich croaked! Oh man, what a treat. Ajaw wishes he could remember what happened. He’s sure it must’ve been hilariously anticlimactic after years of the fool surviving no-parachute cliff dives like terminal velocity just doesn’t apply, the world’s most resilient human-shaped squirrel. What a missed opportunity to finally see someone so unflappable squirm!

It seems understanding the situation finally allows his jaw to get moving. He opens it, and— huh. Ajaw doesn’t think he’s heard Kinich make this kind of noise before. It doesn’t even sound human. It’s an animal’s noise, something primal and vulnerably terrified.

He’s screaming, Ajaw realizes, loud enough to feel it vibrate his eyes. He’s going to ruin Kinich’s throat and then Kinich will be so mad at him when he gets back — the guy doesn’t speak a lot but he sure like to be listened to when he does and nothing pisses him off faster than Ajaw nuh-uhing every time he opens his mouth, and despite how much Ajaw loves to joke around he has to admit that Kinich’s irritated face has lost some of its charm when compared to his rare smiles and even rarer laughs, so maybe he should cool it on behavior that will really get Kinich fuming or else Ajaw will be relegated to sleeping on the couch once his servant comes back—

Ah, that’s right! Kinich will come back. The idiot must’ve fallen in battle, but the Ode will bring him back home to Ajaw. This is only temporary.

Now that he thinks about it, it’s all so clear. Kinich is durable. Annoyingly so. This is the guy that has survived years of Ajaw’s assassination attempts with a calm attitude and a near-limitless patience for getting baited into jumping off cliffs unprepared. Getting rid of a guy like that is impossible. It’s unthinkable that Kinich is gone, so he must not be.

Ajaw just needs to wait and Kinich will return. He always does. He’s Ajaw’s servant, and he is good. Kinich is silly like that, cold and sharp on the outside but so shyly attentive, like he can’t bear to let Ajaw know he feels affection for him even though he’s always warm with Ajaw and has been for years.

Kinich wouldn’t leave Ajaw alone. The Ode will bring Kinich back. That’s the whole point of the name Malipo that follows his servant like a curse and the legacy of burning flames.

It puts a damper on Ajaw’s celebration, because he was truly only seconds away from dancing around the room with sheer joy over their contract being fulfilled. Tch, trust Kinich to ruin Ajaw’s good mood even when he’s not here!

Still, it’s not all bad news. He’s off-leash! He can use this small chance to explore having a human body while he can before Kinich is resurrected.

It’s, uh, kinda hard to move, though. This isn’t the weightless little bit of phlogiston he’s used to inhabiting. How does Kinich stand it? Its limbs are heavy, the head drooped under its own weight. Kinich’s mouth is panting, harsh little hah-hahs of breath that he usually only lets slip when he’s too exhausted to tuck away all signs of his human limits behind the facade of emotionless excellence he strives for but are now pouring out because it’s Ajaw at the helm, too freaked to hold them back.

It’s a struggle to marshall Kinich’s lungs into a pattern resembling normal breathing, Ajaw’s focus easily ruined from the oddity of the sensitive pads of his fingers running over warm skin and the plush pile of carpet under his toes. He finally gets it down — an embarrassingly long amount of time later — and the oxygen whooshing in and out helps with the prickle of spots in his vision. It doesn’t alleviate the painfully tight squeeze on the left side of Kinich’s chest. Hands rise to press against it without even thinking in a futile attempt to massage the ache away.

Fuck, what a way to start the morning! It’s enough to make a Dragonlord tremble with rage. Of course, the trembling might also be because of the blood loss.

Red rivers run from a diagonal cut stretching across all four of the knuckles he used to punch the mirror. The whole hand aches something fierce, too. Ajaw clicks his tongue with annoyance. That, at least, sounds more natural coming from Kinich’s mouth.

What a bother! The great K’ujul Ajaw finally achieves human flesh only to damage it instantly. This is all Kinich’s fault somehow, he’s sure, but Ajaw is a beacon of magnanimity and kindness. He’ll get the idiot patched up.

It feels a little like a breach of Kinich’s trust to do whatever he wants with his body while he’s in control. But Ajaw’s just trying to help, right? He licks his lips and tastes copper while he reasons with himself. Kinich would probably be even more upset if he came back from the Night Kingdom to find his hand all sliced up. Besides, why should Ajaw be held accountable for what he gets up to while in control of Kinich’s body? He’s piloting it fair and square per the conditions of their contract!

Mind made up, Ajaw wobbles his way to the bathroom — and fuck you too, useless, stupid, rage-inducing human legs! He digs the emergency pack of first aid supplies out from under the sink and drops it on the counter with a grumble — and does not startle at hearing Kinich’s voice instead of his own — only to actually startle when he looks up and sees the lower half of the face he’s borrowing smeared with blood. Fuck, that’s right, Kinich had a nosebleed in the mirror, didn’t he?

Now that Ajaw thinks about it, he vaguely remembers a crunch when he fell. Haha, oops? It seems like the blood is calming on its own, though, so surely it’s fine. He splashes water on it a few times to clean it off and then leaves it alone. Kinich is pretty generous about what he lets him get away with; Ajaw will push his luck a little.

The hand is more pressing, stinging with novel little aches and pains. He opens and closes it into a fist a few times and watches, mesmerized, as the edges of the cut pull open and closed with each squeeze. It forces more blood out, little drops that run into the sink and paint the stone with streaks of red. That jolts him out of his stupor. Kinich is a nonrenewable resource! Better not waste any precious bits of him.

The dressing turns out sloppy. He’s flying blind for it, relying on memories of Kinich’s practiced and sure movements that Ajaw doesn’t have a hope of recreating. The bandages wrap loosely around the four fingers of the hand. It’s nothing like the expertly done bandages around his torso, but it’s enough to stem the bleeding and at least hide the sight of the injury.

…Fuck it, Ajaw shouldn’t be expected to know this! If Kinich wants a better patch job he should hurry home and do it himself!

Injury sufficiently dealt with for now, Ajaw turns from the bathroom and casts a calculating gaze over the bedroom. He can’t remember what the fuck happened last night, but he’s got brand new, hot-off-the-press braincells to use so he might as well put them to work.

Here’s what Ajaw knows: Kinich was injured enough to kick the bucket, but there’s no way he went without a fight. Turning over and accepting death is not an option for Ajaw’s servant. It was a strong enough opponent to mortally injure him but not kill him on the spot; he still had enough presence of mind after the fight to at least attempt first aid.

A Vision lies on the floor, another clue. It’s surrounded by a puddle of dark liquid like someone dropped a paint bucket over it, and there are smear marks through it from when he fell.

Ajaw doesn’t pick it up. He’s sure it would be sticky and gross if he tried. Besides, what’s the point of dirtying Kinich’s hands to get some random piece of jewelry? It can’t be Kinich’s. This one is gray and dull, nothing like the vivid green of Dendro that suits his servant so well. It’s not Kinich’s, so he doesn’t care.

Besides the Vision and the smashed-up mirror, the rest of the room is orderly with no sign of a struggle, so it’s likely the actual battle took place elsewhere and Kinich limped home to lick his wounds before keeling over. Rather annoyingly, this means that Ajaw won’t be able to glean many more clues from the environment. He’d have to leave home and try to track down where the hell the Night Warden War that did Kinich in took place to figure out what killed him.

Despite knowing that, Kinich’s feet take Ajaw to bed. He’s tucking himself in without even thinking about it, nestling into pillows that used to be large enough to cradle his entire body without sinking and now squish flat under his head.

He can’t help it. The world is suddenly terrifying, every uneven stone and sharp corner a threat to this body’s health. So Ajaw stays in bed, the better to keep it safe. A little belatedly, Ajaw respects how terrifying being human is. Lords, how does Kinich get through the day with such mortal weakness? Maybe when Kinich gets back from his dip in the Night Kingdom, Ajaw will ask him.

Once Kinich gets home.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Whoever came up with that asinine little nugget of wisdom should choke on a thousand rocks after getting hit by a metric ton of charging Tatankasaur and then fall into the nearest pocket of liquid phlogiston and boil to an agonized crisp, because they were clearly able to peer directly into this moment and that makes them a no-good stalker. Ajaw stays nestled up in a fortress of blankets and pillows, missing Kinich with an ache that burns the chest he’s borrowing like a hot coal. Oh, what’s a Dragonlord to do without his servant! If Kinich were here, he’d know exactly what to do. He’d call Ajaw an idiot, but he’d help with a warmth to his usually cold gaze Ajaw isn’t sure he deserves but is too selfish to resist.

Kinich won’t be gone for long. He wouldn’t do that to him, not his Kinich. Ajaw just needs to wait. He drags the blankets to his chin. Loneliness is an indignity he hasn’t had to bear since the first moment they met and it’s one he’s grown unaccustomed to with how Kinich spoils him with time. Ajaw has spent thousands of years trapped and yet it’s nothing to just one day without Kinich’s infuriatingly steady presence. They’ve had days apart, of course — their first few months were especially fraught with screaming matches that ended with Ajaw fuming in time out, his ego bruised by Kinich’s cutting tongue — but Kinich’s presence is a default in his life at this point, as natural as the constants of time and gravity, and his absence feels like the grass being red and the sky green.

With nothing better to do, Ajaw starts composing letters of formal complaint. Each one bears his gripes about being left alone and all the ways Kinich can repent when he gets back. He can’t actually write them down, too terrified to risk a papercut. He can’t speak them aloud, either. It’s Kinich's voice, not Ajaw’s, and it doesn’t make any sense to voice his criticism to Kinich in the man’s own voice. That’s okay. It gives him plenty to think about to keep his mind occupied.

At some point Ajaw notices that the damnable wristband is on his wrist, latched tight like a prison. Something’s wrong with it. He hadn’t even realized it was there, but he always knows where it is. Ajaw should feel a pull to it, a constant tension on the leash formed by their contract. Nothing’s pulling now except for the weight of dead rock.

He claws it off with a desperation that makes the tips of Kinich’s fingers flush red. It lands on the floor with a harsh crack and Ajaw knows Kinich would be irritated with him for treating it so roughly but nothing can explain the unease he feels looking at it. It’s not right. That should be on Kinich’s arm. Ajaw wants nothing to do with it.

Time starts moving weirdly. Hours, days, longer; there is no meaning to the sun’s passage without Kinich, but still they pass. Ajaw is at once exhausted and unable to rest. Every accursed little breath he steals from Kinich’s lungs is a marathon, but it’s a sprint he cannot stop — to do so is to invite black spots in his vision and weakness into Kinich’s limbs. No matter how carefully he breathes, the body still grows weaker with time, starting with an ache in its stomach that seeps like poison to the extremities and even further still, until just twitching a finger calls for monumental effort and leaves his head spinning. Ajaw is terrified at it, fearful at the thought of the Ode failing because Kinich’s body is too weak to receive its rightful owner. As the days pass unmarked, Ajaw’s unwillingness to move becomes an inability. Kinich’s body is too heavy a burden.

His mind grows hazy, his senses deluded by memories of Kinich. Sometimes he swears he hears his servant’s voice or feels gloved hands running through his hair to sweep back unruly strands from the sweat-glistening forehead of his borrowed body, but each time he opens crusted-shut eyes to check there is nothing but the same empty room. The only change is the smell; the room is already starting to become pungent from the unwashed sweat of Kinich’s body and the puddle on the floor. With the little strength he has left, Ajaw buries his face into Kinich’s pillow and falls into uneasy drifting. The world hurts less if he closes himself off from harsh sunlight and Kinich’s absence and so he chooses to live in a waking dream.

Something wakes him either hours or days later. Ajaw’s curled up in his new normal: Kinich’s bed, buried in pillows and blankets that smell less like his servant with every passing day. There’s pounding at the door, too loud to be his imagination.

For a second, his heart leaps, ecstatic that Kinich is here and mouth already opening to snark something like, “Took you long enough!” and get their regular routine back on to make up for this terrible eon of loneliness, but Ajaw quickly realizes it’s not him. He would know if it was, would surely be able to recognize the pattern with which Kinich knocks or the cadence of his footsteps or the way air hangs around him, sweeter and lighter as if the heavens themself are lighting up to tell Ajaw that it’s his servant’s homecoming. They are sounds inscribed into Ajaw’s very being, written deep into the fundamental core of him from years of cohabitation.

Kinich wouldn’t bother knocking anyway, he’d just open the door and say, “I’m home,” in that weirdly reassuring way he does the few times he’s gone out while Ajaw stayed in. This is not him.

“I’m coming in, Kinich, so you better be decent!”

Ajaw rolls his eyes and turns Kinich’s body around in bed, back to the door. It's just Mualani. As people go she’s not the worst, but Ajaw really just doesn’t have the energy to put up with her right now. As bull-headed as always, she doesn’t take his silence as the dismissal it’s supposed to be. The door swings open, a victim to her assault, and her bare footsteps echo through the small house as she gets closer.

From the door, she calls, “It’s been a couple days since I’ve heard from you, and I know you’re a hermit but I hadn’t heard any disgruntled clients gossiping about you either, so I wanted to— Hey!”

She’s noticed the shattered mirror, then. It’s obvious from the frantic note in her voice as she makes her way closer still. “What happened? Is everything okay?”

These are questions Ajaw has asked himself a million times already to no avail. If he doesn’t get any answers, there’s no way in hell she will. He stays silent. She grows more worried, voice a buzzing echo of his thoughts that only gets louder as he stays quiet.

“What’s with all the glass, Kinich? And the carpet? This isn’t like you, bro, you’re freaking me out!”

If Kinich were here, he would have already cleaned up. If Kinich were here, he’d have already acquired a replacement for the mirror and the paint-soaked carpet. Ajaw knows all of this. After all, he knows Kinich best out of everyone in Natlan. Ajaw is Kinich’s lord and partner, so where the hell does Mualani get off acting like her concern, days late, is any help at all?

He can’t stand it anymore. He snaps, “Shut up!”

It’s the first thing he’s said since the first day and he regrets it immediately. The words sting on their way up his borrowed throat, and more than that it’s Kinich’s voice, so familiar that Ajaw feels an unfamiliar prickle at the corner of his eyes just from hearing it after so many hours of silence. Even then, it’s not right. It’s Kinich’s voice but it’s not him, the tone is different and so is the pitch and everything about it screams not Kinich not Kinich.

Mualani rears back at the venom Ajaw has poisoned Kinich’s voice with, but she doesn’t get mad the way she normally does when Ajaw snaps at her. Instead, she carefully picks through the shattered glass on the floor — her shoes left by the front door — and sits at the edge of the bed. “C’moooon, Kinich. Tell me what’s wrong!”

Ajaw ignores her, afraid to hear Kinich’s voice again. He hopes she’ll lose interest and leave him to his lonely vigil.

The minutes stretch on. A woman of action, she quickly grows antsy. But Mualani is a true friend to Kinich, as annoying as that is at the moment, and doesn’t leave his side. Instead, she reaches for the bandages around Kinich’s torso. Ajaw flinches away from the sting her touch sends rippling through the sensitive skin there.

She smiles. “Aha! I knew you were injured. You can’t hide that from me. C’mon, up, up, up! Those bandages look old, I’ll change them for you.”

His attempts to be uncooperative achieve middling success. Unwillingly, Ajaw finds himself sitting up as Mualani carefully prods him into verticality. Once he’s situated against the pillows, she asks where he keeps his first aid supplies; Ajaw ignores her — it’s a question for Kinich, not him, so why should he bother? — but his gaze lingering over the bathroom door gives the answer away. She rushes out and comes back with her arms chockablock full of bandages and creams. Foul-smelling creams, Ajaw discovers when she rubs it on the unbandaged wound, the bloodied strips of cloth a pile of rust on the floor.

Her hands are calloused, but her touch is gentle as she carefully wraps the wound with fresh bandages. “Is Ajaw around? Did that guy drug you or something?”

Caught out, he stutters, “W-What?”

Mualani smiles at him. It’s wobbly, strained by the panic dancing on her face, but her relief at having some kind of explanation for his behavior is obvious and she latches on to her own reasoning. “That’s got to be it! This is just one of his pranks gone too far, yeah!”

Kinich’s jaw won’t work. Is it just now realizing that an imposter sits at the helm, controlling its old master like a puppet on a string? It rejects him. “He’s…”

“He’d totally do something like this.”

Mualani is right. Ajaw would do something like this. He already has. But it’s not self-defense he’s going for.

“He’s not…”

She doesn’t wait for him to finish, mouth chattering through her nerves. “Just because you have a crush on Ajaw doesn’t mean you’re blind to his questionable personality, Kinich.”

The world stops spinning.

“Crush,” Ajaw repeats. The word burns his throat on the way up, like swallowing the sun in reverse.

Kinich has a crush… on Ajaw?

“I’m trying to avoid the L-word, since I know it gives you hives,” she says, and it’s like he’s being submerged in pure warmth. Slipping into the role of a teasing friend calms Mualani down quick, and she takes Ajaw’s silence as something other than his entire world reorienting itself. With a smile, she adds, “I know you’re pretty gone on him, but you need boundaries!”

Boundaries? Even as his mind is a stone thrown into a rock tumbler, he laughs. What a stupid fucking sentiment. There is no delineation between Ajaw and Kinich. Their destinies are one.

Oh, he used to grumble about it, sure. The Ajaw of Natlantea would have rather gouged out an eye than grown attached to a human. That Ajaw didn’t know two thousand years of silence, though, nor did he know the bliss of having a servant so good, so powerful, so his. More laughter spills out from Kinich’s mouth and it’s all wrong, those are Ajaw’s laughs. Ajaw has cultivated a very specific cadence and pitch to his laughs because if it’s consistent enough he can condition people into associating the sound with trouble and practicing his laugh a couple times is more than worth the hilarity of seeing fully-grown idiots almost piss their pants just from hearing it, but it also means it’s become a habit and it’s one he falls back on now, mind spinning over L-word.

Mean-spirited and cutting, it doesn’t sound like Kinich at all. It sets Mualani on edge. Tension seeps back into the tight pull of her shoulder blades as she refocuses on the bandages.

“It’s fine if you don’t want to tell me what happened,” Mualani says in a quiet voice, something hurt living there despite her the casual levity of her tone. Torso done, she starts to unravel the loose wraps around the hand to redo them. “I know we’ve got different ways of working. If you need to consider letting me treat your wounds as doing me a favor, I’ll gladly pay whatever price you ask afterwards. But we’re both warriors. You know taking care of yourself is important, Kinich. Just because the Night Warden Wars are over doesn’t mean—”

“What?” Ajaw interrupts with a wretched cry. It’s an awful noise, new to both Ajaw and Mualani, and they flinch back at it. The bandages meant for the hand Ajaw injured flutter to the ground.

Mualani casts them a glance, but a terrible thing must live in the space drawn tight between its eyebrows and the downturned corners of its mouth, because she refocuses on Kinich’s face with laser focus. “Hey, hey, what’s wrong?”

“The Night Warden Wars,” Ajaw rushes to ask, tongue a wooden thing he trips over, “are over?”

“Do you have a fever?” Mualani frowns, leaning forward with a raised hand. He puts as much distance between them as he can. The movement is done partly on automatic as Kinich’s body seeks to maintain its own habit of boundaries even while the one who drilled them in is absent and partly because Ajaw can’t get in a full breath and he can’t risk even less space to inhale. The warmth is gone, frozen over into a chill dread that chokes him.

“Answer the fucking question, Mualani.”

She draws in an inhale and releases it slowly like Ajaw isn’t vibrating out of his prison of flesh while waiting for her to respond. Then she says, “They’re over, Kinich. We defeated the Abyss. Do you remember how the Traveler and Mavuika went to fight the last battle? And before that, there was the invasion. So many people were lost. My Aunty Atea, and Chuychu, and…”

Ajaw doesn't give a rat’s ass about the grief in her voice. Those fuckers don’t matter to him. What does matter is that Kinich’s ears are defective little bits of trash in flesh form, they must be, Ajaw must’ve misheard her, because if there are no Night Warden Wars, there is no Ode of Resurrection.

If there’s no Ode of Resurrection, that means Kinich…

His mind refuses to finish the thought, skittering away from it like a many-legged bug from a raised torch. He can’t tell who’s balked: Kinich’s or his own. It could be Ajaw’s logic core, incapable of any equation that ends with Kinich not at his side, or the soft matter of Kinich’s own brain, unable to comprehend that the person who’s been with it for its whole life, growing it and fueling it and teaching it patterns, is gone despite its lungs still drawing in breaths and its heart still pumping away.

Ajaw only realizes he’s screamed when Mualani flinches away, and fuck, he’d forgotten she was there. He doesn’t know anything that’s not the pounding of blood through Kinich’s ears. He can’t see, he can’t hear, he can’t breathe but if he can’t breathe then Kinich’s body will die but it apparently doesn’t fucking matter because he already— Ajaw’s servant— his Kinich is already—

There’s no good end to that sentence. There’s no good end to that sentence just like there’s no good end to their contract except that’s not true, Ajaw wrote it with a fucking loophole for a purpose so—

The scream dies in his throat because Ajaw doesn’t have enough breath to support it, and ain’t that just a perfect fucking microcosm?

Mualani reaches for him in the sudden quiet, a nuisance to Ajaw and a comforting presence to Kinich’s body in a mind-body problem that feels like a thin blade pressed into the rabbit-quick heart trapped inside of him and doesn't help a damn with the way he is being torn apart at the seams. “Kinich, hey, is this because I brought up your crush? I’m sorry, I—”

“Shut up!” Contaminated by Ajaw’s panic, Kinich’s chest heaves like a sweating horse. It’s phlogiston through his veins, energy that chases away the lethargy that’s been holding him down as he struggles away from her, snarling and spitting.

“Woah, easy there—”

“Shut the fuck up, Mualani. You don’t know a damn thing about me—”

“—calm down—”

“—and you don’t know a single fucking thing about Kinich.”

Mualani goes still while Ajaw bares Kinich’s teeth. She’s smart. She doesn’t know the details of their contract but there’s only so many ways to interpret a sentence like that. Her lower lip wobbles and for the first time she hesitates to speak.

Time passes. Seconds, minutes; Ajaw doesn’t know the exact count, but it’s enough time for Mualani to realize that her best friend is dead.

“Ajaw?” she asks the wounded creature in front of her.

Hearing his name from Mualani’s mouth sends a physical jolt from the tip of his stupidly osseous spine down to his abused lungs and forces an inhale that gives him enough air to wheeze in a breath. He doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t need to anyway; the way he inhabits Kinich’s body is enough of an answer now that she’s looking for it.

Mualani’s face turns ashen. She looks drained, corpse-like, and it’s like being in front of the mirror all over again. There are tears gathering in her eyes but she holds strong against them, unyielding to her grief.

“Where is he?” she demands. All of the warmth is gone.

“I have his body.” It feels like he’s trying to talk through a wall of static. It almost makes it better, like Ajaw is hearing Kinich speak from afar rather than being the one to puppet his body.

“How?”

“You saw the wound. Did it look fatal to you?”

It’s a question Ajaw can’t evaluate for himself, but she takes it as a barb. Her eyes flash with indignance. “What did you do to him?”

He can’t answer so he won’t, but Mualani doesn’t need to know about the dreadful gap in his memory. Ajaw glares back mulishly and shrugs. The motion is jerky, too-sharp, and nearly nails her in the face. Mualani sucks in a breath through her teeth. Clearly pissed, only the fact that Kinich’s body would take the blow stops her from reaching out to slap him.

She changes course. “Is he in the Night Kingdom? Did you at least give him that?”

Ajaw wants to curse her. Of course he didn’t! That’s not in their contract. It doesn’t matter to him if Kinich’s spirit is wandering the earth, slowly fragmenting without the protective embrace of the Night Kingdom. He swallows. It doesn’t matter. Just because Kinich has spent the entirety of their time together as devoted as any lord could hope for in a servant, agreeable to Ajaw’s whims and so damn warm under his cold exterior; just because Kinich apparently loves him—

“Kinich was always going to die,” Ajaw says instead, and it’s a fact, that’s how a lifespan works and those marked by the Turnfire always meet their ends in particularly gruesome ways, but it hurts her. Ajaw is using the voice and face of her best friend to be callous. It is a cruelty Kinich would usually send him to time-out for but he isn’t here. What does it matter if Ajaw burns every bridge? At least the scorched earth offers warmth to the frigidity sinking claws into him.

Mualani battens down. “You killed him.”

“Ha! I did not,” Ajaw sneers. He’s pushing. Just a little more will get her to leave, he can tell. “That idiot got himself killed.”

“Don’t call him that!” she shouts. Her eyes, well-known throughout Natlan as warm beacons of unity, narrow with hate. “You’re a monster. How dare you call him that when he died for you.”

“He’s mine. I’ll call him what I wish.”

She gapes at him, face stretched with horror. “He’s his own person, Ajaw!”

How can he explain that he and Kinich are one in all the ways that matter to someone looking in? He can’t, so he doesn’t even bother to respond. Mualani clenches her hands into white-knuckled fists.

“You said I don’t know anything about him. And maybe to you I look like a fool but Kinich is—” she stops dead, mouth opening and closing around an unvoiced sob. Voice hoarse, she tries again, “Kinich was my best friend. I don’t care if he’s dead. His body is still here and you need to take care of it. You owe him that much.”

She stands to leave. Darting out like a viper, Ajaw grabs her wrist. The grip is weak, the shot of adrenaline that lended him energy now faded, but she doesn’t break it. Stolen muscle memory causes his tongue to flash out and wet his lips. “How long has Kinich—?”

He can’t finish the words. Ajaw isn’t looking at Mualani, but he can hear her curled lip as she spits, “You don’t deserve to know.”

“I know,” Ajaw says, vacant gaze set on the dark color of the carpet. “But Kinich does.”

She doesn’t want to answer. She hates him now, he’s sure. He’s not looking, but he hears Mualani’s next breath break on a sob. “Since the beginning.”

She pulls free. Ajaw doesn’t stop her, and then she’s gone.

Kinich loves him.

Ajaw feels very far away from the body he is inhabiting. The ears are plugged with cotton, its limbs bulky and impossible to move. He stares without seeing. He blinks, and there are shadows creeping in on the floor that weren’t there before. He blinks again to see the far wall bathed in dusky purples. He blinks, and sunlight shines perfectly through the window to illuminate the carpet and the Vision laying on its bloodstained pile, dull and gray and dead.

There were many questions Ajaw spat at stone walls during his long time cloistered away from the world. How could Ajaw be tricked by those infernal twins? Why was he trapped alone in the dark? Why was he bound to a wristband? Why must he survive the downfall of everything he’s ever known and live for two thousand years into an era dominated by humans?

The answer to every question is the same: for Kinich.

Watching Kinich descend into the ruins was like watching his destiny bloom before his very eyes. Kinich was made just for Ajaw, he’s certain. Ajaw demanded Kinich’s body because those were Ajaw’s legs, his arms and hands and fingers and toes walking towards him, and so their contract was writ so that Kinich’s body would be his reward. Ajaw didn’t want Kinich dead, didn’t care enough to, but the stars told him that Kinich would be his and so Ajaw demanded his body as recompense.

He didn’t know that it wasn’t so much Kinich’s body that was his but the soul housed inside. His partner, his servant, his other half, come to bring Ajaw home.

They are not Kinich and Ajaw but Kinich Ajaw, like their names were always meant to be read together in a way that “K’uhul” approximates with a similar first letter but wasn’t right, wasn’t perfect until two days of bickering passed, days spent hammering through clauses woven through with a carefully constructed loophole, until their contract was formalized and Kinich finally introduced himself and his name echoed through the chamber of Ajaw’s prison. That’s why, Ajaw had thought. That’s why K’uhul always sounded so close but so wrong.

It’s an axiom: where there is one there is another, Ajaw and Kinich; K’uhul Ajaw and Malipo; K’inich Ajaw, every day spent in company until their contract is fulfilled.

They were supposed to have more days together.

Ajaw… Ajaw has a plan. A loophole in their contract would allow him to get his own human body while Kinich still lives. He just needs a bit more time to perfect it and then Kinich could be his, properly, without the weight of a contract between them. He’s waiting, though, because he’s never been sure until now but apparently—

Kinich loves him.

Huh. Ajaw knows the guy is foolish but geez, he really must be a moron. He has no idea about Ajaw’s plan, no guarantee for the future, and yet he still chooses to love such a wicked creature. Kinich is so devoted, so warm, so perfect. He is Ajaw’s, like Ajaw is Kinich’s.

Kinich loves him. Kinich is dead.

Reality crashes down around his ears. There is no Ode, no loophole. Kinich is never coming home. Ajaw’s stolen stomach roils and he barely has enough time to lean forward before he’s sicking up bile that burns Kinich’s throat on its way out. His entrapped heart squeezes painfully tight in its cage of ribs which melt at the proximity to such burning pain. He rubs a hand over it but it doesn’t help. Nothing can, with Kinich gone.

Kinich loved him and now he’s dead.

It haunts Ajaw with its improbability. Kinich was strong. His survivability was an annoyingly reliable fact about him, as integral to his character as his cost-counting and terse way of speech. Ajaw doesn’t understand how he died. The cause of his injury, what happened before he died; he remembers nothing of it. Their contract stops Ajaw from directly harming Kinich, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t stand by and let it happen. Did Ajaw watch Kinich bleed out with a vicious grin on his face? Or did he hover anxiously as Kinich patched himself up, his movements growing sluggish as more blood escaped? He has no way of knowing.

Dull needles prickle Kinich’s aching torso. The body paint down his belly has dried and is beginning to flake off. Ajaw stares unblinking at the bare skin under it. How long has it been since Kinich died? Without Ajaw to animate it, his corpse would have succumbed to the slow rot of time by now, cold and stiff with eyes unseeing.

Ajaw feels like he is that corpse.

How does a Dragonlord grieve? Ajaw wasn’t there when Natlantea fell. He’d already been locked up tight in a wristband, tricked by those damn twins. Ajaw wasn’t there when the ground dried up its gift of phlogiston and became as dead as Xiuhcoatl, as dead as the Sovereigns and the world he knew. He didn’t see Saurians regress into shells of their former self. He wasn’t there to witness humans slowly take over, infesting the land with their so-called moral superiority as the land became an unrecognizable world shaped to their liking.

Is this what it would have felt like? It is not a nation dying but a person: his Kinich, his entire world. Humans say “other half” too lightly. Ajaw means it. Half of his fucking soul is gone — the good half, his better half. Its shell remains. It's a prison he’s trapped in, as unyielding as the stone of ruins and a phlogiston-formed wristband.

In his haze he can almost imagine Kinich standing in front of him, arms wrapped tight around Ajaw and their foreheads pressed together with just enough distance between them so he can see that deceptively warm gaze he always hides unless it’s the two of them. It’s Kinich, his spirit has come home, he’s back— and then Ajaw realizes it’s just Kinich’s arms wrapped around himself, nails digging painfully into his shoulders as his head presses to the blankets. Kinich isn’t here.

Still, Ajaw is haunted by him. He is there at the edges of Ajaw’s vision as he lies paralyzed, flickering between the bed, the door, the bathroom, in front of the mirror like the image of his daily routine has been stamped onto his eyelids. They’ve spent every second of every day together. Kinich is as familiar to Ajaw as the code of his own heart. Ajaw can easily imagine the sound of his breaths, his soft footfalls, and he does it now. Between waking breaths and the unconsciousness that chases him between bouts of nausea, Ajaw dreams of Kinich.

Some are nightmares, Kinich as formless and wispy as a ghost. He stares with dead eyes, mouth working silently over the sharp corners of a Vision gleaming gray, the softness of his lips cut open and bleeding. He never says anything past the accusation in his dead eyes.

Most are memories. A trip to the market. Kinich’s many successes in the Pilgrimage. A hunt, tracking a Qucusaur down Natlan’s west coast. Every Night Warden War, from the brutally efficient to the one that gave Kinich his Vision. Training with Kachina, the young girl’s eyes lit up at Kinich’s quiet words of praise. Mualani’s voice filling the air around a fire with jokes as they set up camp. Kinich feeding him fruit with a long-suffering sigh as laughter tickled the back of his throat. Annual trips to the grave of Kinich’s father, where he would sit silently as the sun dripped down the sky like a yolk about to burst until night fell and he left without saying a word. Cliff dives. Wind in his hair as they hurtled together towards the ground. Crisp mountain air. Talking to the Scions’ elders, impoliteness hidden behind the veil of Kinich’s impassivity. The time Kinich tried to arm wrestle Iansan and ended up head over ass, blinking with surprise. The enraged growl of a Yumkasaur as it defends its children. The soothing rhythm of twisting castor oil plants into rope. Muddy elbows as he tends to his garden.

Each one leaves Ajaw wishing he could think of nothing, remember nothing, but he still clings to every single moment desperately because he’ll never get more. Kinich’s ruthless manner when dealing with fools. The way he would lock onto his targets and persist through any conditions to see the job done. Kinich, unyielding to any challenge. Sharp knives slicing through meat as he prepared dinner for them. The brusque tone he took when trying to hide his amusement. How soft his hands could be despite their callouses. Quiet nights, Kinich tucking himself into the covers with a fond curl at the edge of his mouth while Ajaw chattered on and on about every inane thought that came into his head while he just listened with a gaze so warm it burned.

In each memory, Kinich loved him. And as he carefully recalls each one, pulling each honey-soaked memory to the forefront of his mind with all the tenderness and possessiveness he was too afraid to show Kinich while he still lived, Ajaw loves him.

Oh lords, how Ajaw loves him. How could he not? It’s Kinich.

He’s sobbing, Ajaw realizes, great broken, keening cries that tear out of his battered throat and leave his body weak with shakes. He tries to stop it but he can’t, only crying harder in a perversion of every moment of calm Kinich cultivated and Ajaw is now treating as preciously as a bull in a china shop, each tear a fuck you to Kinich’s principles because he never cried easily, always acting as if each tear was a weakness with a cost he couldn’t afford. Tears running down his cheeks now is just further proof that he’s not here. Kinich is gone, and his body is here but the lights aren’t on— or, more accurately, the lights are on but what they illuminate is something completely different; it’s Ajaw making himself at home in this stolen hallowed ground, a thief, a squatter, an ingrate taking everything precious and crushing it with his neglect.

What’s that human phrase? ‘Till death do us apart. Stupid, stupid, what a stupid platitude. It’s not enough. It can’t contain the enormity of what Kinich was to him. Death cannot stop that Ajaw is Kinich’s. Kinich is his past and his future, his destiny written in the stars.

Ajaw pushes himself up. Kinich’s body fights him and it feels like an indictment, but he struggles against the dead weight. He needs to see Kinich.

Tumbling forward off the bed is an even less graceful affair than last time, but still he moves. Ajaw crawls on his knees to the floor in front of the cracked mirror. There are enough pieces of it left in the frame to see his reflection by. Kinich stares back at him, except it’s not Kinich. Kinich’s face never looked like this, undereyes bruised and cheeks sallow. He’s thinner than usual, too, and his lips are chapped as if he’s been in the sun for days. His hair is a brittle mess. Kinich’s eyes were always warm when he looked at Ajaw, but now he just looks like he’s been crying.

The boundary between Ajaw and Kinich’s body shatters. Warmth, at least, Ajaw can do. All he needs to do is think of Kinich and his steadfast ridiculousness; his handsome face and the lean cut of his body as he stared down clients; the way he micromanaged every aspect of their budget but still bought whatever Ajaw asked for, and suddenly the mouth in the mirror smiles in an expression so familiar it burns to realize that it’s what Kinich looks like when he’s in love. It’s how Kinich looked every time he looked at Ajaw.

His head falls forwards, pressing to the coolness of the mirror’s exposed backing. What the fuck is he supposed to do now? Ajaw’s destiny is Kinich, he knows that as surely as he knows his name is K’uhul Ajaw. Their fate is to be together, but not like this. He wants to be at Kinich’s side, not in his skin. He wants to love Kinich — fully, with all the pride of a Dragonlord, to have and hold until he’s old and wrinkly and even then he will cherish him — not just his memory.

Grief is terrible in a human body, embodied in a way that feels like his organs are shutting down. He is useless against it. There is no switch to flip, no phlogiston to manipulate to turn his emotions off. Ajaw is as cavernously empty as the ruins that imprisoned him; hollow and cold without his heart.

His heart has been Kinich’s for so long. Surely Kinich knew that. Surely Kinich knew that Ajaw wanted to be his, to turn the weight of their contract into one of reciprocity. Surely Kinich knew that he was loved.

…Ajaw doubts it.

Self-loathing lances through Ajaw for all the times he kept quiet and played off moments that could have become more. Ajaw bought marriage beads for a fucking reason and he used Kinich’s own money to do it. What the fuck was the point of waiting? He’s a goddamn Sovereign Lord. He wanted Kinich and he should’ve had him instead of biting his tongue while waiting for a perfect moment that would never come. Ajaw is a coward. A nasty, cruel coward that should’ve died all those years ago in Natlantea if it meant Kinich would have lived longer.

It’s a useless thought, as useless as an old relic is. There’s nothing Ajaw can do to bring Kinich back. Kinich is gone and his body is Ajaw’s. It’s exactly what their contract laid out and Ajaw hates it almost as much as he hates himself.

In the reflection, he sees a plate by the ajar door, next to a glass of water. Mualani must’ve left them. Ajaw crawls towards them.

He is breathless by the time he makes it across the room and has to sit with his back to the doorframe for the support. He drinks down the water. It’s room temperature and the best thing he’s ever had. It soothes the soreness of his throat and leaves his head a little clearer. He pulls the plate onto his lap. She even left a fork, carefully tucked into a napkin, and Ajaw swallows back tears. The first bite is shaky, hands almost too weak to hold it properly, but it calms the stabbing pain in his stomach. He expects it to taste like ashes in his mouth, but it tastes good. Of course it does: this is one of Kinich’s favorites, dried chunks of meat drizzled with hot sauce, and so it’s one of Ajaw’s favorites now, too.

He chews, swallows, and sips water. Ajaw is careful not to choke. The dizziness subsides.

Ajaw stands with the help of a hand at the wall. He returns to bed but doesn’t lay down. He kneels down to pick up the abandoned bandage meant for his hand. He redresses the wound, winding it around his thumb and over his wrist, palm, knuckles. The end of the bandage gets tucked in to keep it from unraveling.

Mindful of the glass littering the floor, Ajaw finally turns to the bloodstained carpet. From this height, the Vision looks so small. He would ask how something so tiny could wield such power, but it’s what Kinich did. He picks it up. Kinich’s blood has dried tacky to its underside. It’s just cold metal in his hand, but he holds it to his heart even as its sharp points dig into him.

Kinich and Ajaw will never be parted. The stars have decreed it. Ajaw will see Kinich in every reflection. He will hug him every time he hugs himself. Every time he speaks, it will be in Kinich’s voice. This is the fate he has chosen.

If he dies, Kinich goes with him, so Ajaw needs to live. He leaves Kinich’s bedroom. He’s thirsty.