Chapter Text
Saparata sits atop a tower, crushed by the weight of sins he did not commit.
No one believes him. No one has reason to. No one, except he who had condemned him to this fate, his cruel heart hidden behind a facade. Saparata had thought, once, that he was the only one who truly knew Flux, that he was the only one who got to see him as he was. Now he knows he’s just the only one who had been fed such a lie, and had been dumb enough to believe it.
Flux had reserved all his false kindness and careful vulnerabilities for Saparata, had woven the manipulation so thick that Saparata had never questioned its truth. Saparata had been so– so trusting, so naive, so laughably stupid. He doesn’t know if he blames Flux more for being so terribly evil or himself for being dense enough to miss it. Maybe it’s in Flux’s nature, as it is in the wolf’s to hunt the fawn, maybe Saparata had never truly stood a chance against his claws and teeth. Maybe there was never another way this could’ve worked out.
Tears freeze on his face. He hasn’t cried in two weeks until now, back when he’d fled an angry mob and forced himself deep into a dark corner of the swamp to sob the shock out of his trembling body. He’d been desperate for Flux, had immediately devised a plan to search for him, so blind with his foolish priority that he hadn’t connected the dots until he was pushing the boat off from the swamp’s roots.
He remembers how the thought had hit him, how his muscles had stilled and the boat had drifted slowly forward, momentum fading as Saparata froze in place.
He remembers how he had denied the idea vehemently, appalled at himself for such an accusation. He remembers how close he had been to approaching Luminara anyway and sneaking toward Fluixon to seek safety at his side. He remembers how he had planned to convince him, how he had thought to prove his point, and he remembers trusting that Flux would know already how Saparata could never commit such a crime. He remembers accepting that it would be the two of them against the world, but being so filled with confidence that, together, they could turn anything wrong right.
He remembers the hopeless feeling swallowing him up as he collapsed against the floor of his boat, so empty of tears and devoid of life as reality hit him.
Flux had been the one to plant death in Saparata’s house. He was the only one who had the chance to. He’d had the opportunity presented on a silver platter and he had actually taken it, had actually thrown Saparata to the wolves, had actually had the audacity to bring warmth and comfort to Saparata’s life after signing the confirmation of his fate.
Two-faced scum. The loveliest thing in Saparata’s life and the greedy poison in his air. Saparata doesn’t think he can live without him, as pathetic as that may be, and swings his legs over the ledge with a sob that shakes his entire frame. If something so certain as Flux had been uprooted from his life, how can he ever stand on solid ground again? How can he trust it won’t shake apart beneath his feet?
Saparata curls in on himself, leaning forward as the ground stretches away far below, and chokes on a wail that scrapes against his cold throat as it tears from him.
And then, like a switch had been flipped, Saparata stops. Water runs from his eyes and freezes before it can leave his face, crusting on his cheeks. He stares at the ground, so still in place where he sits, truly living up to his role as the helpless fawn who lays itself on the ground in the face of danger. Who gives up even before being confronted. Who might run when teeth nip at its hooves, but doesn’t know how to live in a world alone without the promise of safety.
He can throw himself from the tower now, and Flux will have won. There will be no next chapter to his story. Flux will have schemed, executed, and gotten away with it all perfectly. Saparata thinks, somewhere vague, that the bad guys aren’t supposed to win, and how had the world let that happen?
Saparata refuses. He refuses to let Flux ruin his life like this. Maybe he’s turned everyone against Saps, maybe everyone Saparata had met now wants to watch the sand run over with his blood, and maybe he will never know peace again, but he has to try. Saps doesn’t deserve this. He knows he doesn’t, and isn’t that all that matters when no one else cares for your life anyway? Saparata will fight for himself, to prove that he can, because he doesn’t want to be the deer that rolls over to be gutted.
He can tell his story, bit by bit, small beliefs that roll into a wave and turn the tide in Saparata’s favor. He can plan and execute just as well as Flux, and prove his innocence, and watch the islands regain their trust in him. He can rally a righteous army and strike Flux down.
Who is he kidding. No he can’t.
And does he even want to try? Does he want to return to the people who had chased him out and screamed for his blood? Does he want to throw away his own life, just like that?
Saparata deserves better. He lets himself believe it, finally, trying to tear himself away from the blame aimed at himself for being just the right type of pathetic to make Flux turn against him. Saparata deserves none of this. He shouldn’t be stuck trying to prove his innocence to islands of players that had so quickly called for his death.
His gaze drifts to the horizon, away from the ground where snow will pile and curious hands will give up trying to dig through. He looks away from the tower platform behind him, where a few meager items will act as evidence, and a final note already sits folded in a chest. He doesn’t care to remove it. Let them think he is dead, and let them argue whether or not to believe his claims. He doesn’t care anymore.
There are two islands in this vast ocean. There are bound to be more.
---
When Saparata is pulled from the sea and warmed in a village by a fire, he doesn’t yet believe in kindness. He turns wary eyes against his rescuers, refuses their supplies, and starts to walk again before his body should handle the stress of it. He digs up floors and won’t stand under ceilings and, every time they finally manage to wrangle him into bed, he turns away from the fire and lets his food grow cold. He changes his own bandages with the stock left in his inventory, and lets them sit far too long once his supply runs out.
Three days after he arrives in this strange land, Saparata is almost struck down by the fever of infection.
He’s delirious the entire week after, stuck in a haze of muddled pain and sweetness and snakes that show their fangs only after he’s drawn close enough to touch them. After, he doesn’t remember anything that he’d babbled during the sickness, but the town treats him with even more care than before. It’s a miracle he had survived, and he feels frail for weeks afterward.
It takes a village to raise a child, or something like that. It takes a village for Saparata to heal.
He’s welcomed by a gentle farmer with a lavender cap who shows Saparata patience, and teaches him that there are people who will stick by him even when his broken edges bristle thorny against her. He begins to laugh again with a young freckled boy, a fletcher’s son who climbs trees and drops from them to make Saps shriek with surprise, so full of unapologetic joy and life. He meets an old warrior, gruff and scarred and quiet, who handles swords as naturally as he breathes but tells Saparata he’ll never make it as a loner, and will grow miserable from trying.
He starts to offer his efforts again, starts to give something of himself to others, begins to lead herds to pasture every day and tend to their needs until it’s become habit and he’s been dubbed the unofficial shepherd of the town. They had been called sheep before but now are known as “Saparata’s flock”; his name is known and is responded to with smiles, and finding something useful to do heals Saparata in a way that makes him feel real again.
---
It’s not long before the Mafia storms through the server. It’s horrible, for the brief moment it claims power, and then it’s gone again. The town reconvenes and falls together and lives just like it had before, its roots too strong to be burnt away by something so shallow.
The Law is next, and maybe Saparata should be more concerned, but it doesn’t affect him much. It does scare him, once, when news of a massacre and dangerous players reaches his ears, so he votes for Lettuce and asks the warrior to help hone his skills. He moves on with life, feeling stupidly secure.
Parrot is next, made king following the Law. The sole mastermind of mankind’s downfall. Evil given form, and Saps had thought he’d already seen the most despicable man there could be.
New players pour in, and after the town’s initial excited murmuring, starvation strikes. Hunger dulls their eyes. A never-ending swarm of players scavenge what they can from anyone they can find, and it becomes a fight to survive in their own home.
Saparata’s flock becomes a memory. They were eaten first, before the hunger could gnaw through all the meat on their bones. He sees the despair in everyone’s eyes, feels it in his own, and doesn’t blame them as they ask for the hundredth time if he doesn’t have any other sheep that escaped the pen somewhere. They can’t even fish, every living thing in the water driven away or devoured by the horde.
The lavender-capped farmer turns people from her door in a steady stream, barrels and chests yawning empty, her very walls scraped bare as she searches fruitlessly for one more morsel of food. Saparata’s able to count her bones before anyone else’s.
He hears her crying one late night when he comes to her door, when the hunger has become too much even for him, and pauses to listen to the raspy, shaking sobs. It’s the desperation of a wounded animal, the grief of a human soul at its first loss. He turns from the door.
She’s the first to waste away. Her death comes the very same morning.
It shakes something loose in Saparata, and jostles it into place. It’s the realization that none of this is getting better. None of these weakened people will recover, not truly, not even if a miracle happens. And Saparata knows it won’t. For everything they’ve bounced back from, this is different, deep, irreversible.
Saparata stops pulling away when he sees the ache of hunger, stops retreating into himself as the pain tears at his own stomach too. The freckled boy sits under a tree instead of swinging through its branches, and Saparata longs to avert his eyes from the scene so he doesn’t have to look. He ignores his instinct to let them all fade away alone with some shred of silent dignity, and gathers the boy in a hug. They cling to each other, all sharp bones and knobby joints, and their breaths shake just from the effort of moving an inch. The tree has long been stripped of its bark, chewed up into a terrible dry paste that only fools their stomachs into feeling full as nutrients leech out of their bodies.
Saparata doesn’t have the strength to stand again. He loses consciousness at some point, a fitful, empty sleep that only serves to pass the hours and leaves him just as exhausted when he wakes.
He opens his burning eyes to a stiff form still pressed against his own. He would return the boy’s body to his father, but he had died the day before.
Saparata goes to tell the warrior, and finds him silent in a shallow grave he’d dug himself weeks ago before the hunger had claimed his strength, when the town had been telling him that this, too, would pass. There’s a sword stuck in the crumpled body. Saparata can’t fault him for dying a dignified death. He can fault himself for not visiting– he truly has no idea how long the body has been lying here cold.
Saparata drags himself through the streets. They’re silent, so silent it makes his ears ring, and he cries out just to hear anything break it. His voice grates. A bird flies, startled, from a nearby tree. Not one voice responds. Not one.
This can’t be reality, not when Saparata had finally found something good. He had finally begun to live again. He had found the one honest thing in this world. Denial hits, and he won’t even have time to make it through the rest of grief before he’ll be dead, too.
He hardly has the strength to move anymore but arranges his limbs in a neat pile, stacked like wood upon each other, ankles crossed and hands folded as he lays back on a patch of soft dirt to make it easy on anyone who might find him and think to grace him with a burial. He hopes he’ll meet the farmer and the boy and the warrior in death, too.
---
A chicken.
One.
Singular.
Chicken.
Saparata slowly nurses himself back to health, stealing every egg she lays, straining for them with trembling fingers as she wanders around nearby. He watches with envy as she gorges herself on grass and bugs that had never been enough for his own stomach. Maybe it’s foolish, but once he’s regained some amount of muscle, he strangles the hen to death with shaking hands for daring to come to their town too late.
He stops believing in kindness again. It’s for the better. It’s how the real world works. The real world, which he throws himself back into with one clear, rage-fueled goal. He moves from his town where he had been a shepherd to a city where he flourishes as a butcher.
This is different than the last time he’d regained the will to live. He had, before, been driven by the need to build himself a new life. Now he’s aching to tear someone else’s down.
He uses riches he had scavenged from his village, thinking of it as furthering their impact in the world. They would want him to use it, and he’s honoring them by achieving something real instead of wasting away too. He uses the warrior’s last treasures to purchase a sword, and can pretend for a moment that it was a gift from the man himself.
He builds himself an army. He thinks of it as righteous, even as people curse his name. He can just drive a sword through their necks when they grow too loud.
The number of deaths at his hands grows, and he cherishes it like a prize. He adds the population of each civilization to the tally, the sensations of victory and adrenaline burning through his body after each battle, vicious grin stretching across his face as he breathes in the ash in the air. He will go to any length to achieve his goal. He will stop at nothing to tear the players apart that had ruined his innocent town.
He tears at his hair and pounds his fists against the walls of his room until his fingers break, anything to stop the guilt and the loathing that roars up in his lungs, anything to stop the bugs crawling in his skin and the hate hate hate infecting his bones. Shoebilly knocks on his door once and steps back as it creaks open, lip curling in disgust as Saparata laughs like a madman and calls the world the worst thing to ever happen to anyone.
Saparata does not kill Parrot. Parrot runs off with his tail between his legs and Saparata lights up with the thrilling idea of ‘We can host a hunt to tear him apart.’
Saparata has won. Saparata kills twenty thousand players in just the first day of his reign. It isn’t enough. He needs to do more, to destroy them all– it’s a hunger. He starves. His stomach claws at his sides. He needs to kill them all so the universe knows it can never even think of crossing him again.
It’s like any other day when Saparata joins his troops, hunts down a population of new players, and finds them hiding away in the empty shell of his town.
Saparata’s. Town.
He sees red, and when he wakes from the haze, he can’t tell if he’d torn apart more of his own men or the enemy.
Does it really matter?
Saparata stumbles into the water, watches blood seep from his armor like a cloud, whisked away in the ocean current. He stares blankly into the distance. He isn’t foolish enough to hope for a new life again, not when this one had already gone so poorly.
He doesn’t look at the town behind him. The voices of ghosts are already loud enough in his ears without the sight of it, the laugh of a boy and the gentle teachings of a farmer, and he feels dirt under his nails like he’s pressing a seed softly into the Earth. His side aches where the sword hangs on his hip, and he wonders for the first time if he’s desecrating a memory by thinking of it as the warrior’s gift.
Dark water laps at the armor encasing his frame, netherite hanging all wrong like he’s starving again. The sun is sinking away, turning deep orange and red, and Saparata’s eyes sting as he stares into its center.
He truly doesn’t know if he chooses to crumple into the ocean or if something deeper, more exhausted, cuts the strings holding him up. The water takes him like it’s his last friend in this rotten world.