Godsend
-Disclaimer: Not mine, no matter how I covet the scrap musket.
-Summary: Two short stories exploring positive ways for the story's resolution to play out. Spoilers, if you have somehow not played Bastion enough to finish it.
"There's one big problem with a thing that sets things back to a bygone time; you can't test it. So you're probably wondering, if the Calamity happened already, what's to stop it from happening again after the Bastion does its thing? The answer is... I don't know."
- Rucks, on Restoration.
In Caelondia, it was commonly thought that time was not a convoluted affair. The pantheon set a few events in motion, and the chains persisted from there, weaving the fabric of the future in a manner suggestive of dominoes. It made sense - Caelondians never discovered a way to resist the tide. Attempting to emulate Olak was useless in this regard. A few continued to ponder the matter.
The answers, buried along with everything that the great city needed to support it's construction, lay in Burstone Quarry. The cores, made of minerals that were otherwise ordinary, seemed to become imprinted with memories of the landscape around them. The Mancers would come to theorise that perhaps the energy produced by the cores was the result of a resonance between these memories and the real world, but nothing concrete came out of it - the theory couldn't be tested at this point, so, scientifically, it was useless.
The Ura said that the place was cursed, and a few of the miners sent down to expunge the rattletails were inclined to agree - a few of them that had been manning their stations the longest reported that they could hear voices when they stood near the cores, most vague and incomprehensible but a few offering hints that they originated from the completed city of Caelondia. They could only have come from the future. The stigma of being labelled psychotic prevented the miners from spreading the knowledge due to ridicule, or fear of ridicule, from the people.
Following the disaster of the Mancer's secret project, Rucks contemplated whether the memory of the shards and cores could withstand the change of the world - perhaps offer a cosmic reset button. This was his motivation to empower the Bastion - there was precious little to lose in carrying out the plan, and everything to gain.
The Kid threw the lever. He had chosen Restoration. Kid didn't have the best time - none of the people who came to be survivors did - but he had built the forbearance required to take it on again. Either way, he'd be taking a chance, and he figured he might as well take the homeward path. Sentimental attachment to one's origins was a common trait in the hay-days of Caelondia.
The Kid wakes up. It's past his birth, past his infancy, past his days in school (they didn't last long in any event). It is the day that he begins his second tour. This time, he thinks, he'll complete the five years and earn his Marshal's badge the way he always dreamed, but the Kid is then momentarily starstruck by how alien the idea is. He has never considered joining the Marshals before this very moment, never mind looking forward to service under them. The anomaly is quick to fade, leaving him scrambled, but he drops the sentiment and approaches the Mason leader with his request, about to make history.
He's accepted after a few bouts of jocular laughter, his expression set into an absolute mask of stoicism that communicates exactly how serious he is. There is no induction as a safety blanket, and that's alright by him. The motions of smashing ferocious beasts and surviving in the elements are perfectly familiar to him in both incarnations.
As the Kid carries out his duties, he is plagued each night by visions that his subconscious increasingly believes to be memories. His perception slows, and things seem to phase by him faster and faster. The impossible bears itself down on him - that he has succeeded in transcending the barrier of time - and he accepts it, accepts that he feels like he is puppeteering his own body. That sensation also fades until nothing is left but to find the other survivors. Perhaps they, too, are subject to the echoes of a future that will never happen.
Rucks does a good deal of the legwork toward defusing the onset of the Calamity, being the only one of the four to have the luxury of absolute security clearance. He contemplates the hysteria that might ensue if the commoners learned how close Caelondia came to embracing ash. The pretext for war between the Caelondians and Ura needs to end.
Venn is brilliant, moreso even that Rucks, so Rucks knows to trust his secrets to him without consequence. They conspire to prevent the project from getting off the ground - engineer staff shortages in the Mender's hospitals and clinics and the like - but these are temporary solutions. Rucks divulges more history. When Venn learns the extent of his actions, he despairs, and is devoured by his conscience. Venn steadies himself and orchestrates his own assassination, a deed carried out by a Graver. Following his orders, he waits until there are no witnesses present and strikes in the back with a War Machete pilfered from a Zulf invader back when such weapons almost sacked the city. Venn's last thought is that it is an appropriate demise. The Graver disposes of the corpse in Grady Incinerator at the dead of night, and adds himself to the forge's flames, both by way of keeping his honour and simplifying the cleanup. No evidence is left save for the fact that the fuel keeps those fires burning longer than the day's disposal record would suggest, as seen by the first workers to arrive there the following morning.
The coroner, blackmailed by the Gravers, draws attention to this in the report and exploits the nature of the assassination in order to officially conclude that, by whatever mechanism, the killer had also died, without revealing said killer's race in order to avoid a wave of xenophobic fervour. Venn was the project manager of the Calamity device, and with his passing, it was discontinued. Rucks kept the fact that he also knew how to complete the device to himself (for one thing, he only pieced it together after the fact), and discretely destroyed the documents accrued during the project.
Quite without intervention, the rumour spreads that the kill was an isolated incident by a Caelondian partisan who objected to giving such authority to an Ura. Rucks helps it spread. Spooked by the actions of one of their own, a fair number of Caelondians become Ura apologists, and relations improve.
Zulf is once again a man engaged, the proposal carried out in just as traditional a fashion as before. His past continues to haunt him, but with the help of his significant other, he gets over it, step by step. She is just as beautiful as he remembers.
Having his prior memories doesn't change much, but one thing it does do is remind of him of the others - of how the Kid grabbed his broken body and hauled him off to the safety of the Bastion through rains of arrows and darts, and how Zia tended to his injuries afterward, despite that Zulf had never done either of them any favours. Quite the opposite, in fact - Zia and the Kid were collateral for Zulf's rage toward Rucks and the other Caelondian Mancers. In this way, Zulf thinks, Zia, the Kid and the missionary that raised him are alike. Zulf did not learn forgiveness before, but now, he realises that a quest for peace demands that skill. The thought occurs to Zulf that the Kid and Zia should meet his fiancée, and he contacts them, making the arrangements. He also wonders how Rucks is doing, content now to admit that the two are similar just as they are different.
Zia mourns her father's passing, but she is gripped by the desire to avoid becoming mired in it - the Calamity took many precious people from their families, so Zia is almost entirely unremarkable in this respect.
Zia never felt like Caelondia was home before, and hadn't made much of an effort to seek employment, but this time, she had a plan. The Ura never had a clear-cut caste system, instead encouraging individuals to develop whatever skills they wanted, even if they didn't necessarily serve the Ura. Zia learned to sing, learned to cook, and learned to heal. She took the latter and decided to make a career out of it, becoming an apprentice to the Menders, who were always happy to have someone else help to pick up the slack.
Meeting Zulf's fiancée is just the pick-me-up she needs, but she ponders to herself that boys will be boys - Zulf and the Kid have entirely forgotten to formulate an excuse as to why people who had apparently never met were suddenly friends, judging by the facial expression that Maira* is wearing.
Zia devises this magic bullet. She tells Maira that she serves as a contact to Zulf, since she is one of the only Ura in the city. She adds that Zulf and the Kid met during one of the Rippling Walls' latest shifts and they hit it off straight away. Zia says that the Kid was busy convalescing during the engagement celebration - not exactly a lie, the Kid lost a lot of blood in day-to-day life. Maira believes it after some hesitation, and they continue. Winter is on approach, and the temperature makes it the perfect occasion for Zia to bust out her vineapple chowder, served with black rye to wash it down. The Kid is left catatonic by the flavour, far more vivid than Zia had served it back at the Bastion, where the ingredients were sparse and substandard. Maira takes note of the fact that Zia's expression lingers a little bit too long on the Kid for later reference.
The Kid finishes his second tour. The Marshals trusted him to scout farther than any other person on the Rippling Walls, and he sees that trust put into action when they formally issue him his badge. The musket is cool, too, although he doesn't think he will ever get used to the kick of the weapon, like an ornery mule. The Kid puts in a sufficiently good showing that he is entrusted to test experimental weapons.
Rucks retires from the Mancers in an official capacity and decides to take up writing books, although he never spends too long away from his old Mancer toys. Even in his ripe old age, he churns out masterpieces of both literature and technology, shifting the burden of his mistakes off of his shoulders as he does so.
Zulf and Maira carry out the wedding ceremony. By this point, everything is almost oppressively calm. With no negotiations, Zulf finds himself losing stimulation until he is entrusted to translate several important documents into the Ura tongue. The taboo - use of the Ura language by foreigners - lifts, and Zulf almost finds himself missing his old responsibilities when he becomes a teacher. Almost.
Zia eventually reaches amongst the highest ranks of the Menders, but she still finds time to learn a few more things about the Ura culture from Zulf. Zia and the Kid begin their courtship, and the former is made aware of their progress when the latter finally gives his name, a heirloom from his deceased mother.
At times, the four forget that things weren't always like this, because this - their second life - fits like a new skin.
* I decided to give Zulf's fiancée a name to reduce the awkwardness of the dialogue.