Author's Note: This is spoiler-heavy and there's some male/male in it. Not for people who haven't finished the game.
Things start to fade and blur when I thrust the sword down. I know there is color around me, but I cannot understand what the color is. I was confused by the combination of grief and relief from the past hour's events, but now I am blank. For a moment, I am nothing more than Lorelei's.
Everything shifts, and I remember where I am. I gasp as the ground moves beneath me, as I am pulled into the earth, Auldrant itself moving for me. It is not the first time.
The core remembers all who have passed through it, though few do. I remember them, too. I remember things about them the core does not. I fall and hear an echo from a familiar voice.
"Luke." I look toward him as he gently touches my wrist, adjusting my grip, putting his hand in the small of my back to correct my posture. "That's better. Now come at me again."
I do, the sword still too heavy for me. I am clumsy. He parries my blows easily, and I work up a sweat when he hardly even moves.
"You get clumsy, when we go on for too long," he says. "We can work up to longer sessions. You can be done now."
"But Master, I was just getting—" I whine, voice sounding mildly irritating even to my own ears.
"I will be back tomorrow, Luke. Your arms will be sore—Guy knows how to brew a tea that will ease that. Ask for his help."
I watch him leave, standing dumb in the courtyard, looking sadly down at the dull sword in my hand.
I see others. All the unknown souls who somehow survived sinking beneath the Qliphoth. The brief cries of the boy who we could not save in Auldrant, and for a moment I am there again, feeling not just helpless and alone but useless. Pointless. Replaceable.
I am in a bubble and the color is still maddeningly bright and I want to sit down and be brave and stand tall and hide behind Van, behind Guy, behind Tear or Father.
I look up and see falling swords and somehow I know that I am safe and do not need to dodge them. The body that falls with them is one whose existence I regret and cherish and my heart jumps and tightens. A part of my mind says that this is a very strange place yet my mind is so small in this mind.
He falls and I feel something real as I catch him. I stare down at my face, my grey bloodied face. My fingertips feel his hair and though it looks like it should be soft and he seems like it should be course it is neither, it is just like mine, which is of course the standard against which I compare it. I wait a moment for him to move and somewhere I do.
It is late, late, and we are talking, though I am not sure why or how. The context is irrelevant, as is the content of the conversation. His voice is not like mine, he projects it somehow and a part of me wants to hear him sing. That thought is banished quickly and he sits down next to me, saying there is something he has wanted to do.
The kiss is unexpected but delicious and he is warm and soft and the missing half of my symmetry. Then it is rough and his fingernails rake my skin and I cry out.
"Asch, not—don't—" and I feel guilty for being surprised when he does. Perhaps he should curl up next to me or hug me or something me. Only a part of me understands the mix of shame and desire that makes him lean toward me, heart a hand's breadth higher than usual, breathing deeply and then turn away, which he does.
"I'm sorry. This was a bad idea." He slips his boots on and leaves before I have a chance to speak to him.
I gasp, wondering how much of this is happening. I look down again and see him again. The voice and the color are taking a form.
"You have done admirably." Asch says, lowering his sword. I suck in great breaths of air. Why did I leave the room? Why did I seek him out?
"I don't want to kill you," I say, breathing in breaths of the hot sea air. The color is gone, replaced by something I can recognize. The ocean. Are we in Baticul? The pier forms around me as I think of it and I can imagine the retreating form of Largo. Dead, now, along with his master, I think. But perhaps not now?
"I know. You are weak." He pauses. "I should kill you. I can't. You made me weak."
"I think you were always weak." I say, looking into his eyes. I lay down my sword and he follows suit.
We are somewhere else. Maybe Belkend. It is the first and last and every time we are together. I am under him but in him, and his hands are on my chest and I am breathing out of tune with him. It is rushed and fearful and shamed and beautiful and we are strange not-lovers not-brothers not-selves.
He brushes the not-course not-soft hair from his face and it is sticking to his bare skin. I say nothing as he leaves and do not want to look down because I know if there is blood on the sheets it is the same as the color of the soul of Auldrant.
The body is gone and I am alone and not alone, hearing things that I can not see, remembering things that did not happen. I feel a sudden pang of thanks at the fact that I never had to regain my supposed lost childhood memories.
I am not myself as I pull the sword out of the man's chest. I am not quite strong enough to do so on my own and I kick him off of the end, freeing the tip. A part of me knows I should wipe it down, but I do not. I thrust it back into the scabbard at my waist. I know I should not be strong enough to do this; I remember the sword being heavy and strange in my hands.
"Very good, L—Asch." Says the voice from behind me. My eyes are downcast and I know this will not be the last of my anonymous victims.
The next is a woman, again unnamed. A priestess. I always try to avoid getting the blood on myself but a single bad swing splatters it across my face. A drop gets into my mouth and I taste it, the strange metallic taste reminding me of getting paper cuts and sucking on my fingers to make it better.
I spit on the ground, feeling sick to my stomach, and kneel down, knees suddenly shaking. I do my best to use my tabard to wipe the rest of the blood off my hands, but the heavy cloth only smears it. I vomit all that is in my stomach and when I am finished, the man behind me helps me up, wipes my face off.
"My most apt pupil," he says. "The sickness is normal, especially for one so young as yourself. You have done admirably so far to not have felt it before."
I am still shaking, missing the echo of Lorelei's voice, the reassurance of the movement of Auldrant. Perhaps I will die here. Perhaps I already have.
I stride forward, taking the longest steps I can, avoiding looking down or up or anywhere. I am both atop a great cliff and below the clouds that cover the Qliphoth.
It is suddenly cold, a cold that feels like the color that teases the edges of my vision. Perhaps now it is time, I think to myself, and then it is. He is behind me, his arms around me, his hair a comforting fire coming over my shoulder as his arms wrap around me.
I half expect him to be naked, but he is clad in the same uniform I have always seen him in, but the smile that graces his features is one I have only seen in mirrors.
We walk together, not talking, our edges fading in and out of each other as a blurred photo. We shed our clothes as we walk and are at the edge of a stream. It is familiar, Tataroo Valley and the end of the Yulia Road and it is neither night nor day, with the sky the unsettling color I still cannot imagine, cannot name, cannot look at. I sit down on the soft grass and suddenly realize how little I was feeling when the grass tickles me. I dip my feet in the stream, knowing the coolness will somehow relieve the strangeness of the color and that my feet will not stay wet.
Asch does sing and it is as I expect, though I do not know what I expect. I kiss him this time, and our bodies are neither hot nor cold. We move together and this time it is slow and he has shed his shame with his uniform. My innocence is left behind with my coat and I am not afraid though I understand what this means. We take turns being in each other and are spent and tired and sleep eases the pain of the color and this time he holds me close against him as the world fades into what cannot be a dream.
When I wake he is gone but not and I feel his hands on me and my hands on me and I suddenly know the taste of a priestess' blood. I gasp and lean over, heaving, and the vomit is carried away with the water and his cool hands sooth me and he brings me tea to heal my throat. I feel guilty for not having anything with which to heal the cuts on his face and wonder if gels can heal the pallor of a grey face and then realize there is no grey face, because he is not there.
I shudder, alone and not alone, confusing him with myself, tangling brothers-lovers-selves. We are too much for one and not enough for two, and in trying to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts we fracture the whole. I am shaking and alone and the color leaks in through my skin.
I breathe as deeply as I can, remembering what was yesterday and a thousand years before when we were separate and lovers and the color was shut out by each other's warmth, softness. I remember the feeling of my bed after he leaves, how quickly it became cold.
The strange but comforting sympathy I found when I went to walk away from the coldness of the bed and spoke to Jade. The warmth of his arm around my shoulders, however brief, however unlikely. However dissimilar from Van, from Father.
Perhaps if I leave I can shake off some of these fractures. Perhaps I can leave them in the world above me, in the world away from the color, away from Lorelei. Away from my own ghost. There is too much of the world to fit in it, too, and maybe Auldrant will sympathize with me. Perhaps I will understand it if I look at the parts that would not fit in their spaces.
The taste of a priestess' blood is Hod, and I am dressed, feeling the wind around me, the blessed darkness, the lack of the color, and I can see Hod in the distance, speckled with the color I found on my fingertips as I ran my hand over the deep scratches my brother-lover-self left on my back, of what ran from our bodies as we blurred between each other in the core. The whole is more fractured than the sum of its parts, but perhaps together-not-together we will be able to combine them into something coherent.