Summary: A visit to a friend's house gives Yugo the chance to face his ghost. He's not sure if he's any better for it afterward.
AN: Remember in the season 2 credits how Tristepin decided to just tug that one shushu mirror out of the ocean so he and Rubi could watch Goultard fighting Rushu like it was a sports game? We're running off the rule that the credits are all canon, so he and Eva's house here just happens to have a dimension-viewing mirror (canon Igor never got his rules explained, in that it's unsaid if the mirror can only see Shukrute or if it can be used to phone in on other dimensions) in its basement. It's fanfic, rules get to be played with fast and loose.
To pursue this, Yugo had a few options. He could go to speak with Baltazhar from the start. He could try to look around the Zinit for a workable prison alternative to the blank dimension. In the end, what he did first was go to the house of two of his best friends.
He'd gotten the idea from a relatively recent experience. A few months ago, Pinpin had invited him over to show off something they'd dug out of the watery bay housing Rubilaxia. While Eva sighed at Yugo getting excitedly dragged into the basement by her boyfriend so that he could get smushed onto a bench with the Iop and Rubilax to watch the continuous fight of Goultard and Rushu through the 'window' provided by a Shushu mirror, Yugo himself had found it a pretty fun afternoon with those guys. He hadn't forgotten about it to this day.
He felt much less excited going to that basement this time. Eva had listened to him explain his request and reasoning; she was good at listening. Yugo really appreciated that, more than he expected to. How long had he felt- without realizing it consciously until his talk with Joris- like he had to keep quiet about this problem of his at home?
(He didn't want to upset his dad, not when Alibert knew he'd been through enough for a child; he didn't want to annoy Adamaï, not when Adamaï had been through too much at Qilby and Anathar's hands)
Either way, Eva welcomed both him and his ventings. She was always welcoming to any of them. He'd heard Ad talk about it before, when they'd headed back from a visit. His brother had mentioned something about being glad her welcome made him feel like she'd actually note if he hadn't been there. Yugo thought of Eva's argument against Cleophe joining them at the port; how she and Amalia said the brotherhood were just those present and it had been Ruel that pointed out the brotherhood included the absent Adamaï (included, hah; it'd been named by Adamaï, wouldn't even be called a brotherhood without him). He decided not to mention it. Let Adamaï be happy at her welcoming their family. Yugo felt he owed that. When Ad was making these comments in enough of a mutter to avoid being heard by Alibert but that he knew Yugo would hear, he especially felt he owed it.
He wondered what comments Ad would be making now if he knew Yugo was here and why.
Eva led him down to the mirror in the basement after they'd caught up over lunch (Yugo had managed to get her to let him make gobball stew; no offense at all to her meals, but he rather liked the hobby his dad had passed to him and besides, she had to keep toddlers wrangled) (both tiny twins of the pair of retired adventurers were as wild as Chibi and Grougal and Yugo sympathized with the plight of keeping both from being terrors the moment a back was turned). It was a fun, light visit until they reached the basement itself. There, Eva grew serious, crouching to put her hands on his shoulder and telling him to always remember he could talk with any of them over whatever stress this would cause.
Of course he knew this already. Eva and he clashed on priorities, on what values to put first and what timing to use when on a quest, they had from near the start. But they'd be clear about both their standpoints, talk it over, compromise. And Pinpin said time enough he 'wasn't good with words', but he supported in other languages. Both of them could be told anything and he'd get support back in either discussion or shoulder-pillows and he loved them for it. They were like siblings to him- (he thought of what Ad would think of him being here, purposefully going to address the past that haunted, that hurt, his brother and Grougal and Phaeris, his conscience), so he knew if this upset him (as though it could do anything else), he could return upstairs and find a hug. It was nice to know that support waited, even if he grew quieter, more secretive, as he aged. He didn't know entirely why he did. He didn't know why he was acting more defensive, colder. But he suspected that seeing his people and then leaving them (ageless, stuck, while he grew happily with his family in a world he loved that refused to accept the rest of the Eliatropes into it) was a piece of that reason. He'd seen them alone. It'd been an experience he couldn't share with others because none had a close enough comparison to relate to. Just as his experience of being given that wakfu by Phaeris or of going into the blank dimension and being tormented there, or of putting an enemy into that place to seal him away to his nightmare...All of it was odd to try to explain. He had tried. Clearly, he'd tried. But he lived on, working on stews and breads with his father and twin and two new younger brothers- all while he knew, in a dissociated, lonely, way, that he'd been through those out-of-world experiences and was now meant to just ignore them? He couldn't. He could. He could and that was worse, to think he could leave his people in that stagnant world because he had a peaceful small-town life he wished he could preserve. It was...Well, it was a lot. And he felt guilty for all of it. And, in some of those cases, guilty for that guilt-
(He thought of Ad and wondered if he'd have the guilt that led Yugo to Eva's house now over giving the sentence to the traitor if it was Ad rather than he that had to hear Qilby beg for a different fate)
-surely, when he was the respected king of another life, he would have accepted the situation rather than be trapped with it.
Balthazar had understood it would never feel good, and he knew his previous self wouldn't have. But that previous self would have moved on to getting his people a home, confident, stronger than representatives spitting at his attempts to get land for a kingdom, rather than living in an inn forgetting his responsibility to all those children and his guilt over one adult Eliatrope's fate both.
He felt he was letting himself down.
He felt he was letting Adamaï down.
He felt frustration at this all and it fueled an isolation, a separation from his friends and family. Amalia was mad at him for it, he knew (it wasn't like she ever hid her opinion, he thought fondly). His dad was probably sad; alongside Ruel, alongside Eva...
They loved him. He had to remember they loved him even when he hid the way he was eaten up by the weight of the Eliatropes, of the deaths he'd seen so young through Nox's war, of the judgement he'd handed out in the moment to the traitor. They may not understand the exact emotions, but they'd understand he was hurting for it. What else could he ask for? He didn't need them to completely understand the weights he felt (he didn't wish that on any of them) to be able to talk and be comforted. He always had with Eva when she and he would argue over whether to make a stop to help a suffering stranger or focus on the greater mission.
Yugo smiled at Eva as she gripped his shoulders one last time and stood to leave him to his business. He wished he'd say something as well. A thanks for the offer to talk after he finished down here. A thanks for her always being there to give him advice and support even if they disagreed. He wished it was easy, like it used to be. Wished he didn't feel his words die before speaking, that he wouldn't withdraw, hide away to shoulder weight alone and isolated.
He wished he had a way to nip this now. But for the moment, he had other focuses.
(And maybe...Maybe if he could ever find a solution to his guilt over Qilby, he'd lose enough of that weight to stop the spiral into isolation before he stopped being honest with his friends at all)
(There was no saying what he would be if he reached that point, if he grew that shut away from the very people he needed most and that didn't want him pulling away)
Yugo made it less than a few seconds before wondering if he'd made everything worse by coming here. Still, he stood petrified and quiet looking on.
It was empty, it was silent, it was still. Entirely still. What else was there in a void? Thought? Speech? All would be consumed and never given anything in return. Any inhabitant, crazy and alone. No matter if they started that way before entering.
That still upset him in some indistinguishable way. This image in front of him was too far cry from the active antagonist he'd fought at the archipelago. Too similar to the stranger he and Ad had accidentally summoned with the Eliacube and dofus; a stranger that was wordless, overstimulated, backtracking away from him, Yugo. He'd felt sorry for that stranger. He couldn't sympathize with the murderer in the void now. But he could pity him. Even if Ad told him he didn't need to, even if the world flew on, Yugo could pity. And he pitied himself more in this all; he hated what he'd been forced to do, hated that he couldn't ignore it (move on, leave the murderer to rot forever with no one to remember he was trapped there, no one to consider letting him out), hated the idea of ignoring it. Would a king forget, move on? Had he, in that past life that all the survivors praised him for? In a weird way, he wished he could meet that former incarnation of himself. It was a stranger, but one with knowledge, experience, advice, outlooks, outlooks that could help him now. That passing desire couldn't really go anywhere. No one really had a source of reference to even understand it. Except Adamaï, perhaps, but Yugo felt bad talking about past lives to the brother now playing older sibling to the infant new Grougal when the former had been his father figure (Alibert, he knew, had taken to accepting Ad as his own family, but Yugo knew neither he or his dad could really grasp what Adamaï's situation with Grougal was). It seemed like picking at his brother's scabs to talk about such things. Maybe that assumption was completely off. But Yugo felt like he'd let his brother get hurt enough unintentionally. At current, he was hypersensitive to avoid doing more (and had been so ever since feeling Adamaï's wakfu leave that realm, since seeing what was done to him by Anathar, by Qilby, by Yugo himself because he'd left his brother behind to Qilby's danger while he ran about the world with his friends with hardly a second thought-)
And besides, what did Qilby himself show? Past lives were not meant to be remembered, not meant to be interacted with. Yugo would face this just as he was now. No use wondering if Yugo the King had mourned his own conscience after locking Qilby away. The present Yugo did and that was what he was trapped as.
Sympathy for himself, for the Eliatropes waiting for a world after Qilby destroyed their planet and families, for the brother that had been trapped within the mental chaos of Anathar's control.
Pity for the immortal that could not die, that could not be free with the danger he posed, that could have nothing but his nightmare.
A deserved nightmare, yes. Adamaï, Phaeris, many of the Eliatrope children would say so.
A necessary nightmare, undesirable or not to the one passing that judgement: the only option. Shinome evidently thought as much. Drew a line. Condemned her own twin to isolation and herself to unbirth forever.
Balthazar hated the traitor, hated the hurt to all the children he'd caused. But he didn't celebrate the fate Yugo sent him to.
We don't feel better for it, he'd said. Sympathized with Yugo. Even if Yugo didn't feel the weight, the unease, the guilt, just then at that moment. Balthazar had lived long. He knew Yugo would notice once the adrenaline and moment wore off. He knew Yugo was, in terms of actual years alive, younger than all the children he watched over in that dimension.
Yugo stared through that mirror at the still and knew what it was that place, that solitude, encompassed, knew what he'd felt from it when it had been him in there tossed around.
Hopelessness.
Something he'd caused, something he tried to remain strong in the knowledge he'd had to cause.
He felt sick of staring at the motionless inhabitant of the void and left the basement behind to return to the land of the living.
AN: With the way this fic got written, ie its stream of conscious state, I went against actually having any sort of interaction with Qilby here.
That and the fact that I really felt out of depth with the idea of even writing that interaction, so this chapter is the closest we'll get instead besides hinting at possible future ones.