He stepped gingerly into the crater, which still emitted a slow and puffy stream of smoke at its center from the Needle's now-empty spot. Lucas walked closer slowly to the gap in the earth and squinted through the—darkness? emptiness?—to try and make out anything, anything at all that might be resting underground beneath the surface. A dark shape, an eye, a pointed claw or wing…
Something shifted, low in the dark, drifting smoke. Lucas's eyes widened as a small shape stirred near the ground, a figure that became steadily more visible through the smoke and began to unfurl. The small body shifted from a sleeper's fetal position to a slow, painful-looking rise, sitting on its knees in a tangle of limbs and muscles that looked very unwieldy and noncooperative and clearly aching from disuse.
And very much like a human.
This couldn't…this couldn't be correct. Heart hammering, Lucas took a few more steps forward to make sure his eyes weren't tricking him, to make sure he wasn't just seeing things in shadows in the smoke.
And there was a boy.
A boy. A boy smaller than Lucas or even Claus, seemingly even than the memory of him, pale but with soot-covered skin and dazed. The boy sat on knobby-kneed, trembling legs at the same puncture within the earth where the Needle had been before, where Lucas had yanked it out.
Lucas was frozen watching him, speechless and any grand speeches he'd been half-rehearsing gone in a mental puff of bewilderment. The boy coughed from the smoke pouring out beneath him and the action seemed to use up more strength than he had in the entirety of his skinny frame. Still, he managed a few long moments later to lift his head with a measure of seeming difficulty and stare up at Lucas with teary, wide-blown eyes. The boy sniffled and his pupils were so dilated that there was no way to tell the color of his eyes as he gazed at Lucas with some mixture of emotion that could have been unfamiliarity or fear or awe. A portrait, of something small and hopelessly lost.
"D-Did you," the boy finally stammered, when it became possibly obvious that Lucas was not going to say anything. He stopped to cough weakly for a moment, unsteadily bracing on his palms against the ground while Lucas just kind of gaped at him. "Did…you…p-pull the Needle out?"
Lucas felt he'd forgotten how to speak. His head was spinning and his mouth was very dry at the sight of exactly what the apocalypse had bequeathed upon him. This was not a fearsome dragon with the power to carry entire islands on its shoulders. "…A-Ah–…m…"
The boy sniffled again and made a sound that wasn't a full cough, too weak to do the thing properly. "Did'jou…pull the Needles out?" the boy repeated again, plaintive and a little afraid. And Lucas saw, bewildered, a hint of anxiety in him that seemed more to hinge on Lucas's actions in that moment that the boy was waiting for than the other way around.
"Y…Yah?" Lucas stammered, feeling very stupid.
The boy's face fell, or—or recomposed into an expression like understanding or resignation, maybe? He breathed raggedly and his head dropped, so his eyes now half-lidded were partially hidden beneath tangled locks of black hair that stuck out in all directions. He seemed to be braced for something unfamiliar and not much welcome.
"Understood…" he said quietly, his voice soft and a little uneven in Lucas's ears like it was hard for the boy to breathe. "…Master."
Lucas blanched, recoiling at the word as if struck with physical force. The boy didn't seem to notice, staying quiet with his words still hanging heavy in the air.
Then:
"Th-That's good. I was scared that you didn't…didn't have a heartbeat…some of the times…" The voice was weakly optimistic but full of cracks, the tone of someone trying to convince themselves. But in volume it was fading fast. The boy's eyes closed and he swayed where he sat on his knees in alarming exhaustion.
Lucas's mind blanked completely. Working on autopilot, he walked the rest of the way to the Needle-less hole in the ground and knelt down, arms automatically reaching out to catch the boy as he lost consciousness and went boneless in Lucas's hold. Heart racing, Lucas lifted him out with unsettling ease, and did the only thing he could. He walked back out of the crater again and headed toward the spot where his brother waited, inevitably on pins and needles to see what the blond twin had found.
Lucas wasn't sure what he'd tell him. The boy he was holding of indeterminate age was no dragon, that was for sure. He was no great and terrible creature of apocalyptic strength from the legends…
Lucas's mind was a jumble.
But if that was the case, Lucas wondered uneasily as his footfalls worked in time with the slight breaths of air against his collarbone, then…then where had the meteors come from?
Why were his loved ones alive again?