Your Future Hasn't Been Written Yet
by K. Stonham
first released 21st September 2021
"Hey." Jim knocked on Douxie's door frame. "Got a minute?"
Douxie looked up from his definitely-borrowed-from Blinky book. "I might even have two," he replied. "What's on your mind?"
"Probably nothing. Stupid question. You don't have to answer if you don't want to."
"Jim."
"Um, so you told Claire's dad you were 'functionally ace'?" Jim scratched the back of his head. "I was just kind of wondering how that was different from actually ace? Which I didn't know you were. Which is cool any way you are!" he rushed to add. "I just-"
"Jim. Sit," Douxie said, closing his book and shifting over.
Jim sat at the end of the bed, Archie between them.
"Right, so, this is an old argument between Arch and me," Douxie explained. "He claims that since he's a dragon he has senses we don't-"
"I do," Archie butted in. "I can see your Blaschko lines, and you can't. Argument done."
"Yes, Archie," Douxie replied in a put-upon tone. "Anyhow, he claims he can smell that I'm still going through the last lingering bits of puberty at a glacial pace, due to wizardry-inflicted immortality, and that at some point the hormonal shift will progress enough that I'll be interested in romance and sex and all that stuff."
"You're really not?" Jim couldn't help asking. "I mean, most of the time we spent getting to know you, you were on the run with Nari, and then when we were all in the castle there really weren't a lot of potential partners..."
"Yes, it was pretty much just me and Krel left unpartnered, I know."
"I beg your pardon!"
"Different partnership, Archie." Douxie's hand found its way into black fur. "Anyway, no I'm not interested, and as the party affected, my argument with Arch is that it really doesn't matter, since if the aforementioned hormones haven't finished making up their minds in nine hundred years, I'll probably be dead by the time they do."
Archie stiffened.
"Which I am in no hurry to be," Douxie said pointedly.
"Not right now, anyway," Archie muttered.
"Archie!" Douxie hissed.
Jim didn't speak for a moment as Archie's comment slotted itself together with a couple other, vaguer, insinuations the dragon had made in the past, and he suddenly couldn't help but remember a locked door.
A tub filled with steaming black liquid.
The door handle rattling.
Frantic voices begging him to unlock it.
To let them in.
All thinking something far worse than what actually happened.
Swallowing, Jim reached a conclusion that dropped ice into his stomach.
"Douxie," he said finally, looking at the wizard who was no longer meeting his eyes, "when did you try to kill yourself?"
He could choose not to answer, Hisirdoux knew. He could ask Jim to drop it, or say that he didn't want to talk about it, and Jim would honor that request.
But he'd sworn to himself that he'd tell the truth. Jim, of all people, deserved it.
Douxie closed his eyes so he didn't have to look at anyone. "I have never actively tried to kill myself," he said quietly. "There just have been times when I didn't much care if it happened."
"Why?" Jim's question was soft.
"Are we really doing this tonight, Jim?" he asked, trying to push off the inevitable. "Couldn't we just revel in your theatrical triumph for the remainder of the evening?"
"Hmm, theatrical triumph, or helping my friend?" Jim barely pretended to consider his question. "Come on, Doux," he said. "You said no shame, remember?"
Hisirdoux breathed. On one hand, it felt unfair, Jim throwing his words back at him. On the other hand, he had said them, and meant them.
No way out but through, he thought.
"All right," Douxie said lowly.
"So," Jim asked again, "why did you want to die?"
"Because when you've seen a lot of your friends burned, murdered, or hanged, and you don't dare speak up in their defense or try a rescue or it'll be your turn too... sometimes it seems like you'd be better off out of a world that contains such wickedness and hate." Hisirdoux smiled grimly. "Believe me, sometimes I can understand the Arcane Order's point about humans. But they're trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater."
"But..."
"A good number of the people I lost weren't even accused of sorcery," Douxie said, opening his eyes, looking at Jim's blue ones. Hoping Jim would understand. "They were just people who worshiped the wrong god for the times. Or the right god, but in the wrong way. Or women who were a little too independent, laughed a little too loud, and turned down the wrong suitor. Men who had a bit of property that their neighbor, or the magistrate, wanted. Or a wife or daughter that they coveted but were refused. When you study history," he said dryly, "always look to who gets the spoils."
"But you have magic," Jim protested. "Couldn't you just, you know?"
"Save my people?" Douxie shrugged. "Sometimes I was able to, but not always. I can knock out one man, or two. But a whole town? When we needed to get supplies and run so far away no one would recognize us, that no word would be spread? Let alone when it was a whole city quarter being slaughtered?" His smile now was mirthless, he knew. "Modern history books like to tout World War Two as an anomaly in the history of persecution. It wasn't."
Jim swallowed. And Hisirdoux hated that he was shoving the cold, hard facts of human nature at someone who was fundamentally good, but trying to soften history would be doing a disservice both to it, and to Jim. "You saw Arthur's dungeons," he said softly. "Got a few nightmares out of them, right? And that was a king being merciful that day. Remember what Deya told you about her village. That happened all the time in history, Jim."
"You knew no one would speak up for you if it was your turn," concluded Jim.
"Yeah. Always the outsider, the newcomer, always on the move. People liked me, generally... but none of them were going to risk their necks for mine, if it came down to it." Douxie scratched his fingers through Archie's fur. The dragon was too tense to purr. "And I couldn't risk leaving Archie alone if I got killed. He'd never have forgiven me."
Archie sniffed, but didn't speak a word to gainsay him.
Jim's eyes were fast on him. "What aren't you telling me?" he finally asked.
Clever, Douxie thought. "How much do you remember about being under Arthur's control?" he asked.
"Not much," Jim said. "Fortunately, I guess."
Douxie nodded. "Yeah, probably. Toward the end, the Order had everyone captured on their own flying castle. Everyone except me and Arch, who had gone off to find the Genesis Seals, and Krel. I honestly think they forgot about him when they left him frozen solid at HexTech. I got the grand idea to trap the Order in a time loop while we went off and rescued everyone. Used the Genesis Seals as bait. Merlin would've been furious - he'd said to protect them at all costs. But all of you, and Nari, were more important. I figured if I could get you free and give you a head start, you'd be able to come up with something."
Jim frowned. "You didn't expect to make it out."
Douxie leaned back against the wall. "I planned on it."
He wasn't expecting Jim to hit him. "What?! Ow," he complained, clutching his arm.
"We had to find your body," Jim said savagely, glaring. "Do you even know what you looked like, dead and with every bone in your body broken? Your brains were splattered on the ground, Douxie!"
Douxie stared at him. "You never said. None of you ever said!"
"It's not really something any of us wanted to revisit!" Jim snapped. "You did that to us on purpose?!"
"I'd rather thought that after the Arcane Order had their way, there wouldn't be anything left of me!" Douxie snapped back. "Or that I'd vaporize into soot, like Master Merlin. I wasn't expecting I'd leave behind a corpse!" He swallowed, reined himself in. "It was the only plan I had," he said, trying to keep himself under control. "Should I have just left you all in the Order's hands?"
"No, you should have run with us, you dumbass!"
Douxie looked at his friend, trying to find the words to make Jim understand something that was obvious. "Jim, my life is worth exactly what I can trade it for. And mine for all of yours? Was a bargain. I was not going to lose more friends again. Not this time. Not if I could save you."
Jim stared. "Douxie," he said, "you let the Order take you, on the train. You can't just keep sacrificing yourself for everyone else. Why do you keep thinking and acting like that?"
Douxie laughed, low and bitter. Archie pushed against his hand, making his fingertips disappear into soft black fur. He concentrated on the feeling of fur and warmth beneath his fingers, of pain radiating in his arm from where Jim had hit him. They grounded him, in two very different ways. "Do you want to know why I've never gone back to the village where I was born?"
"Why?" asked Jim slowly.
"Because if I did, the odds are good I would raze it to the ground."
"What?"
Douxie looked at Jim. "When'd your dad leave? How old were you?"
"Five," Jim said. His eyes widened, perhaps just realizing he'd been the same age Douxie had when both their worlds had fallen apart.
"And if you saw him tomorrow?" Douxie asked. "What would you do? Say 'Hi, Dad, long time no see'?"
Jim bit his lip, took his time answering. Douxie waited. "I'd punch him," Jim said lowly. "I'd probably try to break his nose. Wreck his perfect looks so that his ski bunny girlfriends wouldn't want him anymore."
Douxie nodded. "Even as hard as you try to bury it, to overcome it, part of you still wants to make him hurt the way he made you hurt. The way he made your mother hurt."
"Yeah," Jim admitted.
"Me too," Douxie said quietly. "There's a reason why wizards aren't given staves until our masters deem us emotionally mature enough. Why it took me nine hundred years to earn mine. Morgana," he provided for comparison, "got hers in seven."
"Yes, and look how she turned out," Archie put in dryly.
Douxie ignored him. "Even though it's been centuries," he said, "even through every single person who knew me is dead and dust... I can't risk going back to that village." His eyes were wet. He closed them and drew a breath, hoping it would help. "They took a child who could barely use his magic to stack one stone atop another. They blamed him for bringing the plague. They turned him out to starve to death and be eaten by wolves." Douxie drew another shaky breath, scrubbed his arm against his eyes. "I was five," he said fiercely. "I'd never hurt anyone! How could they-" He stopped. Swallowed. Tried to push back the pain that was rising in him like a tide. "If I went back there now," he said lowly, hating his uncles, hating how his voice shook, hating that he still wasn't better even after centuries, "if I go back there ever, I can't guarantee that one stone will remain standing on another, or that a single soul will not be slaughtered. I can't guarantee that I wouldn't become everything Arthur hated, everything he was afraid of. Magic is emotion, and I still hurt that much. I still hate them that much. So I cannot ever go home."
Archie was pressed so close against his chest that their atoms might well have mingled. The pinpricks of his claws were like anchors that Hisirdoux clung to. Nothing in the room was levitating. Yet. Fortunately. "You're a better man than I am, Jim," Douxie said carefully, looking at the far wall and not meeting anyone's eyes, "because you would stop. I can't trust myself to do that."
"Doux," said Jim quietly. "You'd stop."
He shook his head. "Maybe. But just because I don't lay hexes and curses doesn't mean I can't. I'll never be as strong as Merlin or Morgana, but I still have a lot of power, and that makes me dangerous. So I have to stay in control. Archie saved me, but there's a gaping hole inside me, where a five-year-old child was betrayed and thrown away by everyone who should have protected him. Maybe one of the first lessons I ever got was that that was what I was worth. And of all the stupid things I've ever learned, that one stuck. So I push that emptiness down, push it away. Bury it in a box, and hope it never opens. But sometimes it does. Some days it's hate, and some days it's clinging on to the last scraps of self-esteem with my fingertips. And that's something no one can fix."
Jim was silent for a moment, then said fiercely, "I should have hauled you home years ago."
Douxie laughed, just a little, and shook his head. "Jim, you didn't even know me years ago. And giving me a home can't fix me. Merlin tried, and it didn't work then either."
"It might have," Archie opined, "if Merlin had possessed more than the emotional range of a turnip."
And Douxie didn't know why that was funny, really he didn't, but he all of a sudden couldn't stop giggling. Why was it so funny? He ended up leaning against Jim's shoulder, shaking with laughter and tears. Jim's arms wrapped around him. "Next time," Douxie promised, "we're dealing with your emotional trauma. Because I'm about done talking about mine for the next century."
"Do you know," he whispered sometime later, "why I like punk rock so much?"
"Something more than just the guitar riffs?" Jim asked.
Douxie felt wan and burnt out. Almost empty. "It was the first kind of music that ever let me scream out about everything I hated. Pretty sure Claire's the same way. Our parents mess us all up, one way or another. Except your mom," he said.
"Yeah, my dad took her share on top of his own," Jim agreed.
"Jim?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry you all saw me dead. That I made you have to."
"Just... try not to do it again, Doux. We need you alive, okay?"
Author's Note: The bulk of this was written on a bad day when I was decided that "as a treat, you can have that dig into Douxie's mental health." (Jim's turn to come... at some point.) But then came cleaning up the clunky pain splashed all over the screen into something smooth and readable. Ugh. Catharsis may be fun to write, but it's a pain to edit!
My apologies on the slight gore in the image of Douxie's death at the end of Wizards, but... I can't buy the image of him being blasted from a thousand or so feet in the sky and ending up no more badly damaged than some aches and bruises that healed up totally within two minutes of screentime. So I extrapolated backwards from that (literally magical) rate of healing to why everyone was quite sure he was dead, not just unconscious.
And as to my root theory... Douxie was canonically making a living on the street by his early teens (listen to how his voice was still breaking), was already resigned to his death at the hands of the knights because of his magic, and then has a home with Merlin, best described as "casually verbally abusive," for maybe five years before losing it. Modern day, he's living in the back room of a store, working at least two minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, and his best plan to rescue his friends is a flat-out stated suicide run. He's my favorite character, but wow, he's probably a mess and long overdue for a breakdown. (Also note that even in the middle of his breakdown here he still has very little self-esteem, particularly when comparing himself to Merlin and Morgana. Sigh.)
