homeland

a bridge from our bones / cross ✖ affiliated with isola

[hanartiia]

His heavy-weighted word smashed against her conscience, startling her, and in the compressed adrenaline, she noticed the spider-web cracks upon a translucent barrier she'd built up, and never noticed until now. She could not recall when this invisible barrier had formed its way around her psyche. She wondered if it was her doing, or perhaps born from a memory she'd longed to forget. Yuuka had to conclude that it must be the former as she remembered the majority of her life.

She watched Cross drift away, his arms secured behind his back. The thickly swollen and purple-brushed hand made her stomach churn. She knew he suffered an injury in his rescue, but she dismissed it. Yuuka wondered if she had always been apathetic in situations like this. She drew her arm across her chest and snugged it close.

She abandoned Maru when they first met.

She was going to let her brother die when he was kidnapped.

She wanted to hurt her brother after his release.

Yuuka stole a peek at her reflection in the polished chrome. Every echo of her returned her stare; several pairs of eyes were sharpened with shame. She turned her gaze down and followed Cross. She reflected on how she became so cruel. It wasn't just her brother's inactions when they were kids. It was the whole system of sorcery. Death accompanied every mission, and any injury, wasn't something to linger on. She wondered if she wanted to continue living like that.

She looked back at her reflection. She made a silent promise to herself that her past-self was dead and her future-self had yet to be born, but she could control how she was in the present moment. She closed her eyes and pondered briefly on the idea of apologizing. The two words dripped like acid on her tongue. Either interpretation, sorry for saving me, and sorry I hurt you, were both misaligned to how she was feeling. She determined that her actions alone would convey her resolve.

She slowly opened her eyes and her heart stopped.

[eidyllic]

　As he pressed onward, deep aches began to seep through the mangled tendons peeling off his shattered bones. He winced upon suffering the first pulse of pain, then shuttered his mind to his body at the second. He projected his thoughts outward, focusing entirely on the environment and on searching for his markings upon the walls; becoming mindless of himself, the density of his pain lightened from thunderclaps whiting his nerves to compartmentalized sunspots burning holes in the back of his brain.

His steps slowed to a halt upon approaching an open doorway bare of his waymarker. Quietly, he sidled closer to the wall, spared a glance back to check if Yuuka stood far enough away from him, then slid out the scalpel to scrape a 〇 and an arrow pointing toward the direction they now tread upon the chrome. Stashing the instrument again, he peeked into the room.

No cells cluttered the dim space, the area instead strewn with surgical tools, wires, sterile beds, and-- obscured in the dark, humanoid figures slouched where they stood. Cross caught his breath, and he leaned forward through the doorway, compelled by his human instinct to help his fellow man, but caught himself and pulled back. Now knowing there to be guns stationed in hidden places, he chose his own preservation--and Yuuka's--over foolhardy altruism, choosing to observe the room in greater detail before deciding how to proceed.

While he failed to discern any guns shadowed in the corners, the glint of a dirty light pulled his attention away from his search and back to the human-shape haunting the far wall. A sphere, once clear but now foggy and scratched, protruded from its chest and blinked with digital reds. In the heartbeat after he noticed the light, a sheen of red passed over his eyes, dilating his vision and compelling him to lean away. In the next heartbeat, nervousness pricked his skin -- around him, he heard Harmony's ambient hum begin to warble.

Cross turned to look at Yuuka, to warn her that he felt something intruding in on the world's balance, but just as suddenly whipped his head back toward the room. Movement alerted him to danger from the corner of his eye.

Darkness sloughed off the humanoid figure as it rushed toward him, revealing a mechanical exoskeleton of inorganic bones and a bladed limb raised to gouge. Cross threw his arms up over himself, prepared to lose both to guard his life.

[eidyllon]

Cross spoke plainly, and amidst his desperate pleas shared his innermost wish: to reconnect the bond severed between them. Maru closed his eyes, and his mind recoiled from the immense, quiet passion behind Cross's intention. Maru did not reject his twin's wish; no, he had waited 821 lunar cycles to hear Cross's wish. Tears seared his eyelids as his vision blurred. He took a step closer, hands slowly lifting to welcome his brother. His fingertips barely stroked the cloth that hung loosely at his elbows when a similar shade of Rollocula slammed against his third eye.

His soul vibrated as his twin's soul collided into him. His third eye bulged with the Rollocula pouring into it. His third eye, like his other two, was laced with tears. And in that moment, he forgot how to breathe. His body slowed to a near halt, feeling the sensations that were not his own coursing through his body. The phantom seeds ruptured quietly, and out came a hairy, green bulb. Tiny roots stretched for purchase, pawing the fibrous muscles in its silent quest for requited embrace.

"Cross!"

Maru's hands reached up, grasping his brother before the roots could sink into him. He snaked his arms around his brother's torso and pulled him into an embrace. He apologized once before on the space station. Did the apology finally reach Cross, or maybe he was finally changing?

"It wasn't my fault. I didn't create this mess," he cried, tears streaming down his cheeks. "I just want to fix it. I want to fix it all." Fix you. Fix Yuuka. Fix our future. Maru felt his roots pierce through his muscles, scratching at his fascia tissue; every wiggle, every churn brought him more agony than he had ever experienced.

He wondered why the latter generations had to deal with the consequences of messes they did not create. Then, he thought about Dura. It was the first time he thought about Dura as he had remembered him. He was huge in his mind. So tall that he blocked out the sun no matter where he stepped. His smile, yes, that smile that melted the misplaced hate in someone's heart. His laugh that shook mountains. His large, calloused palms grabbed him and heaved him out of the rapids like picking a flower off the pasture. Maru clung tighter to his brother.

He wondered if Dura had these thoughts, too. Did he wonder why no one else would do anything to save his people? He must have, Maru thought, the canal was the answer to every question.

Maru's embrace slackened, and he pulled back to catch Cross's gaze. "We won't let it leave this realm. We won't let it touch our people." He didn't know the way forward, and he didn't know the path he took to get here. He felt incredibly lost. He kept his gaze locked with Cross, keeping him tethered in vastness of the situation.

We worked on the canal together. We didn't see eye-to-eye even then. You weren't worried of losing me in the flash flood. Did you trust Dura that much, or was it something else, Cross? Why have you always been scared of me?

It's your obsession with being a Warrior. You're like your father.

Maru thought about his father. His face obscured in shadows. His smile was large and unconvincing. He hated how much he couldn't remember him or his mother. He hated how much he knew he was like him. How much he looked like him, acted like him.

If you'd let it go--

Maru rejected the idea, and with it, any relation to his face, and felt the roots pierce through the tissue, closing towards his heart. He looked away from Cross.

"Do you feel it too, Cross?"

Then, Maru had a vague understanding of the consequences of his rejected truths. He sensed it like groping through the darkness. He felt it, but did not know the full shape of the idea.

"A warrior protects his people," he spoke to Cross, and to himself. He met his twin's eyes again. "Warriors will always find ways to protect our people. We're doing what we can."

Should I tell him?

--And risk everything?

What would Dura do?

His soul fell silent.

[eidyllic]

　The embrace Maru enveloped him in differed from the one he recalled on the spaceship. The sensation he remembered from back then was of fear and constriction--the shallow racing of breath quieted to hide, of a heart scared to be alive. Those arms had been a cage, something immovable for Cross to be fit into. But now, Maru's own quickened pulse and the despair he cried stripped him bare to birth, returning him to the gentle nascence before duty, before pain--between the fragile, fleeting seconds of peace before the Kalyan gave him Val. His sorrow and struggles, emotions Cross learned to carry on his own, clarified Maru's concept from the murk of culture which obfuscated him for years; he was the brother given to help bear the pain of existence, someone who understood their lives down to seconds. Awash in the comfort of this companionship, Cross quietly leaned into Maru's hug.

His body supported by his older brother, exhaustion spread out of Cross' weightlessness, his muscles beginning to uncoil from two decades of exertion. With his cheek pressed against Maru's shoulder, he stared in the other direction, looking at nothing in particular as his vision turned inward to retrace the roots he saw pulsating beneath his brother's skin. He recalled how they gestated around Maru's heart, their fibers winding around his ribcage, tangling themselves in dense knots, and pushing themselves between the cracks in his bones. Cross vaguely thought that the root system must be similar to those of the tamarisks Dura had planted around the canal; sown in a row behind the willows, the tamarisks dug deep into the soil to find the moisture they craved, anchoring themselves by treefingers too enmeshed with earth to be moved by man or flood. The plantlife burrowing into Maru behaved similarly, seemingly compelled by its own nature to pierce toward his lifeblood. Potted with such danger, Cross understood that Maru was sure to die.

The reprieve Maru granted his tired body ended, and Cross placed his weight back atop his feet again to face his brother, offering what he said a small nod. In the gravity of their situation, he scarcely found any relief in the fact that Maru demonstrated he understood what Cross told him on the day of the tsunami; but, distantly, he wondered if seeing eye-to-eye would help him comprehend the resolve steeling Cross' heart.

「Yes. We are,」 he acknowledged in a voice calm as a distant storm. 「So give me a minute, and...」 Cross then placed a hand around Maru's third eye. 「... Rest for a while.」

Rolloluca crashed over Maru, dragging him beneath its waves and submerging his consciousness within its oceanic fathoms. Cross caught his brother's limp body and lowered him to the floor where he laid him out flat. Then, stifling his own hesitations with action, he spread his palm over Maru's heart and began to work.

Another surge of Rolloluca roiled in his brain, pulling taut the skin around his bulging third eye and piercing the white of the eye with blood-strained veins. Harmony hummed in the electromagnetic field, a familiar sensation which attuned him to his twin -- but as he held onto that familiar frequency like a rope suspending his body over a black chasm, he now tried peering further, listening deeper, pushing his soul into the darkness where he knew Harmony synergized not only with himself, but with the entire world. He knew something greater to exist somewhere in that blackness, near but out of sight; he witnessed it in Maru's superhuman feats, in the way he so effortlessly plucked existence by its strings and strung from it mesmeric songs as significant as the first languages born from humanity as a concept. He knew how to transform the physical by its metaphysical aspects, and Cross now tried to glimpse what Maru could perceive with ease.

Beneath his fingers, he felt the gestated flowers for their root systems, for their seeds, and, unseen, for the genetic coding which bade them to live. He saw amorphous shapes sloshing with microscopic organs and squirming in the tiniest spaces matter was allowed to exist in, and in a millisecond, he peered into the magnetic fields holding all life together, then into polar pulses orbiting theoretical centers too immaterial to see, then beneath everything into the coincidental creation of his own consciousness.

Cross gasped and pulled his hand back, his mind expelled by the limitations of his human way of thinking. Suddenly, he felt undone, as if he weren't as real as he thought he was, and blearily understood that he went too far, saw too much. Grinding his teeth, by his conviction alone he dragged himself back from the precipice of total conceptual collapse and pressed his fingers against Maru's chest again.

This time, he followed the existential trail only as far as the scaffolding of the plant's biology. He saw the fuzzy edges of the roots' cells, first appearing to vibrate in place but over time multiplying along self-sufficient reproductive avenues. They slowly pushed forward, each new cell crawling closer to Maru's heart, and Cross stretched his sense of Harmony across their code, telling them to pull back.

The cells quivered.

Sweat beaded on his temple as he meticulously instructed each spindle, each fiber, each root to defy its nature and lift out of Maru's organs, then his muscles, then his skin. Slowly, Cross coaxed them out through the pores, invisible beneath his brother's tunic but clear to him in his mind's eye, and, his eyes dulling with the matte of his unyielding concentration, his body began to tremble beneath the strain of energies far greater than he knew to maintain. In the brain-space beneath his third eye, aneurysms began to balloon from his blood vessels, and the arteries in his neck began to protrude too far; but his work continued, and he lifted each thread threatening his brother's life until, finally, the last strand of a seed trailed out of his skin, unwound.

Blood burst within Cross' third eye, staining it with a blot of red, and he collapsed.

[hanartiia]

Distantly, metal rhythmically clicked, and the invisible cogs churned. Yuuka listened, and her curiosity cloaked her mind. Her breathing slowed as she navigated her vault of memories, finding a sound that matched perfectly with the whirling noise. She knew this sound, a sound her brother introduced her to unknowingly.

A familiar glacial sunlight stretched from its origin, ten years ago, across an undefined realm to reach her. The chilled sunlight captured her in its unconvincing warmth. With a gentle tug, the memory pulled her into its present time and space. Yuuka, with all the cognitive awareness of her present self, possessed her adolescent counterpart, and she peered through her former self's eyes. The welcoming feeling of a lost home filled her with an unwanted nostalgia. A young Tsurugi sat by her side, aware and uninterested in her presence in the face of the television; she briefly watched him, wondering if he knew that she was quite not herself. When he made no notion of recognizing the supernatural of this world, she followed his gaze to the television. The brilliant bokeh swirled in imperceptible movements upon the pixelated screen, and she vaguely knew without knowing the scene behind the dancing lights. A cookie-cutter hero barreled his way through the sheets of bullets; somehow, dodging the vast array of metal as if he phased through water. And the machine's whirling voices grew more thunderous as she watched.

Gradually, the Yuuka trapped in a chrome maze, realized that this sound held vague familiarities of her childhood. Something she knew so distantly that she had forgotten its existence, but instinctively knew this memory would not abandon her, it was attached to her, like how her body was shaped in the womb, chaotically meticulous. She was marked by this sound, and thus the sound became her. That is why she continued her approach.

She reached the beginning of the T-shaped intersection, unwittingly seeking to spy a reflection of herself she organically forgot. An erratic weight applied pressure against her, and her vision violently rotated. A red burst of light blinded her periphery as metal exploded in her ears. Her body and mind were thrown back into reality with Cross's momentum, and she crashed into him. Her body recoiled to the endless cacophony. Her body jerked primitively, shielding her face and curling her knees into her chest to protect her vitals. She didn't count how many times she rolled or flinched, but considering the slaughtering noise, it must have been close to four-hundred times in mere ten seconds.

A dreadful ring absorbed all sound as the light dimmed, and a hazy, acidic smoke diluted the hallway. The smoke's curling tendrils flickered with last life before dissolving from view. Yuuka unwound her body and carefully rolled from Cross's arms; she dropped to the floor after an unrealistically long fall, and she felt her muscles ache and twitch from acid bleeding from every fiber. She forced her body to move, pushing her weight to her knees, and she looked at Cross. The ringing weened, and a painful muffle followed.

She touched Cross's shoulders, first gently, and then patted instinctively, recreating a pattern she learned somewhere, long ago. When Cross twisted his face, her muscles relaxed enough to feel the brief reprieve. Her face wore an apologetic gratitude, holding it until Cross bore witness to her silent show of thanks, and then, she moved. Her body screamed to stay put and let the fear seep from her bones, but she rejected her body and absorbed the unusual zen that trailed behind near-death experiences. Her open hands hung low for Cross to take. When his calloused hands took hers, and she heaved him up. She focused briefly on the scarred blisters, finding it ironic that the regal air Cross emitted starkly opposed the laborious years of his childhood. She let the grip fall, her hands loosely falling to her sides, and she turned to the wall riddled with hundreds of impact holes, all of which smoked the fading wisps.

Yuuka released a quiet sigh through her nose and loosely shifted her weight to pop a hip out to rest her wrists into her sides. Overcome with annoyance at the inconvenience of nearly dying, she looked to Cross after her quick inspection of the scene and shrugged.

"I don't feel strong enough to attempt using my cursed energy as a shield. If we had a make shift one, though." Her eyes flicked away from Cross's gaze to the adjacent chrome plate that tiled the walls, and quickly shifted her gaze to examine the bullet-ridden wall before her. "Despite first look, the wall does seem intact. If we hold it up as our shield, we might be able to move forward."

[eidyllic]

　The rainy Makyo's storm continued to billow overhead. His shattered hand cushioning the back of his head where he lay, Cross' wide, vacant gaze remained fixated on the hallway's chrome ceiling, staring up through the reality his body existed in and into the grey future trapping his mind. Raindrops invisibly splashed against his face, the muscles around his eyes twitching minutely with each imagined impact, and he knew that the compression his compatriots bound his chest in provided the only respite saving him from life-ending shock. When he felt that compression began to shift, fear spiked throughout his body, paralyzing his voice in his brain--he wanted to beg them to keep the compression on just a little longer, just until he lost the consciousness to care, but it continued to lift until it left him completely, taking with it a comforting warmth he had mistaken for his own pooling blood. His lungs freed to expand, the next breath he took labored against his brain's conception of his body's death; his insides shuddered under the duress of mortal pains too immense to understand.

Out of the corner of his eye, Yuuka's hands dropped into his world, reaching to him from reality's estranged plane. Seemingly oblivious to his death-state, she looked unreal to him from where he lay; yet her hands, waiting for his, coaxed him to believe her to be real. He took a moment to exhale slow, testing whether it was to be his last. But when his shallow breaths continued, something fell quiet within him, his panic slipping through the cracks which began to splinter across his sense of self. The storm smoothed into the greys of hallway surrounding him, the rain stopping to pool as rot in the bottom of his soul.

With a pained grunt of effort, Cross lifted himself to a sit, extended both hands towards Yuuka's, and with dull surprise saw his own hand hanging limply off his wrist. He felt nothing of his injury, the pain displaced through his broken bones and into his skull as a dull ringing struck against the floor, and so he extended his left arm for her to grab instead. His right hand grasping hers, he heaved himself to his feet.

A blood-rush dizzied his brain, that momentary vertigo smearing his consciousness between his realities. Dull aches like deep bruises condensed in his lung and liver, but when he looked down at his chest, he saw no holes in his robes, and when he pressed his hand over those spaces, he felt no injuries perforating his flesh. Adrift in this uncertain feeling of where in time he stood, Yuuka's voice reached him as if from a muffled distance, her words then sharpening with clarity once she floated the idea of using the paneling on the wall as a shield. His attention snapped back to her, his right hand falling heavily to his side and his expression deadening to nothing--to fear replaced with an absence of feeling.

「No.」 The word dropped between them as a callous weight, and before she could respond, Cross turned his back to her, retreading his steps to pick up the scalpel from where he had dropped it on the ground. Once he stashed it back in his waist sash, he turned his head to look at her again, his back straight and his arms held behind his back--a detached and diplomatic posture. 「We're going the other way.」

Once more, he allowed her no time to argue. He began back down the way they had come from, his eyes on the walls to watch for where his markings first began.

[hanabisays]

Hanabi's own gaze looks to the greenery. It's peaceful here, considering. The gods' presence wasn't here, he says. Wasn't that the truth for the most part, honestly?

"It makes sense," She whispers quietly. "But the gods presence isn't entirely gone," She looks at Cross with a small smile. If their presence had been gone fully, she wasn't sure how she'd be able to explain some of the things she could do. Like summoning and doing her rituals (As harmless as they were.)

"Here, there are gods who'll listen." Hanabi feels she doesn't have to ask 'the why.' Even if there were no one to listen, she understood the reasoning behind it.

"Still, thank you for coming all this way to pay your respects."

[eidyllic]

　The empathy softening her reply to a whisper drew his attention back out from his mind. His gaze drifting to her face, he regarded what she had to say on the matter with grave interest, for he recalled from his conversation with Yuuka that Earth's belief systems historically tended to hold influence over relations between people. Yet what she told him now seemed gentler by comparison, something peripheral that required care to see.

「How do you know they listen?」 Unlike the Kalyans, Earth's gods derived their presence from an absence of material aspect, a seeming contradiction that made little sense to him. His own zealotry blinded him to the power of negative space. 「When you worship, do they answer you?」

[hanabisays]

Handmade, and for that, it didn't have the power to receive their prayers? There's a look of confusion. In her world, things handmade held so much power when it was used in prayers. Curses and prayers, were all stemmed to people's belongings and the things they'd spent hours creating. It was how they possessed strength.

Maybe that isn't what he meant, though.

It isn't until their prayers and paying respect is finished and they're back down from the steps of the shrine that she decides to ask,

"You said that you made the offering yourself but it didn't have the power to receive your prayers? Why is that?"

[eidyllic]

　Leaving the figurine atop the altar, Cross' light footfalls followed the woman down the shrine's steps and came to a stop when he noticed her linger. The question did not surprise him, in itself echoing the beliefs he had become familiar with on Earth, but her curiosity in the matter encouraged him to engage in kind; any cautious skepticism which may have divided him from this Earthling had already been bridged when she joined him in prayer.

「It's an effigy of a living thing, that thing being what you would commonly refer to as a "god",」 he began, his hands falling to rest at his back and his gaze pointing forward at the summer greenery enclosing the shrine's grounds. 「If I wanted this god to receive my prayers, I would worship in its presence. But given the nature of this realm, it may come as no surprise to you that this god isn't here to listen.」

His eyes fell to the cobblestone path upon which he stood, a small breath leaving his nose. He understood that his own explanation beget the question of why, then, the figurine existed at all. Not unwilling but not eager to share that reason, he left the pursuit of that answer up to her discretion.

[hanabisays]

Hanabi watched in silence after the other finished their prayer. It would have been rude to watch while he prayed. Eventually, she does make her way up the stairs to stand by the other's side. She'll pay her tribute in respect.

Silence falls between them for a short moment until she finishes. Then, she looks to him with a smile.

"Did you make it yourself?"

[eidyllic]

　By drawing upon the energies of a public holy building for his prayer, he knew he chanced drawing unfavorable attention not only to himself but to his religion, which he steeled himself against when a woman approached where he knelt. But looking up at her, the guarded reproach in his eyes dissipated to muted surprise upon finding that she offered her own prayer, and he quietly removed his hand from around the figurine, his gaze pensive upon it while he waited for her to finish.

「Yes,」 he affirmed, his voice hushed so as to not disturb the worship lingering around them, delicate as settling dust. 「... And because of that, it doesn't have the power to receive our prayers.」

[nomithered]

David feels the weight of those words spared his way. The reply to his question heavier than the question itself. It made the man wonder what it was this Kid might have already gone through to have these Herculean Labors weigh on him. It didn't feel like his place to ask, but maybe he could give him something in turn.

"..Maybe...Maybe the victors do write the history books..but..not everythin' is written in books, let alone stone."

His arms shift atop his knees and his thumb comes up to rub at the edge of his nose when the wind tickled it. He doesn't move aside from that as he continues.

"There's this, uh, guy. We don't know his name but we know where we found him. In a place way out east from where I lived- in Shanidar. So the folks who found him called him Shanidar 1. He lived over 40 thousand or so years ago, crazy right?"

The older man offers a little grin as if it was funny or perhaps just pleased at the fact in general. It was hard to pin.

"But anyways. We found out he had some terrible, awful, injury when he was young. Still just a kid an..it made it so he couldn't see well, nor walk or use the right side of his body. Normally, based on the way of the land at the time, you'd think the guy wouldn't have made it long beyond childhood, right? But he did...He did. He lived long 'nough to become a grandfather."

He glances to Cross a little as he keeps going, trying to gauge if what he was rambling about made any sense to the guy he was trying to ..console? is that what this was?

"For 40 thousand years we didn't have record of him. An no one wrote down the fact that his family took care of him. That they gave him a walkin' stick. And that he ate with them an wasn't exiled..So, maybe, for a while, it might be depressing. It might hurt t' know not everyone knows, but as long as one person remembers, it doesn't mean it never happened. Doesn't mean it can't be re-discovered later."

[eidyllic]

　The steady night-wind scattered the small sigh that left his lips. Staring down at the bed of flowers swaying below, he watched the way their luminescent blues caught the moon's beams and refracted small lights back up at him that winked like stars. He thought that their rhythmic twinkling combined with the peaceful nature of the cliffside must have coaxed such a heavy response out of him, saddling a stranger with implications of ancestral hardships from which he could claim no wounds, and Cross did not expect his statement to be acknowledged, let alone responded to. But when the man began to speak, the weight of his thoughts palpable in the pauses he took to assemble his words, Cross looked at him again to heed what he had to say.

As the story established its origin and unfurled thousands of years in the past, the hard lines of Cross' face softened, his jaw slackening and his stress smoothing from the skin between his brows. The human element driving the tale mesmerized him, and he listened to the man speak as though he was being told the most important thing in this world--and he was, for in this stranger's heartfelt attempt to share the myriad kindnesses blooming from the oldest seeds of the human condition, Cross' own garden flourished with sunlight.

「... I understand.」 He acknowledged the intention behind telling the story in a soft hush, quiet as if unwilling to disturb the power of what he heard. Thoughtful, his eyes flickered over the man's face, mentally reconfirming him to be an Earthling -- he hadn't been aware that Earth's human history gestated from lives so old, but for the people of Earth to have not only endured that long but held fast to memories of the deepest eras from whence they came, Cross felt a tender fondness for them spread in his chest as warmth.

His gaze drifted back to the ground, words heavy with the weight of his world slowly working from his mind to his mouth. 「... As things are now, no evidence of the man my compatriots and I owe our lives to exists with us anymore. We had to leave his body and his life's work behind. I see now how he may be rediscovered later, but I can't abide by him becoming another "Shanidar".」 Cross met the man's eyes again, his expression firm yet somber. 「His name was Dura.」

[eidyllon]

Maru could feel his cells vibrate underneath Cross' scalding reproach. He felt his cell walls blister under Cross' admonishment until his every cell resisted the fiction and jettisoned away. Then, in the fracturing of his cellular structure, his consciousness sank beyond the existing world. He clung to the boundary where he desired to reside, but the earnest, bitter truth pushed him to the realm dictated by carved actions. His mind could not cling for much longer, and he slipped into the eternal darkness that blanketed his consciousness.

The abyssal world stretched beyond measure in seconds. Mankind's history expanded across the universe; photographic stills depicting violence fabled as progress folded upon itself like dominoes until it reached the edge of all things. His recent action, his violent meeting with the boy, was the final act, and it fell off the observable universe. It swung in its fall, falling upward now, and then mirrored its twin. As it tumbled flat, and the historical stills repeated, fluttering down to mirror the opposite side, and it continued cyclically, never ending.

Maru tried to shut his eyes to the horror, but turning away brought another terror. Time became a spirograph, moving slowly and carving reiterations into the world. Each ellipses traced over the one prior. It may have grown, or it may have shrunk, but the millions of circles born from time itself showed no significant change.

It became too horrible to witness. He wished for his eyes to corrode with acid, his bones to become brittle and disintegrate. He wanted everything awful in this world to assail him all at once to save him from the horrid truth of Time.

When his consciousness found him thoroughly punished, Maru collapsed into reality. His cells snapped back into place and convulsed. He was haunted by Time, and by its truth. It had little to offer other than what would come when words were neither shared nor listened to.

He had grown pale in his cerebral pilgrimage. Cold sweat dribbled down his neck, his back until his undershirt absorbed every droplet. Maru curled his legs inward, arms stretched out to hug his shins. Now, silence was all he could offer to his twin. He had learned words held no meaning if their intention was inherently shallow, and to speak words that he dared not listen to himself would be sermoning to the dead. Maru swallowed thickly, parting his lips to finally speak, but he chose to breathe instead.

After a frighteningly long minute, Maru now looked up and stared at Cross. His eyes gyrated from the bleeding adrenaline. "My responsibility to--" excuse was the first words he breathed into existence, and the dead was silent. He clamped his mouth and lowered his gaze again. Shame carved his chest whole and made its new home.

"When did you understand more about the world?" he asked, exhausted in his defeat. "And why do you keep your wisdom from me? Did you know it then?" He spoke of vague implications bathed in violence. "And if you knew it then, then why did you reject me?" Something inside of him clicked when he spoke. He looked up again, almost horrified. "No, no. That was never it, it never was me." The horror intensified in his expression. "Cross, why do you reject Val?"

[eidyllic]

　The silence that elapsed between them incubated a dense sense of discomfort. As Cross stared down at his brother, waiting with growing impatience for him to defy his horror and say something, he assumed at first that the discomfort he felt belonged to Maru and the terrible realizations blanching his face; but as the density accumulated and shame crept through his body, Cross painfully claimed that profound discomfort as his own. His expression curdled. Despite their agreement to work together, he recognized that he trended toward antagonizing his brother, even to the point of nearly failing to protect him from drowning. Maru's reflection upon his mistakes forced Cross to simmer in his own guilt as well.

The question that Maru eventually settled on, however, seared Cross with a prickling feeling like fever, his ruminations burned away from the inside out, his skin crawling with the desire to flee from itself. Dismay and dull anger pounded along the heavy pulse of his accelerated heartrate.

「What?」 Disbelief at those words--an accusation of a crime against their culture--shocked his tone, breathless as though struck, then quickly hardened to bitterness. He looked away, reluctant to parse the implications behind what Maru said to him but too morally insulted to leave it be.

「... So that's what it looks like to you. Maru... has your view of the world always been so black and white?」 He directed the question more so at himself than Maru, a riddle applied retroactively to the behaviors Cross struggled to cope with and comprehend. His heart laden with two decades of weight, he found that it explained most of his grievances.

Cross returned his gaze to his brother again, and now submerged in the dreadful logic he awoke to, the emotions in his eyes deadened. 「Let me remind you of something. The Kalyan may have given us Val, but our identity is determined by the people Val serves. If everyone around us were to die, we would have no reason to call ourselves warriors anymore.」

As he spoke, the words thickened in his throat, and he had to squeeze each consonant out like phlegm. He felt ridiculous explaining something so obvious to Maru, and, his mind growing numb with agitation, he turned his back on his brother once he finished gritting out the facts of their charge. He didn't want to wait to see whether Maru understood; he already felt his restored sense of self hanging on by a thread as-is.

「... I have to go mend our relationship with that Earthling.」

In the next instant, Cross was gone.

[hanartiia]

The scarlet lights scratched Cross's face in rapid secessions, illuminating his expanding, chasmic pupils. Yuuka felt her skin tug towards those three black holes. Soon, her soul descended helplessly into his vacant eyes. Her eyelids stretched, mouth softly parting and exposed the enamel tips. She had fallen into a muddled trance. As she drifted in the weightlessness of her meditation, lost in his empty pupils, she realized that he wasn't quite human, not in the earthly sense. In every other aspect, Cross was far more human than any other person she had met on the lonely archipelago. He subtly cared for every living being he had come across, respecting its existence with quiet, careful observations to keep its memory alive in a ever evolving and forgetful world.

The words, Maru is here, accompanied his silently roaring despair, and his sorrow slammed against Yuuka like a tidal wave breaking against a barrier; his heartache saturated her soul in a relentless, familiar cold. She shivered. Her heart wrenched as she recognized the intimate grief shared by Cross. For a moment, she took pause, mourning the absence affection between siblings, and lowered her gaze in her silent contemplation. After a moment, she raised her gaze, and her empathy stretched across the space between them. Her invisible arms sought to wrap around him, in a very similar manner to his invisible hand had caressed her shoulder in comfort as she routinely consumed her cluster of pills to fend off the monstrous symptoms. Before she could grasp him in a cradle of empathy, he turned away, leaving the room altogether. Forlorn, she sat in the middle of the cell, clutching weakly on his mantle. She refused to fill his empty spaces with false assumptions conjured from her singular perspective and stood with some effort. Her legs wobbled like a newborn fawn, and her brain began to pulse. The incessant red lights clawed into her eyes, festering her already weak mind. Suddenly, the all too familiar ice pick struck her brain with a quick tap. She closed her eyes, brows furrowed in the smallest motion, and she breathed through the pain. Then, she trekked his steps, mantle hung over her arm.

She met him as he carved an X into the reflective wall. The tearing of chrome against steel drove the pick deeper into her skull. Nausea bubbled in her gut. Again, she carefully breathed, fending off the discomfort with seasoned ease. She approached him, watching his hand closely, and the intent rose within her to prevent his action if he decided to repeat his marking. Thankfully, he stored the surgical tool.

He had seamlessly transitioned into a survival state. She had been impressed by his adaptive ability, but vaguely understood that his years struggling to even exist had awarded him these skills. She neither wanted to congratulate him nor fawn over these unbidden skills, and instead, she followed his lead with firm faith that he would guide them to safety.

Once she had returned his mantle to him, a gratitude staining her eyes, she traced his footfalls with care. The emptiness of the chrome prison pricked her skin with millions of bumps. She felt her hair follicles sting with every brush against the fabric of her clothes. She wasn't sure if she wanted to pass another soul, unaware of what lurked beyond their vision. Yet, she wanted to see at least one soul, her brother's. As Tsurugi crossed her mind, her heart sank into the sea of nausea. She shook off the grief and convinced herself of his capability to survive on his own. Despite that, she instinctively pressed her temple to reach him. Her gentle touch offered no response, and she disguised her movements by tucking a stray lock behind her ear.

Time's relevancy faded into obscurity as they wandered aimlessly through the desolate, bitter halls. If it were not for Cross's tactic to mark passages they have passed, they could have easily completed a whole circuit. Each wall appeared the same as the last. The sectioned sheets of metal flooring were measured 24 by 24 feet and were equally placed with no unevenly measured pieces to fill in the empty gaps. The structure was far too precise to have been constructed by human hands, and that thought alone resurfaced a wave of nausea.

Cross had paused to impress a wall with an X, and Yuuka had created enough distance from him to avoid listening to the horrid screech. She meandered forward, observing a L-shaped turn that altered the previous direct paths. She, unaware of the dangers ahead, started her turn around the corner. The cacophony of whirling gears erupted. The rotating shafts loaded bullets into the turrets' chamber, primed to release the sheets of bulbous metal to splinter and perforate all that cross the threshold.

[eidyllic]

　When she handed the mantle back to him, he accepted it without comment and shrugged the fabric back over this shoulders. Pressing onward beneath the flickering lights overhead, he continued scraping waymarkers in their wake. Though he managed to block out the screeching shriek of the metals grinding against each other, out of the corner of his eyes he noticed Yuuka wince and move away from him each time he carved a marking. The source of her discomfort obvious, he paused a beat after raising the scalpel to incise the wall, waiting for her to put a distance between them before he placed blade to chrome.

The rooms they passed contained nothing but ghosts of stories similar to theirs. Empty cells, scattered objects, and dim warning lights marked the spaces abandoned, and despite his attempts to thoroughly scan the areas for information or useful tools, a low humming in the stale, cold air pressed an uncomfortable static denser into his ears the longer he explored. Something in it warned him to flee elsewhere; the droning unnerved him, amplified by an uncertainty if the sound was truly real or a product of his mind accumulating detritus shed from the rhythmic blaring of the emergency signal.

Pushed out of the room by that ambient sense of danger, he glanced toward Yuuka to find her proceeding down the hall toward a bend in the corridor, and with her at an acceptable distance away from him, he pushed the scalpel out of his sash and raised it to mark the area as checked. Then, in his mind's eye, his movements slowed to a crawl through time.

Ch-chck, and the guns loaded their bullets.

One fiber at a time, he felt his muscles unwind around the scalpel, his grip falling limp and the tool descending to the ground as the mechanical noises clicking around the corridor's corner set a black, unknown crevice in his brain aflame. In the fractal span of a second, Cross' eyes widened to the ghost-sensation of rain hitting his face, of his limbs falling heavily to his sides, of blood internally bursting from his veins and soaking his insides in its own gore -- of two bullets drilling through his arteries and into his organs until they slowed to nest. His brain seized in confusion beneath a wave of indescribable phantom-pains he could never unknow, his vision blurring between the rainy Makyo's ruins and the metallic hallway he stood in. They had told the gun to "wait", so it did. One wrong word, and with two shots they claimed his life. Nothing had been "stopped", so his world ended.

A world too soon to end now waited for Yuuka, too.

The scalpel clattered against the ground.

「Stop!」

Just as soon as the command tore from his throat did he rush forward, closing the distance between them in a heartbeat to hook an arm around her waist and yank her backward. Her body secured against his, he stopped his momentum on his forward foot, then sharply dug his weight onto the trailing foot, their trajectory pivoting from forward to backward and sending them tumbling belly-up onto the floor. She landed safely atop him, her body and brain cushioned by his chest, while he threw his free hand back behind his head, cracking his knuckles against the floor in place of his skull. The instant they began to fall, a deafening curtain of bullets glinting red showered the adjacent hall, perforating holes across the space where Yuuka almost stood -- but in his ears he heard nothing but darkness and rain.

[hanartiia]

Cold seeped into her bones and suffocated her body heat. Yuuka unconsciously curled her knees against her chest, seeking any warmth that could free her from the icy embrace. Her sleep dwindled on a thin wire. She swayed into the waking world solely to keep her muscles taut in hope the minute constrictions would generate heat. The other part of her mind rested in the dark depths, seeking refuge from coping with the chilling penetration.

She slept peacefully despite the cold. She was lost on the darkest of seas, lifting up with gentle crests and tilting down into the cradled troughs. The placid, vacant sea lulled her, gave her a peace she could only presume to be the tender death in which her grandparents often spoke out of turn to a naive child who only knew death as the notorious thief of all souls. In her sunless mind, she hoped this was death, and death had kindly greeted her amidst the desolate oceans to take her to the edge of the world, where she would fall off, disappear, and never return.

A familiar warmth tugged at her mind. The sun seemed to rise in her dark expanse. From the mirage of the never ending world, the sun paralleled the black sea, casting its powerful rays along its clandestine surface, revealing the orange-tinted teal and underneath it, objects, memories from her life. She realized, this was not death, but sleep, a sleep so deep and far that she was no longer a part of this universe. She knew she had to return, to go back to the chaotic, challenging, and crooked world. She was neither happy nor sad to be alive. It was her truth, she persisted, and she felt too vain, too proud to resist life's provocation.

Her body reacted to the mantle's warmth, and she grasped it, pulling it closer to retain the heat that continuously escaped. She settled again, closer again now to the emptiness of a dark universe that she once yearned. Though the tender hand and light tremble steered her course towards the hot sun. Yuuka sighed, and she opened her eyes.

The blurry image of the spiky green hair and three crimson eyes conjured the word friend. She blinked through her sleep, ridding the viscous film that prevented her focus. When she finally came to, she saw Cross without his mantle, and with impossible haste, connected the dots. She pushed herself upright, letting the mantle draped from her grip. Yuuka wondered if he had noticed she had clung to it like a newborn baby. She refused to accept it herself, and allowed the mantle to remain on her lap, unable to touch it again.

"Cross?" She looked around, observing the sleek, cold chrome that kept her entombed in wishful fantasies.

"Cross?" her tone firmer now, taut like a rubber band ready to snap. She bore her ocean colored eyes into his. Her silent concerns raged within the chrome cell as she knew instinctively they were not in the Naunax. The Rumelians' temporary home had not been sited anywhere within the city; it's steel spire would have been immediately spotted, and its imposing presence would very well stir fear of an actual alien invasion.

Defeated by logic, her shoulders went limp. All the conversations she had with long-term residents were unfortunately correct. She stared at Cross's fingertips splayed out on the chrome floor. Exhaustion hit her all at once, and she closed her eyes. She nearly submitted to the heavy weight of her emotions bearing down upon her, but she knew Cross was at her side, and she trusted him, perhaps more than anyone else in this world or their world. She slowly opened her eyes, steeled by her faith in the Rumelian, and returned her gaze to him.

"What do you know so far?"

[eidyllic]

　Preoccupied by their situation, he failed to notice anything peculiar about the way she handled the mantle, and he offered no notion that she ought to return it, either. Instead, he solemnly observed the existential defeat she met her circumstances with, a deep exhaustion beaten into limbs soon too worn to continue walking, crawling, struggling. She was tired.

So was he.

Patience steady upon his face, he waited for her to collect her courage, but to the question she dared to ask, he only answered with a slow shake of his head. In place of the material knowledge she requested, he heaved himself to his feet, closed his eyes, and placed a finger atop the lid of his forehead, attuning his soul to Harmony's magnetic field. He felt out the energies distorting that fabric, he listened for the electromagnetic hum of his and his brother's twinned gravities holding their orbits in check with one another, and, nearby, he felt his existence come into balance with Maru's. Cross opened his eyes, his blown-out pupils, stretched dark with unseeing, tightening against the lights of the physical plane, and he dropped his gaze back down to Yuuka, his expression abruptly hollowed out, vacant and owlish.

「Maru's here,」 was all he offered before he returned his attention to the room. His cloth-bound footfalls light and soundless against the metallic floor, he tread carefully around the area, approaching nearby cells and surfaces to inspect for clues. The other cages retained no evidence of their occupants, and he passed the open spaces by with only cursory glances. But closer toward the doorless entrance stood what looked to be an unused operating table, something he recognized to be common on Earth, with various instruments scattered upon it. Scalpels, needles, and other small tools foreign to him were strewn about as if abandoned in a hurry, and he carefully combed his thoughts through the objects before deciding to pick up a scalpel. Knowing that they ought to leave the room and venture out into the sterile, unfamiliar halls, he determined it useful to know where they have and have not been; and so, approaching the entryway, he scraped an X into the wall with the blade.

Tucking the instrument into a fold of his waist sash, Cross peered out of the room and through the pulsating reds lighting the connecting hallway. He saw nothing, no-one, though Maru's near presence informed him that the emptiness attempted to deceive. After scrutinizing the hall as far as his vision allowed, he glanced back to Yuuka again, wordlessly requesting her attention before pointing his eyes down toward the right end of the corridor.

「He's this way,」 Cross explained in a hush. Even whispered words crowded to echoes between the soulless walls.

Once sure that Yuuka understood his intentions, he slipped into the hallway, quickly incised an arrow into the wall pointing in the direction they tread, then proceeded forward toward where he hoped Maru's presence indicated an opportunity for answers.

[animasend]

this one is recognizable. that is the only thing that stays her hand.

behind her rests what remains of a few robots that tried to stop her. parts scattered without a care, char marks littering the floor and walls, a few broken overhead lights and wires that hang with electricity crackling in a now half-lit corridor. there was no consideration of mercy. it didn't even pass through her mind as a possibility. they were in her way and they needed to be removed. piece by piece. why else would wires and components be skewed about, as if removed one by one?

(because they were, just like what she did to those humans who did the same to her over and over again like some endless supply machine– )

she blinks once, twice, chasing away that haze that tries to cover her in a veil. she cannot think like that. she can't survive like that. olga refuses to let them catch her, stick her back in that white room where it'll keep going like some endless nightmare. even if it means her own death, she would rather die on her terms than once more be someone's damn guinea pig.

"......there's no more left in this hallway."

her own voice sounds clipped. distant. her entire being felt like a string pulled too tight, ready to snap with the weight of a mere feather. she's ignoring the cut beneath her bangs, the blood not even registering to the woman as her gaze remains unmoving from the one before her. diamond, lifeless pupils narrow. even if they are familiar, she can't trust them. she can't trust anything here.

@eidyllic

[eidyllic]

　The haphazard violence strewn behind Olga warned him of the danger thrumming in her heart. Having heard the destruction clamoring against the metallic floors and echoing hollow throughout the halls, Cross had diverted from his path to check the situation, but even when proceeding carefully through the shadows, Olga had detected him instantly. Just as quickly did he comprehend where he stood relative to her, and so he revealed himself to her, his hands clasped behind his back, his spine held straight.

「I see.」 He acknowledged her statement plainly, maintaining dull eye contact with her while assessing the damage laying in his periphery. She devastated the machinery with speed and wit, evidenced by the minor injury she escaped the chaos with. But the battle-skill she possessed left little impression on him compared to the demeanor with which she wielded it--the wild, heedless fervor of a warrior whose sense of self came secondary to the impulses of the body. He recognized the haze in her eyes to be the same matte as when Maru's vicious stare fixated on an object of his rage; but unlike his brother who curtailed his violence against Cross directly, he could not measure if the look in Olga's eyes presaged bodily harm to him. The fear that Maru taught him to carry slowed his heartrate to a crawl, the distractions in his mind falling dark--he shucked his sensitivities to face the terrifying nature of the woman he respected.

「... No more except for one, that is,」 he continued, testing how far her statement extended. 「Olga Marie... am I your enemy?」

[eidyllic]

His restless dreams made monsters of the blaring lights and sirens. The cold of the metal his body laid upon stretched across his mindscape and became the familiar floors of the Naunax, whose halls pounded with the panicked footfalls of his compatriots running for their loved ones. Under the stroboscopic reds of their mothership's emergency lighting, Cross stood stagnant, his body parted the flow of his fleeing people, his head whipping around to catch a glimpse of Maru amidst the panic. Their Rolloluca was failing-- the Naunax was adrift-- the ship would soon lose power. Everyone knew the nature of the slow death approaching--the immense cold of space would infiltrate the halls, freeze them while they yet breathed, and hang their brittle husks where they lay. Without Maru, Cross didn't have the strength to charge the Naunax, and they would fall, fall, fall, fall for hours, then years, then millennia, until the landscape of space sifted them into its darkest holes and returned Rumel's existence to the atoms from whence it once came.

Cross woke with a start.

Residual terror thrummed in his chest as his wide eyes flickered wildly over his environment, his mind struggling to peel his nightmare off of his reality. In the pulsating red lights and droning of the sirens he sensed the the slow demise he knew to be coming for him and considered performing his own death rite to save his soul -- yet as he feverishly reviewed the funerary rituals, he imagined the communal effort of carrying Dura's coffin, wondered desperately how he could bear dying without anyone to watch over him, and, slowly, his breath deepened to the hushed heaves of a body wrung of its faith.

Through heavy layers of tired aches Cross lifted himself from where he had dreamt upon the ground and lurched to his feet. Only vaguely aware of his own movement, he took careful steps out of the open door to the prison he had been placed in, his eyes blearily scanning the room before something familiar parted his haze--within a nearby cell, Yuuka had made herself small upon the metal floor.

Clarity scattering the dull film from his eyes, Cross hurried into her open cage and crouched before her, inspecting her body for injuries. Through the emergency lights' dim reds, he could see her thin frame quivering from either cold or fear. Unsure what plagued her, he shrugged off the mantle draped over his robes and gently placed it on her before glancing back at the room behind them.

With his lucidity returning, he observed the area properly for the first time, finding it to be crowded with open cages all deserted of occupants. He felt a dense danger in that emptiness, as if the shadows seethed with threats that others were wise enough to flee from -- but far heavier was the gut-dread that his lifeless state could have not only been his own undoing, but Yuuka's.

Returning his gaze to Yuuka, he placed a hand upon her shoulder and lightly shook her, gently but urgently attempting to stir her from her sleep without startling panic into her. 「Okkotsu Yuuka. Wake up.」 / @hanartiia

[daxned]

"You are correct, except you are missing the part that all our powers are weakened upon arrival."

Nevertheless, she'll give him that. It was true she was only going based on what she saw. It's... reminiscent. The way he spoke reminds her a lot of Sukuna.

"My name is Dam-bi. This is Soft Thistle of Feint Elk Level 90"

[eidyllic]

Although he afforded her observation no response, he quietly questioned its accuracy. Based on the knowledge gleaned from his travels in this realm, he gained the sense that the all-seeing eye derived its immanence not from worldly, material powers, but a preternatural wisdom drawn from existence as a concept. Such a thing could not be measured and therefore could not be taken, and he wondered the reason for her interest in it.

Regardless, his lack of wisdom did not escalate her hostility, though the fact remained that she yet barred his path. 「I see. Well then, Dam-bi...」

「Now that you know I don't have the power you seek, what do you intend to do?」

[quehecke]

ive drawn the whole modulo gang now yayyy

[hanartiia]

Cross's reservations on sharing always bewildered her. She recalled their first meeting on the amusement park bench. As the world whizzed around them in brilliant, blurred colors, they remained frozen in place, discussing the intricacies of religion's role in conflict. As an atheist, she refused religious value over the moral guidance humans should be obligated to follow for the betterment of humankind. He had a different view for good reason. His religion worshipped living, breathing creatures who provided and protected his people. She doubted any human alive now could attest to following such a religion, but she wondered if her ancient ancestors empathized with him. And all this was shared in the shortest time period and was the most he ever said to her.

As she sat with him inside the muggy cart, he shared in one breath his people's history and culture with immense respect. She could not help but be hypnotized by his affection. He loved his people, his culture, so much so that he would risk everything to ensure their continuous existence. She understood her culture to be of a similar mind to an extent. The initial resistance of the sorcerers, even from her, spoke to the possibilities of rejecting outsiders based on preconceptions.

It wasn't until she lost everything that she truly empathized with his and Maru's struggles.

"You'd be a good narrator for documentaries," she pointed at him enthusiastically, as if she finally found the perfect job that he wasn't searching for, "like Damon Battanhouse." She took a timid bite out of her gyoza, still pondering her realization.

"If you wrote a book on Rumelian history, I would read it," she pensively continued, "and I mean that, I'm not much of a reader, but I find the Rumel's history to be fascinating. It feels so natural and surreal at the same time, y'know? As if I heard it from somewhere before a long time ago, and yet it's entirely new."

She chomped on the remainder of her gyoza, "Like an audiobook," she absentmindedly connected her previous idea to her current one. Then, she pulled her head from the clouds and turned to him, "Tell me more, Cross. What is Rumel's signature dish?"

[eidyllic]

The enthusiastic finger Yuuka jabbed in his direction lifted his mind out of his reverie, and he regarded her with quiet patience as her revelation rocketed her a quantum leap forward through their conversation. Though impossible for him to understand the significance of the foreign name she mentioned, the idea which she introduced to him reflected in his eyes as a tentative shine, an emerging inspiration that resonated with his nature. Simuria's sun shyly rose in his heart, his generational troubles shrinking to the featherweight of dawn on his skin -- and, relieved of its burdens, his soul eased itself open to the hypnotic, pristine glow of a world swathed in his own inner light.

「A book on Rumelian history?」 He tried the idea on his tongue, testing how it felt, before his pensive gaze drifted back down to his plate. Unable to yet comprehend the life-pull of this intrinsic calling, doubts slit shadows down the rays of sun still climbing his heart's crests, starting with the holes in his memories that her question exposed. 「... There's a lot I don't remember,」 he admitted, his tone level despite his uncertainty. 「More than buildings were lost when Rumel was razed.」

Cross fell quiet for a moment, staring through the gyoza in front of him and into the murk of his own thoughts. He felt the things he had long forgotten as textured shapes in the dark of his mind, shadow-on-black sensations disembodied from actual events. Some things occurred to him no more distinctly than a fleeting familiarity, while others seared themselves to sunspots behind his eyes. The image of Rumel in ruins buried most of his prior memories under its rubble, and even the destruction he viewed from a height outside himself, his trauma mindless of his own body.

He released a soundless sigh, then took the gyoza between his chopsticks again and sampled another bite. He felt out the flavor profile, searching for something he recognized. 「We didn't have any flour-based dishes, but these fillings aren't that different to what we ate. Meat, herbs, and spices were common staples of our meals. ... Jabaloma would know more.」 Somber fondness crept into his voice as he recalled the elder he respected so dearly, and visualizing Jabaloma's kindly, gentle face pressed a fresh ache into Cross' sore desire to seek the man's counsel. It hadn't occurred to him before to seek Jabaloma's wisdom beyond spiritual matters, to instead hear tales of the things the elders were around to remember once existed, and now with the turbulent news of Earth Maru had delivered to him, Cross feared his chance to learn more to be lost.

He didn't dare risk speaking true his fear.

[eidyllon]

Maru felt his blood reverse its flow with the expanding roots and vines. He felt his heart clench and his lungs tighten as his blood churned with the floral's divisive movement. His body raged at its loss of control, his brain hot-wired by the puppeteer movements that it had not selected. Maru wondered what his insides looked like now. Flesh-colored roots protruded from the muscular fibers; sinew entwined with fibrous vines, strangling the tendons to death. He pictured his decaying brain, flowers erupted from the wrinkled muscle, sagging in parts that should not be anything but perky and round.

A dejected shade of loss hope matted his eyes. He stared at Cross and thought that he was wrong. If he were infected, his body should have reacted in the same way. The sterile stench with dried, clotted blood burned his nostrils. The harrowing flashback of his brother frozen in time upon the hospital bed stabbed his mind. Simurian flowers budded around Cross as his third eye opened; the pupil gyrated as thick tears bled. Maru's eyes widened. He took a rigid step away.

It will happen again.

"C-cure? E-end?" Maru shook his head. Large beads dripped down his face; the back of his undershirt grew damp and heavy with sweat. His lips twitched in a taut, bewildered smile. "It's those two only? And if there is no cure, why both of us?"

He shook his head and retreated by one step again. "No, no, no, Cross. You don't have it." Maru peered deep into his eyes. He saw the discomfort from watching his brother suffer, but those eyes held no consciousness of the backward flow of blood, the inconsolable pain of muscles stiffening and tightening into rock. "Y-you'd know it, don't you, you could feel it."

Maru closed his eyes and tightened his jaw. "You would feel it. Feel it moving inside of you." He envisioned the movement of the vines, prodding at his arteries, aching to get out, to rupture all in its pathway. Maru slowly opened his eyes, pupils shivering incessantly now; visions of Simuria entered his mind.

"It can't end with us. It won't end with us. If it ends with us, that's it for our people. Please, Cross, it may end with me, but if you live, then I can exist in the future generations through you. That's the cycle I want."

[eidyllic]

The existential fear spilling out of Maru challenged Cross' ability to be brave. He knew his brother's storm surges to be of catastrophic and implacable might, torrential barrages of emotion with no regard for consequence; but the nature of this swell differed in force, threatening instead to collapse in on itself before its disaster took the world with it. His heart quailed before the idea that the sacrifice might be for the best.

But he stifled the thought under his budding sense of desperate obligation to Maru and closed the distance between them, grasping his brother by the shoulders to anchor his body and prevent his mind from retreating somewhere Cross could not follow.

「Stop it, Maru! You're making it worse! Listen to what I'm saying.」 Cross waited for Maru to meet his gaze before continuing. 「It's our duty to figure out what this is on behalf of everyone else. That's the responsibility we bear for deciding to settle here. You and I both agreed to rebuild Rumel together, so I can't--」 '--do this without you' caught in his throat with the labored contraction of a dying gasp, and Cross doubled over to wheeze, one hand flying to his neck while he forced the other to remain grasped onto Maru. He attempted to massage loose the constriction straining the base of his throat, but the repetitive motion instead alerted him to a series of bumps protruding from beneath his skin. The air stalled in his lungs as he visualized the shapes hiding beneath his tunic, nesting in his body--small, oblong seeds sown to gestate.

Clutching the fabric at his collar to steady himself, his third eye bulged. A flow of Rolloluca harmonized them -- with his hands over the seeds in his body and his brother both, he felt out the plantlife sprouting within them, their roots aglow in his mind's eye as fluorescent tracers pulsating through their hosts. The lattices in his own body had barely begun to grow, appearing as hairy fibers extending from the seeds; but Maru's had already spread as veins, crawling through the scaffolding of his muscles and tendons and bones to wrap him in the winding grasps of tiny treefingers. Seeing this, a fearful tremble quaked up Cross' hand, and he slowly, reluctantly, released Maru from his hold.

When he looked up again, the reality of what he witnessed blanched all but shock from his expression.

「... We can't let this leave the realm...」 --hoarsely, was all he could plead.

[eidyllon]

It never occurred to Maru that there was a variable he never considered in his efforts to transplant his people into an entirely different ecosystem. The country of Japan seemed a suitable place to settle for its scenery, its culture, and above all, its unique attribution to Kalyan creation. For all the research he undertook, he failed to consider an epidemic could erase his people.

As these thoughts assailed his mind, several more flowers slowly bloomed from underneath his collar. His robes began to rumble from the flowers protruding rapidly upon his chest. His brows furrowed, and he gently pushed on the flowers, feeling the petals collapsed under his touch, and yet were resilient.

Without considering his brother's feelings, he took it upon himself to test the structural integrity of the first flower upon his crown. He ripped it off in a quick motion, stared at it, and suddenly felt the tingling sensation he recalled upon its first bloom. He dropped the flower.

"You are not infected. Perhaps, you have some agency to ward against this disease. If there are others like you, Cross, then we only have to worry about the rest of us," he spoke with golden trims of hope.

[eidyllic]

Cross' budding fears flowered manifest on his brother's body, his widening eyes caught in the trance of the rippling disease pushing at Maru's robes. The growth transfixed him in its sudden severity, which Maru then woke him from in a violent sundering of roots and flesh.

Fibers and blood vessels popped, the coiled plant matter trapping epidermal chunks within its whorls and weighing its collision with floor to a damp splatter. His fear slackening to dull disbelief, Cross stared at his brother, the void of emotion where his horror once lingered a reprimand conveyed in withheld care.

「Why would you do that?」 Years of apprehension toward his brother's behavior soured his question, but even he winced at the way he delivered those words, pricked by their acrid bite. Yet he pressed on, not wanting to stall long enough to hear an answer. 「... Regardless, that wouldn't make sense. We should assume I'm infected, too.」 Biologically, nothing differentiated them enough to immunize Cross but infect Maru; he considered it a certainty that foreign invaders brushed his cells, slower but just as potent.

He drew a steadying breath. 「Either we figure out how to cure this, or we ensure it ends with us.」