Summary: After seeing your worth and relenting his goals to bring about the Great Rejoining, Emet-Selch visits you one last time.
But you don't want him to leave.
[Loosely related/prequel ficlet of sorts]
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For all the times that you’d seen Emet-Selch, it had never truly crossed your mind to the fact that the man was actually there. You’ve experience enough with spirits and specters for the caution to have some virtue, though it’s not one that you ever sought confirmation for--it simply never seemed relevant.
But you’ve gotten your answer at last, though it had not been your intention in even a few short minutes ago.
Arms wrapped tight around the man’s chest, tugging his body so close against yours that it nearly hurts. You had half-expected him to turn to smoke against your touch, so the surprise that fills your eyes when they look into the man’s gaze is as powerfully genuine as it is matched by shock in his own.
Your lips part. No words come out. Just a breath so soft that you hardly hear it yourself.
Though he makes no attempt to pull away from your grip, you can feel the Asican’s golden eyes upon you, as if boring into your very soul. Though it unnerves you, it does in the same way that most of him does--the way that his presence and form and voice but screams in being other, though it could have easily been due to your blessing naturally responding to a soul so opposite your own.
So old.
So ancient.
So lonely.
The man tilts his head and breaks the trance of the moment. Suddenly you can breathe again, though your arms yet wrap tight around his body--and he does not move away.
“Did I hear you right?” The Ascian murmurs, just a touch too soft to be scathing. “Because I could have sworn I heard a voice call out ‘please don’t go!’ as if one was calling for their own parent.”
A moment passes, and so your grip lingers. Your eyes fall away from the Ascian’s gaze but you make no attempt to speak--those had been your words but moments ago, when you feared that Emet-Selch was about to leave your presence in a vortex of shadow.
You were terrified if you’d ever see him again after that.
You were horrified by the idea of the man, this Ascian, never once showing up again in your life. No snide remarks, no play of words or wit--it was more than just losing a familiar thorn pricked deep in your finger, but of someone you’d come to be comfortable around.
Someone who, despite it all, felt familiar to your very soul, though you could hardly place why.
With no answer forthcoming from you, the man seemed happy to fill it with the sound of his own voice, still as soft as before--a noticeable difference from how he tended to talk.
“Is that what you are now, dear warrior? Do you so prize the company of a being who has tried to kill you and your friends--so much that you may cry out with such fervor when I decide to take my leave?”
The words are painful but the tone lacks a bite, as if drained of venom. Hollow. When they fall upon the air they sound more like a challenge than an accusation.
So you hug him tighter. Emet-Selch feels warm against you, warm and strong and broken in some of the same ways you are. You can’t ignore the way you feel when he’s close to you--the buzzing deep in your chest, as if your soul can’t help but try and reach out to his.
Lonely, almost lost to the eons of empty time.
But you hug him. You hold him tight. Your fingers dig into the leather of his jacket and you can’t find the ounce of will to release the grip.
“...Yes,” the word spills from your lips, beginning a gentle torrent that can’t be staved or filtered quick enough. “Because I know you don’t want to leave.”
You hear the softest catch in the man’s breath.
But suddenly Emet-Selch scoffs and shakes his head lightly, as if to rid himself of even the idea itself.
“What gave you such a stupid notion?”
You tilt your head so you can look into the man’s eyes again. Though the words would have pushed a notion of the man’s growing agitation, their tone revealed the Ascian’s expression before you finally caught sight of it.
He looks confused.
“Perhaps your soul is more broken than I assumed. Fragile and foolish and.....”
It’s only then that the Acian seems to lose his words. They trail off into silence, one that lingers for several heavy seconds until, at last, all the man has for you is but one word:
“Why?”
It’s not easy to give him an answer, since you are balancing on the edge of impulse and instinct. But the words must be somewhere in your heart already, for they bubble up unscathed and untangled against your tongue and teeth that threaten to rattle with nervousness.
“You’re lonely too,” you murmur. “I...can feel it. I felt it. You don’t want to leave. You can stay here with me--help us make the world a better place.”
“And you think it would be that easy?”
“Of course not,” you argue gently, growing bold as your body catches onto the man’s material realness--his body heat, his gentle pressure. “But it’s better than hiding in some corner of a forgotten Shard.” Your brows knit together. “You told me not to forget--to remember you and your people. That you existed. Why not join us and keep their history alive by your actions?”
It’s hard to keep Emet-Selch’s gaze for longer than a few more seconds, as his silence begins to feel heavier and heavier upon your shoulders until it’s more than you can handle. It’s then that the shame and worry start to creep in, that perhaps you’ve let instinct go too far, that your words are foolish idealizations.
You worry for what feels like an eternity of its own.
But then it’s suddenly warm, your body, and the realization almost overwhelms you of arms slowly wrapping around your body. They hold tight, matching the power of your grip, until it hurts and you let out a soft noise of discomfort--
--and then they loosen. Just a little. Apologetic. Learning.
“...perhaps you are worthy to inherit what my people have left behind,” the Ascian finally murmurs, though the words feel more like feigned cover for something deeper behind them. “If you are yet so willing to keep me nearby, then I will take amusement in it. For now.”
And he hugs you in return. He hugs you in a way that feels awkward and new, like he’s yet to figure out the pressure to apply around your shoulders. He speaks like there’s eons of emotions beneath his words, thousands of lifetimes of thoughts and hopes and dreams.
He feels lonely in the same way you do deep inside, and yet his arms are firm and his gesture is honest.
Summary: What might have happened if, in the final battle, you hadn't formed the light into a weapon to kill? What if instead, whether purposed or not, it became a weapon of raw empathy, a foundation of connection between two souls--one mortal, the other immortal--to bridge the gap of differed perspectives and experiences as large as the eons themselves.
What might have happened?
[Loosely related/sequel ficlet of sorts]
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In the final moments of battle, you contemplated what lay around you. You contemplated the feelings bursting forth in your chest, a light that threatened to tear your soul to pieces. Even as the entirety of existence seemed to rip apart at the seams, you looked at Emet-Selch’s form and could feel every onz of his pain and misery and desperation.
Even as precious moments trickled past, even as pain sears into the deep center of your very existence, the weapon in your hand is not one to sunder and slay--the effort takes the whole of your being and beyond, but where there was once the burning agony of light that filled your soul over there was suddenly clarity. Pain became hope, agony became passion, misery became enlightenment. With every fiber of your being you changed the light itself into a tool, a weapon, cleansed of its fire and instead into something even more devastating.
When the smoke finally cleared and the adrenaline of battle began to settle, Emet-Selch stood before you, once more in the body of Solus. Your eyes meet with his and, in the span of a breath, you can feel as if the eons separating your souls have suddenly contracted into little more than the brief moments between heartbeats. Suddenly there is no more wall of understanding--one soul to another with no regard to fragmentation, no heed on worth or creed or the concept of fragility. It’s not as if the man’s eyes have been washed with new information, but it’s as if he looks at you anew, as if...
As if, in the brief exchange of your soul and his, he caught a glimpse of something within you. Your thoughts, your life, your emotions, laid bare and overpowering. Eons become seconds, thoughts become memories, and in the twisting span of what is and what was, you are sure that there are tears starting to fall down the curve of the man’s cheek and something deeply familiar tugging at your heart--
And then he is gone. Like that, Emet Selch is gone. Disappeared, but not slain.
You can feel it, though you don’t know how.
It takes time for you to recover, and time still for your friends to make sense of what happened. But they move on and, slowly, so do you--for the longest time, it’s truly as if Emet-Selch had actually died at the climax of the battle between you both. The Exarch is alive and well, Norvrandt is saved from destruction and you, your soul, are whole and hale once more in every manner of being.
When the dust settles, when the people begin their rebuilding of the world one brick and board at a time, you find yourself wondering when you’ll see the Ascian’s face again. For the first while you think he is merely waiting for the opportunity to ruin all the good that’s been done.
But it doesn’t happen.
For the next while you wonder if he’s simply given up on the First entirely, opting to join back upon the Source and wreck havoc upon a situation already standing on the precipice of chaos.
But it doesn’t happen.
At last, many weeks later, you find yourself wondering if you should merely forget about the Ascian and continue on with your life--the twelve only knew how much you already had to worry about. But even then, even when the other Scions have all but chalked the soul up for dead and for bigger things to worry about, you still find yourself plagued by thoughts of the Ascian and his final words to you:
Remember our history.
Remember us.
You certainly don’t think you even can to begin with, the memories all but etched into your soul. Of places and beings and worlds and lives lived years upon years before the earliest creatures of the First even walked. Eons ago.
So you keep your promise to him: you remember. You let your mind run free in the evenings, when there is naught else to hear but the sound of your own thoughts, when memories become real once more behind your eyelids, old words a whisper in your years. It’s like the lives of eons past are but a show within your dreams--it’s as if you’re connected to something, someone, and you are privy to their most intimate recollections of a life they yet longed to have again.
It doesn’t take long for you to realize to whom the memories and feelings of yearning belong to
In fact, the very man visits you several nights after they begin.
You’re worried at first, when Emet-Selch enters your quarters. You are ready to fight in little more than a shaken breath, heart pounding in instinct alone long-since driven into your skull, before the man but gestures with his hands in an open admission of peace.
“For once, I assume, a visitor in your quarters late into the evening has no desire to kill you,” Emet-Selch says, before his eyes shift to the side and his lips purse in a moment of thought. “...Unless you have other sorts of people who come to you in the evenings with no warning. Regardless I am here for neither, you’ll be happy to know that I would likely perish if I even attempted it--and, as we both know from the fact that I am talking to you, well...I’m still trying to figure out why you let that happen.”
It takes a long time for you to even let your guard down, let alone take your eyes from the man in the center of the room. It takes longer still for you to move back to your bed. Emet-Selch talks throughout the entirety, curious about the things you had seen of him. Of his memories. Of his thoughts. Though ancient, he is curious to know what you think of them.
And thus creates the first evening of conversation between the two of you. From enemies to cautious partners of conversation, the days came and went with the Ascian visiting you every couple of nights, always with a wry smile on his lips and a biting wit to his tongue. He would come to you and talk--sometimes he would be the only one doing the talking--playing out a facade that he couldn’t keep very well hidden.
You could feel how lonely he was. And he knew it.
Perhaps it was the echo. Perhaps it was because of your last-moment mercy. Perhaps still it is simple fate, the entwining of souls, the will of a power much larger than yourself. Perhaps it’s all of those things and yet still perhaps it is none.
But there is no denying that, of all the people that Emet-Selch could have connected to, he doesn’t seem to dislike your company.
In fact, as the weeks and months begin to go by and the Ascian never fails to visit, when you begin to see flickers of darkness at the corner of your eyes in heated battles--ones that down the enemy with no source of the blow, when you begin to put all the pieces of your new sense of normal together into one cohesive picture...
