A Lullaby for Gods Chapter 37

I kept rewriting and rewriting this, so it took a while, but yay, it's here.

xxxvii. Seek And You Shall Find

There’s a lot they have to catch up on in terms of understanding the situation, but the young man has tried to teach Aradia and Sollux everything he deems important, and everything he can remember about what happened before he was killed, even though he's getting more reluctant to share his knowledge as more time (or not-time) passes in the bubble. If they’re to work together, Aradia expects to be told everything – that may not be possible for now, since everything she’s being told is coming from someone whose knowledge stops at his time of death, but it’s a starting point. And they haven’t even exhausted the young man’s memories yet.

And they still haven't gotten a response from the young knight's friends. 

Aradia's fully on board and invested at this point. Sollux is more hesitant but if Aradia is going, then he is too. The young man is restless - he's afraid and guilty, which Aradia thinks is understandable, especially since they've already sent the message and are tensely waiting for a response that may not be positive.

If Aradia has to convince him one more time that this isn't a mistake, she's going to pull her own horns out. 

At the moment, the young man is cooking, which seems to be his own form of stress-relief, and Aradia isn’t complaining even if she doesn’t need to eat, because Sollux does, and as far as stress-relief techniques go, this is one of the healthier options.

“Can I ask you something?” She’s already asking, but she can’t help her own curiosity. While she knows the young man’s story, she knows nothing about him. Nothing about his personal preferences, nothing about what he likes and what he doesn’t, nothing about the things a friend should know.

Aradia likes to think they are, at least, friends.

The young man smiles and nods. “Go ahead.”

“What’s up with the tarts?”

That gets her a laugh. An actual, head-thrown-back cackle that she can’t help but smile at even if it’s probably borne out of nervousness.

“I was expecting far more personal questions, so that was a surprise,” the young man says, “Can I ask why that in particular?”

“You said you hated them, but -” Aradia motions to the tray he’s just freshly made and set on the table she’s sitting by as she reads her book.

He seems to sober up, wiping his hands on his apron and sighing. He looks away, turning to the sink. “I do.”

“So why do you keep making them?” Aradia asks.

The young man slowly makes his way to the chair next to her’s, pulling it out and taking a seat. He continues to wipe his hands absent-mindedly, and as he stares at the table’s surface, his eyes flicker to hollow sockets for a second.

“My brother liked them.”

The weight of that answer drags a ball of nervousness into Aradia’s stomach, and she nods, grave. “Oh.” 

“I really hated them because I ate too much of them once as a kid,” the young man says, “But my brother liked them a lot, so I…” He trails off, and waves a hand.

“I’m sorry I asked.”

He snorts, plastering on a strained smile. “Don’t be. The way I introduced it to you, you had to have wondered,” he says, “I also hate pasta spaghetti. The very sight of it makes me heave.”

Aradia laughs. “I’ve never had that, but I’m guessing you’re not going to be making it for us any time soon?”

“Not a chance,” he says, leaning back. Then, softly, “Maybe the others will, when they finally take you out of here.”

The silence that follows is uncomfortable, which is telling. Aradia tries to focus on her book again, but ends up glancing up at the young man too often. It’s clear he misses his friends and family, but – Aradia really doesn’t know if she can drag him out with them either. 

Perhaps if she found a life player. But then again, he’d have to abandon his post here. 

The fishbowl is still waiting in the living room. It has miraculously not gathered dust since they’ve set it up there.

“Do you think they planned it that we’d end up here?” Aradia asks, “Your friends?”

The young man chuckles. “I think they had other plans,” he says, spreading his hands, “And then you ran off and tore it up to shreds, and it was just their luck – or mine, perhaps, working in their favor, because even in death, we still are a team – that you ended up here, when you were so close to one of the Heir of Blood’s infected battlefields.”

“Infected,” Aradia says, testing it out. “You say it like it’s some kind of disease. Like what he’s done is…”

“Some form of sickness?” the young man asks, “You could say that. I suppose…” He quiets down for a moment, bringing his hands up to the table to study his palms like the answers are there. Behind him, the pot is still cooking away, the stove burning bright underneath it. 

“I suppose he was brought into existence to punish us. Turned into some fancied-up metaphor that’s supposed to teach us all a lesson. Skaia is fond of punishing its players for their hubris.”

“You said he had a purpose.”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t gotten to that yet.”

The young man offers her a pained smile, but says nothing of that. Instead, he says, “The blood is sacred.”

Aradia frowns. “I don’t – I don’t understand.”

She knows from experience that blood is sacred. Her entire culture revolves around the blood caste system. Fuchsias were close to being deified, violets were next to them, purples were royalty and blues were aristocrats. The lower you were on the system, the lesser your worth, and Aradia knows that more than anyone. As a child, she’d sometimes found herself wondering if The Sufferer had been correct to question this system, for what was blood but something that kept their bodies running? They weren’t the same color, yes, but let a person bleed enough and they die all the same. She’d wondered how any of her grand-dams had gritted their teeth through all the prejudice, and she’d wondered that again after Vriska had paralyzed Tavros – she always was fond of pushing him around, confident in her blood status.

“I’m sorry,” the young man says, “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant it was sacred in a sacrificial way.”

“Oh,” Aradia says, her expression clearing. She hadn’t even realized she’d been glaring at her book. She closes it and sets it down. “No, I’m sorry, my brain just went straight to Alternia.”

“That’s not any surprise,” the young man says, “Alternia’s system always was unfair.”

“Have you been there?”

He shrugs. “Not really.”

She senses she’s not going to get any clear answers from that, so she tries to backtrack, tries to find something she can expand on. “The blood is sacred?”

“Skaia is fond of its stories,” the young man says. And again, in a softer voice, he says, “And its punishments.” He gently pushes his chair back and forth so it rocks, slowly, as he talks. “The life of every living thing is in the blood, and that is why the Lord commanded that all blood be poured out on the altar to take away the people’s sins. Blood, which is life, takes away sins.”

“You’ve lost me again,” she says.

He draws in a breath. “There’s a lot to talk about here, and I feel as if to understand a story in its entirety, we must start from the beginning.”

“When your friends and I will work together, they will tell me everything, yes?” 

“Everything’s a lot,” he says, “You might pity someone too much and it may cost you your life. They don’t – they can’t have that on their hands. Not again. We’ve put too many people in danger.”

She supposes that’s fair, but she doesn’t like it.

“What can you tell me?”

“I can tell you that we made a mistake,” he says. He sounds tired again. “A grave, arrogant one. And someone had to pay the price. Someone had to be our sacrificial lamb.”

It clicks, somehow. Aradia knows little of Earth’s legends and stories, but that, coupled with what he’d told her – it fits, and she can see a picture form. One scene in a series of many. “Blood, which is life, takes away sins,” she echoes.

The young man nods slowly.

Aradia’s palms feel cold. Maybe this isn’t as black and white as she’d initially thought it was. Maybe there’s something else she’s missed. So many details that she’s missed, and he’s right, everything is a lot, but she has to know.

“What happened?” she asks, “What happened? What did you do?”

He doesn’t get to answer, because Sollux is running to the kitchen, a scrap of paper in his hand. 

“Uh,” he says, looking between them, the young man half-slumped over in his chair, and Aradia looking frantic. “Guys, we got a response.”

Finally. Aradia still needs answers, but she’s gotten a response from the rest of the young man’s friends, and this is a start. She waits as Sollux takes a seat beside her and slides the note over to her, already decoded. The boy had been studying ciphers alongside her after all.

The young man doesn’t turn their way, only runs his fingers through his hair as he tries to compose himself. “What does it say?”

“It says they’re going to visit soon,” Aradia says, “They want to meet us to confirm things, I guess. Or check that you haven’t been murdered again.”

Sollux grins at that, and the mood lightens as Aradia and the young man find themselves laughing. “Should we send them a response?” he asks.

The young man shakes his head. “No. Let’s just wait for them,” he says, “Does it say anything else?”

“Well, uh.” Sollux lifts the letter up to squint at it. “It’s asking that if we’re really sure about this, and how would we feel like about going to somewhere called – ” He has a hard time pronouncing the next word “ – Asgard?”

-

The meeting with their possible benefactor goes surprisingly well. They’re brought into a considerably huge house with a pretty garden out front and a view of the ocean out back, and are introduced to a soft-spoken, amiable human whose name has already slipped Dirk’s mind. He’s already decided he’s not going to address them by name, only by title, because it will be clear that he doesn’t remember, and thus might offend them from this lapse in politeness.

Their benefactor doesn’t seem like the person to be quickly offended though. 

Still, he’d rather play it safe, considering they’d been generous enough to give him and Damara their own rooms, and Dirk has already passed out in his own room for four hours earlier that day, body suddenly realizing it was incredibly tired, and that a comfortable mattress was the ideal place to sleep in. 

He hasn’t been called down for anything, so it’s fine. He has enough time to get changed (they’d been given clothes too – this human was rich as hell) when he wakes up from his nap, and enough time to snoop around the house. If he listens to his manners, he has no right to do that, but if he listens to his paranoia then he has to risk looking the gift horse in the mouth in case its teeth are spikes (he knows he’s butchering that saying but hey, it fits).

He doesn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but he does take note of a few things. For a house belonging to someone wealthy, there’s no servants at all. In fact, aside from Ben (who’d immediately been pulled aside by their host after introductions were made and living spaces were distributed, so he could be patched up and coddled - there’s probably something going on there that Dirk is not going to butt in), there’s no evidence of anyone else living in the house aside from its owner.

Which would explain the light sheen of dust around some of the things in the house, he supposes. Maybe the human liked living by themself and cleaning around to clear their head? Maybe Ben helped when he stopped by? And of course, when you’re cleaning by yourself and still have things to do, you can’t get to every single surface, so there’s bound to be a few parts you’d miss.

Dirk still can’t help but feel like the house is aged. Or hastily cleaned-up. 

Why are you so suspicious of everything?

There’s plenty of reasons to be. But there’s photos all around the house though, and it shows their host with their family. They look younger, of course. In a lot of photos, they’re still a child, or a teenager, but it’s unmistakably them. The question is, where are the rest of the family? Perhaps this is a vacation house, and they’d just inherited it, and they prefer to live in it by themself? A young isolated heir? It’s possible.

Dirk wouldn’t blame them, if every book or film he’s read and seen is correct. A lot of young heirs feel stifled by their rich family and often seek out a place of solace for themselves, some even going as far as wanting to make a name for themselves without the fame that comes with their family’s legacy.

Not that he’s an expert or anything.

He finds Damara in the backyard staring out at the ocean, and beside her, his little seagull friend.

It immediately flaps over to him, landing on his shoulder, when he closes the backdoor.

“Hey buddy,” he says, raising a hand to gently run a finger over its head, and it leans in close. “You followed us here too, huh?”

“It’s following you everywhere,” Damara says. She sounds calmer than Dirk’s ever heard her. Maybe the ocean really does things for everyone.

He walks over to her, leaning his arms on the fence beside her. “Let it,” he says, “It’s got no one else at this point.”

“And when we go to New York?”

Dirk pauses. “You’re really set on that, huh?”

“There’s nothing else we can do at this point,” she says, “We’re already here, and that human’s already making preparations for us to leave as soon as we can, as discreetly as we can.”

“And if we run into trouble?” he asks.

Damara shrugs. She’s strangely calm today. He wonders if it has something to do with plans going well, or maybe she’s just glad to have someplace decent to sleep. There’s no sopor to dunk herself in, but maybe comfortable beds are enough.

“Then we run trouble through,” she says.

Dirk snorts. “Poetic.”

“I try.”

“Really though,” he says, and as he exhales, he almost expects his breath to mist. It’s cold here, and the sun has already set as he’s spent most of his time asleep or exploring already. Soon, they’ll have dinner, and he’ll probably have to talk to their host again, and he hopes he’ll survive that. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”

“I don’t know,” Damara says. It’s as honest as she’s ever been with him. “I hope so.”

“That’s all we have, isn’t it?” He huffs out a sigh. “We keep hoping so.”

“We’ve always been hoping so, Strider-san,” Damara says. She straightens and rolls one of her shoulders to ease out the burn in her muscles. “Since we’ve been playing the game, we’ve always been hoping.”

And she’s been playing the game since long before him, he realizes. 

The reality of how long this SBURB session has been for her hits him. The reality of how long each session is, really. While he’s only been dealing with his own session for – what, a few years, at most? – there’s others like her whose games never properly finished, and thus, never really ended. 

They just get scratched, and its players are thrown in the back burner, forever in stasis.

What kind of existence is that, he wonders, to forever be floating in the void, reliving the same memories over and over again. Passing through possibilities, but being unable to take any steps forward to turn them into realities, being unable to claim a life and a second chance.

This is her second chance. It’s a blessing and a curse. 

And Dirk’s unfairly lucky that he’s never needed a second chance to begin with. Or perhaps he does, to fix his mistakes borne out of arrogance, thinking he can singlehandedly lead a team to victory when Skaia teaches teamwork.

“Yeah,” he says, “You know, you have some real wisdom to impart sometimes when you’re not angry.”

“I have real wisdom to impart to those who take the time to listen,” she says, and snaps her fingers so close to his face he has to flinch back. She’s laughing the entire time she goes back into the house, amused by his bewildered reaction.

-

He’s quick to learn that their benefactor doesn’t stay in the house a lot. 

They give him and Damara keys, show them around certain parts of the house to tell them how a few things work (and old technology is fascinating to Dirk), but most days, they’re out doing who knows what. Not that Dirk is complaining. He has an actual computer now, he has a steady internet connection, and he doesn’t have to worry about where he’s going to sleep for the night or what he’s going to eat. It’s a stroke of good luck.

Suspicious good luck. When he brings it up to Damara, they end up arguing, and then fighting, and then not talking to each other for days. They’re still not talking right now, in fact. Damara wants to move forward and Dirk wants to sit tight and think, and both qualities are good, but Dirk is aware they need to strike a balance. 

And it must be insulting to her, when she’s worked hard in approaching Ben and getting them this deal, and for Dirk to suddenly want to back out from it. He feels shame burn from his cheeks to his ears as he thinks about this.

He’ll apologize. Maybe later, when his own anger has cooled off, and Damara’s not intent on ignoring him.

For now, he’s busy continuing his research. In the past week, he’s already trawled through a lot of sketchy forums that talk about the Avengers and the Safehouse, and conspiracy theories about the missing mutants. They’re government experiments who’d escaped and were being reclaimed, some said. Or are actual threats and sleeper agents being discreetly wiped off the map.

It’s a little wild, if he’s being honest, how people of this era think. He’d imagined them to be a bit more different, but since he’s just shown up here, he has a lot to learn, and learn he will. He has time.

He signs up for more than a dozen forums and keeps track of them as the days pass, keeping tabs on anything noteworthy and trying to cross-reference them as best as he can. He asks questions and sometimes he gets answers and sometimes he doesn’t.

Damara continues to say nothing to him when they pass by each other in the hallway, but she has stopped glaring, which is a good sign.

One night, when he’s still up and awake from combing through another shady site, he tries to go down to the kitchen to get himself a glass of orange juice and some leftover pizza. The hallways are dark as they’d turned off the lights, and with the house being sizeable enough to be lost in, he finds himself wandering through hallways he’d been told were private.

One room has light peeking out of the crack under its door.

They hadn’t been given keys to this one. He shouldn’t check it out, but his curiosity is telling him to.

He ducks down, slowly, and creeps on the balls of his feet, light and nimble, making no noise as he approaches the door. It’s firmly closed, and if he has to guess, it’s probably locked, but he won’t risk getting attention by trying to jiggle the knob open. He lowers himself down onto the floor, thankful he’s decided to ditch the shades for what was supposed to be a quick trip to the kitchen, and trying to peer through the crack. It’s not easy, and he doesn’t get anything clear but a strip of light trying to burn out his retinas, but he does hear things.

He hears their benefactor, and he hears Ben, and he hears other people.

When had their host gotten home? Or sneaked in this many people without Dirk hearing the gates or the front door open?

“He did what?” That’s their host’s voice. They sound panicked yet exhausted.

“It’s fine, we took care of it.” Ben, this time. “Really, just – ”

“No. No, listen – we angered him – ”

“We constantly risk angering him. This is not unprecedented. This is not your fault.”

Dirk raises an eyebrow, attention captured. That’s a new voice. It has a bit of an accent, and it sounds strained and exasperated.

“Palmer’s tongue got cut off!” 

There’s a harsh slap, someone’s palm hitting a table, and then silence. Dirk wants to move to a more comfortable position to get the burn out of his shoulder, but he doesn’t want to get found out.

“I’m just – ” A sob. “I’m trying my best to fix this, and every time something goes right, we have to work twice as hard to patch things up. One of these days, we’re going to miss something, and it’s going to bite us right in the ass.”

The new voice speaks again. “If it’s any consolation, we already missed one thing.”

Another pause.

“…you know, we’re friends, but sometimes your humor makes me want to punch you in the face.” 

There’s a few laughs, and Dirk listens intently, trying to pick out how many people are in the room. Five? Six?

The next voice that speaks makes Dirk harken, and that sets off another warning bell in his head. He’s had a lot of those recently. It’s captivating, like it’s laced with magic. It makes him want to listen. 

It sounds young though.

“Strategically, that puts…how should I call them, our team? Their team? Team Chaos Extended?”

“The Safehouse Crew?” Ben asks.

Dirk’s brain is running overtime committing everything he’s hearing to memory.

“Okay, that works,” the nice voice says, chuckling, “Strategically, that puts them at a disadvantage because even on our end, we rely a lot on my abilities. With Cecil down, they’ll have their ability to compel halved, but they still do have Loki.”

“This is such a trippy thing to be talking about,” says another voice. It sounds muffled.

“You’re telling me,” says the one with the accent.

“We’ve been at this for centuries, guys,” Ben says.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t – it wasn’t this session,” says the muffled voice.

There’s a shuffling. Dirk can see something moving on the floor, feet walking over to a seat. 

“How can you be so calm about this?” asks the host, softly. “I don’t even care about strategies right now. We almost lost two people.”

“But we didn’t.”

“But we could have,” they say, sighing.

Another pair of feet are moving, stopping near the loveseat. “Angel,” the accented voice says, “We didn’t. And you’re allowed to feel awful about this, but you can’t keep blaming yourself for it every time, alright? We need to move forward, like we always do.”

“I’m not supposed to be doing this,” Angel says – and Dirk runs the name over and over in his mind. He doesn’t know how it feels. It doesn’t feel whole, somehow. Every soul has its own identity, see, and names are part of those identities. This is why names have power. And this name doesn’t fit in right, but it doesn’t feel false like whatever name their host had introduced themself as to Dirk, the name Dirk’s already forgotten. “This isn’t my function. This isn’t how I’m supposed to function.”

“We’ve all had to work outside our limits more than once,” Ben says, also walking over. “But we get by. Teamwork at its finest, yeah?”

There’s a few moments of sniffling and muffled sobs, and Dirk feels like he’s intruding on something private. A tender moment between whoever these people are, but he’s so close to finding something out. He could listen until they’re done, or he could even open the door and see who’s on the other side.

He looks up at the doorknob for a second.

“Okay,” says Angel, voice shaky. “Okay. Run what we have by me again. We need to think this through.”

“Cecil’s condition is stabilized, but he hasn’t woken up yet,” says Accent. Dirk needs to make up names for them so it doesn’t sound so clunky in his head. “It’s either because of the drugs, fatigue, and the blood loss – in which case, that’s normal – or because of the exhaustion from the bloodleech and then being possessed by horrorterrors.”

Horrorterrors?

“We can’t check on him, can we?” 

“We can, but we’ll have to be careful. I imagine everyone else is on high alert right now, Kevin especially.”

There’s another heavy pause.

Angel switches to another topic. “We’ll just have to hope he’ll be fine then. How’re Tony and Steve doing?”

“They’ve been visiting the hospital frequently, but they return every night to the tower.”

“Good,” Angel says, “Although I imagine they’re in quite the dilemma of having to choose between saving Cecil or Feferi first.”

Feferi. Where had he heard that name?

“What else?”

“Dave Strider is also still comatose.”

Dirk nearly chokes on his breath.

Dave is here.

Dave is here, on this earth, and he’s hurt and comatose due to whatever mistake these bastards made. How long has the boy been here? Hell, how long has he been in a coma? Dirk finds himself bunching up the carpet underneath his fist, burst of anger lowering his self-control for a moment. Then he lets the fabric go, silent, hoping that made no noise.

“Any complications when you were working on him?”

Ben’s the one to answer this time. “Loki managed to seal up his injury, but with his blood loss, he was still bound to die, or at the best case scenario, suffer anemia for a few days. We managed to delay time like we did with Cecil and perform a blood transfusion spell.”

“Complications, ‘ben.”

“…there’s definitely going to be some. Like you said, we were working outside of our limits.”

“It’s going to regress?”

“It might.”

“Fuck.”

“Angel?” Accent’s talking again. He’s getting up too, and his footsteps – 

Dirk scrambles back. His footsteps are getting closer to the door. 

Then they stop, and Dirk realizes that he’s just been found out. He slowly gets to his feet. If he makes a noise, they can follow it and take him down. He needs to get away silently.

There’s a flash of green light behind him, and with his chance to get away dropping to zero, he whirls around, summoning his katana from his sylladex and striking up. The blade clashes against a golden staff held in the hands of the man he’s facing. 

The door opens behind him. He’s cornered.

“Angel,” the man says, “Why was it a good idea to use your mother’s old vacation house again?”

“Goddamnit – Strider, stand down!” 

Dirk doesn’t turn around, too busy holding his ground against the heavy staff threatening to break the blade of his sword.

“Strider!”

“Put him to sleep,” the man says. 

Dirk slides his blade down then, taking the staff with it and making the emerald-encrusted tip of the weapon bury itself into the hardwood floor, piercing through the carpet and throwing splinters in the air. He flashsteps to the end of the hallway, intent on running downstairs, but then remembers that Damara is still in the house.

There’s another flash of green and then his arms are being pinned to his back, sword swatted out of his hand. He thrashes, tries taking to the air, but the one with the nice voice looks at him and says, “Sleep.”

He does. In the morning, he wakes up exhausted and doesn’t remember a thing of what he’s heard.