Work Text:
Jim didn't expect to be out this late, but turning back time has left him with a busier schedule than intended. The darkness of the park carries an eerie feeling with it, even more so now that Jim understood what was really happening behind the scenes. Any sense of fear, unease or exhaustion is immediately forgotten, however, when Jim's eyes catch on a familiar figure, and he freezes in his tracks, calling out against his better judgement.
"Douxie?"
The teen stiffens, turning slowly. Jim thinks his heart could burst from relief as Douxie looks back at him. "It’s you," he says breathlessly, disbelieving. “You’re alive.”
It occurs to him, then, how bizarre the whole scene must seem. Douxie doesn't remember him, doesn't even know who he is, but Jim does, and the memory of his friend's lifeless body was still not even a full day old in his mind. He wouldn't be surprised if it stuck with him forever. Jim shakes his head to clear those thoughts, swiping at his eyes upon feeling them well up. "Sorry, this must seem really weird. It's just... it's really good to see you."
Douxie just stares at him, like he's trying to pick him apart. Jim doesn't blame him; a random kid coming up to you at 11 pm in the park and proclaiming how happy they were to see you alive couldn't be a normal kind of occurrence. But Jim knew who Douxie was, and what he'd lived through. For the wizard to not even brush him aside with an apologetic smile and a comment about misrecognition was... odd.
When Douxie finally moves towards him, though, it's not confusion that Jim sees in his eyes. It's cognizance. "Jim," he says, voice dangerously low. "What did you do?"
"I—" Jim takes a step back. "Wait a second. You… remember?" He blinks owlishly, mind racing. "Hold up. How is this possible? Nari said only the Trollhunter would know about the other timeline—"
"Timeline?" Douxie's brows furrow, then shoot up in realization. "You used the Chronosphere." And by Deya's grace, in the short time he's known him, Jim has never seen Douxie so brazenly angry before. He moves closer, reaching out to grip the collar of Jim's jacket with both hands. "How could you be so stupid?"
"It was the only way to save everyone!" Jim says defensively, pulling himself out of Douxie's grasp. He looks away. "You weren't supposed to remember anything."
Douxie stares at him, dumbfounded. "And you think that somehow makes it better?" He exhales, shattered fragments of an anxious laugh escaping with the sound. "Do you have any idea the extent of what you've done?"
"Judging by the way you're taking this? I'm gonna say no."
Had they been talking about anything else, Jim would have probably burst out laughing at Douxie's expression. "Time, Jim!" Douxie says simply, no other words to convey the thoughts racing through his mind. His hands card through his hair furiously.
"I'm sorry, Doux," Jim starts. "Really, I am. But..."
The memory of Douxie's sacrifice plays like a video on replay in Jim's mind. How he forced the rest of them off the titan to face Bellroc alone, the terrifying free fall that followed and being cradled in a makeshift net of magic before he could hit the ground. The brilliant blue explosion that shook the earth, and the body of the boy Jim had come to see as a brother crushed beneath the rubble of the titan. Jim remembers the look of peace that had settled across Douxie's face when his body went limp, and he feels his younger heart clench with the pain of it.
"I don't regret it," Jim finishes. He meets Douxie's eyes, standing firm. "Especially now, seeing you alive, and knowing there's a shot of keeping you that way."
"Yeah," Douxie growls, "and I distinctly recall telling you not to bend the rules for me."
"There shouldn't have been rules to bend in the first place!" Jim shoots back. “All of us were there with you. We could have stopped Bellroc together. You didn't need to go and throw yourself away trying to save everyone!"
"Not all of us were there." Douxie's words sound hollow, mournful.
Jim recalls that longing, peaceful look, and realization hits him like a fist to the gut. His stomach churns with grief, and something else, too. He sharpens his gaze into a glare. "You know, you aren't the only one who lost people, Douxie."
"Maybe not," Douxie retorts, "but I like to think that after nine hundred years, I would have been allowed to finally rejoin some of those people."
Jim blinks, bewildered. "So, what? Are you saying that we were all just supposed to move on without everyone? Without you?"
"Yes, Jim." Suddenly, Douxie sounds tired. His expression carries the weight of centuries of grief, even heavier than the burden on Jim's own back. "People die. Especially when they're fighting a war. Sometimes, you just need to live with that fact."
Jim's own eyes narrow. "Even though you couldn't bear the though of doing it yourself anymore?"
Douxie falls silent, turning away, and Jim takes his lack of response as his answer. The short, choked laugh that bubbles up from Jim's throat surprises even him. "Wow," he murmurs quietly. "Talk about selfish."
And really, he doesn't mean for his words to be so harsh. Jim feels something awful twist within his heart the moment they leave his mouth. Maybe it's guilt, or maybe it's hatred towards himself. But, like the way his legs move faster than they ever could before, and how his eyes pierce through the darkness like a torn cloth, it seems that the worst parts of the future have rubbed off on him.
Douxie just stares at him for a long minute. Then, his hands knot themselves into fists. "Don't," he says gravely, "talk to me about selfishness." Blue light flashes in his eyes for a fraction of a second, and he takes a step towards Jim. "You know, somewhere in that pile of restored memories, I recall you once asking yourself what kind of a hero you'd be if you sacrificed everyone else for your own sake. Yet here you are, tampering with a power you can't even comprehend, because that desire to play hero eclipsed any concern you could've had for the people you might be hurting in the process." Douxie stops, inches away from Jim. His shoulders shake with barely contained fury. "Tell me, Jim. Who does that remind you of?"
At that, Jim stiffens. He hates that he doesn't even need to ask who Douxie is talking about. "I'm nothing like Merlin," he snaps, cold and quiet.
Douxie tilts his head, then laughs, entirely devoid of humor. "I'm not so sure about that. It was his amulet that picked you, after all."
"An amulet that you helped him create," Jim bites back. "Don't act like your time alone separates you from him."
"At least I listened to him." Douxie's words strike like cold blades on the skin. "I did what he asked of me because I knew his actions were motivated by the sake of something more, for the hope that tomorrow could be better than today." Douxie jabs a finger into Jim's chest, pushing him back. "But the world was already saved in that timeline. I made sure of that. And you threw that away to turn it all back."
Jim's hand grips Douxie's wrist. "I did it to protect everyone," he argues. "Not just the people we lost while fighting the Order—we can save everyone this time. And now that I'm not the only one who remembers..." Jim's fingers dig hard into Douxie's skin. His eyes are wide, daring to be hopeful. "We can save them all. I know we can."
"Time isn't a toy, Jim." Douxie's eyes are dark. "You can't just use it as a tool to play savior. There's a reason Merlin made the choices that he did. When you know what the future holds, you've got just as many chances to screw it up as you do to fix it." Douxie huffs and tears his arm from Jim's grip, taking a step back. He shakes his head. "You're right, you know," he says after a moment. He fixes Jim with the harshest expression he can muster. "You are nothing like Merlin. What you did was far worse than anything he would have done."
Jim's body moves before his mind does. His arm swings wide and catches the side of Douxie's face in an ireful punch. The force behind his fist must carry some of his future self's strength, too, because there's a sickening crunch as his fingers meet bone, and when Douxie stands straight after stumbling back, Jim sees blood running hot and red from his already bruising nose.
The blood smears across Douxie's knuckles as he brings a hand to his face. "Fuzzbuckets," he hisses, wincing when his fingers brush against the injury. He chuckles darkly. "Right. Suppose I deserved that one."
When the realization of his actions sets in, Jim reaches out towards Douxie. "Are you—" he starts, but is caught off guard as Douxie swings his own fist forward in retaliation. Jim twists his body to the side, but Douxie's hit still lands strong on his cheek. His hand flies to his face as he stares at Douxie, pain blooming under his skin.
"There," Douxie says, bitter. "Now we're even." He steps back and sighs heavily, sinking down to sit on the ground. His elbows drape over his knees as he buries his head in his hands, and in that moment, Jim thinks that Strickler may have been wrong to call him Young Atlas. Jim stares in silence for a moment before settling himself on the ground beside Douxie, legs crossed and hands pressed to the grass.
Neither boy speaks for a long while. They're grateful for the silence of the park, for the darkness of the evening and for the nature of small towns. For a city overrun with its own plethora of creatures, the shadows seem to revel in silence tonight. Perhaps it has something to do with how far back they were on the timeline, but Jim liked to think that the world could just be kind, sometimes.
Finally, Douxie speaks. "Did I ever tell you," he whispers, "what was meant to happen on that castle?" Jim shakes his head. Douxie doesn't look at him, but he reads the silence as permission to continue. "I shouldn't be alive," he admits quietly. "Not because the fall should've killed me—it should've, but that's not really the point." Douxie draws in a slow, shuddering breath, and forces himself to look at Jim. "I didn't expect to make it out alive. In fact, I'd planned on it."
Jim presses his lips into a thin line. "Doux..."
"It seemed like the best, and only, option," Douxie says. "You'd all survive, and the Order would be gone."
"And you?" Jim asks. "Did you think we'd all just move on like nothing happened?"
"Well, you lot didn't exactly have Chronosphere at your disposal back then, did you?" Douxie retorts. He sighs. "I...I don't know what I thought, really. I just knew what it was that I had to do."
Jim reaches out an arm to shove Douxie's shoulder lightly, fresh anger blossoming in his stomach. "Damn it, Douxie," he swears. "Your life has worth, you know. You can't just keep throwing it away on a whim."
Douxie blinks, an inexplicable sadness in his eyes. "Jim," he starts, "after Camelot, when we were attacked by Arthur, you didn't think twice about pushing that shard into your chest, did you?"
Jim's breath catches in his throat. "That's not—" That's not the same, he almost says. Douxie looks at him expectantly, and he sighs. "It was the only choice I had," he replies finally.
Douxie tilts his head, as if to punctuate the point. "There you go," he says. "Then I suppose you understand why I had to do what I did."
"No, Douxie.” Jim’s fingers curl angrily in the grass. “You didn't have to sacrifice yourself—you wanted to. That’s the difference here."
Once again, Douxie says nothing, glancing away and running a thumb over his bloodstained knuckles. Jim sighs. "I'm sorry for not doing what you asked of me," he says softly. "But I can't take it back now. Things are going to happen differently this time around."
Douxie laughs, quiet and short and empty. He leans back. "Maybe. We barely saved the world last time, though. And playing fast and loose with the rules of time rarely ever bodes well for anyone involved."
Despite the heaviness of the moment, Jim feels his lips quirk up in the barest hint of a smile. “Now who's the one who sounds like Merlin?”
Douxie jerks his head up to peer at him incredulously. For a moment, Jim worries that he'll start swinging at him again, but he doesn't. Instead, Douxie's face cracks under the splitting of his lips, and a choked sound bubbles its way out of his throat, something akin to the meshing of a cry and a laugh. Douxie's shoulders shake as he breaks, body pitching forward until he's leaning against Jim, sobbing wordlessly into his shoulder.
The weight of loss hangs heavy over Douxie's shoulders, and Jim hates that it's taken him until now to recognize just how much Douxie had left to grieve. Merlin. Nari. Archie. Camelot, and everything that the history of that era meant to him. His staff, and its intrinsic reflection of his worth as a wizard.
Jim had always been lucky, he realized suddenly. What he sacrificed had kept its meaning. What he mourned, he had recovered. Douxie, in contrast, had long since become accustomed to losing things. So much so, that, when push came to shove, he was more than ready to add himself to the list, fate of the world be damned.
How perfectly, painfully poetic, then, that they were the pillars on which Merlin's legacy stood.
Jim thinks the old wizard would laugh if he could see them now, never one to miss an opportunity to interject with his opinion. Perhaps he would call the both of them mistakes, two sides of the same self-sacrificial coin. Toss them up, watch them spin, and bet the world on them. Heads or tails, it's all the same. There was no greater good to be found here, in their hypocrisy and ideation. They both love too deeply and bleed too red to be forged into fragments of Merlin's armor.
Jim feels eyes prickle with the burn of building tears, and he wraps his arms around Douxie, letting the older boy cry into his shoulder until there's nothing left of him to spill into the world. When Douxie finally pulls himself away, fresh blood has dried and caked to the fabric of Jim's jacket.
"Sorry," Douxie says as Jim stands. He stares at the grass, voice distant and saturated with fatigue.
“It's fine." Jim doesn't know if Douxie's referring to the crying, the blood, or their conversation, but it doesn't really matter to him. He holds out a hand to Douxie, who takes it. "I'm sorry, too. About your nose,” Jim says awkwardly. “I really didn’t think I could still hit that hard. I could ask my mom to look at it, if you want?"
Douxie shakes his head as Jim pulls him up, gingerly prodding at the bone with his fingers. "Don't worry about it," he says, waving the concern off. "Semi-immortality does come with a few perks every now and again. Besides, I don't think it'll be very fun for you to explain to her why I'm like this in the first place."
Jim runs a hand through his hair, sheepish. "Probably not," he agrees, "Still, the offer's always on the table. And not just for this."
"Thank you, Jim," Douxie says, and Jim thinks he means it. "And, if it's any consolation..." Douxie tucks his hands into the pockets of his jacket, hiding their bloody marks from view, and gives Jim a tiny smile. "I meant what I said in my memories. Merlin couldn't have chosen anyone better than you, you know. If there's any shot at fixing this mess... then you'll be the one to get us through it."
Jim seems taken aback, blinking slowly before letting himself smile back. "Thanks, Doux. And you, too," he adds. "Merlin knows a good thing when he sees it. The world's lucky to have you protecting it."
Douxie's shoulders sag, a relief rather than a newly added weight. He nods a silent thanks and turns to leave, blending into the town's familiar shadows. Jim watches him go, and takes comfort in how the uncertainty that settles in his stomach doesn't carry an ounce of fear within it.