Work Text:
You stir awake, exhaustion clawing at your mind as you blearily try to blink away the tears in your eyes. The blurriness of the room around you does not subside, nor does the searing pain in your abdomen. Muffled voices surround you, though you can make out neither the tone nor the contents of their conversation.
You blink again.
There's a hand on your forehead, another holding one of your claws. Warm, soft hands-- hands that cannot belong to another carapacian, that cannot belong to one of your people. If the humans-- the heroes --surround you, it is only polite to introduce yourself.
Your name is-
Your name-
Your-
Something holds you close and tight, and then the world erupts into hazy red and blue lights.
There’s a searing pain in your abdomen.
You black out.
--
You don’t know how long you spend drifting in and out of consciousness. Perhaps it was only a few hours, long enough for you to be moved onto a bed and made comfortable. Perhaps it was a few days, days spent tossing and turning in fitful memories-turned-nightmares.
What you do know is that when you finally manage to retain consciousness, you do not recognize your surroundings. You sit up slowly, careful not to overexert yourself, and glance around the room. It’s rather plain; no decorations or color to be found anywhere. You don’t think anyone had been in here for a long time before putting you here.
Your abdomen aches underneath its carapace.
Your name is the WANING VICTIM, and you have no idea what’s going on.
The last thing you remember is waking up, trapped in the monument where you first watched the Heir, from a nightmare about your failed rebellion. After that, everything grows hazy and confusing. You think you heard explosions outside, and you think you remember being worried for your new friends. Trying to remember anything else only makes your head ache, so you decide to shelve that train of thought for now.
(You think you remember seeing two glowing eyes and a mouth filled with fangs. You… cannot think about that right now.)
Instead, you focus on looking over yourself. If your gut hurts still, there must be some form of injury. You know how to manage injuries. This is something you can do.
When you look down at yourself, you’re horrified to find a gaping hole in the middle of the Rag of Souls. The carapace underneath seems undamaged, though it appears to be scarred over. You take the ripped and fraying edges of the rag into your claws with as gentle and careful a hold as you can, desperately trying to reconnect the edges just to prove to yourself that it’s fixable.
It has to be fixable. This covering is-- it’s all you have left to remind you of your people, of your revolution. You have to be able to fix it.
The threads are too frayed for you to find where they’re meant to connect.
You take a deep breath, desperately fighting back the terror that digs into your throat. No, no, no, you can’t lose them again. You can’t.
They trusted you to lead them to victory, and you led them to their deaths. You have to keep wearing the Rag of Souls, you have to keep honoring their memory, you owe it to them after you killed them.
You close your eyes, only to be met with flashes of memory. Glowing eyes. Sharp teeth. A harlequin uniform, ripped and torn at the edges. A clawed hand ripping through you. Your grip on the Rag of Souls tightens as your breathing picks up. The demon was there. You don’t know what to think, but you’re pretty sure he was the one who tore through your abdomen.
You think you should be dead.
You can’t breathe.
Something lands on your hand. You force your eyes open, fighting through the panicked horror, and--
Serenity is there.
She’s sitting on one of your fists, paying no mind to how tightly you’re gripping your covering, and she’s looking up at you. Her light blinks in a calm, rhythmic pattern, slow and steady and easy to follow. She’s here. She’s here, and as best as you can tell she’s safe and unharmed.
Serenity is here, and she’s safe, and she’s alive, and-- and that means you haven’t lost everyone, you can’t have lost everyone, because if Serenity is here then surely the others are too, right?
You keep struggling to breathe.
Serenity keeps blinking that same calm, steady pattern.
You don’t know how long you’re stuck there, staring and struggling to breathe and failing to think. Eventually though, after far too long, you manage to break out of it.
When you can think again and the blinding terror creeps away from your mind, you can’t help but notice you’re breathing in the same pattern she’s been blinking. A warm smile crosses your face. Of course- of course she’s helping you, even now.
You loosen your grip on the Rag of Souls. She flits from one hand to the other, clearly pleased by your less panicked state, and begins blinking in an erratic manner once more.
If Serenity is here and not trying to convince you to leave, then-- then it has to be safe here. She wouldn’t let you stay somewhere you might get hurt without trying to get both of you out. You’re pretty sure she was going for help when you were trapped.
From the moment you took her out of the amber, from the moment you saved her from her doom, she’s been there for you. You trust her. If there’s anything you know in this moment, it’s that you trust her.
Tension bleeds out of you as you think on this. Serenity is here. Serenity is happy, and unharmed, and not trying to get you up and moving. You have to be safe, though you have no idea where you are and you aren’t entirely sure what happened. You have to be safe. You take another deep breath.
Despite the several naps you are sure you’ve taken recently, exhaustion tugs at you once more. You don’t want to go to sleep alone again. You can’t do it, not after everything. The demon lives in your nightmares, on top of in the waking world, and you don’t have it in you to face him on your own again.
Except that Serenity is still here.
She pauses in her movements for a moment to really look at you. You’re not entirely sure what she’s assessing, but she seems to come to a decision quickly enough, so you don’t really mind.
She flits away from your hands, instead moving to one of the posts at the end of the bed and settling herself there. You stare at her for a long moment before understanding dawns on you.
Neither of you should be alive, you realize. Death has come for both of you, now, has taken both of you into her grasp. And yet here you are: both alive, both breathing, both free. You helped her out of her death, and- and it seems that she’s helping you out of your own.
You fall asleep again only a short while after you figure her out, exhaustion pulling you into its grasp without hesitation.
And as you sleep, Serenity sits watch over you.