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For a moment, there was only one sound in this place, that of crystal shattering on a blade. Two men stared at each other, one in green and the other in orange, before they both closed their eyes and the one in orange began to sink to his knees. They hit the floor with a muffled clatter, his blood red sword following soon after, and he spoke one last thing in tandem with the man in green.
"Thank you."
"I'm sorry."
Thus, Schwann Oltorain fell to the ground and died.
"Schwann!"
The last thing Alexei had remembered was terror - madness. The full, direct knowledge of just how wrong he'd been for the past few years. And then the great apatheia above Zaude falling to crush his body to paste.
But now, Alexei Dinoia staggered through the strange place he found himself in. His heart pounded as he searched desperately for anything, anyone familiar, finding no such thing - until he spotted his first captain. Bare moments before Schwann was cut down by a man wearing his face.
The man in green flinched, his blades brought back up, still standing over Schwann's prone body, and Alexei drew his sword, acting on pure instinct. "How - why?" he snarled. He could still clearly see Schwann's...body, and yet, here was his doppelganger.
"Alexei," murmured the man in shock, whom he now recognized to be Schwann's beloathed alter ego Raven, and the man had the gall to step back from him in fear.
How can there be two of them? he asked himself, head spinning, looking from one man to the other. "Why did you kill him?" Alexei asked aloud, his tone accusatory.
Raven blinked in obvious shock, still slowly backing away and looking at Schwann's dead body, a flickering moment of sadness on his face. "He wanted to die," said Raven, the knowledge of that simple truth most painful. "And also...because he will come back. Because he attacked me...I'm reaaallly hopin' you won't do the same thing as him. I wanted to try t' talk to you this time around."
He wanted to die, the man had said baldly.
Alexei, no longer driven by plans doomed to fail nor sleepless nights devoted to studies carrying the wrong information, truly had no choice but to believe it, even if the speaker was that beloathed alter ego. Now, unlike in Baction and in Zaude, he remembered - allowed himself to remember - those nearly-forgotten moments of tenderness in Deidon Hold all those years ago. There hadn't been time for recriminations atop the eternal shrine, but now... Alexei swallowed.
"Speak, then," he said, without putting his sword away entirely, but lowering it slightly. "And what do you mean by this time around?"
Raven winced and scratched the back of his head. "This...is gonna be hard to hear. We're in a place called the Labyrinth of Memories. I know the last thing ya remember is on top of Zaude, and for Schwann...it was when the rocks came down on him in Baction. I'm the one ya fought on top of Zaude...just a bit older. You two died, but...I lived. If ya don't believe me, take a look at the area around us."
It was the middle quarter, all in beige and as still and silent as could be, as if captured in an old photograph.
"That's impossible," the knight blurted, "you're lying..." But his protest, half delivered out of sheer instinct, dies as he flicked his eyes away from the enemy (?) in front of him. The citizens' quarter - how had he gotten here? And the colors were strange and... ...and it was as quiet as the grave, he thought half-hysterically. This part of Zaphias was never this still unless it was the dead of night, and how that was the part of this that was halfway to making him believe this nonsense, he didn't know. Raven, he heard from the man's handlers in Dahngrest, was a known liar, and a man with a silver tongue. But the man before him didn't seem to fit at least the last portion of that descriptor. He was...he looked entirely sincere, with a portion of the dead look in his eyes that Schwann had always had. But that must mean he... Alexei's sword clattered to the ground, and even the sound of metal striking stone sounded flat in the dead air of this place.
"Uh oh." The sound of a pair of weapons sheathing, and Raven was hesitantly stepping closer. "Hey, you okay? I...know this is a lot t' process. Just know that Schwann...I'm...still alive." A rustle, and he spoke again, "I survived after you did. My friends and I took care of the Adephagos, and...Flynn is Commandant now. The world is doin' good now."
Alexei stared at the man who was - who must be - the real Schwann. So that, he thought hazily, must mean that he was... And then, just like that, he dropped to his knees on the stones below him. "Flynn...Scifo? Commandant?" And the world was...the Adephagos was gone? "I suppose," he began faintly, "that all means that I am...part of this place?"
"I...yeah," said Raven- Schwann with a startling laugh (had he ever heard Schwann laugh before?) and suddenly he was kneeling next to him, patting his back. "I guess, ahaha...y'now know what it's like t' die and come back to life again? Twinsssss....!" The man silently grimaced at himself and said, "Sorry, sorry."
So far everything had spiraled out of control and so unbelievable was the situation in which he found himself, Alexei's next reply was nearly completely out of character. "I don't even know where to begin to know how to respond to that."
"Haha!" Raven crowed, the sound genuinely joyful before sitting crosslegged on the floor next to him and offering him a flask. "Y'want a drink?"
A drink. Perog and Veles, he could use a drink, though otherwise he didn't choose to indulge in such things. Well, he was dead, he thought dizzily, reaching for the offered flask. If that didn't earn him a drink or two, what in the world would? The liquor, as expected, was strong, fiery, and even for a...a memory, it burned all the way down. It seemed to anchor him somehow, though his hand trembled as he passed it back. "Thank you," he said quietly. "I haven't had a drink in..." Years, he didn't say.
"I know you haven't," Raven said, and gently patted his back. "Take your time. If y'have any questions, I can answer them. You've already surprised me a lot today."
Alexei dropped into a seiza position and looked down at his hands - sure enough, that same strange sepia tone as his surroundings. "At least you listened in the end when I told you not to die," he muttered, as if to himself. "You said that the Adephagos was...taken care of. How?"
"That...is a long story, but if I had to sum it up...well, Miss Mordio turned the Entelexia into spirits so they could turn aer into mana so we have an energy form that wouldn't just keep feedin' the Adephagos," his subordinate said, suddenly looking unsure as he looked up at Alexei. Even though he offered to answer questions first, it seemed he had plenty himself.
Alexei blinked. That didn't sound possible, unless the nonsense about a "phase change transition" he'd read about some years before hadn't actually been nonsense but a true, though unverified, fact. It wasn't any more outlandish than anything else he'd woken up here to find out, and he surprised himself by being willing to believe it. "How is Scifo doing as commandant?" he asked quietly, though he wasn't at all sure he wanted the answer.
"He's doing well," Schwann said, smiling. Again, when had he ever seen Schwann smile so happily? "Really well, actually. The council is givin' him hell, just like they did for you, but...he's got Ioder on his side, and I give him a bit o' guidance from time to time if he needs it. But he doesn't often need it. Things are...really peaceful, actually. We even got a treaty with Dahngrest."
As little as Alexei wanted to hear how well his...replacement was doing, it seemed that the man suffered the same problems he had himself. Was he petty enough to be happy about that? Things had been turned so upside down that he didn't know. And a treaty with the guild town. "That doesn't seem possible."
His subordinate shrugged. "All I can say is Ioder and Harry really hit it off. Plus, since we have an emperor again, the council doesn't have as much power as before, so that helps a lot."
Well, it seemed as if everyone was doing just as well - better in fact - with him gone. He tried, and partially succeeded, not to be bitter about that. And about how much happier Schwann was. Without him. Alexei sighed, looked away. "I suppose you're all better off without me," he said finally, and was it the alcohol making him say that, or his own self-recriminations?
Schwann looked at him, and...seemed to understand. He sighed again and chewed his lip before saying, "Y'know, this is why I wanted to come see you. There's nobody else I can really tell when I feel like I...miss you sometimes. When I hear people talkin' about what you did, I just think 'He was so alone'. You really left a complicated legacy...but somethin' that Leblanc and Flynn have been tryin' to get me to accept about myself was that I did both good and bad. The bad doesn't erase the good...and I wanna be the guy to give you the same news, I guess. I think a lotta what happened between us was my fault."
Alexei's stomach clenched at the casual truth. In a way he'd always been alone; in his youth, after Jan died. Certainly in the knights, even after he'd risen to the position of commandant. To be seen this way by a man he'd discarded, to be missed by the same man...that seemed stranger than anything that had befallen him so far. And to hear that he took the fault - Alexei's fault - as his own... The knight looked down at his sepia toned hands again, wondering at it. "Did you truly come here just to reassure a memory?" he asked suddenly.
"...I shoulda told you a lot of this stuff a lot sooner," his subordinate said steadily, looking at him with bright, lively teal eyes. They looked tired, but the furthest thing from dead that he's seen from the man in a decade. "I'm sorry that I never did. I kept it all in my head for so long, I...I've been tryin' to get better at actually telling people what I'm thinkin', and I decided I should tell you too."
"Is that why you came to this place alone?" Alexei asked, almost gratified by the life in his underling's eyes. "You were...always too self sacrificing for your own good."
Again, Schwann scratched the back of his head, a habit that Alexei was rapidly realizing to be a nervous habit of his subordinate's. It almost seemed as if he was embarrassed. "Y'say that like I shouldn't have come here. Sure, it's a bit dangerous, but I've always been good at gettin' myself outta sticky situations."
"Oh, as good as you were at Deidon Hold when the Lord of the Plains attacked?" Alexei responded, heavily sarcastic. He passed a hand over his face, feeling as weary as ever he had. "I... never managed to ask you what you recalled of that battle," he added, looking away.
"That battle when..." Schwann trailed off uncertainly, brows furrowing as he tried to remember.
Schwann got flashes of memory now, buried as it had been over the span of a very long, stressful decade. He didn’t remember much, but he did recall…the pain that he'd woken up with in his head, chest, whole body really, and how Leblanc had hovered over him for some time after. It had been years since he last thought of that battle, hadn't really thought it anything of import, but if Alexei was bringing it up now...maybe there was something he was missing. Clearing his throat, he said, "I remember knights telling me that I'd pushed you out of the way, and remember you being angry that I'd done so. Apparently I'd been on the field for a long time, and that's why I did somethin' as stupid as gettin' myself tossed by a giganto."
Alexei frowned. Of course his underling's recall was spotty, given the head wound he'd sustained. "The gates of the Hold were in need of repair, " he began. "I sent Lieutenant Pavlina and a squad to distract the beast so it could be kept away from the gates. It was...not a mission I expected them to return from." He took a breath to marshal his thoughts. "You took it upon yourself to run interference, alone - for six hours." He'd been so damnably stubborn. Why hadn't he sent someone with the man? So much could have been prevented if only...
That was stupid of me, was Raven's immediate thought, matched with a disapproving frown, but...'not a mission I expected them to return from'...that's probably why Schwann had done what he did. He gave a small laugh and shook his head. "Y'know...I'd like to say that I've gotten older and wiser, but I honestly still get why Schwann would do that. If those really were the only two options, and it'd reduce the amount of casualties, it's the best choice for everyone involved."
"Of course it was what you'd do," Alexei said wryly. "It was what you did do. But you went without food, water, and very nearly without rest for almost the entire battle. While I was...taking you to task for neglecting your needs, the Lord of the Plains finally showed up - along with Pavlina and most of her squad." A wistful sigh. "I told you that you weren't allowed to die," he said at last. "And you...you told me I wasn't either." If he was allowed one wish in this moment it would be for the man beside him to recall those words. And so finally he asked the question he'd intended to ask for years now. "Do you remember?"
Schwann's wince was answer enough. "I...no, I'm sorry. I honestly...don't really remember a whole lot from the past decade as a whole, though. Princess Estellise tells me it's 'cuz I was always so stressed 'n wasn't really...all there, but...but I do still believe that," he said, looking at Alexei meaningfully. "Even if I don't remember saying it, I still believe that you...I don't want you to die. I...actually really wish you had lived." That last statement felt like a ragged admission, one which tore out of his chest and forced the air out of his lungs. Shakily, Schwann smoothed his hand over his mouth and jaw, as if trying to fight a feeling crawling onto his face. That was the first time he'd said it out loud. It felt like such a betrayal to his kids, even if it was true.
I wish you had lived. After everything he had done, both to this man and with his help? Alexei couldn't believe it. But the evidence was there, in the sheer pain in Schwann's voice and in his eyes. Part of him wanted to comfort the man; but in truth he had done enough. After some moments he picked up the thread of his tale. "The beast charged; you pushed me out of the way and took the full force of the blow. You broke some ribs in addition to your other injuries. I decided to treat you myself because of the...blastia." He could hardly bring himself to mention the thing.
"A-ah...yeah." There, pain and fear and discomfort, all wrapped in a bundle as Schwann grabbed at the shirt in front of his heart. "You would do stuff like that from time to time, wouldn't ya?"
Alexei scrubbed at his eyes for a moment. "I didn't want anyone to know what I'd done to you," he admitted in a choked tone.
"I-I know," he said, trying to smile, bringing up his hand again to pat Alexei on the back - Goddess above, he never thought he'd find the day - and failing, utterly, to hide how those memories made him feel. That was the double sided edge of his kids; they forced him to get honest, and that has helped a lot but also made a lot of things more painful. Still...Raven managed to suck in a breath past his forced smile and said, "I know you were just...doin' what you thought was best all those times. Makin' sure I was in workin' order and all that, y'know? Goddess knows I wasn't gonna take care of myself...sorry for that, by the way."
Alexei shook his head, negating the need for any apologies. "I only wish I would have done more for you." The confession tasted bitter in his mouth, but there it was. Alexei shifted to face the man he'd wronged and helped both, and set a hand on his shoulder, squeezing briefly before letting his hand drop to his side.
Raven's jaw dropped open, and a surprised laugh huffed out of him, already shaking his head and planting it in his palm. "Is this happening right now?" he asked the air, blinking rapidly as he looked so confused. "Maybe I really am just making this all up. Just...comin' up with all the things I want to hear. Is that what this is? Alexei wouldn't ever..."
Alexei couldn't blame the man for his reaction. "A lot has happened since..."
Another strained beat passed before Raven's jaw clicked shut and he looked at Alexei again, away from the floor it had fallen to. "I...have a question."
"You may ask. "
"Why...did you always get so pissed when I would...Raven would...come to Zaphias?" he asked, bothered. "He...I...Raven was most like the me from before, so why...?"
Alexei blinked; of all the questions he'd expected Schwann to ask, this wasn't one of them. "I spoke at length with Captain Casey about the progress you were making as a knight, before the war - from a frivolous young nobleman to a member of the knights." It was difficult to speak of that time, but needs must. And Schwann...he was the only truly familiar thing here. "When I saw you in your guise as Raven, it seemed to me that you were reverting to that young wastrel, rather than applying yourself to important matters."
"...Is that so?" he asked, body settling into a faux-relaxation as he forced his shoulders to droop. "...I've often wondered myself about what the hell I was doin' with my life as Raven...it's been hard to believe I've done anything good, in spite of what people have told me, both as Schwann and Raven." He huffed and palmed the side of his head. "I guess I got my answer though. Can't be disappointed when it was my own actions that did it. Sorry for that too, then."
"It doesn't sound as if you've done nothing though. I'm certain Lieutenant Pavlina and the survivors of her squad would say as much. "
"Maybe so. Maybe," Raven said with the smallest laugh before glancing at Alexei and pondering. "Y'know...somethin' I've thought about from time to time was wondering what kind of person you would have been if you'd lived in a time of peace. If you didn't fight and hate the entelexia, if the council supported you in taking care of the people in the lower and Middle quarter. If there wasn't so much suspicion between the Empire and the Union. If we didn't have all these conflicts that our forefathers gave us...maybe we wouldn't have done as many horrible things as we did. Maybe you would have turned out like Flynn. Maybe I could have seen you happy."
"!" Those few words, simply spoken, doubtless well meant, struck to the heart of him even more than finding himself in this place and learning he was dead. It all came rushing back then, the sleepless nights of desperate research, the arguments with the council, the upstart guilds...and even earlier, the War, the arrogance of the entelexeia. And the increasing despair and isolation, the growing conviction that nothing he could do could keep the tensions of the various factions from devolving into war - or worse. And everything he had done to try and preserve something in case of that eventuality. "I was only trying to protect the Empire," he muttered, feeling as if he were choking, but in the face of all he'd rushed to dirty his hands with, it seemed but a weak and feeble excuse, even to him.
Raven looked at him and shook his head. "But in the process, you did a lot more than that."
And with that one sentence, the man before him in the persona he'd hated since he started using it, laid him open completely. Alexei stared at the other man for some moments, unable to speak, unable to breathe. More than anyone else in the world - or even in this place, Schwann - Raven - knew what he'd done. "All for nothing." He realized belatedly that he'd spoken the thought aloud, gasped it into the still awful air of the Labyrinth of Memories. "For nothing," he muttered, holding his shaking hands up in front of his face, "I dirtied my hands for nothing. And in so doing...ordered you to do the same."
But surprisingly, a trepidacious, nearly hopeful, yearning expression seemed to cross Raven's face. Hesitantly, he asked, "So you're sayin'...you regret it?"
A hot flash of anger flared, visible in his eyes - and disappeared as quickly as it had come, aided by the expression on the other man's face. Alexei thought, then, about everything he'd done in his tenure as commandant - from laying the man before him open and bringing him back from the dead against what might have been his will, to sending innocent people to their deaths, to other, baser deeds. Including torturing a young woman who was almost constitutionally incapable of bringing deliberate harm to anyone who didn't attack first. And yet, he felt that he couldn't speak the words. Instead, he bowed his head and nodded, the gesture barely more than a brief up-and-down jerk.
Schwann opened his mouth to respond, then hesitated...afraid. From that brief instant of anger alone, afraid already.
Alexei looked up just in time to catch the look of fear on the other man's face; and yet again he remembered those moments in Deidon Hold. How had he gone from that to this? For the first time, he asked himself - was the world worth saving if he had to lose everything, his own soul included? But clearly there had been another way. "...Why did I give up on finding another way?" he muttered. And he thought hard - harder than he'd been able to bring himself to in life. He remembered all the things he'd pushed to the side. "When you have to fight faction after faction, nobleman after nobleman, to try and do what you think of as the right thing, eventually you start thinking of everyone as an enemy." He said it slowly, in fits and starts. It was like dragging his own vitals out into the open air, so much it hurt. But what he said next hurt even more. "Even you."
"...I never exactly made it easy on you," Schwann said next, his self depreciation just as strong as Alexei's in this moment as he made this confession. A part of him feared that Alexei would wholly agree and blame him instead, and decide to take him out in retribution, but another part of him just hoped...hoped that they could honestly connect again. Even if it was over their failures. "There were a lot of times I saw you strugglin' and I just...couldn't find it in myself to help more. I'm sorry for that."
"What could you have done?" It was half honest question - more honest a question than he'd asked himself in years - and half self-deprecation.
"...You tried to give me hope, in the beginning," he said eventually, unsure about who he was speaking as right now. "Even though you had just lost everything, you were still trying to hold onto your dream as hard as you could. I could have done the same, when I saw you starting to give up." His head hung low, disappointed, ashamed. "I could have even told you when you were going too far. I might have been able to stop you sooner."
Alexei remembered the feeling of his dream - of everything - beginning to slip through his fingers, and looked over at the man beside him. For a moment, he could see Schwann, Raven, Damuron, all at once, coalescing into a man that simply radiated guilt. "You know what I would have done to you if you'd tried," he attempted to argue. "I wish..." But wishes were wishes for a reason; they were impossible.
Still, the man next to him urged him to voice it. "...What do you wish?"
Dealing in hypotheticals was likely useless in this case, as it was in nearly every other case. Still, kneeling here in this awful, still, sepia-toned place, alone with this man and his thoughts and his crimes, wishes were all he had left to him. "Perhaps," he began slowly, "if you had tried such a thing after the Deidon battle...I might have listened then." Perhaps, or perhaps not. "It's an impossible thing, at any rate."
"...So that mission really meant a lot to you," Raven eventually said, the words slowly working out of his jaw as he thought about everything that Alexei had told him. "It's hard to imagine it could be that easy, honestly. Though...I never exactly gave you the chance to show me otherwise."
"It meant much," the knight confessed slowly. "Perhaps not the battle itself, but the aftermath. You were so vulnerable." Alexei found the will to meet his underling's eyes then. "I won't say that it would be easy, only possible. I wasn't...the despair wasn't as deep then."
Confused, Raven tilted his head. "Why would me being vulnerable do something like that? I'd think that would be where I'm at my most useless, not helpful at all."
Alexei frowned. "It was one of the last times I truly let myself feel real empathy for anyone," he said at last, shocking himself with the honesty of it. "Perhaps if you hadn't been so injured, you might have been able to get to me then."
A pause, then the cogs in his subordinates mind began to turn as they processed Alexei's last words. They came with mixed understanding, and guilt, and confusion as he asked, "Does that mean, then," slowly asked as he tried to clarify, "that you gave up on empathy because I had been unable to remember what I had said to you during that mission?"
Of course Schwann had misunderstood him. The silver-haired man shook his head. "No, that's not it; I never asked if you remembered. You were concussed, I doubt you could've had that conversation even if you'd wanted to."
Such an explanation didn't seem reasonable to expect; Alexei had a history of demanding things from him that he neither could nor wanted to do, and Raven couldn't stop that split second of pain and betrayal from flitting across his eyes as he cleared his throat of its sudden constriction before shaking his head. "What, then, could I have done differently?" he asked, surprising himself with how deeply, desperately he did crave the answer. He hadn't meant to be so achingly obvious and deep with his torment over the matter. Admitting he felt guilty was different from actually bracing himself against the ache in his chest that wished to consume him, or earnestly feel like he should beg for the answer. He seldom felt desperate...but if there was anyone to ask, it would be Alexei. "You've been surprisingly...forthright this entire conversation," he continued, finally letting his confusion over the matter show - he'd held back for fear of eliminating whatever rapport they may have developed due to Alexei's pride and history of offence. "I just wanna know, from you, then...what I did wrong. What I could'a done for you. I've got plenty, heh, plenty of ideas, but I wanna hear it from you."
“I could try to be more evasive, if you like,” Alexei began, shaking his head, “but...everything I was working towards turned out to be a lie.”
He sighed, thinking over those disastrous last days. What could have been done for him then? That was a more difficult question. He might not have believed, even then, that he needed to change his course. But he suddenly found himself as desperate for answers as his companion. "When things began to go wrong, when I started to uncover...the truth, it was far easier to blame those around me" - here he glanced pointedly at Schwann - "than to try and decide how to correct my course. Perhaps if someone had aided me in this pursuit..."
Raven nodded, his stare urging Alexei to continue.
"... if someone had helped me decide to try another way, we might all have been saved much trouble." Another impossible dream, but seeing the yearning on Schwann's face was almost too much.
As well as the naked grief slowly settling in on his face once more as he nodded again, this time this time with understanding. "It's exactly as I thought," he said softly, the barest quake in his voice. "I truly am sorry that I never did."
This was wrong. Schwann shouldn't be asking forgiveness of him, not of a man whose crimes against him stretched across an entire decade. But it was clear that the man wouldn't believe that. He decided to try a different tack. "What would you have done?"
"I mentioned it earlier," his subordinate said immediately, his head dropping as he filled with shame. "I would have hoped for you. I wouldn't have offered to kill for you then. I would have tried to...connect, or live like you urged me to. The more I think about it, the more I realize how many chances I squandered and mistakes I made because I stubbornly held onto despair."
Alexei took a deep breath. He still had the desire to comfort the man, but...perhaps he didn't quite know how. Perhaps he'd never known, and the result had very nearly been the end of the world. "If you need my forgiveness," he began slowly, painfully, "you may have it. Schwann, I...I forgive you." Veles and Perog, that hurt; but something in it brought him a kind of relief too.
And though it came with a pause, and a furrow of his subordinates brow, and though he still remained heavy shouldered with shame, his subordinate did say, "Thank you." Even if he did take the next breath to apologize again, and even if again Alexei could see that vulnerability from Deidon Hold...the man seemed to accept it the best he could.
Perhaps it wasn't - wouldn't ever be - enough. But it loosened something in Alexei's chest to see that he was at least trying. Again he wanted to comfort his companion; again he didn't truly know how. But tentatively he lay a hand on Schwann's shoulder. "If you see fit, when you leave this place will you do something for me?" A pause, then he continued. "Please get some rest."
"...I'll try," his subordinate promised with a small nod, relaxing just the smallest bit under Alexei's hand, somehow managing a smile in spite of their painful history together. Yes, he would try, thanks to the growth he'd had with his companions...and yes, he was very, very tired. This conversation had been long and emotionally draining, and it probably would take him a while to discern whether or not it had happened or if it had all been a dream. But first...he'd have to make it out of here. Raven sighed and looked around the space. He wasn't sure how long he had been here in the Labyrinth of Memories, but every once in a while the labyrinth would rumble and shift, renewing itself and shuffling everything around. In fact...a low rumble was already building. As the ground quaked beneath their seated forms, Raven sighed and said, "Looks like it's renewing itself again. I think it does that every day...I wonder if you'll be remade just like the rest of this space."
Alexei was frightened of the possibility, he could now admit to himself. But even more, he... "You should go then," he answered, and couldn't quite keep the fear out of his voice. "If I am remade, I don't wish to harm you - not any more than I've already done."
Sadness washed over his subordinates face, and he said. "Anything you did to me was deserved." Still, he nodded and rose to leave. Distantly, stone groaned and dust shifted, like sliding pieces of a puzzle if the pieces were whole rooms. Their room jolted and moved underneath them, then nearly sent Raven into a fall as it stopped once more.
Unfortunately this moment couldn't last. Alexei heard a strange sound from nearby, and saw an eldritch light. He hauled himself to his feet, looking over just in time to catch Schwann's memory appearing from a portal. "Schwann?"
"Sir, where...?" Schwann's eyes flicked from his commandant to the other version of him, an imposter, standing next to Alexei, dagger half drawn, then widened in panic. "Alexei, get down!" he shouted, rushing forward and drawing his sword, his training kicking in in a split decision to protect his superior. His memories were a jumble, and he didn't know where he was, barely knew who he was, but he knew that he had to protect Alexei, no matter what. Thus, did the blood red sword dive down and through his imposter in green. There was a choking sound, and a gurgle of blood spilled from Raven's lips as he stepped back and looked at the sword going through his stomach.
Alexei barreled forward, whipping his sword out, knocking the memory Schwann away. "Why did you do that?" he shouted. "He wasn't going to hurt me!"
Schwann staggered back from the blow, his sword slipping out of the man with his face and releasing a deluge of red down the man’s front, and looked at Alexei, betrayed but pleading. "Sir, his dagger was out. He's not the real me! I won't take chances with your life." Behind Alexei, Raven stumbled to his knees and a hand and coughed, wet splatters of blood dropping thickly on the stone ground as he forced pressure over his wound. As much as he tried to breathe, he only managed a choked groan.
"We...we were only talking." He felt, perhaps, that he should inflict the same fate on this man as he'd inflicted on the man with whom he'd been speaking but...when he looked at Schwann's face, though he tried to raise his sword, he couldn't bring himself to do it. "Stand down, Captain! That's an order!"
His first captain's jaw clenched and he looked back at the man bleeding out behind Alexei, a familiar cold, distant look filling his face. "It shouldn't matter if an imposter dies, sir. We've killed for less."
"We have killed for less," Alexei gritted, "and we've killed for nothing at all. We've both killed in service of plans that nearly brought the end of the world. Now stand. Down.”
One... Two... Three... Four seconds of staring between the commandant and the first captain until, finally, he pulled a cloth to wipe the blood from his steel. "He is neither a threat, nor a target. Yes sir."
Equal parts relieved and horrified - he'd built better than he'd known, more's the pity - Alexei sheathed his own blade and knelt beside the wounded man; the only real person here. "Do you have any gels on you?" he asked rather desperately. Though perhaps deep down inside, he knew it was hopeless.
The real Schwann had paled rapidly, blood already soaked down his front and dripping in a oozing fountain onto the floor, and he rolled onto his side with a thud. Amidst the darkened cloth covering his stomach, a slight blue glow struggled to shine past the liquid flooding around his fingers as he tried to heal himself. Eyes clenched, he shuddered a nod, before finally managing to clear his throat with one last cough. "I-in...m' p-pocket," he rasped, starting to cycle his breaths through his nose and out his mouth in an attempt to control the shock starting to set in.
Even in a circumstance such as this, Alexei's earliest training held, though he cursed under his breath as he rummaged through first one pocket, then the other, finally coming up with a single apple gel. He fumbled with the man’s belt, cursing how he wore the thing over his shirt in seemingly every outfit he wore before loosening the thing and tearing open Schwann’s shirt too. Cursing his own inability too, he pressed the gel to the wound. Healing spells had never come naturally to him, seeming to slip out of his mind like water through a sieve, and now Schwann was paying the price. "Stay with me," he whispered.
"I...I will," he managed to mumble, shivers starting to settle into his skin, weak at first but growing stronger. Though the gel had been pressed into the wound, healing it was slow going, the open gash leading into his abdomen pulling open even as the gel worked to slow the bleeding. He'd already lost a lot, the dark liquid painting most of his front and obscuring some of the faint white and raised pink lines of former scars now healed...and his blastia, it wasn't shining as steadily as it was supposed to.
Behind them, Schwann hissed in a breath. "Alexei...he has a blastia too. Did you...another? Is that why you care for him?"
"What I did to you, I did also to him," he replied absently, his focus on the bleeding man before him. He was slipping into shock, and Alexei may not be skilled at healing but even he could recognize when someone had lost too much blood. All the lives he'd taken in his years, and his desperation to save this one life was unmatched. But... "It's not enough."
If he'd bothered to spare his First Captain a look, he would have seen the contemplation buzzing under his cold facade, a consideration, and...a sympathy. Whatever was going on between these two felt impossible, as he seldom was graced with Alexei's care, but something in the way this mysterious imposter tried to assure Alexei 'I-I'll...be...f-...fine,' with his meager store of breath, twisted something in his chest. "...Sir," he quietly said. "Does he really mean that much to you?"
Something in the man's tone made Alexei look back at him, and the look on his First Captain's face caught the knight's breath in his throat. "As much as you yourself could have, if only I hadn't lost my way," he confessed brokenly. Then he recalled, eyes flying wide. Schwann knew how to heal. But would he use it? If anything would get him to come to an 'imposter's' aid, it could only be the truth, hateful as that truth was to him even now. "Schwann, I've wronged you from the beginning. I let myself harm you, and I let myself use you as a mere tool, when things could have been so much different between us." A deep breath shuddered into his lungs. "I failed you. Don't let me fail him too."
Schwann froze, shock holding him in place as he looked at Alexei, wide eyed. "Sir...what do you mean by that?"
Alexei's head ached with the force of the emotions he was drowning in. But he had to get Schwann to help. "You never deserved any of it," he panted, "not anything I did to you. Please. Will you heal him?"
"O-of course," Schwann said after another beat, sheathing his sword and kneeling on the other side of the man that had grown quiet. Still alive, according to the shallow breaths lifting in his chest, but very pale. It was disconcerting to lift the man's shirt and see scars along his back that mirrored his, but more of them, but he pushed such thoughts to the side as he placed a healing hand over the exit wound on his back, then picked up healing his front when the man's energy faded. They even used the same healing technique... In the span of a few tense seconds after he started healing, Schwann looked at Alexei and emphasized, "I am a tool, Commandant Alexei. You can use me as you see fit. Your remorse is illogical."
It was an impossible tableau, and yet here it was, memory Schwann healing his real world counterpart, their surroundings silent save the sound of the spell and the wounded man's gasps. "That's why he has to live. He's more than you or I could ever have been. "
"...Who is he?" Schwann asked, the importance of the question surprising him even as it came out of his mouth.
"He's who you would have been, if you'd made it out of Baction. The last thing you remember is the stones coming down, isn't it?" As the last thing he himself remembered was the apatheia at Zaude crushing him.
Schwann frowned, a genuine, strong emotion that he wasn't familiar with building up in his chest. Baction...Baction...his memories were still all a jumble but that name spiked dread in his chest, and he knew it stemmed from Alexei yet again. And the way that Alexei was talking about this man felt like he'd replaced Schwann in some way. This didn't make any sense... The ground looked wrong, he realized with a start. The sky looked wrong. The buildings around him looked wrong. He didn't remember being here the last time he was aware...he didn't remember Alexei being kind or gentle at all. "This is all wrong," he said with a shake in his voice. Suddenly, he wished he wasn't Schwann, he wished he was Raven so he could feel the Don's hand on his back...except...the Don was dead, wasn't he? The memory of the Don's open guts spilling into the plaza stone flashed in his mind, as well as the despair that accompanied it...and after that, the kids, Temza, Egothar, Myorzo...the princess. "The princess," he said out loud, a creep of pain in his voice only slipping through due to being off kilter. He knew the punishment for expressing doubt against Alexei was harsh, but he needed to confirm, just to make sure. "You had me kidnap her."
Alexei passed a hand over his face. It ached to remember what he'd done, but this was too important to allow his weakness any more sway. "I did," he confirmed shakily. "Your last words to me were to wish for her freedom."
Grief and shame stabbed his chest with a force that left him unable to breathe, his task forgotten as he struggled to find something to hold onto so he could keep himself composed. "A-and," he heard his voice shakily ask, "-did she get it? Is she safe?"
"Heal," Alexei urged him, wracking his brains. The green-clad man bleeding out before them hadn't said much of the princess, other than that she... "She's free," he told Schwann. "He spoke of what she said, after they...stopped me."
"She's...but, stopped-?"
A soft touch on Schwann's hand startled him out of whatever he was going to ask next, and he looked down to find the imposter looking up at them, pale as could be, but...looking up at them with sympathy? "S-sorry...I can't explain...everythin'," the man gasped with Schwann's voice and Raven's accent, a genuine replica of his own body except with more lines on his face, more scars on his skin, more...life in his eyes, even as he was bleeding out. "But y-yeah...th' kids...they're all happy...'n healthy."
Schwann swallowed hard, so confused even as he resumed his healing. Alexei was talking about his end and Baction...that he died there, and that Alexei had been stopped and the princess saved. He couldn't make sense of any of it because this all should be impossible, but he somehow got the sense that this man was him, but a different him, one where he's lived a life that Schwann hadn't yet lived. It was way too much for him to understand and ask about right now, though, so he shook his head and just demanded, "Save your energy. I'll be done soon."
Alexei looked at his First Captain, down at the man he was healing, up again. All he could truly do now was to observe, still seething at his helplessness, still truly unable to help. He examined their surroundings. At first it was idle, only out of having nothing to do, but his eyes caught the still-open portal Schwann's memory had arrived through. Was that...? "Deidon Hold...?" he muttered.
Schwann's head snapped up to look at the scene, frowning as he took it in. "That's...not where I came from before."
"Th-the exit...sh'be Yurzorea," Raven mumbled, eyes closing again as he took an exhausted breath. "By th' mountains..."
"But..." Alexei didn't even know why he'd objected at first, only the idea of dropping a wounded man alone on a remote continent disquieted him. But a few moments' thought highlighted the matter for him. "You came here alone, and you need medical attention, " he said to the wounded man. "If you go back there in your condition you'll die." It seemed to be academic. The portal, though wobbling in midair, was unwaveringly fixed, not only on Deidon Hold, but on the Hold at that moment, with Schwann once again wounded and needing help.
Raven briefly shook his head and managed a few last syllables, "'s not what I..." and then drifted off...eyes closed, pale, and motionless in a pool of his own cooling blood.
Schwann clenched his jaw and looked at the wounds on his counterpart's body. "The bleeding has slowed, but...I'm not sure if-" He paused when he noticed his fingertips starting to...dissolve, little particles of him floating off like dust, armor and bone alike and starting to creep towards his knuckles. His eyes widened and he looked from Raven to Alexei. "H-he's unconscious. If this place is made from his memories, then we're-"
"We're going to disappear," Alexei whispered hoarsely, staring at his own fingertips. Them disappearing meant the real Schwann would be stranded here without help, and therefore... No. No, he wouldn't allow that. The memory of Alexei bent and picked up the man, one arm under his knees, one under his shoulder. He was...heavier, than Alexei recalled, and for a brief moment he remembered the man's difficulties with eating. If this weren't an emergency, him gaining weight would be heartening. Alexei took a step. Distracted, fingers dissolved to the knuckles, body in his arms slippery with blood, he almost lost his grip for a moment.
The concept of being nothing more than a memory was an abstract concept before this moment, but now he well and truly was a memory fading. Yet, even still...the sudden hand on his chest felt so real. Raven had looped his fingers into Alexei's collar, weak but grasping so he could hold on a little longer. The strain of being awake again had pained him, his face contorting in a grimace, but he tried so, so hard to speak. "'lexei...I wish you'd...done this years ago. Wish you hadn't died..."
How these were the words that made his eyes overflow, Alexei did not - would never - know. "Forgive me," he whispered, staggering towards the portal. "That is my wish as well." Closer to the shimmering image of Deidon Hold, Alexei could see...could see, somehow, his younger self, tending Schwann's wounds in a tent, long ago. If somehow the man he carried wound up then, perhaps his fondest wish might not be in vain. But Schwann would need the right words to speak to him and be believed. "If you find yourself back then," he urged, "tell him - tell me - 'remember what Jan said to you under the old oak behind the bookstore'." Then he was in front of the portal.
"Jan...bookstore," the man in his arms mumbled in turn, understanding the importance in spite of his faint as he pulled closer to the warm body holding him. "I...I will."
"All my hopes go with you," Alexei whispered hoarsely. "If you can...help me be better." Then he passed the body in his arms through the portal, not wanting to let go of him, still having no choice. Alexei gazed down at his arms with a curious detachment; they'd been dissolved up past the elbow by the portal. But if he'd managed to save the real Schwann's life, it was a worthy sacrifice. Red eyes gazed upon his fellow memory, and he stepped closer to the man. "Schwann...if I may, if this place will let me, I'll tell you everything - anything you want to know."
Schwann carefully watched the man in front of him, so different from the one in his memories, and his chest ached with the knowledge that no matter what this Alexei would say to him, it wouldn't feel real. But if the last thing he'd remembered was the ruins crushing down on his back...there were perhaps two things he'd want to hear. "I just have two," he said steadily, his teal eyes in a familiar look of defeat as he looked at the ground. "And I accept whatever consequence you give me for asking."
"I don't suppose there will be consequences for either of us much longer," Alexei replied, voice wavering. He tried not to look at his arms, but even if he didn't, Schwann's body was also... "Ask anything you want."
Schwann fell to his knees as his legs started to dissolve underneath him, but he looked at Alexei steadfastly. "I only want a yes or a no. First...did you truly intend to kill me and leave me buried in the shrine? Was that intentional?"
Alexei's jaw clenched, but here at the end, there was only one answer he could truly give. One answer Schwann, the man he'd harmed so deeply over the years, deserved. "...Yes."
Schwann nodded slowly, as if having expected and already accepted this answer. "Second...was there anything I could have said to convince you to release Estelle? Could I have begged you and convinced you to let her go?"
Alexei found himself on his knees as well. He was almost gone - but not quite. "N-no. There wasn't. There was nothing you could have said nor offered me."
"I see. Well...thank you for your honesty...it makes it easier, somehow." Thus, Schwann closed his eyes and faded away, gone like dust in front of his Commandant.
Alexei closed his eyes, hoping against hope the real Schwann might change something in the past, or perhaps even that he might see his beloved dead yet again. Then he too was gone.