Chapter Text
It was just an average mission. Go out, kill Scaldra trying to purge a district, then come on home.
The Drifter and their lovers, almost playfully bouncing off of one another on the battlefield, supporting one another..
None of them knew what was coming for them the moment they went out there..
Would they have changed anything?
Said they loved each other more? Touched each other more, held each other closer?
Curled up in bed and let the world go by, not letting each other go?
It was just a playful maneuver, one that the Drifter had pulled several times before– transferring protoframes mid fight to be with their other partner. They zipped out of Amir, breaking the transference link, took one void sling towards Flare, arms outstretched to embrace them in a hug on their way in..
It turns out the Drifter was only human, after all; for that one brief moment.
It didn’t take the Indifference, or anything else quite so grand, it just took a single lucky corrosion-laced bullet to the head while vulnerably un-linked, which went right through them and even grazed Flare’s side, sending the Drifter tumbling into a shattered heap in their lap.
Flare was stunned in place. Their mind immediately flashed back to seeing one of the Rippers fly across the stage to attempt to protect them from Scaldra gunfire as the Drifter went from a run, to a stumble, to crashing directly into their arms, coating the flamboyant protoframe in their own lover’s insides. They grabbed a hold of each side of the Drifter's face, what was left of it, staring dumbfounded into their eyes whose literal void-tinged spark just flashed out like a broken lightbulb.
No. No. No no no no no this couldn’t be happening.
For all the pain they went through, for all they’d lost, this was supposed to be forever. This couldn’t be happening. They couldn’t just leave them in an instant.
Flare felt Lizzie’s consciousness melt with their own as they screamed out, setting every Scaldra in earshot to a hellfire blaze.
“You fucking ASSHOLES! HAVEN’T YOU TAKEN ENOUGH FROM US? ”
Flare ran their fingers across the Drifter’s cheeks as tears boiled over the corners of their eyes, trying to find any kind of life in their lover even though their grey matter was everywhere. “No.. Not again.. Sol, no, this can’t be happening.. Drifter.. Sugar? Please.. You can’t leave Us, Please!”
Amir was at their side before they knew it, coming running as soon as he heard Flare scream, and all his energy just flickered out as he took in the horrific sight of the Drifter’s broken skull. He dropped his gun on the ground and collapsed down with his partners, wrapping his arms around the Drifter’s blood soaked shoulders. He said nothing, he just started sobbing, tears flooding his glasses.
It wasn’t hard for the rest of the Hex to find the pair when Amir composed himself just enough to send an SOS; Flare and Lizzie were audible kilometers away.
There wasn’t anything they could do; Lettie felt.. So, so useless, staring at the shattered puzzle that was the Drifter’s face with nothing she could do but declare a time of death.
She’d seen soldiers go down before, innocent civilians, her own friends and family.. But this felt. So much more..
Hollowing.
Like the Drifter up and took all their hearts right along with them.
It was December, though.. Theoretically, just a few more days, and.. They’d be back.. Right? Like anyone else who died. None of them ever had before, especially the Drifter, but.. It was the only hope they could hold onto.
New Years rolled around; The Drifter’s body had been under a veil in the Backroom as a constant wake for anyone to visit. They didn’t rot, didn’t even stiffen; they were like a limp doll; like one of their frames without their wearer, their wielder, their keeper, their Tenno. Aside from the brutality that had been done to their head; it was like they were just asleep.
Kalymos stayed by their side the whole way, as did Flare, singing dirges with Lizzie to their lifeless shell every moment they woke, until both of their voices went hoarse.
Amir couldn’t bear it.
Even if it meant leaving Flare all alone at night, and spending nights alone for the first time in years.
He slept in the back of the arcade like he used to before he fell in love with the Drifter, but the arcade stayed dark the whole two weeks until the 31st; not a machine or neon light turned on. He just focused on his work, and cried whenever he remembered that he couldn’t just go find them, hug them, kiss them.. Their door was always open for him if he was upset like this; it still was, but.. They weren’t there. Not really.
Flare did their best to fill the void, to be there for him; holding Amir close as he sobbed, laying kisses to his hair and forehead, but.. There was no comfort they could give, really; The melancholy rockstar was a shell of themself as well, so was Lizzie, who just couldn’t quite stay in tune..
It's okay. They can do this. The Hex were strong now.. Even without the Drifter there. They could do it for them, at least. Just.. Go through the motions and you’ll bring them back, like a strange, necromantic ritual..
The clock ticked to midnight, and everything just.
Stopped.
It didn’t spin back. It didn’t keep going forward. It just. Stopped.
So did everything else. The clocks, the December/January snow, the fireworks about to go off for New Years, cars, every piece of tech in the damn mall, in the damn city..
Anything alive, even, that wasn’t the protoframes, Helminth or Kalymos just. Stopped in their tracks, like statues; like a movie that just got put on pause.
The Hex and the other protoframes were left without the glue that held them together, and now they were just.. Trapped here?
Midnight on New Years forever, not even a nuke to put them out of their misery?
How long until they started hearing that tapping on the walls that the Drifter had warned them about.. How long until those strange stone arms started tearing their way through the barrier they had kept for so long?
Even Kaya’s theories fell through; all of them relied on the Drifter being there on one end or another as a lodestone for her to follow, and she couldn’t risk getting stuck one way or the other, or worse, in the Void itself..
While the others planned for something to try and fix this somehow, going over every fragment of information the Drifter had ever told any of them about the Void, the loop, the Indifference, Entrati, anything, Flare fell into a deep, dark pit in their own mind, gently tracing their fingers over the Drifter’s cold, clammy skin.
Fine. It was finally time.
If She wanted to take them fully, and end their pain, they’d take it. No fear anymore. At least if there was an afterlife, they’d see the Drifter again. The Rippers again.
They gave the Drifter’s corpse one last kiss on the cheek from under the white sheet that covered them, tucked a folded piece of paper addressed to Amir in their hands, and headed up into that infested chamber, laying against the wall of techrot under the Helminth’s mouth among a garden of multicolored lotus flowers in that shallow pool, among every broken frame the Drifter or Operator had ever consigned to her.
They slowly lost consciousness, Lizzie clutched tightly in a hug at their side..
If they woke, they woke, if they didn’t, good.
They could feel the Helminth’s tendrils slowly envelop them, holding them warmly, tightly, reminding Flare just for an instant of the way it felt to have the Drifter wrap around their consciousness like a blanket when they were inside of them, that lovely feeling that doomed the Drifter with Flare’s foolish desire for it..
And then, just as Flare thought they were finally being subsumed, there was a sudden, overwhelmingly loud sound of a sucking vacuum as the whole world fell away. They felt themself falling; the whole environment around them gone from the comforting warmth of their death to a touchless, ice cold abyss in an instant.
Flare’s eyes snapped open at the change in temperature and they found themself in a vast, open expanse of swirling, sickly light green light and absolute darkness; falling, or being pulled at terminal velocity towards something. They clutched onto Lizzie tightly, who wasn’t saying a word despite the circumstance- in or out of Flare’s head- and braced for impact..
In a flash, they woke again, sputtering out a mouthful of sand and dust, on the coast of a floating island out there in.. Oh hells.. This was the Void, wasn’t it.
Wait.
An island in the Void..
Was this Duviri? How. Why?
Bewildered, finding themself immediately snapped out of the dark mind space they were in just minutes ago, Flare pulled themself to kneel on that precarious edge and look around, up at a swirling, trippy rainbow aurora sky, then out to the barren land around them.. Strange, swirling natural stone structures, sand and bizarre plants..And some kind of amphitheater, with seating around it, which somehow also looked alien to the environment here..
“And who are you, stranger?” Said a sad voice, with delicately rolling ‘r’s, bringing Flare’s attention to her, as she had accidentally snuck up on them while they were attempting to comprehend the space around them.
The owner of the voice was a relatively tall woman who looked to be made of metal and ceramic, like the Drifter’s favorite frame other than their own lovers, Kullervo.. Deep blue skin accented with wine red and gently worn gilding, draped in silks that matched. “From your clothing and instrument.. You look to be a performer.. Have you come to play for the king returned? Perhaps my time is finally at its end.." She let out a melancholy but somehow satisfied sigh, like one Flare had as they felt the first of Helminth's techrot tendrils wrap around their body back in 1999. How distant that seemed, now..
"I would be careful if I were you, though.. Bombastine will be jealous. And with his jealousy, pain unending..” She offered the hand of her longer arm for Flare to take, to help them up. “My name is Luscinia.. What is yours, stranger?”
Flare stood with Luscinia’s help, suddenly finding themself.. A bit shorter than they had expected; distinctly lacking their permanent high heels. They looked down at themself, finally, and Lizzie at their side..
What. The. Fuck.
They were. Human again?!
Their body was just as they remembered it before their transformation, pale exposed skin dotted here and there with flakes of silver and gold glitter..
They were dressed in a short-cropped draping robe of soft, decadent charcoal and red silk with shining gold and silver accents, colored like their protoframe skin and their stage costume before it, with freshly painted sparkling black fingernails, and sandals whose golden lacings wrapped all the way up to their thighs at the edge of their robe’s gold-embroidered hem. The only remainder of even a memory of their techrot-transformed body other than Lizzie were their metallic finger-picks and a pair of sharp, intricate twisted golden armlets which hugged their shoulders and upper arms, vaguely mirroring their sharp shoulders.
Lizzie was changed, too, though still very herself in comparison. Her necks had bent into a sort of flattened DNA corkscrew spiral, her strings as well, holding each other tight and rendering her into a three-stringed instrument.. Like the Drifter’s Shawzin back home. Once, Flare thought to consign her to this place, and the Drifter wholeheartedly refused.. Sorry, Drifter, but she's here now..
She purred to life once again, starting to find her voice through brand new chords. “ Ooh.. Strange tastes here, aren’t there, Flare? Can You feel it too, Lover? We feel.. Joy.. Oh, it’s been so long..”
“I’m.. I’m Flare. And this is Lizzie..” Flare finally responded to Luscinia, leaning Lizzie’s newly singular neck against their thigh, rubbing their thumb affectionately over the claws that now clasped one another tightly at the tip. ”And no, I’m just..” They looked around.
This was Duviri.
The Drifter had said that they were Duviri, and Duviri was them..
Maybe they weren’t just being poetic, after all? Maybe they ended up here somehow, when they fell..
“..Looking for someone we lost.”
Luscinia gave a sad, knowing smile. “Aren’t we all, friends.. Aren’t we all.. Come.. Let us get out of the open air, before the Dax spot you. They have been on high alert ever since the king returned.. No matter what color the sky is. I would hate to see you cut down so soon after your arrival.” She said, beckoning Flare to follow her to the cover of her stage.
Somewhere else, Duviri’s second, or, perhaps, first and true, king, woke from a hazy dream..
Thrax sat at their side on the fainting couch they woke on, his body language the gentlest that it had been in literal ages. “Welcome back.. I missed you, friend.” The perpetually young tyrant spoke softly, laying a gilded hand on the arm of his oldest friend.
The porcelain face of the blissful Fool smiled back at Thrax, in ignorance of all they had just lost. “I missed you too..”
What did he miss them for? What did they miss him for?
They’d always been here..
This was their home.. Where else would they be?
Why would they ever leave when they were just so happy here?
They stretched their arms out, blissfully basking in the warm sunlight that fell over their ceramic skin. “I feel so light.. It’s such a beautiful day, Thrax, we should go for a run! No- a race! I'll get my Kaithe- Have you seen Brimon? I'd bet I can break that record of his today!”