Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It felt like he'd been struck by lightning. (Not that he had ever experienced lightning, but what else could possibly be compared to a pain so direct and so horrible?)

His entire body jerked backwards to his left, in conjunction with another burst of agony from his wing. His throat suddenly felt painfully raw, as if he'd screamed far too loudly, but he couldn't hear anything over the deafening static in his head.

A frantic look over his shoulder revealed the cause: his wing was speared. A weapon he didn't even recognize was impaled completely through the limb; a long slender shaft with a wickedly sharp tip, viciously hooked at the end to keep it from coming back out, and the whole thing glowed white-hot with powerful magic.

Another flash of pain drew his gaze further behind him, and he realized with sinking horror that the weapon was attached to a cable, the other end leading to an unfamiliar object clutched in Two's claws which must have launched the thing at him. And now, it was reeling him back in.

He didn't have time to think about it. He'd already wasted too many precious ticks just to understand what had happened. Bright pulses of magic were already flashing an alert within the temple– he would be swarmed in moments if he didn't act now.

His right arm crossed over to force the wing forward, while his left reached behind him to grip the weapon shaft from the back. Before any secondary preservation instincts had the chance to kick in,

he ripped the thing out.

Flying on a wing with a hole torn out of it was torture. Time and worlds passed by him in brief flashes– there was no way to know if he'd been traveling the void for seconds or for hours. His mind snapped randomly in and out of lucidity, at times so overwhelmed by the pain and adrenaline that he couldn't even remember why he was running.

Just often enough, though, he came back to himself with the awareness needed to course correct. Not that he really knew where he was going… it was more like following a compass needle, if compasses were powered by a cocktail of gut feelings, dark magic, and shadows of memories inherited from a dead person you'd never met.

But something was starting to feel right. He was rapidly approaching a single world that seemed somehow different from the others he'd passed along the way, and it felt like his heart was singing. Or, not his heart, but… something hidden inside of it.

He slammed into the edge of the world and dug into it as hard as he could. Fiery pain raced up his arms as he frenetically clawed his way through layers and layers of security and firewalls, the jagged edges he was creating digging harshly into his existence and scraping against his exterior code as he forced himself in. There couldn't be much time left. Some way or another, he'd stayed ahead of his pursuers, but he knew they could only be seconds behind him.

The innermost firewall held him in it like molasses, refusing to let him continue or escape, even as his movements become increasingly desperate. Finally, finally, his fingertips caught ever so slightly on the tiniest gap in the system's logic, and with a last push of all the force he could summon he tumbled forward through the barrier into a bright blue sky.

His body was wracked with a shudder of relief as air– air!– whistled past him, his senses beginning to grow distant. As he let himself fall, the Angel's eyes finally slipped closed.

They wouldn't open again for nearly two weeks.

Chapter Text

Tango knew many things.

He knew how to make a pretty great iron farm. He knew the order in which Zedaph habitually put on all of his various PPE components before stepping foot in a lab. He knew the exact breeding cooldown of sheep, right down to the second.

He knew, the instant his back hit the water, that something was wrong.

The first sensation was cold. Falling from such a significant height had plunged him far below the surface immediately, and the river water felt as cold as snow around him. After just a few moments, he could already feel bitter pain creeping up his limbs, leaving a heavy numbness in its wake.

The second thing he noticed was… harder to describe. A lightheadedness, at first, that some of his racing thoughts distractedly attributed to shock and panic, but it became quickly evident that there was a more serious problem. When he finally (it felt like it had been an hour already, though it couldn't have been more than a few seconds since he went under) got enough of his wits about him to try pushing himself back towards the surface of the water, he realized with dread that his movements were sluggish and imprecise, as if his whole body had somehow become too weak to even swim.

It was about then that he started to feel uncomfortably warm. The mismatched sensations were extremely disconcerting– his skin still felt like he was freezing, but it was as if something inside of his chest was growing hotter and hotter. The lightheadedness was continuing to progress as well, and by this point he was so dizzy that even with his eyes open he could hardly tell up from down. It was like having pins and needles in his brain.

The something inside of him kept getting hotter, and began to expand from his chest into the rest of his body. It was like he was boiling. Was he boiling? Could he boil? But the river was so cold. The water was so, so cold. He was freezing. He was so cold it hurt. He was so hot that—

All of his senses whited out in total agony. Before his mouth could even open to scream (for all the good that would have done him underwater), the world fell away around him.

Tango woke up with a violent start, drenched in sweat and gasping for air. His hands, feet, and tail were completely numb, and he was burning up inside as if sick with a terrible fever.

Everything hurt. Everything hurt. He choked on a sob as he continued to desperately heave deep, shaky breaths, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to focus on the feeling of his body laying on solid dirt. It did little to distract from the pain, and there was only so much progress he could make on calming himself down when he still felt like he was dying.

It was impossible to tell how much time passed while he laid there, but when he was finally startled back to awareness by the sound of quickly approaching footsteps, the sun was beginning to set, and that didn't seem right. Was the sun broken? He squinted up at it. Somebody should do something about that.

"Tango!" The voice sounded somehow far away and right next to him at the same time. With monumental effort, he tilted his head towards it, to see someone kneeling down next to him. After a moment of mental lag, his brain identified them as Xisuma. Xisuma said something else then, but he didn't quite catch it, mostly busy still trying to puzzle out what the deal was with the sun.

"You should do something about that," He said (or tried to, and was more or less successful. His mouth didn't seem interested in forming sounds very well).

Xisuma was still staring at him. "What's wrong? What happened?"

Well, at least he sounded appropriately worried. The sun was pretty important. "The sun's the wrong time way." Totally normal sentence, perfectly communicated his concerns. Nailed it, Tango; another putting-words-together victory for a competent things-sayer.

"…I'm going to assume that makes sense to you somehow. Are you hurt?"

Tango nodded as best one can while completely flat on the ground. "Oh it's… so happy fun times. Down here. Having a party. Dying?"

"That sounds like a yes. Okay." Xisuma sighed. He sounded about as stressed as Tango felt.

"Okay," X repeated after another moment. "Let me take a look. I'll try to figure out what happened, and I'll see what I can do about it. Just relax and keep breathing, yeah?"

"I can do that," Tango agreed readily.

And then he passed out.

Chapter Text

"Tango's not getting better."

The words slammed into Zedaph with the force of a train car. He could feel himself tense up, fingers digging into the fabric of the couch. "Excuse me?"

Across the living room, Skizz didn't waver, his expression hard-set as he held the other's gaze. "It's the truth. Zed, it's been a month, and nothing's—"

"A month! This kind of thing takes time, you know!" Indignation bubbled up in Zedaph's chest. He knew he was raising his voice, but couldn't bring himself to care. "He's not going to recover overnight, he needs time, and space, and—"

"Zed, he's getting worse. This isn't 'giving him room to recover', it's just leaving him alone with no support."

"We're not— he doesn't want us around right now! We haven't left, he's literally two rooms over right now—"

"I've seen Tango for a total of maybe 30 minutes over the last four weeks," Skizz interrupted firmly. "In a two and a half bedroom apartment. 1,300 square feet. He leaves his room for maybe five minutes at a time, in the middle of the night, just to get to the bathroom. He's eating about half a meal a day, regardless of how much anyone brings him. The only exercise he even could be getting is within an 80 foot room full of furniture. This is bad. Sometimes you have to go against what somebody wants, for the sake of their safety. This is one of those times."

The room fell into a tense silence.

"It's not just Tango we're worried about, either," Impulse spoke up quietly from his seat beside Skizz.

Zedaph didn't answer, staring at the pair sitting opposite him, the distinct feeling of being cornered beginning to creep up his spine.

Skizz picked up the thread again, his tone grim and sure. "You give so much of yourself to taking care of him. The complete weight of someone else's life, in addition to your own, is way more than any person can handle carrying. You only have so much, and the more you give to him, the less you keep for yourself."

"I don't regret helping Tango." Zedaph's voice was flinty, and his expression had hardened into something coldly neutral. "I wouldn't take back any of it. And if you're suggesting that I should have just left him—"

"Of course not!" Impulse rushed to say. "That's not what we mean at all, Zed, I promise."

"It's part of what makes you you," Skizz agreed, face softening slightly. "You're not the type of person who can just leave something alone once you've seen it. It's one of things I admire about you, man." Then he sighed, pausing to take a breath before regaining that serious edge. "But this past month you've been thinking so much about Tango that you've totally stopped thinking about Zedaph. And every time whatever you just tried for him doesn't work, you throw yourself twice as hard into the next idea. But the truth of the matter is that we don't have the resources Tango needs to recover. And if you keep trying to come up with them out of nothing, you're going to kill yourself.

"You're already killing yourself."

It was like all the sound had been sucked out of the apartment. Or maybe Zedaph just couldn't hear it over the static noise building in his head. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears, and for some reason it seemed like every breath he took only held half the air it was supposed to.

This was wrong. Everything about this was wrong. Zed was fine. He had to be, always, because Tango wasn't. So he was fine. It wasn't like he'd been through anything nearly as awful as Tango had. There wasn't any reason why he should have a problem. Zedaph didn't have sleepless nights, or panic attacks, or nightmares, or flashbacks, or anything like that. He didn't. He didn't. Of course he didn't.

He didn't wake up in a cold sweat haunted by the smell of rot and isopropyl and the scraping sound of a bread knife playing a bonesaw. He didn't still feel, sometimes, wet blood coating his hands, soaking into his clothes, clinging under his nails, running down in rivulets to form slick puddles on the wooden floor of the old bedroom— didn't still see it, occasionally, dark and red and terrifyingly stark against deathly pale skin, when he looked at Tango.

He didn't.

He was fine.

…But Skizz and Impulse were looking at him like he might not be, and something inside him creaked dangerously at the thought.

He opened his mouth, tried to find something to say to refute them, to argue and prove to them that he was okay, but nothing came out. His mind was blanking, completely stalled by trying to process an idea so incongruous with his own understanding.

He was fine. He was fine.

He was fine.

…

But what if he w