[ao3 mirror]

for the fanworkathon, prompt was ‘forget barian sekai no tame ni - surviving is good enough at this point, even if their world doesn’t make it with them.’

There are cracks forming in his gems. A spiderweb of them until the gems look very nearly white with it, only the one in the center of his chest untouched as of yet. He laughs when Durbe asks what he’s done. Head thrown back like it’s the best joke he’s ever heard, and it’s almost possible to believe that the strain in his voice when he speaks is the after-effects of laughing so explosively, rather than some side effect of whatever is coursing through his gems and destroying them so entirely.

“I’ve saved you, you imbeciles,” he wheezes out, and the venom in it doesn’t match the sentiment but he sounds entirely sincere, and when does Vector ever sound so very sincere about anything besides his revenge on Astral and the Tsukumo boy? “Sorry about the world,” he adds after a second though, throws his head back again and it’s a few moments before the laughter has even quieted enough for Durbe to ask again what he’s done.

And oh, what he’s done. Astral energy, he says, snatched it right up and took it into himself, though he won’t say where or how he got it from. The look in Alit’s eyes is what cements that, most likely, because Vector laughs and asks if he’s worried about his little human boyfriend and Alit might have punched him if Mizael hadn’t grabbed his arm and held on tight - and isn’t that ironic, huh Mizael? Durbe hurries him back to the point then, puts himself a little in front of Mizael and Alit and lets out a little warning Vector so that Vector rolls his eyes. But, fine, yes. Absorbed Astral energy, like he said - and doesn’t it burn! Doesn’t it flash through his veins like ice and fire and turn his crystals to dust where they sit! Truth be told, he says, and leans in, and though he’s mouthless they can all see the little smile that would curve up his lips if he were in human form, the kind of smile that tells of imparting some great and special secret. Truth be told, he thinks it’s going to be a little messier than he’d planned. It might explode, he says.

He pauses. Spins away from them, back turned now and wings buzzing restlessly. He reconsiders.

It’s definitely going to explode, he decides. Probably going to take the whole place down with him!

There’s a moment of long silence, and then Durbe breathes out, “You’ve doomed us all.”

Vector’s wings still now, and he turns back around, goes all sullen. He’d pout if he had the mouth for it.

“I haven’t. I’ve saved you all, don’t you see?”

His voice is pleading, suddenly. It’s unlike him, proud and vicious Vector who doesn’t kneel or beg for anyone, who will never serve anyone but himself because his freedom and himself have always been the important things, haven’t they - but then he isn’t proud and vicious Vector any more, is he, he’s bowed and served and felt the pain of it, the humiliation of kneeling to another and the actual, physical pain of the things Don Thousand has done to him.

(there’s a stain slipping over the golden setting around the gem on his chest, like a tarnish)

“I’ve saved you,” he says again, and now his voice shakes with it, goes weak and quiet as the setting around his chest gem continues to darken. “I’ve saved you.”

Louder now, faster, he speaks again. Don Thousand needs to be stopped, he says, and besides this place is poison anyway, isn’t it? The acid ocean and the acid rain and the lightning that comes down and shatters the crystals, sends shards of them flying every which way - why should they have to settle for this? They were human once, weren’t they, that’s what everything keeps telling them, and the bodies are disgusting, stinking sacks of meat, but look what they get for it! That world, sparkling and shining, and if they were human once then don’t they have just as much right to it as anybody else? Don’t they deserve it more, for everything that they’ve suffered in this hellhole?

He gestures wildly, arms thrown out wide and then the flat of one hand beat against the gem in his chest for emphasis. “Forget this place! I’m saving you! So that you’ll live! Who cares about this place? It’s about living, isn’t it?” Frantic now, eyes too wide and words too fast - he has to get them out, doesn’t he, while he still has the time - and he’s spinning, whirling, wings buzzing and stirring the dead air around him as he gestures wider, grander.

And then it stops, sudden, and he’s spinning back around and moving in and grabbing at Durbe’s arms with claws that dig in deep.

“It’s about living,” he repeats, barely more than a whisper and again he’s imparting some great and special secret to them all, “That’s what matters. Living, you have to live, you can’t let anyone have your life but yourself.” His claws dig deeper into Durbe’s arms, ignore the way Durbe winces and Mizael sways forward in an aborted lunge for him before stilling again. 

“You can’t let anyone else control you. Never, ever, there’s nobody to trust but yourself and only idiots trust themselves to others.” It’s still soft, wheedling now. “It was him, it was always him. He made me an idiot just like him,” he adds, and not a one of them has to ask who he means. “I got too deep. I was going to make him pay and he did all these little things and it was infuriating, every bit of it, him and that thing and why did they– no, see, that’s why it’s bad, because he made me weak - he did this! - and not one of you is going to make him suffer the way he should!”

He’s gotten louder now but he still clutches at Durbe, and perhaps it’s a little more than just clutching, perhaps he leans too, doesn’t quite hold all his weight, but who can deny the dying? And he is, isn’t he? Isn’t he, he asks, isn’t he dying and for them rather than for himself? Isn’t he doing something for them - look at him! Isn’t this the best proof of how weak he’s been made, of the poison that Yuuma put into him with smiles and touches and his detestable kattobingu?

Though, he allows, maybe it’s not entirely unselfish. Because he did it, didn’t he, let someone control him, put his life in their hands - literally, he adds, and his wings buzz faster, an almost nervous little flutter of them - but he has this, doesn’t he? He let someone control him but he can control this, if he let someone control his life he can fix it now, can’t he, he can fix it by controlling when that life ends.

“And that end will mean something,” he adds, and laughs again, laughs at himself and says again, “See? See what he did?”

And then he’s drawing himself up abruptly - drawing on some reserve of energy that he hadn’t betrayed with the way he’d been hanging onto Durbe - to spin away once more, come to a stop facing them and with his wings buzzing up a storm at his back.

“Go,” Vector says now, and there’s an urgency to his voice that moves them, that sets Durbe to opening a portal and urging the others through it - or perhaps it’s not his voice, perhaps it’s the way that tarnish around his chest gem has covered the entirety of the golden setting, or the little spiderweb cracks that have started in the edges of the gem. It doesn’t stop Durbe from hanging back near the portal, close enough to step through as quickly as he has to but still watching, waiting - of course, Vector shoots at him, because he’d hardly be Durbe if he didn’t stand around watching and waiting without ever doing until he has no choice. Durbe doesn’t say anything though, doesn’t do more than watch and wait as Vector throws his head back and laughs again except that this is the kind of laugh that speaks more of pain than of amusement.

“Are you going to try to save me, Durbe? Stop me?” he laughs, and his eyes are busy darting this way and that but they focus on Durbe now and then, when they do focus.

“We both know I can’t,” Durbe says back, quiet compared to Vector’s own words, and it’s enough to even silence Vector for a few short moments.

But it doesn’t last, can’t, not with Vector, and soon enough he’s hissing go again and this time Durbe does move for the portal himself, steps backwards with his eyes fixed on the larger cracks spreading across the gem on Vector’s chest. Watches, as the portal takes him, the light that bursts out from the gem when it finally cracks, floods everything so that when the portal spits him out into the human world he’s left blinking, struggling to see past the spots in his vision to where the others stand, a ragged little band clinging to each other in the bright human sunlight and staring at him, waiting for him to say something. Waiting for him to tell them what’s happening, what they’re going to do, where they go from now.

But what is there to say? What can he say, beyond that it’s over? That Vector is gone, that their world is gone? Because Vector might be - have been - a liar but even he wouldn’t be able to fake the way that Durbe can no longer feel the connection to the Barian world, the emptiness and the loss of its departure.

Except that Durbe can’t say those things, because he’s their leader and, now more than ever, they need him strong. So instead he only draws himself up tall - deep breaths in and out, pretend your vision is clear instead of eyes that are still spotted from the light and burning from the loss and the shock of it with tears that will not, cannot fall - and speaks, forcing his voice not to waver.

“You heard him,” he says. “We survive.”