[ao3 mirror]

for a prompt on the fanworkathon: “’The constellation of the Great Bear was seen as a funeral procession, around a Bier or coffin. The bier was marked by the Plough or Big Dipper stars on the body of the Bear - Merak, Dubhe, Phecda and Megrez. The coffin was followed by "Mourners” the three big stars on the tail of the Great Bear; Alioth, Mizar, Alkaid.’

alit, mizael and ryoga are the only barians who make it in the end.“

it is nearly 3:30am and i have been working on this on and off since this morning and so i am not nearly coherent enough to make any proper comments about it. past character death obviously bc of the prompt, past durbe/mizael, implied mizael/ryoga/alit i??? guess???

Mizael and Alit get an apartment together, when it’s over. What choice is there, really? Barian world is gone and they’re the only ones left, and maybe both of them would like to be anywhere but Heartland but neither can agree on where and they’re both too tired to fight, too lonely to leave each other.

So they stay in Heartland, and they hold onto one another, and neither of them is all that surprised when Ryoga starts turning up outside their door because he’s one of them too, isn’t he? He might insist that he’s Ryoga Kamishiro no matter what, that he isn’t Nasch and won’t ever be Nasch again, but he’s still Barian. And Rio is gone, Merag is gone, whoever she was in the end it doesn’t really matter because she’s gone and he’s left alone, just like Mizael and Alit. All three of them have lost, and maybe Ryoga’s lost less than them because he was never so close as they were, or maybe he’s lost more because he didn’t have the chance to be before they were gone, because he lost the one of them he was close to and now Mizael and Alit have, at least, each other.

They don’t discuss it, anyway. Don’t discuss much of anything, for that matter. Ryoga spends more and more time at the apartment, until the spare room starts being his bedroom instead; him in there alone while Mizael and Alit sleep in the master bedroom, huddled together as close as they can be without ever touching. By day they drift about, every one of them at a loss for what to do to fill their time, and by night they sink into those two rooms and hold themselves apart from one another, draw inwards in their mourning and sing out their pain in wordless movements and ringing silence because the stars stopped singing through them the moment the Barian world was gone.

Sometimes Yuuma visits. He’s there for Alit, there for Ryoga, and so Mizael drifts into one of the other rooms and pretends not to listen. Not that there’s much to listen to, anyway. Yuuma talks, Yuuma laughs and jokes and tries to engage them, and his laugh rings out hollow and out of place in the quiet of the apartment until Mizael wants to go to him, wants to wrap fingers around his throat and silence him; wants to ask why he laughs, how he can laugh at all. Didn’t you lose too? he wants to demand of the boy, didn’t you lose as we did?

But he can see, he thinks, how it would go. Yuuma’s eyes would close off and he’d grip at where the key used to hang, and maybe he’d stop coming after that or maybe he’d just stop laughing when he did come. He’d stop coming or he’d stop laughing and there would stop being those little half-hearted smiles from Alit or the soft snorts from Ryoga that make his loudness even a little worth it. So Mizael tolerates it, drifts about the other rooms and tries to tune it out and wonders whether Durbe would be proud of him for managing to restrain himself on his own.

Those are the moments he lets himself remember Durbe. Remember any of them, because the thought of any of them is like a stab in his human heart - the one he can never get rid of now, can never trade in for the crystal core he wants back so fiercely - and Durbe is the worst of those stabs. In those moments though, with Yuuma’s hollow laughter in the other room, he steps willingly into the pain, lets himself sink down into memories that burn just as much as if it were the Sea of Ill Intent itself that he were drifting in. What would you think of us, Durbe? he asks, alone in those moments, What would you tell us to do? What are we supposed to do, with all of you gone?There’s a part of him that, he thinks, hopes that somehow he’ll get an answer. The part of him that has him staring up at their stars, too, has him heading out past the city so that he can get a proper look at them.

Those stars that had once seemed like a marker for home, that had been a comfort on the nights where he’d had to stay in this world, seem so much more distant now. So much colder. But still he memorises the constellation, still he finds it in the night sky and traces the shape of it with a finger; Dubhe, Merak, Phecda, Megrez, Alioth, and then he stops for a long while on Mizar, stares up at it and aches deep down in his human heart until he can bring himself to move on, to finish it on Alkaid for a few short moments before he invariably, inevitably, returns to Dubhe.

The others have their little rituals, too. Ryoga draws. Sketches out things he remembers from his past life. From this life. Draws a kingdom, draws the other Barians, draws Astral and Yuuma and two sisters who were one sister and that sister is gone now anyway. Alit works out. It’s different from before; not to strengthen him, not to make him better. It’s purposeless, now. Or, no, perhaps there is a purpose. To exhaust him, so that when he collapses into bed beside Mizael it’s into a deep, dreamless sleep rather than the nightmares he’d suffered at first or the sleeplessness that Mizael suffers still.

It’s on one of the sleepless nights that Ryoga comes in for the first time. Stands in the doorway and stares in, and he obviously assumes both of them are asleep because he just about jumps out of his skin when Mizael sits up.

“You want something,” Mizael says sharply. Pauses. “What do you want?” he tries again, less accusing this time. It’s not his forte, and he wishes Alit weren’t so deeply asleep. Ryoga shakes his head but doesn’t leave, doesn’t stop staring across at the bed and the gap between Mizael and Alit.

Mizael isn’t patient, has never claimed to be, and Ryoga’s standing there and staring between them and not saying anything and eventually Mizael makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. “What? Is there something wrong with our sleeping arrangement?”

“…I thought you’d be closer,” Ryoga says. It’s quiet, sullen, and he’s… embarrassed? Mizael can’t tell; can’t understand why he would be, if he even is in the first place. “I thought…” He cuts it off and shakes his head sharply, turning to leave.

“Stop,” Mizael snaps at him. “You thought what? Why would we be closer?”

Ryoga doesn’t answer at first, and Mizael wonders if he’s going to at all. Be patient, he tells himself, an internal voice that sounds rather more like Durbe’s than his own.

“I thought you’d… hang onto something, I guess,” he says eventually, slow and halting like the words are being dragged out of him. “You two are. I don’t know. You’re from before. You know each other, I guess. I’ve not… I thought you would.” He stops there, like that’s any sort of explanation, glances back to where Mizael is sitting and blinking uncomprehendingly at him.

“Whatever,” he concludes, “It doesn’t matter.” This time he doesn’t stop when he’s told to, so that Mizael is left staring at the space in the doorway that Ryoga has just vacated.

He sits that way for what seems like forever, staring at where Ryoga was before his gaze falls slowly down to rest on Alit instead. I thought you’d be closer, Ryoga had said, and Mizael… wonders. What he’d meant by it, why he’d said it, why he’d been there in the first place. Whether they could - ought to be? - closer in some way that they’re not.

Regardless of any comments Vector might have made to the contrary, Mizael isn’t entirely ignorant to human affection. There are things he knows, little things he remembers as though from some half-dream - the way he’s come to identify all the memories of his past life now - and little things he’s picked up since they began this human half-life, things he’s learned while drifting from place to place and watching the humans go about their lives. He’s watched them and the way they act around one another, with friends and family and more than that besides, and he’s never made any move to replicate their actions - he’s not human, after all, so why would he want to? - but now he wonders.

What does it mean to be Barian, when none of them has any way of proving it any more? When they’re as flesh and blood as any of the humans, when their flesh hangs heavy on aching bones and surrounds the aching hearts in their chests? Mizael doesn’t doubt that the other two ache just as deeply as he does, that the same bone-deep exhaustion drags at them too. And in the face of that, in the face of that pain and that exhaustion, he flounders. What is he supposed to do, what are any of them supposed to do?

They’re Barian, they’ll never stop being Barian, but in every way that counts they’re nothing but human. Would it be easier, he wonders, to give in to that? Would it ease the pain, to accept what they’ve become? His pride in himself, in being Barian, in being above humanity, tells Mizael that even if it did it wouldn’t be worth it.

Only, he doesn’t really know how much pride he has left at this point, after days and weeks of this.

He doesn’t do anything in the end, though, for all the time he spends staring down at Alit before he eventually lets his head fall back onto the pillow. In the morning, he tells himself, he’ll think about it again. In the morning he’ll ask Ryoga about this, in the morning he’ll bring it up to Alit, in the morning he’ll do something.

Morning is… different, though. Morning is too real, doesn’t have any of the dreamlike air of that late at night, that little sleep. So Mizael stays quiet, steers clear of Ryoga, is edgy and quiet around Alit. When Yuuma comes to visit he’s glad of it, glad of the excuse to disappear into the other rooms and ask, wordlessly, What do we do, Durbe? Where do we go from here, and how?

Ryoga comes again that night. This time Mizael pretends to be asleep, lies there with his eyes held shut and only peeks out from under his lashes when he’s certain Ryoga’s gone. His skin prickles with something like shame as he stares out at the empty doorway. What is it that he’s afraid of? He can’t even deny that it is fear, much as he wants to.

Mizael refuses to be afraid of anything so insignificant. In the morning, he tells himself. And if not the morning, then he’ll definitely do something if Ryoga comes again in the night.

It goes on for a month. Some nights, Mizael pretends again to be asleep. Some nights, he’ll sit up and stare at Ryoga, but there’s silence between them until Ryoga leaves. Some nights, they’ll trade a few words. Ryoga never brings up the inches between Mizael and Alit again, and Mizael never presses him to. Those nights are, in a strange, stunted way, almost companionable, and he finds himself wondering whether Ryoga is lonely.

Mizael certainly is.

The only constant, besides the fact that Ryoga comes at all, is that Mizael’s always awake for it, even on the nights he pretends otherwise. There are the nights he pretends to sleep, the nights he’s too raw or too tired to even offer up the option of speaking, but he’s always awake for every moment that Ryoga stands in the doorway.

Until one night, when Mizael has spent half the day wandering around near Tenjo Tower, wondering whether it would be worth it to try paying Kaito a visit, and the rest of the day - after deciding not to - wandering the city aimlessly for something to do to pass the time until it was safe to enter without risking interrupting the others with Yuuma. There’s a different exhaustion from usual after that, something more immediate than the constant, low ache in his bones that he’s gotten so used to in the time since the Barian world fell. The kind of exhaustion that has him not remembering anything after his head hit the pillow when he wakes in the morning.

And that’s new enough, having slept through until morning without a single awakening. It’s even more new to wake up with the warmth of someone else pressed up to him, because up until now Alit hasn’t once closed the gap between them, not even in his sleep. Only, when he opens his eyes, it’s not to Alit having rolled over too far but to Ryoga sprawled between them, one arm thrown out across Mizael’s chest so that when Mizael’s eyes open he’s treated to a view of the fabric of Ryoga’s pajama sleeve with the little cartoon sharks printed on it, and his other arm thrown out across Alit’s chest in much the same manner.

Mizael’s first reaction is to push him away, or to get up and act like normal and pretend like nothing happened. Something stops him, though, some little spark in a light that’s been too-long drowned and snuffed out by these bodies. There’s no light left to any of them, only the flesh and blood of the human bodies, but Mizael still feels the echo of it now, the way if they still had it right now it would hum out contentment and twist lazily together in the faded morning light. He remembers the same with Durbe in the Barian world when things had been better, slow twisting-together of their lights until their heads had spun with it and they’d come to rest between the crystals where the others couldn’t find them.

Something like that isn’t possible now. Not stuck in these bodies, not when the Barian world is nothing more than a memory. But he still imagines he can see where it would swirl in the air above them, and that’s enough to keep Mizael in place, keep him just watching the other two without moving. It’s enough to have his eyes sliding shut again after a couple of minutes, too, head sinking deeper into the pillow as he lets sleep wash slowly over him again.

Durbe, he thinks to himself, slow and drowsy as he lets himself lean more into the warmth of Alit and Ryoga beside him, I think we’ve got it, now. This is where we go from here.