The Gift
04.02.2022
Kadek dreams often. His mind is filled with all manner of love and fear, and the night brings it to life. Kadek's dreams are often nightmares. Often memories. Often, he dreams of the past... and dreams of it again. In the grey pre-morning light, writhing in the dry embrace of pain, Kadek is awakened from a dream of the past. A night so long ago it feels like a whole different lifetime. It is one he knows well—a dream of a dream (which dreams itself over and again)—after all, he lived it.
It is the middle of the night. Years ago, some number, some measure of time ago. Four days after he arrives in New York City. He can not breathe. This is only a memory of a night but it is happening. It happens in his mind. His vision is blurred, smearing the streetlight outside the single window into an orange blob. He realizes they are tears long after they fall from his eyes, long after they dry in streaks down his face. He sits on his bed with his back against the wall, shifting his eyes between the single window and the single door. In his hands is a lump of metal. It is electrum, an alloy of silver and gold. Electrum is power. So much more than he will ever, ever know. It is a mercy that he has not slept. When he sleeps, his dreams are rife with guilt and fear. He dreams of the color black and unfathomable voices which he cannot discern, telling him he is blessed, telling him he is loved, and that he should be kind to his gifts. He is told that he is the best of them, and that feels like a bald-faced lie—so he does not sleep that night. By the time the weak sunlight peeks through his window that day, his throat is worn raw from retching and he is clutching at five new bubbles of electrum. So much power, but it feels like a curse. It feels like a brand-new death, the kind that never ends, and he wonders how those voices can ever claim it to be a gift.
Kadek sifts through the pain and puts the dream out of his mind. He stamps it down and tucks it away with all the other dreams, nightmares, and memories. They're not fit for the light of day. As sensations ravage his brain full into lucidity, a thought crashes clear into his head. I don't want to be like this.
This is not the first time Kadek has had the thought. It won't be the last.
He tries to sit upright and doubles over, groaning. He's used to mornings being like this. It's been four years since he has fled to Colorado and he finds it easier to count the days when he hasn't woken up feeling like there's something tearing through his insides. The electrum is easier to manage now, especially since his hands have learned the boundaries of the energy inside him and he can grasp at it like a magnet. It allows him to pull the metal up from inside him and out through his mouth, gagging past the muscles in his throat which protest at the foreign body. He crushes the day's harvest into a smooth ball with nothing but a determined thought and the smallest bit of pressure from his hands. He tosses it with the others. The newest one disappears into the bucket he's shoved next to his bed, landing among the month's harvest so far with a clink. Kadek doesn't know what to do with all the electrum. The idea of selling it leaves a sour taste in his mouth, worse than what he gets after heaving it up every morning.
He drags himself into the bathroom to shower. The counter holds an electric razor, a toothbrush, and smears of black from the last time he'd dyed his hair. It's barely longer than a buzz now, and he likes it that way. There are no strands to get stuck in his face, no time spent combing it out. The medicine cabinet is covered with a towel so he doesn't have to look at his reflection. Kadek waits for the shower to warm up and peeks under the towel. A tiny triangle of mirror is exposed and he presses his finger to it. At least this one is intact. The last time he had looked in a mirror, it had ended disastrously.
Kadek shudders, pulling away, but the memory slithers up and he scrunches his face up as it spreads out.
He has been living in his small apartment in New York City—with a single window and a single door—for nineteen days. His hair is newly black. It is different, almost enough to be frightening. The roots are brassy blonde because he does not know how to hide them. There are dark stains under his fingernails and on his palms. His white sink is now a dirty grey. It has taken him four tries to make his hair black. There was a great deal of growling and grumbling and cursing when he dropped the brush. He isn't happy with the result. He is incapable of doing it right, and it looks pitiful. His hands shake and he spits out curses under his breath as he saws through the locks of his too-long black hair with the dulled blade of a pair of scissors he’s snapped in half. The hair falls to the floor and he stares at his reflection, his eyes cold and hard—ice blue, struck through with green, like a rampant forest.
The mirror shatters when he flings the scissors at it. He sits down on the floor and picks up the largest pieces of glass, sweeping his hands along the floor to catch the rest. His fingers get sliced by the sharpest of shards, the ones that appear far too delicate, sickly green and razor-edged. The black from the hair dye underneath his fingernails stain red, darkening until they're impossible to not notice. Between one breath and the next, the slices in his skin stitch themselves up. Kadek takes it in with dawning horror. The glass dust and shards push out of his skin as it closes up. Shock silences him. This is the first time he has ever seen such a thing happen. And to him, no less. He does not sleep at all that night. His hair is uneven and his mind is as loud as the sky overhead, crowded with pinpricks and unknowable things. He holds a new chunk of electrum in his hands, tossing it up and catching it. Over and over.
Kadek's shower is hot and it turns his skin red while he sits under the spray, eyes vacant. He comes out of the memory and tries to catalog all the things that led up to this moment, hiding in Colorado, six years after his death. He comes up with nothing and shuts the shower off. While he eats breakfast, Kadek flips idly through a book he's had for as long as he's been here. It's about as large as his head, thicker than even the most intensive of textbooks, and bound in something that doesn't feel quite like leather. It's smoothed over in places with wear, shiny with oils from hand after hand. One of the corners is crushed, like it had been dropped at one point. The cover is blank except for two words, embossed in a golden script in the center: The Dominions.
The pages tell a story of centuries with tears and stains and sun-bleached spots. The writing is the same script on the cover, done in natural ink at the beginning. The words there are most faded, nothing more than brown marks in the vague shape of letters. Later, it's pen. Black and blue ink, sometimes a hasty red. Whoever wrote it poured their soul into each page. Kadek can feel it, when he draws his fingers over the lines of text and informative sketches.
Kadek's book tells him that he is called a metallon. The book has saved his life more than he'll admit, and finding it was a stroke of luck. The situation was almost suspicious, but he has learned not to question certain things, or they will get taken from him. He first saw the book sitting on top of a washing machine at the laundromat. It wasn't his, so Kadek left it alone. The next day, it was under the bench at his bus stop. Two days after that, he pried it out of his mailbox with a grumble. Kadek is reluctantly grateful to whoever made sure he kept it.
The book says that metallons are known as "mothers of metal," but that sounds like author fluff to him and the name sounds like a bad superhero. The reality is not so heroic. There are concerning diagrams of autopsied metallons in the book, showing crystalline formations in their guts, or sometimes blobs of molten alloy. The metal "grows at an alarming rate, and must be harvested often for the health of the metallon." One option of harvesting—one which turns Kadek's stomach—is to take advantage of his rapid healing and perform daily surgeries on himself. That is never going to happen, so Kadek has gone with the second option. He uses his fickle magnet hands to drag his electrum out of his body through his mouth. If repeatedly brushing his teeth doesn't help, coffee usually washes away the taste of metal when he's done. It's the only reason he still drinks it.
He fingers the numerous neon sticky notes he's placed throughout the book as reminders and pages of interest. The book is like an encyclopedia. It's full of names and different kinds of powers, drawings and diagrams of not-quite-humans, and there are pages titled with dates which read almost like his own recountings of dreams. Those pages, all labeled with question marks, tell Kadek more and more about these… Dominions. He isn't sure what exactly they are, and the author isn't clued in any more than he. His working theory is that they're some kind of higher planar being, as close to gods as he dares to believe.
There is a piece of notebook paper that Kadek has placed in between two pages wherein the author writes about something called a Seer. The paper is Kadek's own, written in the kind of shaky script that comes straight out of sleeping. He'd scrawled whatever he could remember from the dream, months ago. He'd been talked to in it, by voices which he was certain he'd never heard in the waking world. They were at once familiar and mysterious. The word "Dominion" had been spoken that night, and so Kadek wrote down all he could recall. The dream had left him paranoid all day and he'd picked at the edge of the notebook paper for hours before folding it swiftly in half and slipping it into the book.
You will wander through your life, a baseline. You will grasp at threads and tear the corners off of book pages and knock shoulders with strangers and you will be a baseline. And then you will die. You will come close. You will be in the process of dying. It happens to the best of you. When it does, to the best of you, We will take you. We will embrace you, mold your form into one which will rise above that baseline. We will speak to you, and love your heart, mind, and body. We will love your organs and your bones. We will take you and We will save you and We will welcome you to Us. The Dominions Save. The Dominions Hold. The Dominions Love…
The Dominions Are.
The words sound like ooze when he speaks them aloud, like his voice is not meant for them. The dream hadn't helped his understanding. He's at a loss as to what the Dominions are. If anything, it only reinforces his god theory. Whatever they may be, the Dominions are responsible for making him into a metallon. They're responsible for everything in the book, too. The seers, the alatum, the greys, the ravenous, wastelesses… all of them. Sometimes they're born or, like Kadek, they're saved from death and transformed into something else. Something other.
Kadek picks up his phone and dials his friend, March. He had shared the book with her about a year into their friendship and she had looked at him like he'd shown her Atlantis. A week after, she told him she was a vampire. Vampires are in the book, in a section that Kadek has marked with red sticky notes. He thinks himself to be funnier than whatever people have told him. He always chuckles and explains the jokes to himself later, to make sure they are funny. The sticky notes are red because vampires drink blood. Blood is red. Kadek tells himself that it is funny because it's true.
The book has a lot to say about them. "Vampires are humanoid beings and almost indistinguishable from humans until up close. They have pointed ears and sharp canines, although the extremity of these features varies from case to case. Vampires cannot walk freely in the light or visual presence of the sun without being harmed by fatigue, psychological stress, and physical injury. These symptoms vary in potency. Vampires feed off mostly human blood to compensate for their own, which is depleted at a faster rate than can be replenished through hematopoiesis. Vampires are in a constant state of anemia due to this."
Kadek flicks the red sticky notes back and forth and thinks back to the time after March had confessed.
He hasn't seen March for four days—not since he was shocked into silence by her confession and she left without another word—but his piles of electrum and the magnetism in his hands make him seek her out and apologize. He never gets far enough to say 'I'm sorry.' She tells him that they aren't so different, after all. They have both been chosen by the Dominions. Kadek doesn't have anything to say to that. He thinks, bitterly, 'who'd want to be chosen for something like that?' They stay friends. Kadek doesn't have anyone else.
"March," Kadek says now, when she picks up the phone. He glances at his oven clock and realizes she's probably just woken up. When they first met, he hadn't thought her nocturnal habits were worth a second glance. It all makes so much more sense now.
"Mitchell. How are you?" March has always spoken formally, and Kadek makes it a game to try and get her to use his first name. He doesn't succeed often.
"I'm doing fine. I'm reading the book right now. Did you know there's a seer in town?" March makes a noncommittal noise, which means that she knows. She just doesn't want Kadek to know. He will do something reckless. He will do something dangerous, she knows. It will not be the first time.
"I may or may not have heard whisperings about a psychic who claims to commune with 'the universe's voice.'" Kadek rolls his eyes at her words. March is an expert on talking in circles, never really saying what needs to be said, but exhausting time and energy on nothing more than syllables.
"That's it, then. We have to go see this… seer. If they can really speak to the Dominions, like the book says," Kadek pokes the book forcefully, right over a heading that introduces a Seer's powers, "then I can find out how to get rid of this 'gift' once and for all."
The air quotes around gift are a mistake, Kadek realizes, when he drops his phone trying to make the gesture with both hands. He hears March complain about the noise when he goes to pick it up, and she sighs heavily into his ear when he seats the phone securely between his head and his shoulder.
"This is not going to get you what you want. I will come with you, but I need you to understand that I believe this to be among the most foolish of things you have done."
Kadek snorts. "Trust me, I've done worse. You just weren't there to see it," he tries to joke.
"Kadek. Promise me…" The use of his name alone makes Kadek snap to attention. The soft tone March uses is just a bonus. "Promise me that you will accept whatever answers you are given. Do not meddle."
Kadek finds himself nodding slowly. He lets out a breath, shaky through his morning-raw throat. "Fine. Yes, I promise. Whatever bullshit the Dominions have for me, I'll take it. Like I always do."
"Thank you. Now, I am going to go back to sleep until it is dark. We may visit the Seer tonight." March hangs up without waiting for an answer, and Kadek opens his mouth to equalize his ears. Four years in Colorado and he just doesn't cooperate with the altitude. He'll be lucky to avoid a nosebleed before tonight.
In truth, Kadek can't find it in himself to be excited about the seer. He has never had any strong convictions about actually being able to confront the Dominions, and he has grown used to it.
Kadek stands to clear away the dishes from his evening meal and hide the book under his mattress. It's the kind of item that begs to be treated like a secret. Once the book is safely tucked away, he flops down in front of his television and closes his eyes, choosing something to watch at random. It is, incidentally, a movie about vampires.
March is waiting outside, across the street, when Kadek exits his building. He is bundled in a coat and a scarf against the chilly night air. The sky is a sinking black and the Stars shine down like the glittering of rain on glass. Kadek greets March with a nod and she returns it, walking with purpose down the street. March doesn't speak until they're well down an alleyway on the other side of town.
"The seer will know you," she starts. Her boots echo off the narrow walls of the alleyway. Kadek sidesteps a puddle and hurries to match her longer, swifter stride. "Do not look surprised. The seer will also know why you are there. Do not," and March grabs him by the arm, hard enough to draw a hiss from him, "look surprised. The only way you will get anything out of them is if you fake it. You have to seem like you know something."
"Because they won't bother with a clueless idiot," Kadek mutters.
"Yes, so do not let them know that you are one."
"Hey," Kadek shouts, jogging to keep pace. "That's mean."
March glances around at the mouth of the alley. "You keep me around for my honesty, Mitchell."
"I keep you around because you're a good friend," Kadek corrects, his heart warming at the twitch of March's mouth. She doesn't ever truly smile, but that's as much as he ever gets. Kadek is about to tease her for it when she stops in front of a darkened storefront. It looks abandoned, with sheets stuck up against the windows and no signs in sight.
"We are here." March steps up to the door and pulls on it. There's a click, and then it gives. She slips inside. Kadek gives the street one last look, making sure no one's eyeing them, and follows her inside.
It's dark in the building. Kadek can barely make out that he's in a hallway. He puts his hand out to touch the right wall closest to him and follows it down. His steps are dampened by a carpet underfoot. As they continue down the dark hall, Kadek's hand brushes against some kind of fabric. It's soft and rich, heavy like a curtain. He stops and pulls on the fabric, feeling how it tugs like it's not fully secured to the wall. March has stopped as well and waits while Kadek pulls on the curtain. It finally falls away and hits the floor with a dull, dusty thud.
Behind the curtain there is an oval mirror, framed with ornately carved wood. Kadek peers into it, but does not see himself. He is, instead, looking into another room. It is bare of little else besides a bed and a small table. It's very dark and he has to peer close to the glass to see anything. Aside from the furniture, there's someone in the room. A kid, not much younger than Kadek, but skinny and ashen. He looks up from where he's sitting on the bed and his eyes widen. Kadek smiles when he runs up to the mirror and presses a hand against it.
"Hello. Who are you?" Kadek asks, tilting his head in question.
"You? Hello… who. You?" The kid speaks back in a stilted, timid way.
Kadek frowns, combing through the Dominions book entries he's remembered. Something comes to mind. One under the Star Dominion, able to create windows between universes and communicate by parroting back whatever words they hear.
"He’s an echo?" The Echo stares at him with wide eyes.
"Echo."
"But… they're just stories," Kadek mutters. He slides his other hand along the mirror until it lines up with the small, delicate one pressing in from the other side.
"Kadek, we are all stories," March says from across the hall.
The echo locks eyes with Kadek, his shoulders shaking with something—is it fear or just the cold?—and his small body curled inward like he's trying to protect himself from all the world. March steps up behind him, her fingers twisting in the tasseled ends of Kadek's scarf. He tears his eyes away from the young man's thin face and looks up, straight into March's molten silver irises.
"Is it not proof enough for you to see me? To see yourself?" March asks. Kadek shrugs in response. "Perhaps you have lived so long in the dark that the light hurts your eyes."
Kadek bites his tongue against a scathing retort. He wonders if she'd feel the same, waking up to electrum nuggets crowding her innards. Being a vampire can't be easy, but there's a special kind of pain in having to drag chunks of metal out of your body day after day like a ritual.
"It's not that—I have proof. I've had proof for a while. I just think that some of these things would be better off staying urban legends." He crosses his arms and glares at the floor.
Unfortunately, you do not get to decide what is real and what is not."
Kadek thinks March shouldn't be allowed to be right so often. "Yeah. But there are things out there who do get to decide that." That is what he's bitter about.
"And that scares you?" Fuck. Yes.
"It pisses me off, more like." Kadek scuffs his boots along the carpet. "I've been told that this is a gift. It's not. It's a sick, useless curse and it's ruining my life." He balls up his hands until the joints ache from squeezing so hard and then he lets go. March turns away after a beat and continues down the hallway. Kadek trails after her, sending one last look at the echo.
The hallway turns sharply left after a few more steps and there's a frosted glass door at the end of a shorter hallway. March is nowhere to be seen. She must have gone through already. Light peeks through from behind the door and Kadek opens it without resistance. The room within looks like a cross between an antique shop and a natural history museum. Artifacts crowd shelves on every wall, many of them clearly of the Dominions—even Kadek can tell that sometimes, whether he wants to or not—and books stuffed onto every unoccupied flat surface. There is a raised platform at the back of the room and March is there, talking to a person seated on a cushion.
"Nevermind, he's here," the person says, cutting off whatever March had been saying.
Kadek steps over a pile of different kinds of furs and joins March.
"Took ya long enough." The person says. "I thought maybe ya got lost in the single hallway."
She's sprawled leisurely out over a patchwork quilt and some small blankets and is resting on a few pillows that have seen better days. As far as people go, she's small and unassuming, like the Echo they saw earlier. Her hair is dark and pulled back from her face, where she's sporting the kind of smirk that makes Kadek want to walk right back out. She's smug about his tardiness, for reasons he can't figure out.
Kadek decides that he doesn't like her. He glances over at March, but she is stone-faced. Her jaw is set and she's just short of a glare. The woman doesn't seem to notice, or simply does not care.
"Name's Brighthold," she says. "I assume you've come to commune with the Star Dominion?" She stops, wincing slightly. "Ah, but—neither of you are of the Star Dominion."
Kadek feels sick, all of a sudden.
"You're Planet Dominion," Brighthold points at Kadek, her small hand curled into the most accusing fist. She sits up straighter and wraps the corner of one of her blankets over her legs. "Oh, metallon." She almost sounds sorry for him.
The Planet Dominion. That is what Kadek belongs to, now that the Dominions have forced a useless alloy upon his entire being. Brighthold almost laughs when she turns her dark eyes upon March. Vampires lay under the Moon Dominion. And Brighthold is a seer. Of the Star Dominion, according to the flier Kadek had found. They are all connected and yet split by the corners of each of the Dominions. Seers speak only to their Stars. Kadek wants the floor to swallow him.
"Y'all didn't think this through, did ya?" Brighthold levels Kadek with a stare that's like a shard of glass. "But you're in luck. I'm a convergent seer. I s'pose your little book told ya about those, huh?"
Kadek's 'little book' does, actually. Convergent seers: those able to commune with Dominions other than the Stars. It's quite simple. Kadek has no idea why Brighthold wouldn’t advertise that.
"Well?" Kadek startles, looking down to where Brighthold is holding out her hands to him. "I haven't got all night. Do ya want to talk to 'em or not?"
Kadek shakily places his hands in hers and she lets out a breath between her teeth as she sinks into a slump, her eyes slipping shut. Kadek feels a tingle of electricity down his fingers, shooting up his arms to prick at the back of his neck.
She cracks an eye open and he freezes. Her eyes are glowing violet, a striking shade that tears through him when she turns to stare fully. The drawings in Kadek's book never did justice. A seer's activated eyes are almost terrifying in-person. Kadek tries to pull his hands away but she grips his fingers enough to bruise. She opens her mouth—mist drips out like she's living in sub-zero temperatures—and speaks:
"Kadek Mitchell. You are discontented. Our gift is not enough." Kadek shies away from the jarring tone, something far more powerful than a body that size should be able to make. He hears the words inside his brain. The voice, the voices, layered upon each other like a chorus.
"Tell Us," Brighthold continues, although—he supposes it's the Dominions speaking, now. "What can We do for you?"
Kadek blinks and the world goes dark.
The sensation of Brighthold's hands gripping his falls away and the weight of the planet under his feet slips into nothing. The darkness around him is not black or blue or purple or anything. It is an absence so deep it hurts to look at. Kadek squeezes his eyes shut and revels in the familiarity of the action.
"Oh, little one, We love you so. What has been done to make you feel this way about Our gift?" The voices. Oh, the voices. Kadek shrinks away from the rumbling sound of them, but the noise comes from all around—how can he shrink away from everything?—and it presses down on his spine. The echoes of the first sentence fade away and Kadek takes in what has been said.
The darkness stretches out, away, and up. There are no walls off which the voices should echo.
"Do not presume to know how Our plane operates." It's a different voice this time, distinctly uttered from straight ahead. Kadek whips his head up, in futility, because there is nothing there to see. The more he focuses, the more he feels a heat flickering out to touch his face. Like a fire, like a flame, like the heat off a stove or a radiator. "You are not in your world anymore. You are in Ours."
Kadek feels sick when the voice rolls out around him. He feels like he's staring into the heart of the sun, but there is no sun.
"What are you?" He whines, curling up again to shield against the un-shieldable.
"You know who We are. We have spoken to you many times before." This time, the voice comes from behind. Kadek knows that they all sound the same—like it's the same person's voice—but they all feel different. The one in front sounds like fire and sunlight, scorching him. The one from behind sounds like ice on a lakeside, like lances of moonlight pinning him to a ground which doesn't exist here.
"Y-you're the…" Kadek swallows. He feels like he's being watched by things with no eyes. "The Dominions."
A wash of warmth pours over him. It feels like pride, like caring, but not so right.
"Well done, little one." A new voice, from the left. New, but oh. This is the one he hears in his dreams. This is the voice that tells him to love his gift. This is the voice that has never understood how trapped Kadek is.
How does one escape an inevitable change? How does one embrace the knowledge that they will never be the same? How does one exist in a space that is meant for them, when they do not feel like it is?
"Chosen," the voice from the left chimes in. "You feel othered?" Kadek nods weakly.
"Why? You have been given—"
"A great gift. I know. You've said."
"Then why?" The voice sounds lost. Kadek knows how that feels.
"Why me?"
Silence reigns over the darkness. Kadek's voice does not echo. It is wrapped into the non-black and disappeared. "Why did you do this? I liked who I was before."
"No."
Kadek wants to cry. They know his lies, they know his thoughts. If they can see so deeply into his being, how come they changed him so?
"Listen, little one. We will explain." The voice from the left has fallen silent, so a new one speaks up. From the right, sounds like stardust rain down on him. Twinkling undertones behind a wall of solid color. Kadek shuts his eyes and in time with the next words, a rich shade of royal violet pulses behind his lids.
"Kadek Mitchell, you were once a lost soul, an empty heart. You need Us to fill what has been broken, what has been spilled. Our power is not absolute. You only see its operation because it tangles with your own power." There is a pause. Kadek feels weightless. "Your own power is what matters. It is change. We do not change you, little one. Only you can do that."
"What? But how?" Kadek's mouth feels sticky, like it's full of honey. His words swirl around in the nothingness in front of his face but they are ignored.
From ahead again, that blazing voice of the Sun. "To be human is to have that power of change. Without it, Our gifts would not come to pass."
The Stars chime in from the right: "We have seen an infinity twice over of possible lives and in none except these where we have bestowed the gift, have you ever found peace. You are an anomaly. A wonder. In a precious few of the twice-over infinities, We have seen you hailed as a hero. In the same way that Sisyphus was too! Many see strength in the way you scorn Us. They would see strength, too, in the way you will harness your power in this life."
And to the left, the Planets: "It is fear that grips you. Loneliness. You feel you are an outsider." Kadek can't even nod anymore. "Alone… even when you are surrounded."
"I'm not like everyone else," Kadek whispers.
"No one person is like another," the Moon intones, sending vibrations down his back. "You will never be like everyone else."
"I just want to fit in."
"No." All four of them, every single Dominion. A single word that grinds itself against his skin, begs to be let in, begs him to know that it is the truth.
"You want acceptance." The Stars.
"But not from others." The Sun.
"You want acceptance… from yourself." The Moon.
Kadek squirms in his balled-up position, feeling those invisible eyes on him again.
"We accept you, Kadek Mitchell. We chose you because you are more than just human, you are more than just your power of change." The Planets' voice lands on him like a caress. "You are a metamorphosis. You are a metallon. You are proof of Our love. We saved you from death…" And here, the air changes. Kadek is trying to make sense of all They are saying, trying to believe that They really did this for a reason, and not to torment him. It becomes cold. The darkness gets darker.
"...Because you are Ours."
The light in the seer's room feels like a blow to the head when Kadek opens his eyes, disoriented. He is sprawled out on the wood floor with his scarf bunched up under his head as a pillow.
Brighthold is still holding both his hands and her eyes are dripping something like tears, but purple and glittering. She lets go and returns to her seat on the platform, wiping the tears from her cheeks and looking unbothered by it all.
"You sure got chewed out by 'em, didn't ya?" Brighthold catches herself from laughing when she sees the distressed look on Kadek's face.
"I—I don't…" He's at a loss. The entire ordeal is fading fast from his mind and all he can remember clearly are those last words: you are Ours. It's not comforting, and neither does it make him feel better. Their words about change and being accepted did a little for him, but… is it really going to make a difference?
Kadek never had high hopes for this. He tried to avoid having any expectations of his communion with the Dominions. And yet. It is not what he thought it would be. He expected answers. He expected these answers to be one of two things: satisfying and clear-cut, or infuriating and something that would justify his anger.
He got none of that.
Kadek leaves with March on his heels and he fumes. There is so much fluttering under his skin and he does not know how to deal with it. He does not know how to make it dissipate. Is it him? Or is it Them? Are They under his skin? They have always been under his skin, even before he ever spoke to Them. The door slams open under Kadek's palm and he stalks into the street. The sky is lurid green, how it is just before sunrise.
March waits until they are a block or so away before she speaks. "Tell me, if you could save that echo, would you?"
Kadek pauses, remembering how the curtain had been replaced when they left, as if he'd never even moved it. "Save him how? Like, free him from his situation, or free him from the Dominion's gift?"
March hums like she does when she thinks deeply. "Do you think it would be freeing, to be unable to look between worlds? To be unable to use it as a means of escape?"
Kadek frowns. "I know what you're doing, cut it out. I get it. Okay? I get it. Just because I'm miserable, doesn't mean everyone else is. But it doesn't make what I'm feeling not matter."
"That is true," March concedes. She slows her pace and rests a hand on Kadek's arm. He visibly relaxes and they continue to walk in silence until they draw near to Kadek's home.
"Would you?"
March tilts her head questioningly and Kadek elaborates upon his question. "Would you… y'know, be a human again if you could?" Kadek almost wishes that he did not ask. He is terrified of what her answer may be. Terrified of what that means for him, and what his existence is. He stops and waits when March pauses altogether, her brows furrowed in a rare display of overt emotion. She stands statuesque in the fading moonlight.
"Never."
Kadek thinks of her answer as he enters his home. It grates on him when he falls into bed. Nothing has changed. Not his mind, not his heart, not the grumble and creak of electrum inside him. It's almost sisyphean, his life. Up and up and up and then—he falls back down into the darkness and must begin again. There is no line over which to pass and suddenly become better. There is no breath in that suddenly makes the air cleaner, or the sky brighter.
He wonders if, just as Sisyphus, the only tragedy of his life is knowing. Perhaps if he never had become aware of the world outside of his life, he could be happy.