Chapter Text
Zulf's swimming; not in water, but in time. He feels like a heavy thing, floating in mid air, like his spirit's left his body, only there's still too much pain for that. Sometimes, he coughs, and he can feel his ribs breaking all over again, and when he chokes on the blood, it makes him cough again, and it all just repeats. When he can move at all, he tries to roll himself in ways that won't press on broken bones and bruised skin, but his whole body is a collage of overlapping bruises and cuts, and there's no relief. He can feel blood like he's used to feeling air; he can breathe it and drink it and he's vividly aware of it seeping out of him, and soaking his clothes, and matting in his hair, though that gets harder to focus on as he loses more. His vision is in and out, and he hears only silence, punctuated by the desperate beating of his rabbit heart, and his own ragged breathing. He closes his eyes, and the darkness is smeared with red.
Zulf spits a mouthful of blood onto the ground his face is pressed against, and tries to move himself away from here. He sings in his mind, beckoning the Mother to come and guide his way to the place beyond pain, but she doesn't come. It rasps and burns to use his voice, but he longs to sing, so she can hear. Instead, he slips into unconsciousness again.
When The Kid finds Zulf, he thinks he's already dead, and in a way, he's almost sadder to find that the blood-stained fabric of his vest still rises and falls slightly, that he's still here. The Kid has no specific love for this man, and he can hear Rucks whispering in his ear to leave him, that he needs the ram currently resting on his shoulder, that Zulf will die his traitor's death alone, and it will be no concern of any of theirs. But The Kid is made of different stuff. He's been tempered by years of loss and hard work, and now, by weeks of unlikely companionship. Zulf was a stranger once, but now, he's like some kind of messed up family to The Kid, and you don't just leave that to bleed out, no matter what they might've done. He had his reasons, and The Kid wants to hear them from Zulf himself. The ram, his only weapon, rolls away, and off the edge of the world. Zulf seems heavier than it, somehow, like the weight of how important it is to keep all of them alive has become physical, and is pressing down on The Kid as he hoists the broken Ura over his shoulder. They'll find a way out, somehow.
He's lost count of how many arrows the other Ura have fired in their direction now, though he's acutely aware of the three now sticking out of his legs, and the one in Zulf's left arm. Bitterly, The Kid wonders if, in choosing to try and save Zulf, he actually doomed them both, but it's a passing thought, because he doesn't have time to focus on anything but moving forward. If he thinks about the blood, or the pain, or that they might not make it, then they won't.
Zulf weaves in and out of consciousness, though The Kid can't tell if he's really aware of his surroundings, of The Kid carrying him, and the Ura shooting. It's a blessing, really, that he's so in the darkness for this. It shocks The Kid then, when he hears Zulf start singing, just a low murmur, a little raspy and muddled, but still audible in The Kid's ear. He gets a shiver down his spine when he finally makes out the words: it's an old funeral song, a prayer to Micea, the Mother, to carry the spirits of the dead to the realms beyond this one.
It's a beautiful song, haunting, though not exactly sad, and The Kid thinks Zulf probably had a beautiful voice once. Has. Has a beautiful voice, he forces himself to think. He's not letting those thoughts capture him, because he knows they'll tie him down, and he needs to be free in order to get them both out of here, to bring the last core to the Bastion, and fix it, and do... whatever it is they're going to do when it's complete.
He's so focused, just on taking the next step, and on Zulf's singing that means he's not yet gone, that he scarcely notices when one of the Ura turns on another, and others start doing the same, pulling their bows and guns from each other's hands, and throwing them down. But he does notice when they all stop shooting, and just start staring. Even after everything, people are people, he supposes, and even if they're not all good, they're not all bad either. A person can't really be just one or the other, they're always some blend of the two, and everything in between: humanity is not a matter of polarity. He wonders what they'll do now, after they let him and Zulf escape back to the Bastion. After they move on, and the quest, whatever the quest is, is done, what will become of these last Ura, sans the one on his back, and the one awaiting his return?
When they reach the Bastion again, weaponless and weak, Zulf's on death's doorstep, and his blood's all mixed up with The Kid's. All their potions have been drunk down, all their energy spent, save what little bit The Kid spares to stumble to the closest tent, and collapse, laying himself and Zulf down together in a haphazard tangle of limbs and blood and fabric and fatigue. Zia rushes to the Distillery, then the Lost and Found, and the Scullery, ransacks the shelves for anything that might help, pulling bottles and jars and pots off shelves with all the urgency of a mother squirt throwing herself between her kits and a hungry predator. Rucks gets bandages, clean ones, and brings them with his wartime expertise into the tent. All four of them don't leave it much for some time after that.
The Kid sleeps three full days, and when he wakes, he finds himself bandaged, mending, and hot: Zulf's a furnace in the small tent, soaking the bedclothes in sweat and shaking in his sleep from time to time. His face is hardly recognizable under a collage of bruises and cuts, though The Kid knows it was worse before Zia's treatments. Both men have been stripped down to their undergarments and wrapped in bandages and smeared with healing ointments, but they're each worse for wear, Zulf especially. The Kid can tell from his breathing that a handful of cracked ribs are making it hard on him, and that, were he conscious, every breath in and out would be a stabbing, aching pain. It's better that he stays asleep as long as he can for this.
Seven days, and Zulf's looking weak and wan, the purple of his bruises fading some, leaving him colourless. The Kid's alright now, save for a few last healing scratches, and he throws himself into helping the other two in Zulf's revival. Him and Zia make hot soup, and try and get Zulf to drink it, to little avail. Most of the broth dribbles down Zulf's gaunt cheeks and onto the already blood and sweat-stained pillow. Rucks doesn't talk much about what was supposed to come after The Kid brought back that last core, not yet. He bides his time and helps what ways he can, imparting wisdom here, keeping hope with a story there, helping tie the occasional fresh bandage. Zia spends hours singing to him as he sleeps, and The Kid sits and watches them both, enraptured by the surreal, melancholy beauty of them both.
At ten days, Zulf wakes up. He's hazy and pale, but he's alive. He coughs, and rasps when he speaks, and he takes what feels to be a hundred years to drink down one cup of hot broth, but all these things, all these painful things, they're happy too. Zulf is alive again, and living more every moment.
The days pass in kind, all four of them just floating there, in the Bastion, a motley impression of a family, just caring for each other. No one blames Zulf for what he did, and when he stammers out a rough apology, Zia silences him with a soft hand on his cracked lips, and shakes her head. The past is the past; this is their future now. Zulf smiles up at her, and The Kid, watching from Zia's side, tries to remember if he's seen that before. He doesn't recall ever seeing Zulf look as happy as he does now, Rucks sitting near his feet, Zia and The Kid at his side. Sure, he's covered in bruises and packed with broken bones, but they haven't left him yet, and they won't. Whatever he lost in the Calamity that he won't tell them about yet, he's got back a home and a family now, at least.
Zulf can walk, with a little help, by the third week. He hobbles about the Bastion, leaning on The Kid, or clinging to Zia's arm. Rucks catches him more than once before he falls when his tired legs go out from under him. The old storyteller carves him a cane, and before long, Zulf can walk without any help at all. It's time then, for a decision to be made.
Rucks has told Zia, before, when The Kid was off adventuring for cores, and he tells the rest of them now. The Bastion gives them two options: the first, a restoration. Everything gets reset to how it was before, like the Calamity never happened. At first, The Kid thinks it's perfect, but while Zulf looks hopeful, his eyes looking past all of them, to someone or something no one else can see, Zia grows quiet, and sad. He can't possibly choose between their happinesses. Rucks clearly wants to restore, but... The Kid wonders how likely it is that the Calamity won't just happen over. Something gives him the strangest feeling that the history they've lived would only repeat, that undoing the event won't undo the path that lead to it, that the Calamity would just happen again and again until someone made a different choice. Until he made a different choice.
The second option is to evacuate, to leave Caelondia and the Calamity and all of it behind them, and just go. Thinking back, The Kid isn't sure he'd want back the life he had, not really. He'd lost his mother already, and he didn't have much else. Another tour on the walls, and another after that, maybe a mancer some day, just step after predictable step, until the end. Maybe he'd meet a nice girl, and settle down, and maybe that future had kids and happiness in it, but then again, maybe it didn't. He could die alone on the walls in a year, or in a moment when the Calamity hit again just like it had before, or fifty years down the road in his own bed, but there was no real knowing either way. In the end, Zia was right: all the moments he wanted to relive, excepting ones the restoration wouldn't give him back, they had happened after the Calamity. He hadn't felt so happy and at peace as he did now in quite some time really. Who was to say he couldn't have a future on the Bastion too?
A decision like this one isn't easy, and it takes him some time of thought. It means the world that they all trust him to pick, but it makes sense. Out of everyone, The Kid's the only one with no strong leanings. Zia's life before was lonely and empty, as Zulf's after was, and Rucks life was, at the very least, fulfilling. In fact, he still hadn't picked when he entered the lower quarters of the Bastion, where the activation switches were. A shot at life without the Calamity sounded good, but... one look at all of the rest of them there, at Zulf with his cane, and an arm around Zia's petite shoulders, at her slight smile, and the way the wrinkles around Rucks' eyes tucked and moved when he spoke, and The Kid knew that he could never pick another life but this one. Whatever had happened, or might happen again, choosing this, choosing them, was the right choice, and when he launched the Bastion free from Caelondia, and their collective pasts, he could feel his doubts dissolving in the clouds that surrounded them.
The fresh air they sailed through was clear and sweet, and there were green streaks on the blue horizon, evidence of far-off continents they'd never seen before. There was a whole world to explore out there, and an endless sky to sail through, and they were going to see it all, together.