Chapter Text
"Till! Till, please stay with me!"
The stage is a cold, unfeeling sensation against his back. It's ironic that only moments from death, he feels more alive than he's felt in weeks. Everything comes into painful focus, the blinding overhead lights and the unfamiliar callouses on Mizi's palm, gentle against his cheek. Mizi is a vision, an angel come to cradle his last breaths, eyes like the falling stars he'd seen with Ivan outside of Anakt Garden. The faint sting of copper at the back of his throat is, at least, familiar where this sudden kindness is not.
She's different, yet as beautiful as he remembers her being.
"You're the only one I have left, so--!"
The cheering of the aliens in the audience sounds a lot like rain, Till thinks, and he wonders if this is how Ivan felt as he died. If he felt as much solace as Till does now, dying with someone at his side, Bastard.
The stage is cold, and then it's warm, like he's been submerged in a warm pool. He hasn't moved though, so it must be his blood. He'd never thought about it very much--how fragile humans were. Not until Ivan was lying at his feet and looking so dull, not until Till had lost him, the one who always stood in his peripheral vision. Someone who, if Till had thought to look back, was always following him.
Mizi's lips are moving but he can't hear anything over the sound of rain. She looks desperate, one thread away from ripping at the seams, but that's not right. The Mizi of his memories was always smiling. Always laughing and running and sincere with all her heart. Now, her tears drip onto his face, one after another. In his chest is a lulling peace, simmering regret.
I loved you, he wants to say, who gave me hope.
He loved her, but that doesn't make him want to stay any more than he wants to die. Living is a marathon. Living is enduring. Living is a fight and Till is tired and Mizi doesn't make his heart blaze the way it did before. Maybe he's too jaded for something as childish as hope, too childish for that infatuation that set fire to his entire being, or maybe the same rain that doused Ivan's white suit simply extinguished Till, too.
Ah, really, what was that all for... Ivan?
He regrets it. Regrets wasting the chance Ivan gave him. Regrets leaving Mizi with another stain on her clothes. Regrets not winning, if only so he could get back at the aliens, so he'd be able to say I told you so. After Luka died, he would've killed himself soon after as a final insult, and Till regrets that he won't be able to see the look on Urak's face.
His swimming vision is the first to go, like someone turned the lights on the stage off. Then, his sense of touch and the hand on his face. It all disappears, until the only thing left is the wretched sound of rain hitting the ground like a never-ending chorus of thunderclaps.
"Mizi?" he calls.
He must be dead.
"...Ivan?" he ventures more cautiously.
"Do you want to see them?"
Till whirls around, spinning in circles to find anyone who could be standing in this void with him, but there's only darkness everywhere he looks.
"Do you want to see them?" The void asks again.
"...Fuck. Of course I do, what sort of question is that?" He's too tired for anything but honesty.
"I'll take you to them."
"...Thanks."
Maybe he's finally gone insane. He had been waiting for it to happen--it had to happen, with all the needles and drugs that Urak told him would make him better, yet never did. But if insanity is talking to a faceless void that will take him to see Ivan, it might not be too horrible after all.
"Hey, who are you?"
A pause. A breeze drifts through and ruffles his loose tank top.
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"I am God."
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The world bursts with colors, vibrant life. Artificially green grass and blue skies with lazily floating clouds. He's standing in the middle of a field barefoot, with the familiar weight of a collar on his throat. The same one he died wearing. In front of him is Mizi, hand in hand with Sua, who died like a firework show--a beautiful spectacle that tore apart everything it touched. The first thing Till does is to turn around, to turn away from the star that mesmerized and blinded him, and at his back is--
Black eyes, wide with surprise, fingers curled into the bark of a tree just meters away. So, so close.
Maybe God hasn't abandoned us after all.
His ears pop. Blood streams from his nose, a steady trickle.
Ivan catches him when he faints.
.
.
.
Slowly, sounds begin to filter back in. It feels almost like dying in reverse, except instead of rain and the sound of a cheering crowd, it's the steady beep of a heart monitor and a needle under his skin. Years of conditioning has him tearing the needle out, but he immediately feels stupid for it--just because some injections harmed him, doesn't mean they all did. Still, he can't bring himself to put the needle back in.
The bright white room assaults his eyes, pristine walls and a blanket newly dotted with red speckles from the wound on the inside of his wrist. His wrist--
Till freezes and stares. His skin is smooth.
What's going on?
He blinks, searches harder for faint red pock marks and white scars from needles torn out too roughly and left to heal wrong. No matter how hard he squints, his arms stay bare, and he faintly registers the beeping on the heart monitor speeding up.
When the memories come, they come all at once like a tidal wave of misery and the ephemeral sense of too many lives cut too short. Mizi. Ivan. A cold stage, eclectic lights, the warmth of his own blood pooling beneath him.
A void as black as night.
Ivan. Ivan. Ivan.
He remembers the way his snaggletooth had scraped his lip, affection wrapped in violence. Numbly, Till lifts his hand, traces a finger along his bottom lip for the scab Ivan left. It's not there. Like it never happened. It should be there, because he remembers. He remembers that day in painful detail, so there's no way it was all a dream.
Then, is he dreaming right now?
Do you want to see them?
His body feels simultaneously too small and too big for him, his skull pounding like a bass beat. He's alive. He's eleven. He's twenty-one. He's dead. He's young again and he knows things that he shouldn't know.
Till can hear the alien nurse speaking on the phone on the other side of the wall, carefully placating. The low grumble of Urak's voice intersperses her words, unhappy from what Till can tell. It's a familiar tone for Till to hear from his guardian.
The nurse comes back into the room without warning--too fast for Till to hide the IV he pulled out under the blanket. Her face crumples with annoyance and the next thing he knows, the collar is back on his neck, and she's pulling him out of the hospital cot to his feet.
She pulls him along more than he walks, and normally he'd fight back, but nothing makes sense and getting beat might just rattle the memories loose from his head. Till can't forget, he refuses to forget. As they traverse the halls, the sounds of a choir melds into his awareness, growing louder as they go. Several eyes turn to him when they enter the choir room and the nurse pushes him in with a muttered "So troublesome." The first one to move once the nurse leaves is Ivan, breaking away from the choir to run up to Till. He wouldn't normally, would have kept to himself more, but Till must have worried him more than usual this time.
"Till," Ivan whispers, grabbing his arm and tugging urgently, "come on, before the teacher gets mad."
If Till wasn't scrambling to find his footing in this time and this place--he would've torn his arm out of Ivan's hold and walked himself.
As he is now, the only thing he's even sure of is that he's Till, and that's Ivan.
Ivan.
It feels like a fever dream. Ivan's hands are smaller--still big enough to wrap around the column of his neck. He's blinking. Speaking. Eyebrows furrowing so infinitesimally that Till wouldn't have caught his concern if he hadn't been looking.
"Till, are you okay?" Mizi's young, naive face swims into view. The sight of her throws Till into a sense memory of blood gushing from a wound on his neck and a gentle hand on his cheek before Ivan's tightening grip on his wrist pulls him back to earth.
"I'm fine," Till answers. His voice is unfamiliar--hasn't dropped yet. He sounds like a child. But isn't he a child?
His uncharacteristic behavior has even Sua turning to him in concealed worry.
"Alright, enough, let's not let this disturbance get us off track."
"Yes teacher!"
"Now, from bar 32."
Ivan shares his music score with Till, knows Till doesn't have his own--he couldn't have it, not when the nurse dragged him straight back to the classroom from the infirmary. It's been a decade since Till sang this song, yet it feels like he's been practicing it for days, a tune stuck in his recent memories. He sings on autopilot, well enough that the teacher doesn't point out any mistakes at the very least, and in the blink of an eye, class is over.
"Till."
"Hm?"
For a moment, Ivan says nothing back--like he'd said his name without expecting a response, and now he has nothing to say. The rest of the kids run past them, excited to go outside to play. An artificial breeze brings a shiver up his spine.
"You can't just say my name and then not follow up with something," Till says. It's a lie--there isn't much Till wouldn't give to hear Ivan say his name more. Ivan can call him whenever he wants.
"...You've never fainted before."
"I was tired," he defends.
Ivan leans in closer, like he's scrutinizing not just his outside, but everything lying underneath his skin too. His stare makes his skin crawl, makes a fire bloom in his chest. "You slept a full eight hours last night," Ivan calls him out.
Till pauses. "How the fuck did you know that."
"I have my ways. And being tired doesn't cause nosebleeds--you were fine yesterday."
Even as a baby-faced twelve-year-old, Ivan's stare is an eerie thing; that shine of blood red in the center of his pupils and the all consuming void surrounding it. A black hole that might just swallow him whole if Till lets it. A part of him thinks he wouldn't mind, living in Ivan's eyes, if it means they can't be separated. If it means the sound of rain will stop haunting him.
"It's nothing you could do anything about," Till chooses to answer, and that's when Ivan's mask really begins to crack.
The laughter outside is a jarring contrast to the air between them, and Ivan--Ivan looks scared.
It's in that moment that Till realizes that he's never seen Ivan scared before. Always cool in the face of any hardship--he'd smiled at him as he died, too. A simple shine in his eyes that had said there you are and had been content with just Till's gaze on him.
If anyone asks, a temporary bout of insanity is what drives Till to pull Ivan into a bone crushing hug.
"Wh--?"
They don't do hugs--it's an unspoken rule. They hang out. They beat each other up sometimes. They make up. But they don't hug and if they do, it's certainly more on Ivan's part to be chasing after Till.
"Not a word."
Till has always been something of a rule breaker anyways. His action stuns Ivan into silence. Till takes that chance to catalogue every sensation of this moment--Ivan is warm in Till's arms, warm and wearing white (he hates white, likes Ivan in black). His hair tickles his nose. They're still the same height at this age. He smells like the Anakt Garden soaps and products.
"Till," Ivan starts, "are you dying?"
A question for the ages. Is Till dying? Is he dead already, and merely dreaming this in his last moments in Mizi's arms, on a cold, unfeeling stage?
"Nah," he says, "like something like this could kill me. Also what the fuck? Why would you jump to that conclusion?"
"You'd rather punch me than hug me. Unless you were on your death bed."
"...Who said that, huh? I'll punch 'em."
A faintly mischievous smile appears on Ivan's face. "You said that."
"W-well, I take it back, okay? And I'm not dying."
Ivan moves an inch back as if to look at his face and gauge if he's telling the truth, then stops, like he doesn't want to let go of Till. Something seems to change in his demeanor though, in a split second--from hesitation to determination. Resolution. Till doesn't know why, and that--
The last time Ivan set his mind on something, he died.
"You're thinking about something," Till says as evenly as he can manage with visions of Ivan's corpse painted behind his eyelids.
"Of course I am, my head isn't empty like yours."
At that, Till lets him go, which manages to draw a contrite expression from Ivan. Compared to his older self, his expressions are so much easier to read, and when Till looks closely at him it's almost--
Cute.
"Let's--let's just go. You just started reading that fantasy book, right?"
"Yeah?"
Till pauses at what he's about to say, but he decides: Screw it.
"Read in my room."
Ivan's eyes blow wide.
"I don't have to sneak in?"
"You've been sneaking in?"
"No."
"I already feel like I should be regretting inviting you."
Ivan laughs soundlessly. "No take backs. Unless you're a coward."
"What? No way."
Till doesn't take it back. Never planned to, either way.
In the in-betweens, sitting in Till's paper-riddled white-walled room, existing in silence, Till studies Ivan. The way his eyes track the words on the pages of his book, flipping every once in a while.
I went back in time, he finally acknowledges. I went back in time, and everyone is alive again.
This couldn't be anything but real. The sights, the sensations, Ivan sitting serenely on the floor with a book in his lap like all is right.
He thinks and thinks and ruminates on the regrets he held as he died. Everything he did and didn't do. Looking in the direction of one star and neglecting the one who orbited him all along, up until it was too late and he was dying at his feet.
Till looks at Ivan and thinks, The aliens are going to regret thinking they could ever keep me on a leash.
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