Work Text:
You are a place where miracles don’t just come true. The land itself is a miracle. The sea is a miracle. The sun, still discernible through the grey corona of Pale swallowing Elysium—that too is a miracle. Your island is the biggest dot among 70,000 dots, freckled across the wide smiling face of Insulinde.
You are Revachol, the former capital of the world. The voyagers from Mundi once dragged their fingers through your sands and fell to their knees, shouting l’Insulinde, l’Insulinde! You were a holy sign to the human things who risked so much to find you. A divine torch against the Pale.
Your torch against the Pale, and man’s unceasing capability for destruction, is a human thing too. Your favorite thing. He is screaming and colorful and afraid. He is a miracle.
Right along with his mother, you cradle him when he's born. He is the son of an immigrant intellectual, and a soldier of fortune who was born in the same hospital twenty-nine years before. You are able to speak to his father and be heard on rare occasions, but he is not the same as the son. A heart too hardened and a mind too inflexible.
Harrier is born in the final peaceful year of the Commune of Revachol. His parents are hopeful, happy newlyweds. It feels like the war is over. Finally over. That your streets can be rebuilt, that your people can weave through your labyrinthine body without fear. There will be no more starving children in your gutters. No more gunshots cracking across the sky. Still, you know it's a dream that cannot be. The blood that has barely finished sinking into your soil is already begging for another layer.
Harrier is a curious child. He, his parents, and his older sister live on the water. He plays in the tidepools, tidepools the color of his eyes. Uncoordinated toddler hands reach for common sunstars and glittering bobtail squids, pulled back or corrected by the gentle touch of his mother. That single year is idyllic.
(He doesn’t remember it.)
When he is fifteen months old, the bloodshed begins, exponentially worse than ever before. The family leaves the house, and it's leveled mere days later, much like everything around it. The waters of your great bay are rotten with bodies, with toxins and mazut. Your lakes turn black with ash. Your rivers run bloody. It's worse than any war before. The goal is to kill your people, kill as many of them as possible. It is done with terrifying and relentless brutality.
Just months later, he's struggling for life in the same hospital he was born in. You watch as his muscles turn rigid, then freeze near hard as bone. His jaw won’t open enough for him to wail from the pain. But he survives. Then, he survives his mother’s execution, expertly squirreled away by his father, alongside his sister. When tuberculosis sweeps through you, killing tens of thousands in Jamrock alone, still, he survives.
His sister does not.
It's the first time you're able to speak to him—and he's able to truly hear. You speak to him in her voice.
HARRIER, you say. IT WILL BE OKAY.
The eight year old jerks up his head immediately, distracted from his sobbing. “Perry?” Hope springs from his eyes in the form of a new wash of tears.
You recall the sister’s name: Peregrine.
I AM THE CITY.
Harrier doesn't understand, but he's comforted in some small fashion all the same. You are his family, and he is yours. A family that can't be taken from him, not like his mother and his sister.
The father dies in one of your ditches six years later, drowning in an agony too deep to escape. The wind through the corridors of Central Jamrock are his funeral hymn. You are the only one who will miss him. His son has long since given up on him. Still, you show Harrier where his father's body is. Your favorite human is sentimental.
Still, when his father died, you showed him. You didn’t want to—but you knew it would matter to Harrier, to put him in the ground, or burn him, or send him off on a little boat like the rest of the human things do. Harrier was sentimental like that. The way he loved you made that abundantly clear.
Harrier found the body. He buried his father by the lake shore, in the patch of dry grass and dead trees where his childhood home once stood.
“Well?” he whispers. You know he's talking to you. “Are you going to tell me it’ll be okay, again?” You can hear the challenge in his freshly dropped voice. He's starting to sound like a man, now.
ONE DAY.
The fighting starts to calm after its near decade-long onslaught. Several new schools open, and Harrier enrolls himself the first chance he gets. His mother taught him until her execution. Since then, he scrambled for any book he could get his hands on. He misses the lessons and his mother with an ache so fierce you feel it at your very core, whatever it is that makes you Be.
He loves school, and performs well in his studies. The human things are rebuilding you as he walks down to accept his high school diploma. He starts work at the school immediately. He watches over some of your children, the littlest ones, the weakest ones. Your infrastructure is trembling, but aid airships carry over 500,000 doses of vaccinations to you, everything from measles to rickets. You're still unsafe for the children, but now, there's a chance that one day you might be. Harrier wants to do his part. He's quickly trained to dispense vaccines. He loves this job. He's so good at comforting the tiny humans when they cry.
At night, he goes to one of your universities to study. Harrier says they let him go for free. (He specifically says, "I'm the smartest kid to ever walk those halls. I would have been more surprised if they hadn't given me a scholarship.") Not long later, he tells you that he wants to be a teacher. You already know, but even so, you say—
YOU WILL BE A GREAT ONE.
Two years later, Harrier accepts his associate's degree, construction noise all around him. You are being rebuilt. Whenever he has time, Harrier walks your streets, checking to see what new structures may have been built, or what old one is now restored. Where he goes, he talks to people. He asks questions. Asking questions is his favorite activity.
He's so excited for the future. He believes you—that it will be okay.
Harrier loves teaching your children. It makes him feel like he's helping to rebuild you, too. Where some lay brick and concrete, Harrier makes the little ones run in circles. You don't know the details, but you know it's very important.
Then he falls in love with another human thing, a woman. She loves him back. She loves him like he loves you—which might be part of why he loves her. They move into a little house on Voyager Road. She stokes the fire in him, a greater ambition than safeguarding the children. He wants to guard you. You and all of the citizens in your western half.
Harrier wants to join your Citizen’s Militia.
Two years at the academy, still while teaching. They put a white stripe on his back, one that will never truly come off. He becomes something called a patrol officer. His feet jog down your fresh new pavement every day. It's the 30s, and you feel alive. You feel like a city with hope flowing through its roads and alleys, for the first time since ‘09.
Time passes.
He changes as he ages, like the human things tend to. You don't like the way he changes, the way you see flashes of his father in him. He starts to lean into violence in a way he never has before. You watch him lose an unborn child to an unpaid electric bill. You watch him lose the woman. You watch him lose the little home on Voyager Road. The woman leaves Insulinde entirely. She cannot call you her home anymore, because of him, your favorite. He moves to Boogie Street with nothing.
Except for the white stripe. When everything else is gone, that remains.
A darkness brews in his empty chest. He starts to drink like his father drank. It had always been a problem. You didn’t know what it felt like to drink; you’re a sentient landmass. He does it to forget, you eventually realized. But what if he forgot you? Forgot the vows he made you all those years ago?
It's getting harder and harder for him to hear you.
The next human thing Harrier cares for is a man. The dark shape of him lopes behind Harrier. For a while, you're grateful for that dark shape. He grounds Harrier in your reality. He brings out the best in him. Years into their partnership, Harrier asks you to keep him safe while he's bleeding out on one of your sidewalks. He calls him Jean.
Then they start to drink together. The drinks one day turned into drinks and fun little pills. It doesn't take long for the the pills to get less fun. The alcohol is killing him. Harrier can barely hear you, though he does still strive to protect you.
Until he starts to fail. Himself, you, the unit he created to play guardian to your most violent edges. The bold, brilliant light of him has been dimming for years, and now it barely stutters to life each morning. He can't hear you at all. You would shout for him, but there is no room for you, not past the noise in his own head. You can't lose him. Your future shatters into possibilities instead of sureties. If he dies, you die.
He tries to kill himself. You decide to let him.
Mostly.
You allow him to obliterate almost everything. He wants the universe purged of his presence, and you won’t deny him that. He doesn’t just want to be dead, he wants to have not existed in the first place. Which, by rights, maybe he shouldn’t have. But if there is a god to complain to, you have never heard its voice.
You scour him inside and out. You do things the only way you know how to: big.
He wakes up frightened. You leave the glowing core of him, the one that sings in tune with you, untouched. He is a new animal, and he knows your voice on the wind before he knows his own name.
Another one of your protectors helps to guide him as he stumbles through the world on ungainly legs. Still, the magpie flies. He finds pieces of himself, past, present, future. Better yet, he builds new ones. He assembles a man born fresh. He wants to solve the murder of the hanged man, and you nudge him here and there, to make sure he doesn't lose his way.
But then—
“Please. God.”
Suddenly, you know him, the other protector. You know his name: Kim Kitsuragi. He's never left you. Not once since his birth. He loves you just as Harrier loves you. You are more a parent to Kim than any of the human things.
You don’t waste any time. If no one else is going to answer the call, you will. You put your arms around his. You let him see with your eyes, for a split second. And your eyes see everything.
Harrier and Kim both survive, and they solve the hanged man's murder. Harrier is smiling more than you've seen him smile in years.
After a trip to one of your hospitals for a few days, Harrier stands on the rooftop of his real home, the domed silk mill watching over you, his dear city. He smokes a cigarette, Kim on one side, Jean on the other.
YOU BELONG HERE, you say to him gently.
Harry lifts his chin and grins at the sky.
“What is it?” Kim asks, tilting his head back to watch the passing clouds.
Jean continues to map your streets below with his eyes. “Something wrong?”
“Nah.” Harrier puts arms around both of their shoulders, still smiling. “Everything’s okay.”