Chapter Text
It took Add three dimensions to realise he was looking for some kind of affection. In that third dimension, he knelt on smooth Hamel stone with silver arms pinning him as Raven breathed another name into the curve of his spine, so maybe it's not his brain that's the problem but his (oh so skewed) judgement.
He's no stranger to heartbreak. The crushing weight on his chest was familiar, where the whisper of a dead name sighed with a reverence that could never be his is still tattooed into his bones. It followed him even after he shattered the Water Eldrit and opened the door to another dimension.
A dimension where maybe he might have better luck... but when had he ever been lucky?
-
In the fourth dimension, Raven rejected him. There was no argument, the answer was as black and white as his hair.
Add swallowed his pain and carved it into Berthe until it opened the portal atop the spire to a new world.
He didn't look back. He told himself that he was only there for his mother, after all.
-
The seventh dimension dropped Add into the arms of the sky. It was like a dream, the time he spent with Ciel, and Add let the other pull him apart with sweets and sweeter words, falling more in love.
Then they crossed paths with Raven and Add's violet sky became a breaking dawn.
Perhaps it was because he was doomed to make the same mistakes, or perhaps it was an effect of the shattered glass heart born in him.
Add saw clear blue skies, perfect for a bright sun, and he silently crept away in dawn's dim tailcoat. Forgotten, he supposed.
At least he didn't have to leave a note.
It's okay , he had reasoned, because Ciel has that person now and he's always been the second choice. Even for himself.
-
(In the next dimension and the dimension after that, his mother was still dead and he let no one touch him, even as he sewed his skin together from where Ciel had unravelled the stitches with quick and gentle words.)
-
It was sharp wit and a biting tongue that brought him out in another dimension. Add remembered how to laugh and grin with a mouthful of knives, muss hair with a flick of his wrist.
But he saw a thirst that he could never quench so Add kissed hair the colour of the tulips that grew in a long-forgotten garden and left.
-
The world after that settled into his skin the same way it had settled into the other two.
He's not sure how they met and he never asked. Meetings, our Add had thought to himself, should be remembered by the people who cared, and that was not him.
Definitely not him.
He decided that he was intense. They were intense, even more so together. They were the pressure and power that changed gas to liquid and liquid to solid until it sublimated into gas again - that was what they were.
It was in the way Mastermind's nimble fingers skated down spines, across sensitive skin and over hip bones, the way Psyker learned where and how to lick and bite and embrace, where pain tolerances ended and fingerprint bruises began. It was where Esper, our Add, learned to breathe and say his name with the same extollation as the one lodged between his shoulder blades, swallow love on breath that tasted like coffee and steel, and hum lullabies to faded memories while combing soft, white hair.
Too much of anything had always made him want to vomit, and this world was not an exception.
The other two could sense it. They are were all the same person, after all, but the pieces of their hearts fit better than his jagged edges.
(He still left shards, unknowingly, with them.)
He promised to come back one day, and perhaps he will, when he figures out how to return to previous dimensions, so it’s not a complete lie when the words leave his mouth. They understand, nod and kiss him goodbye.
Two weeks into the new world, Add wants to run back to their love.
-
Silver and green, they became a happy couple as Add hovered on the periphery and watched as they taunted him in their ignorance.
Rena made a lovely mother, he knew this in the way she cared for the children around her. Somehow, Add found himself in her orbit as her gentle hands placed coffee with a hint of chocolate in his.
Like she knew. She knew there was still a child begging for a mother’s love underneath the layers of cold shoulders and caustic snarls.
Rena provided and Add didn’t want to accept, only it had been so long and he thought to himself just this once… just this one time in this unnumbered dimension, where he’ll take what is offered to him because-
Mother.
Add gave Rena one show of affection after he announced his departure. She opened her arms after everyone had gone their ways and he stepped into the circle of her embrace after a moment of hesitation.
It wasn’t the same, but Add no longer had a frame of reference to truly say whether or not his mother smelled of herbs and tanned leather. Rena murmured platitudes into his ear and he almost believed them.
Almost, because he saw the way their fingers intertwined and the way they smiled at each other as they walked away, like they were the only people in the universe.
Jealousy festered deep in Add’s heart and made his spine ache.
-
The twenty-third dimension was destroyed.
He ripped it apart in a fit of anger, and when he was shaking off the vertigo and drain of moving across space and time, he regretted. Oh, how he regretted.
That Raven... had not deserved his death. Neither had that Rena, even if she had slapped him hard enough to see stars.
Add should not have said she was useless. Should not have told her the only reason why Raven looked at her like that was because he only saw someone else. Should not have tried taking someone who was not his, would never be his regardless of the teeth marks under his plug suit.
Add should not have pulled Raven aside and kissed him until the taste of herbs and fruit was replaced with coffee and bitter lust.
He was selfish and juvenile, cruel and stubborn. Add never should have rigged Raven's arm into a collapsing black hole when his ultimatum was refused.
He told himself he should never be allowed a relationship with that man. It would only lead to disaster.
-
And then he woke to the smooth gait of a woman he'd always been wary of.
When he'd convinced her to let him down from her back, he wobbled once and was immediately scooped up. He had scowled and Elesis had laughed brightly into the summery air.
She gave him an old pair of clothes, soft and sweet-smelling, and cooked for him. A little too salty, the meat a little too tough, but it was edible and much better than his own cooking.
Elesis didn't press him and he didn't offer any insight.
He stayed at the little cottage halfway between Fahrahman and Velder, tinkering with his dynamos and buying medicine whenever Elesis was too hungover to walk to her recovering hometown.
A week after he was found, Elesis prompted him to spar with her.
Practice, she'd slurred.
He was thrown on his back in less than ten seconds. She had laughed her bright, annoying laugh and offered him a hand up.
(He accepted.)
Maybe it was a little too early for sparring, she had said, and got him to do enough exercise for him to flop onto his bed and groan in pain afterwards.
There was always something about her that drew Add to Elesis, yet put him off. She never yelled at him, even when he lost himself in thought and dropped her plates on the kitchen floor or pushed too hard when he helped her with stretches. Even when her younger brother arrived, all refined edges and chivalry, Add had taken an immediate dislike to him. They'd gotten snippy and Elesis had thrown pillows at the both of them.
The next day truly frightened Add. He woke to the noise of Elesis's howling voice and the unimpressed bark of Elsword.
The front door slammed.
He heard the liquor cabinet open.
Add crept out of his room and Elesis greeted him with a smile that was stretched too thin, too bright.
He made coffee and snatched the bottle Elesis was trying to down straight and dumped a fair amount into both their mugs.
She asked if he was going to ask and he said no, shut up I’m going to talk about myself.
And he told her. Everything he could remember of his mother - not much anymore - and the worlds he went to. Even when some of Add’s memories blurred into one another, Elesis didn’t question continuity.
He told her about how people were different and how people were the same. Constants and variables. Always a search party. Always a thief. Always someone he looked at from afar.
Elesis had given him a severe look at his last world, but her hand on his ankles, where he’d thrown them onto her lap, didn’t move.
Then she asked whether or not he knew someone named Ara.
Add wracked his memories of blurred faces passing in and out of his way.
Maybe, he had said. Why?
Elesis had sighed and put her mug on the low coffee table. She didn’t reply, but stared past him with a deep melancholy that struck Add because he’d seen it before.
He’d seen it in himself.
Did you end up telling her? His voice is low when he asks and Elesis pulls a wry smile that is a shadow of what he’s used to.
She told him no... because Ara had died before she could.
Suddenly, his pining seemed even more childish than before. Elesis didn't even have the ability to hit undo and start a new game. And yet, she listened and did not judge, did not plead.
(He feels lighter.)
His coffee is cold when he puts it next to Elesis’s mug, shifting so she can lean her head on his shoulder. In the silence between them, he offered to try. Jump back in time, just a little jump, and stop Ara’s death.
Elesis cries. Maybe she heard the hesitation in his voice. A world of branching possibilities that spelt happiness for only one of her. Maybe it was something else.
They end up sprawled over the couch, Elesis heavy on his chest and tears soaking his shirt, but mercifully asleep.
Elsword thanks him after, when the woman is sleeping soundly in her bed. For what, Add isn't sure but that's okay. His heart shakes but does not shatter.
Add tells them he's leaving the next morning.
-
The new world opens for him, he sees a dark-haired woman with sweetness and suffering in her eyes, and tells her she should talk to the red-haired woman in her future.
She laughs and he walks alongside her, picking her up every time she fell, until she sees a heart blazing in the heat of battle.
Esper leaves after the petal shower settles and both Ara and Elesis kiss him on the cheek, eyes bright and resplendent in white. He smiles at them, true and glad. He hopes he'll remember presenting their rings years and years in his future.
-
Another immeasurable world, another realm lost within. Same names, same faces, the sameness presses down upon him and he wonders if he's gone mad.
Add joins the search party somewhere around Hamel, practiced ease and rehearsed lines from saying 'I will help' again and again and again and
The tea is unexpected.
The caffeine barely affects him, but it's warm and the prince of Hamel sits next to him with his own book and steaming mug.
Esper's curiosity gets the better of him and he asks Chung about his reading material, if he can just take a little peek-
Designs, plans, research he's never seen before but vaguely remembers fill Add's vision in a swirl of lanolin and ink, and then there's a steadying hand on his arm.
Chung picks up his father's research notes smiling thinly at Add and he feels guilt for dropping something so precious. Add apologises, the first time in months? years? worlds? (he can't remember)
The prince comes back the next day to read. Add notices his presence when a cup of tea materialises by his elbow.
And so the routine went on. Add tested universe divergence and Chung tinkered with Freiturnier in the background. Tea would sometimes find its way to Add's lips and sometimes materials Chung needed found their way into the pile of scraps in the time traveller's room.
They worked well on the battlefield, he found. He could run in and deliver damage while Chung covered him from further away. There was very little that they two could not destroy on their own.
Smiling became easier with the prince, less abrasive for both the action and with others. Chung smiled so much for someone carrying the weight of a kingdom on his shoulders that Add couldn't help but mirror the prince's grins.
He didn't think he'd ever see Chung not smile.
It was supposed to be simple, climb the empty mountain range, pick up some materials, climb down.
There was not supposed to be a monster hungry and awake at the peak.
They were so very, very outclassed by the heaving, black serpent that stared down with its multitudes of purple eyes, pearl glowing ominously.
They fought hard and even tried to run, but the monster had surrounded them in an impenetrable wall of scales and the flaming breath of something that should have stayed asleep in the belly of the mountain.
Add will never forget the sound of armour creaking and giving way between fangs, the muffled shriek of metal and man, the dull thud of Chung hitting the ground. Unmoving.
Freiturnier was shattered. The core sputtering in the last throes of energy fallout.
It's his last hope.
-
Never again.
If Esper could tear out his wrecked heart in order to be free of his torment just once, he would happily die in peace.
He does not expect her to help him.
He gives her access to his memory logs when he explains his proposition and she stares balefully the whole way, through the blood on his hands and the bile on his chin. There’s memories there even he doesn’t remember and it churns in his gut, seeing it laid out on a screen like a shelf of home movies.
He tells her how he can’t do it. He can’t go on like this. In the moment of sanity (insanity) he has, Add tells her that he’ll only go on to destroy more and more until everything gives out on him.
(The love he’s had for anything has always been too much, so it’s time to dig out the glass)
It hurts the first time, when the machine clamps onto his back and needles drill into his delicate skin, and he gasps out in pain.
Is it supposed to be like this? He had rasped, when he managed to regain control over his tongue.
Would you prefer to remain as you are? She had replied, yellow eyes flat and unrelenting.
It flows out of him, dark and viscous. Somehow he knew his feelings were about as ugly as the sludge in his veins, but seeing it fill the strange canisters in a Battle Seraph’s laboratory was another matter.
The second time, he wonders how Eve survived the pain of draining something inherently human (was he human? or a monster living on borrowed time?) until he remembers she’s a Nasod. Does she feel pain? She had emotions before, but it does not mean the extraction wasn’t excruciating for her as well. And she was alone with nothing but a few Nasod bots for company. Maybe she didn’t feel pain that came from the body, only suffered from being too perfect.
But it works. He can think back on the times where he may have felt something, the rejection and all the deaths, by his hand or otherwise, and not feel anything at all. No heartache, no regret, no sadness.
Nothing.
Add no longer wanted to tear out his heart when he thought of Ciel, throw up when he heard the echos of creaking armour in his ears, or cry when he remembered a lovely wedding under the boughs of an ancient tree. He no longer wanted someone that was always never his and never will be.
There’s a certain clarity that comes with being pumped full of Light El until he can see the shadows of the bones in his fingers. The light fades eventually and his reflection looks better to him. The madness is fading from his eyes and his mouth doesn’t hang in a perpetual frown anymore.
He thinks the Elesis who cried on his shoulder would be proud.
He thinks the Rena who loved him like her own kin would be happy.
He thinks the Aisha who bantered with him until sunrise would be glad.
He can’t manage to force himself to smile.
-
Esper is being hooked into the machine (one last time almost there just once more) when he hears the door slide open with a pneumatic hiss.
The person calls for Eve and Add turns his head to meet golden eyes, watch the words die in his throat.
Raven looks alarmed, as if he didn’t expect to see someone strung up in wires and pipes, black slime shifting through the translucent plastic like great slugs that slithered through his veins, and maybe he blanches slightly at the sight of such a creature like him staring at him .
It has to be what the swordsman is thinking, he thought it in every other world. After all, Add has seen it in their eyes - the way Raven always looked at him like he was something contemptible and filthy-
Esper feels… nothing.
It’s working.
Eve intercepts Raven and Add goes back to staring absently at the floor tiles, pleased yet not (because feeling anything was blessedly impossible for him now) that Eve’s promise had pulled through.
He’s free.
And yet, he recognises the sound of distress in a voice where before, he’d have done anything to comfort.
Was this any different? Did he still want to soothe someone who had never looked at him with anything but suspicion?
He’d tried so hard and for so long, and yet all he could think about was his mother and how much his back ached because a constant had murmured a dead woman’s name into his skin.
No. This was worth it. Ridding himself of attachment was the only way he could possibly live happily, maybe it would even help him get back to his real mother. Not the fakes that had shielded the other hims, cried as everything was crushed beneath his heel.
He’d give everything to go back to a time where he is happy and tormented by nothing. Too much love had broken him and cauterising it in fire and light might finally give him peace, even if it meant melting his shattered heart into something new.
Eve’s short, clipped voice buzzes in his ear, warning him that she is about to begin the final procedure. Clear doors close around him and just as the machine whirs to life, Esper hears a loud, crunching thump against the glass wall.
He has no time to process anything because pain sears into his spine, chasing away the world until all that is left is the creaking of his strained bones and the feeling of being burnt alive from within. It hurts so much it's impossible for him scream but slowly, he can sense it, the name that was whispered into his bones fades under the relentless torrent of magic poured into his fragile body.
Finally, finally he won't be hurt again.
Then it's as if he's in sudden freefall, cut off and thrumming like a live wire. Belatedly, Esper realises the machine was shut off and the El is dissipating in his skin.
Something touches his arm and Add jerks in response, a hoarse cry clawing it's way out his throat.
"Hey, whoa- I'm not going to hurt you." An arm carefully wraps around his front, supporting his weight as the machine lowers Add to his knees.
He smells ash and the tang of iron in every uneven breath he takes, and Add thinks this has to be some hallucination he dreamed up. He's passed out from pain and his brain is supplying him one last illusion before the part that yearned for the person cradling him finally croaks and leaves him alone.
The needles are pulled out of his back one by one and Add numbly registers blood running down his back. The pump is detached with a horrible sucking noise and Esper realises the pained gasping is coming from him.
His back feels like it's been flayed open and the mounting hurt is turning the corners of his vision black.
"Hey- hey, stay with me-!"
No, he thinks. Don’t let it be this world, of all worlds.