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Lukas doesn’t know how long he stares at it for. Just that its heady glow had instantly ensnared him, moth-to-flame, the moment he slipped into the treasure room. And then his tired eyes were tracing each mechanical vein and artery through the glare, red filling his vision to the peripherals.
Each pedestal bore its own fantastical artifact, retrieved from a world so far from their own in many ways, yet none managed to seem quite as otherworldly. Like it was never meant to find a home in their version of reality, a puzzle piece taken from an entirely different jigsaw. Its low pulse thumps a constant pace in his ears, though every so often the rhythm juts and stutters, as if some remnant of advanced intelligence were still clinging to life, still in search of a host. If he zeroes in, he can almost hear a hum of steady commands from a distant voice, one he remembers in the same way memory grasps at a dream.
It’s easy to feel secure in the light—that he’s him again, he has control, he’s safe—but here in the dark, how easy would it be to sink back into that one-track state of mind, to be lulled by the promise of utility—of belonging? He entertains the thought as long as he dares.
His focus is broken by the heavy groan of the door, the soft patter of footsteps that follow.
“Creepy, isn’t it?” Petra says from behind him. The vague tenor of awe she’s taken on is the same one she wears without pretense on an adventure, marveling at some new, cool, extraordinary sight. Now, she wears it with a pointed nonchalance, in an attempt to belie the weight of what they’re both looking at. “I’ve never seen something artificial seem so alive before.”
When he looks over his shoulder to face her, leaning against the doorframe of the treasure room in fewer, looser clothes than he’s used to—nothing more than a camisole and shorts—he finds a lump lodged in the space where words should come out. Since their merry band of four made it back home from the Portal Network a couple of weeks ago, he hasn’t been able to look at her in entirely the same way. So far, he hasn’t been able to put a finger as to why, only that it’s not tied to any sort of hostility. Still, it’s a noticeable change from the quiet comfortability he’s always had with her, a natural extension of the trust and loyalty they’ve forged, as the member of their new Order with which he’s had the most history.
She smiles sympathetically, a little guilt rounding the edges. “Sorry for startling,” she says in an uncharacteristically small manner. Though that may be because the rest of the Order are, presumably, sound asleep in their quarters upstairs. “I assume we’re awake for the same reasons.” She steps forward to situate herself beside him.
“Do you hear it too?” Lukas asks tentatively, because there’s a not-at-all-unreasonable chance he could be hallucinating, or imagining things at best. Despite the two of them having been subsumed into the same consciousness, at least for that short while, he can’t assume she’d experienced it the exact same way he did. Though he distinctly remembers having felt her presence through the singular clutch of Harper’s creation, the cacophony of brilliant minds struggling to break free—she’d seemed so far away.
Petra’s lips twist together. In a show of contemplation or inner turmoil, he isn’t entirely certain. “Sometimes. When it gets really quiet,” she draws out plainly but slowly, as if rationing her words. “I try my best not to let it, though.”
Images swim through Lukas’ head of how busy Petra has kept herself in the time since they got back; sparring, hunting, doing random favors for people around town like she used to. Even the most menial of tasks she wouldn’t trade all the diamonds in the world to do. Of her trying to wrest control, to fight back in the way she does best.
“You’re going to think this is weird,” he says preemptively, catching the glow of the heart in the corner of his eye. “But I find it kind of… soothing.”
Through the red-filtered dim, he makes out a bewildered look shot in his direction. “Weird, all right. Unless you’re joking?”
“Not really,” he says, as honestly as he can muster. He’s always had a fine grasp on language and so it isn’t too hard for him to weave an analogy that gets to the core of what he means. “It’s like… like I was tuned into that frequency for such a long time, that now my brain just feels… kind of empty without it. Better something to fill the space than static.”
She huffs and locks her arms tight to herself, tilting her head away. Her next words, though clearly about him, don’t feel particularly directed towards him. “Then again, I can’t really judge how bad it messed you up. You were a part of it for longer.”
A pregnant pause follows, as if both of them had been unnerved out of continuing the conversation. It occurs to Lukas that they haven’t yet had a chance to unpack what really happened in Crown Mesa. The general gist, sure, just to bring Axel and Olivia up to speed. But after exiting that world, they’d simply moved on to, rightfully, more pressing matters of the Old Builders and the Atlas and putting an end to the whole portal-hopping debacle.
“It’s not healthy for us to be cooped up here. I’m going outside,” Petra breaks the silence matter-of-factly, and Lukas knows it’s her own stiff version of an invitation for fresh air.
He lets her go ahead, waiting about a minute and a half to clear his head before following her down the hallway to the terrace he knows she likes to frequent when she wants to escape people. Really, it’s more of a balcony, given the minimal space and the lack of a way out other than back inside. His trained eye knows it couldn’t have been a planned, deliberate part of the Order Hall’s architecture—an attempt to design around a miscalculation, maybe—but he figures she’s found a purpose for it all the same. It’s so much like Petra, to carve space in the world even when it’s unwarranted, that he would’ve smiled at the thought had other things not been weighing so heavily on his mind.
He finds her perched against the oak railing, staring off into the chilly, gusty night with an indiscernible expression. He takes up the space next to her and the cicada-accented silence they sink into, thankfully, is closer to comfortable this time.
“It’s silly,” Petra begins after what feels like a long while. “Stupid, really. How we’re keeping that hunk of redstone around.”
“It’s a valuable artifact,” Lukas counters, keeping his tone even and on the side of detached. “We fought tooth and nail for it, like all our other treasures. Harper might have some use for it in the future.”
She scoffs. “It’s not treasure. I know value when I see it. It’s collateral damage.” She refrains from using her full chest, from releasing the words for the breeze to snatch, but they’re tinged with her usual stubborn pride. The sound is almost relieving in its familiarity. “If Harper needed it back, Ivor would’ve stopped for it before he left for Crown Mesa today.”
That was the reason, it clicks now, why he’d been kept from restful sleep by thoughts of this adventure in particular, of the myriad mini-adventures they’ve had in the recent past. Why he inexplicably followed the spiral of thoughts down to the treasure room.
“Why don’t you say something, then?” Lukas asks. “You know Jesse would listen to you if you didn’t want it displayed.”
Petra slumps down onto the railing, heaving out a deep sigh. “I don’t know. Sense of accomplishment, I guess? I mean, it is impressive-looking. Olivia seemed like she wanted to pick it apart. And Jesse, by no fault of his, doesn’t see it the way we do.”
She turns to look at him for the first time since he’d joined her out on the terrace. “I’m surprised you aren’t more affected by this. Between the two of us, you weren’t spared from the worst of it.”
On cue, twin sensations of phantom pain and unwanted memory dig their claws at the edges of Lukas’ mind. He steels himself before it can take hold, before it can render visibly on his face and crack the measured tone of his voice. “That doesn’t negate the fact that you went through it, too.”
“Yeah, but—” She bites her lip, as if her own memories were being unwantedly conjured up. She glances away for a split second, but when they lock eyes again, there’s a strange strain behind her gaze now; it’s the look she gets when she’s itching to get something out. Despite Petra’s proclivity for concealing her feelings, she’s never been that great at the actual art of lying. “Can I tell you something?”
“Anything,” he says earnestly, gearing up to help Petra weave her way through her emotions in the way he’s always done. If, by any chance, it can help take his mind off his own.
“Sometimes I wish Jesse had freed you first.”
Though Lukas already has a guess as to what she might mean by that, consolation is quick to bubble on his tongue. “It was a split-second decision, Petra,” he says, firm but soft with understanding in the same way a parent might reason with a child.
“I know. It’s just—” She makes a noise of exasperation through her nose. “Do you remember… how it felt? Under PAMA’s control.”
Noticeably, it’s the first time either of them have uttered the computer’s name. A sudden heaviness settles over the air, over the nebulous discomfort that previously hung in its place, as if to signal it’s no holds barred now.
He nods slowly. It’s difficult—the phantom pain seeming to grow, to unravel the more he makes an effort to recall—but he can. He sucks in a breath. “You couldn’t have thoughts of your own. Not unless you wanted to be punished, anyway. So it’s much easier to submit to the hivemind and have its thoughts be indistinguishable from yours, than to resist.”
Buried within that articulation, Lukas realizes, is a revelation. That PAMA always gave them the option, as unclear as it may have been, to opt out, to fight back—if they had the will to do it. At first, it doesn’t make much sense, because what malevolent superpower wouldn’t want full and total control over its subjects? But he supposes that the illusion of choice is a form of control in and of itself. Lukas did manage to fight back, to regain control a couple of times during Jesse’s final standoff in the belly of the beast. But that was only at the last, most desperate moment, while being quite physically used as leverage against his friend. Petra surely would’ve made an earlier, better effort to struggle—probably even Jesse, if he’d been so unlucky as to have gotten chipped as well. So what does that say about Lukas?
Still, Petra has the grace to look like she knows exactly the associated feeling Lukas had described, her own recollection silhouetting in his stencil of the events. She continues, “Sometimes I think it should’ve been me who took the brunt of all of that. I was the one who led us into that mess. And I think it could’ve been fitting retribution, you know? Force the one who strays from the pack to follow without question.”
She gestures towards the night sky, tracing an arc from a distant cluster of stars to a single, even more distant speck with her fingers, not unlike an artist smearing paint on a canvas. “In any case, it shouldn’t have been you. You were nothing but a team player for those few months.”
Lukas flashes back to the Network, the endless cobblestone and liminal space etched into his long-term memory. Those few months hadn’t exactly been tension-free, especially in the beginning with a still-dubiously moral Ivor in tow. But portal after portal, they learned to adapt to one another, work as a team, even enjoy each other’s company in the down moments. Somewhere along the way, Ivor’s routine mistaking of his name grew from willful ignorance to full and total knowledge that it ruffled Lukas’ feathers. But those few minutes before they entered the penultimate portal to Crown Mesa were the tensest things had ever gotten between them on the trip. At that point, everyone was fraught with exhaustion and frustration and fear to varying degrees (their previous detour to what they’d dubbed Fire World having done nothing to lighten the mood), with Petra naturally being a sort of magnifying glass for all of it. So when she and Jesse got into a spat, it was more a matter of counting down the seconds until something of the sort happened.
Lukas saw the reason in both of their sides. Jesse was a natural-born leader, the human personification of a compass constantly pointed north—but people trusted him because he was never infallible, and his judgment often ran out before his persistence. Really, they should've taken a pause to rethink their blind-guess-and-hope-for-the-best strategy about three or four portals before they actually did so. Because Petra, pugnacious as she could be, also had a keen sense about when to stop pushing on a fruitless situation. So, not wanting to add fuel to the fire, Lukas stayed out of it. He knew from experience as the de-facto mediator of the Ocelots, a group otherwise composed of extremely hard heads, that two opposing, yet equally strong forces clashing together—Jesse’s initiative and Petra’s temperament—usually never boded well, more so with intervention. He decided he’d resolve himself to wait for things to calm down, to begin to flow towards the path of least resistance as most do. And then the next thing he knew, Petra had broken off from the group and was determined to traverse whatever was behind that ominous redstone portal on her own, because it’s a sure sign something has gone terribly wrong if she of all people was following the path of least resistance.
Jesse had long forgiven her for the ordeal, not solely because it indirectly led them to their way home in the form of Harper. But Lukas knows Petra still feels regret for how rash she’d acted—that much she’s made clear. It could get away from her a lot of the time, but her rugged individualism had always been one of the things he admired about her. Now, he gets a sense something irreversible might’ve happened to it; he pictures the normally bright, defiant spark of her spirit beginning to flicker. The imagined sight, frankly, worries him.
Lukas’ brows knit together, a cocktail of sympathy and mild distress filling the space. He says, putting more push behind his words, “None of us deserved retribution for what happened. You couldn’t have known what was behind that portal. If anything, I don’t think we would’ve defeated PAMA if not for Jesse making the choice to save you. He knew you’d be more valuable in the fight than down and out.”
Petra laughs humorlessly. “It hurts when you put it so… rationally. As if fighting is all I’m good for.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he placates, resting a hand on her bicep and feeling goosebumps rise on her skin. She doesn’t shake him off, though she could easily find reason to.
“Yeah, I know. I’m just saying you give our leader too much credit,” she says dismissively. “We’re lucky his intuition is as dependable as it is.”
Lukas drops his hand. “I’ll be back,” he says over his shoulder before retreating inside, crossing the width of the hallway to the adjacent room—some sort of study—and spotting the shape of a flannel strewn over the couch in the darkness. Must be Axel’s, his tendency to make every room he walks into feel immediately lived-in no matter how newly constructed it is. He returns to Petra’s side and gingerly wraps the wooly jacket around her shoulders before she can protest. The chill visibly seeps from her frame.
“Thank you,” she offers, soft and pleased. She’s noticeably gotten a lot better at comfort—at accepting it and extending it—since he first met her all those years ago. He’s certainly seen all of the Order, friends both new and old, grow up under the pressure of circumstance since their relatively recent ascension to hero status.
They descend into another bout of silence. In the interim, she absentmindedly goes to pick at a scab on her finger while he turns his attention to that cluster of stars, trying to make an educated guess as to which constellation it could be of the seven-or-so he’s committed to memory.
He huffs once he’s had enough of it, of the starting and stopping. “You’re right, though. We give Jesse too much credit. Which is why I hate that…” That last sentence tumbles out of his mouth faster than his mind conceives it and so he attempts to trail off, to let the last of the words slip under his breath.
But her sharp ear catches the fragment before it can fully dissipate. Her eyes narrow in an attempt to deduce its latter half. “You hate that, what?”
“…that a part of me resents that he freed you first.”
Petra’s eyes widen, probably because the sentiment of his confession, in a roundabout way, validates her own. “What? Why?” she still asks like the reason is so unfathomable.
Lukas winces, a beat too late, and reels it in by way of shaking his head. “Maybe resent is too harsh. Jesse’s doing his best; I doubt we would’ve done any better in the same situation. But, if I were more useful, more of a friend to him in the past, I don’t know… maybe it would’ve given him more of a reason to choose me over you.”
He doesn’t even notice his unsavory choice of adjectives until he makes out the shudder of her shoulders under the jacket. “What makes you think you wouldn’t be… helpful?” she makes a point of the word. The apprehension is overtaken by a wry chuckle. “You were being more of a nerd about those portals than any of us were. You had your journal.”
“Which I started in an attempt to be more helpful.” He shrugs. “I’m not trying to self-deprecate, but you’re an ace with a sword. Ivor’s a whiz with potions, and probably too knowledgeable for his own good. Sure, I’m a decent shot, but so is Jesse if it came down to it. It isn’t hard to see why in a dire situation, I’d be the weakest link.”
She frowns and gets the look that means she’s mentally chastising his preternatural calm, his ability to think above the situation—not from a lack of empathy, but because his empathy lies in that third-person perspective. Only, there’s something else to the look, too. Something a little closer to concern, possibly? “So… what are you saying. That you blame yourself for what happened to you?”
He takes a minute to mull it over, because ‘blame’ also feels too harsh of a word. He comes back with a decisive response. “I wouldn’t go as far as to say that. I guess I’m just saying if there had to be blame, it wouldn’t feel fair to pin it on anyone else. Neither Jesse nor you.”
To Lukas, this makes sense. He’s become so used to being treated like a spare part—with the Ocelots, even with what would become the New Order at first, simply as a consequence of old, worn-out grudges and badly-thought alliances. It’s usually not by intention, or out of malice, but because it’s the role he’s most suited for. His nature is not the kind that carves, but the kind that slots into the places required of it, doesn’t force a way through when there is none. It all falls in step with his internal logic, hardwired in the same way PAMA must’ve been programmed to view every living entity as another cog in the machine, another rung in the ladder towards achieving its master plan.
Still, something beyond his sense—his heart—knows that’s not right. At least not anymore.
So he’s not surprised when Petra’s expression falls a hundred feet, then hardens into something resembling indignation. It’s something he’s used to, but that doesn’t mean he can’t still find it amusing how her default expression of emotion seemed to be anger for a lot of things. If not outright anger then an adjacent variant, or something unrelated but otherwise laced with its unflinching forcefulness. Anger gets what it wants and doesn’t care what destruction it leaves in its wake.
“Lukas,” she pleads.
He averts her gaze, not wanting to face the hurt he’s sure has made its way there. “Lukas, look at me.” He snaps up to attention, and it’s there, like a sword impaled through the gut. “How is that fair? If I can’t blame myself for what happened, you can’t either. Not after what PAMA put you through.”
It finally surfaces, fully lucid and rendered in harsh colors and flat angles, and he doesn’t push it back down. The computer weaving into his being, weakening his body and mind and his tether to his sense of self, robbing him of his autonomy. The futility of not knowing if his friends were coming to his rescue, if PAMA would eventually win the battle, or the war, if he’d be complacent in someone else’s twisted vision of what the world could be for the rest of eternity. He imagines Petra in his shoes, his in hers. Despite his resentment at not having been valuable enough to be Jesse’s first pick, maybe he doesn’t want that after all if it means her having to experience all of it in his place.
And now he realizes why he hasn’t been able to look at her the same. If there was an alternate timeline where Petra had been the one chipped for longer, been the one the rest of them fought tooth and nail to rescue, would he be able to handle it? Not the combat or the strategy or the tenacity required of those things, but the emotional aftermath? If Jesse had to witness either of his oldest, dearest friends, Axel or Olivia, go through the same thing—would he? Suddenly, it feels like none of it matters at all anymore. Not who gets pinned with the blame, who’s more of an asset to the team, who’s more justified in their guilt.
That dislodges something in his chest, sends it reeling up his throat. He thought that if he ever broke down crying tonight, that the cause would be the residual terror bound tight against his heart needing to uncoil eventually. And while that’s certainly a part of it, the straw that breaks the camel’s back ends up being that guilt they’ve both been carrying, that blame they’ve harbored towards themselves.
He doesn’t even feel the tears well up in his eyes until they speckle onto the wood railing.
“Oh, Lukas,” Petra says, or rather doesn’t say but involuntarily gasps, the sound of utter heartbreak overriding any previous traces of hardness. She wraps an arm around him, the jacket falling to the wayside, and he instinctively buries into the crook of her neck. Her embrace doesn’t feel particularly gentle or benevolent—it never has. It usually makes up for that with a kind of practical firmness, which this also lacks. This almost feels desperate, tender in a way that catches him off guard, as if she were on the precipice of breaking herself. Still, the simple, mundane fact that it is her embrace—the knowledge that she never gives it away sparingly but is sparing it for him now, because of course she is—provides its own kind of comfort.
Her fingers thread through his hair, a thumb trailing off to stroke the back of his ear, as he feels the exhale of a long-held breath against her chest. As if she were already feeling the relief that comes after the tears, only they were still being shed.
“I hate that you feel that way.” It’s said with all the controlled fury she normally reserves for the heat of combat, when she can get a grip on her normally unwieldy anger because she has a clear target to channel it into. “Jesse cares about you. So does Ivor, if you can believe it. I care about you. Don’t ever take that for granted.” The statements land with all the impact of unnegotiable truth.
“I know. I know,” he mumbles into her bare shoulder. She’s been trying to make a habit of telling it more recently, but to him it’s never needed affirmation. Not for what might as well be as omnipresent a force in his life as gravity. In the shadows most of the time, conveyed primarily through subtle gestures and curried favors, but otherwise as certain and real as anything else. “I care about you, too. So much.” I’m so glad you're safe, a thought rings out in the back of his head. His thought, in his voice alone.
He doesn’t pull away until he’s sure his lungs can regulate breathing again, until his diaphragm can reliably produce a steady, unbroken stream of speech instead of choked-up bits and pieces.
“Aw, I messed up your hair,” Petra says ruefully, despite Lukas having no need to look presentable in the dead of night and not being nearly as vain as the comment would imply. There’s a hint of her old self from what already seems like a lifetime ago peeking through the lousy excuse, an indication she’s had her fill of affection for the time being. Her tolerance may have grown, but it’s still a tolerance.
“How do you do it?” Lukas asks, voice raw with the obvious hoarseness of a real, good, well-deserved sort of cry. She still has her hands on the blades of his shoulders. “Keeping it together. Being strong, in the face of all of this.”
She laughs and it’s a curt and dry sort of sound in the absence of vigor, because they’re both pretty spent. “I’m not strong. I’m just tough. A strong person wouldn’t have bottled all of this up.”
He didn’t expect a straightforward answer, but the statement is so stark in its honesty and far too self-aware an observation for what’s expected of her. A pang hits Lukas when he realizes he’s one of the mere handful of people whom Petra would admit the distinction to. The pallor of the moon reveals all sorts of things; sincerity, vulnerability, exhaustion in the contours of her face where a shallow sort of self-assuredness would normally reside. It’s so unlike the brash, confident Petra that lives in broad daylight. And yet there’s something so familiar and intimate about the Petra in front of him, because it’s the one he knows is behind all the armor if the right person can find the chinks in it.
He matches her with an admission of his own. “If it helps, I’m not so rational either. I’m just trying to make sense of why it feels this bad.”
She hums, like it’s something she’s already figured out. “It’s how we manage, right?”
This time, the silence is palpably lighter. Lukas catches a glimpse of the five beacons peeking above their view of the canopy. He thinks about how he can embody the constancy, the bravery they promise. His hand finds its way to hers on the railing and their fingers twine together. She gives a squeeze—not any firmer than the hug, but assuring all the same.
“We’re going to be alright,” she says, though it sounds uncertain. “This’ll fade. We’ve got each other, and… that’s how it’s always been.”
“That it has,” he says, wiping the remnants of tears from his eyes. If there was anything comforting about the choice Jesse had to make, it’s that choices usually have at least two components. Lukas never had to go through it alone.
He tacks on, deciding to indulge her, “And we still manage to kick ass.” It’s not very convincing in his current state.
Petra takes the bait anyway, a trace of her signature smugness sneaking back into her quaint, tired smile. “That we do,” she finishes. She steps back from the railing, beckoning with a tug of his wrist. The other hand scoops up Axel’s jacket from the floor. “Come on. It’s cold. Let’s head back to bed.”
Lukas trails close behind this time, their hands still joined like a knot—not impenetrable but tight and secure and intricate—as the terrace door shuts behind them.