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You are Leif.
You are Leif, and you have just been cut free from a spider's web in Snakemouth Den, and you are scared. You keep your shaking hands hidden away beneath your wings, keep your face the same stoic mask it always is, but your words come out garbled in a language that isn't yours, and you cannot recognize yourself when you look at your reflection in the ice-blocks you suddenly know how to cast. Your hands are cold, and you know it, but you can't feel the bitter bite the way you used to, and that scares you. You are pale blue instead of warm red, and your wings are numb and heavy and refuse to respond to you the way you want them to, and there is a beetle and a bee looking at you as if you are a liar, an imposter in your own shell. And you don't know if you are, because there is ice in your veins where hemolymph used to be, and you are trying to keep your racing heart from pounding its way out of your frail, frail thorax, and you-
-And you want to go home.
You are Leif, and you are starting to come to the dawning realization that there is no way back home. The queen who sits the throne now is not the Elizant you used to know, the kingdom has shifted around you in a way that no longer lines up or makes sense with your memories, and the one bug you do recognize is old enough that your face slips from her mind completely, no matter how many times you plead for her to try.
Many years have passed, while you were trapped in Snakemouth. Far too many. It's impossible, but that status is very quickly fading down to merely improbable, and the shock of it all is harsh enough to contest with the ice now lining the inside of your thorax.
If you could, if there was no one else around, you would sit and pull your antennae and rock back and forth as you allowed yourself to break down. As Muse used to let you do, when the sights and the bustle of everything around you grew to be simply too stifling to bear anymore, but where Muse used to be there is now Kabbu and Vi, and the thought of letting yourself slip while their watchful, concerned eyes are pinpointed on you feels like needles stabbing through your wings. They are kind, but they are not her, they are not Muse, and you miss her more than you thought you could miss anything in the world. You miss her terribly, enough to send a physical ache through your body, but she is no longer around to catch you when you fall, no longer around to support you when you misstep or say something wrong. Nor are you there for her, for you were left behind, you were trapped in a spider's web to be exposed to the horrors of Snakemouth, and now you are worlds away in a future full of bright-eyed bugs seeking the glories that you failed to find, hungry and tired and so, so confused.
Perhaps you weren't the one left behind. Perhaps it was her, forced to flee for her own safety, as you would have begged for her to do anyways. And now you are here, bewildered and alive, while she had to weather the grief of losing you up until her dying day as you hung dazedly in that cursed fucking spiderweb that you were idiotic enough to stumble into.
The guilt gnaws at you almost more than the hunger.
Later, much later, you learn that you have great-grandchildren, and the guilt grows into a sharp-edged blade that nearly tears you apart from the inside out. You remember the sweetness of her scent, how she clung to you just days before the expedition with her face pressed into your fluff and her giggles rocking you as you tried to catch one of her antennae to kiss it, your heart full of a warmth you never thought you would experience. You remember lying with her afterwards, in a comfortable inn bed, tracing the curves of her sleeping face as you wondered what your children would look like. If they would be slender-shouldered and awkward like you, or vibrant and full of life like her. If the expedition you just took would give you enough berries to buy a house, so you could make her the palace that she deserves. If she wanted children, and if they would like you.
And then you realize it, and you feel as if your entire world has been turned upside-down and left to fall apart.
She was with child. When you ventured into Snakemouth, she was with child. And you left her, you left her, and she had to deal with everything all alone, and you never knew what your children would look like, if there was more than one, if they were adventurous and bright like her or focused and sarcastic like you. You never got to make a nest for her, you never got to cradle the eggs or kept your new-hatched children warm against your fur, you never got to guide them through their pupation. You never got to teach them how to play card games and marbles, or sneak home a family pet while Muse pretended to be shocked or appalled, you never got to watch them grow up and grow old with you.
Your descendant looks so close to her, just the way you'd always wished your daughter-if you even had a daughter- to be. You see Muse in her, and you see the pattern of your wings, and it hurts you down to your very soul even as some part of you swells with joyous pride. They are a happy family, vibrant and colourful, while you are the washed-out ghost of a moth staring in, puppeteering a body that feels like it should not (does not) belong to you. You almost feel guilty, for pushing a stranger into their lives, but they note the pattern of your wings and your slender, pitiful frame, and they welcome you with a warmth that you almost feel you don't deserve.
She lives on in her children, and her children chose to like you, as you feared they wouldn't when you held her in your arms and dared to dream of a future with her.
That, at the very least, is good enough.
It must be. It has to be.
For you would not know what to do if the end result was anything else.
(You get to hold Tod, once, when he kicks his way into his 'cool uncle's' lap, and you nearly melt at the comfort of getting to cradle at least one of your descendants, to teach him how to play Spy Cards or regal him with tales of your many adventures. His hand is small in yours, when he reaches for the deck pinned expertly between your fingers, and you let him turn them over and study the monsters you made them with. He is small, but his fur is soft like Muse's was, and tufts in the same way yours does, as you teasingly flick snowflakes at him to distract him while you instinctively groom through his ruff for tangles or burrs.)
(He had many requests for ice-spells that night, and you took him outside to show him every single one, lest you disrupt Muze's carefully-cleaned house. The only reason why you don't get to hold him again is because he's far to restless and wriggly to sit still for very long, even when the heat wave starts and you quickly become a source of respite for everyone around you. That, and he gets sensitive and overstimulated in the same way you are sometimes, so for the most part the two of you play games until Muze calls you in for dinner, or Vi takes over after dithering for hours over how she's 'too old' to play with children anymore while Kabbu stands with shining eyes in your family's doorway.)
(You have to stop yourself from teasingly asking Muze to give you more grandchildren at one point, as is the rite of passage for any grandparent, no many how greats were in between. Still, that doesn't stop you from introducing Tod to Chompy, who is close enough anyways.)
You are Leif, and there is a nightmare amalgamation shambling its way towards you, and you look at it and think sibling.
And it's nonsensical, isn't it, the way that the words twist their way into your mind. You've never met this moth before in your life, never had the misfortune of knowing them before the blight parasite crawled its way into their heart. But it shrieks in a language that you understand, a language that the shambling corpses felled behind you spoke as well, and fear thrums through you in a tidal cascade, the ice in your veins surging to screech back at the creature looming before you.
You know this lab, you know this creature. It is your sibling, blightwight shambling parallel to your surging, shivering frostbite, and it is the s̷̳̈̒u̶͉͆̓ͅc̶͓͋̕c̶͓̆ͅe̵̱̣̾̿ş̵͉̚s̶̼̝̃̕o̷͎͒̾r̶͈̍̉-̸̬̏p̵̩͛s̸̤̤̔͊ė̵͚̀u̵͖͂d̴̦̔o̸͎͎̅͝g̷͈̗̉͗o̴̥̣͒͝d̶̦̐̚-̵̞̬̈s̶̙̋͋a̸̳̐v̵͍̿̚i̷̺͌o̸̙̿͘ͅr̴̲͘͝ to the failure you were said to be. It is your sibling, and it is angry, angry and resentful in a way that transcribes language, in a way that hisses out with the noxious power fuming from the blight crystals fused into its carapace. It crawls over broken glass and chitin-scales, ragged wings held stiff in the air, and howls its rage up to the laboratory ceiling as if the roaches that created it could hear it through the shroud of death, could understand the agony that they wrought upon it. Its writhing tendrils churn sickeningly, a mirror of the disgust curling in its chest, and it focuses on Kabbu and Vi with the hatred of a predator cornered in its den, defending the hellscape that it chose to make its home.
Nothing makes sense, but you can feel the heavy thrum of magic in the air, parallel-point to your own, and suddenly through the crippling fear and the rage-anger-hurt-pain-INTRUDER-INTRUDER echoing in your head, clarity strikes. You curl your hands into fists, then throw them and your wings out together, and the shield of pure magic you form in front of your friends turns back the blast as if it were nothing.
"I have no siblings!" you cry, because somewhere, Leif the Moth realizes that it is true- and you are him, are you not? You are Leif, you always were Leif, and nothing around you makes any sense- and there is hatred of your own burning deep within your heart at the audacity of this creature to try to lay its claws upon your friends. To equate kind-hearted Kabbu and fierce little Vi to the monsters that sacrificed others as they sought an impossible immortality, that reduced so many innocent bugs to the vengeful abomination that their scientists left behind. To equate you to it, as if you could ever lay a hand upon them the way the creature before you urged you to do, as if you could ever turn your magic onto the bugs that risked their lives to save your own. "As if I could be related to this beast!"
Traitor, the Zommoth hisses in the language of false gods, but you couldn't care less. Not as you raise your claws to the sky, turning your anger to the ice in your chest, and bring down the world in a hail of jagged icicles.
And then you realize, and you understand.
You are not Leif. You are a parasite, living in his shell. You are a failure, a monster, and you crawled into a dead bug's body and fused your mycelium to his muscles and mind because you wanted, ever so desperately, to be something else. You are an experiment, an abomination, and you don't know how to be anything but the man that sways side to side when he's happy or spends entire nights poring over Spycard decks while Chompy rests her little head in your lap, the man (person? does gender even apply to you anymore? Did it ever even apply to Leif? This is not a dilemma you have time to freak out over) who fell in love against all odds with a beautiful girl with a chiming laugh that kicked his ass as if it were nothing, and you don't know how you would live alone and separate from that person, how to stop being that person even if he is the moth that you are not.
You are a parasite, an imposter, and-
-and your friends do not seem to be nearly half as concerned about it as they really ought to be, crowding around you with sympathy instead of scurrying away in fear. They sit next to you when you snarl at them, angry at yourself and at them for being so callous about their own safety, and Kabbu reaches forth to wipe the tears falling from your eyes, while Vi blows off the whole situation with all the confidence you've come to expect from a rowdy teenage bee. You are a parasite, and you are dangerous, and you are melting into Kabbu's embrace to sob silently into his shoulder as the fear of hurting them twists about with all the rest of your insides, while Vi pats you awkwardly on the back and mutters something about selling your teardrops as eternal ice crystals.
You are not Leif, but you don't know what else you are supposed to be, and you suppose, in an odd sort of way, that everything loops back around to make you him again. You do not know if you are the cordyceps or the moth, or if there is even a separation between the two, but you have never tried to hide the person that you've become, and the way that your friends are looking at you makes you almost feel like-
You want to be Leif. You don't know how to be anyone other than Leif, so you choose to be Leif, confusing as that may seem. And your friends (family, now, you suppose, a thought that swoops around your chest in an emotion you can't even begin to comprehend) are delighted to hear it, and they are just as happy to hold you close as they lead you back home.
You are Leif. There is a magic-twisted cordyceps resting inside you, the result of a species' arrogance and hubris. You might be the cordyceps, or you might be the moth- but that does not matter now, not anymore. You are Leif, and you were a husband and you are a father and a grandfather and a great-grandfather and so on, and there is a secret letter asking Queen Bianca for formal custody that's still lying on the table where you left it, marked with the same scrawling handwriting that even death and rebirth couldn't take from you. You are Leif, tenth known sorcerer of the Ant Kingdom, valuable member of Team Snakemouth, royal blade of Queen Elizant II, future adoptive father of Vi the Bee and current heart-mate of Kabbu the Beetle.
Your soon-to-be bee daughter kicks you in the gut before turning over to find a new spot to sleep on your chest, grumbling all the while. Her claws come to rest on the cracks in your thorax, where the tendrils keeping your heart beating wriggle discontentedly at the blow. Against your side, Kabbu shifts and sighs in disappointment, as if he could sense Vi's violence through the shroud of sleep, and you close your eyes and lean your head back against the hammock's soft pillows, curling your wings up around them both to shield them from the muggy heat of the summer night.
You are Leif, and you are loved.