Chapter Text
So much needs to be discussed: questions to ask and answers to be given. Secrets of the known universe, probably, hidden on Lucid’s tongue and just begging to be coaxed out.
And all Sunshine can focus on is the way his name sounds coming out of that mouth.
“Sunshine.”
Not that Lucid is faring any better. For all that he has found his voice, he seems uninterested in using it very much. Uninterested in anything that isn’t touching Sunshine. As if they haven’t spent most of their developing relationship in constant contact with one another.
Lucid touches him like he’s relearning the shape of him. Like memorising a once familiar landscape, fingertips skating over whatever they can reach, the inked expanse of his exposed forearms and the soft fabric of his button-down shirt, his throat and up into the strands of his bleached hair. Lucid touches, and it feels as if he is afraid. Afraid that if they aren’t rooted into this realm together physically then Sunshine will fade from existence.
He cups both hands at Sunshine’s cheeks. He draws his thumbs over the crest of a cheekbone and traces the shape of his jaw with careful, curious fingers.
“Sharper than I remember,” Lucid says, and there is a roughness to his tone that may be disuse, or perhaps, the sadness that is pulling at the corners of his mouth. “What have they done to you?”
Sunshine wants nothing more than to sink into the affection, to the connection he has been seeking for longer than he dares consider. Lucid's touch is a balm on his aching existence, the very aura of him sings in response.
But… rather than give in, Sunshine makes himself focus on the importance of what’s being said to him.
“You remember?”
Against his skin, Sunshine feels Lucid begin to tremble. The press of his touch is no less insistent, but it becomes somewhat sporadic, fluttering like the delicate wings of a butterfly. There and then gone.
Lucid continues to smile, but it’s tighter. Made of steel when Sunshine has only known Lucid to be silk.
“Pieces,” Lucid says, quietly.
“Then tell me everything,” Sunshine insists, body slanting forward into Lucid’s space, eager and imposing. “There’s so much we need to–”
“Sunny,” Lucid’s hands halt him in place. Fingers dimpling the skin of his forearms. “Calm.”
He’s unable to do anything else. Lucid has always been a source of comfort since they had first laid eyes on each other, he has been an embodiment of tranquillity. With the added power of a voice, hypnotic for the sweet melody of it, Sunshine is entranced into obeying.
He goes still. Lax. Allows Lucid to manipulate him closer until they can drop their foreheads together, Lucid’s fingers moving across Sunshine’s scalp in a rhythmic, pacifying press.
Who knows how long they have been here already, surely one more night won’t hurt, will it?
They don’t even talk for the rest of that night. As much as Sunshine expects that Lucid would want to bask in the feeling of having working vocal cords again, it seems that he doesn’t need them. Perhaps even before having it removed from him, Lucid had been a creature of few words, because he is more than comfortable communicating with his body, exactly as he had been already.
It’s his curled fingers and an energetic smile that urge Sunshine closer, it’s the playful crinkle at the corner of his eyes and the happy little wriggle of his entire body that tells Sunshine how content he is to be able to be able to settle together in the mossy nest of Lucid’s making.
It’s the blooming of wildflowers and the creeping of vines and the excited twittering of birds overhead.
For the first time since arriving in this place, Sunshine drifts into sleep.
He dreams of Lucid, looking regal in a flowing pink shirt, climbing up a grand wooden staircase. Only, when before he gets to the top he turns his head over his shoulder and looks directly into Sunshine’s eyes, a wide smile on his face, and his hand is offered up in invitation.
His mouth forms a word that Sunshine recognises on sight for how often it has been spoken in his existence but seems out of place in this particular scenario.
As Sunshine places his hand in Lucid’s, he hears it too, a whisper on the wind, but not from Lucid himself. Someone else, a voice unfamiliar, but there anyway.
“Fate.”
☆∘◦❀◦∘☆
Sunshine’s return to the waking world is not dissimilar to the last time he woke up.
For a second, he’s not entirely sure where he is. There’s a familiar ache overtaking his insides, the kind of hollow sensation he’d all but forgotten about since arriving in Lucid’s presence. Sunshine feels cold and adrift and a moment of sheer panic overtakes him as he thinks that he may have found himself once again stranded in a void of darkness with no one to guide him.
Only, when he jolts awake, eyes wide and his decorative lungs sucking in air like they’re actually functional, he finds that he knows exactly where he is.
Twisted branches and layered leaves, the natural alcove of bark and greenery that Lucid calls home. Sunshine is propped with his back against a tree, his own jacked draped across his body. He is safe.
But he is also alone.
So while one source of panic is quickly stemmed, another blooms right in its place.
Sunshine considers himself a fairly put-together individual. By all accounts, he’s been informed he is intimidating with it, his ability to remain mostly stoic in the face of whatever the universe throws at him. But after the series of concerning events that lead up to this moment, he is less than graceful as he scrambles out of the nature-based nest and goes looking for his missing… lover?
Thankfully, he doesn’t have to go far. When he emerges into the bright sunlight, Lucid is there, a little ways from their resting place. He’s cross-legged in the grass, twisting his wrist and curling his fingers. His back is to Sunshine, but that doesn’t mean Sunshine can’t feel how happy he is.
Radiating contentment as the fabric of reality pulls in towards him, curling around him like a lover's embrace.
The tightness builds and then snaps, just as it had last night with Eight, only this time, there is nothing to show for it. Sunshine felt the creation take place, with his higher senses, he knows that something somewhere was brought into existence, but it wasn’t here.
“Eight.” Lucid says, startling Sunshine from his silent vigil at his back.
Since he’s been discovered, Sunshine moves into Lucid’s space, dropping to sit beside him with his curiosity showing blatantly on his face. “What about him?”
“I didn’t mean to.” Lucid’s smile remains in place, but it dims. His eyes get shiny with unshed tears, devastation written into the divots of his skin as his gaze dances along the length of his elegant fingertips.
“I know,” Sunshine, compelled by a tugging in his lower gut, reaches over to take Lucid’s hands in his own. He turns them over to look at the expanse of his knuckles, now free of any injuries and thrumming with healthy energy. “And you shouldn’t regret it. He gave you your voice back.”
At this, Lucid’s entire being lights up, and he rocks his entire body so that his shoulder bumps against Sunshine’s. Their fingers interlock and are pulled firmly into Lucid’s lap as he agrees to the sentiment with a nod of his head.
“I remade him.”
Lucid says it so casually that it takes Sunshine a moment to fully process the meaning of the words. And even then he is left somewhat dumbfounded.
“Sorry?”
“Remade him.” Lucid repeats, “Not here. Somewhere else.”
And truly, Sunshine isn’t sure there is going to be a better segue into what he needs to know than that.
“Lucid,” there’s that urge again, to be delicate, to approach Lucid the same way he’d approach Comp while he is in the height of distress, and Sunshine wonders if that instinct is a long practised one, recognising the person it was reserved for, “Do you know that Eight isn’t the first person you’ve made?”
It’s difficult to tell if this information is a surprise to Lucid. The smile falls off his face quickly, but that could be in shock or resignation, and in Sunshine’s hands, Lucid’s grip gets marginally tighter. His eyes have always been so knowing, so much wiser than his circumstances may suggest, and as they look over Sunshine now they seem ancient.
In those eyes Lucid sees the birth of the universe, exploding stars burning bright and snuffing themselves out again. Constellations writing themselves into existence. Planets in orbit. Animals and humanity alike come into existence and deities take their first breaths.
Lucid looks at him and Sunshine is already beginning to understand.
“I dreamt them,” Lucid explains, brow furrowed in concentration, “Didn’t know they were becoming real. Not until Eight.”
And it’s been clear since the return of his voice that Lucid doesn’t enjoy talking, not even when capable, and the more he does it, Sunshine thinks he understands why. Is starting to hear an unrealistic quality to it, only noticeable the more words that are crammed into a sentence one after the other.
Lucid has a beautiful voice, but his tone isn’t always right. It’s somewhat dreamlike and distant, mismatched and stilted in places.
Not like a God that is socialised among mortals. Not like a deity that has spent an existence surrounded by others, communicating vocally.
But something higher, with more degrees of separation. With very little opportunity for hearing speech patterns and only mimicking what they are exposed to in controlled bursts.
More pieces begin to fall into place, and just as before, Sunshine doesn’t feel the need to dumb himself down. Lucid’s method of communication has no bearing on the wisdom held behind his eyes. The authoritative curl of his mouth. The power held in his delicate hands.
“They’re memories,” Sunshine can see it now, everything he’d begun to suspect coming to clarity. “Not just dreams. Everything you don’t remember, your subconscious does and it’s been making them into living people. It’s been sending them to find me.”
Lucid doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. Sunshine has reached a conclusion all on his own.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” Lucid continues to blink at him, patient, as if he has been waiting for the revelation to come but is unable to force it into existence. Like he needs Sunshine to figure this out all on his own. “One of The Three? The… The Creator?”
Lucid, without the need for his recently returned vocal cords at all, confirms the suggestion with an apologetic smile and a lethargic blink.
“You need to tell me everything you remember,” Sunshine orders, brisk and harsh, but unapologetic in his firmness. “Right now.”
And in response, Lucid reaches across the short distance between them to touch fingers against Sunshine’s frowning mouth.
Sadness edges his features as he murmurs, “Sharper.”
☆∘◦❀◦∘☆
Lucid agrees to answer, but he will only do so after he’s ushered them into the sunlight and brought a bushel of fruit to Sunshine, cradled in the pouch of his shirt like a newborn baby.
Lucid agrees to answer, but he decides that he has to do so while pressing slices of apple and clementines into Sunshine’s mouth with his fingers, and Sunshine isn’t sure if it’s a continued act of affection or simply a way to make sure that Sunshine doesn’t interrupt him.
Both seem equally likely.
“I remember pieces,” Lucid starts, nails piercing the skin on a fresh orange, juices dripping to his wrist. “Can’t give you all the answers you want. But Eight gave me some things.”
“Care to share with the class?”
For that, Sunshine gets fruit shoved into his mouth and Lucid taps at his jaw in a command to chew.
“I remember imprisonment.” The air around them seems to get sharper with a chill. The trees shudder in time with Lucid’s confessions. “Remember trying to fight and losing. In the end… making a bargain.”
This time, Sunshine knows better than to voice the questions building in his throat like bile. Understands that Lucid has likely always been a creature who speaks best without words, even before his voice was taken from him, and that expecting him to explain through an act of monologuing might be a tad unreasonable.
So he waits, even drops his mouth open obediently for the next press of fruit. Lucid eyes him with amusement, but doesn’t comment.
“I traded myself,” Lucid confesses like a devotee at the altar of a God, and Sunshine has never felt more unworthy of worship than this moment. “Kept you from destruction.”
It’s not so undignified as choking or sputtering, but Sunshine does… freeze. He feels trapped in time. Pinned like a butterfly in glass and observed by Lucid’s piercing gaze. He offers no fruit this time, he doesn’t move to touch Sunshine at all as the implications set in.
“How much do you remember about yourself, Sunny?”
☆∘◦❀◦∘☆
Sunshine has never claimed to know himself all that well. Since the moment of his conception, he has been fairly sure of the exact opposite, actually.
He’s always felt like a mystery. An anomaly surrounded by statistical accuracies, a fault to be discounted.
Rain had even admitted it, towards the end. That he’d always known Sunshine wasn’t what he was advertised to be, no mere mischief God, but something to be hidden and protected for fear of what his true identity could bring onto him.
To finally have confirmation that there is a reason for his existence is both relieving and infuriating all at once. There’s the grief again, similar to how Sunshine had felt upon discovering that he was missing Lucid all of this time, only to not know where to begin finding the answers.
Sunshine has Lucid now, but in many ways, he is back to square one in terms of resolving the pain in his chest.
He isn’t stopped when he wordlessly rises from the ground and starts walking in a direction without consciously deciding where he’s going. Lucid looks at him with sadness in his eyes, but the same steady calmness that he always radiates is permeating the air.
No words, but Sunshine feels his understanding anyway.
And Sunshine walks. Stomps. Marches. He prowls.
From the moment he had arrived here, Sunshine had felt settled. Soothed. At home. Not completely healed, but close enough, the edges of a wound being slowly stitched together. He’d almost forgotten what it was like before, on the outside, when his temper was always sitting beneath the surface and his patience was a tentative spectre; sometimes present and sometimes not.
He’d forgotten what it was like to feel so out of place in your surroundings, a glitch in the matrix of reality, equally observed and ignored all at once. Schrödinger's deity.
Sunshine walks and he doesn’t stop until the scenery starts to repeat itself, the limited spectre of their enclosure keeping them hemmed in. Distantly, Sunshine had always been aware of their limited space, the same as any other God’s domain, whatever they make has some metaphysical boundaries, Rain’s rainforest, Sky’s cloud, it makes sense that Lucid’s prison is the same.
It had never bothered him, not until now, not until Sunshine feels an explosion beginning in his lower stomach. Particles colliding, birthing rage and pain and–
Sunshine screams. From the hollow of his bones, until his tongue tastes like ash. Sunshine screams.
And something cracks.
☆∘◦❀◦∘☆
It doesn’t take Lucid long to find him–of course, it doesn’t, they’re locked in a glass cage–and when he does, Lucid’s sadness has evolved into despair.
They maintain no reasonable distance from each other, as much as Sunshine tries. Lucid steps into his space and Sunshine tries to step away, only to be met with a disapproving side-eye and Lucid’s more insistent presence.
He has no choice but to allow Lucid to subject him to closeness. Shoulders brushing together, fingers dancing against his wrist where a human pulse would pound but instead of that Sunshine has the beat of the universe thrumming in his veins. Everything that breathes, does so through him. Their threads are knotted around his throat and they’re pulling.
“If you’re one of the Three…” Sunshine grates out through the barbed wire in his throat. “Why would you throw yourself onto a sword for me.”
Lucid’s hair falls around his face as his head drops to the side, his smirk is full of affectionate amusement like Sunshine should have come to an obvious conclusion by now.
At their feet, Forget-Me-Not’s bloom in a carpet, leading off into oblivion.
Sunshine turns his gaze towards Lucid, feeling much like the child he has never been, lost and confused and so overwhelmed he feels ready to tear a reality in two about it. Lucid reaches up to tuck Sunshine’s hair away from his forehead, to brush his thumbs through tear tracks across his cheeks.
“Much sharper,” Lucid says, and it sounds like an apology.
“You keep saying that,” Sunshine pleads, “like you remember what I was before. Who I was.”
The silence begins to get heavy. Weighted. The sounds of the forest have all gone quiet around them, and Sunshine might be agitated at the fact that Lucid could just talk. Could have cleared this all up in one swift conversation. Could have explained by now.
But Lucid isn’t a being of many words, and Sunshine is learning that he is even less of one who puts words in other's mouths.
He doesn’t just want Sunshine to form conclusions on his own, he needs it. Lucid is seeking confirmation that anything between them, past or present, is real. Organic. That it’s happening and not just an unconscious fabrication of Lucid’s own desires.
It must be so hard for a creator of such strength, who regularly dreams whole human beings into existence by accident, to distinguish between fact and fiction.
Sunshine turns his body towards Lucid fully, dislodging his hands from his face, reversing their roles by instead cupping his hands at Lucid’s jaw, holding him steady as he drops their mouths together. Lucid’s surprise tastes sweet on his tongue, a sharp inhale through his nose and the gentle tremble of his body.
It’s far from the kind of perfect kiss that most humans will write poetry about, but mostly just because Sunshine doesn’t think there is language to describe it with any kind of reliability. Lucid’s kisses feel like a sunrise and sound like the crash of waves against a shoreline, carving its devotion with an insistence that dares you to ignore it. It’s not even the first time they’ve done it, but the other time Sunshine had just watched a person be unmade in front of him so the least of his worries had been the smell of lavender and rose on Lucid’s skin or the soft give of his body where Sunshine reaches for him and grabs.
But above all else, it doesn’t feel new. It doesn’t feel fresh.
Kissing Lucid feels as practised as stepping through a mirror into a new dimension.
Practised. Age old. Written into his sinew.
A garden of wildflowers that were sewn into his bone marrow at the point of creation and finally coming to bloom.
Lucid loves him, and that has always been a foregone conclusion.
☆∘◦❀◦∘☆
“I don’t know where we go from here.”
The day cycles away into the night. Sunshine hasn’t let them return to their small nest yet, he has a sudden desire to see the stars tonight, and Lucid isn’t in any position to deny him anything right now. Soft and sweet at his side as they lounge on their backs in the grass.
It’s the first time either of them have spoken in hours, and Lucid’s voice doesn’t so much cut through the night air as it does part it carefully. Like a koi fish moving through the current in a stream.
“What do you mean?” Sunshine asks, dropping his chin towards his chest where Lucid’s head is resting, his ear against the false heart that only beats when the occasion calls for it.
Lucid’s proximity certainly calls for it, Sunshine feels it thumping in Morse code, and Lucid listens like it’s speaking directly to him.
“What happens next?”
“We leave,” Sunshine states. “That’s always been the plan.”
“Has it?”
“Hasn’t it?”
Lucid gives a little sigh and shuffles onto his front so he can plant his chin into Sunshine’s sternum, bottom lip protruding in an exaggerated pout and his eyes half-lidded with a lazy scowl. Sunshine responds by poking his tongue out of his mouth, and for that, he gets Lucid’s chin dug hard into his chest until it begins to ache.
“You’re a nightmare,” Sunshine comments idly, but there’s no bite to the words. “You dismantled a person for that voice of yours, darling, perhaps you should consider using it.”
“Accidentally,” Lucid scrambles himself up onto his knees, crawling over Sunshine’s prone form and settling with his ass on his thighs. Arms folded over his chest and the pout still firmly in place.
Sunshine has no choice but to give, and he’s beginning to fill in a lot of gaps about their relationship before all of this if how easy he finds it to give in to Lucid’s whims is any indication.
“Yes, accidentally,” he agrees, and he brings himself upwards, palms pressed into the grass beneath him and holding his body perpendicular to Lucid’s. “But my point stands. I know you don’t like it, but you’re going to have to talk to me. What makes you hesitant to leave?”
“Still don’t remember enough to know why this happened, Sunny.” Lucid, tactile as ever, self-soothes with contact. Walking his fingers up Sunshine’s clothed chest and to the base of his throat. Tracing swirls there that are remnants of the ink stains he used to leave as his means of communication. “You don’t remember anything at all. Who knows what will happen?”
It’s the most words Sunshine has heard him string together since his vocal cords were returned to him, and it’s just as hypnotically melodic as every other time he’s spoken. But they’re also full of fear, coming carefully through a curated mask of calm.
“Here,” Lucid enunciates, broken on a whine. “Safe.”
“Lucid,” Sunshine sits straight, loops his arms around Lucid’s waist, and pulls him close to his chest. “You’re a prisoner. Someone is keeping you here. You’re only safe as long as they want you to be, and we don’t know when that will change.
“Besides,” Sunshine adds when he can feel more resistance building in Lucid’s tense body. “We can get you your memories back. We can find out who did this, we just have to get you in a room with all of your other creations.”
Lucid emerges from the safety of Sunshine’s neck, a question in his eyes. Sunshine meets him with a grin, “Lucky for you, I’ve been doing some collecting for you.”
Mouth opening on another comment, but then quickly closing again, Lucid turns his gaze towards the sky again, and Sunshine recognises it for what it is. An end to the conversation for now, Lucid requires a little more time, a little more space to think.
Sunshine is confident that an agreement will come, just that it won’t be easy.
They resettle into the plush lawn beneath them and silently agree to put a pin in the topic for now. Lucid is comfortable in his gilded cage and afraid that he’ll be unable to fly again once the door is opened.
But as the night draws on and they watch the stars move across the sky, the final nail in the coffin of this existence makes itself known.
At first, it appears to be nothing more than a shooting star, a streak of gold across an otherwise glittering sky. But hours pass. In this small bubble that is mostly created directly from Lucid’s imagination runs on a strange orbit, similar to the pattern of the earth but with a skewed axis and cycles that fluctuate between shorter or longer days (depending on Lucid himself, Sunshine thinks). Stars move, they arc with the imaginary orbit of this fabricated planet.
The shooting star does not move.
Sunshine notices it, watches it, and shortly after. Lucid notices it too.
And then, Sunshine remembers something that had seemed inconsequential at the time.
“Something cracked,” Sunshine says, and Lucid turns a look on him that is nothing short of adoration.
All hesitation seems to have evaporated in that one admission. Lucid seems almost manic, beaming as he repeats, “It cracked!”
☆∘◦❀◦∘☆
Despite his eagerness to hightail it out of this reality prison and never look back, Sunshine tries to petition to wait until daylight to make their escape attempt.
In a complete u-turn of his previous attitude, Lucid is unwilling to be patient. As if now that he’s seen the evidence of it with his own eyes, the small sliver of confirmation that they can be free of this place, perhaps even return to who they might have been before all of this happened to them, and the idea of waiting is suddenly unacceptable.
“Now,” he demands, hands out and palms up, how fingers wiggling with his eagerness. “Sunny, come here.”
“Wait a second, just–” Sunshine is pacing a dirt path into the grass, fingers in his hair, combing through the strands as he thinks. “We don’t even know what we’re doing.”
“Rewriting fate.” Lucid supplies the answer as if it’s easy. “You said you could feel the foundations.”
“Yes,” And he can, much keener with each passing day.
The strength of them, as old and sturdy as any creation of Lucid’s but nowhere near as precise. As if the being who had put this place into motion wasn’t used to making but had done the job as best they could with the tools they had. It’s the difference between a building constructed thousands of years ago and still managing to stand despite being made purely of wood beams and plaster, and a skyscraper made of steel that collapses when the earth shakes.
Or perhaps, where Sunshine is concerned, more like the difference between a finely made suit and a hand-knit sweater– only one of those things will completely unravel in one delightful swoop if the right thread is tugged.
“They’re imperfect but strong,” Sunshine continues, when Lucid just keeps blinking at him in that damnable way he has of just trusting that Sunshine is clever enough to know what’s going on here. “I wasn’t sure I would be able to bring them down on my own, so I estimated we’d need to work together to unmake them. Like you unmade Eight, but with my power behind you for a little extra–”
“I can’t feel them.” Lucid interrupts.
Sunshine promptly feels the bottom of his stomach fall into his shoes. “What?”
“Never been able to feel them,” Lucid is up on his knees now. A sacrificial lamb before a God. A helpless man before a saviour. “I tried once, long time ago. But I– I think I can only feel things I have made. I can only unmake things that are mine to unmake.”
Sunshine is taken back to the early days of his existence, a bemused Rain at home in his rainforest, the scent of petrichor thick in the air as they both watched Sunshine change a pocketwatch into a pen and back again. Over and over. Reshaping the matter in his hands like a child with clay.
One of the fundamental lessons that had been drilled into him, as they toyed with what Sunshine’s lack of creation ability had meant, his finesse for manipulation that Rain had been eerily impressed with at the time.
The same lesson all of the Gods adhere to, for obvious reasons.
We can bend, we can shape, but only Fate herself can unmake what she has made.
“I can unmake it–” It’s not a suggestion, it’s not even a question.
Sunshine has finally reached the answer he’s been looking for since the moment of his apparent birth, and Lucid looks equally as proud of him as he does apologetic that it took them both so long to see what has been in front of them for some time.
Maybe apologetic that he’s suspected this since he regained some of his memory, and decided to let Sunshine take his own journey of self-discovery rather than simply tell him.
Sunshine swallows fire and anger and tries to remain calm as he speaks. “I can unmake it because it was Fate who made it.”
“Wasn’t sure,” Lucid sounds like he’s begging, the usual song of his voice distorted and harsh, there’s grief there, and isn’t that a familiar feeling these days? All they have lost, all they might not even know about yet. Unanswered questions as far as the eye could see. “I thought I might be wrong.”
Which is exactly the sentiment Rain has shared, right until he was punished for opening his mouth. Right before Sunshine was ripped from reality and dropped into a prison of his own making.
“Lucid,” Sunshine’s chest feels tight. His skin sears and his aura throbs. This is what destruction feels like, he is sure. This is being unmade. “Was I the one who put you in here?”
He’s not entirely sure what it will do to either of them if that’s the case. What it will mean for their existence, what it means for their escape. But, even as frightened as Sunshine feels, it appears that Lucid is unwilling to let himself cave to the same feeling.
He shrugs one shoulder, an act intended to look careless and failing so miserably it’s almost comical, and he offers one hand up. An olive branch. A promise. A dedication.
In his palm, a Forget-Me-Not blooms, and Lucid nurtures its petals with the bright sunshine of his smile.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “But we can find out together, can’t we?”