Chapter Text
It starts off with light blurriness — the kind you get when you forget to remove your contacts before bed, dryness and irritation welcoming you back to the waking world. Étoiles doesn’t wear contacts, although he does don a pair of sturdy, cheap rectangular glasses on occasion, whenever reports have to be read or written in thin leather-bound books for the Résistance’s upper echelon.
(Upper echelon he’s never caught a whiff off, by the way. Étoiles understands the need for secrecy, for compartmentalization — but damn, it does get lonely here in headquarters, with nothing but his own voice and long-dried ink speaking of codes going rogue and islander alignments to entertain himself with.)
He blinks, once, twice, rubbing at his eyeballs through the skin of his lids. No amelioration. He shrugs it off, readjusts the straps of his slime armor. It’s a shit one, not even the good enchants on it. But he’s been restless lately, antsy. Not quite worried, but something else, something in the negative shape of a beloved, beret-wearing egg. Ants under his greenish skin, a fire only the cold bite of enemy blades and a close brush with Lady Death can fix.
He likes Kristin. She’s funny, with her large brimmed hat and gentle smile and gentler words still. Philza’s a lucky man.
“You are sad,” she would say, in the space-between-spaces he would drift to when downed, just before the ‘doom-doom’ of revival. The crimson bud of her smile would twist into a scowl, as she watched him give her a two-fingered salute. “Is that why I see you so often, starling?”
“I’m not sad,” he would answer without fail — the ache inside his chest wasn’t sadness. Étoiles didn’t do sad. He killed, he destroyed, his body grown in a weapon meant to hurt and maim and be hurt in return. Meant to be wielded by someone worthy. (He thinks of pitch-black feathers and a wheezy laugh, the tingle of wither-decay dancing on his skin, the smell of bone. Claws digging into his bony hips, a litany of trills speaking of ownership-claim, great shadows trapping him in so effectively. His knee guards stained by fresh soil where potatoes are endlessly grown in honor of a great warrior he once crossed blades with. Worship, devotion.)
“I’m not sad,” he mumbles, jumping down the well and into the darkness of the dungeon below. Hopefully it wouldn’t be a shit one, and he could scratch that itch in the back of his mind that demanded blood be spilled, be it his or otherwise. “Maybe I die for real today, let’s goooo.”
He never does. He’s too good at dungeoning, too good at placing blocks and throwing splash potions at his feet, golden apples now a rare last resort because he knows what happens when he eats too many. Aaaah, what a pity, he thinks, as he loses himself in the clash of metal on metal and the grunt of mobs falling at his feet. What a pity, I feel nothing. Bad day for me, bad day.