lazybox | izunia lucis callout

[Izunia always preferred to be doing something with his hands, at times like this, so it all works out. The grand gestures were all Ardyn's; Izunia was careful and precise, until he forced himself to be sweeping and loose.

After so long, he doesn't have to second-guess himself about the precise amount of sweeping and loose he should be, but it's still preferable to have something to do with his hands, like carefully piling firewood into exactly the proper shape.

It's good, because it's the wildest story he's ever heard, and he's a man who spent several millennia in a ring. And yet -

Izunia. Ardyn Izunia. It's so hard not to flinch.]

Mmm.

[At first the hum almost seems like all the answer she might get, but - ]

I can't say that makes the most sense out of anything I've ever heard, but I do recall a few ideas thrown around by those who cared deeply for physics - 'what if every choice we make creates a new timeline,' that sort of thing. Did you ever find out why he used the other name?

[It's thrown out so casually that she probably won't even know that it's the most burning question he's ever had.]

[ She opens her mouth. Closes it again. And... really, that's an answer all by itself, isn't it? As is the way her lips purse and the way her gaze drifts to look at absolutely anything else rather than risk catching his gaze. She knows why -- of course she knows why. He used it because of spite and hurt and bitterness and because of black and bile running through his veins instead of blood. But god. She can't just go and say that, can she? Even if she can't just lie. ]

He said... [ how to explain this without the words Starscourge, exile, execution coming up? A fun game for the entire family. ] He said it was something to do with his brother. He needed a name to use and it... it might as well have been Izunia's.

[ it's a gross oversimplification but it's close enough to the truth.

She swallows, not sure if she has the right to be asking him anything right now but... she has to know. ]

When I saw you on the beach and called you Izunia-san... you said "Izunia is a dead man". What... what happened to him, exactly?

[It might as well have been, indeed. 'Ardyn' twirls a last piece of firewood - a twig, really - back and forth between his first two fingers in a nervous gesture that probably doesn't match up at all to the Ardyn Yuuri knows.

A gross oversimplification, maybe. But the heart of it isn't invisible.

Fair is fair, isn't it, brother?]

Izunia... made a huge mistake, and gave everything he had trying to atone for it. To the very end of his life.

[She isn't the only one who can give compellingly few details. Really, he's as much a politician as any other Lucis Caelum, save perhaps Noctis.]

My brother was the dearest thing to me in the world. That much, I hope, is in common with the Ardyn you know.

[ ... Now that's interesting. A mistake she would've simply nodded along with but atonement is what makes her start to wonder if somewhere, there's some wires crossed. She'd thought it a simple case of irony and the universe playing a cruel prank. A world in which Ardyn gets to be the king with his name immortalized and all he gives in exchange is his younger brother, to the Starscourge. But if that really was the case -- if Izunia Lucis Caelum was the prince lost to time to become the Accursed Immortal then how could he have died to atone for it?

Something is strange here. Something is off and wrong and Yuuri doesn't know enough to put a finger on just what. So instead she nods, trying to work out what question to ask to finally start putting this puzzle together. ]

... it is. I know he loved Izunia very much.

[ Past tense. She has no idea what feeling is left behind now, after two thousand years of stewing on a betrayal. But the Ardyn she knows... she likes to think that there's a ghost of the feeling there, at the very least. ]

I'm sorry. For all this, I mean, I'm a stranger, aren't I? I haven't even introduced myself and here I am, talking like I know so much about you. [ she gives him a tired, tired smile. ] I'm Yuuri Wakasa. If... if there's anything else you need to ask then please do. I'll do my best to answer.

Please, don't be concerned over it. It's rare these days that I meet anyone who even knows the name - I should be the one apologizing, for I nearly pulled a blade on you.

[And who can blame him, considering that he got the shock of several afterlives in that moment? He's still - the part of him that isn't a politician playing a role that's become second nature is still reeling.

There was supposed to be nothing left. Nothing but a daemon - that's what he told himself, trying fruitlessly to put the thing with his brother's face and voice down, even knowing that it would do little good. Ring wrapped round his finger, a contract with the crystal itself - dooming himself and so many descendants in the hopes of someday freeing his brother from that hell.

The ring is gone, now.]

Was he well, the Ardyn you knew?

[It is only the tip of the iceberg of the questions he wants to ask, but he can't let any of that traitorous desperation show. Can't ask is he here, because he knows damn well that if he lets himself - if the answer is yes -

He'll be Izunia again, irrevocably.]

[ Again, it's her expression that answers the question first before Yuuri herself does. Her frown softens a little and becomes just the faintest hint of a smile. Was he well, he asks and she thinks of the wonderful, idiot man she called her father surrounded by the family who'd decided they wanted him and weren't going to take no for an answer.

Was he well? ]

He was. The last I saw of him before I came here, he was happy. In fact, I, um--

[ She laughs and there's a little more warmth to it now, even under the embarrassment. ]

When I saw you on the beach, I was almost hoping that's who you were. It's selfish of me to want that, I know -- he's better off at home with everyone else, where he belongs but I... I miss him. I miss all of them very much.

[This time, there's no mistaking the way he reacts - the stick he's still toying with slides into the growing fire, Izunia's fingers going slack in uncontrolled relief.

Not even just well. Happy. Oh, Crystal and god both, a word he never thought he might hear in regards to his brother again.

He pulls his hand back, almost as an afterthought, as though to pretend that he had meant to drop the stick into the fire all along. These hands, in his brother's clothes - ]

There's nothing wrong with missing a person you might not ever see again.

[Happy. Oh, Astrals. Surely he does not deserve to hear such news.]

If he has truly found a home, after everything we've been through - [Let her think that that is a commonality of being Ardyn, instead of the other.] - then I am truly grateful to you, Miss Wakasa.

[ Miss Wakasa.

And it's that, somehow, among everything else that hits Yuuri in a way that feels well and truly wrong. All these disparate details have confused her, sure. And his reaction seems somehow disproportionate to her answer. But it's not until he says Miss Wakasa that her feelings coalesce into suspicion. The Ardyn she knows -- or at least, the man who'd woken up on the Fantasy Sweet, still thinking he was the Healer king -- had never once called her Miss Wakasa.

Because when he was Ardyn Lucis Caelum, he hadn't wanted that distance, had he? She's so sure she'd heard him say something like that -- that he didn't want Lucians to look at him and see a king first and a healer second, for fear they'd hesitate in approaching for his help. So she doesn't think that, even in an alien world with a stranger who knew him inside out, that he would default to formalities like that.

Maybe it's presumptuous of her, to assume she knows this man because he has Ardyn's name and face. But something is wrong here, and Yuuri spent eight weeks surviving by the skin of her teeth by sniffing out lies and contradictions. And this... this is suspicious, if nothing else. ]

... when you say everything you've been through... what do you mean exactly? [ she doesn't mean it to have the sting of an accusation, but when she says it so slowly and with a look like that on her face, it would be hard pressed to sound like anything but. ] Some of the things I know and some of the things you're saying... they don't match up. I wonder if we're getting our wires crossed somewhere.

[And Izunia was a king, but never a healer at all. Ardyn's healing magic was one of the only things that wasn't shared between them. It was the only thing he hadn't been able to imitate and had to excuse away -

That part of myself died with my brother which was, in its own way, true.

And now the girl is suspicious and hell, he hasn't had to make up similar excuses in centuries, he's distinctly out of practice.

At least he can manage a legitimate far-away, doesn't-really-want-to-talk-about-it look, even while his heart is still trying to scream its way out of his chest.]

The war, the plague, everything Izunia did... I imagine you can guess well enough. Though for all I know it was different for your Ardyn.

[Please let it have been different.]

... I think it might have been, yes.

[ None of this is coming together in a way that makes sense. If there was a war and a plague but Ardyn is still himself and sane, then that must mean Izunia was the healer. But if Izunia was the healer then it doesn't make sense for him to have died -- if he was the one taking in the Starscourge then surely it would've been Izunia who became the Accursed Immortal. Maybe the strain was too great for him in a way it hadn't been for Ardyn and it had killed him... but no, that doesn't seem right either. Because it was never that Ardyn had survived what he'd become. He had simply been refused the right to die. ]

What... was it Izunia did, exactly?

[ Still suspicious. Still just barely toeing the line of an outright accusation of lies. ]

[Almost everything he's told her is the truth - almost everything. Just, a very different version of the truth than the one Ardyn himself would have told her.]

He saw a monster with his brother's face, and did everything he could to destroy it.

[...Would Ardyn have tried to laugh it off? Always so flippant -

Izunia tries, but there is still an undercurrent of miserable regret.]

Blades, fire, firing squad, sun exposure... I imagine you get the idea. Anything that could kill a daemon.

[ And there's the confusion again. Because this is starting to sound like the story she knows but it doesn't make sense. It can't make sense if that all still happened but Ardyn is here to tell the story.

... unless. Not unless... ]

But it didn't work, did it? None of it did. He couldn't be killed anymore because they wouldn't just let him die.

[ "Izunia is a dead man". A dead man who made a terrible, terrible mistake, who spent the rest of his life miserably trying to atone for it. ]

And when he wouldn't die... what did they do with him then?

[He just nods.]

Izunia was not the Chosen King, after all. And no power short of that could destroy what the gods called 'Accursed.'

[For his mistake, the gods demanded not only Izunia's soul, but the souls of all his descendants, onward and onward, until a boy named Noctis became the dawn.]

'Seal the daemon in Angelgard' - one of Izunia's advisors, I no longer remember which, even if the words are burned in my memory. So that was exactly what they did.

[ When Ardyn had talked of his brother, Yuuri had always pictured something like -- something a little more like Noctis. Maybe his face would've been more severe, his hair messier and that same ridiculous shade of purple or red or whatever it felt like being when the light hit it. Close enough to tell they were brothers, but not exactly a mirror image.

Maybe that's why it's taken her so long. Because if she'd known what face to look for, the pieces would've fallen into places more gradually but far quicker. Now, though, it all comes clattering together in one great rush.

She's a fool. It had never entered into her mind that he would arrive here -- he occupies the same space of her mind that Megu-nee does. Gone, not forgotten, but still gone and forever out of reach and there's nothing any of them can do about it. But what the hell does a world like this care for people who are supposed to be dead and gone?

And he is dead and gone. He has been for nearly two thousand years, not by any plague or scourge but by the simple passage of time, because this man isn't the Accursed Immortal he's-- ]

... Izunia.

[ -- Lucis Caelum. ]

You're Izunia, aren't you?

[And perhaps in another time, he would have been - still twins, even, but not so utterly the same. Not a man who lived out the greater part of his life under his brother's name, matching his fashions and mannerisms until it was impossible to tell where Izunia ended and 'Ardyn' began. Until he could barely remember his own preferences for how to act and what to wear -

The flinch at his name is revealing and obvious, to the point that even answering the question is a formality.]

I should count myself lucky that there was no one in the court who really knew Ardyn well enough to tell, if you've figured it out this quickly.

[He doesn't know how to feel. It is the first time he has been - the first time Izunia's name has been spoken in so many years. He almost wants to thank her, for seeing through it, for allowing him to take the cover off for the first time in so many long years.

Perhaps that's why fate has brought him here. A final chance to reveal all his secrets, a last will to the light of morning that parts the endless, deceiving night.]

I haven't thought of myself that way in very, very many years.

[ She'd made idle jokes to Ardyn, to the others, about what she'd do if she ever came face to face with any of the troublemakers from their worlds. She'd even said to Ardyn, hadn't she, with a grin on her face that she'd have words with Izunia should he ever be misfortunate enough to meet her. And now he's actually here, she doesn't know what to say. ]

... I... I don't...

[ I don't understand, she wants to say because there's so much here that makes no sense. He'd kept up the act this entire time and she'd been so fooled. They'd been happy to banish and kill him without any sort of cover up in the history she knows so why all the pretense, here?

And then under all the confusion and all the scattering of her thoughts, something surfaces and it's so bitter and angry that she can't even filter it before it comes out of her mouth. ]

Everything-- you already took everything else-- so you took his name, too?

...Izunia didn't deserve to be king.

[Those words - they're the deepest truth of his soul, spoken with a hint of underlying anger that's almost a more convincing Ardyn impression than anything he's done so far.]

Izunia was a fool who struck down his own brother in a moment of fear - oh, there were the executions, but the hand on the first blade was mine, and it was gripped in a panic when I saw him in the grip of the Scourge. I didn't ask questions, didn't ask if he had it under control - I only acted, to my eternal regret.

[The one time he didn't think things through.]

Ardyn was the one who deserved to be remembered, as king, as voice of the Crystal, as the Founder of Lucis. So I killed 'Izunia' myself to ensure that history, at least, gave my brother the credit he deserved.

[ She can't decide which is worse. The idea of him being forgotten and just thrown away like trash of course is awful. But there's something almost perverse about the idea of Izunia picking his name off his corpse like a vulture picking carrion and living that lie for the rest of his life. There would be children, she realizes with a start, who would grow up thinking that their father was Ardyn Lucis Caelum and would never have reason to believe that the man they loved was a liar.

She feels sick. ]

Don't you dare talk about what he deserved. As if you have any right--!

[ She's so angry that she's blindsided by it almost and she has to scramble to her feet so she can do something. She's filled with directionless fury and it has nowhere to go because as angry as she is, the logical part of her knows she can't put all the blame on Izunia, as convenient a scapegoat he is.

But it certainly feels nice to have a target for once. ]

So you lied for the rest of your life -- pretending you were him, like he could be replaced that easily! All the while, he was rotting away on that island and-- and you--

[ Anger renders her, for a moment at least, speechless. ]

You think it was easy?

[He deserves this, really. Deserves every word, deserves no absolution. But the idea that it was easy sparks a temper that he had almost forgotten he had.

It was never easy. Punishments aren't supposed to be.]

What do you suppose I should have done - given the people their true king, a fratricide who doomed his own brother to that darkness? What good would that have done? The line of Lucis would have ended then and there, and Ardyn -

[And then the anger comes crashing down, and his shoulders slump.]

Ardyn wouldn't have had the chance for salvation at all.

You could've told them the truth!

[ It isn't Izunia's fault. If it's anyone's fault it's the Astrals, all the gods who'd decided that the lives lost on the way to their Chosen King were a price worth paying. But she's been so helplessly angry for so long about all of it -- about Airlocked, and the Nonary Games and the Freelancer Project and Bahamut that it feels good to finally have something to vent at. ]

Don't you think if he deserved anything, he deserved that much? You talk about salvation but how was he supposed to be saved if no one even knew what was wrong?!

[ She's trying so hard to shut herself up and calm herself down but she can't. She knows how overblown and overwrought her anger must seem but -- well. If there's anything this family has in abundance it's spite and anger, isn't it? ]

...How indeed.

[Bitter and pained and guilty and -]

...Bahamut himself told me there was nothing left. Just a daemon wearing my brother's skin, and I believed, because who would question the gods? I thought that my brother was gone by my hand, and only a daemon remained...

... I know I made unforgivable mistakes. That he still found happiness somewhere - being able to hear that is more than I deserve.

[He's tired, and old, and has a lot more practice beating himself up about the entire thing than Yuuri does. It's almost refreshing to have someone else do it.]

[ Bahamut. It all comes back to Bahamut, doesn't it?

Yuuri takes in a long slow breath and makes herself hold it, just long enough to calm herself down. There's nothing to be accomplished by yelling at a tired, sad old man who already knows the mistakes he's made. And besides that it's... surprisingly hard to keep up her anger when he looks so much like Ardyn. It feels like a cheap shot, but for all the things she can blame Izunia Lucis Caelum for, resemblance to his own twin is hardly one of them.

She sighs, just as long and slow as her breath in and her hands finally unclench. ]

... we're. We're doing what we can for him. We can't fix any of it or changed what happened but I...

[ She swallows hard and then pulls herself up to her full height, almost a little defiantly. ]

He's happy. It isn't perfect but... he had a home and a family and he's happy. I can promise you that much.

It does me more good to hear than you could ever imagine.

[Only good news he's gotten in two thousand years, actually.

Slowly, something uncurls in him. He's... Lighter, in a way that's impossible to put a finger on. He's put down a burden for the first time.]

I have no real right to ask, but - please. Tell me everything.

... everything, really? Not that I won't, I just. Um.

[ She gives him a strained sort of smile that just screams "I've seen some shit" ]

It's a very long story and it's... well, let's just say the parts I already told you are basically the tip of the iceberg.

[The smile he gives her in return... Has also seen some shit.]

Ardyn and I came into adulthood in the last few years of the Astral War, dear girl, and that is just the tip of my iceberg. I assure you, I'm not going to capsize.

[He gestures at the fire, which has grown naturally during their more heated discussion and now offers some actual warmth.]

Though it might be for the best if you sat down.

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