fanfic; life goes on

[contemptibility]

Title: Life Goes On
Series: The Legend of the Legendary Heroes
Character(s): Tiir.
Warnings: Mentions of blood and death.
Summary: He's a shadow of a leader and he knows it, but better to be a shadow than nothing at all.
Dedication: To igiko and kalisona.
Note: This is some weird future canon-AU-idk thing. Also, this was originally going to be for the Hanged Man prompt, but then it kind of. Didn't turn out that way.
ETA: In light of Vol. 12, a lot of this is inaccurate now in regards to how their group works, whoops.



—

Life Goes On

—


”Do you want to change the world?”

He’s been expecting it, at the same time that he’s been desperately wishing for it to never happen.

He finds her in the main base, which is admittedly the last place he thought to look. It’s empty now, and has been for months—Gastark made sure of that. Or perhaps ‘empty’ would be the wrong word to use, as corpses still litter the ground amidst dry blood. The stench is overpowering, even to someone who surrounds himself with death, but—

(Why?)

There’s no reason for her to be here. Tiir can’t even stand to be here, and he knows that her blindness has done nothing to her perception. In her own way, she should be able to see exactly what he does, as he stands at the entrance of the house. Surveying the ruins now, it’s nothing but another shattered memory of the past—another piece that he’ll remember for the rest of his life, but otherwise left behind.

Ene’s sitting on a chair by a window—one of the few left untouched after the attack. She’s always looked ethereal to Tiir, ever since her hair and eyes turned nearly white, but basking in the moonlight, she looks particularly otherworldly tonight.

“Ene?” he calls. She doesn’t answer. Tiir tilts his head to one side, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary—Ene has, at times, lived in her world, much like him. Trying to ignore the bodies of his friends at the same time that he recalls their deaths, he walks over to her.

Her eyes are closed, with a soft smile gracing her face. Tiir brushes her hair out of the way—and then recoils.

Her skin is cold.

Far too cold.

“No,” he says, trying to deny it while the pieces click together in mind. “No, no, no, no, no—”

It isn’t true, he refuses to believe that it’s true, he doesn’t want for it to be true—

But as he grasps her ice-cold hand, falling to his knees on blood-stained ground, reality comes crashing down with him. The air is silent, save for the sound of his own breathing, and all too heavy to the point where he feels like he’s about to choke on it.

He doesn’t know how much time has passed when he’s aware of his surroundings once more. His mind awakens to the realization that he needs to breathe, though he can’t remember having stopped to begin with. His hand is gripping Ene’s tighter now, as if he could somehow transfer his life into her body—have her breathe again.

She doesn’t, remaining as lifeless as a doll. Somehow, though, with her face glowing in the moonlight, she seems to be more alive than Tiir is—Tiir, who feels like something has finally broken within him, and he no longer knows how to fix it.

As he kneels in what might’ve once been the only home he’s ever had, realizing that he’s the only one alive within miles—he has never felt more alone in his life.

“Why?” he asks, willing for his voice not to waver as he speaks to a girl who can no longer hear him. “Why didn’t you tell me…?”

—

Nothing changes.

Or rather, there isn’t anything to change. He continues as the leader, but now as the true one, as bitter as he is over the thought.

Life continues. He returns to the group that he was previously with, who say the standard things: where did he go, did he run into any trouble, welcome back. In return, he smiles cheerfully, thanking one of the older God’s Eyes bearers for looking after the children while he was gone. He strokes the children’s heads, cooks dinner, and tucks them in.

It’s so utterly familiar and mundane that he wants to scream.

He has never breathed a word of Ene’s existence to them. Not when Gastark lurked as a constant threat, forcing Ene to lead from within the shadows and Tiir to represent her. It was a practice that he had accepted, eager to protect her in any way he could.

In the end, though, it isn’t Gastark that claimed her life.

… He told her not to overwork herself.

Either way, anyone else who knew her is dead. The thought leaves a bitter taste in Tiir’s mouth, as he fully understands what that means.

She died for a world that doesn’t even know that she existed.

He wants to cry at the injustice of it all, but he can’t. He wants to speak of her, but even if he were to, he doubts that his friends could truly understand.

The only person who ever did understand him is gone now, after all.

—

Though nothing changes, everything starts to fall apart.

To begin with, their numbers are dwindling. At the very least, the rate at which Tiir finds new God’s Eyes bearers is decreasing, and though Gastark’s attacks are lessening as well, their community is depressingly small.

If it were simply that, however, Tiir wouldn’t be so concerned.

With Ene gone, he’s painfully aware of a lack of guidance. He and the others continue with their daily lives, and they’re happy, he knows. This alone is more than they could have hoped for, as outcasts, as the condemned. And yet Tiir knows that they’re wasting away—that they were meant for greater things.

Whatever the reason was for their birth, as Ene had spoken of, is a secret that she carried to her grave.

Tiir leads in the shallowest sense of the word. He looks after them, heals the wounds that humans have left behind—but he knows that they’re no closer to peace than they were before. He leads them in the same way that he did before, when he knew that he was merely a figurehead.

He accomplishes nothing.

Despite that, he carries the burden of being an official leader. If everything wasn’t his responsibility before, it certainly is now. Even though things still proceed as they did before, he’s suddenly all too aware of every decision that he makes.

What could go wrong. What needs to go right.

As Ene is no longer to there to correct things, he has to make sure everything is perfect the first time around now.

At the same time, he knows that he’s doing nothing but run around in circles. It’s pathetic and indescribably frustrating, and he hates himself all the more for it.

Yet life goes on, and so he continues to smile and act like nothing’s wrong. The children told him that his specialty was playing pretend—they were right. It’s almost sickening, how good he is at it, but it disgusts him less than the feeling that even so, he’s still a failure. Despite that, he moves forward (but does he even have a choice, really?). He feels like he’s advancing slower than before, and so he tells himself to be glad that he might even be advancing at all. He can’t stop; he never has before, and he’s not sure if he even knows how.

He tells himself that he has to this for his friends. They’re relying on him, having never known of a better leader than him (of a girl who could actually save them, compared to what he’s doing).

He tells himself that Ene wouldn’t have let things end the way they did if there was no hope.

And so, he holds onto that hope. He clings to it, even though sometimes, for the first time ever in his life, he doesn’t feel like fighting.

Sometimes, he’s tired of fighting.

But Ene fought, he knows, and surrendering is never an option. If he were to give up, then he might as well end his own life, right there and then.

No matter how sick he is of trying to be strong.

—

He places black flowers on her grave—black, because he remembers from years ago how beautiful her eyes were.

He misses her—more than anyone could imagine.

“I still don’t know if you were right, when you said that they would be fine with me,” he says quietly. And he reminds himself of who he is—Tiir Rumibul, the leader of the God’s Eyes bearers.

A role he never wanted, but one that he knows he has to carry. For his friends’ sakes, for Ene’s—for the dream they both had.

“But I suppose it doesn’t matter now, does it?”