[Fanfiction] Fracture - Chapter 21
PROLOGUE: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/fancreations/fZAXxjHA-fanfiction-fracture PREVIOUS CHAPTER: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/fancreations/TlBnRsuV-fanfiction-fracture-chapter-20
Fanfiction.net link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10770866/1/Fracture
Genres: Suspense/Drama/Mystery/a lot of others Characters: Leona, Caitlyn, Nasus, Kassadin, too many to list
Summary: The machine that sustains the lethal matches of the League fails. Events spiral outwards. (Character death.)
REBIRTH
Noxian air was bitter.
It might have been the smell of antiseptics floating around, or the dryness in her mouth, but the moment she took a breath, Sivir knew where she was.
It was pitch black – no light – and for one moment, she wondered what had happened, fighting through the vertigo as she pulled herself into a sitting position. Her back cracked, spine popping, and the Battle Mistress cat-stretched briefly, holding a hum in her throat.
Then she remembered.
It had disappeared.
The mercenary burst out of the cot, throwing off the sheets as she stumbled on cold, tiled floor. Fumbling for something to grab onto – anything – she caught hold of a handful of curtain, yanking it aside. There was a bright moon in the sky.
It had disappeared.
She didn't know where her armor was, where her weapons had gone, who had taken her and where exactly, but that didn't matter. With clumsy, aching hands, she scrabbled at the window, chipping at its edge with her nails until she could ease it open. Unlike Shurima, the night air was warm.
His body had disappeared.
The Battle Mistress heaved herself painfully up onto the sill, scrambling over the other side until her bare feet met grass. She was in a courtyard, of some kind – residential, it looked like. A private clinic? There were lights further away, drifting out of huge windows. Someone was up. Quickly, the mercenary crouched low, pressing herself flush against stone walls in an attempt to stay shadowed.
Nasus's body had disappeared.
It could only mean one thing. Wherever she was, she needed to leave. Never mind her stuff – she could look for it later. She had to get to the Institute, to the Fields of Justice.
Sivir peered around a corner, eyes squinted. There wasn't much she could see, in the darkness, but it looked clear enough. She crept forward.
"Don't move."
.
.
.
Home.
For some reason, she thought she'd never see it again. There was a kind of farawayness in the concept – an overwhelming nostalgia – that hung over her, and despite herself, she felt her throat seize up a little.
There was something inside of her that wanted to cry.
Katarina swallowed, pulling her knees up to her chest, burying her nose in familiar blankets. It was a comforting smell, and it shook her like few things had before.
Where had she been the last few days? What had she been doing?
It was hard to recall, but the Sinister Blade felt as if she had spent a long, long while empty. Dead. She wasn't one for soul-searching, Noxus had no time for sentimentalism, but it was strange, how hollow she felt.
She glanced around the vacant room – at the IV, stuck into her arm, the anemic light of morning slipping through her curtains. There was a shadow by her bedside, and then she knew.
"You should have told me," he said – and there was no tenderness in his tone, but a bitter, sharp edge.
"… I know," replied Katarina, after a long while. She closed her eyes, hugged her knees close.
"Do you have any idea how long I searched? How many people I had to contact in order to find you?" he asked lowly. "I have a lot of loose ends to tie up now, because of you two."
"We couldn't have been gone longer than a week," she murmured. The exchange was familiar. Soothing. It was tempting to go back to sleep.
"A week and a half," he corrected irritably, and she didn't have to look to know his arms were crossed.
Katarina didn't say anything in reply, and he didn't continue, until another lengthy moment had passed in silence. Then she heard a sigh - tired, and heavy sounding, as if it came from deep within his chest.
"You should have told me," Talon muttered. "How long were you going to try and hide it?"
"Hide what?"
"That she was getting worse."
She frowned. "We just didn't…"
"Did you think I wouldn't notice?" he snapped, interrupting her. It was a calm sort of snap, a premeditated fury. Like calculated cruelty, the composure did nothing to take the edge off of it.
She looked up, mouth pressed into a thin line, eyes searching the shadows for his. There was a rustle of clothing - and finally, he stepped into the light. Talon drew up a chair behind him, settling by her bedside and pulling off his hood. Even hunched over, she could see the dark rings around his eyes.
"We just didn't want you to worry," Katarina told him quietly. "We thought we could fix it."
He sighed again, pinching the bridge of his nose. "The last time I saw General Du Couteau, he told me to look after you two."
"Well it's been a long time since we saw Dad," she replied, a little regret sticking to the back of her throat. "You don't have to hang around anymore. You know that."
"And yet I'm still here," he observed duly, glancing up at her.
"You're still here," she agreed, and a small, wry smile pulled at the corner of her mouth.
He said nothing to that, only shaking his head in a way that made Katarina want to laugh. It was so familiar - so terribly familiar. The only thing missing was…
"Where's Cass?" The Noxian assassin looked around. "How is she?"
A knock at the door. Possibly one of the servants.
"Enter," Talon ordered.
"Nice place you got here," came the low, dry voice. There was a slithering.
"Sivir," she greeted, a little warily.
Truth be told, Katarina didn't remember much after the whole fiasco with Thresh - she remembered vaguely something about lanterns, a dark, wide chamber, and the sudden appearance of Xerath. The Battle Mistress must have been picked up with them - but then, where was the Curator, or the Butcher?
Cassiopeia, still a snake, coiled around the foot of Talon's chair, propping her serpentine head onto his lap. It was with faint wonder that the Sinister Blade observed him as he laid a hand on her head.
"Gets more affectionate the colder her blood is, I see," remarked Sivir, amused. Talon shot her a deadpan look. "Thanks for the patch up, by the way." She patted her bandages.
"Why are you here?" she asked bluntly.
The mercenary shifted her weight from one foot to the other, shaking out the newspaper she had in her hand. Katarina hadn't even noticed it.
"It's back up," she replied, sobering.
It?
"You can't mean…?" started Katarina.
Sivir nodded. "They wrung a statement out of the Herald about it. He's being held in Demacia right now."
"Then the Institute of War is running again?"
"Still down." The Battle Mistress threw the paper onto her lap. "Read the article yourself if you want."
"Why is this significant to you?" asked Talon.
"There's somewhere I need to be. Something I need to do," she answered, shooting him a vexed look. "Something I would've done already if you hadn't stopped me from leaving earlier."
"A half-dressed, disorientated mercenary would not make it far on Noxian streets at night," he pointed out flatly.
"Well, now I'm dressed, completely lucid, and I need passage out of Noxus," she returned easily.
Talon glanced at Katarina from the corner of his eye, and she shook her head.
"Not yet," he answered shortly.
Sivir scowled. "What do you want?"
"What you found out from Xerath. What he said about Cassiopeia. Tell me," she said. "Then we'll talk about getting you out of here."
The Battle Mistress crossed her arms, shifting her weight onto her back foot. Gaze moving from her, to Talon, then to Cassiopeia, she seemed to make a choice.
"All right."
.
.
.
The sun was bright.
He trudged along slowly, feet making sloppy imprints in the dirt. There was nothing on the horizon but the sand and the sky, and he squinted his eyes as he faced out into its glaring visage. Emptiness – only the earth on fire. He licked at sharp teeth with a dry tongue, and moved sluggishly onwards.
Where was he going? Where had he been?
He didn't know.
He only kept moving forward. Like a moth driven relentlessly towards light, he kept on towards the distant horizon. There was no purpose to his steps, no direction to his actions, yet there remained something within telling him not to stop – never to stop. He didn't know what it was.
He had tried to look inside – and found nothing.
.
.
.
It had been a long time.
She'd almost forgotten what it had looked like at high noon – how the river had swelled up with a gurgling shine, and the jungle had rustled in the midday wind. It had been a while since she had taken cool, wet breaths instead of breathing the warm, chapped air of the Shuriman day.
Even if the grass had been watered with blood, she had kind of missed the Summoner's Rift.
Sivir slogged through the knee-deep water, shaking out her boots as she finally crossed over into red jungle. The last cicadas of summer were clicking all around her, and she stopped briefly, looking skywards.
He hadn't been on the blue fountain. That left two possibilities: he had wandered off, or he had been dropped on red side.
Either way, she needed to find him.
.
.
.
"You read this, right?"
Her words came out in a rush, carried by a shaky exhale. Katarina set the newspaper down, collapsing back into a chair. The empty dining room felt too wide, too large right about then.
"Should you be walking around?" He didn't look up from sharpening his blades.
"Just answer me."
"Yes."
The soul-chaining, the rebirth, the stagnation...
The Sinister Blade cradled her bandaged arm, traced where the needle had been set in a moment of shuddering re-composure. She needed to collect herself.
The truth behind the system gave her terrible, terrible thoughts.
"Sivir said that the curse," she began, softly, hesitantly – afraid of what ground she might tread with this train of thought, "would change Cass's soul."
Talon didn't reply to her for a long moment, and she thought, for a second, he hadn't heard her.
"You're afraid her link will be severed," he concluded, examining the edge of a dagger.
"She's still part Cass right now, but... for how long? How long until it goes all the way and she's just a snake?"
He stopped in his ministrations – glanced up at her with razor-sharp eyes. "You're not suggesting..."
Katarina grimaced, looking away from his incisive gaze. "Before it's too late."
"Do you understand the kind of risk you'll be taking?" he asked coolly – and that slight shift in his inflection told her everything she needed to know about his thoughts on the matter. He was putting up a front again, drawing up the distance. "If the machine is nonfunctional, she will die. If it doesn't return her to her previous self as I'm assuming you theorized, then she will have suffered the agony of death for nothing."
Talon set the dagger down, passing a hand over the collection. He seemed to hover over one, and then stop, sitting up straight to look at her.
"Is that worth it?" he pressed, and that hard edge crept into his tone again.
"I don't know," she answered honestly. "But what's going to happen to her regardless can't be much better."
"And you know this for a fact?"
"I know this is what she'd want," answered Katarina, adding a little wistfully, "better to die while she's still beautiful than waste away alone, she'd always say."
A lull passed over them, and she guessed he was taking the time to think over her words.
Truth be told, the thought of it terrified her. What-ifs raced across her mind at a breakneck pace, and she swallowed thickly, clutching at her bandaged arm. If this was what it took to save her, could she kill her own sister when it came down to it? To leave her at the mercy of the curse, or to kill her in an attempt to cure her – which was worse?
"I don't know how long before her soul turns," she murmured, more to herself, and she forced down the nausea rising in her stomach. Another long moment passed.
"Let me do it," he said at last, turning away from his weapons, and there was a heaviness about his words that shook her. Talon took up one knife – a long blade, as if for slitting throats – and she leapt out of her chair, snatching it from his hands.
"No!" She held it close to her with stiff fingers, wide gaze meeting his surprised eyes. Katarina took deep breaths. "No."
She turned it over in her hands – examined the keen edge.
"I'll do it."
.
.
.
Maybe he was shriveling up.
He stumbled forward, eyes turning unblinkingly towards the sun. Beneath its blazing gaze, he felt very small, very insignificant – and withered all the same. His head was pounding – his vision pulsed. His throat was parched. When he tried to swallow, the walls stuck together and it wouldn't go down all the way.
A collapse.
The sand was hot. Not warm, but searing. It seeped into cracked scales and chafed him with its coarseness. Half of him wanted to curl up, to sleep – but the other half wanted him to move, to flail weakly for something, anything to grab onto and pull himself back to his aching feet.
There was nothing – but his trembling hand caught onto something soft.
Cloth, of some kind. Fine threads that were smooth to touch. It felt scorching against his fingertips, and he raked it in, pulled it close. It bunched up against him and he pressed it into his stinging nose, hugged it flush to him as he curled around the bundle. It smelled like sun-baked perfume, familiar and far away.
Dry eyes blinked. Once, twice, then closed.
The half that wanted to sleep won out.
.
.
.
Inwardly, Sivir wished she had thought this through a little more.
Like many things she had forgotten about it, she'd forgotten just how big the Rift was. How exactly she was going to find Nasus quickly, she wasn't sure. There was a lot of forest to cover, and she didn't have the usual wire-up of a match to see the other lanes. Whether he was in the jungle, or on one of the main pathways, she wasn't certain. He might have just been camping in red base.
With the Institute still a mess, the turrets were shut down, so she wouldn't have any trouble just walking in if he was. The problem, she thought to herself, looking up at the looming tree tops, was that she had no damn idea where he was.
What if she was too late, and he'd left? With the Institute not operating, she had no way to contact. him, and he, her, and there was no way in hell she'd be able to scour the entirety of the Shurima for him. Maybe she should have left the matter alone – whether he was alive or dead didn't affect her that much – but for some reason, the Battle Mistress found she couldn't.
She just had to be certain he was out there.
Sivir hopped over a felled tree, scanning for tracks or waste, or something to let her know that someone had passed by. It was her luck of course that there was nothing, but she would be the first to admit that she wasn't the greatest at tracking anything outside the desert. The canopy was too thick for her to do the usual glance around for smoke, the horizon too covered up by foliage to look for figures in the distance.
The mercenary trudged along, keeping her senses open. It was in times like these that she wished she'd taken the time to listen to Rengar's idle chat, when a match got dragged out and they'd had moments to spare. He loved to talk about his methodology. Being freelancers, they often got lumped into the same matches. She'd stood beside and against him enough times to know how skilled a hunter the Pridestalker was.
Wait.
The Battle Mistress stopped in her tracks, surveying her surroundings carefully. She was relatively certain she had heard some kind of crack – like striking wood.
Someone was nearby.
.
.
.
She was looking at her.
"Hey, Cass..." she greeted softly, shutting the door behind her. The snake flicked her tongue, letting out an almost curious-sounding hiss. "How are you holding up?"
Her sister coiled herself up slowly, taking her time about it until Katarina found herself almost hypnotized by the way the pattern on her scales folded. Her tail flicked at the carpet she had coiled up on, as if in complaint, and the Sinister Blade had to smile to herself.
"Miss your bed, huh?"
Cassiopeia tilted her head at her, watching with unblinking eyes. The Noxian assassin strode into the room, settling cross-legged beside her. Her sister plopped her head unceremoniously into her lap, and Katarina brushed at the scales, almost absentmindedly.
It felt like there was a ball of lead sitting in her gut. As if her stomach had become a pool of dread.
Just one quick strike. Right at the base of the neck.
Her fingers felt cold, and wooden – as if they didn't really belong to her. Even as she felt the smoothness of reptilian scales, the coarse leather binding of the knife's handle, she couldn't quite register that those sensations were coming to her, that she was sitting here, with a dagger gripped tight behind her back.
Sever the spinal cord – she won't feel a thing. Quick, clean. Right at the neck.
It seemed to her that her heart was beating very hard – unnaturally hard in a way that made it seem as if it were about to burst out of her chest. It wasn't fast, thumping loudly and rushing blood into her ears, but it was strong, and painful.
She'll go fast, easy. Might be some thrashing, but it'll be after the feeling has gone. Instinctive.
"Listen," she began, and her voice strangled itself coming out of her throat, as if it didn't want to be heard. "I'm about to do something that..."
It was hard to find the words, and the way her throat was jamming up turned them into a strained croak. Cassiopeia didn't move, or make any kind of noise and she wondered, briefly, if she had fallen asleep.
"I'm about to do something that you won't like," she managed to say. "But... it's for your own good, so please..."
She raised the dagger high, and sunk it deep.
Cassiopeia's head snapped upwards and she could feel the rest of her body straightening out. She jerked sharply – left, right – tail beating wildly against the floor. Katarina kept her grip firm, wrapped her other arm around her head and pulled it close to her, curling around it.
"I'm sorry," she whispered – and her voice was straining so much, she might as well have been yelling.
Her sister's head bucked upwards into her chin and her jaw snapped shut loudly, almost taking her tongue off. But still she held her close.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," she repeated, eyes screwed shut as she felt the thrashing begin to die down. "Cass..."
Cassiopeia went limp in her arms, head falling forward such that the knife – still held in her vise-like grip – pulled out a little bit with a sickening, slick sort of noise. Oh god. Oh, god – what if it didn't work? What if her soul changed beyond the link, or they shut the machine down? What if she didn't change back?
What if she just killed her younger sister for nothing?
Katarina swallowed a sob, breathing harshly through her nose as she hugged Cassiopeia's serpentine head close. It felt heavy – so heavy – and cold like stone. She had the strangest feeling of something crumbling in her arms.
And suddenly, she was holding nothing but air.
.
.
.
Maybe this was the afterlife. He couldn't be sure.
Life and death were strange things, and he'd never experienced the one – only the other before he moved into the limbo between. What lied beyond death, he had no idea. He only hoped that it was a phase – a transient existence before he was thrown back into the cycle.
Nasus was starting to get tired of eternities.
He sat up slowly, listening to the bones in his back crack, to the rushing, flooding noise in his ears as the blood re-oriented itself to gravity. The day was bright, and he had to blink several times before he could fully open his eyes. It was a familiar sight.
Truth be told, one he had hoped never to see again.
The red side base looked strange without the glow of its nexus to cast a crimson sheen to the stonework. Glancing down, the runes that encircled the fountain were also dark. Everything was powered down.
Carefully, the Curator of the Sands got to his feet, taking up his halberd in one hand. Why was he on the Rift? The last thing he recalled, on the very edges of his foggy memory, was a wide night sky, and an incredible weariness. He was relatively certain he had died.
Nasus twisted his torso this way, then that. There was no stinging in his side, no ache – not even mild soreness. He felt perfect, perhaps a tad stiff from however long he'd been lying on the fountain, but in top form otherwise. Had the system come back online?
He descended from the fountain, legs stumbling in an awkward, rigid gait from a long time without use. The base was completely empty; there was no shopkeeper, no steady flood of minions, no indication of other champions about. Nasus took a deep breath, and tried to see if he could taste death on the air – there was nothing but the smell of the forest.
Slowly making his way out of the base from mid lane, he mulled over two possibilities: that the system had come back online, and by some stroke of providence, he had been saved, or that the system's link had created this afterlife, bound to the Summoner's Rift even after death. Briefly, the Curator had to wonder if he was, perhaps, a ghost.
He struck a nearby tree with the butt of his halberd as he passed – watched with some measure of trepidation and relief as the bark splintered loudly. Not a ghost then, if he could still influence the physical world so. Rather, a revenant.
Assuming, of course, that this was indeed not his great beyond.
It would be a desolate afterlife. Wandering alone with no sense of purpose, no sense of time – none of the anticipation that came with foreseeing an end. Would it be forever, or a day? He didn't know what effect the system had on the sacred cycle of life and death. Would he ever leave this forest of the damned, consecrated by endless blood? Or would he be trapped, eternally roaming the empty jungle with no ally or enemy in sight?
He didn't know, wasn't sure – and that was a frightening thing.
Nasus paused in his steady march, peered up into the clear, luminous sky. He could hear the clicking of insects, the distant howling of wolves, and the sound of wind threading through leaves. No, this could not be the afterlife. It was too real, too physical – not some fading, distant dream that would dull his eyes and ears in its perpetuity.
There was a rustling to his side. Footsteps fast approaching. The Curator of the Sands held his halberd tight, whirled around to meet it.
A familiar face, bursting from the thicket.
And he prayed with all his might to his bygone gods that this was indeed not the afterlife.
"I found you," she murmured, a little breathlessly, eyes wide as if she were shocked by the sight of him.
Something about it struck him, as he slowly shifted his stance back to one of ease – the Battle Mistress converging upon him out of nowhere, her face written with both awe and disbelief, and his all too fearful musings up until that point. He smiled at her.
"It is strange. I am certain I was with you only just the other day," he said wonderingly, "but it feels like such a long, long time ago."
Sivir stared for a moment, as if at a loss for exactly what to say. He could see the faintest tremor in her hands – the shakiness to her posture. She strode up to him, firm, determined steps, and for a moment, he feared she might strike him.
He was not certain what to do with a hug.
"You idiot," she ground out. The librarian could feel the quivering of her arms around him; she sounded livid. "Do you have any idea...?"
"I'm sorry," he replied awkwardly, patting her on the back with a light, hesitant hand.
She stayed quiet for a moment, forehead leaning into his chest.
"You're a son of a bitch," she mumbled, releasing him – caustic words that drew a fond smile from him.
"Thank you," he told her as she stalked away. "For coming to find me."
Sivir turned to look at him, over her shoulder. There was a strange, raw expression on her face, shifting rapidly back into the guarded, wry countenance he was so familiar with. She grinned dangerously, in a way that struck him both true and false.
"Thanks for not dying on me."
.
.
.
She woke in a flash of light.
And so did he.
.
.
.
Next Chapter: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/fancreations/IudgQGiF-fanfiction-fracture-chapter-22