Darkness
"How could you act so foolish?"
Ajak looked at him disapproving. Her scolding tone was a pretty harsh contrast to how her hands stroked his face with gentle, skillful touches that slowly but surely allowed the swelling and the dull but aggressive pain, that had spread everywhere by now, to subside.
Normally it should have been quick and easily done, a simple healing like so many times before, but Makkari clearly had far more power than Ikaris had ever given her credit for, and she had put a lot of it into her punch.
Ajak had explained to him that a hit with the power of such speed would probably have cracked a human's skull and Ikaris had no problem believing her that. He'd seen the Deviant's shattered remains in the marketplace like everyone else and they tended to be more robust than a human.
Normally, the speedster used her time during fights to get bystanders to safety, but that obviously did not mean that she lacked the strength to fight. He had already realized that during the emergence on the beach.
"It wasn't my intention to provoke her." he tried lamely.
Ajak raised an eyebrow and looked up from a particularly red bruise on his jaw to his eyes with a glace that made it clear that she was tacking none of his shit. "Yet you did."
Ikaris had to fight himself not to roll his eyes, something telling him that doing so would only make the situation worse for him and after Makkari he preferred not to test it. Instead he let out a sigh.
"I don't want to hurt Druig, you know?"
Ajak's gaze remained unchanged, urging him to continue while she did her work, and Ikaris lightly rubbed his temple behind which a headache had been building up for hours.
"Why would I want to hurt him?" apart from the fact that he and the mind-controller didn't get along very well for most of the last millennia and he had tried to kill him before of course, but that was something completely different for him.
Back then, on the day of Emergence, in Ikaris' eyes, the meaning of his entire existence had been at stake. The most important thing for him had always been to fulfill Arishem's will and even after Ajak had revealed the true nature of their mission to him, that hadn't changed.
He had never been as close to the humans as the others, perhaps because he had known more than they, but also because he had never really been able to understand them, just as little as he had been able to understand his fellow Eternals who had come closer and closer to the humans over the centuries, who had enjoyed what they enjoyed and viewed humanity and earth less and less as a mission and instead as more and more as worthy of protection.
Druig in particular had done that, Ikaris had realized that in Tenochtitlan at the latest. On this day, his mind controlling brother had become uncontrollable for even Ajak and therefore a danger for their higher mission in Ikaris' eyes.
Druig had told him back then already that, in order to stop him he would have to kill him but on this day, Ikaris had not yet been able to bring himself to do it.
What had changed in the five hundred years between this confrontation and emergence? He really wondered that, and not for the first time, because no matter what Makkari and Thena seemed to think and no matter what he had said on that day, he had never really wanted to harm any of them.
Just when had he become able to look into his brother's blue eyes, blown wide with fear from the lack of time to put on a mask of fake indifference and bravery, and decide that he had to get rid of him?
"Why do you?" Ajak asked, her voice still so calm and controlled as if they were making small talk.
Had the question come from anyone else on their team he probably would have gone into a confrontation but Ajak was a different matter.
If there was one person who had always been able to see through him other than Druig, to understand him, other than Sersi, and who he was nearly as loyal to as Arishem, it was Ajak.
Killing her had by far been the worst thing he had ever done and, from today's perspective, he still couldn't explain what it was that had kicked him to do it. She had been their leader, the one who trusted him the most, and he knew he had always been something of their chosen deputy. She was like a mother, a voice of reason and a fountain of security.
And she had trusted him and counted on his understanding instead of his obsession with the mission, that had been her big mistake.
That same trust was what had become Gilgamesh's undoing, even though his death had been in no way planned.
"I dont." he answered after Ajak had finally finished healing his jaw so that speaking no longer caused a painful throbbing behind his teeth every time he as much as opened his mouth. "I don't want to have to kill him or anything, I just want to do what is logically right."
Ikaris would never admit it, but the betrayal in Druig's eyes had been almost as bad as the one in Ajak's and Sersi's eyes had been. He hadn't figured that the other man might have had even a shred of faith left in him after the fall of Tenochtitlan. Obviously that had been a mistake but whatever might had still been there sure as hell was definitely gone now.
Ikaris would like to be able to truthfully claim that he had worked on autopilot at that moment, that he had been a soldier like he had been build for or that the sheer desperation at the thought that everything could have been for nothing had turned his thinking off. That had certainly the case with Ajak, but Druig...
Ikaris had had enough sense of mind to target him, not to dwell too long in his battle with Thena or the others, but to go straight for the one he thought was the only one who could have stopped Tiamut's birth. It didn't sound like he had not known what he was doing if he was being honest with himself.
"Oh Ikaris" he looked up as Ajak removed her hands from his face. The pain from Makkari's punches was gone, now no more than a faded but still fresh memory, and he realized again how much force she must have hit him with, considering how long it had taken to heal the damage.
She placed a hand on his arm, comforting and warm and healing in a different way than the touch before had been.
"Sometimes the logical solution is not the right one. Our situation has changed drastically, as has our mission. If we want to continue on, then we have to change our ways as well."
"It endangers us." he argued. Could she not see what had happened? Wasn't this whole mess prove enough to her?
"The Deviant does. And it particularly endangers Druig." her eyes bore into his and he swallowed at the admonishing look in them. "He is not the source of the danger, Ikaris. He is what we must protect with all our might."
That was more or less what Sprite had thrown at him before she had twisted the words about humans in his mouth and stormed off. Admittedly, he had phrased that quite unfortunate. It was also the same as what Sersi and Kingo had explained to him, albeit in different ways, and basically he got it, he just couldn't bear not being able to do anything.
Ajak squeezed his arm, making him return her gaze. "It would certainly be the simplest method." she said. "Aftewr all, itwas my first instinct too. But if we are to fulfill our mission to protect humanity then we must also protect each other. It's not Druig's fault. He is a part of us as you are, I think you know that."
Ikaris could have said many things. Certainly he had a lot of things that came to mind in this moment, such as the fact that it was the humans themselves who were at war with each other each time a chance for conflict offered itself and who didn't seem to tire in finding new, increasingly cruel ways to kill each other, or that humans themselves were to blame for the Deviants being back because they relentlessly worked in destroying their own planet and, due to global warming, had freed the monsters from the eternal ice that had been their prison for ages.
He could have contradicted her that Druig hadn't done much to keep them together and instead was actually the reason they broke up fivehundred years ago.
But then he would have had to admit that maybe that was part of the reason for his aggression against the mind-controller.
Druig had driven them apart with his decision for the humans and while the others had looked for a new life, new passions and goals, or had even grown in the new situation, Ikaris had not been able to gain a foothold, the reasons for his being had simply been snatched away from him and to say that it had not left him bitter would have been an outright lie. His mission had come to an abrupt end and although he knew deep inside that it wasn't Druig's fault, it had started with his resistance in Tenochtitlan. With his betrayal on Arishen and what her mission had been, on all of them.
"Ikaris." Ajak urged him once more, squeezing his arm just a little harder. "You will not do anything against him."
He had lost the meaning of his life, he had lost Sersi through his own stupidity, and he had had a lot of time to think about who was to blame and what could have been.
And yet, he'd never felt the urge to harm Druig. Never until that day so he didn't contradict her and merely nodded as she looked into his eyes, clearly waiting for an answer.
"Of course, Ajak."
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The darkness had always been something that humans had feared through all of their history.
It was quite a justified fear because in the course of their development it had always been the darkness that had offered the best camouflage for the natural predators of the earth, the predators from whom they had not been allowed to protect them, as well as those that had come from the same creator as the Eternals themselves.
Whether it was the thicket of a ancient rain forest, the depths of an unexplored cave, or the shadows of the endless night, humans had an innate, instinctive fear of being in the dark, worse yet, being left alone in the dark.
For Druig it was different. The darkness offered far fewer dangers to an Eternal, far fewer mysteries and unknown predators, if anything he could actually say he had often enjoyed the darkness and shadows.
It wasn't that he was uncomfortable moving around in the sun, but standing in the light always meant a certain amount of attention that he could easily do without. Contrary to what some of the others once believed, or perhaps still did, humans were by no means simple-minded creatures. Sure, they didn't have nearly the knowledge of an Eternal, but they where creative and thoughtful and many of them had an intuition that seemed to tell them that he and his fellow Eternals were different from them. The he was different in particular.
He had never enjoyed being in the spotlight like Sprite, Ikaris or Kingo did. He had never come as close to humans as Makkari, Sersi or Phastos, and he had never been worshiped or idolized by them as much as Thena and Gilgamesh.
And Druig had been perfectly fine with that. He actually enjoyed to stand in the shadows, behind the others, observing and learning from the people around him, coming to understand them in completely new ways. He had never longed to be seen as a god and his way had offered the opportunity to see things that others might miss, or even just to watch Makkari being delighted by things that surrounded her. Seeing the smile on her lips when a person learned her language, the twinkle in her eyes when she gazed at an object that she wanted to add to her collection, those where his favorite observations.
Malkari was the one thing able to coax him out of his shell. Always full of wonders and excitement, always in the mood for a loving bickering, that were just a few of the countless things he loved so much about her.
Whenever his thoughts weighed too heavily or the feelings and fears of those around him threatened to overwhelm him, she was always there, a calming presence to focus on and sink into. A safe space that he could escape to whenever the emotions of his fellow Eternals, which influenced him particularly strongly when his walls were down, became too much for him to bear. Whenever the impressions of his abilities became too much, their weight so heavy that he felt as if his skull would burst, she was there, a wonderful, warm alternative to the darkness in which he found himself in more than one way.
But the darkness that was surrounding him now was awfully different from the one he was used to.
At first it had felt no different from sleep, but he quickly realized that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't wake up.
It felt as if the shadows were wrapping around him like manacles, snaking around his limbs, forcefully pulling him further and further into the depth, further and further away from the surface. Away from his family. Away from her.
His consciousness was wrapped in a dense fog that slowly robbed him of all his senses, made him blind and deaf and mute no matter how much he struggled against it.
But even worse was that he could feel something pulling on his insides, sometimes steadily, sometimes that used violent force. It sent a blinding white pain through his entire body, but especially through his head and he clutched it in a helpless attempt to ease the pain, his mouth wide open but no sound would escape his aching throat. That something he couldn't quite name was trying to swallow him whole and rip away his being and the pain got worse the harder he struggled against it.
The thought of giving up and just letting go was tempting in those moments.
It was terrifying. It was maddening. Druig would have screamed if he could have but whatever was tearing at his powers was rendering him incapable of even that.
He longed for Makkari to pull him out of these shadows, but he could not call out to her, reach out to her with his hands or thoughts, even though he felt her near. Or was it just imagination?
He couldn't feel her thoughts. It was like his gift was failing him. The thought of being o close to her and yet unable to reach out for her was torturous.
But he clung to the memory of her smile with desperate fear whenever another wave of pain crashed over him or the chains threatened to drag him deeper into this nothingness. At her sparkling brown eyes that lit up whenever there was an opportunity to get up to mischief, at warm arms that wrapped themselves around his waist, at gentle hands that stroked his hair or drew words on his back, a swift of air and the short lived smell of her whenever she raced by to fast for his eyes to catch more than a golden blur.
It was these thoughts that kept him afloat and made him brace himself against the chains of shadows again and again.
Makkari, he thought to remind himself why he was doing this, why he had to hold on no matter how bad it got.
For Makkari.
His beautiful beautiful Makkari