Archive of Our Own

Lomedy is new and shiny — in the figurative sense — so it’s only natural that the prisoners slowly but surely gravitate towards him the first morning after he’s brought in. No matter how irritating Wemmbu thinks it is that Lomedy is taking up time and attention that Wemmbu could be using to plan out a proper escape. 

The night before, when Deputy Ace had dragged him in and Loppezz had greeted him with a sort-of amused surprise Wemmbu hadn’t heard from her before, his interest had been briefly spiked. Even more so after Lomedy only gave half-answers that sounded bitterly resigned in response to his question on why he was here in the first place. 

Bed pressed against the wall he shared with Lomedy’s cell, Wemmbu spent a good while silent and listening, in case he would hear anything to simultaneously cure his boredom and sate his curiosity. He got nothing but heavy breathing and restless turning, like Lomedy couldn’t quite get to sleep. Not that Wemmbu can fault him for that — he’s sure a career as a farmer wouldn’t necessarily result in a lot of time spent in prison. 

As much as it irritates him that Lomedy is a new distraction from plans far more important, he can't help but peer over at him in the corner of the meal hall, half-hunched over a near-empty plate. 

Baablu and Fantst hover near his shoulders like twin devils, Lomedy curling into himself further to ignore them both, wings twitching from where they were folded uncomfortably against his back. He looks like a harvestmouse trying to hide from the world inside a tulip, quiet and still while curled between pink petals. 

He shouldn’t get involved. Wemmbu’s stressed enough trying to wrack his mind for any way to deal with his fellow prisoners in a way that’ll convince them to try and escape with him. There’s no reason to make his life any harder by stepping in between the trio and inviting more ire into his life. 

A few moments later he's sitting across Lomedy, staring down Baablu and Fantst with a mild smile. 

“Hey guys,” Wemmbu greets, friendly as ever. Shows all his teeth as his hand tightens around the plastic knife he’s been sawing at his raw carrot with for the past ten minutes with little success. 

Fantst, smarter of the two, takes one look at the bags that must be darkening Wemmbu’s eyes and the twitch of his fingers around his utensil before he grabs Baablu by the arm and drags him away. Not exactly what Wemmbu meant to happen, but he wouldn’t be rushing to call them back. 

Lomedy doesn’t look any less hunted. This close, Wemmbu gives him a once over for the first time, and is surprised to find him looking much worse for wear than he expected. 

His skin is pale, not quite because of a lack of sun but rather pointing to illness, aside from the skin around his wrists that are rubbed raw — red and painful, skin peeling back in odd places. Still, he doesn’t seem very sick on the surface, if Wemmbu doesn’t factor the bruises under his eyes as borne from anything besides a lack of sleep, and the way Lomedy shakes despite the hot weather. Exhaustion weighs his shoulders down and makes his stress all the more apparent. 

When Lomedy refuses to meet his eyes, Wemmbu’s gaze then naturally goes over his head to his torn wings that seemed incapable of stretching out, judging from the winces that flash over Lomedy’s face when he attempts. 

Wemmbu decides to try a conversation regardless. Call it healthy curiosity. 

“So, you’re Flame’s friend?” Wemmbu asks. 

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Lomedy says, after a few moments of silence where he seems to realize that ignoring Wemmbu isn’t going to get him to leave. 

“Wow, that’s just — so rude, for no reason.” 

“For no reason,” Lomedy repeats, as if tasting the words on his tongue and finding them bitterly amusing, “Right, yeah.”

It’s odd. A bit too familiar, for someone Wemmbu doesn’t remember meeting or speaking to once in the years he’s spent roaming this place. “Sorry, have we met each other before?” 

“No,” Lomedy says, not elaborating. 

There’s some truthfulness to it, but he’s clearly still hiding something — Wemmbu’s never been the best at picking up on lies, something he’s reminded of every moment he spends in Zam’s orbit, someone he thought he would never have to think about ever again. But since that first fumble, losing everything because he had unfounded faith in someone, he’s tried to be more skeptical. 

And he knows he’s not getting the full truth from Lomedy. 

Still, Wemmbu knows there’s little he can say to pry an answer out of him now. And nothing he could do at the moment that won’t get him thrown in solitary. 

He has to tamp down a grimace at the thought, reminded of what would come with his week-long stay — remembers Spoke’s armour glinting with red in the dark of his cell, the slightly hard edge to his amused tone, the way he looked at Wemmbu through the bars of his cell and offered him a deal that made something in the pit of Wemmbu’s stomach sour. Unsettling white eyes staring right through him. 

“And you still have a problem with me?” Wemmbu says, instead of thinking any longer on that. Ignores the goosebumps that rise on his arms, thankfully hidden under his jumpsuit. 

“Seems like everyone does,” Lomedy says, half-under his breath. 

“That’s… not entirely untrue,” Wemmbu concedes. He jabs his plastic knife into his carrot and takes a bite, crunching through orange and chewing to fill the space between Lomedy’s short answers and his pestering. Through it all, Lomedy looks halfway between irritated, blank, and slightly — pained? 

A minute later and he’s the one who breaks the unsteady silence between them. 

“What do we usually have to do? Like. What does a day here look like?” He asks, slowly and haltingly, like it’s a herculean task to speak to Wemmbu of his own volition. 

“Well,” Wemmbu starts, wiping his mouth with the arm of his jumpsuit, “Usually, we have breakfast before we’re put to work. Then lunch, then work or some supervised recreation, then dinner, then in our cells for the rest of the night. Sometimes it’ll be more work after dinner, though. Which sucks. Way too hard on the muscles.” 

Lomedy grimaces in reply. Wemmbu decides to push his luck. 

“Hey, since I answered a question of yours, how about you answer one of mine? Just so we’re even,” Wemmbu says. Hand cupping his chin where his elbow is propped up on the table. Lomedy seems to sink even further into himself, even as his eyes darken and his jaw ticks. “I’m not asking for a lot, really. Just want to know why you’re here in the first place.” 

“It doesn’t matter,” Lomedy snaps. 

“Sounds like it does,” Wemmbu says, voice a little lilting, more than a bit amused. Poking at someone’s temper is a past-time of his that he’s missed, a relic of his time spent roaming the server with Egg at his side. 

“Listen, man, just —” 

Lomedy cuts himself off with a sharp breath, just as he starts to sit up and lean forward, recoiling as his arm wraps around himself tightly. He blinks hard, once, twice, breathing slightly shuddering before he exhales slowly. Then, after briefly meeting Wemmbu’s eyes, he doesn’t say another word. 

“What was that?” Wemmbu asks, curiosity thoroughly spiked. A thin thread of concern slips into the tangle of emotions that lives in his chest, one that he finds easy to discard at the moment. He’s more interested in picking apart the puzzle in front of him than he’s necessarily worried for Lomedy’s well-being. He hardly knows the man, after all. 

Frustratingly, Lomedy is stubbornly silent. 

“You get hurt?” Wemmbu continues to ask anyway. “The guards do something to you? Did you put up a fight when they were arresting you or something?” 

“Or something,” Lomedy grinds out between clenched teeth. There’s a sharp edge to his words that wasn’t there before. Annoyance — or pain?

Before he can needle any further, he hears the sound of the heavy stone doors sliding open and familiar footsteps. Wemmbu can’t help the grimace that twists his shit-eating grin into a frown, focusing on biting through the rest of his carrot. 

Loppezz speaks up before he can finish. Tough luck. 

“Okay, all of you, put your trays away. I’ve got a job for you,” she says, as if she hasn’t had a job for them the past few days. 

He spares a glance at Lomedy while chewing. Finds his plate mostly full — if half a loaf of stale bread can count as ‘full.’ In here, that much is a feast compared to the usual meagre pickings. Wemmbu rolls a few things over in his head quickly; Lomedy’s sickly pale skin, the way he curls an arm over his abdomen after moving too abruptly, the seeming lack of hunger, and the limp he, rather terribly, is hiding. He feels the slight concern from earlier root itself further in the pit of his stomach. 

Then Loppezz is behind him, leaning over his shoulder to say, “Hurry up, Wemmbu,” and he’s distracted again. 

Anger at the situation stirs in his chest — at the fact that Loppezz is ordering him around while wearing his armour that he had given her so many months ago. His nails bite into his palms as he gets up with gritted teeth. Humiliation overruns any worry he could spare for anyone else. 

Despite it all, he doesn’t miss the way the emotion in Loppezz’s voice — usually clear as day, her irritation louder than anything else Wemmbu thinks he’s ever heard in his life — turns somewhat indiscernible for a moment, when Wemmbu is already walking away from the table to the doors.

He’s already pretty far by the time she speaks, but he still hears her say, “Come on, Lomedy. No excuses for lagging behind.” 

It’s odd enough that Wemmbu makes note of it. Something he’ll come back to later. For now, he dreads the ache of working with arms weighed down by mining fatigue and tries to ignore Zam standing by his side where they crowd by the door to the cafeteria. 

By the way her gaze burns into the side of his head, Wemmbu can put together that she isn’t trying to do the same. It makes his skin crawl. Reminds Wemmbu of times that have long-since passed; when his trust was something he’d put in anyone, when he hadn’t been burned and safety was never a commitment he had to work towards. All things Zam took from him without blinking, just to disappear like she never had Wemmbu’s life and being in the palm of her hand before twisting it into something almost unrecognizable.

He grits his teeth. Thinks back on Spoke’s offer — escape with the caveat that he’ll be in his debt. Wemmbu feels a headache poke at his temples and lingers on the idea of accepting the deal for longer than he would in any other moment. 

Then, Loppezz’s screeching cuts through his thoughts and they’re shuffling along the way they have the past few weeks. Lomedy is a quiet addition to the back of their group. 

If Wemmbu didn’t know any better, he could say nothing has changed at all. 

Every day of work is monotonous no matter the task — there’s little difference in Wemmbu’s eyes between mining with a wooden pickaxe while the sun beats down on him and swinging at trees in a cramped room with a blunt wooden axe that starts cracking the moment he puts it to use. 

Today is another shift spent in the ravine. A slice of sky cut into what feels like an overarching cave, littered with wood bridges and guards who are more disinterested than not. Every aspect of this prison feels as though it’s meant to break its occupants’ spirits, one way or another — a slight chance at sun just for it to come with aching muscles and exertion that’s made worse by mining fatigue. The illusion of a chance at freedom that is broken by Lawmen and the shiny swords that hang by their hips.

Wemmbu’s mind races, uncaring of all these things — plans of escape, of ways to free himself and his cellmates of the Curse of Binding shackles that would keep them from putting on real armour, marking them as prisoners. 

He’s been rolling an idea over in the back of his head for a few days now — chipping away at the shackles till they were near-broken but not quite recognizable as such — so that it only took a few spirited slams of them against stone before they could start to make their escape. 

Wemmbu thought he had the greatest chance to put that half-baked plan into action in the ravine; it’s swarming with guards, both above and within the ravine itself, but there are enough prisoners that Wemmbu knows that he can find a minute or two — all he really needs — to begin the process of breaking off their shackles. 

For the first few hours, though, he needs to play his part; Wemmbu accepts his wooden pickaxe from Loppezz and moves on silently to start chipping away at the ravine’s walls. 

Baablu, Fantst, and Zam don’t deviate from their usual routine of mining and irritating anyone within a two meter radius of them. There are multiple times where a slow-pounding headache spikes at his temples when Baablu and Fantst get too rowdy, arguments growing louder. 

The pair of them have been — not exactly close, but it wouldn't be a stretch to say that of all the prisoners cooped up here, they're certainly the closest. 

Wemmbu can see cracks forming as the days go on, as they spend more and more time stuck in this monotonous schedule, knowing that Wemmvu is clearly up to something but still too slow for them to know if they'll be stuck here for another week or ten more years. Stress wears down on them until they're taking it out on each other just because Zam starts refusing to rise to their bait, no matter how much he can see her grinding her teeth to stay silent, and because nothing they say to Wemmbu really sticks. 

Unfortunately for Lomedy, he’s just the target for Baablu and Fantst’s poking and prodding — someone to gang up against, if for no reason than to hold onto that camaraderie. 

“Dude, how much longer are you going to keep slacking?” Baablu prods at Lomedy, “Don't you know we have to be mining gold?” 

It's the most stupidest of arguments — for one, because gold doesn't naturally spawn on this level, secondly, they were mining with wooden pickaxes, and thirdly, because it was evidently only to keep them occupied with work than allow them free time between themselves — and Lomedy knows it.

And the most glaring issue of them all is the fact that Lomedy is actively mining while Baablu is bothering him. 

“How much have you mined?” he asks, careful curiosity in his voice whilst not even looking at Baablu. 

“Ten.”

“I have twelve,” Lomedy informs him, very matter-of-factly. 

“Genuinely, what?” Baablu's disbelief is palpable in the air, “Prove it.” 

“You first,” Lomedy says without looking up. He swings his wooden pickaxe one more time, hard, nearly shattering it on the stone, splinters crackling and almost hitting Baablu. He looks at him then, face mostly blank. “You have a pick I can borrow?” 

 “Oh, so you're a funny guy,” Baablu says, annoyance barely kept out of his voice.

Lomedy shrugs, “It's easy when the jokes are bright pink and right in front of me.” 

Wemmbu whips his head back around quickly, hoping to god Baablu didn't catch the laugh that almost sprung out his mouth or he'd never hear the end of it. He could not listen to him complaining about the End fight and his ‘disrespect’ or whatever issue he’d make up just for the sake of slandering Wemmbu.

Baablu, clearly irked by Lomedy's sarcastic nature, cranes his neck around to look for Fantst, who in that time had moved away to continue pestering Zam, and spotted him further down the ravine. Without another word, he throws over his own pickaxe before stalking off towards Fantst, leaving Lomedy alone to mine.

As amusing as Wemmbu finds it, he’s slightly irritated — he was banking on convincing Baablu to help him start chipping away at his Curse of Binding shackles, the man usually too volatile to give him the time of day. And in the state he is now, Wemmbu is sure that attempting to lead Baablu away now would just escalate into a fist-fight. 

Lomedy, Wemmbu thinks whilst watching the farmer return to the bleak job of mining, is an unexpected wrench in his plans. 

Even the day-to-day schedule he was relying on to put his plan to escape into motion is altered because of Lomedy; something that Wemmbu is only made aware of when he notices the strange attention a pair of guards pay him over the other prisoners a while later, taking an interest in him that he hasn’t seen before. 

It’s inconvenient. Wemmbu is usually relying on the two of them hanging back against the rocky face of the wall, eyes distant while they trade conversation in low tones. The active attention they pay Lomedy is uncharacteristic. 

“Hey, Lomedy,” he hears one of them say. Wemmbu keeps an eye on the trio from the periphery of his vision, watching Lomedy refuse to acknowledge them.

“Should you really be ignoring Lawmen as a prisoner?” The other asks, tone just the slightest bit amused. 

“...Sorry,” Lomedy says, very quietly. Far less combative than he was with Wemmbu only earlier that morning, or even with Baablu a while ago — it’s another to the list of odd things about him. None of the other prisoners, Wemmbu included, shy away from the opportunity to irritate Loppezz or the other guards, making their dissatisfaction at the situation known. 

Maybe Wemmbu could’ve dismissed it as Lomedy being naturally more subdued, but he had been arguing with Wemmbu, had been annoyed at Baablu and Fantst, and the pair of guards that he was so sullen in front of were speaking to him less like they knew of him and more as if they knew him. 

“You tired?” One of them asks — the taller of the two with sandy hair, who seems to find a lot more humour in the situation than Wemmbu thinks is warranted. “Want a break?” 

And for some reason, Wemmbu sees Lomedy flinch out of the corner of his eye. Interest piqued, he dedicates more of his attention to — whatever is going on with him. Everything to do with Lomedy has been weird since he got here this morning. 

“They asked a question,” the shorter of the pair prods, swinging his foot lazily at Lomedy, a half-hearted kick that he leans away from like the farmer’s ducking blows in combat. 

“No,” Lomedy grits out, Wemmbu watching his knuckles whiten around his wooden pickaxe. 

“No, what?” 

“No, I don’t need a break,” He says, like the words are being dragged out of him. The two guards who decided that he was worth their attention don’t say much about the tone — the taller one just snorts in amusement. 

“You won’t have to beg for one this time,” they say, “You’re in chains wearing a jumpsuit. Can’t get more guilty than that.”

Which — what? 

Wemmbu looks over, directly at the trio — finds that Zam is staring at them with the same confusion. Baablu and Fantst bicker with each other further away, almost out of earshot, so the only thing that Wemmbu can hear is the way the shorter guard laughs. Sees how Lomedy nearly flinches from the sound. 

“Hope they aren’t wasting too many resources on you,” the shorter one says as the pair start to drift away, apparently done with bothering him. The tall one shoulder checks Lomedy as he walks by — Wemmbu hears him hiss in pain, almost missing the guard’s parting words. 

“You seem to be fine with… the lesser of finer things, to put it lightly,” and they both begin to laugh, pausing to pat Lomedy’s back like he was in on the joke before moving on. Lomedy stays stiff, head bowed. Wemmbu can see his jaw tick, fist clenched tight around his wooden pick. 

When the pair move away, further down the ravine where Baablu and Fantst are about to escalate to blows, Wemmbu naturally makes his way to Lomedy’s side. 

“What was that about?” He asks, blunt as always. 

“Nothing,” Lomedy says, quick and snappish, his frozen, quiet demeanour from earlier suddenly gone. He turns away, towards the other end of the ravine, away from the two guards. Wemmbu still catches a glimpse of his face before he turns entirely — reddened in embarrassment, clear as day in his voice when Wemmbu puts the pieces together. 

“What were they talking about?” He prods anyway, following after Lomedy.  

“I don’t want to talk about it. It doesn’t matter.” 

“You said the same thing this morning and you’ve been wrong both times now,” Wemmbu points out, a neutral smile on his face as he notes the discrepancy. 

It’s not that he finds anything here generally amusing, but there’s just something funny about it to Wemmbu — about Lomedy, landing here a day prior and already stirring up so much trouble after days of monotony that Wemmbu was already getting bored of. He’s a curious case, one that Wemmbu wants to pick apart for lack of anything better to do. 

Most days, out roaming in the world with Egg by his side, he could keep himself reasonably occupied by travelling and chattering about anything inane that came to mind. When Egg was trapped in the End, the next reasonable step was to find something more to do, bored out of his mind with no friend by his side and nothing but ambushes to keep his days occupied. 

The Invisible Knight was that for a while — and here, without even realizing, Wemmbu’s latching onto the strange case that Lomedy presents as another stand-in for Egg. 

“Come on,” Wemmbu needles, when he doesn’t say anything else, “You can’t seriously expect me to just… ignore all of that. Or not ask about it.” 

“I think that’s perfectly fair for me to think,” Lomedy says, sounding more agitated as Wemmbu follows after him, “I’m not asking you how you ended up in prison, am I? Or — or how your stupid horn got chipped, or why Lettuce seems to have it out for you specifically.” 

“Funny you should say,” Wemmbu says, patting Lomedy on the shoulder once, “It’s actually your friend Flame’s fault I’m in here in the first place! Isn’t that a fun coincidence?” 

Lomedy snorts. “That makes two of us.”

“You don’t say,” Wemmbu says, far more interested in this conversation than beforehand — it’s more than the immediate denial from this morning, a little surprised to find out that Lomedy blamed Flame as well. He was expecting the Law to point fingers, but not so much the guy’s actual friend.

“Let's not get into it.” 

Shrugging, turning to the ravine wall and swinging half-heartedly at the wall, Lomedy attempts to end the conversation. Hilarious, really. Wemmbu is persistent when he’s bored. 

“But what if I want to?” He drawls, stopping right next to Lomedy to mine right by his side, shoulder to shoulder.

“I don't really care about what you want?” Lomedy’s voice is even and unwavering, apparently very steadfast in his deflecting of Wemmbu. He can see the way Lomedy’s knuckles whiten around his grip on his pickaxe, swinging just a bit harder than necessary. 

“You know, at some point it has to get boring just turning me down over and over again,” he says, just for the sake of saying something. 

“Not particularly.”

“You’re no fun,” Wemmbu complains, only half-serious. 

Lomedy certainly isn’t outright entertaining, not the way Baablu and Fantst seem to be, but he’s still a curiosity that Wemmbu wants to pick apart, piece by piece. Him being combative would probably be more fun in the future, Wemmbu is realizing. No need to spoil a mystery for himself by having the answers told to him the moment he asks. 

“Nobody told you to stand here,” Lomedy says pointedly, “Actually, I'm asking you to go to your friends and leave me alone.”

“You think those are my friends?” He’s almost offended. Horrified, maybe. 

“They very clearly are, and if you're trying to hide it, you're doing a pretty shit job.”  

“Dude — you — do you not hear anything that happens on this server? Like at all?” He’s tripping over his words in his disbelief. Wemmbu just truly can’t imagine the concept of anyone thinking he and Baablu were genuinely friends.  

“Zam gave you her share of bread the other day,” Lomedy shrugs, “And you and Fantst joke plenty. I guess you and Baablu can be debated but I'm sure if I asked he'd say you guys were.”

And the mention of Zam, the implication that Lomedy thought that they were friends — like she hadn’t towered over him once upon a time, blows raining down upon Wemmbu’s skin, crooning questions of how much does this hurt, while she laughed. The unnatural glowing of a totem stitching together cuts and erasing bruises from his skin like nothing happened at all. 

He’s realizing now, head spinning slightly, that nothing that she ever did ever stuck. No scarring at all. Like Wemmbu walked away from her empire unaffected. 

Then he remembers where he is — sees the way Lomedy is looking at him out of the corner of his eye even as he continues to mine away, and shoves those thoughts away violently. 

“Last time we saw each other Baablu was trying to kill me,” Wemmbu deadpans. 

“Friends on here tend to do that, I’ve noticed,” Lomedy shrugs after a pause. The energy between them has shifted slightly, even if Wemmbu doesn’t know what it means. He pushes onwards anyway. 

“But come on. Baablu of all people?” He complains. 

“You don’t seem all that different to me,” Lomedy says innocently. 

Wemmbu sighs frustratedly, running a hand through his tangled hair, “Okay, whatever, bro. At least explain what all that —” he gestures vaguely to the guards from before, “— was about now.” 

“Nothing that you need to know about or anything you’ll convince me to talk about.” 

There’s a grit to the words, like Lomedy’s grinding them out through clenched teeth, clearly getting frustrated the more that Wemmbu brings them up. It’s a weakness that Wemmbu doesn’t hesitate to jump on — not with the memory of explosions echoing in his ears and Zam’s loud and confident voice floating in his head. Before she was knocked down so thoroughly. 

“Embarassed that your friends are poking fun at your expense?” Wemmbu pushes. Some sort of wild satisfaction rolls through his chest when he sees Lomedy’s shoulders stiffen at the word friends.

“They aren’t my friends,” Lomedy says, low and indiscernible. 

“Oh, but you seem so similar,” Wemmbu mocks, repeating Lomedy’s own words back to him. 

Lomedy's face hardens in a way Wemmbu hadn't seen before, and when he speaks again, his tone is low and cautious — like a warning.

“Come back and say that to me when Baablu forces you to —” he cuts himself abruptly, turning away from Wemmbu to take in a shaky breath, some attempt of trying to regain control in the action.  

“Forces me to what?” Wemmbu asks, very interested. Lomedy doesn’t answer, just turning away — all his previous fire seemingly extinguished, drained of all life in a way that makes Wemmbu all the more curious. 

After that, no matter how much Wemmbu needles Lomedy, he doesn’t say another word. 

Whatever. It’s not like Wemmbu’s going to be hurting for opportunities to bother him again. 

Bolt. Click. Shut. 

Loath he was to admit it, the cell walls have become familiar to Wemmbu — a constant in the routine that was beginning to feel like habit. 

Bolt. Click. Shut. The others cells follow suit, the rest more hardened in their routine from the months upon months that Wemmbu was not here for, and he pretends he doesn’t see Zam jump in surprise every time she hears a voice through the walls as opposed to her lengthy periods in solitary.

The cells themselves are something Wemmbu would class as a violation of ethics, though he doubts there’s anybody to complain to about the two blankets that barely reached his feet, or the mold festering in the corner that he stays well clear of, alongside the murky sink — fresh water, still — that were a coin-flip on if it’d work or not. Each wall is connected all the way to the ground, Wemmbu’s room unfortunately in the very corner, the iron door thick and heavy next to the line of iron bars barely a fist width’s apart. The only semblance of ventilation comes from a gap the width of two fingers at the base of the stone walls, between his cell and the next.

Though, the singular, leaf-sized grate that pokes out from halfway under the wall suggests that it’s less a show of kindness and more of an attempt to save money on plumbing. Gross, but what does Wemmbu care — he’s going to be out of here very soon, if all goes well. 

It’s right before lights out, when they have at least half an hour where they’re free to be alone without the guards, that Lettuce decides to pay them a visit. 

His footsteps are clear and echo against the stone walls, weight behind them and if Wemmbu listens closely, he can hear the sound of metal upon metal from the assortment of buckles on his boots that stops right before reaching Wemmbu’s cell.

“Lomedy,” he says in his soft-spoken tone to get the farmer’s attention, “Over here, please.” 

There’s a small grunt that Wemmbu hears on the other side of the wall to where he’s sitting, before further noises of shuffling — Lomedy getting up, Wemmbu assumes, before a small step, a pebble flinging to the other side of the room in what he thinks was Lomedy’s attempt of moving after his first long day here. 

It fails. Wemmbu doesn’t need to be able to see him to know he collapsed straight back on the bed, a hiss of pain before Wemmbu catches the sound of wings scraping against stone.

There’s a few beats of silence, one that nobody dares break before Lomedy finally replies, in a halting voice, “I — can’t.” 

“Ah,” Lettuce says, as if just remembering Lomedy’s predicament, “I forgot about your… rough trip back. Hard time walking?”

If Wemmbu were a more naive person, he likely would’ve fallen for the concern that bordered dangerously close to genuine.

“You could say that,” Lomedy says evenly, glaringly obvious to anyone listening in that he would rather be doing anything else in this moment than be talking with Lettuce.

Lettuce seems unperturbed by this and snaps his fingers at a nearby guard, “No matter, I’ll just come to you.” 

Click. Bolt. Swing. Lomedy’s cell door opens, and Wemmbu thinks he’s not the only one with a prickling uncomfortableness at the thought of Lettuce, Deputy, or really any Law personnel actually in his cell, walking in there like it’s not the only place they have to themselves without their watchful eyes.

Despite himself, Wemmbu sits right against the wall, ear meeting stone — curiosity a fickle thing for him to fight against. 

Lettuce takes two steps into Lomedy’s cell before stopping. He sniffs, and Wemmbu finds himself mimicking the way his face is likely scrunched up in disgust. 

“You don’t need to,” Lomedy says tiredly, “You’ll get your shoes dirty.” 

Lettuce hums, “Perhaps we should hose you down — quite a lot of blood in here for someone of your stature, no?”   

“I did say you didn’t need to come in.” 

Lettuce ignores that, continuing to walk closer to where Lomedy is, his shadow falling across and into Wemmbu’s cell, a towering figure of authority over an flightless avian.

“As much as I would love to make idle talk,” he says in a tone that suggests the complete opposite, “I’m afraid I’m here for a reason.” 

“Something quick?” Lomedy asks, hopefully.

A pause. Then, with a smile in Lettuce’s voice, “Well that’s all up to you.” There’s more sounds of shuffling, a blanket being tugged and Lettuce’s sigh is audible, the same way his shoes splashing violently was, blood splattering onto Wemmbu’s jumpsuit through the gap at the base of the wall from the force. A moment later and he's sitting on the edge of Lomedy’s bed.               

“Where’s Flamefrags, Lomedy?” 

“What?” Lomedy’s voice is the picture of confusion, though there was a hint of another emotion under the layers.

Lettuce clicks his tongue, impatience becoming visible, “Flamefrags. You know where he is.”  

“No, I don’t,” the incredulity bouncing off the walls, “Your people watched him run.” 

“And you expect me to think you didn’t have a plan — that you weren’t helping him escape? Or — what, did he actually leave you behind? Genuinely?” 

There’s a sharp intake of a breath from Lomedy, like Lettuce had punched him in the stomach despite him not having raised a hand. Nail on the head, it seemed.

“Oh, I see,” Lettuce stresses the last word, something like delight in it, shoved straight into Lomedy’s face, “He left you.”

“That’s not—” 

“Oh, but it is,” he insists, putting together pieces and finding them to fit all too well, “From what I heard, he didn’t even look back, either.” 

“Because he was being chased,” Lomedy argues, and Wemmbu thinks to himself, remembering Flame’s retreating back from the hole that Lettuce would find him in only moments after, that it sounds exactly like something Flame would do.

“Was he being chased or did he run, which is it?” And when Lomedy doesn’t reply, Lettuce doesn’t seem to care.

“Well, this is disappointing,” Lettuce continues, not sounding very bothered at all. “The only thing I’ve found out is that you’re far more useless than I thought you already were.” 

Lomedy’s voice is small when he tries to refute it.“I’m not,” he says, and the shadows on Wemmbu’s wall morph into a clean silhouette of Lomedy’s side profile, looking straight into the darkness where Wemmbu assumed Lettuce was sitting.

Lettuce hums, “You’re not?” Then, before Lomedy can respond, “Then how about this — get in contact with your friend, find out where he is, and consider yourself pardoned.” 

The unfairness of it all is staggering. If Flame had really left Lomedy to Law, had really just run off to save his own skin, then there was no chance that Lomedy would be able to get a message to him, let alone be allowed to send a message out of prison to begin with. It’s an impossible request, and everyone in the room knows it.

The shadows on the wall twist into a noose. Wemmbu blinks, and it’s gone.

“If you can’t,” Lettuce continues on when Lomedy doesn’t respond, “Then I suppose we should talk about your execution.” 

His what, Wemmbu almost says aloud from shock, eyes widening slightly. 

Any possible chance of pretending he misheard is shot out of the window when he hears Baablu’s faint gasp echo over to him from the opposite end of the cells — followed by Fantst’s not-very-quiet, “No way,” and Zam’s shushing of the both of them. 

Lomedy doesn’t seem to be surprised, just tired when he speaks again. “I’ve done nothing wrong.” 

“Yet you’ve agreed to take responsibility for his actions,” Lettuce says, a yawn at the edge of his voice, and his next sentence is muffled as he talks through it, “And we have your admission of guilt — don’t flinch at that, Lomedy.”

“...Sorry.” 

It reminds Wemmbu, for an uncomfortable moment, of himself — the deference he showed Zam, once upon a time, when he was under her thumb even after his empire was blown to pieces. And again, when Egg’s voice got hard and unfamiliar, distant in ways that Wemmbu didn’t think he could be, after all they had gone through. 

Old demons crawling up his stomach to squeeze around his heart. Wemmbu breathes and pretends he can keep distance from this — from what was meant to be a passing mystery to keep his boredom occupied. 

He’s practiced in pushing things down. Does it again now, turning his attention back to Lomedy and Lettuce’s conversation. 

Lomedy’s words sound forced out, like they were forced out from behind gritted teeth, “Are we done?” 

“Hm?” Lettuce says, head snapping up like he hadn’t been paying attention before Lomedy’s words caught up to his brain, “Oh, right. Sure, yeah, we can wrap up here — any requests before I leave —? though no promises I’ll be able to fulfill them.” 

A beat. Then — “My leg,” Lomedy says, words stilted — as if weighing his options, between exposing any weakness where the rest of the prisoners were clearly listening in and asking for help.  

Must be real bad, Wemmbu thinks, if he’s saying anything after all the denial before. 

Lettuce clicks his tongue, “Ah, no point in looking at that, really. Give it a week, it won’t hurt for much longer.” It’s the cruelest thing Wemmbu’s heard in a long time, and it feels worse with Lettuce’s gentle voice, saying it like it was a comfort, promising more than death on Lomedy’s doorstep.

“You know,” Lettuce says, as he stands by the door to Lomedy’s cell, visible to Wemmbu, “I’m noticing you have a problem with me — that’s not really an issue, though. I can send Deputy Ace along next time, if you’d prefer a more familiar face.” 

From what Wemmbu knows of the pair, it sounds like an uncharacteristic kindness. That thought fades when no immediate reply comes. 

There is a long pause, where Lettuce looks back at Lomedy before a smile creeps up his face, into a grin and then a giggle before, “Are you crying, Lomedy?” 

“No,” Lomedy says forcefully, but his voice is thick, “There’s just — just too much dust in these shitty cells of yours.” 

“Mhm, nothing to do with how you’re holding your leg, is it?” 

“Can’t help it if it’s still bleeding.” 

Still? Wemmbu thinks, It’s been over a day now though?

Through the bars of his door, he can see Lettuce wave his hand leisurely, the iron door slamming shut. Wemmbu watches Baablu hit his head against the wall when he jumps from the sudden sound but doesn’t particularly have it in him to laugh. He feels vaguely sick. 

“It’s slowed, right?” Lettuce asks whilst motioning to the guards to lock up the door again — Click. Bolt. Shut — and Wemmbu assumes Lomedy nods in response because Lettuce claps his hands together, a decided finality in that action, “Then you should be fine.” 

There isn't much more argument about. Lomedy doesn't say another word and Lettuce spares Wemmbu a quick glance, before turning around, muttering something about new shoes, and walking out.

The lights shut shortly after, signalling that it's time for bed. 

Wemmbu stares at his dark ceiling for a long, long time.

The next day, when Loppezz delivers him and the rest of the prisoners to their ‘enrichment room,’ Wemmbu’s eyes are on Lomedy before anyone else. 

It's not something he consciously chooses to do — honestly, Wemmbu probably only stares because the last he heard of Lomedy, voice weak and shaky through a stone wall, was right before Lettuce told him in no uncertain terms that Lomedy was going to be executed in place of Flame if he didn't hurry back. After that, there was nothing but silence and harsh breaths that Wemmbu drifted off listening to. 

Even now, thinking about what Lettuce says makes righteous anger curl in his stomach. Nevermind the fact that there is no way for Lomedy to contact Flame, and that Lettuce knows this — as if all he wanted to do was to make sure Lomedy could find no moment to try and rest and recover, knowing he would be executed soon. 

That and the fact that Wemmbu knows what days like these entail — and that Lomedy has looked like a sneeze could knock him over for the past day is not conducive to their usual activities — has him glancing the man over. 

Lomedy is in no condition to fight — even now, he’s walking slowly, dragging his feet, one arm wrapped around his middle protectively while he tries not to look as awful as he probably feels and fails miserably. Wemmbu and everyone else in this prison earned their stay here by virtue of actually terrorizing the people on this server and can sniff out blood in the water like nothing else. Everyone knows that Lomedy is a dead man walking. Wemmbu just might be the only one who can put a definitive timeline on his expiry. 

At least he won’t die right this minute, Wemmbu thinks, mind already drifting from Lomedy. The Sergeant hasn’t made any of them fight without a totem yet — something about wanting to keep the prisoners for easy labour and probably some twisted form of entertainment. Nothing here is going to kill Lomedy, so it’s easy for Wemmbu’s thoughts to drift as his eyes wander before landing on Zam. 

Then suddenly, like a lightning strike, he’s hit with a memory so distant he almost forgot it entirely — from when he was left with a crater for a kingdom and Egg was the only person he realized he could rely on. 

Infection curdling in his leg after he stood too close to an explosion that rainy night that Zam revealed the worst of her betrayal to Wemmbu. Sickness stubbornly sticking to Wemmbu when he didn’t have any health potions or golden apples to heal with, still coursing through him when he made his way over to Zam after getting summoned. 

Getting beaten until his totem popped, only to go home and collapse a few hours later when the infection raging under his skin didn’t fade with the injuries — all the totem did was seal his wound closed without touching the infection, leaving rot to fester and nearly kill him anyway. 

Egg’s later research, borne from a need to soothe his own poorly-hidden panic, eventually revealed that more often than not, totems only speed up infection, leading to quickly-escalating sickness that turns deadly before nightfall. Something Wemmbu was never aware of before, all because of some incompatibility between the gold-emerald magic of totems and immune systems. 

All this leads Wemmbu to one blaring realization: if Lomedy gets his totem popped at all today, he’ll be dead before next morning. 

“You each will get — one carrot! To heal!” Sergeant says, loud and commanding, yanking Wemmbu from his errant thoughts. When he startles back to himself, Zam is staring back at him, something unreadable in her eyes. 

Wemmbu tears his gaze away. He can’t start to try and untangle the mess trying to claw at him from the inside-out. He finds Lomedy at the back of the small crowd waiting for golden carrots from Sergeant, clearly trying to keep from drawing attention to himself, even if he doesn’t know what’s going on. 

“Waddle!” Sergeant yells, “You will be fighting —” 

“Can I fight Lomedy?” Wemmbu interrupts loudly, before he can finish. 

The Sergeant fixes him with a look through tinted sunglasses that is entirely indiscernible. His mood swings between reasonable and irrational so often that he hardly knows what to expect from him. But Wemmbu can’t let anyone else fight Lomedy, not when that essentially means dooming him to death the moment he gets assigned anyone but him. 

“I just want to get my hits in before anyone else. That’s Flame’s friend, you know. He’s been trying to kill me for the past year,” Wemmbu adds, grasping for anything to convince Sergeant that this is an entirely petty request. He seems to favour holding grudges and showing off pure strength for the sake of it over anything else when it comes to dealing with the prisoners. 

Silence from the Sergeant stretches for a few seconds too long, leading to Wemmbu almost jumping out of his skin when he finally shouts, “Waddle, you will be fighting — Loser!” 

“That’s not his name at all, but —” Wemmbu cuts himself off when Sergeant chucks a golden carrot at him and aggressively pulls open the door to the ring. 

“Get in!” He shouts. Wemmbu complies immediately, beelining for the corner and turning just in time to see Lomedy start to drag himself in after Wemmbu. 

He looks paler than he was before — skin slightly damp with sweat, hinting at a fever. Bags under his eyes, which doesn’t exactly track with the lack of noise from his cell next to Wemmbu, but still makes him look even more ragged. Wemmbu’s eyes catch on the dark spots on his jumpsuit, right around the abdomen where he keeps an arm wrapped around tightly, and another dark stain around his calf. 

Too blatantly highlighting a weakness, some older part of Wemmbu thinks — back when he was more ruthless, quicker to draw a sword. 

Present-day, Wemmbu’s claws bite into his palms as Lomedy draws himself to stand up as straight as he can, knuckles white when he raises his fists. 

“Ready? Three! Two! One! Battle!” 

Wemmbu isn’t expecting much of a fight, so it catches him by surprise when Lomedy swings without missing a beat, sluggish as the movement is. He’s so slow that it’s easy to dodge, lashing out with a stray fist to punch Lomedy’s side lightly. More of a glance-off than anything meaning to hurt him, kill him, but Lomedy’s breath punches out of him like he’s winded, anyway. Bruised, Wemmbu notes to himself.

Something foreign tightens in the pit of Wemmbu’s stomach. He lets a punch to the shoulder hit and counters by spinning around Lomedy, elbowing him lightly in the back — pulls out more flashy movement, if just to hide the fact that he’s not exactly trying to kill Lomedy the way he was trying to kill Zam only a few days prior. 

“Kill him! Kill Wemmbu!” Baablu shouts from the sidelines. Clearly bitter about the End fight, still, despite how much he insists that in any fair fight, Wemmbu would’ve gotten his ass handed to him without fail. 

It doesn’t distract him, but Lomedy seems bothered, shaking his head. For a moment, Wemmbu almost thinks it’s in disapproval before he catches the bleary look to his eyes, vision fogged over. 

“Wemmbu is not dying, be serious,” Zam says in reply, Wemmbu catching the two of them starting to get rough with each other out of the corner of his vision. 

Perfect, he thinks, as Lomedy catches him with a hard knock to the jaw. 

It catches him off-guard — before he can stop himself, Wemmbu acts solely on instinct and grabs Lomedy by the collar. After barely a second to think, Wemmbu is slamming him down on the ground, where the gasp that escapes Lomedy as a result sounds more like a death rattle than anything else, his left wing making a sickening crunch — before Wemmbu’s mind can catch up with his body, the heel of his boot is digging into darker patch of fabric on Lomedy’s calf. Lomedy makes a sound that’s a half-choke, half-sob and Wemmbu flinches backwards before remembering where he is. 

The fight outside the ring picks up steam at the same time. Wemmbu risks a glance over and finds the Sergeant tearing his attention away from him and Lomedy to get between Fantst and Zam, who have gotten much more agitated — to the point that they’re standing chest to chest, shouting in each others’ faces. 

This is the perfect time to fill Lomedy in on his true plans. 

And yet, it would be so easy to just kill Lomedy here and leave him to die later tonight. Far easier than trying to force such an elaborate plan into motion. 

But maybe it’s his pale eyes and the way his grip weakens, or how he clearly isn’t used to fighting the way any of the other rotten souls in this prison are, or even the fact that he was a farmer before getting pulled into this mess — but all Wemmbu can think of, staring down at his face, screwed-up in desperation, is Rejoice. Thinks about the way he died smiling, telling Wemmbu being his friend was all he wanted, and the way he lost the sunflower Rejoice gifted him. How Rejoice died because he made the mistake of befriending Wemmbu. 

How he didn’t want history to repeat itself with Lomedy dying over things Flame did. 

A stray punch to the cheek grabs Wemmbu’s attention again. Looking back at Lomedy, he makes up his mind. He doesn’t think he’ll get another chance after this. 

His hands wrap around Lomedy’s throat. Wemmbu’s grip tightens until his claws poke into the skin below without piercing flesh, a false show of force that, from outside the ring, looks far deadlier than it is. 

Even still, with little strength behind the action, Lomedy tries and fails to scrabble weakly against him, nails raking against Wemmbu’s forearms. 

“Kill me,” Wemmbu hisses under his breath, when Sergeant starts shouting and Fantst and Zam’s argument renews with even more vigour and anger than before. Lomedy pauses once the words click in his mind, confusion passing over his pale face. 

“What?” He asks, voice cracking at the end — not emotion, rather sickness slowly but surely robbing him of his voice. Still, Lomedy doesn’t pause in his attempts to get Wemmbu off of him, wings fluttering wildly where they’re pinned under him. 

“Pop my totem,” Wemmbu urges, quiet and rapid as his eyes flick to the crowd outside — Sergeant getting between Fantst and Zam while Baablu tries to pull his friend back. “Totems don’t heal infection. It’ll just fester, I’ve seen it before. You have to win the fight.” 

Lomedy’s face screws up in confusion, tinted with pain and exhaustion. “Why would you care what happens to me?” 

It’s a question Wemmbu doesn’t have time to consider, let alone try to answer. One glance up and he can see the Sergeant’s attention start to get pulled away from the other prisoners, fixing back on the fight. 

“Just beat me now or die in your cell on your own tonight,” Wemmbu hisses. He puts the slightest bit more pressure on Lomedy’s neck, driving his point home and drawing a thin line of red out of his skin, tracing down Lomedy’s ashen throat. 

Wemmbu is immediately greeted with a knee to the stomach, winding him before a fist swings into the side of his face. 

“Good,” Wemmbu grins, just a bit more vicious than he means it to be when his back hits the floor with a slam. Lomedy’s eyes, foggy before, seem to steel in response, vigour returning to him in a way unexpected. 

All of a sudden, as Wemmbu asked, Lomedy is pummeling him with more force than before. Maybe a burst of energy before he’ll slump over later, or maybe just pure determination borne from the knowledge that losing this means Lomedy is facing certain death later. 

That, or he’s fuelled purely by the fact that Wemmbu of all people is holding his fate in his hands. Wemmbu wouldn’t blame him if that had been what set Lomedy off. He thinks he would react with just as much aggression if he knew that someone like Flame or Lettuce held a similar sway over his living or dying. 

About five minutes later, Wemmbu dies with blood staining his teeth and a slight smile he can't quite hide on his face. The totem pulls him back from the edge of death with a gold tint to his vision and dizzying green vignetting the corners. He blinks, trying to shake off the dizziness and jittery feeling of the void licking at his skin just to get violently pulled back to reality. 

“No way,” Wemmbu hears from the side of the ring. He looks over to see Zam, Fantst, and Baablu watching him with varying degrees of disbelief. 

Of all of them, he only cares to see Zam’s reaction. Finds her looking at him with unreadable eyes. On the surface, distant, but when Wemmbu meets her gaze, it’s so intense he’s reminded of standing in front of her on a rainy night surrounded by explosions like he was still there, still that person. 

“Nice job, Lomedy,” She says to him as Wemmbu and Lomedy leave the ring. He doesn’t pay anyone else any mind, just watches Zam offer an arm to Lomedy and lead him over to the wall, helping him slide down without jostling the slow-weeping wound on his calf any further. 

This might be the first loss that Wemmbu’s truly felt was a win on his end. Even still, he can’t stop himself from rolling over the way Zam looked at him through it all, or the way his stomach twisted with something other than pure anger. 

There’s little chance for Wemmbu to corner Lomedy for the rest of the day — he stubbornly refuses to meet eyes with him, Zam by his side any moment she can get away with it. Warding Wemmbu away from himself just by virtue of eating dinner with her. 

It’s frustrating, but still reeling from a popped totem earlier, especially with so little food to recover and being put to work for a few hours afterwards, Wemmbu didn’t want to risk being near Zam. Not when he was as weak as he felt, too reminiscent of his lowest point months prior. 

Zam seems well aware of it, too — had been looking at him from across the cafeteria with a slight smile, barely there for anyone who didn’t know her well, but Wemmbu had spent months by her side, once. Learned every quirk he didn’t think he’d need to remember anymore. Saw amusement in her upturned lips that, for once, didn’t infuriate him. 

He couldn’t focus too much on it, anyway. Not after seeing the way Lomedy seemed far more stiff than he was before their fight, limp more pronounced. It’s been weighing on Wemmbu all night, for reasons he can’t quite piece together. Nothing he wants to look too deep into, but for the sake of his quick-sapping sanity, he can’t leave it unaddressed. 

Loppezz is slow to leave them once she goes through each cell, Wemmbu impatient all the while. The lights shut before her and her guards file out, darkness that he has to blink to adjust to. 

“Lomedy,” Wemmbu hisses through the wall the moment the last of the guards leave their cells for the night, “Are you okay?” 

It’s a rather stupid question and he feels silly for even voicing it, because of course Lomedy isn’t alright, but there’s no other way to really go about this and even if it’s to soothe his own guilt, Wemmbu thinks he’s at least a little obligated to check in.

“Shut up,” Baablu calls from across the room — a very stark reminder that there’s no privacy in places like this, illusion broken, “You genuinely suck at whispering, dear god.” 

“I don’t care,” Wemmbu shoots back, “You should be glad I at least tried to be quiet.”

“Yeah, thanks for being the worst,” Baablu says.

“I’d argue I’m actually one of the better people here — I don’t see you checking up on anyone.” 

Baablu’s face from opposite Wemmbu’s cell is the most confused he’s ever seen him before he rolls his eyes, turning ever so slightly in the direction of Lomedy’s cell, and very loudly asking, “Dude, are you okay?” 

“Alright,” Wemmbu huffs, “That was literally my exact question. Word for word.” 

Baablu shrugs, “Not many ways to ask it — let me try again.” He pauses, hand scratching the back of his neck whilst he tries to come up with some other variation of how to ask about someone’s wellness. “Hey, Lomedy, how —”

“Can you shut up?” Zam interrupts, loud and annoyed. “We get it. You two care so much. Go to sleep.” 

“Wait,” Fantst says abruptly, voice thick with sleep as if he’s just shrugged it off whilst on the brink of falling under, “I care too. Lomedy, are you doing well?”

“See,” Wemmbu points at him, “That’s a good way to ask. Take notes, Baablu.”

“What? That wasn’t even —” 

Zam’s voice is a tone beyond annoyed when she interrupts them next, “Lomedy can you genuinely just answer them so they shut the fuck up.” 

There’s a beat of silence before Lomedy mumbles something none of them catch.

“What was that?” Baablu calls across, “Wemmbu what did he say, we didn’t hear.” 

“I didn’t hear it either, idiot.” 

Fantst’s voice is bleary, and if Wemmbu squints, he can see him turning around on his thin mattress before snuggling down comfortably, “Lomedy can you repeat that, I won’t be able to sleep without knowing what you said.” 

“Now that’s just mean,” Zam sighs, the roll of her eyes somehow heard in her voice, “You sleep actually anywhere — remember the time you overstayed solitary because you just slept through it?” 

“Oh my god,” Fantst groans, voice clearer as he sits up, “Dude, it was because they accidentally laced our food, don’t you remember — you and Baablu puked it out and I stomached it like a champ.” 

“Oh. Right,” Zam says. For a moment, Wemmbu thinks she’s going to leave it there, actually conceding for once, before she continues, “I’d rather be puking in my cell than sleeping in solitary.” 

“What else was I going to do there?” Fantst asks instead, yawning.

“‘Reflect on your actions,’” Baablu says, clearly mockingly, “No other just reason to be in solitary.”

“No, Baablu,” Fantst shakes his head exaggeratedly, “That’s only for people who actually had something to reflect on to begin with, let’s say… an empire of sorts?” 

“Ha, ha,” Zam says plainly.    

Wemmbu loses himself in the conversation, a sort-of lightness in the air he hadn’t felt since he came here, an unwilling familiarity between him and the other three and it takes him a moment or two to notice neither him, nor Zam flinched at the mention of the Empire. It’s almost distracting enough that if his ear wasn’t trained to the wall, he would’ve missed Lomedy’s small voice speaking, what seemed to be, directly to him.

“I’m fine,” Lomedy says in an almost whisper, uncaring of if Wemmbu hears him or not, likely banking on the latter. 

“Oh, joy,” Fantst says, immediately turning over and facing the wall, taking it as a cue to end the conversation and go to sleep. “Thanks for letting us know, Lomedy.” 

“You’re such a dick,” Zam says, in the same moment Lomedy says, somewhat confused, “You asked?” 

Baablu interjects, “Because I care — at least more than Wemmbu does. I said it quicker than him.”

“That’s just… not how it works,” Wemmbu says dumbfounded. 

“Well, even still, I wasn’t the one who wanted to fight Lomedy in the first place. For a grudge against his friend, no less,” Baablu continues, shrugging where Wemmbu can see him.

It’s clearly a taunt meant to needle Wemmbu just for the sake of it rather than any serious criticism, but the pit of Wemmbu’s stomach twists a little, anyway. He’s not used to this — hurting people and feeling bad for it. Guilt is something he, more often than not, discards as an unfortunate consequence of doing what needed to be done to survive. 

But it’s just — even when helping people, all Wemmbu seems to do is hurt them. It’s a realization that hits like a blow to the chest. 

“You sure?” Wemmbu asks again. 

“I already said I’m fine,” Lomedy repeats, “I don’t know what else you want me to say. Just go to sleep. I don’t care who cares more.” 

“Well, if Lomedy said it’s alright, then,” There’s a thump from Baablu’s cell, body hitting his mattress as he finally gives up on bothering Wemmbu and Zam for the night. “Good to know, Lomedy. Thanks, Lomedy.”

“Shut up, man,” Zam says. 

“Can you blame me?” Baablu’s voice still carries its dramatic air even when muffled by a pillow, “If only Wemmbu showed me that amount of concern when he almost claimed my soul last time we met.”

“Oh my god, bro,” Wemmbu groans, unwilling to entertain this any longer. “I can’t believe you’re still bringing this up.” 

“Oh, sorry we can’t all shrug off attempts on our life as easily as you do,” Baablu shoots back. “You don’t even sound that bothered about being executed.”

“Becuase it’s not going to happen,” Wemmbu grits his teeth saying this, before remembering where he was and not saying a word more.

“What do you mean?” Baablu asks, a bit more interested than before. Wemmbu doesn’t reply — knows that even though they’re left on their own here, there are always ears listening. As annoying as it is to listen to Baablu grumble, “Hello? Nothing? Okay man. Whatever! Aurafarm and be mysterious all you want — see if I care when they kill you.”

Wemmbu snorts to himself, turning over in his bed, listening to Lomedy’s breaths even out slowly but surely. At some point he drifts off, ear still pressed to the wall.

“So,” Zam says as she takes a seat next to Wemmbu, “Lomedy.” 

Wemmbu takes a casual bite of his meal — bread, today, that he managed to pinch from the usual lunchline brawl that always ends in bruises — and blinks at Zam. 

“What?” He asks. 

“What does he have on you?” Zam asks, stabbing her fork into her raw beetroot. A spray of red juice stains her orange sleeves darker, splattering against the bottom half of her face. Zam doesn’t make a move to wipe it off; just looks at Wemmbu with dark and intense eyes. 

She’s been watching him in a similar fashion since the day before, after Wemmbu lost (let himself lose) against Lomedy for the sake of keeping him alive. 

Nevermind the fact that he almost seemed worse off the night of. All Wemmbu heard was quiet grunts of pain interspersed with gaspy breaths that seemed far too hollow and wheezing compared to the relative quiet that Lomedy’s kept to since he first got here. 

When Wemmbu met his eyes today, Lomedy only barely looked at him before turning away. An action that made something foreign in Wemmbu’s stomach twist uncomfortably; a feeling that he pushed down a moment later. So what, if Lomedy decided to avoid him, despite what Wemmbu did for him — despite the fact that he had to meet death half-way in the void just for his sake, and that he didn’t even say a word when Fantst and Baablu were calling him weak and an easy target at dinner afterwards, leaving more than a few bruises on his skin during their usual brawl.

It doesn’t matter, really. Wemmbu isn’t trying to make friends in his attempt to break out of this prison. 

But now, in retrospect, with Zam staring him down without blinking while she sinks her fork all the way down to the base of the prongs into her leaking-red beetroot, Wemmbu can admit that maybe he was a bit too hasty in thinking he pulled off his ruse without any suspicion. 

“What are you talking about?” Wemmu asks, playing dumb anyway. Even as his skin crawls at the question. 

“He beat you,” Zam says slowly, like she’s talking to someone particularly stupid, “Like — he beat you. He beat you. I couldn’t beat you and I ran an empire. Baablu couldn’t beat you and he’s been fighting for years. A farmer from nowhere shows up and manages to pop your totem? You think I’m buying that? I’m not an idiot.” 

“He’s Flame’s friend,” Wemmbu shrugs. He takes another bite of his bread, stale and hard, chewing until it’s near-dissolved in his mouth and his jaw feels sore. “Taught him some tricks I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t think I’d go down, either.” 

“Is it Egg?” Zam asks, ignoring Wemmbu’s explanation entirely, “Does Lomedy have Flame holding him hostage somewhere? Is that why he isn’t here with you? You two are usually joined at the hip.” 

“Flame isn’t holding Egg hostage, I — where did you even come up with that?” Wemmbu asks, growing frustrated. He rubs his hand over his shoulder, where Baablu tried with startling effort to dig the point of his elbow into from behind. 

“He did that one time, he told me,” Zam reminds him, “When he was still a guard for my empire.” 

“Right. Forgot that was a thing,” Wemmbu says. 

And he means it. He did forget that before all the talk of honour and being a solitary force of skill, Flame used to be Zam’s subordinate. Led around by the nose like an attack dog. The imagery makes something close to morbid vindication run through him for a moment, quickly squashed when remembering the finer details of that time. 

Of tridents and explosions and bruises like paint on his skin — blue, purple, yellow and sickly green. When Wemmbu felt smaller than he had ever been as a child and tried to hide it by wearing armour that he refused to remove, even at the edge of death. Reminding him again just how vulnerable he was here, wearing nothing but a jumpsuit and cuffs around his wrists and ankles that kept him from putting on any netherite he might've come across. 

The sliver of amusement he felt at the situation: at seeing Zam stained with beetroot juice like it was blood, the way red on her yellow hair made her look stupid, and her insistent interrogation — quickly fades. He levels her with a stare that is far less patient than before. One that she almost recoils from, fingers tightening around her thin fork. 

“Okay,” she says after a long silent moment. “If you say so.” 

And he almost thinks she’s going to leave it there before she adds on, quick and quiet — “But I know you let him live.” 

Wemmbu can’t find himself to do much else but sigh. Resigned. 

He runs over yesterday quickly; remembers the arm Zam offered Lomedy to keep him steady, a gentleness to her touch that Wemmbu knew she’s never been able to fake. 

“Yeah,” he admits near-silently, so soft that no guards nearby could overhear. Deciding to take a gamble. 

It’s a point to Zam’s intelligence that she isn’t surprised. Looks more as though she’s gotten confirmation on a truth she’s believed regardless of the amount of evidence she had to prove it. Wemmbu’s known she likes to keep her cards close to her chest, to the point she’s fine with people thinking she isn’t quite as knowledgeable as she might be. It doesn’t quite line up with her reputation regarding her pride, but balancing rumours is a game she plays often that, as much as Wemmbu hates to admit it, works in her favour in moments like these. 

“Why?” Zam stresses, leaning forward as she nearly hisses out the question. 

Wemmbu nods in Lomedy’s direction: he’s leaning heavily on his arm in the corner, at an empty table with a mostly-untouched loaf of stale bread. Even now, after a night of rest, he doesn’t look much better. His hair is greasy, skin looking clammy even from so far away. His head repeatedly dips before it’s jolting up again, like he’s falling asleep before waking himself up forcefully, again and again.

In the bluntest of terms, Lomedy looks awful. Like he’s been napping on death’s door waiting to be let in. 

And no one is doing anything. 

“Look at him,” Wemmbu says under his breath, that twisting thing in his chest constricting around his heart, “Does it look like he was going to survive the night if I killed him then?” 

“Well, no,” Zam says without missing a beat, “But that doesn’t explain why you care.” 

“Why do you need to know?” Wemmbu counters, for lack of an answer. Despite the words, the longer he speaks, the less tense he feels, somehow — for all Zam likes to pretend that they were never allies, Wemmbu doing just the same, he’s spent enough time with her to glance past the mask of nonchalance she constantly puts up. Seeing stress and worry in the slight twist of the corner of her mouth and the slight, barely-there crease between her straight brows. The way her leg bounces, restless, a rhythmic beat drumming in tune with her probably-racing heart. 

“You care about him,” Wemmbu realizes, just as she looks back at Lomedy — catches her staring with eyes so blatantly worried that it nearly startles him. 

“I don’t,” she says stiffly. Her gaze drifts to her beetroot in front of her as she lifts it to her mouth and gnaws a bite out of it like she’s trying to sink teeth into a human heart. There’s no need to say a word more after the denial. Wemmbu knows better than to push — sometimes it’s room to breathe that’ll draw out more than sharp demands ever could. 

They drift into silence. A long few minutes later, Zam very quietly says, “He reminds me of someone I used to know,” before clamming up and refusing to speak another word. 

For once, Wemmbu can understand her in this regard. He’s always seen ghosts in the living, even when he should know better than to try and recover the past in palimpsests. 

The rest of their dinner is spent in silence and Wemmbu’s shoulder throbs in turn with his heartbeat. Zam is breathing slow and steady by his side through it all. 

Of all the menial tasks Law has them do during their days, chopping down trees is one of the most annoying. Not entirely pointless, like ‘mining for gold’ is, considering they actually manage to get a few resources with the sorry excuses of wooden axes they’re afforded, but still an insult regardless. As if Lettuce doesn’t have the resources to gather wood for shields using his own personnel. 

Not to mention the twigs, leaves, and branches that always get caught on Wemmbu’s jumpsuit, in his long hair, or the dirt that somehow, someway, ends up in his boots at the end of the day. It’s going to be a cold day in hell when Wemmbu manages to walk away from this god-awful room with no pebbles digging into his soles. 

It’s made worse by a considerable amount that Lomedy actually does the work. His hands are rigid around the axe, and every hit reverberates around them with the surprising amount of force behind each swing. He is, by all means, a picture perfect prisoner. 

“Lomedy, bro,” Wemmbu steps up next to him, wary of the splinters about to dig into Lomedy’s palm, “You’ve gotta relax.” 

“I don’t think I need your advice,” Lomedy says in reply, very calm in contrast to the way his knuckles whiten around his axe. 

Wemmbu gestures to his leg, “You can barely stand as it is, why waste energy you very clearly need?”

“And yet here I am. Standing,” Lomedy deadpans. “I’ve managed fine without you deciding to make me your new pet project, thanks.” 

“Oh, come on,” Wemmbu drags out the word, “It’s not like that — I’m just —” 

He cuts himself off before admitting that he’s worried; half because he’s unsure where the word even came from, half because he doesn’t want to give any ammo to the rest of the prisoners clearly listening in. Lomedy seems to hear it regardless. 

“Worried?” He fills in the blank, the word sounding sharp and angry on his tongue, “Honestly, I have no clue why you are.” 

“Neither!” Fantst calls out from behind a few trees over. 

Wemmbu massages his temple, squeezing his eyes shut, “Is it really too much to ask for a private conversation in here?”

Baablu pops his head around the very same tree he and Lomedy were standing at, “Uh, yeah.” 

Lomedy turns to Wemmbu at that moment, a blank look on his face that Wemmbu isn’t used to seeing, “Then we can leave it there. Alright? Alright.”

“Not alright,” Wemmbu disagrees, “What’s up with you — I’m genuinely just trying to be a nice person and help you out because, bro, you clearly need it.”

Lomedy doesn’t answer, just fixes his position to swing his axe again, and Wemmbu, beginning to get frustrated by the constant dismissals, grabs his wrist to stop him. It’s Lomedy’s immediate hiss of pain and drop of the axe that reminds Wemmbu of the skin beneath his grip being rubbed raw, disgustingly smooth in a way skin shouldn’t be. 

“Sorry,” he apologises, letting go at the same time, “I forgot about that.” 

“You don’t say,” Lomedy’s voice isn’t the picture of contempt he wants it to be, splotched with pain as it slowly ebbs away, giving passage to conceding. “Fine. You want to know why I don't want your help?”

“Well, yes,” Wemmbu says, like it isn't the question he's been asking for about half an hour now.

Lomedy takes a deep breath, as if he's readying himself to take off something that's been weighing on him.

“This,” he gestures around to the expanse of it all — the trees, the prisoners, the guards: Law. “This is all your fault.”

“Oh, damn,” Baablu says, far closer than Wemmbu last remembers him being. He can hardly get himself to care, amid the righteous anger and confusion that’s lit in the pit of his stomach with the words alone. How — just —

“My fault?” he enunciates, clear-cut with no wiggle room for interpretation, “No, no, enlighten me, Lomedy, how is this my fault?”

He hears Fantst, who has also moved closer from the last place he saw him, whisper rather terribly to Baablu, “Okay, but when aren't things his fault?”

Lomedy turns to face Wemmbu fully — something stronger players lack the spine to have done — mouth curled in displeasure that hits somewhere particular in Wemmbu, despite the farmer's sickly appearance. 

“This is on you, because if you —” and he jabs a finger into Wemmbu's chest, Wemmbu's eye twitching as he holds himself back from instinctively knocking Lomedy to the ground, “— hadn't sought after Flame, hadn't insisted on fighting him and hadn't levelled cities and towns in your search for him, we wouldn't be here at all.”

“Well —”

“No, I’m not done,” Lomedy interrupts.

“Oh, damn,” Baablu says, hushed. 

Undeterred by the onlookers, Lomedy keeps his eyes trained on Wemmbu, unfounded resentment having finally found a target.

“That stupid fight, with your stupid nukes and your stupid, stupid, maces — you couldn't have waited for him to be more geared? He wasn't even in full netherite, for fucks sake.”

They sound all too similar to the excuses Wemmbu’s heard Flame made, as though Lomedy was just parroting what he heard Flame complain about over months. It's ridiculous — holding a grudge on behalf of someone who left him behind, as if Wemmbu had any influence over whether or not Flame decided he was worth fighting for. 

“None of that has any correlation to now,” he says, instead of saying any of that. Just barely keeping the cap on his anger. 

Lomedy looks at him like he's stupid. “Are you — do you genuinely need me to spell it out for you?”

“Uh,” Zam calls out from afar, “I need it spelt out please! Even if Wemmbu doesn't!” 

Wemmbu looks towards her, and then back at Lomedy — waiting — and apparently that alone is enough for Lomedy to tell that Wemmbu does, in fact, need it spelt out for him.

“Okay,” Lomedy says slowly, still not looking away from Wemmbu, “If you hadn't beaten Flame how you did, calling yourself the strongest all the while, then Flame wouldn't have started that whole quest for his stupid title back — do you know how many nights I’d show up to his house and see him pouring over maps to pinpoint recent Invisible Knight sightings?” 

He doesn't wait for Wemmbu's answer, and distantly Wemmbu hears Baablu go, “Wait, Wemmbu was the Invisible Knight?”

“Genuine fucking months he spent looking for you, for an even match up once he was geared again and for what — a thousand players dead, and your loss,” he punctuates that with a throw of his axe, wood embedding into wood with a crack.

“A whole lotta yap to me,” Wemmbu says, despite the linear narrative. It's the clearest of pictures, even if he pretends otherwise.

“And now what — all of a sudden you want to pretend like being the strongest never mattered? Like you're such a good guy that you’ll die for some farmer you don't even know to pretend you're not some — some awful person? Or did you just get used to everyone thanking you for all your hard work when they didn't know you were the one causing all their problems in the first place? How many people were happy when they found out you were the Invisible Knight, huh? How many of those people you helped do you think were cheering when Lettuce brought you out and announced your execution?”

Lomedy’s voice is raspy, getting worse with the volume, and out of the corner of Wemmbu’s eyes, he can see the guards beginning to approach.

“Sorry that I’m not filled with gratitude that you care,” Lomedy spits out through a gravelly voice. “When the only reason I’m here in the first place, that I’m probably going to have a limp for the rest of my life — is because of you.” 

There is a long moment where nothing is said. 

“I think,” Wemmbu says lowly, “That you’re mad at the wrong person. And I'll let all this slide — just this once — because the person you're actually mad at isn't here, and I'm just the closest thing you'll get to vent your feelings to.”

Lomedy falters for a moment. 

“Wait, who's he mad at then?” Zam whispers, not doing a very good job at it, and Wemmbu looks over to see her standing with Baablu and Fantst.

By the time he looks back to Lomedy, his face is schooled back into the empty anger it was before, “I don't think you get to tell me who I'm mad at.”

“I think I do when you've been yelling at me for the past fifteen minutes straight.” 

“Besides,” Wemmbu adds, hearing more footsteps echoing in the enclosed space getting closer, “It’s pretty obvious that you're upset that you weren't worth sticking around for, isn't it?” 

The guards have doubled by now, most of them looking to the others to deescalate something that Wemmbu itches to turn into a fight. Call it habit, the way his hands curl into fists and most of Lomedy’s weak points becoming glaringly obvious to him out of instinct — all of it unnecessary as Lomedy flinches back as if struck regardless.

“What’s going on here?” Loppezz’s loud voice cuts through the argument, cleanly cutting it off. 

“Nothing,” both he and Lomedy say at once.

“Then quit talking, and get back to work,” Loppezz stresses, pushing at Wemmbu’s shoulder to get him to continue. 

“Actually,” Wemmbu stops and turns around to look at Loppezz, something vindictive pooling in his chest, “Lomedy's being… combative, keeps putting his hands on me while I haven't touched him once.” It's unserious the way he says it, like he's complaining to Loppezz that Blurpinstein stole his bread despite the criminal having been in solitary confinement for the past two weeks. 

Loppezz doesn’t look very amused at the joking complaint — clearly thinking of the last time she saw Wemmbu outside of the prison, standing by and watching her civilization fall to the ground because of him — and blinks at him. 

“Right,” she says, unconvinced. 

“Dude, no way you're snitching,” Fantst laughs at the nonexistent issue, “It was just a poke in the chest.”  

Loppezz gestures to him, “A poke? Really?” 

It’s plain enough that the anger doesn’t quite dissipate, but he feels stupid for bringing it up in the first place, even as a joke — looks back at Lomedy, who’s walking away from the scene entirely and sees the way he limps. Not even exaggerated, just the way he’s been walking since he first got here. 

And what, some voice in the back of his head says, clearly amused. You’re going to get the sick guy in trouble for hurting your feelings? 

“Ah,” he says, waving his hands, “You know I'm playing, Loppezz.”

She levels him with a look. “Good, because you do know if there's a report filed about an inmate then Lettuce has to come down himself to deal with it, right?” 

No? Wemmbu thinks. “Yeah,” he says aloud.

Loppezz doesn’t seem entirely satisfied, but nods anyway. Looking over Wemmbu once before stepping away to the guards that had been overseeing them the majority of the time, speaking to them in quick low voices as they appear to fill her in on the past half-hour. 

Whatever. Wemmbu picks up his wooden axe, scarcely used, and swings it into the trunk of the tree in front of him. Ignores Zam’s eyes on him, Baablu and Fantst’s gossiping, and Lomedy’s slow steps growing distant. 

Lettuce and Loppezz are already speaking when they enter the holding room later that night, making it clear enough that they weren’t exactly here for conversation with any of the prisoners from their entrance alone. Low enough that Wemmbu can’t hear them immediately. Still, Wemmbu can’t help but tense up as they walk past his cell, catching pieces of the words they trade. 

“— Guards mentioned he looked riled up, something about how he might be gaining enough energy to try and escape, especially with the help of his wings —” Loppezz is saying. 

Even after the argument earlier that day, he can’t help the traitorous spike of worry that runs through him — remembering the way Lomedy seemed worse for wear after saying his piece, exhausted like it took all the strength he had to spit those words at Wemmbu in the first place. 

Remembers his joking complaint, and wonders, suddenly, if it had some influence on their discussion at all. He dismisses the thought, even as his skin starts to crawl. 

“— There’s really no need to worry,” Lettuce is saying as he continues to walk by, Loppezz buzzing with nerves by his side. Something that Wemmbu picks up on, just by virtue of knowing her as long as he had. “I’m sure the guards were just exaggerating.” 

“But still,” she says as he stops closer to Lomedy’s cell, out of Wemmbu’s line of sight, “We should consider it. They had to bind them on the way over here — clearly that means they were a problem before?” 

“You weren’t there,” Lettuce says. 

“Deputy Ace told me to keep an eye on him,” Loppezz tells him in reply. 

The name is met with a sharp inhale from Lomedy’s cell, like he’s only just put together what they’re talking about. 

“Deputy Ace answers to me,” Lettuce reminds her, voice just the slightest bit harder. “You do, too.”

“Besides, look at him,” Wemmbu hears Lettuce continue to say to Loppezz. It’s not demeaning, nor scornful. Just said in that soft, benevolent tone of his that makes Wemmbu’s skin crawl with anger every time he hears it. “Does he look like he’s in any condition to fly?” 

“Because I can’t,” Lomedy hisses, annoyance and exhaustion coating his voice all at once, like he had tried making this argument countless times before, “They. Don’t. Work.” Each word is pointed — enunciated, as if Lomedy is scared of what Lettuce might do if he decided to ignore him anyway.

“So no need to tie them down,” Lettuce says — to Loppezz, Wemmbu thinks, because she speaks up next. 

“But Deputy Ace said —” 

From the corner of his eye, he sees Lettuce gesture flippantly towards Lomedy, and Wemmbu can picture the likely sight in front of him clearly — Lomedy curled up on the floor, wings stuttering as he attempts to stretch them out despite the burn, shaking and trembling and slowly bleeding out from infected wounds. Nothing that would kill him immediately, but enough to keep him in place.

“He can’t even lift one of them, and the mafia’s done the hard job of clipping them for us already. There’s no need.”

Loppezz’s voice is confused, a likely thing to occur when receiving conflicting orders from her higher ups, “Deputy Ace said that he’s still a flight risk, and he accompanied him here. Shouldn't we consider that?” 

“Deputy Ace,” Lomedy says scathingly, “Is a fucking idiot.” 

Lettuce didn’t seem very offended at Lomedy’s direct insolence. Instead, Wemmbu hears the sound of someone grabbing onto metal bars.

“Loppezz,” Lettuce says, curiosity layered so thick even Wemmbu begins to wonder what he was asking about, “Doesn’t he look rather pale to you?” 

“Sweating too,” Loppezz points out, her concern genuine,“Something wrong, Lomedy?” 

“No,” Lomedy says, in all the ways that scream ‘yes’. His voice is hoarser with every sentence, faded at the end, like he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs to finish even the smallest of replies —

“Are you swaying?” — Great. Wemmbu closes his eyes, taking a deep breath, and wonders if Lettuce is being obtuse on purpose. 

All the pieces are in front of him. Clearly spelling out that Lomedy’s come down with some sort of fever, mixed with a crashing immune system; how on earth he managed to continue with his witty remarks was beyond Wemmbu entirely. All he could really do from his own cell was wait for the next.

Except it doesn’t come. 

Five pairs of ears, all straining to hear the same conversation, are left sorely disappointed as it seems to draw to an abrupt end. Wemmbu thinks, for a moment, that Lomedy has just chosen to shut down attempts of a conversation as he’s typically done since he got here, that the silence is a willful spit in Lettuce’s face.

It’s not.

Those same five pairs of ears all hear the same scrape of skin against stone, and the loud thud that is Lomedy’s body crashing against the floor. His head makes a sickening crack that has Wemmbu bolting up out of instinct and Loppezz’s sharp gasp is more than enough to set the awful feeling in his stomach in stone.

Explanation comes in the form of Fantst pressed right to the bars of his cell, a clear view inside of Lomedy’s from where he was standing.

“He’s down — I think he fainted?” He says, loud enough that guards posted outside their holding room rush in, looking over to Lettuce and Loppezz for any signs of injury before at the inmates.

“Dear god,” Lettuce says, sighing, “Only a few days yet that room is a disgusting mess.” He gestures towards it, looking at the guards, and two of them step forward. They listen aptly as Lettuce tells them to make sure it’s nothing that would send Lomedy to his predetermined grave before his scheduled time. Then, Lettuce is leaving Loppezz to oversee them.

The two guards mutter to themselves quietly in Lomedy’s cell. Wemmbu leans closer to his wall to listen in. 

“Think he has a concussion?” One asks.

“Nah,” the other replies, “Can’t have been too hard of a fall.” 

The first one hums, “He’s really warm though?” 

“That’s because of the fever, not the concussion, are you stupid?” 

“Oh.” Then, “Isn’t a fever also bad?” 

“As long as it doesn’t kill him any time soon, then no — grab his other arm, we need to get him on the bed.” 

There’s a few grunts as, Wemmbu assumes, the guards lift Lomedy up from the floor, hisses of how heavy his wings are in comparison to their brittleness before he hears the sounds of springs underneath a mattress compressing tightly from the force — like Lomedy had been thrown, not laid, upon the bed. The two of them leave, content with their job and continue with their idle chatter as they resume their posts outside, just leaving Loppezz and her own guards in the room to perform their nightly check-up before turning in.

Wemmbu’s mind races through it all. Thinking back on how angry he was earlier that day — the slight flush to his skin, the way he exerted so much force into each swing of his wooden axe, wearing his body down more and more before even getting started on shouting and Wemmbu. Realizes that part of the reason he even passed out in the first place was because of him. 

It reminds him too much of earlier, Lomedy pinning every issue he’s seemed to face on Wemmbu’s shoulders. But now, distant from everything, he — doesn’t necessarily agree, but — he sees the path drawn from that first fight with Flame, and how it dominoed into Lomedy slowly but surely dying only a few meters from Wemmbu, entirely alone. 

Because Wemmbu knows that he’s going to die before his execution. Concussion, fever, whatever’s going on with his legs and wings — it’s a death sentence that’ll doom Lomedy tonight, unless someone does something about it. 

And as Loppezz loops around the room, he slowly realizes that no one is willing to try. 

“Loppezz,” Wemmbu hisses through the door when she walks by. Quiet, so the other guards don’t hear, but enough that she won’t be able to ignore him. He sees her pause and turn, drawing breath to shout as usual before he rushes to beat her to the punch. “I need to see Lomedy.” 

The request clearly catches her off-guard. Maybe it’s the urgency behind it, or the fact that Wemmbu hasn’t asked anything of her in months now, or even that he and Lomedy were only arguing a few hours ago. Wemmbu barrels forward before she can try and walk away — he knows she isn’t as apathetic as she pretends to be, knows that even if she hates Wemmbu, there’s history between them that he can pull on, in just the right way, to get his way here. 

“Listen, I know you don’t like me and you’ll probably be right there in the crowd cheering when I get executed —” And Wemmbu carefully doesn’t think about how he automatically said when, how easily the word slipped off his tongue, “— but Lomedy didn’t do anything. We both know that. And he’s dying in there, Loppezz.” 

“You don’t know that,” she snaps, apparently done with him — but not before Wemmbu catches the slight tremble of her voice. Hesitance. He latches on. 

“You heard Lettuce,” Wemmbu counters quickly, “How he knows Lomedy looks bad. That was before he collapsed — And you and I both know there’s no reason to keep anyone in here alive. You really think Lettuce is going to bother sending healthy guards to take care of him when they could catch whatever he has?” 

“Lettuce wouldn’t let him die,” Loppezz sniffs, drawing herself up taller, as if she’s above Wemmbu. But she doesn’t sound nearly as confident as a moment ago — maybe she’s running through everything she knows of the Law’s leader, things that even Wemmbu wouldn’t be privy to. Not when he only sees Lettuce through the eyes of an enemy and not as one of the subordinates he seems to view as disposable. 

“Lettuce was ready to kill him a week ago,” Wemmbu reminds her. “Why would he try to keep Lomedy alive?” 

“What makes you think I want to?” Loppezz snaps. 

“Because — I know you’re not that kind of person,” Wemmbu says. It comes out faltering. Not because he doesn’t believe it, but because he knows a large part of why she isn’t as open as she used to be was because of him. Memories of a mountain rumbling as it slowly collapsed, the look of horror on Loppezz’s face when she didn’t think to hide her every expression. The way she turned to Wemmbu and stared right at him as if she was truly seeing him for the first time. 

Her expression in the present day shutters. A complicated look rolling over her face before it’s blank again, and she’s stepping back from the door. Wemmbu’s heart sinks. 

“Loppezz —” He tries again, a bit more desperate, before falling silent when he hears the clink of metal on metal. 

Keys, he thinks, dizzy, when he sees Loppezz’s hands busy at her waist, where they’re hanging off a loop. 

“If you try anything, I’m going to kill you,” she warns. Dead serious as always. Wemmbu can’t get himself to care. 

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he says, impatient. Loppezz pauses for a moment to look at him — maybe she hears something in Wemmbu’s tone that he doesn’t recognize himself, but for the first time in a long time, when they meet eyes, he isn’t greeted with immediate hatred. Just — confusion. Maybe something closer to bitter envy. He doesn’t know. Can’t bring himself to figure it out, not when he hears the twist of the key in the lock and is immediately thinking only of Lomedy, dying only a few feet away from Wemmbu. 

As he beelines for Lomedy’s cell and Loppezz closes the door behind him after letting him in, he just barely hears a faint voice, nearly whispering. Almost misses it, if not for the fact that everything else in the room was still. 

“Good luck,” he hears faintly. Whips around to see Loppezz twisting the lock shut again, refusing to meet his eyes.

She leaves him alone a moment later. Wemmbu watches her go, frozen in confusion for a moment, before remembering himself and turning back to the room that seems to stretch endlessly behind him. 

Lomedy’s cell reeks of death.

There’s a stench of blood and sweat in the air and Wemmbu carefully walks towards the bed in the corner, making sure to avoid the splotches of red on the floor. As he draws closer to the bed, he can see more evidently how Lomedy’s shakes and twitches have turned into fully blown tremors, each breath racking through his weakened body. He’s not wearing a blanket, laying on stomach to avoid putting pressure on his wings. 

When Wemmbu finally reaches the bed and puts a hand on Lomedy’s middle back, in between the roots of them, he finds his shirt soaked through completely. Lomedy lets out a rattling breath, something in between pain and ease and relaxed against Wemmbu’s cold hands. He lets them trail up what would be soft feathers, if not caked in mud and grime, and Wemmbu takes this opportunity to fully assess the damages. 

Clipped wings to Wemmbu look painful, and he can’t even begin to imagine what it actually feels like. He thinks about Egg, and the few times he had asked about his wings and Egg had just shrugged noncommittally, saying something about additional limbs that Wemmbu hadn’t really paid enough mind to remember.

He doesn’t have wings of his own, but he knows that having them clipped is the cruelest of things that could happen to a person — it’s akin to tearing off a limb, the pain of either likely the same and the more he studies Lomedy’s, the more disgust creeps up his spine at the inhumaneness of it all. The tears in the skin were already redenned, and appeared to have been for days by this point and most definitely infected, along with the uneven way his feathers had been trimmed months upon months ago and how they folded easily despite it being common knowledge that doing so could cause lasting damage. 

Lomedy’s wings looked like he had put up a fight, had struggled against the hands that pushed him down and didn’t care for how they grounded him so long as it was done.

Wemmbu lets go of the wings momentarily, focusing on the dark patches around his abdomen and calf, rolling up his trousers just enough to see the wound. It seems that no matter how bad Wemmbu thinks Lomedy has gotten, the farmer is still somehow worse off, because Wemmbu physically recoils at the sight of the wound, shoving down the urge to gag.

Rot comes to mind before infection, though the latter is what he’s technically looking at. 

He quickly lifts up Lomedy’s shirt too, and is met with — as he had suspected — a large bruise that spanned all down his side, the very same place Wemmbu had hit the other day, though he was certain his small jab would not have caused an injury of this size. It would also explain the ragged breathing, how every wince Lomedy would make when taking a breath was because the bruising had reached inside his lungs too. 

There was also a gash on the opposite side, deep enough to cause an issue but light enough that the blood had clotted and the bleeding had come to a halt over the past few days.

“Fuck,” he mutters to himself, then, louder, “I need a first-aid kit.” 

A noise comes from the opposite end of the cells and there’s a moment before Baablu’s grating voice says, “There’s no way you’re getting your hands on one of those.”   

“Gee, thanks,” Wemmbu replies wryly, not bothered to ask why Baablu of all people is awake right now, “I had no idea.” 

A few minutes pass with nothing else said, and Wemmbu finishes his look-over Lomedy for visible injuries — too many cuts and scrapes to count, his wings (which, if they weren’t clipped beforehand, they’d be rendered useless now), his calf screaming for a healing potion or even a golden apple, just anything before it became too late. 

Wemmbu feels Lomedy’s forehead with the back of his hand, unnatural warmth radiating off it, whilst Lomedy takes in shallow, quick breaths that threaten to stop at any moment.

Slowly, keeping a careful watch on Lomedy’s rising and falling back, Wemmbu makes his way to the other corner of the room where Law had allowed them a small bucket that fit just about between Wemmbu’s hands. He fills it up at the sink, letting the water run and run and drip down his hand and down his sleeve until it’s cold enough and brings it back to Lomedy. 

Lomedy only begins to show genuine signs of life after Wemmbu rips off a patch of cloth from his uniform and dunks it in the water. He hesitantly adjusts Lomedy so he isn’t lying on his stomach and the more injured wing hangs off the end of the bed, gently placing the cloth across his forehead. Lomedy's face relaxes ever so slightly, a sigh escaping his blue-tinged lips despite the sweat that layers on his skin and he sinks deeper into the bed, one of his eyes cracking open just an inch.

“Flame?” Lomedy says, voice blurred and delirious, before Wemmbu can tell him to go back to sleep. He freezes, unsure what to do next. 

“That’s — not really,” he says, voice still quiet but a tinge of something apologetic touching the edges. 

“You came back?” Lomedy continues, as if he hasn’t heard Wemmbu. He probably hasn’t — feverish and exhausted as he is, Lomedy sounds like a child. “You… Deputy Ace said…” 

He trails off again, as if saying more than a few words at a time takes physical effort, strain that his body can’t afford.

“Are you going to — to leave again?” There’s a twinge of hope that Lomedy fails to keep suppressed, and Wemmbu can’t bring himself to say anything, frozen in place. Then, quieter, “Please don’t.”  

“I’m not… I’m not going anywhere,” Wemmbu says hesitantly, because it sounds like something Lomedy needs to hear. Proven right when Lomedy’s lips twitch upwards in a ghost of a smile. 

He lets the implications settle in his stomach like acid, far realer now than when it was Lettuce saying it, muffled behind a wall, and Wemmbu throwing it out as a taunt; Flame had left his friend — probably the only real one he’s had, from what Wemmbu’s heard — behind. Flamefrags had. To this. 

Even when fighting together, with the understanding that they would have each other’s backs until the pressing threat of Lettuce had passed and they could go head-to-head again, Wemmbu never expected the sword that swung into his back that day, blood in the back of his throat as he flew away immediately. Brain reworking to classify Flame under enemy once more, one trying to kill him after he already survived a massacre. 

Wemmbu always assumed that Flame was lonely — he just never quite realized how much of that was self-inflicted. How that callousness seemed to extend even to who Wemmbu thought was his closest friend. 

“Are you doing alright, Lomedy?” he asks, swallowing past festering guilt as he lies straight to a dying man’s face. What other opportunity would he get for answers, Wemmbu justifies to himself. “Does anything hurt?” 

“Everything,” Lomedy breathes, flinching at the word. “My wings — they — are they still bound?” 

“Bound?” Wemmbu frowns, something in the pit of his stomach twisting, “I wasn’t aware they ever were.” 

Lomedy laughs a broken, derisive exhale that sounds more sickly than anything, “Yes they were, Flame. They did it right after you — you left.“ And the laugh starts to sound more like a bitten-out sob. Wemmbu doesn’t know what to say — has nothing to say.

“On my second day here,” and now Lomedy stops laughing, a more frightened tone seeping into his voice, “They — Wemmbu….” 

Wemmbu blinks at his name being brought up — sudden and unexpected — whilst Lomedy trails off, somewhere deep in thought, desperately searching for comfort in who he thought was his friend by his side.

“Flame, I think he — he shattered my wing.” 

Wemmbu stops breathing. 

Lomedy’s voice is barely audible, like he’s saying something he desperately does not want to be true, and Wemmbu’s eyes return to Lomedy’s wing that hangs off the bed. A mess of shapes and angles that Wemmbu had assumed was attributed to the farmer’s awful habit of wing-folding. 

But now, very clearly, he can see the unnatural way the bones jut out, how the top end curls in on itself, not out of choice, but because the bone there had snapped. How the creases that adorn his feathers don’t align in the slightest with the direction his wing is facing now. 

And Wemmbu can only think back to their ‘fight’ — the way he slammed Lomedy on his back hard. Their argument, just a few hours earlier, Lomedy suddenly becoming far angrier at Wemmbu compared to how he tried to ignore him before. All at once, things are much, much clearer. 

All at once, guilt tastes like bile in the back of his throat. 

Heart hammering in his chest, Wemmbu kneels back beside the bed and feels the damp cloth on Lomedy’s forehead — warm now — and peels it off to dunk it in the bucket before reapplying. 

“Why aren’t you saying anything?” Lomedy mumbles, after a long few minutes of silence, “Are you upset with me?” 

“No,” Wemmbu rushes out, “I’m just worried.” 

It’s not the comfort Wemmbu imagines it would be, as Lomedy freezes, head tilting towards Wemmbu’s voice before he blearily opens his eyes. One blink, two, three, before Lomedy’s vision returns to him.

“You’re not…”  

Wemmbu shakes his head, “No, I’m not.”

Very quietly, as if trying not to be heard, Wemmbu hears Lomedy faintly say, “So he didn’t come.” Uncharacteristically polite, he chooses not to acknowledge that he heard anything at all.

“What tipped you off?” Wemmbu asks instead, idle curiosity taking hold whilst Lomedy is still very much delirious and not all there to withhold information. Any other person would likely call this immoral, which is probably why it’s a good thing Wemmbu isn’t any other person.  

Maybe it’s the fact that Lomedy is sick, mind still addled and words seeming to leave him without permission, but he speaks bluntly and without hesitation, saying, “Flame doesn’t ask those kinds of questions.” 

A pause. “Last time the Law got their hands on me, Flame asked me about — about —” he fumbles over his words, “About his redstone before asking if I was alright.” There’s palpable resentment in his voice, enough so that Wemmbu would’ve been fooled if he hadn’t watched hope rise in Lomedy’s beaten-down figure at the misconception that his former best friend had really come back for him.

“Bro,” Wemmbu sighs, switching out the cloth again, “Go to sleep, Lomedy. We can talk about how much we hate Flamefrags in the morning, cool?”

Lomedy makes a face, “What do —” he interrupts himself with a yawn, eyelids already drooping despite his efforts to stay awake, “What do you have to complain about.”

A smile graces Wemmbu’s face. “I’ll find something, I’m sure.” 

Despite his promises otherwise, Lomedy falls asleep within moments, though it's less of a sleep and more of a crash, but Wemmbu isn't here to debate semantics. He sits himself on the floor, grabbing another rag and bucket, this time with warm water, and begins to slowly clean the mud and grime from Lomedy's wings.

He avoids the torn and infected areas, unwilling to wake him, even if accidentally, keeping a mental note for every wound he comes across that he needs to later clean. He falls into a rhythm for the next few hours, often having to change the water after it changes to a murky red from the concerning amount of blood loss. 

One of his wings, weirdly, is covered in mud from just one side — like Lomedy had fallen onto it and then dragged himself across muddy terrain before getting up. He doesn't think much of it though, considering the trip here was likely just a long one. Trips and falls were bound to happen — Wemmbu simply notes it as something to clean off and moves on. 

Wemmbu thinks about Egg, who is meticulous with his wing-care, who, even at their lowest getting Wemmbu to help him clean them in a river nearby before they set off once more, was insulted when Wemmbu suggested hiding his wings when they were on the run. There is a sickening thought of a world where Egg's wings are clipped and shattered, and Wemmbu's stomach flips into knots, and he wonders if Flame feels the same.

Some quiet, derisive voice in the back of his head wonders if Flame is even thinking of Lomedy at all. 

It’s hours before Lomedy wakes again, this time, even less aware of where he is, who Wemmbu is, of what’s going on.  

Wemmbu can only tell that he’s awake by the way he shifts, face screwing up in pain — the past few hours, he’s been still as the dead, unmoving while sleeping. It’s the most peaceful Wemmbu thinks he’s seen him since he first landed in this place, even at the edge of death. 

“Can I — can — can — water?” Lomedy manages, seeming to give up on putting together a sentence. Wemmbu doesn’t answer, just reaching for a bottle somewhere on the ground. Finds one in the dust, getting up to fill it up in the sink a moment later. 

But Lomedy is more volatile than before — he makes a noise at the sound of Wemmbu’s footsteps, something that sounds half-way to wretched. It makes Wemmbu’s head snap back over to him, wondering what could’ve possibly happened in the seconds that he looked away before Lomedy starts speaking again. 

“Do you — I can — I’m guilty, I'll take res — responsibility, please… I’m thirsty, please.” 

His babbling has a desperate tone to it that Wemmbu has never heard from him — nothing that sounds so small and scrambling, on the verge of tears, has ever left Lomedy’s mouth before.

“I — what are you talking about?” Wemmbu says, stumbling over the words himself as he rushes back over to his side. Doesn’t know what to do, settling on pressing the lip of the full bottle to Lomedy’s mouth. 

Lomedy drinks like he's been deprived in the past. His hands tremble as they reach up to hold the bottle himself and it's a miracle none of it spills anywhere. His eyes are glazed over and vacant, and he's looking right at Wemmbu but it’s like he's seeing someone else instead. 

“Who are you taking responsibility for?” Wemmbu asks once Lomedy's done, his voice accidentally more authoritarian on impulse and Lomedy flinches, head hitting squarely against the wall. He gasps out, a silent sound of pain.

“F — Flame,” Lomedy stutters, followed by, “It — it hurts.” 

Puzzle pieces are beginning to click in Wemmbu's mind, and despite there only being a third of the pieces available to him, he doesn't think he likes the full picture. His attention is snapped to Lomedy's hands, pressed together at the wrists, rubbed raw from what Wemmbu assumes is rope. 

There's noticeable ropeburn — similar to the tears along Lomedy's wings. Wemmbu carefully grabs his forearms and pulls them apart, back down. It’s been perhaps the longest of times since Wemmbu's needed to be this gentle with fragile creatures, but Lomedy is on the cusp of death in this shitty cell and the only person who seems to care enough to do anything is him. 

He doesn't think he'd be able to stomach running into Flame at some point in the future, and having to tell him his best friend died hoping he'd come back for him, scared and hurting every other moment.

“Lomedy, bro,” Wemmbu eases him back into the bed, “It's me, Wemmbu.”

“Wemmbu?” 

He nods, “Yeah, you're in Law prison right now.”

“I'm not — I'm not outside?” 

“Not at all.”

“But the snow — I — I'm cold,” Lomedy says the last word quickly and tenses, as if he doesn't want Wemmbu to hear it but knows he will and is bracing himself for some sort of particularly violent reaction.

There is no reaction. Instead, there's Wemmbu pulling out a spare blanket, layering it atop the previous one. 

“There. Feel better?” he asks, “You've got a nasty fever, Lomedy.”

“Am I getting better?” No, is Wemmbu's immediate thought, you're getting worse.

“Well,” he says, dragging out the word, “Nothing we can’t work on.” His tone is light, forced in its ease, but Lomedy doesn’t seem to notice, only shivering further. Even under the layers already piled on him. Wemmbu doesn’t think adding another would be a good idea — he’s not totally confident in his medical knowledge, but he knows that trying to brute force a fever by bending to all of Lomedy’s whims isn’t the best idea.  

“I might have to ask someone for a first-aid kit,” Wemmbu thinks aloud, tone imbued with a forced lightness when he says might, as though Lomedy wouldn’t die without one. “Lettuce might not — well. Hm. I could ask Deputy Ace —”

“No,” Lomedy says, breaths shortening in an instant, eyes wide with instant panic, body tensed as if ready to flee, “Is — is he here?”

“Here? Uh, not unless he's visiting or something.” 

At that, Lomedy visibly relaxes, the tension slipping from his figure. It's confusing — Wemmbu would argue that of the two leaders, Deputy Ace was a far nicer man than Lettuce could ever be, and struggles to understand why Lomedy reacted in the manner in which he did.

Unwilling to make him uncomfortable, Wemmbu doesn't press it, and instead rests his hand on Lomedy's shoulder, gently pressing him back into the mattress. 

“Go to sleep,” he says for what feels like the millionth time this night, “You'll feel better in the morning.”

Lomedy, very clearly, did not feel better in the morning. 

Night stretched out for far longer than Wemmbu’s felt it ever had before — the little sleep he got was restless, stress keeping him from ever fully falling asleep. A more derisive, young part of him that he’s grown past, since adventuring with Egg and learning just how large the world was, how small he was in comparison, growls in the back of his mind. 

Could just let him die, it suggests, bitter and awful. Tone biting and mean. No one cared about me, so what’s the point in caring about someone who’s going to be executed anyway. 

The guards come in not too long after sunrise, and Wemmbu’s eyes snap open, not as tired as he thought he would be, Spares a glance over at Lomedy, who is breathing softly, but still in short, sharp bursts.

Loppezz appears at the bars at the front of the cell and she glances in, eyes stopping briefly at Wemmbu; like she’s surprised he’s still there. For a moment, Wemmbu thinks she’s about to say something before her eyes track up to Lomedy’s curled up form, flicking away a moment after.

“Breakfast in ten,” she announces to the room, getting a few sleepy mumbles as replies from Fantst. Then, directly to Wemmbu, “You should get him up.” 

Wemmbu raises an eyebrow, pointing to Lomedy to ensure they’re talking about the same guy, “Him?” 

Loppezz sighs, as if Wemmbu has already managed to get on her nerves just as the day has begun, “Yes, him. No slacking, you know this.” 

“He is genuinely on death’s doorstep,” Wemmbu argues, beginning to stand up and placing himself in front of Loppezz, effectively blocking Lomedy from her line of sight, “Have you even looked at his injuries?” 

There is a look of guilt that washes over Loppezz’s face that Wemmbu expects to disappear in an instant, and when it doesn’t he packs on the heat — digging into Loppezz’s kind nature that now seemed so foreign to him, like a language he had lost the meaning to.

“Alright, if you want to wake him up and tell him to walk on that leg of his, be my guest,” Wemmbu says sarcastically, grin on his face that’s too sharp, “What’s the work for today? More mining? Or are you going to have us fight each other again? Just let me know so he can prepare.” 

“It was —” 

“Actually,” Wemmbu interrupts, “Matter of fact, step in here a moment, would you?” 

Maybe it’s the decisiveness in his voice, or the sickly, wet sound that comes from Lomedy’s throat as he coughs, but in a few moments Loppezz’s key is unlocking the door and Wemmbu is grabbing onto her wrist — not to fight but to pull her over to Lomedy’s bed. Her white shoes are immediately stained pink but neither of them have the mind to say anything about it, and as they approach the sleeping farmer, Wemmbu rolls up Lomedy’s trousers to expose the wound.

When Loppezz let Wemmbu into Lomedy’s cell the night before, it was dark. Lights off, Wemmbu’s vision adjusting to the darkness to work through it. 

Even then, unable to see anything in clear detail, Wemmbu could only compare Lomedy’s infected leg to rot — like the peeling flesh of zombies, in desperate need of something other than whatever meagre bandages he could fashion out of his jumpsuit. 

Somehow, in the light, it looks even worse.

Wemmbu steels himself not to balk. Still, he finds himself looking at Loppezz’s reaction as an excuse to keep his eyes away and thinks that it’s probably a good thing he doesn’t have an appetite right now. Loppezz, however, can’t look away. Her eyes stay trained, fixed on where the blood oozes out in small drops, and Wemmbu watches as her face goes ashen.

“Save that look for the execution,” he says to her lowly, and Loppezz fails to suppress a flinch.

“Fine,” she says eventually, and behind her Wemmbu can see the others lined up in a row, looking just past him to Lomedy — to the wound on display — and he remembers rather suddenly, that any conversations that happen within the cells are also within earshot to everybody around.  There’s a wobble in Loppezz’s voice, and she takes in a deep breath, then another, and then a third before it starts sounding normal again, “He can stay — I’ll get someone to bring him his share of food.”

Immediately, Wemmbu asks, “Can I stay with him?”

He catches Baablu giving him an incredulous look out of the corner of his eye, but doesn’t care to acknowledge it, or the way Fantst elbows him sharply in the side as if to say are you hearing what I’m hearing? 

Zam also speaks up, her voice ringing around the room, “Can I —”

“Nope,” Loppezz shuts her down without blinking, “Two of you I can make a case for, three is out of the question. Go have breakfast, Zam, you rarely get to have it with other people.” 

Zam’s low, muttered reply of, “By choice,” doesn’t go unheard.

Out of the corner of his eye, Wemmbu sees Lomedy begin to move — not the regular twitches and shudders that seem to be a subconscious thing, but full movements where he rolls onto his stomach with a groan, face turned to the side and eyes beginning to slowly blink. 

Loppezz bolts out of the room, guilt and regret now a red stain on her perfect, un-creased shoes, and Wemmbu knows that the sight of just one of Lomedy’s wounds — ignoring it was objectively the worst one — would keep her awake at night for many weeks to come.

One of the guards, hanging back and watching silently, closes the cell door, the rest of the prisoners led out as Lomedy wakes up further — not any less delirious than during the most worrying swings of the fever from the night before.

“Flame?” Lomedy mumbles, eyes closing again, and his voice is laced with so much sleep that Wemmbu’s sure he won’t stay awake much longer.

“Not Flame,” Wemmbu amends, unwilling to make the same mistakes as the night before. Can’t stomach taking advantage of him any further, seeing the clear way his leg is slowly eroding. “Wemmbu.” 

“Oh,” Lomedy breathes out, “Sorry.”

It’s the last thing Wemmbu needs to hear from him  — reminds him too much of the way he apologized to Lettuce his first night here, where Wemmbu saw him as nothing more than someone to keep himself entertained.

Apologies aren’t something that he’s practiced in; it’s far easier to bulldoze through situations, finding things to fix rather than regret, unwilling to dwell for any longer than seems necessary. Wemmbu is a man of familiar habits, and this doesn’t change — not in the span of a few days, thrown into a situation he wasn’t expecting, one that escalated before he could even begin to get caught up. 

Wemmbu does not apologize, but he lays a wet cloth on Lomedy’s head and hopes it makes up for his lack of words. 

“Wemmbu?” Lomedy says again, voice fainter with each sentence, “Wemmbu, it — it hurts—” His words begin to speed up, picking up pace, like Wemmbu won’t allow him to finish. His stomach drops and curdles with multiple feelings, and as he peers over at Lomedy’s face, he can see fresh tears clinging to his eyelashes but refusing to fall.

“What does?” Wemmbu’s voice is uncharacteristically soft, mirroring Lomedy’s by accident, and he can make multiple guesses on what seems to be causing the most pain. 

The question comes out by nature, an act of comfort in this cell where Lomedy’s injuries fester and peel and Wemmbu knows, despite all his denial, that if he can’t clean those wounds out by today then Lomedy’s execution will happen without a crowd. Wemmbu can almost imagine Egg’s running monologue, if he had been there in the moment. 

You’re trying to take care of someone? You? Oh, it’s so cooked if you’re the only guy to turn to, he can hear his voice now. 

Yeah, Wemmbu thinks, a little bit of muted hysteria in there, the longer his question goes unanswered. It’s so cooked. 

The more Lomedy wakes up, the more his pain receptors do the same, until the avian is curling up into a miserable ball of misery and pain. He makes a noise that’s much like one of a wounded animal caught in a trap and it’s then that Wemmbu realises he’s turned onto his shattered wing, weight pressing down heavily against the bones threatening to give way, elbow digging into the cuts. 

Lomedy’s too out of it to notice, a silent, sobbing mess from the pain that comes from practically everywhere and Wemmbu almost trips over his feet with how fast he’s rushing to pull him up.

“Wemmbu —” Lomedy chokes out, gasping, “Wemmbu, make it stop.”

“I will, I will,” Wemmbu says, trying to keep his voice from tilting with panic, and he loops an arm around Lomedy’s waist to avoid touching his wing at all, and very carefully begins to pull him up, “I’ve got you, dude.”

Lomedy’s hands immediately find purchase in the fabric along Wemmbu’s back, gripping onto it tightly. As Wemmbu shifts him into a sitting position, heavy weight off broken bones, Lomedy’s face falls onto his shoulder — an awkward, makeshift hug of sorts. 

“Uh,” Wemmbu says, unsure if he should pull away, but the fabric where Lomedy's eyes are is beginning to stick to his skin from the tears. He decides, ultimately, that Lomedy can have this, and the next time he needs one — a hug, that is — he can go to Zam.

Eventually the pain seems to subside, because Lomedy pulls back, swaying slightly, his grip on Wemmbu vastly loosened but still there and his eyes begin to droop again. 

“Hey, no,” Wemmbu admonishes, pushing Lomedy gently away, letting him lean against the wall, unwilling to let him go straight back to sleep before breakfast’s been delivered, “Eat first, then sleep, okay?”

Lomedy mumbles a half-hearted attempt at a sentence, eyes already closing, and Wemmbu just shakes his head, choosing to interpret it as an agreement. 

Time passes, slowly but surely, Wemmbu walking through each moment in their usual routine as he waits for Loppezz to send breakfast their way. By now, they should be having their usual cafeteria brawl for food — maybe not as intense, because Wemmbu likes to instigate more often than not, but he’s sure Baablu will take any chance to punch Fantst if he can find one. 

Through it all, Lomedy starts mumbling again, nonsensical things just to himself and, curiosity a constant dictator to Wemmbu's decisions, results in him leaning down to catch whatever Lomedy was saying.

It takes a bit of strained effort, the first few words a jumble of mess before he can understand anything. Lomedy’s head tilts his way, eyes unseeing, and Wemmbu is half-expecting to hear Flame’s name again when Lomedy speaks again. 

“Oh,” he mumbles, sounding vaguely surprised, “It’s you.” 

“Yeah?” Wemmbu says, confused, “I reminded you not even like ten minutes ago.” 

“That can’t be right,” Lomedy’s head lolls, like he’s trying to shake his head in denial, “It’s been years.” 

“It's been genuinely no time at all, I actually haven't left your bedside since last n —” A sharp gasp of realisation from Lomedy cuts him off, and it takes a second for Wemmbu's heartbeat to slow.

“Your mace!” Lomedy says, voice rising almost excitedly, and Wemmbu winces hearing the rasp, instinctively shushing him to be quieter. Lomedy's voice drops to a whisper immediately, and he cracks his eyes open, just the smallest amount to look around for anyone. 

“Sorry,” he mouths, followed by, “Are you here for your mace?”

“Why would you have it?” Wemmbu asks. Probably a mistake to, honestly — Lomedy doesn’t seem very tethered to reality at all, clearly speaking to someone that isn’t Wemmbu. 

But — well. Loneliness is something that Wemmbu doesn’t consider very often, but here, in this cell after spending days isolated from friends, anyone who wasn’t an enemy, he’s reminded that the only person he can speak to without a voice in the back of his mind screaming that they tried to kill him once is dying in front of him. 

He’s selfish in this regard. Hearing Lomedy’s soft tone, reserved for his friends, and pretending it’s for him. 

He, very suddenly, has the visceral urge to go see Egg.

“You gave it to me?” Lomedy's voice pulls him from his thoughts, “Before you… before…” His face changes, a frown gracing his features the more he seems to remember something. 

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says, suddenly far less enthusiastic. 

“What do you mean?” Wemmbu asks despite himself, but Lomedy doesn't answer. Perhaps it was good timing, or more so ironic depending on who you ask, as he’s interrupted by —

Click. Bolt. Swing. 

— Breakfast. 

He turns around, ready to complain about the frustratingly long time it had taken them to show up, but his words die in his throat when he sees who had graced their presence. 

Lettuce looks the picture of a saint as he walks in with two loaves of bread and some water bottles, smiling jovially as he greets them both, “Good morning!” 

“Lettuce,” Wemmbu says evenly. The cell door is opened, and this time, Lettuce doesn't step in, just holds out the tray for Wemmbu to grab — which he does briskly, before walking back to Lomedy and placing the tray on the bed.

“Before you sit down,” Lettuce says, not having moved from the door, “I'd like you to come with me, please.”

“What for?”

“We'll discuss that in a moment.”

Wemmbu rubs his temple, sighing, “Look, this guy —” and he points to Lomedy, “— is probably going to starve if I don't sit here and watch. Can it wait?” 

Lettuce's smile seems frozen on his face, strained if anything, “I think he'll be fine for half an hour or so.” Wemmbu doesn't really like Lettuce's definition of ‘fine’, and also doesn't like how he's talking to Wemmbu as if he can deny his request. 

“We can't talk here?” 

Lettuce gestures to Lomedy, whose head is lolled to the side, eyes fluttering closed whilst the flush on his face from the fever seems to be spreading, “I'm afraid it's not secure here.”

“I don’t care what he hears,” Wemmbu says, only slightly surprised to find that it’s true. 

“Bruh,” Lettuce deadpans, “Just get out, man, we can come back in genuinely just a moment.”

Maybe any other day, Wemmbu would have agreed and gone along, just for the sake of not upsetting the person who’s been holding his life in his hands the entire time he’s been at this prison, but — after a long, restless night spent watching over Lomedy, watching him cycle through hope and bitter, awful fear, all the while hurting beyond belief — Wemmbu feels at the end of his rope. Unwilling to take a step outside; something in the back of his mind screams at him that if he steps outside now, Lettuce won’t let him back in. 

After all, it was Loppezz’s momentary kindness that allowed him entry in the first place. Lettuce has never been the same as her. 

But the thought of last night strikes an idea in his mind. “I'll go with you,” he says rather abruptly after the bout of silence, “If you give me a first aid kit.”

Lettuce sounds genuinely amused at that, “He's going to die anyway,” and they both look towards Lomedy, “I'm sure he can hold out until his execution date.”

“He won't,” Wemmbu says, and it sounds like a promise. 

“God, it's never easy with you, huh?” Lettuce rubs his eyes, tired despite the day just having begun, “Alright. Prolong his suffering, by all means — now let's go.” He emphasises the last word, impatience stressing the syllable and Wemmbu takes one look back at Lomedy before stepping outside the cell and in between the guards. 

Lettuce’s office is just as Wemmbu remembers it — far too clean, like he never actually spends any time doing any work in the prison, lavishly decorated for the sake of stroking his own ego, and entirely too small, lack of windows making it feel somehow more claustrophobic than Wemmbu’s own cell.  

“Take a seat,” Lettuce opens, as he always does, and gestures to the chair opposite him. Wemmbu stays standing. The pin-up smile on Lettuce’s face drops, one act of resistance enough for him to drop the act in front of Wemmbu — it’s almost funny if it weren’t for the circumstances.

“It wasn’t a question, Wemmbu,” he says pointedly, and the guards on either side of Wemmbu push him by the shoulders into the chair, despite his multiple voiced complaints.  

“Fine,” he says, narrowing his eyes at the guards, and shaking their grasps off, unwillingly sitting down. He says on edge, never relaxing into the seat and very blatantly turns his head every few minutes towards the door, ensuring his only way out was not blocked off.

“I’d take this more seriously if I was you,” Lettuce comments, “It is your execution we’re discussing, after all.” 

Frankly, Wemmbu’s tired of hearing it.

“What about it?” He sighs, mentally preparing himself for the mindless drivel Lettuce is about to force him to listen to. 

“We, and by we, I mean the Law, have decided that due to your recent… behaviour,” Lettuce says, like he can’t think of a better word, “To prevent you from trying to escape again, we’ve decided to move your execution date up.” 

Wemmbu thinks it would’ve been better if Lettuce had asked him to pick out the wood for his coffin instead. There is the very sudden and nauseating realization of mortality — that his life would likely be over in a few days, and the one person he cared about on this server would likely never find out until his body had begun rotting underground.

“Right,” is all he says, slow and even, whilst he collects his thoughts, “Why tell me this? What would stop me from increasing my attempts if I know I have less time left?” 

Lettuce smiles at that, like he’s been waiting for Wemmbu to ask.“I’ve noticed you made a new friend here — Lomedy?” 

Wemmbu doesn’t reply, but his skin crawls the moment Lettuce brings up his name. 

“You haven’t had to worry about bringing him along during your last few escape attempts — you haven’t exactly been trying too hard, considering you’ve decided to play caretaker — which reminds me! You said you wanted one of these?” 

Lettuce fumbles for something under his desk before pulling out a first aid kit, laying it down on the table between it. Before Wemmbu can take it, he puts one hand flat on top of it, leaning a little closer. 

“Frankly, it’s a bit of a risk to be giving you this first aid kit in the first place,” Lettuce starts, his voice taking on that benevolent tone he puts on when he’s packaging commands as kind requests. “But I’m sure that even with it, he’s not going to make it very far. And I would hate for you to have to worry about what state he’ll be in next time you try to run. So if you take this, I’ll ask you to remember that I’ll be keeping a close eye on his prognosis, especially so if you’re not there to do so. 

He ends with a smile; all teeth, a bit too sharp compared to his usual close-mouthed grins. 

“What do you mean by that?” Wemmbu says quietly, a tone he hasn’t heard from himself in a long time, “What do you mean by what ‘state’ he’d be in without me?”

“If you can’t put it together yourself, I’m sure Lomedy can inform you of what to expect, based on his trip over.”

And Wemmbu thinks he’s going to leave it there, before he tips his head, as if considering something, before speaking again. 

“You know,” he says, settling down in his chair and getting comfortable as opposed to Wemmbu’s rigid posture, like he was about to tell the room a story before pausing — looking over Wemmbu’s shoulder. His gaze naturally follows, ending up at the two guards bordering the doors

“You guys can leave for now,” he says. It doesn’t sound like a suggestion. The guards look at each other for a moment, likely debating between themselves if this breaks protocol or not, before shrugging and filing out, their shadows discernible from the inside once the door swings shut behind them. 

“As I was saying,” Lettuce continues, clasping his hands together as if reminiscing, “Back when I was a child —” 

“Are you serious?” Wemmbu interrupts. Lettuce levels him with a flat look. 

“Don’t interrupt me. Anyway, back when I was a child, more… naive, we’ll say, I found a rabbit caught in one of my family’s fox-traps. Clearly not what we were expecting to catch, it was quite a shame — the poor thing had started to try and gnaw its leg off to escape by the time I had stumbled upon it.” 

His face is reminiscing, as if he’s genuinely thinking back on a random childhood memory while sitting in an empty office with Wemmbu in front of him. It’s off-putting; Wemmbu shifts uncomfortably as Lettuce starts to tap his finger, slow and rhythmic, against the surface of the first aid kit. 

Tap. Tap. Tap. 

“I took it home — not the best idea, at the time. My family was already starving that winter, stressed over making it to the spring without having to worry about another mouth to feed. But I was insistent. Cried. Begged.” 

Lettuce doesn’t blink at the descriptors, even as Wemmbu thinks they’re the last words the man would’ve ever described himself with. Even as a child.  

“My parents gave in. Told me that it would be my sole responsibility — I was excited, can you believe it?” Lettuce laughs, almost making Wemmbu jump, the noise a loud burst in the quiet room. The air around them is thick with tension, till Wemmbu’s shoulders are stiff and he’s gritting his teeth. 

Tap. Tap. Tap. 

“I was excited that this… poor creature had been hurt, just so I could try and take care of it, nurse it back to health.” 

And Wemmbu can’t help but think back to himself, when Lomedy had first arrived in the prison — weak, hurting, clearly unwell, while he only took an interest in him because he needed something to keep himself occupied. Keep himself from getting bored. 

His stomach churns. 

“I wasn’t successful, of course,” Lettuce says, very flippantly. He waves a hand, shrugging his shoulders. “In the end, the kindest thing I could do for it was put it out of its misery. My dad told me it was practically torture to have prolonged the inevitable as long as I did.” 

Wemmbu’s mouth is dry as he swallows. “Your dad sounds like a dick.” 

“Oh, he was,” Lettuce agrees easily, “but he was right.” 

Tap. Tap. Tap. 

Slide. 

The first aid kit is pushed to the end of the desk, Lettuce fixing Wemmbu with a smile — not his put-on ones, benevolent and performative, nor his sharper, threatening ones. Just a genuine smile, freezing Wemmbu in place as he takes his hand off the first aid kit. 

“Good luck, Wemmbu. Truly. In whatever you decide to do.” 

Miraculously, Lomedy isn't asleep by the time Wemmbu comes back. He's halfway there — slumped down uncomfortably, eyes half-lidded and a yawn stuck in his throat — but still awake. He's eaten half his share of the bread, and clasps a water bottle in his hand tightly enough that his knuckles go white.  

“Yo,” Wemmbu greets, less convinced of Lomedy’s inevitable death than before, “Great news.” 

He lifts up the first aid kit, watching Lomedy’s gaze follow before his eyes widen slightly. 

“They actually gave you one?” He asks. Voice still raspy, torn to shreds, but lucid. Far more so than anything he’s said the past night — no longer soft and vulnerable, just blank and slightly guarded the way he’s been the majority of his stay here. 

Unconsciously, Wemmbu’s shoulders relax from their previous tension, unaware of just how worried he was that he would be coming back to the farmer on the edge of death, delirious and seeing people who weren’t there again. 

“Yup,” Wemmbu says, and doesn’t say a word about Lettuce’s story or the news that his execution will be moved up. Things that Lomedy doesn’t need to worry about right this moment; the last thing he wants to do is stress the man out right after he’s managed to get himself together. 

He takes a seat next to the bed, cross-legged on the ground the way he spent a majority of the night before, only slightly self-conscious for a moment when Lomedy fixes him with an odd look. The brief discomfort at his gaze goes as quick as it comes — if it’s to be compared to how he’s seen Lomedy the night before, Wemmbu’s sure that he’ll walk away with less to be ashamed of. 

“So you’re fully back to yourself now,” Wemmbu comments, for lack of anything else to say. Lomedy nods stiffly, free hand curling into the blanket laid over his legs. 

“Yeah,” Lomedy says. Then, joltingly, he offers the rest of the bread to Wemmbu. “Here.” 

For a moment, Wemmbu thinks that Lomedy might still be delirious after all — the last they spoke while he was lucid, he was shouting in his face, all biting words and insults and blame laid at Wemmbu’s feet. A far cry from Lomedy offering him food without holding it over his head, or something. 

Maybe he remembers more from the night before than Wemmbu thought. He takes the loaf, slow and careful out of quickly-ingrained habit, and nods in thanks. 

It’s silent besides Wemmbu chewing on his share, stomach growling even as he eats. It’s only a few minutes before he’s finished the bread off, dragging forward the first aid kit Lettuce gave him the moment his hands are free. He’s flicking the latches open and opening the lid before Lomedy can say much, blinking at the contents. 

Bandages, clean rolls instead of the makeshift ones Wemmbu’s made with pieces of his jumpsuit. One healing potion, glowing red and unused, cork still sealed at the top. Nylon thread and curved needles, tweezers and scissors, even a small bottle of alcohol and cotton pads — probably to clean out a wound manually, something that would no doubt take ages and only put Lomedy through agony all the way through. 

Thankfully, the healing potion is the perfect solution, Wemmbu knows — it would kill infection from the inside out before knitting together the worst, life-threatening damage. The last, untouched parts of the wound would be unaffected, but with nylon thread and a curved needle to go with, Wemmbu knows more than well enough what to do with what he has. 

“This is great,” Wemmbu says aloud, unused to the silence now that Lomedy is more awake. It’s the first time he’s been truly alone with him, no other prisoners listening in to their conversations, while Lomedy wasn’t seeing ghosts in Wemmbu’s place. “The healing potion is going to deal with the worst of the damage — you won’t have one foot in the grave after that.” 

“But it’s going to hurt,” Lomedy says. It’s not in that quiet, hurting voice Wemmbu is half-expecting. Instead, it’s matter-of-fact, like he’s discussing the weather. 

Probably already knows of the effects, Wemmbu thinks, after spending so much time with Flame. He doesn’t think the man is one to sit still and wait for natural healing to work through injuries; not with the amount of people constantly clamouring to fight him, or the rough and heavy way he uses the full force of his body in each swing of his sword. 

“Yeah,” Wemmbu says plainly. He doesn’t need to say you’ve been hurting all this time; Lomedy is more than well-aware. Would probably take it as condescension, if anything. 

“Alright,” Lomedy nods. His shoulders relax slightly when Wemmbu doesn’t say anything more, like he was expecting a barrage. 

“Whenever you think you’re ready, you can take this,” Wemmbu says, carefully pulling the healing potion out of the first aid kit, voice slightly tight as he imagines what would happen if he dropped it — there’s no way on earth Lettuce would give him a second — and pretends that he isn’t on the verge of losing his mind after spending a full night with little rest stressing over whether Lomedy would live or die. 

“Just so you know, though,” Wemmbu adds, “Your leg and wings — really, any of your injuries that’ve put you to the point of death — are probably going to be burning for a while after they’ve healed.” 

He seems slightly surprised at this. “But I’ve seen Flame fight right after downing one of these?” 

It’s a point in Lomedy’s favour that he doesn’t stumble over the man’s name. Wemmbu shrugs. “When fighters get used to healing potions, they can push past the worst effects. Not recommended, of course, but.” 

He ends off his sentence with a hand wave, putting the bottle in Lomedy’s lap before pushing himself up to sit on the side of his bed, instead of sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor where he barely came up to Lomedy’s shoulder. 

On the same level, Lomedy doesn’t look nearly as small as he did the night before. Not any less determined, even as he seems tired beyond belief. Stubborn despite the pain, clinging to life with hands digging into it, refusing to let go. 

“You’ll be here?” Lomedy asks, and coming from him, fully lucid, it’s enough for Wemmbu to blink in surprise. 

“Yeah,” he says after a while, nodding slowly. “I will be.” 

Lomedy takes in a deep breath, seeming to steel himself before his fingers are working at the cork of the healing potion. 

“Alright,” he says, “Good,” before lifting the bottle to his lips and downing it entirely in one go. 

Lomedy’s keeling over himself immediately afterwards, eyes screwed shut while he hisses in pain. The hand that was curled tight around a water bottle shifts to his jumpsuit, over his heart — like it was racing and he was trying to keep it from beating straight out of his chest, tearing through skin and bone in the process. 

“Yeah, it’s rough,” Wemmbu says sympathetically when Lomedy starts to shake. His free hand, scrunching his blanket between thin fingers claws for something else, ending up on Wemmbu’s wrist — before he can pull back, Lomedy squeezes, hard, letting out a shuddering exhale all the while. 

“Only letting this slide this once,” Wemmbu says, as if he hasn’t let Lomedy cling to him earlier, “Because I know this shit hurts bad if it’s your first time using it.” 

“So kind of you," Lomedy manages through gritted teeth. Sweat drips down his temple, not anywhere as concerning as Wemmbu would’ve found it the night before — this is evidence that it’s working. He peers over at his leg, exposed and untouched by the blankets that were laid over him, finding the worst of the infection almost — melting away. For lack of a better word to describe it. 

It doesn’t literally melt, leaking into crevices of the wound that were raw and exposed to air, but the way the worst of the injury, the bits that looked like rot appear to disappear presents that illusion. 

Wemmbu relaxes, even as Lomedy’s grip grows tighter. 

“Thanks,” he says through clenched teeth. Wemmbu looks up at Lomedy’s face, blinking. Lomedy doesn't meet his eyes, still closed, though not as tightly, as though he was adapting to the feeling. “For helping.” 

Wemmbu doesn't say of course, because there's no way that he or Lomedy would believe that, but he shrugs, saying, “You're welcome.”

As formal as it sounds, it suits him far better than no problem, or it was my pleasure, or, anytime. 

Silence naturally follows. Not filled with tension like the night before, nor charged with anger as per usual whenever Wemmbu and Lomedy end up working near each other at Loppezz’s behest. 

It's broken by Lomedy, surprisingly. 

Even as the pangs of pain from the healing potion must be wracking through him still, he says, “I’m sorry. For saying everything I did.” 

For a brief moment, Wemmbu thinks he's speaking about the delirious ramblings from the night before. Then, he's reminded of their argument — that feels a million years in the past, and waves his free hand dismissively. 

“Whatever. I forgot about that entirely,” he says, not even lying. Between stressing about Lomedy's fragile hold on life and the way he heard the man speak, stripped of all defences and at his most vulnerable, he had very little time to think on the words that Lomedy flung at him at his angriest. 

Besides, Wemmbu thinks, with far less malice than the first time he said it, they clearly weren't meant for me. 

“...How did you end up in here, anyway?” Wemmbu asks. He knows Lomedy hears the underlying question — how he got in such an awful state, why he's at the brink of death when none of the rest of them are. 

It's silent for a long while. Where Lomedy breathes, slow and ragged, as the potion of healing runs its course. Wemmbu is almost ready to accept that Lomedy was going to pretend that he hadn't said anything at all before he answers. 

“Flame was running from the Law and he came to my farm to hide after I told him I was done with him. When they showed up, he ran. They needed someone to take responsibility for his actions.” 

Lomedy pauses here. Eyes still closed, pupils moving like he was reliving that very day in the present moment. 

“Someone had to take the fall,” Lomedy says, very quietly. It’s the closest he’s sounded to his delirious self the night before, “And I was there to volunteer.” 

It doesn’t sound like the full story — not in the slightest, but Wemmbu can’t help the question that escapes his lips regardless. 

“Why would you take the fall for Flame, though?” He asks. 

“Someone needed to,” Lomedy repeats, as though this was an explanation that required no further elaboration. “If he was going to run away from taking responsibility, then — as his friend, I could have stopped him somehow. Done something.” 

Wemmbu blinks at the honesty; wouldn’t have expected it, from the way he and Lomedy had been at odds for a majority of their time here. He supposes there’s very little to hide from someone when they’ve seen you at your weakest, pulling Lomedy back from the edge of death to live another day. Something he was told was stupid, over and over, considering he was going to die anyway. 

For a brief moment, he wants to ask Lomedy if he thought the same thing. It’s an idea that goes as quick as it comes. 

“But you can’t control him,” Wemmbu points out the obvious. “If he was going to run from the Law and refuse to get arrested, then how is that on you?” 

Lomedy shrugs. His voice is still tight with tension, pain tinging its edges even as he grows used to it as he speaks, “I could’ve stopped him.” 

“You’re a farmer.” 

“I gave him my mace,” Lomedy says through gritted teeth. “He still has it.” 

“And that still isn’t your fault. That’s just how Flame is. You can’t change someone’s nature that easily,” Wemmbu says, and he’s almost surprised how easy it is to talk about Flame as though he knows the man — like he was a friend of his, same as Lomedy, knowing the way his mind works. 

“That’s not fair,” Lomedy bursts, knuckles so white around Wemmbu’s wrist that he nearly winces just out of virtue, reacting to the fact that his grip has gotten so tight. “It — when he left he didn’t even hesitate. He just — ran. The moment I told him that if — if losing meant so much then he could just — go.” 

And Wemmbu doesn’t know what to say to that. Almost regrets putting himself in this situation in the first place, if it didn’t clear up so many things that he had been wondering about — putting together the pieces he was offered now and painting a far clearer, different picture of Lomedy. One of responsibility borne of guilt being placed on his shoulders, bitter anger and betrayal and hurt against Flame that warred with a desire for him to come back for Lomedy instead of leaving him behind. 

“If — if —” Lomedy continues, shaking his head and finally opening his eyes, looking right at Wemmbu as he speaks. “If it’s not my responsibility, then it’s Flame’s and he left me knowing that, and everything that — everything I went through — for him — it’s pointless.” 

The limp in his stride that Wemmbu knows won’t fade, the way he cried from the pain of his wings shifting the night before, the rot in his wound, the bruise painting his side blue and yellow, the way scars litter his skin. 

Lomedy’s eyes, wide and full of something that Wemmbu can recognize now as not just pain, but betrayal, anger, sorrow, heartbreak, at the mere idea that everything he had suffered would be for nothing. 

Wemmbu doesn’t make it a habit to be kind, but he isn't unnecessarily cruel. He doesn’t push it. 

“I’m sure you did what you thought was best, then,” Wemmbu says, instead of tentatively saying that maybe it was all for nothing. It’s not even a lie — from what he knows of Lomedy, he works on logic where he isn’t overwhelmed by feelings. “I don’t think there’s any person who’d know what to do in that scenario until they were living in that moment. There’s no point in wasting time on hypotheticals.”

It seems to be the right thing to say. He relaxes, grip on Wemmbu’s wrist lightening. For a moment, Wemmbu thinks it’s because the pain from the healing potion has passed before he hisses again, curling into himself as a sharper spasm must go through him. 

Still, his body doesn’t carry the same tension it had only a few moments ago. He looks the least stressed he has since first arriving — like the simple act of carrying those thoughts alone was enough to have him constantly tense, sharp and angry. 

What a thing to have on your shoulders, Wemmbu thinks. The question of whether or not a friend was worth losing a working leg over — especially when he couldn’t piece together whether or not he even cared. 

Wemmbu doesn’t think he’d have an answer, if he was in Lomedy’s place. By the way Lomedy doesn’t push him further, or say another word on the matter, he must have figured out what conclusion Wemmbu came to. 

When Wemmbu leaves his cell later in the day, after stitching up what’s left of the wound on his calf a few hours later, Loppezz leads him back to the other prisoners, Lomedy given the rest of the day off to recover while Wemmbu is handed a wooden pickaxe and told to mine. 

Zam ends up by his side. For the first time since getting here, he doesn’t think of their shared past — just their present-day situation, both on the same level, every prisoner here powerless in their own ways. 

“Is he going to be alright?” She asks, very quietly so the guards don’t hear after a few long minutes in silence by his side. 

“Yeah,” Wemmbu sighs out. “I think so.” 

It’s the most honest he’s been with her in years. 

It's a failed escape attempt that gets Wemmbu sent, predictably, into solitary. The one he prepped so long for, made calculated moves and waited and waited until they had fallen into a routine enough that the item checks had stopped, and the guards stopped breathing down their necks — all of which came tumbling down in the face of armour and a sword. 

The others don't seem as discontent as he is, though none of them are up for execution in a matter of days, but Wemmbu can't help but fidget in the face of his mortality. He stalks around his cell, back and forth and back and forth, enough that if it wasn’t hardened stone beneath him, he would've likely carved out a path by now.

As expected, after a few hours, the redstone lamps begin to flick — on, off, on, off, on, off — and Wemmbu is plunged into darkness. He takes a moment to let his eyes adjust, the shapes taking form, and silhouetted against the moonlight is a familiar figure in a red-trimmed chestplate.

“Spoke,” he greets begrudgingly.

“Wemmbu!” Spoke replies, much more gleefully, grabbing onto the bars and leaning in,“I take it you've made your choice?”

Wemmbu scratches the back of his head, sighing at the idea of agreeing to something Spoke had proposed — though he suspects that their escape will be rather messy, and any deal he makes now could simply just be avoided so long as he doesn't see Spoke afterwards. 

That, and that he needs to get back to Lomedy. Lettuce’s threats swim circles in his head, and Wemmbu can’t help but think of Lomedy alone in the holding cell, barely having clawed himself back to lucidity and still yet weak — imagines Lettuce walking in without a single person to oppose him when he inevitably does something irreversible.

He needs Spoke's help, there's no getting around it.

“Get me out of here,” and it's the closest Wemmbu will ever get to a verbal agreement.

There’s a small pause, in which he expects his door to swing open and maybe an enderchest placed down so he can gear up — not for Spoke to peer through the bars with outward curiosity.

“That quick?” he asks, “Just a few days ago you were adamant on not accepting my help, what changed?”

There’s a crazed kind of look to the voidling the more Wemmbu inspects him, random twitches flitting across his body, stress so apparent his jet-black strands have begun to gray and a paranoid kind of fear that seems to be pushing him towards something specific.

“My execution date’s been pushed up,” Wemmbu shrugs, “And my last escape plan completely failed —” 

“Like I warned you.”

“— like you warned me.”

Spoke's eyes — hollow circles of plain white — bore into Wemmbu's, and he begins to smile.

“I'm so glad you've come to your senses,” he says jovially, opening the heavy iron door but blocking Wemmbu's way out, “But first, I need to hear you say it.”

“Bro, come on.”

“Just so we're on the same page,” Spoke promises, already placing down an enderchest.

Sighing, Wemmbu relents. “Fine, I owe you one. Happy?” 

“Very.” Spoke opens his enderchest and turns it towards Wemmbu, an open invitation, and barely thirty seconds later Wemmbu is walking out of his cell, a mace in his hand.

The rest are easy to gear — Spoke breaks their curse of binding shackles, giving them spare armour, and in no less uncertain terms, tells them to kill everyone they see. Escaping with Spoke is an option that fast forwards to the end.

By the time Wemmbu looks up — like really looks at his surroundings, he finds himself just outside the holding area. He runs in, boots thudding across the floor and beelines it to Lomedy's cell, Zam and the rest not far behind.

“Lomedy!” He forcefully pulls the door open, immediately greeted with the farmer in the same state he had left behind not so long ago. Relief floods him at the knowledge that Lettuce didn’t have time to follow through on his threat before he’s speaking, urgent, “Dude, we gotta go.”

“Go?” Lomedy asks, confused. He's laying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, no particular will to move, and before he knows it, he and Baablu are grabbing him by the arms and pulling him to his feet.

“Woah —” he stumbles for a moment, surprised and off-kilter, “What do you mean? Where are we going?” 

“We’re escaping, idiot, now hurry!”

Instead of running — or limping, really — to the door, Lomedy takes a step away from them instinctively, shaking his head, “No way, I can't do that.” 

Wemmbu groans, “Not this again.”

There's a hand on his shoulder before he can speak again — Spoke.

“We don't have much time,” he warns, “Either convince your friend or don't, we have to leave regardless.”

And the thought of leaving Lomedy here — knowing what Lettuce threatened him with, things that Wemmbu never thought to tell Lomedy when he was sick and still recovering — isn’t an option. 

“We're going,” he says to Lomedy, and it's less of a suggestion and more of a promise. Wemmbu lowers his voice, stepping forward, the closest he can get to a private conversation with the crowd behind him waiting impatiently for them to just leave. 

“I know why you want to stay, I get it, okay? But — Lomedy, if you throw your life away for Flame’s sake, you’re nothing but a martyr.” His voice is urgent and quick, sharp at the end when he hears Spoke clear his throat pointedly behind him. 

Lomedy's eyes widen just a fraction before he replies. “A thousand people, Wemmbu. Someone has to take responsibility.”

“It doesn't have to be you,” Wemmbu argues, “It especially shouldn't be you.” 

“Wemmbu —”

“We don't have the time to wait —” Wemmbu puts his hands on Lomedy’s shoulders, closer than he’s been since nursing him back from the edge of death nights ago, so far yet so present that he can still hear Lomedy’s fever-borne rambling about how he wanted nothing more than for Flame to come back — how much everything hurt. 

“— Lomedy, your death won't bring about any justice. Just — if you really want to die — if you think that taking responsibility for something you didn’t have a hand in is going to do anything for the people left behind, then you can stay here. If you really, truly believe that everything that happened to you was deserved.”

And he can see that it gets to Lomedy — sees the way his hands shake slightly, the way his throat bobs as he swallows, eyes flicking away from Wemmbu’s — but it’s not enough. Lomedy shuffles back slightly, as if ready to lay back down in his bed and wait for death to come. 

For a brief, fleeting moment, Wemmbu wants to shout in his face, a desire that comes and goes in a blink. 

As a last attempt to convince him, Wemmbu says the only thing that comes to mind instead. 

“What am I supposed to tell Flame?” 

It’s the pure, unfiltered truth, because what is Wemmbu going to say? 

Despite everything he’s heard since the beginning of Lomedy’s stay, despite how much Lomedy seemed dismissive and angry towards Flame in the moments where he wasn’t wishing he was by his side, Wemmbu thinks, and very adamantly believes, that something would probably break in Flame if he knew of Lomedy’s death — and Lomedy knows it. Wemmbu can tell by the way his eyes dart away, and his shoes scuff against the floor as he steps forward, closer to the exit.

“You really think he’d care?” 

He almost immediately agrees, just for the sake of getting out of here, before he registers the tone. Different from every other argument he's made for staying here. 

After the time they’ve spent here together, Wemmbu can tell that it’s a genuine question, not another attempt to stall. Realizes very suddenly that after Lomedy, Wemmbu might be the closest person to Flame. Something that Lomedy has come to accept a long time before Wemmbu ever put those pieces together himself — maybe why he blew up at him so many days ago in the first place. Maybe even why he's so hesitant to leave now; afraid to leave and realize that he suffered for someone who didn't even care at the end of it all.  

Wemmbu is honest when he answers; knowing that if he lied, Lomedy would take execution over freedom without hesitation. 

“I think there wouldn’t be anyone who cares more.”

Lomedy is out the door in seconds.