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WHO: Eleven & Five
WHEN: Dec 5th
WHERE: Serthica Beacon
WHAT: Catching up
WARNINGS: heavy topics

Gears shift. They lodge tightly in his throat and echo the throb of his heartbeat. Between his ears, sands shift and fall. For a moment, he's there again, time threading between his fingers, watching the sand fall in endless curtains, and the air too still to breathe.

Eleven blinks, swinging around, but there are no transparent creatures climbing walls and dissolving into a quiet rush of sand. No dais, no sphere, no Timekeeper- only blood rushing through his ears and pounding in his chest. He breathes, straightening from a tense stance, and flexes his fingers from their twitching grasp for his sword.

The sense of being out of place isn't new, and while there are a handful of people, the air isn't hostile. Instead, it feels vaguely expectant, though no one seems to be particularly focused on him. Eleven steps forward and casts about for anything resembling familiarity.

There is something about one of the figures that pulls at his mind and tugs at his memory. A boy he feels he might have seen once before, but finds himself unable to place..

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Five didn't think they'd ever see the beacon in this cursed city. He'd only voted to stay to deal with the threat he helped create, but in the end his one opportunity was wasted on stubborn curiosity. — That same curiosity is why he's near the beacon now. It's the third time he's watched it activate, and he's only growing in theories about how it works. Whatever is behind it, it's faulty and unstable. Far too risky for taking his family back home even if he hadn't lost them at every turn.

It doesn't surprise him when it breaks.

He realizes then that he hasn't seen Allison since it started up. A nagging worry tugs at his gut as he stalks through the remaining crowd, but he stops when he finds a familiar face staring at him.

"Eleven?" He narrows his eyes and changes direction towards him. This isn't the first time the beacon has called someone again, but never someone he knew. The last few months pushed him to the edge of what his sanity could take, and now Eleven appears, untouched by any of it. (Unless he's overestimating his sanity, but he's not prepared for trying to analyze another hallucination.)

"Why did you come back?"

The boys calls him by his name rather than his title. Although, that would have been more telling a few months ago, before word had begun to spread too far. The question that follows as the boy approaches is a touch more pressing, however.

Eleven turns again, finally taking in the metal mechanism behind him. There's something about it, like he should recognize the contraption. But it isn't a Sphere, and still there aren't any tockles in sight.

"You look familiar," he allows, glancing back with furrowed brows. "But I don't recognize where we are."

Five quietly studies him after that remark. It's disturbing how often magic can alter memories, and he's had more experience in that than he cares to. He would think of it as a clean slate, if Eleven didn't already say he looked familiar. Some incidents are better left forgotten.

"That's because you weren't here when you left." He frowns, trying to judge how long ago that was. Seemed like he disappeared in the cursed village, but he never confirmed that he went back home. It's hard to tell if that's important.

"It's been almost nine months. We kept moving east." He keeps staring, trying to place how long it might have been in his time. "I assume you went back to where you came from."

Eleven takes some time to think about that, with drawn brows and puzzled looks around. The feeling that he should know this person's name weighs on his tongue.

Nine months. Where was he nine months ago? The specifics fail to manifest, but given he'd turned back time three or four months ago, he has a loose idea. The days were difficult to track under constant darkness. A subtle prickle of unease leaves him searching the sky for something he intuitively knows he won't find.

Eleven takes in a deep breath. "This isn't Erdrea."

And this wasn't the first time he'd left his home world. There's a discomfiting certainty to that now. East. He shivers through an echo of memories bearing down on an already diverged pair of timelines.

"The Void- dimensions- time." He presses a hand to his head as his vision wavers and illness threatens to crawl up his throat. "Goddess. What's happened?"

There's more to this than he thought. Five's eye twitches as he rambles. Just when he dismissed the possibility of getting any more insight into the beacon, Eleven starts hitting him with a few keywords that sharpens his gaze. He might not know why he came back, but there's a chance it wasn't entirely involuntary.

He moves closer into his space and attempts to keep his focus on him and not everything going on around them. He needs to know what he meant.

"You were messing with time?" The confusion means it probably wasn't intentional, but he's not any less apprehensive because of it. "What void?"

Eleven frowns, focusing on the questions rather than the insistent press of memories trying to weave between timelines and break apart his already fragmented understanding of events. Their surroundings fade to background noise; unimportant.

"I changed time months ago." Vaguely, he understands that doesn't mean much of anything, but it's disorienting to puzzle out further, so he shelves it aside. "I've visited the Void twice; it's how I got here the first time. ...I think. But not this time."

His answers only bring up more pressing questions. Somehow Five had never caught Eleven's theory for how he got here before, and he would have remembered if he'd mentioned visiting a void. Not many of them seem to enough memory of the experience to offer anything useful. Fewer admit to bringing it on themselves.

Most people might be jumping to help fill in the gaps, but unfortunately they aren't the one that he happened to bump into. Five's patience hasn't improved over the past nine months, and his tone hardens as he presses.

"I'm going to need more than that. What do you mean you changed time?"

Eleven's eyes flick back to his young companion, mouth pulling into a frown. There's recognition there now, and he gets the sense that he's close to recalling the boy's name. They've spoken before, in that nebulous existence pressing all around him.

He shifts in an aborted urge to sit down. Standing and conversing while his mind crowds with information feels like too much multi-tasking, but a sense of apprehension forces him to keep his feet.

"We're not friends," he says without quite meaning to, but knowing with a quiet certainty that it's true. He regards him for a few moments, a sense of wary consideration creeping in as he weighs his willingness to answer his question. But it doesn't matter here, he comes to understand, what happened in his home world.

Eleven drags a hand through his hair, leasing an agitated breath. Five doesn't need all the details.

"There was something I had to fix," he said finally. "So I went back in time to change it. That was four months ago, in Erdrea. It's.. better now."

Maybe he doesn't need to fill in all the gaps. Five is close enough that he can see the gears turning the more he looks at him. He assumed whatever advantage his memory fog gave him might be short lived, but he still manages to be thrown when Eleven seems to reach a conclusion out of nowhere. All the things he could have remembered, and that's the first thing that comes to him.

It's fair, but he had tried to make amends before he disappeared, in his own way. Which he could remind him, if it weren't for the way he talks about time travel. For as often as it comes up, maybe that's the common denominator he's been overlooking.

"Something you had to fix." It bothers him that he uses his words. There's always something to fix, but only a couple worth justifying all the risks involved. "How did you do it?"

How, like the details of something seemingly impossible are likely to be recreated. Eleven sweeps a dubious look over- over Five- not particularly interested in this line of questioning but feeling a touch more steady for it. He hasn't been able to talk to anyone about this for months.

"There was.. a tower," he answers haltingly, fumbling for where to begin an explanation. "All time passes through it and crystallizes into a sphere." All things considered, it's a decent oversimplification, and given how beyond him the precise mechanics are, it works.

"It can be broken by.." Eleven's hands jump together and tighten. "Well, a certain sort of power."

Recent experiences in a tower cast a shadow over his explanation, which must be more abstract than he's describing it. He could give him some credit for at least trying to answer his question, but it doesn't balance the fact that he's been willfully manipulating time. Maybe he always could and it somehow never came up.

"A power you have?" Eleven might be ready to ask his own questions, but some things are hard to move past. He'll catch him up on this horrible place in a minute. "Was that the only time?"

Eleven begins to nod, then pauses, hesitating. His eyes flicker off, brows creasing as he considers Serenica.

"For me, it was. The sphere is shattered, and cannot be broken again in this--my--timeline."

His eyes return to Five. "Why?"

He’s come to accept that there are different ways to achieve time travel, and just like magic, they’re less predictable and far less precise. If he broke down the reality of what they’re doing when they decide to alter time, most of them couldn’t possibly comprehend. The damage done across dimensions could go a long way into explaining how things got so screwed up.

Why would he possibly want to know?

“I like to keep track.” He gives him a brief, tight smile. If landing back here isn’t enough, he’s looking into the face of consequences. “You remember we aren’t friends, anything else getting through?”

The answer gives him some pause, and Eleven eyes Five with some scrutiny. A question traces the back of his teeth, but he elects to hold it in reserve and ask once he's had more time to think about it. Time. He's tired of it already.

"Your name is Five," he answers, though it comes out more uncertain by the end than he means it to. He frowns and shifts again, hands curling into his baldric. Eleven casts about for anything else. "There's.. something wrong with this world- the cycle of it."

Huh. They only traveled together for months on end, but he's still surprised how quickly he pulls out his name when he's still trying to remember what's wrong here.

"That's one way to describe it." Life and death are an evolving concept here; a mockery of natural order on par with time travel. They can even make... living dolls. Which is really a mockery of a different sort.

He gives him a long hard look, maybe even feels a tinge of jealousy that he missed some of the truly worst months of his miserable life, only to sigh and shake his head. Eleven will remember in time and wish he never had. It's only because of Five's own history with memory loss and the confusion that brings that he decides to tell him how lucky he was to get out when he did.

"A few of us never left. I could tell you all about the undead, but we're a bigger problem. We shouldn't be here, and everywhere we go we disrupt this world." They've yet to see the real repercussions of their actions. Something only time travelers can truly appreciate. "Now we've had a couple of minor successes and suddenly there will be an entire group of people who think they know what's best. Most of them don't see that we're being manipulated, just like we always have been."

Eleven's frown deepens, fingers curling tight around soft leather. A shiver run through him from head to toe. To think their mere presence is disrupting the cycle of this world. He shifts and turns a despairing look to the inert mechanism behind him. It's difficult to solve a problem without understanding it. The sword on his back is a testament to that.

"Manipulated," he repeats, turning back again. There's something to that. Being led by the nose, following for lack of options. A burst of frustration flickers beneath his skin and is gone.

Eleven casts another speculative look over Five. The boy? doesn't speak how he should, and there's something to that as well. He looses a sigh and rubs at his forehead. There are at least a half dozen different trains of thought to take from just that bit of information, and his focus is too divided to chase any of them in particular terribly far in the moment.

"Is there somewhere we're staying?" he hazards, pulling on an invisible mantle as he glances about. "I could hear your thoughts about it as we walk."

Five frowns at the way Eleven keeps looking at him, if only because he doesn't know if some other memory is surfacing. Not that he's concerned about his reputation, but it makes it harder to know what reaction he'll get once the pieces come together. For a few reasons, he decides not to answer questions he hasn't asked. It'll come back to him.

He takes a moment to consider how disorienting it must be to get thrown back into this. Eleven might not realize it yet, but he had good timing, for once. Just a few days earlier Five would have discouraged walking anywhere out in the open. He's largely relied on teleporting to get around to city to avoid being followed, and the apartment he shares with Wrath was one of the only safe spaces in the city.

Things have changed, and here he is feeling strangely obligated to fill him in on their situation. With another shake of his head, he starts walking in a direction, leading away from the crowd at the beacon and towards somewhere he can gather himself.

"We've killed two undead warlords now." Eleven might remember the first, eventually. The second was taken out by his own brother. "The son of one of them is who made this city the way it is. I don't think it was a coincidence that we were brought here, all things considered."

Two undead warlords, Eleven parses as he moves to follow in Five's wake. ..How many were there? Something about the "first" one teases at him, like he should be more than peripherally aware of it. It's followed by a senseless tug of guilt.

He turns his focus back to Five. "Not a coincidence that we were brought to.. this city?" Had Five named it already? To think he's already losing track of what he has and hasn't been told.. "Or that we've been brought to this world?"

"Could be both, for all we know." A conspiracy theory might not be the height of important information for someone who just arrived, but Five is getting tired of being jerked around from one crisis to another. Now that they've been slowly eliminating the biggest threats to this world, aside from them, it's fairly transparent that they're being guided in a certain direction.

“Unless coming here has something to do with altering the timeline.” He’s still stuck on that thread that he never bothered connecting before. “You’re not the first. You didn’t arrive from a beacon last time, so there’s something else we must all have in common.”

Eleven spends a single moment considering what that common factor might be, then swiftly abandons it. If someone who has been here for.... awhile, without leaving, and who likely knows of most everyone hasn't sorted it, he isn't going to in the next few minutes. Best left to those with more capacity of thought than he has in the moment.

He spends a few minutes in quiet thought as they walk, fruitlessly glancing about for anything else familiar.

"..I take it we still don't have the ability to move about on our own power, then." It feels so much like an inevitable truth that he fails to pose it as the question he'd originally intended it to be. Instead, shifts focus. "What end do you think we're being manipulated toward?"

"I've got some theories." Revenge is Five's best guess, but he mostly relies on his own observations and doesn't often share them. He's hardly the only one suspicious of the Merchant, but he can't remember where Eleven stood when he left.

"We've lost some people, so they might have branched off at some point. We've stayed together for lack of better options." The more time goes on, the more he's had to reevaluate his options. Not in any small part because he's seen just how quickly they'll turn on him.

"When it comes back to you, you'll remember what we have to go through just to get to a beacon. They can get us to do whatever they want for a chance to reach them, only to have them fail every time."

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