Work Text:
Cast out (World walker pt. 1)
You’re twenty-five years old when you hear them talking about you one night. You’re on your way home when you overhear them mention your name and wonder what to do with you. You can’t hear everything they’re saying but the tone of their voices makes you uneasy.
They confront you the next day after summoning you to the palace. “You’ve done enough” they say, “it’s time for you to go back home now.” You don’t understand. You have fought and bled for this world, this is your home, what are they talking about? “This way you can go back to your family and live a normal life where you belong” they explain as if that were possible after the decade you spent entrenched in war and bloodshed and sacrifice. You refuse. This is your home. You helped save this world; you can’t imagine going back to the place you were born. You don’t want a do-over, you want to stay. They took you and brought you into this world ten years ago, but you found your family here, don’t they understand? You go to bed that evening relieved that they listened to you.
You’re twenty-five years old and your eyes snap open because something is wrong. This is not your bed, you’re not in your flat, where are you? You stumble to the bathroom on autopilot, panicking too much to realize how weird your body feels. You look in the mirror and it feels like someone doused you in icy water because – no. No. Your fifteen-year-old body, small, soft, and oh so innocent stares back at you.
You’re twenty-five but you’re fifteen again and the betrayal cuts deeper than any blade ever did. They did this. They took you when you were fifteen, thrust you into another world and forced you to fight a war for them. They watched as you fought and bled for the family you found and built for yourself. They cheered for you when you helped win the war and brought peace to the land. You finally relaxed after a decade of war and then rebuilding efforts and got yourself that flat you had been eyeing for years. Peace was within your grasp. And then they took it from you. They only saw you as a weapon and threw you away when they no longer needed you. And now you’re back where it all started but how are you supposed to pretend that the past ten years of your life never happened?
You’re fifteen again and you can’t look your parents in the eyes at the dinner table. They do not know what you have done and what you have been through – for them no time has passed since you were taken from your bed in the middle of the night, but you don’t know how to be their fifteen-year-old child anymore. They put the changes in you down to a bad night’s sleep at first. Later they think that you being so withdrawn and quiet is just you being a normal teenager and joke about how it could be worse. You start spending a lot of time out of the house after you overhear their conversation.
You’re sixteen again and despite exercising regularly in the month you’ve been back your body is still so soft and breakable and wrong. You keep touching your palm expecting to feel the raised scar of the blood pact you made with your chosen family only to be met with smooth skin. You never thought you’d miss your calluses but it’s disconcerting how soft your hands are. Even though it’s summer you’re always cold because magic doesn’t flow through your veins anymore. School started again and you desperately try to catch up to your classmates. The teachers don’t understand how you’ve forgotten so much in only six weeks of summer break but for you it’s been a decade since you went to school and the subjects you studied on your own back home are not applicable here. Your friends here are angry at you for forgetting birthdays and plans but truthfully you can barely remember their names after not seeing them for ten years. The distance between you and them grows because how can you relate to their problems and typical teenage issues when you’re a decade older than they are?
You’re seventeen and you haven’t gotten used to the sounds and smells of this world yet. The food tastes wrong and all the preservatives in it make you nauseous. The air still feels dead to you without the magic in everything you were accustomed to back home and there are days you almost choke on each breath. The only reason you haven’t gone insane or given up yet is that even though they threw you away like trash and put you back into your younger body without your consent they couldn’t undo everything. The place in between worlds clings to you now. You might not have magic anymore but the echo of it remains. You can still hear the whispers and feel the pull of the gateways. There are not many of them and none of the ones you found so far lead back home but the possibility of finding your way back there eventually soothes a small part of you.
You’re eighteen and you still wake up screaming more often than not. Even though it’s been three years since you got back your nightmares of the war haven’t gotten less severe. In your dreams you feel the blast of magic hit you again and again, each time it’s as agonizing as it was when it happened on that battlefield, the smell of your burning flesh as acrid and vivid as you remember it. You dream of lying on the ground knowing that this was it – this was the battle you wouldn’t get to walk away from. The sensation of dying, of physically feeling the life leave your body while your magic desperately tries to heal your injuries is what wakes you up, gasping for ais and shivering uncontrollably. You dream of seeing your chosen family fall in battle over and over again just like you dreamt back home. Only now you cannot simply go across the hall to check on them or go to their tent to reassure yourself that they are safe and well. You cannot spend sleepless nights surrounded by your support system, all of you leaning on each other to deal with the horrors because you are worlds away from them.
You’re nineteen and you don’t recognize the person in the mirror. The image feels wrong, this is not what you’re supposed to look like at nineteen. On muggy days you press your hand to your side to alleviate the pain of a wound that this body never received. You still expect to see the horrifying scar covering almost half of your torso which you received from a magical blast that almost killed you every time you change clothes, but only smooth skin is there. You start to cover your body in tattoos you used to have so at least something will look familiar, but you stop after the first one because it helps less than you thought it would. Even tattoos are different in this world.
You’re twenty and you’re still trying to make it work because the war taught you to be adaptable but the feeling that you don’t fit into this world hasn’t gone away yet and you doubt it ever will. You never wanted to come back here but they forced you and after five years you’re still furious when you think about it. You’re starting to forget little details of your home until one day you wake up and realize that you can’t remember the cadence of your best friend’s laugh anymore. You try to make new friends but most of the people you meet can’t begin to relate to you and you can’t tell anyone about what happened to you anyway. You try therapy but without a clear picture of what’s going on – for obvious reasons you can’t tell them – there is not much the doctor can do to help you. They diagnose you with PTSD and a handful of other acronyms and prescribe you something to help you sleep. You don’t take it.
You’re twenty-one and you keep moving from city to city, hoping to find a place that doesn’t feel so dead and cold to you but so far you haven’t found one yet. You’ve found six gateways in the past three years but none of them lead back home. You still haven’t given up hope that one day you’ll find a way back to where you belong because you refuse to accept the alternative. This world can’t be all there is for you.
You’re twenty-two when you start working in emergency services because even though you don’t have your magic anymore you still know how to help people and the urgency of each call is familiar to you. Your co-workers joke about how you were born for this job considering the ease with which you take to it and your bosses are impressed by the reports about how you stay calm even on bad calls. If only they knew you have seen and treated far more horrific injuries during the war. One of your co-workers is an army veteran and sometimes you catch them watching you with a knowing, sorrowful look in their eyes. Before they can confront you, you pack your belongings and move again.
You’re twenty-five and on your way home after a long and hectic shift. The sun starts to climb over the mountains, rays of sunlight hitting the mist rising up from the forest just right until it looks like the whole mountain is on fire. For the thousandth time since returning to this world you find yourself holding your breath in anticipation of the song of a phoenix that always accompanies a mountainside bathed in the red glow of a sunrise. But once again only silence greets you and something inside you just … breaks.
There are three gateways within half a day’s drive of your location – you moved here to be close to them just in case. One leads to a flooded, lifeless wasteland, and another to a place that reeks so strongly of sulphur you’re honestly surprised no one else has noticed it and alerted the authorities to get them to find the source of the smell. You almost give up but then you find the third gateway. It leads to a misty forest full of blue trees taller than any you’ve ever seen before. You cautiously reach your hand through the gateway and feel a tingling in your veins you haven’t felt in a decade. Your magic wakes up slowly, like a cat stretching after a long nap and with a broad smile on your face you step through the gateway and don’t look back. It’s not your world but it feels more like home than the one you just left behind. And you think maybe, if you keep going long enough, you’ll find your way home eventually.