It had been... a couple of hours or so. Or was it days? He vaguely remembered seeing the sun dip behind the horizon a few times. Yeah, that was more accurate. A few days had passed. The forest floor had passed, too. Now, it was just a bunch of sand. And heat. Lots of heat.
"Lucas?"
Lucas tilted his head upwards and blinked at Sophia.
"Is this where you wanted to take us?"
He followed her gaze to a shabby shack off in the distance. The heat being emitted from the orange sand made the structure appear to worm around in the air. As Lucas walked closer and closer to the site, he realized there were even more shelters surrounding the area, and somehow, they were less structurally sound than the original hut. If Lucas had to take a guess with his burned-out brain, there were four in total.
Someone emerged from the original shack and looked over in their direction. They turned to speak to someone inside and pointed towards them. They then spun their head around, prompting more people to show up. The group began to run over.
"Uh, guys?" Lucas heard Will say. "What are they gonna do...?"
"It's fine." Lucas' voice sounded hoarse after not speaking a word their whole trip.
"LUCASSSS???!!!!!" a member of the other group exclaimed. "IS THAT YOUUUU- Oh, OW!!!!"
"Seriously, Link?"
After not being able to for so long, a meagre smile broke onto Lucas' face. He quickened his pace to meet with them half-way.
"Is that...? MJ!" Sophia exclaimed.
Sophia whizzed right past Lucas and leapt to take her dear friend into her arms. MJ stood there, bewildered, for a moment. "I thought you didn't like hugs," was all that she could say.
"Well, I like being stuck with that idiot even less," she grumbled while glancing over to Lucas.
"I see." MJ refused to return the gesture. Sophia finally understood and released her. Then she tried giving MJ a warm smile. Still, MJ remained as stoic and unmoving as a statue. Sophia fought the pained look on her face as she went to greet Ian, Sarah, and Ashley. They were actually gracious enough to indulge in a lively conversation with her, obviously having missed her immensely. Even Stepan and Matthew made a few quips here and there.
"HOLY MOLY, LUCAS, YOU FINALLY FOUND SOMEONE SHORTER THAN YOU!" Linkin screamed once he was finally back up and running again.
"Ha, ha," he huffed.
"Who are all these people?" Jaron asked while gesturing towards Pine, Will, James, Aidan, and an unconscious Enoch slung over Aidan's shoulder.
They all took turns introducing themselves, and Jaron did as well. After Pine made a crude comment about some silly pun he made, he sighed, then looked to Claire. Throughout the whole interaction, she stood a few feet away from the rest with her arms crossed and her gaze fixed on the orange horizon.
"And you are?"
"Claire."
And that was all.
The massive group of teenagers all ended up huddling around a bonfire for warmth after the sun faded away. Stepan brought up some water deep beneath the sand in the form of water, and once it melted, he made some of it into vodka. It turns out that a drunk Linkin was somehow more... energetic than sober Linkin, and he began using Jaron's head as a ukulele as he sang a song about communism. Linkin wasn't the only one who got drunk, so when he was ultimately wrestled into the ground by Jaron, Will began telling a story about some buff men, vampires, and standing off the top of his head. The whole group spent the night roaring fits of laughter.
That is, almost the whole group. As much liquor as he drowned himself in, the smiles he cracked and the giggles that escaped from his mouth were extinguished the moment they came to be. A joke passed from one ear to the other, and the back not facing towards the fire was nipped away at by the night's cold. Something was weighing down his chest, and as the night went on, he found it unbearable to even speak up when spoken to. At some point, the others got the hint and cut him off from their whimsy.
The person seated behind him, he realized, also couldn't enjoy everyone else's company. MJ hadn't even attempted to play the part of a fellow clown in their circus. She and Lucas ended up becoming a part of their own two-man show.
"What happened to Jalen?"
There it was. The question Lucas had been dreading this whole time. Link, Jaron, and the pirates were unsure of how to approach the subject, and the people who had been with Lucas in the Yellow Plains didn't have the courage to bring it up. That left Lucas to search for the heart to answer MJ.
"Gone," he croaked out.
MJ didn't say anything initially. Lucas was glad she didn't. He didn't have the energy to ward off any half-hearted, pitiful condolences. However, the words that followed were certainly worse.
"Vaessen is, too."
The pair's silent act resumed. MJ simply watched embers float away and die as they departed from the fire. Lucas pretended to do the same. He pretended not to feel the heart within his chest tighten up to an irrational degree. He pretended not to feel the frightening loneliness that ate away at him when he was younger, before he found a family, and after they tossed him aside. He pretended to know some sense of what to do now—now, that he had no sense of direction and no guide to make up for it.
MJ placed something on his knee. It was circular and glowed every shade of the rainbow imaginable, but most noticeable of them all was the vibrant red illuminating the shadows on his face. A needle was in the middle and spinning around erratically.
Lucas took the compass into his hand and brought it up to his face. Then he said something to it—something that was barely over a whisper. "What am I supposed to do now, Vaessen?"
That is when something, a memory, locked away in the back of his mind responded. "...the Bookkeeper on Bantaybungou I mentioned will surely provide you with a better answer."
---
A/N
Hey, hey, hey! Welcome to the final chapter of the penultimate arc! Finally!
The next arc is gonna be shorter than the rest (everything up to this point has been seven chapters, I've planned the last one to be six). Also, I recently finished "No Longer Human" by Dazai Osamu after I got it for Christmas. HOPEFULLY some of Dazai-sensei's brilliance was absorbed by me and was written into here while I attempted Lucas' emotions.
Anyways, I'm bad at outros...
Bye.
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𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐃
Fantasy✦✧✧✧✧✦ ❝ i've been lost my whole life . this . . . this doesn't make that much of a difference . ❞ ✦✧✧✧✧✦ multiple teenagers were thrown out of their kingdom due to their unusual powers. many try to start new lives, but some wish to go ba...
