Chapter Text
“Wemmbu?” Egg asks, one sleepy afternoon in their treehouse. Well, not really a tree-house - nothing like Mane’s, anyway. More like a hollow tree that they lived in.
Wemmbu, currently cleaning his mace of blood from a few chungies that he killed, looks up. “Yeah? Can it wait? I’m lowkey kinda busy, bro. And we’ve talked, like, a lot the past week.” Egg’s been really attached to him, recently, like a dog to its owner. Follows him around everywhere, talks to him, asks him about his favorite things and stories. He doesn’t know why, exactly, it’s odd, but maybe it’s like that time Egg got hyperfixated on ants for a week. Maybe he’s the ant, and Egg read something to make him interested. Recreating Paragon: Wemmbu and Egg. Step 1: know your best friend.
“You can listen while you clean,” Egg shoots back, easily. “You’ve got ears.”
“Oh, so is this gonna be one of your research papers or, like, stories? ‘Cause those are the only long-winded ones.”
“No, bro. I wanna tell you something,” Egg says, and that’s what really gets Wemmbu’s attention and shuts him up, ‘cause Egg never does a pre-amble. He’s always short and sweet and straight to the point, which is part of why they’re best friends. Egg makes an expression that Wemmbu would call chewing on his lip and thinking, but - well, Egg doesn’t have lips. He’s one giant eyeball plus a dozen-or-so little white wings plus a suit. So that doesn’t work.
“I mean, there’s really no good way to say this,” he says, after a moment. “I’m dying.”
“What?” Wemmbu asks. He barely registers dropping the cloth, letting Gambit fall to the floor. “No. No, Egg, you aren’t. That’s not funny, bro,” he insists. There’s a sliver of horror slowly dawning in his mind. Egg stays silent, letting Wemmbu ride out the initial shock. “You’re not. Are you? You’re not, right?” His mind is in a tailspin, utterly lost and confused because Egg is his day-one. In the beginning, there was Wemmbu and there was Egg, playing in the rose-gardens and daring each other to fly across the void, and in the end there will be Wemmbu and there will be Egg, bleeding away on some blown-up battlefeld. “You’re not. Tell me you’re not,” he begs, he pleads.
“I am,” Egg says, gently. When Wemmbu doesn’t talk, he continues his twisted ghost story. Because it must be a ghost story, never mind that Egg would never prank him like that, he’s just doing it to scare him. Right?
Right?
“I’ve been sick for a long time,” Egg continues, and he looks down at the midnight pants of his suit, almost ashamed. “I think Minute knew, but he never told me. I was always… different, weaker compared to the other angels. I didn’t know why, but I do now.
“I was sick. I am sick. It’s a… a terminal illness, is what you call it. I’m going to die when this sickness runs its course.” He sighs, looking up and meeting Wemmbu’s eyes again. “I’m going to die in three days,” he says.
He doesn’t remember much more from that conversation. All he knows is that his mind sort of snapped for a little bit and only a few hours later managed to piece itself together into some sort of fragile, shaky normality.
He does, however, remember the last three days they spent together. Egg made him promise a slew of things after he died - not to blame himself, not to massacre the server, to talk to Jaden a lot. And once the hard part was over, it was the easy days Wemmbu had wished for, once upon a time. (But not this way, not with this doom looming over their heads)
They went fishing, every day, for hours on end, to make up for all the times they didn’t. They would talk, on those slow-moving afternoons. They would talk about nothings, about nobodies and nowheres and nowhens, spinning tales out of the cotton-candy clouds and the honey summer air, and it made them happy. All the unsaid apologies that needed to be said, spoken in easy wordless ways that only they could understand.
Wemmbu showed Egg a little game, called Pac-Man, he’d managed to install on his communicator. Come night, they’d play together, sprawled out on their light-blue and purple bed. (Well, pushed-together beds, technically, but who was counting?) The moon would rise in a window Wemmbu had installed (before this hell), and the stars would smile down at them, and the communicator would cast a green glow on their face, and they would laugh and trash-talk and be normal (never mind death like a stormcloud hovering over them, never mind Wemmbu’s mind slowly splintering. He needs to do this, at least this, for his friend.)
There was no fighting, not in those last days. It was peaceful, and Egg started up a little wheat farm (although he would never live to see it ripen), and wrapped up a few research papers (never mind the ones he left unfinished, there was no time for that now).
And on the morning of the fourth day, he woke up and knocked on Egg’s door and there was no reply. Nothing would ever compare the heart-stopping dread he felt that day as he pushed open the spruce door and walked inside to Egg’s body. Image forever burned into his eyelids. Piece of paper clutched in his hands.
He doesn’t remember much after that, either. He remembers that he made Egg a grave, and he would’ve had him a funeral, but no one would’ve cared enough to go. He remembers that he regretted all the things they didn’t know about each other despite their time together, regretted not asking what’s your favorite flower? or would you want deepslate or stone bricks or what on your grave? Would you want to be cremated? Is there any, any, any way to stop this illness of yours? Regretted leaving all the could-have-beens up to fate, because fate never favored people like them. Underdogs like them.
And he read the piece of paper, too. He doesn’t remember much of that, either. The letter currently sits inside the drawer of his desk, the mangrove one that Egg helped him make. He doesn’t plan to open the drawer and re-read the paper any time soon, because if he does maybe his mind will go to hell forever, shattered into a million irreparable bits. And maybe then he’ll decide to stop breathing out of habit, and maybe it’ll be a relief, but Egg wouldn’t have wanted that.
Jaden visited. He didn’t plan to visit Jaden - Egg must have told him. It’s nice of him, coming over and taking care of Wemmbu. It’s Jaden who reminds him to eat, gets him up from his unmade bed, forces him to wash. He hasn’t said a word of thanks in return, but still Jaden does. He has a million things he wants to say to him, but he can’t find the words for them, can’t formulate a way to string them together so they say what he wants them to say. Every sentence he’s tried to piece together after Egg’s death sticks on his tongue and rots there, leaving a bitter taste behind.
Some days he has the urge to kill someone, kill anyone. Thudding behind his sternum, a hungry monster begging to be let out. Jaden’s gone, now. Not that Wemmbu’s blaming him - he wasted far too much time on someone who couldn’t be helped. Sometimes he orbital strikes spawn again, taking delight in the flashing red-and-white TNT in the sky. They look pink from afar, like cherry blossoms. Did Egg like cherry blosoms? Wemmbu thinks he mentioned that once. But he hated flowers because of their pollen, made him allergic. Is there pollen up in heaven? Surely not, heaven was a place for angels and angels didn’t deserve allergies. Is he happy up in heaven?
He’s started randomly orbital striking places. It feels better to do it when there’s soldiers, and there just so happens to be a war going on. It’s nice of fate. For once.