easy mode: "Ludger wrote this for you, before he... passed."
You have all of one ask to completely shatter my character. Make it count.
do not pass go, do not collect $200, this is your easy mode mockery
“What? No, that can’t be right.”
They’d planned this out together, they’d both worked and sacrificed to make this happen. But there it was on the note, clear as day.
“Dammit Ludger, you can’t just pass on Mario Kart! Especially if it’s just to maintain your current one-win lead!”
may or may not be a continuation to this ask.
Later, in his hospital room, Julius was at a loss. The silence was deafening, white noise and static filling the space where his thoughts should have been. If he could focus... he should be able to focus. He’d been awake long enough for it, wasn’t still shaking himself out of the haze that followed his unconscious state. The letter might as well have been blank for all the good that it did him right now.
What had happened? Ludger had faded away and he’d been unconscious for all of it. How had he felt?
( I wasn’t ever supposed to survive you )
( we were supposed to do this together )
They’d made it back to the Prime. Somehow, after everything, they’d managed to pull it off. It should have been impossible.
They... were back in the dimension they had started in.
That sounded right. Better than calling it ‘their’ dimension. It wasn’t, really. Theirs, that is. Not anymore. They’d given it up of their own will back then. It had gone on without them. It didn’t belong to them anymore. Maybe it never really had. What was an entire world when one’s global sphere was limited to a few, infinitely precious people?
They could have seen how she was doing. It didn’t seem like it’d been that long. The others all occupied important enough roles and positions. It would have been simple to track them down, and from there, track Elle down.
It was because of her that Ludger had always kept moving, after all. Dimension after dimension...
They could have seen her. Correction; Ludger could have seen her. Julius was just along for the ride.
But-- it would have been nice to be properly acquainted with the girl Ludger had been entirely willing to give up everything for. Better than they had been in a single fractured Nia Khera, in any case, when they had been Key and Seeker rather than Elle and Julius. At the very least, she deserved a direct apology for having been treated that way. He’d have been no better than his father otherwise.
Likewise, it wasn’t as if he had much to tether him to any other of his brother’s former companions either.
“... It’s you they’d want to see, Ludger. Who am I to them?” Julius finally murmured to no one in particular, setting the letter quietly down. He sighed, folding the last words Ludger had to say into fourths and eighths before tucking them away into his breast pocket.
“I can’t believe you,” he said, without heat. He ghosted over to the edge of the room to look out at the panorama that was Trigleph’s sunset, just outside the window. He knew this hospital. It'd be at most a half hour trip by foot to the Residential complex where Frères was. On the way he could stop by a newsstand to pick up the most recent paper and see just how the world had been doing in their absence. “Big brother can’t always handle everything you’re not sure about facing, you know. Weren’t you always saying that you wanted to do things together, as brothers, from now on? I...”
“How... do I tell them I came back without you?”
