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misscp1990 · 1 year

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Seasons (part 1 of a small Modern Fantasy AU)

Spring always dies for someone else. This never changes no matter how many incarnations pass and Booker dares to think something might have changed in the fabric of the universe.

Spring, after all, has to die for Summer. Booker, who is Autumn and so selfish he never wants to leave the stage to Winter (Lykon, he’s too nice, and so tired, every year he gets paler and quieter, and one day Booker will try to wake him up and Lykon will shake his head and tell him they had a good run, Booker will have to find someone else to take care for the world when the sky goes dark), understands that there’s a price to pay to have the sun of summer and the sweetness of ripe peaches eaten in front of an endless sea. Spring doesn’t just die: Spring bargains, fights tooth and nail for a chance to see the world bloom.

Spring is hope, and Spring is currently dying of blood loss and broken bones and broken everything —Booker forgot how humans work, ah— in the middle of a trafficked street. She is a black woman who just saved her brother from a car whose driver didn’t see the red light and internally decided someone had to die today.

“Are you sure it’s her?” he asks Yusuf.

Yusuf’s human form is better than his, though he has been doing his job for much longer than Booker. He’s technically the oldest man in the world, yet he keeps up with the changes of the world better than Andy, Quỳnh, Lucky, Jin, basically everyone. (He has to keep his eyes on the humans while he makes his daily trip across the sky. Yusuf is also the most stubborn man in the world: after 400 years he’s still looking for him.)

Yusuf could fool anyone and pass as a human, only his eyes are too ancient and the colour of molten gold. He keeps them on the woman dying, Spring, if his hypothesis is correct. The last Spring lasted less than a decade before the call of Death (death as Celeste, not as a season that will come back again and again forever, because this game is nothing but predictable) became too strong. This one, Yusuf assured them, will last longer.

Spring dies in the arms of her brother, who realises the fundamentals of first aid, which would order him not to touch her, are useless, because his sister will be dead before the ambulance comes.

“Nile,” the kid sobs. He repeats her name like a prayer; it’s the oldest pain in the world, yet both Booker and Yusuf tear up at the sight.

“It’s so fucking unfair,” Booker says. He knows the System inside and out, but it feels good to say it anyway.

Yusuf nods. They wait with bathed breath: one of them will be called to do the honours and lead Nile to the Impossible Land where incarnations live outside time and space and everything that matters.

The air shifts. The smell of flowers hits Booker’s nose leaving him almost lightheaded: it’s been centuries since they had a powerful Spring, and this one already changed the colour of the sky —not grey anymore, but blue like her eyes will be when she wakes up as the incarnate season she is. She’ll be good for the team, Booker hopes. He has learnt the hard way Spring can’t fix the decay written in his DNA, but he wants to hope for a friend, a companion. (Not something more: Yusuf and Nicky are the proof falling in love is the worst thing to do for those like them.)

Yusuf stands up from their table: other customers of the coffee shop are looking outside, horrified and terribly intrigued by the tragedy that just happened, but they don’t see him.

“It’s not me,” Yusuf says. He looks relieved. Booker certainly is: explaining death and the System is never pleasant.

“Me neither.”

“I can give you a ride,” Yusuf tilts his head, hinting at the corner of the street where he parked the fucking sun (you see now why Booker has already gone mad).

“Thank you, man. I appreciate it.”

There was a time where Yusuf loved driving the Sun across the sky, where being the Sun meant he was always smiling, always full of wonder and hope for humanity. Not anymore, not for a long time: Yusuf drives fast in complete silence, and Booker stays with his head outside the window and hopes not to throw up on the tiny humans underneath them.

The world passes in a blur under them, hours become minutes (time is of little importance for the Sun) until it’s time for sunset. Booker and Yusuf paint the sky in comfortable silence, mix purple and orange and pink and try to welcome Nile to the team in the only way they can: showing the beauty in their line of work. Not many people can say they painted the sunset over the endless sea.

There was a time where sunset was Yusuf’s favourite time of the day.

(400 years ago. Conversation overheard during an Autumn sunset:

“More blue, please.”

“Not a chance. You’ll have your blue all night, I have new pinks I want to try.”

“Purple, then. On the clouds.”

“Why don’t you paint? It’s your job, too.”

“I prefer to oversee the works,” then, softer. “I love watching you paint.”

Should Booker have stopped them? Shake Nicky until he understood the danger they were in? Or was it too late already? Is Autumn late for everything that’s good, melancholia shaped in the form of a man made of fallen leaves?)

There was a time where sunset was Yusuf’s favourite time of the day. Not anymore, not for a long time.

Andy has been Summer for millennia: her crown is antlers of brass and wood and bone, permanently attached to her skull. Where Yusuf is carefully concealed power, she is so entangled with her season that even in her human form, her eyes are too blue and her teeth too sharp, and her voice is always too convincing, ineffably inhuman.

The Impossible Land is hers. They didn’t exactly vote for her: Summer has always been powerful and Lykon never cared for politics. She reigns with grace and mercy, scarce patience but a lot of heart. She doesn’t hesitate to cut the decaying branches in the family, but she never forgets one of her own.

(She’s another one that can’t look at the moon without guilt stealing the breath from her lungs. She doesn’t believe that Yusuf doesn’t blame her more than he blames himself. Andy already cheated once, to have Quỳnh by her side; she couldn’t do it a second time when the Stars came for Nicky.)

When Yusuf and Booker enter the Impossible Land, they’re stripped of their names and most of their humanity. Yusuf becomes more light than flesh, Booker’s skin decays as he leaves a trail of leaves and fungi and larvae in his steps.

Summer sits on her golden throne. Winter(Lykon) is nowhere to be seen. He won’t survive the year, Autumn realises. He’s so tired of the System.

Quỳnh is water and Water is Quỳnh: she is sitting in the most obscure corner of the room, to avoid the weight of too many eyes on her. Centuries after her second birth and her humanity still clashes with the Incarnation Summer bestowed on her to keep her alive. It’s a painful existence, born out of love. Eurydice of the waters of an Orpheus that cheated.

Spring is beautiful.

The realisation hits him with the force of the strongest winds earth has to offer, right in the chest. She’s already looking at him as if she could feel his presence. (To Springs, he smells of smoke, chestnuts, tangerines, everything good about his season.)

She’s still so, so human, dark eyes and a small scar on her cheek and some tufts of hair escape her braids as if she was in a hurry when she died. Booker wonders what it would happen if he told her to run.

“Spring,” he says instead. Then, because they will not have all his humanity: “Nile. It’s nice to meet you.”

She smiles. It doesn’t look like an easy smile, but more like she can’t help it. Maybe she’s feeling what he’s feeling: an irrational sense of complicity and affection, the urge to hug her and tell her it’ll all be okay. That they will never have another Nicky.

Yusuf introduces himself after he does. He’s incredibly charming despite the literal gaping wound where his heart used to be, eternally spilling blood on his golden armour. Nile has the grace and sensibility not to comment on it. She did better than Jin, who is Air and Winds and laughs at the worst possible moments, like right now.

Jin is one of their youngest, but also wilder than all of them combined. He was beautiful in life, the kind of perfect proportions that had him followed by scouts who wanted to make a model out of him, but in immortality he is wild enough to make his perfection bearable. He smiles his most beautiful smile and laughs delighted at Nile’s shocked face when she sees him flying.

“Hello, new one!” he chirps, hanging upside down from an invisible bar.

Others —Lucky, Quỳnh, Andy and every one of the minor incarnations— roll their eyes at Jin’s entrance, but Booker is glad Jin is trying to lighten up the mood.

Yusuf clears his throat. He looks—worried, Booker realises. Nervous. His golden eyes move quickly through the crowd. Andy avoids his gaze, another clue something is going on.

Now that he looks more closely, Andy is more than nervous. She is the picture of barely contained anger and shock and energy, the type of reaction she typically has on her solstice, not when Spring manifests. She’s gripping the arms of her throne and she is fucking scared of what Yusuf is going to say next. What the fuck.

“Nile,” Yusuf says, very slowly as if not to scare her or himself. “Who guided you here?”

No one takes the merit. Not Jin, not Quỳnh, not the absent dying Lykon, certainly not Booker. Who took Nile from the underworld and told her she was Spring?

A chill runs down Booker’s spine as he locks eyes with Andy. She’s shaking her head slightly, but Nile doesn’t notice her warning.

Nile says, as the first flowers bloom in her hair like jewels of a crown: “A man dressed in white. He said his name was Nicky.”

Shouts start to erupt in the Impossible Land.

“The Stars would never release him!” “They’re coming for us!” “Impossible!” (The cruelest of them: “He was supposed to keep them happy for us.”)

Yusuf doesn’t move: he looks frozen, a statue perpetually staring at the new Spring.

Nile doesn’t know the war she’s starting. It only makes the tragedy more poignant.

“He said he was the Moon.”

#the old guard #yusuf al kaysani #nicolo di genova #nile freeman #sebastien le livre #joe x nicky #yusuf x nicolo #andromache the scythian #the name lucky is a homage to the delicious brainrot on my dash that imagines carmy from the bear as nicky’s brother #if you want I can remove the name !!!#(future)#book of nile #there’s a tv joe!!#lyde writes #long post #continue it please

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