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radioactivepeasant · 1 year

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Fic Prompts: Free Day Thursday

This is part of my Splinter Cell au, following up on Jak meeting his alternate timeline parents for the first time

Mar peered at the crowd from the safety of his uncle's arms and frowned. That was a lot of people! They looked normal, not dressed funny like the people in this city, at least. But what were they all crowded around?

A tall lady moved aside for an instant, and Mar almost could've shouted in excitement if his throat hadn't seized up.

Mama!

He smacked Sig’s arms, his shoulders, frantically, pointing at the crowd and then himself. With a shaky breath, Sig crouched and set him down on the sand.

"Go on," he said thickly, "Go to your mama."

Mar didn't have to be told twice. He ran as fast as his short legs could carry him. Some of the adults heard him coming and turned to see him, only to step back out of his way with wide eyes. Mar slammed into his mother's legs and clung to her skirt. He didn't understand why he was about to cry. He was happy! He'd missed his mother so much! So why was he crying?

Mama gasped, and then her arms were around him, warm and strong and just like he remembered.

"Baby!"

Mama's voice bounced up and down, like she had the hiccups.

"Oh Minnow, we were so worried about you! Who took you? Are you okay? Do you remember what happened, baby?"

Mar buried his face in the crook of his mother's neck and shook his head. He didn't remember much about the night they all got separated, just mean faces and an ugly bird and people yelling at him to be quiet. Probably because the weird people in Haven were so loud that they couldn't hear themselves think already. Mar thought he maybe used to cry out loud, but it wasn't quiet enough.

"Where's Jakky?" Mar asked, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

Hadn't Jak had a mission today? Did he come back okay? He'd seemed scared before going.

"Your br- your older brother?" Phobos asked. She smiled, but her eyes were damp. "He came out to meet us when we got here. Your daddy is talking to him."

"Where?! Where's Daddy?!" Mar whipped his head back and forth, searching the crowd for his father.

He spotted Jak, looking really nervous and doing the thing where he scratched his arm a lot. Mister Kor used to call it a Nervous Tick, which was a weird thing to say, because Jak wasn't pretending to be a clock at all. Jak looked down at the sand and mumbled something.

Why was he nervous? Jak wasn't afraid of anything!

"Is Jakky sad?" Mar asked, confused. "We found you! Why's he sad?"

His mother's arms tightened around him. "I don't think he's sad, sweet one. But Jak hasn't met us before. He's a little shy, and that's okay."

Well that didn't make any sense, and Mar wasn't shy about saying so.

"Mommy," he signed, matter-of-factly, "You're Jakky's mommy too, remember? You remember? Why you said he hasn't met you?"

Phobow frowned and slowly rose from the sand to settle Mar on her hip. She looked to her husband, speaking quietly and gently to the skittish teenager, and sighed.

"Jak...got taken away a long time ago. Just like bad guys took you away. I think he was too little to remember us."

Righteous indignation rose up in the little boy's chest and spilled over his cheeks in hot tears, even while he fought to keep his lip from trembling.

"That's not fair!" He almost hit the Spargan next to Phobos with the vehemence of his signs.

"It's not," Phobos agreed. "But we're here now, and I promise, Mar, we will never lose either of you again."

Jak met her eyes at that moment, and he pointed at himself in disbelief. Phobos's heart ached seeing the shock in this newfound son's face. It wasn’t that he didn't believe they were his people. Phobos had seen those eyes in the broken before the rebellion finally toppled the old regime of Spargus: Jak didn't know he was worth saving. He didn't understand why anyone would want him -- or was it that he was used to being wanted as a weapon? An object, a tool with no autonomy or feelings of his own.

Phobos would find the people who had taken her baby, and she would find the people who had broken this boy -- this spitting image of Damas -- and they would pay in blood for every tear they'd caused to fall.

For now, she simply held Mar to her breast. She closed her eyes and let herself feel the pulse in his skin where it lay against her neck, warm and alive and proof that this was real. He was so much taller now, and thinner than he ought to have been. A gangly tangle of arms and legs, wound around her neck and waist. Phobos buried her face in his hair and let the tears fall at last.

Relief and joy and the pain of two lost years -- two years of milestones they would never get back -- and it was finally over.

Jak watched the woman crying softly into Mar's hair, feeling unbearably out of place. This scene wasn't meant for him. He wasn't Mar.

He was as much a stranger to these people as they were to him. They didn't know each other. He couldn’t just pretend to suddenly have memories and emotions that had been ripped from him ages ago. Whatever he'd been like as a little kid, who was to say he had been anything like Mar was now?

Panic began to build in his throat, ringing in his ears and drowning out whatever Mar's father was saying to him.

They have some version of me in their heads. Everyone does. What do they want me to be? What'll they do the first time I screw up? Sure, they're nice now, but what happens when I don't fit in their box?

Suddenly Daxter was there, weighing down his shoulders, digging in his claws just enough to bring Jak back down to earth. And he felt something else, something he'd only experienced once before.

Light eco.

The eco washed over him like a warm wind, soaking into his muscles and down into his core. It met the darkness head on, and a violent surge of nausea rocked Jak. His knees hit the sand unexpectedly, and his jaws ached with the force of holding back bile. Every nerve, every cell burned like he was back in the Chair again. And then, just as quickly, the pain was gone.

The ugliness, the boiling acid that flowed between his veins and arteries, was...different. Farther away, almost. As if it had been neutralized by something. The light eco?

"Easy, easy there, pal."

Daxter patted his back.

"Just take some deep breaths and let Spike here work his magic."

"Don't call me that."

Mar's father sounded mildly irritated, like he was distracted.

"It fits, doesn't it?" Daxter retorted.

"Call me Spike, Scar, or anything that isn't my name," the man grunted back, "and I'm calling you "rat"."

Daxter crouched low against Jak’s neck and muttered in his ear, "Touch-y! I can see where you got your sense of humor, Jak."

He turned to give Damas a wry look. "Bigfoot here gets the same way when Krew's goons call him "prettyboy"."

Jak gritted his teeth. "You call me dumb names," he rasped through numb lips, "nobody else does."

He finally found the mental wherewithal to raise his eyes and discovered that Damas knelt in the sand across from him, one hand glowing slightly. There was a very grim look in his eyes, one that spoke multitudes.

"Never let them take your name from you," he agreed solemnly.

Jak averted his gaze again with a bitter snort.

"They already did once. But this name, I chose. It's mine."

Precursors knew he'd gotten to choose precious little in his life. He wouldn't give this up.

Damas leaned back and settled both hands on his knees.

"All the more reason to fight for it," he said.

Then he tilted his head and frowned.

"Is your eco core stable now, young one?"

A cold chill squirmed in Jak’s gut. He swallowed hard, and the words stuck in his throat as he turned to Daxter.

"How close was I?" he signed as dread rose to squeeze his lungs.

Daxter winced. "Fangs and claws, but no horns," he whispered.

Oh rot.

Mar's father had seen the Thing. Barely a glimpse, but it would be enough to seal his fate.

Trembling, Jak looked up.

Damas’s expression was still grave.

"No one else saw it," he said quietly, "It's alright. You're alright. Do you often lose control in fight or flight situations?"

"Lay off! It's not Jak’s fault!" Daxter leaned out from Jak's shoulder, fur bristling.

"I never said it was," Damas answered. His face softened, and he leaned forward.

"When was the last time you absorbed light eco, son?"

What kind of question was that?

"...two...two years ago," Jak mumbled.

That seemed to satisfy the exile king. He fell back on his heels with a nod.

"Self-taught mastery over dark eco hasn't happened in generations, and never without the balancing influence of its sister element. I'm amazed you can battle-shift at all with an unbalanced core."

Jak and Daxter stared at the man with dull shock stamped across their faces.

Slowly, Daxter turned back to Jak.

"Did...did you get any of that?" he asked.

Jak grimaced. "I understood all those words separately," he muttered back.

"Sig, has he done this before?"

Jak craned his neck as Sig pushed through the crowd to sit down beside Jak. He dropped a comforting hand on Jak’s back and clicked his tongue.

"Just give him space. He's got this. Right cherry? You got this."

He waved off the other Wastelanders with a brusque gesture and shifted to one side, sitting as if guarding him.

Damas visibly relaxed and nodded once.

"I'm afraid this many of us at once may have overwhelmed him."

Jak slotted his fingers into his hair and an inappropriately hysterical giggle burst out of his throat, startling him and Daxter both.

"Ye- yeah, you could say that."

Sig frowned sharply. When Jak’s eyes drifted away, he quickly signed to Damas, "He's known little kindness and much suffering. He barely remembers how to be a kid."

Damas winced ever so slightly. He let out his breath in a few short puffs, then rocked back on his heels again.

"Jak," he said slowly, "I...apologize if this question is intrusive. But do you have any recollection of your parents from your original timeline?"

The boy's eyes hardened, and he shifted, drawing his knees to his chest in an almost protective gesture.

"No," he said sharply. "I didn't know my parents. Wasn't part of Samos’s plan."

Samos.

The name clearly meant something to the exiled king. Anger flashed briefly through his eyes, warning of an approaching storm.

"Meddling acolyte," Damas muttered under his breath with a vicious curse to punctuate it. "He has much to answer for."

Shaking off the dark look, he tried to settle to something more neutral.

"If that is the case, then we really are starting at the beginning, aren't we? I...understand that we have not yet earned your trust, Jak. But would- that is, would you permit us the chance to do so? To get to know you?"

Jak tightened his arms around his knees and resisted a childish urge to bury his head in them. To hide. This was so much attention, so unlike anything he'd become accustomed to. They weren't treating him like a monster, but they sure weren't treating him like Sandover and the Underground did when he was a "hero", either. No demands, no assumption that he was going to fall in line and see things their way just because they told him it was the right thing to do. Someone was asking for a chance to prove himself to Jak!

Unable to properly form his thoughts into words, Jak bounced one shoulder. It was a silent cue to Daxter, a plea to answer on his behalf. The ottsel sat up and folded his arms with a grimace.

"Is this some kind of trick?" Daxter asked suspiciously. "People don't normally ask -- or care -- what we think. Tess and Sig excluded. They just bark orders at us and complain."

"Sounds like Haven alright," Damas answered dryly. "Let me guess: "go there, do that, fetch this, kill them, everything's all your fault", right?"

Daxter squinted at him. "You sure you only just met us? Cause you're basically reading off our script."

With a humorless smile, Damas shrugged. "Even kings are not exempt from their demands. Or perhaps it is especially kings who are not exempt from their demands."

He looked like he was about to say something else when the breath was driven from him with a loud "oof!"

Mar barreled into him, knocking Damas back onto the sand.

"DADDY DADDY!" Mar's hands shouted, then he flung his arms as far around the man's chest as he could reach -- which wasn't far, frankly.

Damas caught Mar up in a fierce hug, and curled his body around the little boy as though he could hide him from the world.

"Mar! Oh, let me look- let me look at you!"

He smoothed back Mar's hair, traced his fingers along round cheeks, memorizing every detail.

"Sweetheart, you got so big! When did you get so tall?"

Jak was pretty sure it was a rhetorical question, but he couldn’t help answering anyway.

"That's um, that's pretty recent. Just since moving in with the Babak."

He hoped that was at least some comfort to the man. In just the two years they'd been apart, he'd found himself shocked by how much Keira had changed. He couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to miss your own kid's milestones like that.

Well. Maybe he could.

After all, the Explorer he'd called Uncle had traveled so often and so far that Jak had experienced most of his milestones alone.

A small, warm, hand slipped into Jak's and squeezed. He looked up, surprised, to find Mar leaning out of Damas’s arms. Mar was frowning, eyebrows knit together. He pursed his lips and tried several times to make a sound.

"Dz- ss-" he swallowed hard and tried to remember how to use the muscles in his throat. "J- Ja-k?"

Jak's mouth fell open.

He knew Mar preferred to be nonverbal, just as he had been at the same age. Speaking out loud was reserved for when they felt safest. When they were fully comfortable with their surroundings. Mar had never felt safe enough to verbally talk to Jak before.

Are we safe? He's safe now, what about us?

Damas’s eyes widened, and there was a suspicious moisture in Sig’s single eye as they both stared at Mar. They knew Mar Didn't Talk To Strangers. He didn't speak to people who weren't family. Which meant that Mar had fully accepted Jak as family.

Well, that streamlined things a bit.

"Jak's okay, Lil Man," Sig said, clearing his throat. "Just give him time to adjust, okay?"