somewhere we can laugh truthfully -

[oncedriven]

"The thing about Luke," Asch says finally, folding his arms and looking off to the side, "is that he's not capable of hating anyone, not really. If you're trying to kill him in a cave and the roof collapses, his first thought is still going to be to throw his body over yours."

Oh, I realized. It wasn't anything I could say to him so directly, but - "I know the type," you say.

Of course Luke had felt familiar, and had been comfortable for you to be around - of course he'd escaped your reflexive doubt that everyone secretly hated you. If you and Asch were cut from the same cloth, then to balance out that cynicism, Luke had to be the same kind of person as Orion.

Asch nods, as though he expected you to say something like that. "The other thing about Luke is that the worst thing that ever happened to him was because someone pushed him into using his power," he says.

You know you're frowning then. "What happened?"

"Short version? He collapsed a city," Asch says. "Ten thousand people died. He survived. Nobody involved has ever forgiven themselves, except of course for the bastard who was to blame."

That pulls you up short. You've broken enclaves, before you knew what you were really doing. But the combined death tolls of Bangkok, Salta, and the rest - they weren't ten thousand people. Even the largest enclaves rarely breached four digits of permanent residents.

"What the fuck," you say. "Luke's just - he's just some guy! You cannot tell me he has that kind of power and just... doesn't use it!"

Asch looks you in the eye for a moment, and says, "Do you?"

And the thing is, you could destroy a city of a lot more than ten thousand people if you put your mind to it. You don't, because that's not who you are and also: what the fuck, but you could.

"Okay, point to you," you say. "But that power doesn't come out of a vacuum. It can't. So what does that make you?"

Even as you say it, it makes sense - how Asch could stink like a maleficer even though he's just as much strict mana as you are, for whatever equivalent they have. If Luke is the enclave, Asch is the maw-mouth. The counterbalance.

Even though you're both assholes, you're good people, Luke had said. Asch has been fighting to be a good person ever since I was born.

You close your mouth tightly on the question, regretting having asked. Asch says, "I'm the other half of the power. We can do the exact same things."

"That doesn't make sense," you say. "If you're the balance, then sure, but if you're both..."

Asch blows out a sigh. "If you're looking for who suffered in exchange," he says, "you're never going to find a single person. It's more spread out than that. It's... Two thousand years ago, people discovered the power to heal, and predict the future, and a shitload of other incredible things. They discovered it the way the people at CERN are discovering new superheavy radioactives."

"And that had to be balanced out somehow," you say.

Asch nods. "They called it miasma, and claimed it was the aftereffect of the war that sprang up to try to control the Seventh Fonon. Maybe in the most literal sense, it was. It doesn't really matter."

He waves a hand through the air, very deliberately, and you feel - it's not quite malia. It's something like the memory of malia, and it makes all the hair on your arms stand up. "It's a gas, functionally, a little heavier than air. You breathe the particles in and choke on them, but you breathe most of them back out again. It's only when you draw fonons in that it really gets inside you, and then it sticks, like lead. You can't ever get it back out again."

You still don't understand how fonons work, that taking-in-and-out that comes to them as easily as breathing, but you can put together well enough what he's talking about. You know how maleficers rot from the inside out; you imagine that happening to everyone in the world...

Because in their world, there weren't any mundanes. Luke had been baffled by the distinction for months, still couldn't tell the difference any more than you could tell the difference between a fonist and anyone else. To him, there wasn't a difference; it was something anyone could learn, if they started early enough, before they lost the sense for it and those parts of their brains got absorbed into more important tasks.

So you shiver, and say, "And that's... you?"

"No," Asch says. "It's not nearly that simple. To try and solve the problem of the miasma... For every power on Auldrant, there was an entity composed entirely of that fonon. Hypothetically, anyway, because we don't know of such a being existing for the miasma. But Lorelei - Lorelei definitely existed." There's something both frustrated and wistful on his face, the kind of mixed feelings that happen when someone brings up the Scholomance and the 'gap year' where you remade it from the foundations up. "When the world looked it was going to end, a woman named Yulia made a pact with Lorelei. She wrote the story of the next two thousand years into Lorelei, the planet's memory."

"She wrote - like a prophecy?" you say.

"Exactly," Asch says. "As far as the world outside the two of them was concerned, that's exactly what it was. The Score became the sole religion of Auldrant, because it was accurate, and because it promised unprecedented prosperity, at the cost of momentary suffering and sacrifice."

Two thousand years. You start to understand, then, the magnitude of what he's talking about - two thousand years, of the entire planet following a plan written to the letter, suffering and hurting and dying in the hopes that it would someday pay off for their children's children.

"Two thousand years of suffering to make a god," you say quietly. "And that's Luke."

"No, that's me," Asch says emphatically. "Luke is the result of a maniac who took a look at Yulia's bargain, realized it was fucked, and tortured me until all the light parts fell out into someone he could manipulate more easily."

Asch has been fighting to be a good person since I was born.

Because the part of him that found it easy to be a good person got taken out and made into someone else. Because they aren't twins, they're two people who were once one person, a bargained-for little god the same way you are a bargained-for wrench in the system of enclaves and the system of suffering they were built on.

You choke down a laugh. "That's so fucked," you say. "That's so - I'm sorry." What the hell else can you say? You can't imagine how much pain must have gone into making Luke. No wonder things are so complicated between them.

Asch just grimaces. "If it had happened any other way," he says, "it wouldn't have worked. The momentum of Yulia's Score - if there hadn't been two of us, we would have just been carried along with it. And Yulia's Score ended in the death of the planet - it was a stalling tactic, a way to open the possibility of a better future."

You nod. It makes sense - putting the doom back in, with all that momentum behind it, was probably the only way that Yulia could have managed it. The amount of power that creating a prophecy that the entire world would willingly follow to the letter needed would have been too much for one person, otherwise.

Two thousand years of suffering, building into the creation of a god. In the hundred fifty the Scholomance existed, it had gained enough power to develop its own rudimentary consciousness and the ability to facilitate things for students to become who they wanted to be, even as much as you had to suffer on the road to get there. Of course, it was a much more concentrated form of suffering, three children in four dead and the maw-mouths of the two largest and most stable structures in the void waiting at the bottom, plus who knew how many other lesser ones Patience and Fortitude had eaten over the course of its existence.

"And you're the one who carries the weight of all that," you say.

Asch nods, sharply, some of his hair spilling over his shoulder. "It's part of why I can use that power more freely than Luke, probably," he says. "I know what it cost. I understand what it cost. But I won't force him to face it. He's already broken once."

Because he destroyed a city.

"Yeah," you say quietly. "That's... probably for the better, that you don't push him." Luke's ignorance of all the lives pressing down on him was the balancing-out of his easy personality, the casual acceptance of things being as they are that had carried Orion all the way down to Patience. If you were a maleficer, if you were someone like Ophelia, you can see why shattering that innocence for the sake of power would appeal.

That's what did happen to Asch, in a lot of ways. The innocence was ripped out of him, and that left room for figuring out how his power really works.

You say, "Is there anything you can't do?"

"There's a few things I can't do without Luke's help," Asch says. "He doesn't need me to cause a second order hyperresonance, but I can't make one on my own. That's the only one I've found that isn't just a limitation of being a flesh and blood human."

You nod slowly. You have no idea what the fuck that means, but you're disinclined to ask. You're still wrestling with the weight of two thousand years of suffering packed into a person.

"No wonder you hate prophecies," you say.

His eye linger on you for a minute, and they're just green, a bluer and darker green than you can remember noticing on anyone before, but you feel like you can see the thing he really is peeking out from the inside. "You might be the first person to really get it," Asch says.

"My great-grandmother is generally acknowledged as the most powerful seer in a couple centuries," you say. "I have a bit of experience."

Asch grimaces and nods stiffly. "I'll pass on getting an introduction," he says. It's as light as he can probably get at the moment.

So you take the hint, and say, "Want to go get food?" because you've never met a teenage boy who didn't want that.

It doesn't exactly have the intended effect, but it still seems to get Asch out of his head. He snorts slightly, and the thing behind his eyes retreats, and then he's just like you, a normal kid carrying too much power for one person. "If there's anything left," he says, and then he hops down from the ledge and off you go.