Work Text:
Yana has nightmares. His room is connected to the laboratory and so Chantho hears him screaming in the darkness when they’re especially vivid. By now, she knows not to try and wake him. She makes him hot chocolate, or what passes for it now, and brings it in to him once he’s composed himself. He tells her not to worry about him so much and apologises for waking her, even though he knows she doesn’t sleep (it’s his sweetly mistaken idea of friendship to treat her like a human). When she asks chan what he dreamt of that made him so afraid tho, he waves his hand and claims not to remember, though she thinks he does. She thinks he dreams of falling and the man in black, but she doesn’t press him for details as his hands twitch rhythmically against the chipped mug.
Yana tells stories. They all do - there isn’t much else to do on Malcassairo except work and tell stories of better years and places - but Yana’s are special. They don’t just fill time.
All of Yana’s stories are about the man in black: a villain so evil that his own people cast him out, and even the gods of the underworld eventually rejected him, forcing him to wander the universe alone for eternity. When Yana speaks of him, his voice becomes low and quiet. He terrifies the watching children, who gather to hear the stories night after night, though they must sometimes have nightmares of their own.
Chantho understands, only too well, what draws them to the stories. Despair is such an insubstantial enemy, difficult to look in the eye and harder to beat. She and Yana spend hours giving speeches about the footprint, chan which will surely be ready any day now tho, but it doesn’t help much. The man in black is cunning and ruthless. He steals the lives of others and laughs as civilisations burn, but for all that, he is just a man and he is always defeated in the end.
Yana calls his adversary Theta, though he is quick to explain that this is not the hero’s real name. Like the man in black, his real name is kept secret. Theta is just as clever and just as powerful as his enemy, but where the man in black walks alone in the shadows, Theta has a stream of plucky companions who help him foil the man in black’s schemes. No matter how bad the situation, the children know it will be fixed when Theta turns up. They cheer sometimes, which startles Yana: always wrapped up in the story.
“Are you sure it’s the right time for cheering?” he asks with genuine confusion, rather than storyteller’s guile. “The whole planet is on fire.”
“Oh, that. Theta will put a stop to that,” one of the children points out, smugly
“Yes, of course,” Yana says. "Yes, you may be right.” Then he smiles and relaxes visibly and carries on with whatever story he’s been telling. He loves talking about Theta, who is his favourite character, the one he cannot stop returning to and improving. Some days, Theta is old and waspish, other times he is gentle and young, sometimes serious, sometimes cruel, sometimes verging on clownish.
“Forgive an old man’s pathetic memory,” Yana protests, when the children point out that Theta’s hair was blond in another story, “if I said it was blond last time, then I was wrong last time. It was definitely curly and brown. Long, at first, then he cut it short in the War. Does it matter?”
It is perhaps this inconsistency in his physical appearance, even his personality, which stops Chantho completely believing in Theta. His motives, always good, are glossed over, as if Yana does not properly understand them. He feels like a fiction: someone Yana has invented in order to fight off the demons.
She believes in the demons though - she sees them darken Yana’s face when the drums bear down on him, and she hears them when he screams in his sleep - and she believes in the man in black, because she saw him looking out of Yana’s eyes the only time she tried to wake him from his nightmares. That night, his terror was almost unbearable, the scream sounding, impossibly, on seven or eight frequencies at once. She touched him and it stopped immediately as he woke. His pupils were wide and black in the dim light. He smiled like the Futurekind.
Chantho would have run, but before the man could speak he blinked and was suddenly Yana again, shivering under the thin blankets, apologising for waking her and asking about the possibility of hot chocolate.
His stories are always better on the days after his nightmares. The plots are more complicated, the characters richer, the man in black comes closer to victory and Theta sometimes hesitates with moral uncertainty, which Yana does not usually allow. On these occasions, more than ever, the storyteller seems to be remembering, rather than creating.
“Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Yana says, when she suggests this to him one day whilst they are replacing the circuit boards in the footprint. “Theta would have made this infuriating thing work by now. Probably just by hitting it and hoping. That was usually his style.”
He frowns at his invention and gives it a sharp smack with a nearby hammer, but the machine remains unresponsive.
Yana sighs. “No. As you can see, he and the man in black are merely made-up stories for children,” he says and smiles so benignly that she almost believes him.