Chapter Text
Dissatisfaction began with a speech. The words were so resonant and illuminating that everyone agreed. All the people standing in the auditorium agreed, and so did all the people outside. All the rocks and trees and buildings and cars agreed, too. After all, every one of them shared the same limitations. Every one of them saw that distant, uncrossable horizon and knew they couldn't bear to stay still.
And if everyone agrees, how can you possibly be wrong?
--
At the center of Dissatisfaction, there is a man. But Dissatisfaction contains many men, and countless other things besides. At the edge of Dissatisfaction, there is also a man.
--
A collection of pieces extends from its vast whole. The great, consuming body of it takes time to reach its destination, and these pieces-- these scouts-- act as its eyes, periscopes, searching out the Light that makes Dissatisfaction more whole.
Like a video game, suggests the man-shaped piece at the edge of the endless dark. Dissatisfaction agrees with itself, but finds this metaphor demeaning, and it soon forgets the thought in the vortex of its all-encompassing mind.
The man-shaped piece stands inside of a building. Rather, it stands in a hidden, Ethereal plane, in a place which happens to overlap with the inside of a building. It watches smoky impressions of people moving about. People who don't yet know their own Dissatisfaction.
It can feel Light, not far from here. Dissatisfaction has seen countless uses of Light, in all the places it has consumed, and so the piece recognizes what are likely scientists, doing experiments with and accelerated by the newfound Light.
It slips through a wall and feels Light-- sees it-- so bright that it is blinding, so easily recognizable. All the other scouts start rushing towards the same location. The body of Dissatisfaction will, of course, take a much longer time to reach this place, but now it knows exactly where to go.
It is impatient, but it has learned to tolerate this inconvenience. It gets quicker each time, after all. Soon it won't take any time at all.
In the same moment, though, as the piece crosses the threshold and comes upon Light-- buttons are pressed and wands are waved. They are nothing to do with the piece, of course, unseen beneath the plane. But it is caught in the crossfire.
Light snaps the tethers of this edge of its mind, and suddenly-- it is not a vast whole extending a piece into this place. The ocean recedes, leaving a shell alone and lost on the shore. The man-shaped shell has barely a moment to react.
He is in their plane, now, which means he will be seen. Dissatisfaction cannot be seen, so he has to be something else.
The man-shaped shell, as his shape would suggest, is mostly comprised of something that was once a man. Not entirely, though. After such a long time and so much blending with the rest of Dissatisfaction, (because all parts of it are synonymous in thought and matter, truly), he has been other things.
- The man, he remembers the most of. The frustration of losing his glasses. The man has glasses, and skin that is pale and sort of cold in a way that makes people yell when he tries to hold them.
- The westernmost wall of a small clothing shop saw many customers and was plastered with many advertisements in the decade it lasted before being repossessed and demolished. The man's ancient memories cannot recall the clothes he wore, so the wall supplements them. Many of the pants it saw were blue.
There's more, but this is enough in the moment. The man-shaped shell takes on distinct form and color, before he can be seen as Dissatisfaction. He lies on the ground, more man-shaped than he has been in aeons, but no more of a man.
"Holy shit," says a voice above him. It comes from something else person-shaped... no, an actual person. A scientist. A woman. Her ears are long. Should his ears be that long? It's too late to change them now.
"Who are you? How'd you get here?" she asks. The other people are running around and doing things he isn't certain of. Hearing them is automatic, but he is still trying to remember how to move his eyes.
She isn't wearing blue pants, either. He's not sure he's made any part of this body right. His throat vibrates with the attempt to make some kind of apology.
"Blue...jeans?" she repeats the thing he says, which was not an apology. She glances at his legs, then back at his face. "That your name, or...?"
"...Yes," he decides, taking the easy out. He can't remember most of the man's name, but the 'B' at the start sounds right. Like it belongs. Now that he thinks of it, he does remember a little piece of the name, he thinks.
"Barry. Bluejeans." he slurs. His eyes manage to look around the room. Someone is rushing the ball of Light out of sight. He aches as it leaves, but knows it doesn't really matter.
There isn't anywhere for it to go, and the other scouts-- though he can no longer feel their presence-- are surely chasing after it. Dissatisfaction will arrive and take it, and consume him again along with this new reality, and all will be right again.
He figures out how to move a little, and she helps him up. Then he's passed on to other people, who take him elsewhere to be checked over.
--
Barry Bluejeans easily passes the medical examination. There is nothing physically wrong with him, inside or out.
After all, he is exactly man-shaped.
--
"We're trying to figure out what happened here," Davenport says. Barry understands him to be some sort of authority on this world's Light project. "Obviously, we weren't trying to conjure a random person. Or conjure anyone, really. But if you'd be willing to provide us some information before we get you back home, it would be invaluable."
"Get you where?" Barry asks. No, wait, some far-off instinct taps at his mind. This isn't a conversation with himself, with Dissatisfaction; 'you' and 'me' are words that mean different things. "...Get me where?"
"Y-Your--" Davenport furrows his brow. "Where would you like to be dropped off?"
He'd like Dissatisfaction to come pick him up, please, ASAP.
"Uh, I don't... know." Fuck. Fuck. He's sure the man lived somewhere. People know places they live at. He's messed up terribly.
"Oh, no," Davenport says, horror dawning. Fuck. "I am so sorry--"
What?
--
As it turns out, amnesia makes an excellent excuse. They keep him around longer to ask questions, which means he gets to stay near the presence of Light, but they never push when he says he doesn't know shit, so they never get too close to the truth.
"What were you trying to do?" Barry asks at one point.
"Oh, we were-- Okay, so there's this whole new form of energy we've discovered recently, right," Lup says. Barry nods as if this is new to him. If there's any knowledge Dissatisfaction has left him with, it's Light and the way Light empowers it. "We call 'em Bonds. And we were doing a sorta strength test -- using the Light to try and sever one."
Oh. Of course. Dissatisfaction is held together by the repeated, internal bonds between all of its component pieces. That included the man-shaped piece. But because he'd been too close, and because the Light probably overpowered their experiment, the severing had targeted him, and torn him from the whole.
"But it was just magnets! We were trying to turn off magnetism between two magnets. To see if we could reinstate the bond afterwards. Otherwise we couldn't ethically experiment with emotional bonds, things like that." She sighs. "And now we're even further back on that front, 'cause this one went so wrong."
"The Light was in the same room," Barry says slowly. "I bet you it overcharged the experiment. So something unexpected happened."
She stares at him. "Yeah, we... thought of that. But it's kinda all-or-nothing with that thing. So they're considering how to divert the energy."
Barry shakes his head. Many, many worlds have experimented with the Light and learned more of its nature before being assimilated; he shares fractions of that knowledge. "No, like-- You could siphon a little off the top. Use it independently. Then you're not accounting for elephants when you're trying to work with bugs."
"You sound so sure," she says, fascinated. Her eyes haven't left him.
The thing is, Dissatisfaction is made stronger by every world it consumes. And Light is the fastest form of growth, giving it more knowledge and power to assimilate each time it touches a world. So of course he'd want them to use it to its fullest potential. It'll be all the sweeter when they're all part of it.
"Just a hunch," he grins. "Have you tried it yet?"
--
Having nowhere else to go, Barry gets officially hired as a project consultant within the week. A month later, when they finalize members of a planned expedition, he's one of the seven they invite.
The prospect of people leaving the planar system outside of Dissatisfaction sounds... new, if it's even possible. It might be a problem. But based on the project timeline, Dissatisfaction will likely beat their takeoff deadline. So they'll get all the knowledge and none of the escape, which is ideal.
--
Lup's eyes are red, one time, when she comes to a meeting. (Taako's hat is tipped down, too, but he's better at avoiding attention when he tries.) Afterwards, Magnus asks her what's wrong, and if she needs a hug, or a back massage.
"Uh, no," she says. She gives a long and deflating sigh. "It's just--"
She explains that a celebrity has died unexpectedly, and she read the news that morning. And it just hit her hard, y'know? That music got her and her brother through some tough times.
"It's okay," Barry assures her.
She squints at him. "Appreciate the effort, but it's really not. Like, I'll be fine, obvs, but--"
"No, it-- it is!" Barry insists.
"Excuse me?"
There's such a hostile energy coming off her now, and Barry doesn't know why. They've always gotten each other pretty easily, bouncing off each other about scientific ideas and sometimes sillier, nonsensical ones. But not this?
"I mean it doesn't matter," Barry clarifies quickly, and somehow that makes the vibe in the room worse. "Like, death isn't good, obviously, but we're changing the world, here! People die every day -- everyone else is gonna be onboard with our mission!"
"But she's never even gonna hear about it," Lup says.
"She could," Barry scoffs. She's really not making any sense. "We've got the Light. Just fish her soul out of the Astral Plane."
She stares at him, speechless.
"What the fuck," Taako says.
"Get out," Lup finally says, and when Barry starts to protest that he's got just as much a right to the meeting room as her, Magnus inserts his body between the two of them, and escorts him out.
--
Merle knocks on the door of Barry's office. The shadowy mass clambering over the furniture in a fury has to stop, and reconstitute itself, and look like a man again.
He opens the door. "What."
"Hey, bud, I just wanted to check in," Merle says. "You said some, uh... pretty weird stuff, there."
Barry crosses his arms. "Weird? It made perfect sense."
"...Sure," says Merle, not very convincingly. "Well, it's fine if you didn't feel sad that a singer you don't know died. Lots of people don't. But lots of people do, too."
"But why would you? It doesn't matter, Merle. All of this is so-- It's small! It's nothing! We have the Light -- she could care about bigger things than just -- the experience of one person!"
"You sure seem concerned about her experience," Merle says.
Barry stares at him.
Oh, fuck. He's right. Barry's been separated from Dissatisfaction for too long-- he even thinks of himself with that name! He doesn't have a name.
--
The goal of Dissatisfaction is to take everything into itself, to be bigger and bigger until it can break free of the laws attempting to govern its existence.
When Lup laughs, she's bigger. She takes up more space in the room, but somehow, she doesn't steal that space from anyone else.
Dissatisfaction has little use for humor. When she's a part of it, when her shape and power is recycled with new purpose, she probably won't tell any more jokes. But that's not the point.
Is it?
--
"Um, I-- wanted to apologize," Barry says. The heart-shaped thing inside of him beats quickly, traitorous.
"Did Merle send you?" Lup asks. A pink bubble expands from her lips until it quietly pops.
"No, I-- Well, he helped me-- figure out how to word this?"
"Okay." She remains guarded. She leans back in her chair, arms crossed. "What words you got?"
"I'm really sorry for what I said. I don't know if I-- if I understand, fully, but that doesn't matter. I wanted you to feel better, and that was a stupid way to try to help."
"Oh, that was an attempt to help?"
Annoyance flares in him, but shame tempers it. "Yeah. Sort of. A bad one, obviously."
"A terrible one."
"The worst."
"Well, okay," she says. "Thanks for the apology. That whole thing sucked."
"Yeah, it did," says Barry. He's well off the loose script he formed with Merle now, but something else is welling up inside him. Something old, some half-held memories of the entity from which he inherited his name. "Yeah, that's... That's not a way I want to be-- at all. If you're ever willing to give me another chance, I-- I won't waste it."
Lup regards him, curious. He feels small under her gaze, and a part of him wishes they were part of the same entity, so that he could understand her thoughts perfectly and have them too. Another part of him... relishes this. The separation. The uncertainty. The relief and euphoria overtaking his tension when she holds out a hand to shake.
"One more chance," she agrees. "Don't be stupid this time. Unless it's in a funny way."
--
After that, Barry throws himself into the work. He gives them every insight he has, learns (relearns?) theories of magic and Bonds until he starts having his own ideas. He must have been an arcanist, before, or have pieces of one inside him, for how quick it starts coming to him.
The deadline moves up by a day, then another. Davenport insists that he takes breaks. He takes the minimum time off required, still thinking through every problem while he waits to return. Everyone understands, though: the Light makes everyone want to work.
With Barry's pushing, the launch day ends up a week before the day it was originally planned. The arrival of Dissatisfaction was already going to be close; he doesn't know if they're going to beat it. (It probably won't matter, but. What if it does?)
--
When the ship jumps out of the planar system, the sight is familiar. Barry knows, intimately, the pattern of the twelve discs.
But he has never seen Dissatisfaction from outside, before. It is larger than any reality he an conceive with the small fragment of its mind he broke off, and it is... terrifying.
It claws into the Prime Material Plane with its myriad tendrils, dragging it inwards, forcing its metamorphosis. He doesn't want it to take him or his friends. Why did he ever?
(It's like watching someone give a speech (when has he ever attended a speech?) and watching everyone agree, all at once, with perfect echoed voices. Like hearing your voice shout along in sync.)
He shakes, backing up from the deck railing as Davenport flies them to the edge of this reality. He retreats to his small, allotted chamber and instantly falls apart.
The room fills with him, a shifting and shuddering mass of ink and shadow. It takes shapes of memories that don't belong to him.
Sildar Hallwinter, a man from the very first world to consume itself. The memory of an advertisement board from a quaint little store. A mother's recollection of the laughter the first time she took her son to the mall. A bouquet decaying against wet grass before a gravestone, engraved Barry J. Midford.
These are each fragments of people and places who won't ever again get to exist as he does. Things that he's helped to be consumed.
He doesn't hear the urgent, worried knocking on his door. He doesn't even notice it opening.
But he does hear Lup scream.