Work Text:
It has no name.
You do not understand. You are Grimmchild. You are legacy. You are fire and laughter and the sweep of a bow before and after the play is finished. You exist only in the context of what is meant to be—never-ending, never-beginning, always hungry.
It has no name, and if it did, it has no voice to whisper it to you. You are still tending to your own, the creaks and croaks of speech being born. You entertain a dream where you speak for you both, perched atop the cold exoskeleton covering its head. You share the voice it helps you cultivate.
It’s not in your nature, the dream or the generosity. You will shed it when you grow.
You know yourself, the towering nightmare of your future. You know yourself, the buzzing larva of your past.
You don’t know it. It moves and acts in alien ways. It takes the turns and twists of Hallownest like well-known shortcuts one minute, then falters to a dead stop and stares at the path like it has never seen it before. The maps grow and grow, unfolding across the benches you rest at. It scribbles stand-ins for statues and stores and notable landmarks, decorating them in glittering buttons. You have never seen it pause to admire art, and you pass by the abandoned husks of so much of it in the City of Tears.
You don’t know it. Bugs are cold creatures, all of them. You are the anomaly with your wings of warm membranes and the flames in your abdomen. But it is more than cold. There’s nothing to warm, nothing to lay your purring thorax against and fill with your own heat. Rarely, it touches you, always to guide or grab you out of the way of danger, like a wayward spear can end something like you. It has small, sure hands that belong around the hilt of a nail; too careful to damage you even when you were small and weak and new to yourself; too strong for you to break free even now if it wanted to hold you.
These are the parts you can describe. You build them around the unexplainable, around the absence of its touch even as it wrapped its grip around you. The not-cold, not-heat that glided across you like muffling cloth until you couldn’t remember that you are a candle-creature, that you burn. The way it was on you before you saw it move and let you go before you knew you had been touched, and yet the sense of it on you lingered for hours and hours with the weight of nothing more substantial than a shadow cast overhead.
You don’t know it. It sits like a broken doll, head fallen to the side. You are still growing. You tire.
From the rumbling underbreath comments of Elderbug, it doesn’t. Its long pauses in the heart of Dirtmouth are new, are given to you, are kindnesses.
You don’t know it, but you know enough about things that are not meant to exist to know that they are rarely kind.
The iron bench warms beneath your chuffing breaths. You curl your wings around yourself. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t breathe. It doesn’t live.
It’s more honest on the bench than it is running around with a nail in hand.
You are Grimmchild, and you know yourself, and you know that your existence is not one that will allow you kindness for much longer. It has the advantage there: in being nothing, it has a choice. In being something, you will run out of time. It is helping you run down the clock with every spirit swallowed.
You don’t begrudge it this. You are meant to be what you are meant to be. A bell cannot be unrung. It echoes.
Still, you will not be kind forever.
The infection encroaches. The two of you have watched it creep into familiar territory. The two of you have failed to hold back the rot.
You think it is trying to make itself into something that can. And when it finally becomes something, there will be a loss that no one can measure. When it is named, when it gives itself to purpose, it will cease to exist, and that new bug will come into being.
You will know that bug even less than you know it now.
You chirrup. You scoot. You lay your head upon the threadbare cloak that covers its lap.
It doesn’t react. Its head is low, shadow sockets impossible to read. The dim lamplight dances over its head, and you watch until your eyes are too heavy to focus.
Beneath its cloak, your warmth fails to reach it. You are pouring yourself into a void.
One benefit of being meant for more: You won’t run out of flame. If absence can be satisfied, you will share until it is. If not, you still refuse to move. The cloak is soft beneath your chin.
You wonder if you will know its name. If. When. You will be more before it finishes becoming. You may be able to speak.
You are selfish. That’s a truth, of you, of what you will be, of what you always are. You don’t like the idea of what’s yours adorned with names you haven’t given it. You croak. Herald. You buzz. Guardian. You purr. Companion.
None of these names are the name, but they are yours to give and they resound in your mind as you think of it. If it must become something, then it will have always been more to you first than to the rest of Hallownest.
You will have loved the void, knowing it will not love you back unless and until it becomes something that can, knowing you will not be able to hold onto your love with your becoming.
You are Grimmchild; it is nothing, and it is your everything.