Chapter Text
Sampo had always had very ordinary, boring dreams. They consisted of all your typicals: out-of-place faces, nonsensical physicality, the unabashed weirdness of his unconscious psyche…
He understood this did not sound boring. However, the truth of the universe was this:
Dreams were more than just your own.
They belonged to you and your other. Your soulmate. Intertwined by fate's ever-meddling fingers from the moment you took your very first breath.
Or, at least, that was what Sampo had heard from the mouths of more people than he thought there were stars. Across planets and galaxies and time, too. Always a constant. Always a fact.
Dreams were not your own.
Except, Sampo had never shared his dreams with anyone. When he slept the only things he ever saw were from the recesses of his own unfortunate mind. Never had he closed his eyes and felt like he was seeing through somebody else's. Never had he slept and been joined in that so-called dreamscape by his so-called soulmate, as others proclaimed to be reality.
Not to sound bitter, of course! Rest assured, Sampo Koski was someone who could enjoy his own exuberant company without need for anything else, because he had learned to accept that fate thought this was the best way for him to live out his life:
Alone.
"Have you had any fun dreams yet, kultsi?"
Sampo remembered his mother asking him that, once. A long time ago now, back when he was a boy that barely came up to her elbow.
She had swept her fingers across his forehead as she was tucking him into thick, warm covers in the cold. In that small log cabin in the woods they used to share, with snow thick enough that it would blockade the door if they did not shovel it often enough.
"I dreamt that a toad ate our entire house once," Sampo replied eagerly with a childish grin. Hands out as far as they could reach, just to show how much this supposed toad could eat.
His mother laughed something warm and pulled his hands back to rest over the quilt, with hers perfectly covered over top. The curl of her long blue hair fell enough to brush the backs of her knuckles as she leaned forward.
"No," she hummed, "I mean special dreams. Is there ever anybody else inside?"
Sampo did not quite understand the question yet. It made his words simple and confused, "Loads of people. You're in them, too."
"I see," she smiled like that meant something greater, "You don't ever feel like you're looking through somebody else's eyes?"
(Even though he had forgotten so much about her, Sampo thought he would remember his mother's smile for eternity. For how it was plastered to her face like a lingering, even at their worst. When they and their entire town wanted for food and money in the winter, or when she grew sick enough that she could barely even stand. Still, she would smile, and people would gather to it for the comfort of her optimistic silver linings.
Sampo really hadn't perfected it like she had.)
"Not really…" Sampo said hesitantly, "Should I be?"
"No, it's okay," she replied as she squeezed his hands in assurance, "It will come eventually. And when it does, you will remember much better than anyone else, too, now that you're older. That will make it even more special."
To little Sampo, that was enough. The simplicity of it's okay. The idea that dreams of his soulmate would only be more exciting and important when they eventually came to him.
Sometimes he tried to imagine what she would say if she found out that they still hadn't, nearly three centuries later.
You are more special than I even thought before, or something unquestionably, dreadfully tender like that. Reassuring him like it didn't matter that he was twisted into something tangled in the long, long time they've been apart.
Alone, alone, alone, was what his own mind would say in response anyway.
At one point in time, Sampo genuinely enjoyed being a Fool.
This was especially true when he first encountered them, back when he was wanting to escape a planet tainted by grief. Because he ventured out into the universe, fresh-faced and naive, and he found people that reminded him how to smile at his worst.
Sampo drank it up like a drug.
He was eager and enthusiastic for every turn. Happily, he indulged only in the whims that brought him joy and let it begin to shape him into something new. Someone who was consumed by the thought, what fun can I have next?
He quickly began to have a particular reputation for it.
If you want to learn how to revel in life to it's fullest, go see Sampo Koski. Trail the Foolish path he carves and forget about life for a while.
Sampo used to think this meant he was like her. That people wanted to come to him for comfort. For silver linings to look upon.
He was young and inebriated on the fresh, new feeling of every thrill, however, because he sees now that people came to Sampo Koski to forget. They came to learn what it truly meant to ignore your worries and doubts and nihilistic thoughts just like he did.
(Things like how his dreams continued to be manufactured by only himself. Things like how his anger for the unfairness of the world bubbled like a nasty, acidic brewing.)
They wanted him to teach them how to smile at their worst and feel better for it.
The issue was that Sampo had never actually learnt how to do that. He had simply begun mirroring the person he loved more than anything. But mirrors were not reality, and so his own grins were tainted by a forceful ignorance. By his unwillingness to admit that he didn't know how to smile and have it be truthful.
(He said were, but even now he hadn't figured it out. How did one smile and have it be anything but a mask?)
Still, the Fools came to him. They partied and laughed and indulged in all of Sampo's worst fantasies. Drinking and sex and the breaking of every rule he could find. They followed where he lead, even despite how he lead them down a spiralling staircase into the abyss of elation.
It should not have been a surprise when THEY gazed upon him for it.
Hysterical laughter. A masked smile larger than the universe and sharper than even his most cutting thoughts. Overlapped all over. Hands reaching out. Chaos. Mirth.
You're fun.
You're fun!
I want you to keep entertaining me!
KEEP ENTERTAINING ME
hahahahaha!
here, here!
here, here!!
Sampo was utterly nothing in that moment. Out of reality and out of body to match. Still measly and small and surely nothing but a pitiful speck to something as grand as Aha.
His mouth was traitorous, however, and started to speak like this wasn't an Aeon.
"Is it really that fun to follow someone like me around?"
THEY began to manically laugh again and did not reply otherwise; only the rolling peaks and dips of a cackling that Sampo shall never forget.
He was not even really capable of forgetting that, anymore. For with THEIR gaze came a lot of things Sampo had no ability to refuse, as just a speck.
(He thinks he would have accepted it eagerly at the time anyway, because he hadn't yet learned that even the headiest of thrills stop working after a while. And why would anyone want such fun to end if it felt so good?)
Sampo Koski became something a little less human in that moment. Gifted with the touch of an Aeon that wanted nothing but to see him continue his pathetically desperate but apparently amusing life.
In particular, it was his physicality that changed the most. His mind—for better or for worse—stayed exactly as it had been, but his body-
Well. What would be most important to talk about first?
Sampo would have liked to say it was how he became capable of twisting himself like a moldable clay; in a way he had secretly dreamed of from the moment his voice dropped and his shoulders began to widen. The ability to ignore the boring truth of how reality had begun to consider him—as only a man—and choose to look more like a woman whenever she wanted to. Whenever she itched for it. To be seen as pretty and not handsome. To wear a woman's clothes and not have it be a man in a dress.
(And even better, to still have the ability to come back into looking like a man again whenever he itched for that too. Because Sampo was a swirling, chaotic mess of things, and even his gender could not escape that truth about him. That most of the time, he enjoyed being a man like he was born, and sometimes she enjoyed being a woman too. They didn't exist like a battle he wanted to choose between, but instead like a pendulum that made his stomach swoop wonderfully whenever it swung either way.)
He'd have liked to call that the most important, but it should probably actually have been the even greater reality that becoming an emanator of Elation made his body ignore.
Aging.
Sampo, when Aha had first gazed upon him, was maybe 35 years old. He said maybe, because he didn't even quite remember anymore. He knew the ballpark, because he could look in the mirror and see the soft lines that indicated he had been something normal once. The grey hair at his nape that he knew would have eventually spread all over had it been given the chance.
But that was a long time ago now. Just about three centuries, maybe. Maybe. Of which he had spent a lot of that time using everything imaginable to forget about being something real at all.
So that should likely have been the first thing to mention about how Sampo existed, nowadays.
Oh, and also that he spent all his time trying his very best not to sleep at all. Because for some unfathomable reason, Aha had chosen to find amusement in letting Sampo Koski destructively ignore all the parts of reality he disliked the least.
His stagnant physical gender. His dreams, which never contained any hint at the soulmate that fate was meant to create for him.
To him, being an Emanator was disregarding the rules of reality that he would otherwise have had to bend to, and making them bend around him instead, just so that he could cling to his fleeting happiness. Hence, Sampo thought he could count on just his hands the amount of times he had slept in the past 100 years (or more). Because it was never by will. Never by choice.
Instead, he escaped into the chaotic whims of life when he was awake, because he couldn't escape into the safety of dreams like everyone else apparently could without it making him utterly miserable.
And Sampo Koski was not miserable, of course. No no no.
Don't you remember?
He was fun. As proclaimed by the most fun Aeon of all, to boot.
Yep! That was him, alright.
Super fun.
(Sometimes when he thought things, he felt like he could hear the curling of that laughter again like a dreadful shiver up his spine.)
Eventually though, like he had said before, even the most exuberant revelry got somewhat tiresome when it was all he had done for so long. When time was theoretically endless, it led to feeling like he had tried everything at least once, and now life was just repeating it over and over and over.
Plus, Sampo Koski had a small little secret. Like a splinter under his nails he never managed to remove.
He didn't much like the Masked Fools anymore.
(Or maybe he never quite did, and was only desperate for something to make him smile.)
Sampo was nothing but a hypocrite to think it, of this he was more than aware. Elation had shaped him in a way that could never be undone. And even before that, he had always been an enthusiastic follower of the belief that life was boring without a laugh.
This dislike hit him suddenly, however, when he stepped foot onto a place like Penacony and let his worse off habits consume him again so easily. When all it took was the barest push from Fools who wanted to indulge in their awful habits just the same, and had deemed him the (unfortunately correct) type to come along.
He did it because it was new and Sampo was constantly craving for that hedonistic feeling he used to have when he was truly young. When no consequences meant unadulterated fun.
Penacony, then, was built upon no consequences. It had been reformed into a place where you could slip into a manufactured dreamscape—made surely for people like him who did not have one of their own to cling to—and indulge.
Sampo had tried a true myriad of things. So many he didn't even think he could count them all anymore.
Never before had he tried dying.
Only because he knew he would wake again in the real world, of course. Which he did. A sharp, loaded gasp of a breath that had his ribs rattling from the suddenness of it. Then, the tumbling of laughter from the fact he even felt such a heavy, thrilling thing at all.
As expected, when he returned to that fake sleep (the closest he had willingly been in years to dreaming) he only found he wanted to try it all over again. The plummeting of his stomach like he was falling from the sky, with the knowledge he would land on his feet at the end. The smile and the gasp and the dreadfully adrenaline fuelled pumping of his heart, which could not discern it away from actual reality.
The few Fools who persuaded him to try out this pleasure-seeking planet in the first place didn't find any issue in the idea. In fact, they trailed along just like those old days of follow the leader. Except the leader was Sampo Koski and he thought if he had a choice he would not follow himself even a step in any direction.
(His dislike for their influence on him bubbled like a threat.)
Penacony was still new and fresh, though, and he was an addict intrigued by all its parts now. So he stupidly—very stupidly—thought he should try those too.
Food and alcohol. Gambling.
Dream bubbles.
It was those that truly did him in.
Specifically, how they got at his forever burning curiosity. A trait that would eventually kill him like it did the cat.
Would the bubble be as boring as his normal dreams? Would it create something new, considering how long it had even been since he slept at all? Would his soulmate appear here like a taunting mist he could not grasp?
Sampo wanted to know.
So he carefully reached out his fingers toward such a bubble, brushing over the film containing something bigger than it should. He expected only weird nonsensicality and things that shouldn't be connected at all.
Instead, Sampo saw a river. Intimately nestled between a litany of pine trees he knew like the back of his hand, with snow spattering the ground just thin enough to clearly tell him the time of year.
"Eat this!" called his own voice, young and small and bundled in leather coats. Standing at the side of the river as he brandished a sword larger than his entire torso.
There was a man he was facing, who was tall and looming and with no face at all. He wore the coat of arms that the city-folk often bore like a pride.
Young Sampo swung his sword just once and the man dissipated into a cloud of mist. A truly childish imagining of what fighting must feel like.
Still, there was another voice that called out to him. A soft melody that made his breath catch on the tightening of his chest.
"Well done, kultsi!" his mother said from just behind Sampo with a clap of her hands. Something so clear and fresh. Not muddled at all by time or his aims to forget, here in this dream.
(It felt like his old, wrung-out heart shattered at kultsi. An endearment he heard for barely even a fraction of his lifetime at this point, but still warm enough to linger around for the rest of it.)
Young Sampo turned to her with a pleased grin. Looking right past his shoulder. "Was I cool?"
Sampo was suddenly, abruptly afraid that this was where the dream would end. It made his head whip so suddenly in her direction. Just to see if– if–
His mother was smiling. Young and healthy and bright.
"Very much," she said toward young Sampo, though he felt it like a tearing in his own chest. "But I want to go home. Will you come home with me?"
"But…" young Sampo started to exclaim, "What about the other guys?"
At his words, Sampo felt like he could hear their stomping like a crushing tempo. The sound of hooves hitting compacted dirt.
"What guys?" his mother asked so openly. "Come on."
She outstretched her hand toward his child self. Just past where the real Sampo was stood.
For some unfathomable reason, young Sampo did not take it. His face instead curled into something tight. "You don't understand."
"I understand, Sampo," she implored over the cacophony, "Now come with me."
I'll come with you, Sampo thought. He impulsively and childishly tried to clutch her hand inside his own, but all he did was pass right through her.
"No," young Sampo argued and shook his head with a finality, "I can't."
You can, he thought even louder, please don't—
Don't–
Sampo ripped into reality so quickly he thought it displaced some of his limbs.
It hadn't, of course. In fact, this wasn't even reality that he had slipped back into. Simply another layer of distractions to hide himself between like a dangerous drug.
"Aeons," he whispered to himself. Staring at the dream bubble floating so innocently in front of him again like it hadn't shoved a knife into his chest and twisted.
"Was it that bad?" sang out a voice between pearls of laughter that were only followed by more.
He had forgotten that some Fools had been lingering around with him still.
"Are you crying?" a softer voice said so amusedly. Curling up.
Sampo finally tilted to look at the small group, who had clearly been invested in their own dreaming, but were now all tilted to look at him just the same. Evaluating. Putting him under the stage lights. A myriad of audience members he cared very, very little for.
"I–" he started, only for his voice to crack on just the one syllable. It made him realise so suddenly that he was, in fact, wanting to cry.
They laughed.
It was a bursting, cacophonous thing, just like the Aeon they all loved so much—not that any of them had felt that for their own ears.
It was this that hit him and made his splinter dig too deep for him to ignore. The dislike for that sound that followed Fools wherever they stepped. Sadistic and mean and cruel.
Sampo liked to laugh. He liked to smile. He wanted to convince himself he could be optimistic about this shitty world like her. He wanted to make other people feel happy too, like her.
Once upon a time, he thought that was what it meant to be a Fool.
He was nothing but naive to think so, however, because Fools didn't care about bringing their joy to others. Instead, they simply wished to live in it for themselves, at the expense of everything else they ever touched.
Sampo hated them. He hated them so much that the anger felt like it burned the laughing on his own tongue sometimes.
More than anything, he hated that he was just the same, wasn't he? Craving for a deadly rush that did nothing but hurt everything. Even himself, too! How wonderful!
Sampo already regretted everything he'd done in this fake dreamscape.
Please come with me.
No.
His tears spilled over onto his cheeks, and Sampo Koski began to join in with their laughter at the insane hilarity of the entire thing. Bitterly, he pressed a hand to his mouth and let the air escape him in chuckles instead of cries.
Except, he was not laughing with them and their sadistic enjoyment of his breaking. No. Instead, he laughed at how much he had strayed away from her image in his attempt to replicate it.
His mother was a woman he never really understood. A woman he didn't even remember the name of anymore. Just a smile and the idea of her words.
Sampo pictured how she would look at him now, and only felt a sense of shame for all the ways he had ruined himself.
He thought she would be disappointed in him.
He wanted to leave it all behind for a while.
He wanted to go home.
"You're giving it up?" Sparkle asked in that saccharine sweet tone. A little mockingly, maybe. Looking at him with an eyebrow raised in her surprise, but also with a smile perfected into something prying. "Did you hit your head, old man?"
She held his mask so strangely between her fingers, and the lights of World's End Tavern made it look somewhat ethereal as she did.
Sampo shrugged and smiled wide for the way her expression always felt like it dug uncomfortably under his ribs. "Maybe I feel like trying out the simple kind of stage for a while."
She snorted and cocked out her hip, "It'll be boring as all else."
"You'll understand when you're older," he teased.
"Kill me if I'm ever as old as you," Sparkle retorted back mirthfully and suddenly waved his mask in front of him like she wanted to make him crave for it. "I'm not giving it back easily."
That's why you have it at all, he thought.
"No, of course you won't," Sampo smiled. "I'm sure I'll get it back if I want it, though."
He silently hoped he never would.
Sampo spent a while running from planet to planet to planet. To the farthest ends of the universe he could find, looking for something he didn't even know how to name.
(Too cowardly to admit he might actually have had an inkling of an idea.)
Apparently, there was something about Jarilo-VI that seemed to fit the bill.
He thinks he knew it from the moment he stepped foot onto the cold crunch of snow. When he passed by the sparse, occasional spattering of withered, old trees barely clinging to life. Tall and particularly pine-like.
He thinks he knew it from the moment he slipped secretly into Jarilo's only city, too. The lingering warmth of a society trying to shelter away from the cold that was clearly plaguing them. The never-ending winter that had killed all else.
Sampo felt a little more human amongst the familiarity of it. A little younger, maybe. A little less like a Fool.
He wanted to cling to that new-old feeling for a little bit.
Selfishly, he carved out a space for himself in Belobog. Slotted himself into the gaps as if he could have been there from the start, instead of just an outsider lying with every syllable out of his mouth.
Still, he had bad habits. Simplicity did not mean he wanted to be bored here; it just meant he wanted to laugh in the way ordinary people laughed again.
He took on Sampo Koski the criminal. The thief. The scammer. The rule breaker.
(Sometimes very secretly, he took on the journalist too. A woman with a teasing smile, who was obviously not Sampo Koski, because ordinary people didn't ignore the physical rules of the universe in such a way.)
He did this because Belobog was fortified into something tense and close to snapping from the pressure. From the isolation of only themselves as allies against the cold and the Fragmentum monsters it brang.
Sampo—as the normal person he was pretending to be—wanted to alleviate some of that weight. Even if the only way he could alleviate it was by helping people who needed to laugh remember how.
A nurse down in the underworld, swamped by the relatively recent closing of their borders. A man who was wanting for the warmth of a geomarrow heater he couldn't afford anymore. A little girl who wanted to touch snow, because in the underground she was apparently not allowed the right.
This, then, was how he met one Gepard Landau. A Silvermane Guard proudly wearing the emblem on her chest in a way that made distaste secretly taint his tongue.
(A noble born one too, he eventually learned. Making his distaste just that little bit stronger.)
"Outside of the city is off limits," she said sternly and with a suspicious frown. Tall enough to unabashedly say it right to his face, with the false assumption that Sampo would listen. Muscular enough that he thought if they were to fight fair and square (as in, if Sampo were normal) she might even win.
Strangely, the short cut of her hair was much thinner on the right side of her head, where Sampo could see a large, seemingly fresh scar running almost all the way up to her eyebrow.
"Can't a guy just get some snow?" he replied with a purposefully fake innocence and then continued to crouch back down and scoop some of said snow into a small jar.
"Off limits means no exceptions," the guard continued in a clearly baffled annoyance. "I'm not saying it again. How did you even get past the guards?"
Sampo chuckled something secretive to himself and screwed a lid onto the jar. He just had to get it back to the underworld quick enough that it wouldn't melt, now.
Mentioning the Silvermanes that Sampo had to slip past did make him ponder though: why was this guard all the way out here by herself? It wasn't patrol territory and it certainly wasn't near frontline territory, either.
Hm.
He stood and couldn't quite stop his cocky smirk, however, "So what, you'll arrest me for getting some snow? I didn't think the guards had fallen that low."
Any amusing confusion to the blonde's face was gone. Instead replaced by a tight jaw and a heavy glare. "This isn't a joke. I'm giving you a lot of leeway right now."
He saw how her hands clenched into her jacket from how they were crossed across her chest. The metal fingers on her right moved with a mechanical stutter, in a way that meant to him they had to be real and not just some fancy gauntlet for show.
More than just a city patrol member, then.
Aeons, Sampo did enjoy intriguing things.
"Okay, okay," Sampo appeased with his hands up, still letting that dislike for so-called guards tint his teasing words a little, "Little ol' Sampo Koski knows when to back down, lest the big scary guard come throw him in jail."
For some reason, her expression twitched so openly and her eyes swept him up and down.
"Why do you want the snow?" she asked abruptly. Suspiciously. Like she knew something, all of a sudden.
Oh, that was fun.
It meant his name had made it to Silvermanes he hadn't even met yet. Sampo Koski the criminal. Yet to have been caught by the numerous guards that had already attempted it.
Sampo laughed like a burst at that. His grin wide and unfiltered like his mirthful tone, "Wouldn't you like to know, blondie."
And then, just as quickly as he came, Sampo ran. His feet took off against the snow on Belobog's border, and he rushed back toward the inner city like a whirlwind.
"Oi!" the guard called at his back in an indignant shock. Only for a moment, though, before Sampo heard the shuffling of feet against snow as they abruptly began to run after him.
A quick reaction time, at least.
That was the first time Sampo was chased down by Gepard Landau, for something as meagre as getting snow from outside the walls.
It was most certainly not the last.
The issue with pretending to be normal was that he was treated as such.
He sounded nonsensical when he phrased it like that, yes, but it was like this:
Maybe two years into staying in Belobog (Sampo was unfortunately bad at keeping track of time), he got into a little scuffle one evening. It truly was almost nothing to Sampo, at this point in his life; just a minor cave-in near Boulder Town and some desperate vagrants that wanted to take advantage of this fact.
Sampo was a little preoccupied with trying to help a couple unfortunate miners get out of the rubble, though, and they caught him off guard because of it.
(Not that he even really understood what they were aiming for. Maybe to get at extra Geomarrow before anyone else in the small bout of chaos.)
The fight was still piss easy. Sampo was somewhat ashamed to say they managed to injure him at all: a knife pressed right into his side.
Sampo was fine to leave it as it was. Another part of his strange physicality was that if he just thought it hard enough, he could forget to feel the pain of such a bothersome thing.
It never healed any quicker than other people, but he at least had that.
Once again, however, he was trying to be normal here, and the few miners around for the scuffle viewed him as such.
One of the women quickly rushed over to grab Sampo's wrist when he reached down to pull out the knife, "No, no! Don't take it out, it'll make it worse."
"We- we should go to Natasha," an older man chimed in, anxiously hovering over them both and holding his hat between his hands as he did.
"Oh no," Sampo eased quickly with his palms out and a grin to match, "No need to bother such a busy woman! It looks worse than it is. Old Sampo Koski's had far more trouble than this."
"Come, come," the older man rushed out in almost a panic and began ushering Sampo in the direction of Boulder Town. Ignoring his protests. "Quickly now."
The woman nodded and quickly began doing the same. "You should get checked out for that bruise, too, Matvey."
That's how Sampo truly ended up in Natasha's clinic for the first time. Not for his usual errands or to be like the annoying pest at her window, but instead with something that would probably actually worry most.
Sampo was not most. He found it hard to grasp worrying about himself in this department anymore.
Still, he was very aware of how concerning it would be to an experienced doctor for him to not feel pain from such an injury. Especially when it was causing him to bleed so much. So, he tried to force through old habits and feel it like a normal person might.
It sucked. Truly. He remembered why he made himself forget.
Sampo hissed when Natasha pulled out the blade, and continued to dramatically pout at the pressure she applied with a cloth right after.
"Hopefully we're lucky and it missed everything important," she murmured with a frown.
"Good for you," Sampo laughed a little breathlessly even despite how he'd been made to lay down, "I'm a very lucky guy."
Natasha huffed in a stressed kind of way and called over a young girl who was rushing around the clinic floor doing various odd things for other patients. A trainee, he supposed.
"Continue to hold this," Natasha said, "And replace it when needed. It doesn't seem to be vital, and should likely clot soon. Call me immediately if it doesn't."
"Yes," the girl nodded purposefully, though he thought she looked anxious still.
"Does this mean I'll get to go home soon?" Sampo teased as the girl and Natasha swapped places. Pressing a hand to his head to help swamp the dizzying feeling that was beginning to press inside his skull.
"No," Natasha sighed as she headed back to the floor. "You're staying here for me to monitor you, Sampo."
Somehow he managed to stop himself from groaning at that.
If only he had been paying more attention, he wouldn't have ended up here. He wouldn't have had to feel so out of it from barely any blood loss at all. He wouldn't have had to bear the worry of a person like Natasha weighing down his lungs, even when he wasn't the type of person who needed it! There were much better uses for their limited resources than stitching up an old, useless, liar of an Emanator who thought it would be fun to be human again, after all.
Great work that was turning out to be, huh?
Luckily, he did stop bleeding relatively soon. Though, Sampo was feeling more light-headed by the minute, so he didn't really have a good grasp on how long that took.
"He's still awake, though," he thought he could hear the young girl mumble to Natasha for some reason, while the woman was pressing a needle into the crook of his elbow.
"Give it a minute," Natasha softly said back as she stood up and adjusted the IV bag he had been attached too. Then, she turned to catch Sampo's gaze from where he was looking at her through the heavy press of his hand. Still trying to dissuade that headache-inducing feeling. "Your blood type, Sampo. Do you know it? I want to double check my notes."
"When did you get my blood type?" Sampo huffed with a smile that took far too much effort. "Surely you've gotta ask a guy before something as intimate as that, Nat."
"Sampo," she said firmly in that way she always did. A little tired and perpetually exasperated at him, even despite her relatively young age.
"I dunno," he sighed and licked at his gums, which felt a little off, "O positive, I think."
"Like I thought, then," she murmured with a pensive expression.
For some reason, they both continued to simply look at Sampo afterwards. Like they were waiting.
Sampo wanted to examine everything about them for it, but the world was starting to feel a little heavy. Low and heady and hard to keep his eyes open.
Oh.
Wait. Wait.
"Wait–" he gasped out and grabbed at Natasha's skirt with his hand loosely, "Why're you making me sleep? I don't…"
Natasha's expression only fell into that worry even more, as she leaned down to press her hand to Sampo's shoulder, "I need to examine the wound and stitch you up."
"I could've–" Sampo tried to say, tight and clinging to his thoughts. Curling his hand into her clothes even more. "I could've been awake. Fine—Fine by me! I–"
"It would have hurt more than I need it to," Natasha said so calmingly. For some reason, her hand smoothed through his hair in a way that- that made him think of his- "I'm not trying to put you into shock, Sampo."
"But…" he murmured through the final dredges of his consciousness, "I'm not…"
And so Sampo, for the first time in a long time, slept.
Not by will. Not by choice.
Simply by the unfortunate consequences of pretending to be human.
Sampo expected to open his eyes to bright, clinical, overhead lights.
Instead, he opened his eyes to see the stars. A litany of specks among the nebula of space that he knew very intimately, by now.
Even more strangely, when he moved to sit up from how he was splayed out ungracefully under the sky, he noticed two stark things.
The first was his own body.
Now, Sampo had become used to the feeling of his body being strange after this long as an Emanator.
Never before had he looked quite so intangible, though, because Sampo didn't seem to have flesh at all. Instead, he seemed like he was made up of galaxies and stars and streaks of deep, intertwining colours, just like the space he had woken up to see.
He tentatively moved his arm just to see if it was really him, and sure enough, all the stars painting his skin moved with him.
It made him tumble out a sudden laugh, especially because—when he looked down at himself some more—it felt sort of hard to pinpoint which side of the pendulum he was swinging on. For every new blink, it felt like this body shifted between both man and woman in such rapid concession that all it left was some strange feeling that he was currently both at once, yet still each of them individually, too.
The second stark thing was that the floor was like a thick, warm blanket. The kind that was soft enough for her to want to ignore life for a while and just bundle up in it. A deep enough blue that it almost blended in with the darkness of space surrounding it, as both things simultaneously seemed to go on forever. As far as Sampo's eye could see.
He instinctually ran his fingers through the material of it, wondering why touching it made him think so much of home. Of log cabins and bedtime stories and have good dreams, kultsi.
Oh. Right. She supposed she did surely have to be dreaming right now.
Though… none of her dreams had ever felt so real.
Sampo was so distracted by these things, that it took her far too long to notice the thing she should have probably noticed first. The speck of gold amongst blues and purples and blacks.
A person.
A… person?
They were something small, even as they noticed Sampo and come closer to him just the same. Even as they came to stand by his hand where it pressed with all his weight into the floor.
Confusingly, they were maybe just as tall as the length from Sampo's elbow to the top of his middle finger. Just as intangible as Sampo seemed to be, except this man—because it was likely a man, now that he was looking closer—was made of something like the evening sky on warm summer day, instead of Sampo's stars. Orange and pink and soft in all the ways they blended into each other.
Something utterly warm, like the picturesque feeling of sitting on the beach and letting yourself breathe with the waves as the sun sets.
Even despite his size, the person stood out so strongly among everything else.
He did not seem to have a face, however. Merely the soft, slow shift of colour that was a little too entrancing to look at.
(The sight made Sampo reach her own hand up to her head, just to see…
He too, did not seem to have a face under his fingers. Even despite how he felt like he could smile if he tried hard enough, and could still see even though there was apparently nothing to see out of.)
Despite this inability to see his expression, Sampo felt like he knew what the small person was feeling, as he looked up at Sampo from the floor.
A sense of awe.
Because-
Because-
I mean special dreams. Is there ever anybody else inside?
Surely not. Surely. Surely.
He had been alive for so long, now, with nothing at all to show for it. Surely this couldn't be…
The man hesitantly took a step closer, and Sampo impulsively reached back down toward him: because he had to know. He had to know.
She eagerly held out her palms at the floor for this person, who was for some reason much, much smaller than Sampo was in this dream plane. Hoping. Hoping.
The man stepped forward and sat himself onto her palms with nothing but cautiousness. Cross-legged and with a surprisingly perfect posture. Sampo felt the wariness so intimately between her ribs, even with no words or expressions to see it.
Still, she returned the carefulness, as she brang her hands up, up, up; until the man was right in front of Sampo's non-existent face for her to examine.
There was a moment of nothing.
Sampo desperately wanted to be able say:
Is it you?
He thought that thought over and over and over. Crushing everything else tight underneath it. Pounding on all his years and years and years of thinking it could not be possible. That fate had simply scorned him into loneliness.
Aeons, he was painfully praying this wasn't a dream of his own torturous making.
Sampo was ripped out of her thoughts by the feeling of something warm pressing to her face. A hand—barely big enough to cover a third of her cheek—as the man leaned forward far enough from where he was sitting in Sampo's palms to reach out and touch. To press his own golden palm to Sampo's nebulae-made skin, which was-
Oh.
Which was wet with intangible tears, somehow.
How strange, to cry when he didn't even have the eyes to do so. A slow, dreadful cascade of all his terrible fear. All his terrible wanting.
Somehow, he thought he could hear it. Not by words or even any kind of language at all. Merely the thrumming under his skin, like they could maybe exist in that intertwined kind of way.
Of course it's me.
Sampo was something truly broken for it. For the pure, simple kindness of it, expressed like she shouldn't expect anything else. Pressed heavy and purposeful into Sampo's skin.
She wondered if her soulmate felt the way she sobbed, even without a face to show it. As she pleadingly tried to show the relief of what it meant through her own touch. Leaning close enough that her forehead pressed to the top of his.
Softly and carefully, that is. Because this person was small and human and something breakable, and Sampo prayed he wouldn't break them like he often broke everything else.
Thank you, he thought in that same kind of way. To fate or Aha or something, for finally giving him this, even though he really did not deserve it. Thank you.
It will come eventually. And when it does, you will remember much better than anyone else, too, now that you're older. That will make it even more special.
Sampo opened his eyes to the real world again. To cold clinic lights and perfunctory blankets. Feeling raw and dreadfully open inside his chest, even though the pain of his injury was already dull and his head was not woozy anymore.
For the first time since he was too young to understand anything at all, he wanted to go back to sleep.
Much more standard for him, though; he was dreadfully afraid that if he did, there would be nothing there for him again except an undoing of his own making.
(Or maybe that was an undoing of his own making, which he had simply convinced himself was one of those supposedly real soulmate dreams in the moment.)
Sampo wanted to sleep again.
Sampo never wanted to sleep again.
A new pendulum for him to swing upon, apparently. Except this time, he prayed he never had to go to either side, despite how he couldn't escape both truths at once.
Suddenly, there was a hand pressing to his forehead again.
"It's good to see you awake," Natasha hummed very softly. That, in conjunction with the strange quiet of the clinic floor told him it must still have been the dead of night. "Do you still feel dizzy?"
"Dizzy with something," Sampo couldn't stop himself from saying. Low and bitter and not yet awake enough to perform.
Natasha's face pinched into something tight. Sampo regretfully shut his eyes and aimed for playful again when he swatted her hand away from his face.
"Just kidding," he laughed and pressed his own hand to his head once her painfully warm touch was gone. "I think I just had a bad dream. Forgive a guy for a moment."
Natasha hummed in a perfectly neutral kind of way. It made Sampo's stomach churn.
Still though, there was only one thing his brain was saying on repeat. No matter all the worldly distractions he could throw at it: like Natasha's presence or his own inner monologue attempting to drown it out. No, just one thing that made his heart squeeze over and over and over.
My soulmate. My soulmate. My soulmate.
He supposed that was better than alone.
Right?