#ill be posting to ao3 later
I’m a day behind, but here’s Day 1 of @the-line-is-erased:London- Seeds - The time before our story began; the time after it ended.
Hamid barely recognized the entryway amidst the rubble and decaying roots that still clung to every surface even if their omnipotence was no longer intact. With a faint smile and a shake of his head, he made his way to the door which was hanging off its hinges and stepped inside his old apartment.
His days at university seemed like a lifetime ago. Parties with his friends – or, more accurately, the people he wanted to impress so that they wouldn’t make him a target of their harassment – had caused their fair share of damage to the apartment, but he never cared back then. He’d just have someone clean up the mess so that he could continue to live in blissful ignorance.
But now the place was falling apart. A large root tendril broke through the ceiling of the living room such that anyone taller than Hamid would have to duck to navigate through the space. The furniture was toppled and broken, and a thick layer of dust coated all that remained.
As Hamid stepped through the space, he felt something beneath his feet, and noticed that his selection of fine liqueurs had fallen and smashed into the floor. In the shattered glass that littered the once plush carpet, Hamid could still hear Bertie’s ridiculous boasts, as if they echoed off of the shards after all this time.
Back when it was him, Bertie, Zolf, and Sasha, the place almost felt like a home, even if they only spent a few days there. After he got kicked out of university, the apartment was hollow and empty, while also acting as a suffocating reminder that he would never be good enough for his parents, never be able to prove himself to his father. But with all of them there, it was full. Bertie always knew how to fill the space, certainly, but even with Sasha silently working on bombs (of all things!) in the corner and Zolf sulking in a chair though he never allowed himself to relax completely, the rooms finally felt lived in.
There! There was still that mark on the wall from where one of Sasha’s bombs went wrong and poofed in her face, a bit of soot still marking the occasion. And over there, that was where Zolf nodded off and Bertie startled him, making Zolf stab out wildly with his trident and hit the wall on accident. And that chair, that’s the one Wilde was lounging in when they first met.
Hamid raced between memories and smiled at each one, until he tripped on a table leg and went crashing to the ground. Collapsed on his knees, he started to cry. The world was so different now. Bertie and Sasha were gone, and Grizzop too, though he never got to spend any time there with the rest of them. Their memories were all he had left. And Zolf was still around, but he was different. Though… Hamid supposed he was different now too.
He knew he was a better person than he was when he lived in that apartment. He’d just helped save the damn world, for goodness’s sake! But he looked back on the times they’d had there, and, for the slightest moment, he wished that he could relive them and truly commit them to memory so that he would never forget.
As Hamid crawled back to his feet and made to leave the apartment, giving it one last look, he smiled again. It had been a wild ride. And even with everything he’d lost, the friends wrenched from his grasp, there’s nowhere else he would rather have been than in the thick of the adventure. No matter what came next, he would always remember the family he made along the way and how they made any space a home.
