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Cyrene bleeds out in the golden fields, her blood near-indistinguishable against the wheat. She is smiling, serene, apologetic. Time unravels around them, and the next cycle begins.
Golden blood drips off the Flame Reaver’s blade. In the distance, Aedes Elysiae is burning, its people buried beneath the unyielding crawl of the Black Tide. Somewhere out there, in the crush of tragedy, the boy who will one day call himself ‘Phainon’ is once again watching his world fall apart.
Caelus will find him soon. But for now, they keep their eyes on the Phainon in front of them.
…He’s somehow managed to get into the same outfit. Hood and mask and twin weapons and all. Against the searing firelight, his silhouette has turned into something jagged and monstrous, all unfamiliar shadows. Caelus looks him up and down, slow and careful, and then crosses their arms with a sniff of disdain. “Damn, man,” they say, and at the sound of their voice the Flame Reaver’s shoulders hitch just slightly, fingers tightening around the weapons. Caelus ignores all these very loud warning signs to walk towards him anyway, shaking their head. “Did you really have to keep the mask…? I mean, uh, it’s very cool! Very… prisoner of fate-esque…”
His head twitches to the side just slightly. Hesitant. The bloodied blade rising, stilted, in their direction.
Caelus rolls their eyes right at him. “C’mon, really?” Then they eye him a little closer, and despite their determination to keep their voice light, they can hear their tone soften in spite of themself. “I’m not gonna pretend like I don’t know. You can’t really expect me to.”
There’s no answer. The blade doesn’t lower, but it doesn’t rise any higher either. It’s hard to read him with that mask on, but as usual, knowing makes all the difference. In context, all unfamiliar shadows turn crystal clear: because his shoulders are still stiff, and his hand has started shaking. His sword still drips with Cyrene’s blood.
Caelus takes another step. “Partner,” they say, gentle. They reach for his hand, covered up and gauntleted and still curled tight around the sword, and feel a thrill of fondness when he doesn’t even try to pull away. “I’m sorry. But that mask looks really stupid.”
His shoulders hitch again, like a hiccup of laughter. Given the whole—er, situation—the actual noise that comes out of his mouth is not so much laughter as it is something guttural and spluttering and halfway between scream or sob or even a giggle.
Maybe it’s cruel to do it like this. 33 million cycles; shit like that can’t be repeated over and over without some serious compartmentalizing, yeah? Especially given—and Caelus carefully doesn’t look at where Cyrene’s body had fallen, where the shadow of her golden blood lies near-invisible in the shifting wheat—well, there’s a reason Phainon’s done it this way. Caelus does actually get that.
The problem is, even if Caelus knows this, logically… emotionally, they just can’t do it. Phainon is—he’s sweet, for one thing, and also he’d called them the hero of his heart and his partner and his friend, and that regard had weighed so heavy. Not in a bad way, per se, just… in a way that makes Caelus want to treat it gently. Few people look at Caelus and see them like that; make a choice you won’t regret, Kafka had once said, and Caelus has taken those words and applied them to choices both severe and silly. Phainon saw all those silly choices too—he knows exactly what Caelus is like. He’s placed this heart in their hands anyway.
It’s still cruel, perhaps. But if there’s any hope of Phainon leaving this tragic story with any of the joy that once lived so easily on his face, then something of those 33 million memories he’ll bear should be gentle.
And regardless, cruel or not—Caelus watches Phainon shudder, face still masked but just as easy to read as ever if one knows how to look. And then that blade lowers at last, and Caelus thinks: Bingo. Partners, right? They’re in this together, which means there’s no way they’ll let him shoulder all that misery alone.
The blade lowers even further, and then both weapons drop out of his hands entirely. Flame Reaver of the Deepest Dark, dropping out of that floating menace that had once seemed so inhumane. Now that shadowed figure looks as if he is bleeding with the force of his own emotion.
Caelus doesn’t even bother trying to catch the damn things; better they’re out of hand. Besides which, the tension has broken, or at least something close, and in the moment Phainon takes to wrestle with his composure, Caelus reaches up with careful hands and takes the mask from his face.
“Fuck,” Caelus says, automatically, as soon as it’s off. Phainon’s skin is bleach-pale, cracked like glass and bleeding all the color from him; his eyes, his skin, his hair; even the shadows under his eyes washed out and grey. “Okay, never mind, maybe you should put this back on?”
Phainon’s face—even warped—is heartbreakingly recognizable. The expression that crosses it at this moment is just as ugly on him as it would be his real face. There are still tears drying on his cracked and bleeding cheeks.
“Friend,” Phainon rasps back, whispery. “You… suck.”
The sass would work a lot better if he wasn’t still crying. Caelus smiles at him anyway, caught somewhere between sheepishness and sadness, and carefully wipes the tears away with the pad of their thumb.
On second glance, he doesn’t look… too bad. Cracked and bleeding gold, but it doesn’t look like he’s made of stone or breaking galaxies, the way the Flame Reaver of the last cycle had, before crumbling to nothing, inherited once more by his own self. He looks—like Khaslana, still, but already the weight of uncountable Coreflames is eating away at him. But when Caelus presses their thumb against his cheek, if nothing else, it’s golden blood that wells from his cracked face instead of jagged galaxies.
Aedes Elysiae crackles and screams in the distance. Phainon keeps his eyes on them like it is taking everything in him not to look back at it. Caelus carefully cups his face in their hands.
“But seriously, any other mask—”
They can feel a muscle in Phainon’s cheek twitch; whether it’s laughter or rage or just screaming, its emotion and Caelus will take it. In the next instant he is gone, vanished away as if to smoke, weapons gone from the ground and Caelus left standing there with their hands cupping empty air, and in the heartbeat of a moment where Phainon flees, Caelus lifts those cupped hands to their mouth and shouts at the sky, “Or a bath! Sorry! But you reek!”
.
“What are you doing,” Phainon says, later, desperately. It takes a moment for Stelle to really place the voice; he still sounds like Phainon, sure, but there’s a reverb to the words that distorts the familiar into something static-y and unnatural. Phainon must hear it too, because when Stelle looks at him, they can catch just the barest edge of a flinch, like he’s fighting a recoil at the sound of his own voice. Makes something in them go cold and angry to see it, honestly. Not enough he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do—but he has to lose himself while he does it, too? It’s enough to inspire even Stelle, air-headed and reactive, to plotting a murder.
It’s some time later—Stelle isn’t really sure, mainly because they’ve been skipping through eras like a kid on a playground, taking full advantage of “Mem’s” (Cyrene, really, or what is left of her) ability to reach through time. But they’ve met some new faces and re-met some old friends, and at the moment Stelle is taking advantage of time fuckery in order to explore an as-of-yet undestroyed city. Treasure chests! Breakable shields! It’s the little things that make the Horrors worth it.
…Phainon doesn’t really look like he’s seen a lot of little things. Mostly just a lot of Horrors.
“Aw,” Stelle says, genuinely a little chuffed. “You got rid of the mask!” They can see his face and everything. Gruesome, still, but at least he’s showing it.
Except he shakes his head a little, at that, and lifts his hand to move back one side of the cloak. The mask is… hanging from his belt. Well.
“Baby steps,” Stelle promises, solemnly. “I am going to get that thing off you eventually.”
“Stelle,” Phainon replies. Exasperated. Also, again, careful; words slow and deliberate like he’s trying to talk around what all that power has turned his voice into.
“Creepy,” Stelle comments back, eyebrows raised. He wouldn’t know about the name change if he hadn’t been watching them, after all. “You could just stop by and say hello, you know?”
This time he presses his lips stubbornly shut and shakes his head. Stelle doesn’t push. Can’t win them all, after all, and anyway— he did ask a question.
“I’m robbing a temple,” Stelle tells him, turning back around to carefully knock over a vase with their foot. “Wanna help?”
He’s not really asking about the temple, of course. He’s probably referring to everything else in this loop, Stelle waving him down like an enthusiastic child every time they catch so much as a glimpse of him; leaving him little trinkets signed off as “for my partner ;)” on rooftops and random corners; that one time they smacked a photo of current-loop-Phainon’s closet and the absolute fashion monstrosities they found in there against his chest, laughing too hard to even properly make fun of him for it. He’s looked more and more unsettled by it every time, even through the mask—he was bound to ask eventually.
But it’s more fun to misunderstand, and so Stelle takes his moment of silence to tip over another vase. The breaking noise is very satisfying.
When they glance back to judge his reaction, he’s still staring at them. Stelle raises both eyebrows right back, and then on impulse makes a face at him. Lips pulled back and tongue sticking out and exaggerated angry eyebrows.
This doesn’t seem to help his thought process any, because in the end all he says is, “This… is a theatre.”
“All theatres are temples to the arts, do you know nothing?” Stelle replies, actually kind of offended on the arts’ behalf, and then their eye catches something shiny in the debris of the broken vase and they immediately ignore Phainon in order to shift through the trash for it. Haha! Credits!!
It is almost enough to distract them fully, but a whisper in the wind draws their eyes back to him. Careful, Cyrene breathes into their ear, amalgamation of frozen memory and the warm scent of sunlit bulrush. Please be careful with him.
Phainon is still standing there. His shoulders tight. He is not smiling.
Stelle quiets a little. Then they stand, letting the credits and the shards of the vase fall through their fingers, and brush the dirt from their knees.
“Because it’s important,” they tell him, a truer answer to his question. And it is vague and unhelpful, yes, but it is genuine, and all around them Cyrene is like the warmth of a quiet smile, a secret shared with a wink.
Stelle nudges the shards of the vase with their foot, feeling vaguely scolded and guilty with it; already the theatre has lost its shine to them, a place of riches turned into a grave. If Stelle is the only one laughing here, then maybe it was never all that funny.
But he’s still standing there, watching them. And that means something too.
Stelle leaves the broken vase behind to approach him. He doesn’t draw back—he’s always been too controlled for that—but they can see the wariness in him anyway, in the way his eyes fix on them, the way the tension in him winds impossibly tighter. This close, his eyes… there is a glassiness to them. Like it is a struggle to focus. Something sinks deep in their chest; it occurs to them, too late, that perhaps his reluctance and slowness of speech is only partly because he hates what his voice has become.
Stelle moves slowly. Their hand, reaching out. Plenty of time for him to move away. He doesn’t. Stelle grins up at him, warm and pleased, and then they thread their arm through his, grabbing at his gauntleted palm and linking their fingers, careful to avoid the bladed tips of the gloves.
“It’s been a long day,” Stelle remarks, to the air. Cyrene laughs softly in reply. “Wanna see something cool?”
His brow furrows just slightly. Stelle winks back at him, and then raises their hand with pen poised. When they drag the pen down through the air, Cyrene breathes life and power into the break that follows.
Stelle lets their memory do the rest.
First the steel platform of the docking station; next the endless windows, the small machines, the distant murmur of researchers. Herta Space Station unfolds around them, memory overlaid across the abandoned theatre.
But the real jewel is, as ever, the Astral Express.
Memory is half emotion— Cyrene has taught them this much. Stelle trusts her with it again now: the wonder, the love, the warmth of home, and with them Cyrene paints the memory in picture-perfect beauty. The devil is in the details: the long, gleaming body of the train; the faint scent of steam, of steel, of stardust. The dark wood and the brass and the way the Express seems endless to the eye; no matter how many times Stelle has tried to count the carriages, the number always seems to change, one more or one less from the last time they looked. It’s absolutely perfect.
Next to them, Phainon has gone shock-still. He doesn’t even seem to be breathing.
Stelle lets him look. Then they tug at his hand, and when he turns to look at them, still dazed and disbelieving, they swing their linked hands together and announce, “Welcome to the Astral Express!”
And it’s funny, in a truly awful way, because somehow it is these words that make Phainon flinch.
Stelle blinks. Uncertainty blooms in their chest. Phainon is no longer looking at them; his jaw has clenched tight and his hand in theirs clutches back at last, in a vice grip that borders on genuinely painful. For a moment, Stelle hesitates.
Cyrene murmurs in their ear. Stelle listens, and slowly relaxes.
Phainon is very still. His head turned away. His every breath seems to rasp in their ears.
Stelle considers him carefully, taking their time to choose their words. At last, something settles in them.
“My friend,” they whisper to him. Quiet, hushed like a secret. It feels right, even if it is just them here. “Do you trust me?”
Phainon still has his head turned away, but he twitches just slightly at that, and even at an angle they can see the briefly sardonic pull at the edge of his mouth.
His words are still slow to come. “Obviously.”
Stelle waits, just to make sure he’s finished speaking, and then nods in solemn reply. “Then trust me now.”
Phainon doesn’t seem very moved by this. The exasperation pulls deeper at the lines of his face; finally, he turns to meet their eyes. “Trust… isn’t the issue.” Stelle stares blankly back. Phainon shakes his head; frustration sparks across his expression. “This isn’t—what we should be doing.”
Ah.
But Stelle keeps his gaze. “It is.”
“It… won’t—”
“It is.” This time they squeeze his hand back. He must have forgotten they were even holding it, because his own vice grip goes abruptly slack, as if in surprise. The bladed fingertips of his gauntlet stained faint red by their blood. Small pinpricks of pain across the back of their hand.
Stelle doesn’t even feel it. “You showed me your home. Let me show you mine.”
The wheat fields, the soft lap of the waters against that rickety dock; Cyrene on her swing, singing among fallen leaves. How warm that memory had been— how beautiful! Lygus may have unfolded that history as if it was a cynical thing, some empty play for his amusement—but memory is Cyrene, is her song on the air and the promise holding Amphoreus together, those two children in the wheat fields who grew up to doom each other. The Aedes Elysiae within that moment was not the cold crush of numbers but instead the warmth of memoria, the home-sick memories of Khaslana and Cyrene breathing sunlight reflection against golden wheat, color to the leaves and flowers, the faint scent of sea salt and bulrush to the breeze.
Stelle has seen so many beautiful places already, these two scant years on the Express. In comparison to some, Aedes Elysiae is not so much a place of glory as it is a place of humble beginnings. But some part of Stelle still can’t help but think it was one of the most beautiful places they’ll ever see.
They can’t offer Phainon a better ending, not yet. They can’t promise all will be well when it’s not. When he’s cracked and bleeding and burning up inside, when he’s the failsafe in case this new page needs to be rewritten a few times more. But at the very least, it feels right to offer him this. A memory for memory, place for place—home for home. A warmth without teeth, or blood, or the bitter weight of knowing.
Phainon’s expression shifts, caught between emotion and a shuttering of his own face. His breathing has slowed again. Stelle can feel him shake, slight and secret, through the press of their hand in his.
He doesn’t answer. Just breathes in, like he’s about to, and then swallows hard like the words are some bitter fruit.
Stelle waits, patient. Some things can’t be rushed—and besides which, they understand. This is the worst thing they could ask of him; it is one thing for him to trust his back to them in battle. Even this world and its future is an easier burden to bear together. But to trust them with this—a moment mundane, a return to normalcy, a hope so fragile and forgotten he likely can’t even name it—well, that’s another thing entirely.
Eventually his mouth twitches—an emotion there and gone too fast to track—and then his fingers curl, just slightly, to squeeze their hand back.
“Okay, partner,” he says. His voice is weary and thin. “Show me… your home.”
Weary, worn, withering. His throat scorched by his own flames. But there’s a spark to his gaze, now, for the first time this whole new loop, and Stelle loops their arm in his, already pulling him alongside as they rush for the train doors, their smile crinkling deep at their eyes.
Cyrene laughs at their backs. Stelle barely notes it, long used to the sound—Cyrene has a good sense of humor, which means she finds everything a little funny—but Phainon twitches, and his head turns back like he’s almost caught the echo of it. That unknown emotion back again on his face. The hitch of his breath.
Stelle follows his gaze. The memory of Herta Space Station remains empty set dressing to the splendor of the Express. There is nothing there worth seeing; certainly nothing to hint at Cyrene. But Phainon seems to find something in it anyway, because the last bit of tension eases from his shoulders, and this time the look on his face is clearly a smile. Small, and wavering, a little exasperated. But a smile.
When he finally turns his gaze back to Stelle, they make sure to greet him with a grin. “Good to go?”
“…Yeah.”
Stelle shows him their home. The lights like stars, the glittering dining car, Dan Heng’s archives and March 7th’s photo room, Pom-Pom’s little outfits and Stelle’s prize jewel of a mini fridge. It’s not the tour they wish they could give him. The people are not there because they are too precious to even fake, and Stelle themself is a faltering host, their words snagging on homesickness. Phainon is still shattered. Amphoreus waits, even now, under the heavy gaze of Destruction.
But there is a moment there, as Stelle flings wide their arms to present their home and all of its little miracles—the catcakes and Bubbles and the phonogram, still spinning Robin’s records—and in that moment, when Stelle looks back, they catch it. Phainon, his eyes wide and awake and aware: looking at it all, every piece of it, with wonder.
And that’s enough.
.
It’s quiet, the remains of Aedes Elysiae. Time’s gentle touch—or rather, Cyrene’s own heartache—have treated the wreckage with a care no other ruin can claim. The burned husks of the houses have been overgrown rather than crumpled, gentle vines winding up the years-old burnt wood; the rains have washed away any blood, and if there was once any evidence of the Black Tide and its corrosion it has been beaten back through small victories, inch by painful inch. What is left is a quiet cemetery. Flowers on the graves.
The small, rickety dock is all that remains of that once-home; the wheat fields have overgrown and the cobble streets swallowed up by moss. The dock itself isn’t much better, but time has been gentle and precise with this remnant of home too—the rot contained to plank boards easily missed, the waters gentle against the pier.
“ There you are,” Caelus says, with fierce surety. Despite themself, they can’t help the surly curl to the words. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
They only found him today because of Cyrene. Even now her presence lingers at their back, her regard a faint pressure on the world. They thought they’d been getting somewhere, with Phainon—at the very least, they thought his agreement to explore the Express may finally get him to loosen up—but instead he has practically vanished in the aftermath, what little glimpses and shadows of him they’d caught before now near-non-existent.
Sure enough, when he turns to greet them, the name on his lips is wrong. “Stelle.”
“Caelus for now.” It’s been Caelus for a few weeks at this point—getting stale, but not so stale that they’re considering their options, though they might end up Estel again before the month is through. It’s been awhile since they’ve had an Estel mood. But that’s not the point. “ You’ve been avoiding me.”
“Caelus,” Phainon corrects, a little guilty. “…Has it been… that long already?”
Their mouth twists. “…A few weeks.”
“Oh.” He’s quiet for a bit. “So you’ll be… switching it up again… soon.”
Caelus keeps their scowl trained on him, even as something in their chest pangs. It’s silly, to get emotional over this. They already knew Phainon understood them—that he knew of their idiosyncrasies and their little games and the names they took and discarded like clothes from a closet, even if he didn’t understand why —but for some reason it makes them ache, just a little, to hear him say it aloud.
Partners. They’ve never disagreed when he calls them that. It’s a different sort of partnership from what they have with March and Dan Heng, in a way they can’t quite explain; with those two, it’s like the universe is meant to be experienced with the three of them side-by-side, a future unfurling beneath their feet. Even when they’re apart, Caelus brings a part of them alongside, tucked close and secure in their heart. But with Phainon and Cyrene…
Caelus has no past they can remember; the pieces they’ve found have only ever broken their heart. But this is the best way they can think to word it: that Phainon and Cyrene feel like people Caelus could have known forever; as if they could have grown up in the same village, running through the wheat fields, secret games behind small hands. It’s a false history. But the feeling behind it—that’s a different story entirely.
Sometimes they look at Cyrene and Phainon and feel as if all the empty pieces of their past would make sense if fit alongside them.
It’s horribly embarrassing. It’s not even logical, because sometimes Caelus still gets homesick for that life they can’t remember, some flash of Kafka’s smile or the way an expression twitches across Blade’s placid face; Firefly’s laughter, soft and sweet, and Silver Wolf never failing to appear whenever there’s a game to play together, her excuses rapidly growing more and more flimsy. They see the cats of Okhema and their chest goes tight. The whole thing is enough to make Caelus want to bury their head in the sand, and they are, according to March, the most shameless person alive.
And yet! Here they are. Yearning for a past that isn’t real, for a home left behind; wanting both of them. Wanting all of it.
They never make it easy on them either. Cyrene, who jokes like they’re old friends, who smiles at them with warmth and deep fondness; Phainon, sitting here at the dock, like Caelus in Aedes Elysiae isn’t an intrusion, who remarks on Caelus’s habits like he’s known them all his life.
He’s looking at them now. It’s such a strange and contrasting image; the heavy armor and cloak of the Flame Reaver, settled on the pier like the weight of the world’s gravity has fallen on his shoulders. The tip of his cloak drags in the water. He isn’t wearing the mask again, which is still progress, but right now all it does is highlight the way he’s falling apart. His skin like stone, or sand, or something equally cracked and fragile. Even the gold of his eyes has bled away now.
All this—and yet he sits at the dock like a child would, feet in the water and hands by his side as he watches the eternal night. It’s so— Phainon. They’d ruffle his hair super aggressively if they weren’t so scared of hurting him further. Which is stupid, also, because he can totally kick their ass.
“Sorry,” Phainon says to them now, visibly exhausted and speaking slowly and still, achingly, genuine. “I… lost track… of time.”
Caelus makes a face at him, but their annoyance has already turned cool and hard in their chest, bittered by concern. They hold the expression for a beat longer—just to let it sink in!—and then their shoulders droop. “It’s fine,” they mumble. “…Was it something I said?”
Phainon visibly hesitates. His head half-turns back to the horizon.
Cyrene’s presence presses against their side, cold air curling around them like the mimicry of embrace. The encouragement is sweet but unnecessary. Caelus takes a deep breath, sighs loud enough to have Phainon’s shoulders hitching, and then steps forward to sprawl carelessly beside him on the edge of the pier.
In the deep shadows of the Evernight the sea is the deep black of ink; Caelus mimics Phainon anyway and slips off their shoes. The water rings around their ankles, pleasantly cool. They cast a glance at Phainon’s own shoes, sitting dry on the dock—solid, heavy things of solid iron, just as bad as his gauntlets. There is blood drying along the sole.
They sit in silence there, the two (three) of them, and the quiet lasts just long enough to make Caelus restless. Phainon is still avoiding their gaze—his eyes staring off hollowly at the dark sea—so Caelus breaks the ice first, like the very cool friend that they are.
“I say this with love,” Caelus announces to the air, “but dude… partner…. buddy... pal….” A pause. “Your shoes look so stupid.”
Phainon stares blankly at the water. Then his eyes squeeze shut.
“Where did you even get that outfit anyway?” Caelus wonders aloud, like it’s just occurred to them and not a thought that’s been ruminating for weeks at this point. Haha. “Why does fashion survive time travel?”
“You can… stop talking… at any point,” Phainon replies, with feeling. His eyes are still shut. It still doesn’t hide the way all the tension has abruptly bled out of him, shoulders slumped like he’s a puppet cut from the strings.
“That’s a funny joke,” Caelus replies, and grins wickedly at the way Phainon’s shoulders tremble, a helpless laugh he can’t quite bite back.
“You,” Phainon says finally, still trembling slightly. “You… really are…”
Caelus eyes him. It occurs to them, belated, that perhaps his shaking isn’t just from laughter.
“…Sorry.”
But Phainon shakes his head. “No,” he says, and this time his words come out firm, fierce with feeling. “No, don’t… apologize. To me. It’s—” he exhales hard, sudden and sharp; a rare frustration crosses his face. “ Sorry. Talking is…”
“Hard,” Caelus offers.
“Used… to be easier.” The words are wry. But he shakes his head again, and his grimace eases. “Partner. It’s not you. Not really. I just— don’t understand.”
Ah. Caelus stays quiet.
“I asked before,” Phainon adds, somewhat pointedly. “You… didn’t answer. But I’ll ask again.” He waits. Caelus keeps their eyes on him, ever patient, waiting for him to speak. Phainon’s lips thin first.
“Why?” he says, finally. “Why are you… doing this?”
He’s not talking about the role of Deliverer. He’s talking about the burden Caelus has placed on themself. To have named themself that shadowed spectre's friend…
He’s not wrong to question it either. Caelus promised to bear that burden with him; Caelus promised to save this world. Their insistence on everything else has only made that shared dream harder to achieve. Hysilens and Cerydra both are already cautious of outsiders; Caelus’s friendship with an unknown entity of incomparable power has not helped endear them to those two. It hasn’t stopped these friendships from forming, from Caelus being able to meet once more with Tribios, Aglea, Anaxa, Castorice and Mydei—but it has been an uphill battle with them all, for much the same reason. Ironically enough, the only person to take it in stride is Phainon himself—who had shrugged, and said simply, “You seem the sort to make friends of all kinds… just be careful though, okay?”
Which was sweet, but also funny in a way that wasn’t funny at all, and Caelus had had to take a moment after that conversation. Just to ache.
The Phainon in front of them— he’s waiting for an answer. He doesn’t really look like he expects one, to be fair, but he’s waiting anyway. Just in case Caelus might have more to share.
This time Caelus is the one who has to look away. It’d be so easy to brush it off. It’s on the tip of their tongue, teasing and evasive— Did I make you uncomfortable? — but then a voice whispers through the wind, Cyrene’s distant yet determined song, and instead they find their own shoulders curling inward, as if to brace against a blow.
“Phainon,” they whisper to the waters. “….What will happen to you? At the end of this, I mean.”
He’s silent for a heartbeat more. They can feel his gaze like a weight against their shoulders.
“Which… me… are you asking for?”
“Both.”
He doesn’t answer right away. Then he sighs, faint and soft. “Likely what… always happens. A merge. We are the same person. It is how it always ends.” He pauses. His voice hushes, turns almost internal, speaking half to himself. “But… when it's truly over… a death? Maybe. I can’t—promise whose. But there must be… some sort of ending. For me. For—that version of me. For both of us.” His hands have curled to fists by his side. Quietly, desperately, as if to himself: “There must be.”
The words weigh in the air. Too late Phainon seems to realize the full truth of what he’s admitted, because his faraway expression abruptly tightens with guilt. “…Sorry.”
Caelus takes a deep breath, refusing to flinch. It’s just as they expected, after all. “Well, there you go. That’s why.”
“That’s— what?”
How can they say this? How can they put this into words? He matters to them. He is important. He is—
“You’ll probably merge or die or both or whatever,” Caelus says, like it’s easy and not something that burns at the core of them, “so I—I want—you deserve something better, you know? Than just… 33 million plus memories of blood.”
He’s silent for a moment. Then, haltingly: “They aren’t all bad memories.”
“Yeah. But the bad ones are the ones that have stuck with you the most, aren’t they?” He looks away. Caelus shakes their head. “You deserve better. You deserve—something new. Clean?” They don't know the words for it. They don’t know if there’s any words at all that could ever capture it.
They want him to remember something beautiful. They want him to have something silly and useless and warm.
“You’re human,”Caelus says finally, fierce and frustrated and lacking any words better than this. “You love, and are loved, and even if you don’t like you then I want you to know that I like you. That Mydei and Cas and—” His shoulders curl. The wounds too raw. Cyrene touches at their shoulder and Caelus switches tracks. “—and, and you can… you can still come home to them. I know you can. I’ll make sure of it!”
“Caelus,” Phainon says. Not so much with warning as it is with exhaustion. The argument lost before they can even start it.
“You’re human,” Caelus snaps back, refusing to back down from this. They feel almost feverish with the force of their own abrupt anger, bright with righteous outrage. “You smell when you haven’t had a bath, and you make shitty fashion choices, and you’re still a snob about artifact authenticity—”
“Caelus—”
“And you’re my friend!” Caelus finishes, loudly, talking over him. Phainon shuts his mouth. The silence weighs heavy. Caelus takes in a deep breath, and this time they say it softly: “You’re my friend. Why shouldn’t I treat you like one?”
Silence across the graves of Aedes Elysiae. The phantom weight of Cyrene’s hand on their shoulder tightens with near bruising force. Bracing. For Caelus? For herself? Maybe it’s for both of them.
“Some people can’t be saved.”
Phainon says this quietly. He doesn’t say anything else.
Cyrene’s grip tightens. An icy wind so cold it burns. Caelus doesn’t move, keeping their eyes on Phainon’s face. As the seconds tick by, the last of the anger leaves them, but in its aftermath is simple determination. Phainon isn’t wrong. To this there is no disagreement. The people Caelus couldn’t save linger in their memory even now: Mikhail, Gallagher, Dan Shu, a million other names from a million different histories.
But that isn’t the point either.
Cyrene’s painful grip loosens, like something in their heart has shone through that strange connection tying them together. That icy pinprick fades beneath the starburst of her relief. Her presence drifts back, gentled with apology, but Caelus would never hold it against her in the first place. It’s agony, what Cyrene and Phainon have each doomed the other to. One day they’ll reunite, be able to apologize and berate each other and laugh as they please, but until that time comes Caelus is happy enough to bridge the gap. It’s the least they can do.
And it is with Cyrene’s fierce refusal of the end in mind that Caelus scoots closer. They are almost shoulder to shoulder with Phainon now, and in the nearness they knock their leg deliberately against his, half-challenge and half-friendliness—just to do it, just because. He doesn’t retaliate. Just looks back at them with his brow furrowed.
“You called me your hero, remember?” Caelus reminds him, gentler now. “…Won’t you at least let me try?”
“Try,” Phainon echoes. His voice has gone distant again. His eyes starting to drift away back to the sea.
“Yes.” He still doesn’t move. His eyes avoiding theirs. Caelus reaches out both hands and turns his face gently to theirs. “Phainon. Let me save you.”
He stares at them. There are cracks lining his skin, golden blood and galaxies both welling from the wounds. His eyes are colorless, and shadowed, the brilliant blue and the burning gold turned empty and ashen. Already he has begun to break. Like stone, like bony charcoal, like a million stars in an iron tomb. But he looks at them now, finally and truly, and whispers back, “How on earth could anyone?”
What, save him? Caelus almost laughs. “Easy.”
“ Easy, ” Phainon echoes incredulously, sounding almost offended.
They laugh and take their hands from his face; this time he doesn’t turn away. “When it’s over,” Caelus tells him, with a helpless fondness, “If you’re still here… and when you remember… well, I bet you’ll hide away. Run for the hills like a moron—crawl off into a cave somewhere or something—”
“ Hey —?”
“So I’ll come find you.”
Phainon stops mid-protest. The words frozen on his tongue.
Caelus keeps talking. “And I’ll say, hey handsome, having a breakdown all by yourself? And you’ll make that face at me—yeah, that face, the one you’re making right now!—and then we’ll probably have a very stupid and cyclical conversation about guilt and deserving and blah blah blah, but eventually you’ll follow me out of that cave anyway. Because you love this place, partner. Because you love it soooo much, it’s honestly kinda silly. How could you ever stay away?”
His eyes are fixed on them. His breathing has gone shallow and shaking. At last, his lips move.
“What if… you can’t?”
Caelus plays obtuse. “Can’t what?”
“Find me. Find—whatever’s left. If—”
“When!”
He swallows. “When. When it’s over.”
What he doesn’t say: If he lives .
Caelus keeps his gaze. This time they don’t correct him. Because it is a if, because he has to want this, Caelus thinks; a future is not an absolute for him. But if he stays. If he lives. If they all make it. Then they hope this promise carries him through the moments where that choice is made.
“Of course I’ll find you,” Caelus replies. A sly whisper echoes in their ears, like laughter turned crystalline. “See? Cyrene will sell out your hiding spots in a heartbeat. Actually, she already has. Only cost me two corn chips. Did you know she liked corn chips?”
Maybe it’s the stupid non-sequitur; more likely, it’s the mention of Cyrene at all. He blinks fast. His shoulders bow and his hands tremble. One hand rises to hide his face; Caelus scoots over and takes his other hand in theirs. It’s becoming a trend, at this point.
“She’s laughing at you,” they add, conversationally. “By the way. If you were wondering.”
“She’s always had… the worst sense of humor,” Phainon breathes into his elbow. His voice is wet and trembling. And how funny! Distorted as it is, warped and echoed, twisted by power and tears alike—this is the most like himself he’s sounded since this loop began.
Caelus squeezes his hand. Prompting. “Go on,” they tell him. All at once there is a giddiness to them, a glee undaunted. The taste of victory sweet as sugar. “Say it, say it!”
“I—” His breathing shakes. “Do I… have to? Partner, please, you’re… killing me here.”
“It’ll be good for you,” Caelus says, sagely. “…Obviously I’m gonna do it anyway.” And he’s extra stupid if he thinks Cyrene will let him leave her without a fight.
Phainon laughs like he’s heard it all, the spoken and unspoken both. It is stuttering and broken and if Caelus were anyone else, he may have broken their hand with how tightly he’s holding on. But that’s fine. It’s better than him letting go.
“Caelus,” Phainon says, finally, wretchedly. There are galaxies behind his eyes and eons bleeding from his wounds. For the first time, he sounds nearly the same as the Phainon the trailblazer first met, that young man with the audacity and the confidence and the smile in his voice. “Cyrene. Please… save me.”
Cyrene’s answer is as fierce as a battle cry, wordless and unyielding and full of hope.
Caelus just cackles back. “Partner,” they chortle, like they didn’t just strong-arm him into this, “you don’t even have to ask!”
“Ah, shut up already,” Phainon replies, and without hesitation pushes them right off the pier into the water. Cyrene’s laughter, bright and hysterical, settles in the air like a spring. And even though Caelus comes up spluttering, spitting out salty water and cursing through the soaked strands of their hair, it’s worth it all—because sitting there on that pier, like that boy he probably thought buried with this village, Khaslana is laughing bright and clear like he’s never had to face any horrors at all.