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Phainon has never been good at quiet.
He’s excellent at silence — battlefield silence, the kind where you hold your breath and flatten your heartbeat to muster courage. He can carry the wounded across a ruined city and not so much as scrape his boot on broken tile. He can sit beside Mydei on a cliff edge after a twenty-day siege and let the wind fill in the words neither of them can say.
But quiet?
Quiet is when nothing is hunting you anymore and the world isn’t screaming and you can suddenly hear yourself think.
Amphoreus breathes now. The air has a new flavor, a sweet mineral smell that wasn’t there during the cycles of blood and iron. Soldiers laugh and drink heartily. A child shouts because lights are streaking across the sky every night and they’ve never seen that glowing crescent rise in the dark before.
Peace is here.
Which means Phainon has run out of excuses.
He lasts three days pretending he’s fine. He sharpens his swords, re-wraps the leather around his gloves, rewrites the same training schedule with tiny pointless adjustments, and then spends a whole Parting Hour staring at the word “confess” in the margin of his to-do scrolls and feeling like he’s going to throw up.
The fourth day he goes looking for Cipher.
He finds her exactly where he expects: slinking around the night market. She’s cleaning the edge of a mask with a bit of oiled cloth and humming to herself, boot up on a cracked bench, curls pinned back by a silver comb he’s never seen her wear before. It’s probably stolen, but he doesn’t ask. There are more pressing matters at hand.
When she looks up, her eyes flash molten-gold and then settle into their usual mischief. “If you’re here to make me do my monthly reports,” she sings, “I will transform into a pigeon and defecate on your meticulously labeled artifacts.”
He stands there like an idiot, too nervous to even react to… what had she just threatened? Then: “I need help.”
Cipher’s smile shifts, the edges softening. Not alarm, for she’s seen him bloody and broken and less rattled than this. She tucks the mask into her pocket and gestures at the bench. “Sit. Spill.”
He doesn’t sit. He starts pacing because somehow his legs have developed the ability to march while his spine is, unfortunately, still made of his own desperate self. “There’s something I’ve wanted to do for… it’s been a while.”
“A while,” she repeats politely. “As in… how many cycles exactly? Oh, don’t answer that, I’ll guess based on what it is.”
He stops pacing and stares at her. “I want to tell Mydei—”
Cipher makes a sound between a delighted gasp and a wolf-whistle. “Millions! It only took a few millions, but we are finally here!”
“—that I… care about him.” He pointedly ignores her while his ears burn. “More than care. I… love him, perhaps. You knew that. Everyone knew that. He probably already knows it, but hasn’t mentioned it just to spare my feelings. But… I want to tell him. For real. Not the stupid half-attempts I keep giving up on before I can even start.”
She’s nodding vigorously, eyes shining. “Go on.”
“I get nervous,” he continues, wincing at the understatement. “He just looks at me, and the part of my brain that can form words just ceases to work anymore. Then I change the subject to inviting him to a spar. Or to talk about the weather. Or ask what book he’s reading. Point is…” Phainon gestures vaguely to the universe. “It gets away from me.”
Cipher presses her lips together to hide a toothy smirk, but fails. “You want practice.”
He could die. “Yes.”
“With… what. Exactly.” She’s trying so hard not to laugh that her voice wobbles.
“Confessing,” he grits out. “You know. Saying the words, staying coherent under pressure, not wanting to crawl into the nearest amphora when he so much as asks me to sit next to him—”
“Darling,” she says, and pats the air in the general direction of his shoulder. “Who do you think you’re asking?”
“You,” he states, and swallows. “You can… you can become him, right? You could… you could be Mydei. Just so I can practice. I’ll get it out, the whole thing, and you can, I don’t know, tell me if I sound like half the idiot that I feel like? Maybe?”
Cipher watches him for a long moment. The alleyway is very quiet, an owl hooting somewhere overhead. “You want me,” she repeats slowly, “to become the man you love… so you can confess to me.”
He puts his face in his hands. “This is the most humiliated I have ever been.”
There’s a rustle as Cipher stands and crosses to him. Her hand is warm when it lands between his shoulder blades — not a hug, exactly, more a steadying pressure like she’s reminding him of gravity. “I’m teasing,” she sighs softly, and he knows he must look truly pathetic for her to be this serious. “I know what you’re asking. And I think it will help! You have to practice to get better at anything, right?” A cheeky grin ghosting back into her voice, she adds, “Also, it will be funny.”
“Cipher.”
“I will help,” she declares, and that’s the thing about her: for all the theater, for all the mischief, when you ask for her help — she gives it. She steps back, crosses her arms. “Tell me where you need me.”
He exhales in relief. “Tomorrow, on one of the old rooftops. The little one over the east quarter, where he would always knock me on my arse during spars. At evening, when the stars start to come out.” He swallows. “I want it to feel… like us.”
Cipher hums. “Yes. Nostalgia suits confessions. You’ll be there?”
“I’ll be there,” he confirms. “And if I run, you’re allowed to hunt me down and drag me back by the ear.”
“Oh, I will,” she exclaims cheerfully. “Bring water. And your courage. And perhaps a script? I don’t want to spend my entire night on this.”
“I have a script,” he says too quickly. In truth, he has eleven scripts, all terrible, all scrapped in the bottom of his wastebin.
“Of course you do.” She graces him with a ridiculous, flourishing bow. “Go. Sharpen your silly silver tongue. I will… do what needs to be done.”
He nods. He should feel better. He does not. Terror has turned into a ritual, yes, but it is still very large and he wants it to be gone.
He leaves the alley alone, Cipher already having vanished into the shadows. Amphoreus still breathes around him. Somewhere down the cobbled road, a stringed instrument plucks a lullaby. He presses his palm against the wall as he walks and the stone hums faintly with new warmth.
If he is going to be a fool, at least it’ll be in a beautiful place.
The next night approaches faster than he’s ready for it.
The east quarter is the color of burnt honey at this hour, the sun sinking and the first stars peeking their heads over the rim of the world. The little rooftop still remembers them: the broken ridge where Mydei’s greaves chipped it when he dodged, laughing breathless, and said, You keep leading with your shoulders when you think I’m going to sweep your legs, you idiot.
Phainon arrives early, because of course he does, and immediately begins to pace again.
He has never paced before a battle. He is pacing now like he expects the upcoming conversation, though manufactured, to decide whether he lives or dies. He stops. He inhales. He tries to rehearse script number five because it struck the right tone between poeticism and not sounding like a dying swan. He forgets the second sentence. He rehearses script number eight, which had the line about wanting to make love in Mydei’s library and immediately wants to launch himself off the roof for being insufferable.
He goes to the roof’s edge and counts fireflies until his eyes sting. He tells himself: it’s Cipher. It’s safe. If you stammer, she will make fun of you and then you will say it again, and then again, until it’s not scary anymore. If your hands shake, she will still make fun of you, but it’ll prepare you for the worst case scenario. If you panic, she will… probably just laugh it off. Probably.
Footsteps on the stairs.
Phainon’s spine turns into a tuning fork.
He leans on his elbows on the cracked wall flanking the roof and looks out at the moon because he does not trust his face.
“Deliverer.”
The voice is low and warm and familiar in a way that punches his lungs from the inside. He turns, schooling his features into the calm he used for his debating days.
‘Mydei’ is standing in the shadow of the stairwell, the last lines of sunset gilding his shoulders. He’s dressed like he always is when he’s done with his day: soft linen, sleeves rolled, hair tied back in a loose knot that will come undone if you breathe too hard near it. There’s a smear of something pink along his jaw, the remnant of his favorite pomegranate juice, no doubt. He looks… like himself, unbearably.
Phainon’s brain, frazzled as ever, promptly supplies: Cipher did a very good job with this illusion.
“Hey,” Phainon begins, and the word comes out like he’s been stabbed. “You look—” He almost says real. He pivots hard. “—like you didn’t sleep again.”
Mydei lifts an eyebrow. “I slept,” he grumbles mildly. “You look like a spooked chimera. What’s wrong with you this time?”
“Just… nerves,” Phainon manages to get out, and tries to smile like a normal, functioning adult. “Thanks for agreeing to this.”
Something complicated moves behind Mydei’s (Cipher’s? This is all too confusing) gaze, too fast to parse. “…Of course.”
They stand in the tilting silence for a moment, the world lowering itself toward night.
Phainon realizes if he waits any longer, he will combust and start crying and Cipher will have wasted her time and talent. He clears his throat. Hums, “Right,” which is nothing, and then drags his courage up where his mouth can reach it.
“I love you,” he says.
All of his previous scripts are thrown to the wayside. He hears the words drop into the evening like pebbles dropped in a well, the ripples moving outward, touching the edge of everything. His hands are steady if he digs his nails in hard enough.
Mydei doesn’t move. His expression is unreadable. His eyes are very, very alive.
Phainon exhales and steps forward because the only way out is through. He tells the truth like he’s listing supplies, but his voice keeps doing that breaking thing.
“I’m bad at this,” he breathes wryly, and that at least is true and makes the corner of Mydei’s mouth twitch, no doubt Cipher trying not to giggle. “I kept putting it off because the world was ending. And now the world isn’t ending. And that… took away my excuses. It made the part of me that loves you really, really loud.”
He rubs his palm on his thigh because sweat is a thing and Cipher will, in a minute, definitely point it out. He goes on. “I’ve loved you for a long time. I don’t know how to measure it. Before the black tide. Before the first Era Nova. Before… It feels like I knew you and then immediately began loving you, and every cycle we lost just taught me different words for the same thing.”
The wind moves Mydei’s hair at his temple. His gaze flickers to Phainon’s mouth and away again, so quick Phainon nearly misses it.
“I love you when you’re radiant and terrifying and everyone looks to you like you’re the leader that you are,” Phainon confesses, helpless. “I love you when you’re quiet and you fix a chipped cup with resin and gold and tell me that repaired things are stronger. I love you when you don’t sleep so you can watch over people who need it more. I love you when you snore, which is unfortunately loud. I love your stupid hard-headedness. I love that you push me in training and remind me to keep my guard up with this little smile like you know I’m going to drop it for you anyway.”
Heat crawls up his neck. He is, he thinks, a man shaped entirely out of embarrassment and sincerity, wrapped in an unfortunate body.
“I want—” He stops and tries again. “I want to make you laugh on purpose. I want to bring you tea before you ask. I want to be the person you look for when you’re tired. I want my hands to know your weight. I want to— This all sounds like a cheesy poem. I’m sorry.”
Mydei’s lips part. “…Don’t apologize,” he says, soft, and Phainon nearly folds in half.
He rushes, as if speed can get him to the end of this alive. “I know this is— I mean. It’s safe to say this to you, right now. Because it’s you, but it’s not— you-you.” He gestures at Mydei’s face and realizes how insane this all is. “I mean you’re… ah, Kephale. You’re a very good illusion. The best. I just… I hope this wasn’t too terrible?”
For a heartbeat Mydei goes as still as a statue.
Then, he takes two steps forward.
Phainon’s thoughts scatter. He’s aware, distantly, of the warmth coming off Mydei’s body, of the clean inked scent of his skin. He wonders how Cipher is doing such a good job of the tiny, impossible details: the nick on Mydei’s knuckle that hasn’t healed yet from this morning, the faint constellation of freckles on his jaw that Phainon has only ever noticed when they were both too exhausted to do anything but stare.
“Should… I keep going?” he manages, voice cracking.
Mydei’s gaze searches his face like he’s reading something that just changed. “Deliverer,” he utters, and then he puts his hands on Phainon’s shoulders and kisses him.
It isn’t gentle. It isn’t careful.
Mydei’s mouth is warm and decisive, and the sound Phainon makes is humiliating in a way that goes straight to his knees. The world narrows to the pressure of Mydei’s fingers, the line of his body slotting against Phainon’s like it has always been there, the scrape of teeth, the soft, involuntary noise Mydei lets out when Phainon’s hand finds the back of his neck and draws him closer.
Phainon kisses back because of course he does, because he has been holding a storm in his ribs for centuries and someone has finally set it free. He leans into it like a man who has been walking through the desert and suddenly remembers the sweet taste of water. He is shaking. He is feverish. He is completely undone.
And then the tiny part of his brain in charge of rational thinking claws its way to the surface and screams into his ear:
You are making out with Cipher.
He jerks back so fast he nearly headbutts them. His hands fly up like he’s being arrested.
“Okay— whoa— wait— I— Cipher, what in the hells!” he blurts, mortified and breathless and furious at himself. “That was not in the plan! We said practice! We did not say—” He gestures wildly at the space between them. “You can’t— you can’t just kiss me when you’re him, are you trying to kill me?”
The person in front of him blinks. His lips are flushed and damp. There is a bitten half-frown on his mouth that taunts Phainon’s continued existence.
“…Cipher?” the person repeats, very quietly.
Phainon freezes, for there is no other explanation for the brokenness spoken in just that single word.
There is a long, vast silence in which Amphoreus continues being beautiful, but Phainon is no longer a part of it.
“Mydei.”
“Deliverer.”
“Mydeimos…” he whispers.
“Yes…” the one and only crown prince of Castrum Kremnos confirms through gritted teeth.
It’s not Cipher.
Phainon’s soul stands up, leaves his body, takes a quick lap around the roof, and then comes back to inhabit him only out of pity. His hands are still in the air. He lowers them very, very slowly. “Oh,” he says intelligently. “Oh no.”
Mydei — the real one — has an expression bordering on murderous on his face and, Phainon realizes in horror, the tips of his fingers are twitching in they way they sometimes do before a fight.
“I can explain,” Phainon squeaks, which is a lie. “I mean, I can’t, not well. Cipher— I asked Cipher… I thought you were Cipher. Just now. With the—” He gestures between them again. “I assumed, because we agreed on practicing how I was going to tell you. So this is— You’re— You are really— That was— I have to go.” He tries to step backward but encounters the ledge behind him, and maybe it’s for the best that he keeps on walking back.
“Phainon,” Mydei growls, and it makes him feel even more out of his body. “You are going to attempt to explain what is going on right now, or else we are never speaking again.”
Phainon’s mouth becomes a faucet and he cannot find the knob to turn it off. “I didn’t— I mean I did mean it, I meant all of it, obviously, I have never meant anything more in my life. I wrote it out eleven different ways because I couldn’t decide on perfect words, but I could never find the courage to say it to you, so I just wanted... some help.”
Mydei steps in, slow, like he knows he’s approaching something that might bolt. He raises both hands and sets them, deliberate and gentle, against Phainon’s upper arms. The contact is so steady it reorders the molecules of the air.
“I got a note under my door,” Mydei huffs out. There’s a tiny shake in his breath that makes Phainon’s heart do a stupid dangerous thing. “It said to meet you here. I thought it was from you.”
Phainon squeezes his eyes shut. “I’m so, so sorry, Mydei. Cipher, she must have misunderstood, or thought it was funny to mess with you and I, but it’s not, it’s—”
“Don’t,” Mydei hisses, and the word is a plea and a command at once.
Phainon opens his eyes. Mydei is close enough to kiss again and that’s a problem. His brain tries to sprint in a hundred directions and adopts a new strategy: descending into honesty because lying requires too many working parts.
“I love you,” he says again, hoarse and helpless. “I wasn’t supposed to be saying it to you-you yet, but I do. I have. I will. It’s not new— it’s just… out there, now. And if this ruins everything, if you don’t… if you want me to pretend this never happened, I can. I mean I can’t, but I will do my best to try.”
A strangled sound escapes Mydei. For a second Phainon thinks he’s broken him. Then he realizes Mydei is… laughing?
“You think I want to pretend this didn’t happen,” Mydei starts, wonder threaded through the words. “After I was the one who kissed you first?”
Oh.
Mydei’s hands tighten on his arms, not enough to hurt, just enough to stake him to the moment. “Tch. Idiot Deliverer,” he chides, and it is so gentle Phainon could cry.
“An accurate description,” Phainon agrees with fervor.
Mydei breathes out, a small shiver passing through him like a thread pulled tight. “I didn’t know tonight would be… this.” A wry tilt of his mouth. “I guess I should have known when the note had a tiny cat-eared heart after your signature.”
“That tracks with something she would add,” Phainon mutters.
“But I’m not surprised,” Mydei continues, and the world sways a little. “You’re not exactly subtle. Why else would anyone go to such lengths to retrieve a signet ring from the bottom of the River of Souls.”
Phainon is going to need to lie down on the floor for six to eight years.
He doesn’t get to because Mydei’s thumbs sweep, barely there, up the curve of his arms, and Phainon’s whole body pays attention. “Say it again,” Mydei urges. It’s not a question. “Properly. This time to me, knowing it’s me.”
Phainon swallows, feels his pulse in his mouth. He inhales the night, the salt, the honey-warmth of a city that has decided to live. He finds Mydei’s gaze and lets it steady him like a blade laid flat against his palm.
“I love you,” he promises. It spreads through him like syrup. “Mydei, I’m in love with you. Not as practice. Not as a thing I’ll say ‘for real’ later when I am braver. I love you now. I love you when I’m an idiot. I love you when I’m not. I want to build a life in this new world with you. I want to be there when you are tired. I want to be the person who remembers to make more tea when you forget. I want to be stupid with you and wise with you and very old with you if we are given that gift.”
A quiet, choked sound leaves Mydei’s throat. His eyes are glossy. “Good,” he says simply, which is very much not enough, and then, before Phainon can die of a compliment that is a single syllable, Mydei leans in and kisses him again.
This one is slower than the first, a question with its hands on his jaw, and Phainon answers so thoroughly it tips him back against the surface behind him.
Mydei tastes like something sweet he can’t name. His body goes warm at every point of contact. Mydei’s fingers slide from his arms to his face, one hand bracketing his cheek, the other curling into the hair at his nape, and Phainon emits the kind of noise that will haunt him in daylight and Mydei swallows it whole.
The kiss goes heated because apparently they are the kind of people who don’t know how to hold back in anything in life. Phainon’s hands find the trim of Mydei’s waist and then his back and then commits the ripples of muscle to memory. Mydei presses in and the line of their bodies is a problem he will be meditating on for a long, long time.
When they finally separate, it’s not because they want to. They stand there, foreheads almost touching, air ragged between them.
“Okay,” Phainon gasps, voice frayed. “So that was… not fake.”
“No,” Mydei agrees gravely, and his mouth is a little wrecked and Phainon has to look away before he sinks his teeth into the plush of his lower lip. “Not fake.”
“I’m sorry I called you Cipher,” Phainon blurts, and then wants to leap off the roof again, because why would he bring that up again?
But Mydei huffs a laugh, a ray of sunshine. “If it helps,” he murmurs, “up until that point, everything was near perfect.”
“That does help.” Phainon winces. “Actually, no, it does not help at all.”
Mydei’s smile lingers. Then he sobers, the line of his brow soft with something close to fear. “You are sure?” he confirms, very quiet. “That your feelings are not just due to our… elongated history.”
Phainon could answer with a lyric. He decides to answer the way Mydei likes best. Straightforward.
“I am sure.”
“Good,” Mydei says again, a little strangled. He leans in like he’s going to kiss him just because he can now, and then seems to think of something, hesitates, and pulls back a fraction. “Do you think…” His composure wavers and returns in a manner very uncharacteristic of him. “Revenge. Is there any chance we can convince Cipher that her little plan didn’t work?”
“No,” Phainon grumbles, hopeless. “She probably already knows that it did.”
“That is unfortunate,” Mydei sighs, but he’s grinning again in a way that makes Phainon feel like a sunrise is happening somewhere very nearby.
They stand at the rim of the roof and watch the lights of the city blink awake. A breeze lifts Mydei’s hair and Phainon reaches out without thinking to smooth a strand back behind his ear. Mydei catches his wrist and kisses the heel of his hand like it’s a normal thing to do.
Phainon’s heart, a loyal idiot, does a back flip.
“So,” Mydei simpers, not letting the hand go. “Tomorrow. You won’t have run away on me?”
“Never,” Phainon says with his whole body.
“Then later,” Mydei smirks, a mischief in him that he hides under priestly patience but not well enough to fool anyone who loves him, “you will show me what you wrote in those other confessions.”
Phainon groans. “You can’t read those. They were written by a different man, a much worse man, a coward, if I’m putting it lightly.”
“I look forward to meeting him,” Mydei muses.
Phainon is going to die. He is going to live a very long time and then remember this and die of the memory. He tips his head back and laughs into the sky and feels — for one gorgeous second — the heavy, familiar ache in his chest loosen like a knot finally teased open.
“Okay,” he says to the stars. “Okay.”
Mydei lifts their joined hands and sets them, deliberately, palm to palm, fingers interlaced. The gesture is simple. It feels like stepping into a warm room.
“Say it once more,” Mydei murmurs, because he’s him.
Phainon looks at him, at the way the new peace glows along his cheekbones, at the way the night makes a halo of the stray hairs at his temple, at the way he is so very real and so very here.
“I’m in love with you,” Phainon admits, and this time it’s easy.
“I’m in love with you, too.”