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Hvergelmir flinched and twisted backward, her reaction immediate upon being touched without permission -- wanting only to get away. It had been a bad week. She was so on edge all the time now.

She was shoving the hand away in panic, and it took a few long seconds for it to register what had actually happened. A friendly aura. A familiar voice.

A face...

The Cosmos knight squinted, trying to see through a few layers of brown grime and a matted mess of twigs and other forest detritus to the person beneath. There was a Mercury knight under all that -- and sure enough, he looked as familiar as he sounded.

Young and unsure. Struggling. But something else, too -- a memory came back, fleeting and old -- of a younger boy, his face full of wonder and joy at the marvels of the universe, desperate to try and see it all in an impossible panorama of starlight.

Zippeite.

He was alive. He was here.

Hvergelmir reached up to press a hand to the side of his grubby face, like a treasure she meant to hold up to the light for inspection.

She smiled behind her scarf, the light of it reaching her eyes. Yes, you do, Hvergelmir thought. I remember you, too.

Hvergelmir could still clearly remember the look in Azzo's face that she'd see so recently. She'd shown him the pad of paper, which he hadn't understood, and then, after an awkward joke on a Mauvian's part, she'd still ended up --

It didn't matter. It was the same either way. Eventually she always had to face the part where someone who'd once looked at her as someone they clearly thought of as having a place and a purpose now looked at her like -- like the ruined thing she was. The part where she could see in their faces Hvergelmir changing from someone who was a knight with a sacred oath into someone who had been those things, once.

She let her hand drop away from not-Zippeite's face and shook her head no, lowering her eyes. No hello. Without looking back up, she pulled her scarf to her chin so the Mercury knight could see her answer for himself.

It wasn't a question there was an answer for. Hvergelmir knew, because she'd asked herself that particular question, why, over and over again, more times than she could count. There were no answers. There were a dozen answers. She could say any of them, and they would've been true -- but none of them ever satisfied the miserable ache of self-pity in her heart. There was nothing joyous about being a martyr. If you survived the experience, it just reminded you how selfish you were.

Even so, she couldn't just stand there. Things got more awkward the longer you left them, and he'd asked a question -- so Hvergelmir had to say something.

Because a man named Labyrinthite is a big, giant a*****e, she considered right off. It was, in figuratively factual terms, a strictly honest statement. He'd done the deed, and he'd done it out of violent hatred. Hvergelmir had remembered it in a thousand nightmares since then, burned in her mind afresh each time she woke up. Because the Negaverse didn't want to hear what I had to say.

Because it was always going to end like this.

Because I wanted to be a martyr, without thinking about how unglamorous that is when you succeed at it.

Because I was greedy. Because I was cocky, or stubborn. Because things got more and more dangerous and I thought 'just one more, if I can convince just one more person.'

She saw, in her mind, Zippeite's skittish glances, like a frightened deer. He'd purified; it had given her hope. She remembered Zircon's shuffling feet. She'd purified too; another reason to go on. She remembered a pair of deep gray eyes, familiar from so many visits, and watching Titan miserably cling to his tired duty to the Negaverse even as they offered him back less and less hope of any true honor or noble service. Because there are some people you love too much to ever give up on them. Because there were people I would've waited for as long as it took.

Because I didn't know what to do with myself, if I wasn't doing that.

Because Vanessa asked me to be her child's godparent, and I was selfish and said no, and the universe punished me for it.

Because I wasn't clever enough to find a way to succeed without getting caught.

Because I was too harmless to kill, and this made for a funnier joke.

In the end, she pulled out her dry erase board, uncapped her marker, and what she wrote was:

Because if no one comes for you, you haven't made a difference. I like to think I helped people. It feels worth it. She reached out to brush her fingers briefly over Helicon's face again, trying to offer a reassuring smile that she hoped wasn't too hideous. I have no regrets, was the lie she wrote down and held up for his inspection.

He was just the same. Hvergelmir had known Zippeite when he was a frightened, angry, lost kid, really, and he had to be at least in his twenties now, surely -- but he was still the same boy she'd known then. Still fraught with emotions he couldn't contain and didn't feel worthy of, still so much more sincere and vulnerable than he realized. Time didn't change everything -- at least not at the same pace -- and whatever it had changed in Zippeite-now-Helicon, all the potential she thought she'd seen in him once was still there. He still had so much room to grow.

And he was trying so very, very hard.

The choice to purify wasn't an easy one. Aside from rare cases, like Tanais, it was usually a decision that offered many costs, many risks, and few benefits. It was a leap into the unknown -- throwing away the devil you knew in favor of the devil you didn't. It meant losing a huge piece of your memory and nearly everything safe you'd relied upon before. People who came to that decision, and had the certainty to go through with it successfully, did so with a greater core of strength than many of them realized.

That was as much courage as anyone could ask, in those circumstances. As frightened and alone as he'd always been, Zippeite had made it through the other side. She couldn't imagine feeling disappointed in that.

And it was something like a gift -- a rare gift -- to have one of hers (or so she privately considered them) come home to her after all this time. She'd assumed by this point that Nærøyfjord would turn out to have been the last -- and he had, in a way -- but here was one more she hadn't counted. Rejoice: a prodigal son has returned. He was lost, and is found.

There were tears on her face, the happy kind. Hvergelmir nodded and, before he could, cast her arms around the grubby young knight in a strong embrace.