The same thought had pierced Sanidine's consciousness since the second it happened, and no matter how many thoughts he tried to shove in its place, nothing really worked to replace it.

So the same three words kept repeating, like some cursed mantra: Evan is gone.

Literally, gone. Nothing but a pile of dust, now, blown away by the wind. Sanidine, stupidly, had even thought that if there was some way he could just catch it all he could pump Chaos into it, bring him back to life. Maybe worse off than before, but alive.

The wind had taken away the dust before he could even form the idea solidly. He'd been too stupid, trying to chase down the Senshi responsible for it all.

By the time he'd gotten back, he hadn't known what to do. He had thought, prayed, that Evan had some defense mechanism. That it was just some illusion.

He stayed in the area until dawn, waiting. Clinging to a half-assed idea formed out of desperation. If he'd caught anyone else having the same train of thought, he wouldn’t have hesitated to chew them out and ridicule them, and it made it so much harder when he had to face the fact that he was being stupid.

He just couldn’t accept it.

Sanidine stayed out all night.

He didn't really even think about anything. After the initial shock passed, he'd gone numb. His mind wanted to work; every now and then he'd get the first glimmer of an idea, excited that he might have found a solution, but it flickered into nothing.

He couldn’t finish a thought because he was afraid of coming to terms with the fact that there was nothing that could be done.

So he just stopped thinking.

Mostly, this all probably had to do with the fact that Sanidine rarely lost. Lost anything, much less a human life. He'd already been taking Evan's youmafication bad enough, but at least then he'd been able to lie to himself, to tell himself that things were going to be okay.

But they weren't.

Not if he wasn't even here to get better. It was just Sanidine, grappling for strings that had been cut a long time ago.

This wasn't how things were supposed to be.

Sanidine hadn't even lost so much as a dog in his life—how was he supposed to handle a person?

It wasn't like he'd never faced death. He'd seen it on television, heard about it in the papers. But he'd never lost anyone important. There was just a numbness, like someone had replaced all his blood with sand, and he could sometimes feel it shifting in his veins as he walked. He didn't feel human.

He didn't feel alive.

It stayed that way for long enough than numb felt like the new normal, but that probably had as much to do with seeing Evan disappear in a poof of dust as it did the fact that he just hadn't slept. He'd been wandering for over twelve hours, and the sun came up and he knew he couldn't stay powered up. He'd be too obvious, and while he half wished he'd run into someone he could fight (maybe they'd knock some sense into him) he just felt all washed up. He didn't want to see anyone, didn't want to talk.

He wasn't sure when he'd powered down, or when he'd walked back to his place. One minute he was down a dark alleyway, watching the pinks and oranges of the rising sun light up the sky, and the next thing he knew he was on his doorstep, fumbling with his keys as he tried to slide his car keys into his house lock.

It must have taken him five full minutes to even make it into the house.

It probably wasn't the first time any of his neighbors thought he was stumbling in late, and drunk. He worked at bar for Christ's sake; how could they not? He and Evan were notorious for coming and going at almost all hours.

He and Evan.

Evan.

Back to him, again.

Zack wasn't hungry. He didn't feel tired, but his body slumped as he walked, and his feet dragged. It took him three, four times longer than usual to get his shoes off. The house was far from messy, but it showed the clear signs that someone hadn't been cleaning up after themselves.

Zack had a feeling it was only going to get worse. At least with Evan around before, he could trust that he'd come home to a clean house, and a warm meal, and how could he be so stupid and ******** something up like that? He had joined the Negaverse with no problem—what the hell was so different between him and the guy who recruited him? He'd talked him through it, too.

Just push the Chaos in, just let it take over, be a better person than you were before. All the power, all the perks, and you just had to sit there, look pretty, and pretend like you gave a damn about some stranger named Metallia.

It should have been easy.

Except, here he was, in an empty house. It was reassuring to be home, but it was an empty shell of what it used to be, and a constant reminder that Zack had ******** up. There was no back button, no undo.

Just the cold realization that he was in over his head, and that he deserved to be miserable.

He didn't make it to his bedroom or make any effort to change out of the clothes he'd first put on yesterday; he landed face first in the couch, nose pressed up against something that smelled distinctly like Evan.

Zack cracked an eye and identified it as Evan's sweater—curled up in the corner of the couch he must have left it in, shoved under one of the pillows and half hidden beneath a blanket and the cushion. It was the softest slap to the face he'd felt.

Dreams eluded him, thankfully, but well after sleep claimed him there was a single, nagging thought.

The voice that told him he was missing something, and he wasn't trying hard enough.

There was a whole world of Dark Magic—how could it be the end?

…With all this power, how could he fail?

Someone had the answers. Somewhere.

He just had to find them.