*
The days ran together. Not, as they were often described, in a slow haze — but in an ugly blur of worry and fruitless effort, a race against the clock. A trade, Alkaid had suggested, one Transcendent for another: but with no indication of whom, exactly, Hvergelmir was supposed to throw upon the fire in order to see Ida spared.
There was a dark, ugly part of her heart that whispered suggestions — people she wasn’t personally close to, people who didn’t seem to be much use to the war effort, or the distant pipe dream of Castor being Transcended just for the joy of being able to give him away — but that part was nothing she was proud of. It was a nagging voice that she’d been hearing often, lately, ever since that last trip to the Moon. It liked to tell her how much easier, how much more honest it would be to just be selfish. It liked to tell her just this once, and no one would have to know.
Hvergelmir thought of Gehenna having done the same thing to Ida, and found it in herself to recoil from that line of thought. She thought of Teide, struggling every day to believe that those kinds of thoughts were human and not broken, and to believe in her own ability to choose good — and Hvergelmir found it in herself to follow in those footsteps. To choose good.
It was just funny how it seemed harder, these days, than before. How the darker thoughts had come more quickly.
Maybe it was what had happened with the Code, after all. The Chaos they’d each taken on. She liked to hope so. The alternative — that she was just becoming a more sinister version of herself — wasn’t pleasant to contemplate.
Today, though, desperate and short for options, she’d turned down a new avenue. Hvergelmir had been so fixed on her own problem, after all — how to force herself to Transcend within the next few days — that she’d barely had any time outside of her scheduled hours at her bench to do any patrolling.
That was how she’d stumbled on Labyrinthite’s message. It wasn’t meant for her, she felt certain, but it was alarming all the same. Months had passed, since she’d been looking for Ida, then sick, then looking for Ida again . . .
It was a long time. She was worried. She didn’t know what she’d find, when she saw him again.
And his message didn’t bode well.
Hvergelmir made her way to the rooftop he’d mapped out at a slow approach — nothing calculated to be cause for alarm. She arrived, as she always preferred to, with no weapons. Hopefully things had not gone that far south, after all: they’d been on good terms the last time they’d spoken. And she had to keep faith.
“Labyrinthite?” she called out, when she cleared the roof. Hvergelmir looked around. “Are you here?”
****
People came and went from the rooftop that General Labyrinthite had claimed as his personal battleground.
It was a top of a decrepit bakery, long since abandoned with a section of the roof that had caved into the structure below. The roof access remained intact and it was often where the reaper general would perch upon and wait, sharp eyes, too bright against gaunter features, peering into the darkness as he waited.
Tonight, however, was different.
The tall man was within the vicinity of the building, his large dark swirl of an energy signature encompassing the place, but he could not be found on top in his usual perch. No, instead he was wandering through the crumbling bakery itself, fingers leaving streaks on the still standing fixtures when he dragged them across dusty surfaces.
He was aware of the bright energy signature that marked a knight, but he paid it little attention as he stepped over crumbled stone and pieces of what looked like an industrial sized oven. Glass crunched beneath his heels as he made his way towards the front of the building. There were holes where full glass windows once were and the door had been ripped off it’s hinges, hanging limply by a single screw.
Labyrinthite had stepped out one of the broken windows when he heard Hvergelmir’s voice.
Labyrinthite? Are you here?
The inquiry made him laugh, if only because of whom it came from. She was above him and that made him smile as he moved so that he could see the roof and the white of the Cosmos knight more clearly. “I am here.”
A mix of muted emotions fluttered through him at the sight of her. What would she think of him? He’d once been on what she would consider the path to redemption. Had he fallen in her mind?
“You were not someone I expected to see.”
****
Hvergelmir imagined not. Whatever Labyrinthite had been intending with his gruesome message, it hadn’t been a cry for help: it was some kind of call-out, something very nearly in the realm of ‘suicide by cop’ at worst (or maybe, in a way, at best — who could say?). He was always giving up on himself so easily — and he tended to give up on Hvergelmir, too.
Well, here she was. Still keeping some kind of faith in him . . . enough, at least, to trust him with her immortal soul.
She peered down off the roof to find Labyrinthite waiting, leaning halfway out one of the bakery windows.
“You couldn’t have set up shop in a working bakery?” she asked, giving the half-collapsed building a dubious once-over and quirking a conversational eyebrow in the General’s direction.
The General. It was painful to see him that way, think of him that way — ever buried deeper in Metallia’s grasp, ever farther from his own freedom. Hvergelmir was well aware of what she was risking here.
“Is it safe down there?” she asked, stepping hesitantly closer to the ledge. “Structurally, I mean.”
****
“Of course not,” he replied. “Can’t have people thinking I’m available for tea parties or the like.”
Hvergelmir might have thought that Labyrinthite was regressing, but he saw the opposite. It had been foolish to think that he was anything, or anyone, but who he’d always been. General Labyrinthite, knight of Metallia. Reaper. Denying who he was at the core of himself had been foolish, he could only pretend to be something else for so long.
“I’m not exactly here for pleasant conversations.” But his messages had made that clear enough in his mind.
Glass crunched beneath his boots as he walked, positioning himself beneath the moonlight that filtered through the darkness of the building’s shambles. “I doubt it,” he admitted truthfully, shrugging as he spoke. Safety had never been something he’d concerned himself with even before he’d join the ranks of the soldiers who filled the negaverse. “Though no more unstable than the roof.” Depending on where one stood.
“I could come to you,” he suggested, thinking of how easily he could teleport to her side. “But if you’re here to lecture me, then I suggest you take your leave while I am feeling gracious.” There were few who would be afforded the same things Hvergelmir was.
But the Cosmos knight was from a time before and those were always the ones he was more merciful towards.
****
It was, perhaps, a slight sting to Hvergelmir’s pride to bear the suggestion that she lectured people — but bear it she did: Hvergelmir wasn’t in the habit of quibbling over minor unkindnesses directed her way. It was much easier, she’d always reasoned, to bear a small insult for the sake of building a rapport. It centered the idea that Hvergelmir’s ego wasn’t more important than the concerns of the person she was talking to. Very few people — Castor, often, and Bischofite once or twice — had the ability to truly jostle her out of the serene territory she’d staked out for herself.
Labyrinthite wasn’t one of them. Not anymore. These days, she looked at Labyrinthite and saw not the fearsome terror he’d once struck in her veins, but the preemptive hostility of someone who tried to push a friend away to protect himself from being hurt. He was always giving her excuses to walk away from him, trying to spare himself the pain of rejection by instigating it early. It wasn’t a pleasant thing, bearing so much hostility all the time — but it was how things were. And he wasn’t lost to her yet, not fully.
She hoped not, anyway. She was betting everything on it.
He wouldn’t hurt her. He wouldn’t hurt her. He wouldn’t hurt her. She had to believe that. She’d tried so many other options, scoured her Wonder for clues, and time was so short . . . this was her last, best chance.
“I’m not here to lecture you,” she confirmed, trying to loosen the nerves from her taut shoulders. “I came because I need your help.”
****
Labyrinthite had a reputation, he was sure, or else those of Skaikru wouldn’t have sought him out and he knew that he had a future reputation, for those that remembered those dark memories. He wondered what Hvergelmir thought of him now, surely it was not the thing of nightmares he’d once been to her. Not if she allowed him into her personal space, not if she was here asking for help.
I came because I need your help.
Something about the words sent a thrill down his spine and he tilted his head at her, eyes bright in the dark shadows cast across his face. They blinked slowly and when he opened his eyes again, he was standing behind her, hands lifting to push back his hood so it pooled across his shoulders.
In a slow, gravely voice he asked, “what makes you think I’ll help?”
He was not the man that met her at the bench in the park any longer. He wasn’t the same person who’d allowed her to wrap her arms around him during a lapse in strength. It was unlikely that he was who she thought him to be, at least not any more.
Labyrinthite took a step forward, hands falling to his side and the gloved one tapped against his thigh.
“Surely you have someone else you could turn to, someone…” his lips twitched, curled upward to display the sharp points and white of his teeth, a smile - sinister in nature, “Safer.”
****
Hvergelmir froze. It was hard not to be aware of it when Labyrinthite teleported: her senses told her that the strong pulse of his aura had moved abruptly, shifted to some new place — but sensing the shift wasn’t the same as knowing, right away, where he’d ended up. It was the sound of his feet on the rooftop, his voice in her ears — both the same scuffling crunch of low gravel — that told her that the General was standing behind her.
Vulnerability was not a new feeling. Hvergelmir was always unarmed, frequently showing her enemies her soft throat. It was how she negotiated. Still, the animal instinct was there, deep under her skin and in the very fundamentals of life, telling her that her back was exposed and in danger, bare flesh marked with the scars of the star that Schörl had carved there, offering no armor and no protection. She froze up because she was human — and because she’d worked very hard to train herself out of flinching.
“No,” she said, turning, raising wide golden eyes to Labyrinthite’s own. “There’s only you.”
Titan would’ve been safer. Plenty of people would’ve been safer. But it had to be Labyrinthite — it was Labyrinthite before, in that other future. It was the only way to be certain.
“A friend of mine was kidnapped several months ago. Alkaid will set her free . . . but only if I can provide another Transcendent in her place.”
****
There was a curl of pleasure in his belly as he watched her tense up, whiskey-gold eyes sweeping across the familiar frame of the she-knight. They traced over the outlines of the scar, who’s meaning he did not know or care to know, before traveling up. A foot tapped impatiently against the concrete beneath them, a sign that he wanted her to turn around because he only did dealings face-to-face if he could.
Labyrinthite might have been a monster wearing the skin of a man, but he still had honor even if it was twisted.
Once she faced him and their near-matching gazes met the general stepped forward, standing tall and imposing as his instincts coaxed him too. “I’m flattered,” he said at first, looking upon Hvergelmir with something that could be confused with fondness. At the very least, Labyrinthite looked like he was more willing to consider whatever foolish request she might make.
It was all lost the minute that the name Alkaid left the woman’s mouth. Immediately his expression darkened and the step he’d been taking forward reverted into a step backwards. “I’m afraid on that basis alone, I’m inclined to reject you.”
There was only one person that Labyrinthite looked to of equal rank and it was the Ascendant that he walked tandem paths with. “The Ascdenant-General and I…” They weren’t exactly close, even if they still gravitated to each other after all this time. “What makes you think I can help you anyway? I know nothing of transcendence.”
Except that it was one of the things that thwarted him from corrupting Celsus.
“It’s a foolish endeavour Hvergelmir,” he said. “Your friend will likely die at Alkaid’s hands before you can save her.”
****
Hvergelmir hadn’t known there was any sort of a special connection between Labyrinthite and Alkaid. She hadn’t expected it — but whatever it was that lay between the two of them, it had clearly just cost Hvergelmir a scrap of ground that she couldn’t afford to lose. Ida was counting on her. She had to do this, somehow, some way.
Worry felt like a cramp in her stomach, tugging at her. “I never ask whether other people think my endeavours are foolish,” she said softly, folding her arms together like the air had suddenly turned cold. “I already know they do. I have to try anyway . . . someone I care about is counting on me.”
In the end, that had been all there was. Ida was in trouble, and someone had to take her place.
It was hard to know how much that might or might not resonate with Labyrinthite. He believed himself to be mostly alone, she knew — but it was his humanity that had brought him low before, his very fear and dread of becoming a shell of a person, all dark deeds and no one to cradle him in their arms and remind him that sunrise always came again. It was hard to know how aware he was of his own heart at any given moment, or how often he might reject its merest tug. Hvergelmir really was gambling with her welfare, here.
“I transcended because of you in that other future,” she said harriedly. “When you put your hand in my chest. Please, I need you to try. I wouldn’t be asking if I hadn’t tried everything else I could think of.”
****
Being around Hvergelmir was a complicated thing for the general, because the woman had seen him during one of his darkest times, when he’d been vulnerable and hurting - an after effect of a failed purification. Which meant that she thought things of him that no one else would, not even himself, and it was confusing.
Like those only from his past, the lady-knight brought about a stirring of emotions he’d thought long lost.
It was irritating.
“That friend of yours is already at death’s door.” Or close enough, he supposed, reminded that upon his visits to Alkaid’s star he’d met the girl he assumed Hvergelmir was desperate to save. “Though I applaud you for seeking to sacrifice yourself instead of someone else.” It was unclear if he truly found the idea admirable. The sharpness of his grin had softened when she spoke of that future.
It always put him a little off balance when it came up, probably because, in the end, that future dictated much of his present. Like the onslaught of knights and senshi coming his way and the blood on the walls, that also stained his hands. But unlike before, it didn’t make him sick.
There was a slow exhale of breath, Labyrinthite’s jaw ticking as teeth set upon each other and the grin disappeared. He stepped forward, intent on crowding her towards the edge that she was already so near to. “Fine,” he growled, left arm lifting and gloved fingers reaching for a whisp of hair near her face. “I will grant you one favor, because of our history.”
****
“You’ve seen her?” Hvergelmir asked, her eyes brightening. The fact that Ida had sent her messages had been proof enough that she was still alive — but had given her precious little to go on other than that. What Labyrinthite told her didn’t add much hope, truthfully, to the quality of her situation: but it did add to the urgency of it. And it told her one other thing — something she’d feared, when no one else from the Negaverse she’d spoken to had known they were keeping Ida captive. Perhaps the others were simply too low-ranked. “At least, perhaps, I’ll have you for company, then.” She’d feared long days and nights with only Alkaid for a visitor, her chalky, cracked persona slowly breaking Hvergelmir’s sanity down into brittle bits. The possibility of Labyrinthite was something. Perhaps he didn’t hold their relationship as dear as Hvergelmir did — it was hard to tell, with him — but maybe he’d trust her more in shackles. It felt like some sort of comfort, at any rate, when faced with the stomach-churning idea of ending her days in some dark oubliette.
None of this was what she wanted. She wondered, not for the first time, how she’d gotten here. How she was managing to let her feet carry her toward self-sacrifice when the last thing she wanted to give up was her freedom. Hvergelmir wasn’t a strong person — she wondered where she’d found such steel, and how long it would be before all her bravery burst in the face of her fear.
Distant thoughts. Right now she had to do this.
She’d never given more than fleeting, self-serving thought to the idea of sending someone else for Alkaid’s trade. People were free creatures. They weren’t hers to buy and sell. Whatever weak impulses she had — and there had seemed to be so many, recently, ever since that night on the moon with the Code — that was one possibility she’d never been able to seriously entertain. It was too far over the line. Too inhuman.
It didn’t matter. Labyrinthite had agreed. Hvergelmir expected to feel relief — and she did — but she found herself shivering instead, a sudden fear crackling up her spine. Self-preservation was a powerful impulse. She tried to still her hands, and thought, please be gentle with me, then, because she didn’t want to die: but what she said was the clinical thing instead, the practical thing. The thing that put her safety last, where it needed to be for everyone else’s sake. “Please be careful, then,” she said in a wavering voice, clenching her hands at her sides. “There was a backlash last time, and I can’t control that if it happens. I don’t want you to be hurt.”
She took a breath. Held it.
****
“I have.” He replied, bright eyes searching her expression. He wondered why the senshi meant so much to Hvergelmir, but he also had to remind himself that he did not understand the she-knight even after all this time. He knew enough, he mused. “Alkaid did not allow me to play with her toy, but it’s for the best. Especially if you want to cling to the meager hope that she lives. The ascendant-general is far kinder than I am.”
They tortured in different ways.
“But I would not hold on to hope that she’ll call upon me to visit you,” he warned, whiskey-gold flicking over to the strand he’d wrapped around his forefinger. The white was bright against the black of his glove. “She only calls upon me when I am needed to do something she cannot.” Like with Castor, his bloody and torn wing suspended and hung somewhere in the city. “And I can assure you, seeing my face will not bring you any pleasure.”
Whatever relationship they had, it paled in comparison to that of his and Alkaid’s. The only thing that rivaled his loyalty to the ascendant was his loyalty to Metallia.
With more gentleness than would be expected of him, Labyrinthite carefully pulled his finger free of the strands he’d been toying with. He took that same hand and pressed gloved fingers against her breastbone, noting the way she shivered. “You don’t need to concern yourself with my wellbeing.” His head shook and his tongue clucked against the roof of his mouth.
Labyrinthite didn’t care if the backlash occurred, pain meant feeling something and he always welcomed that type of feeling.
His eyes flicked up and his tongue wet his lips before he let his hand sink past her chest and into the subspace where her starseed resided. Then -
He wrapped his hand around it.
****
There was no sudden flare of light.
There was no shockwave, nothing to knock Labyrinthite back or lose his invasive hold on Hvergelmir’s starseed. There was no sound. No glimmering light on Hvergelmir’s shoulders or down her back. There was no feeling of a higher connection to her Wonder. There was no reaction at all.
All Hvergelmir could feel was the sensation of being stabbed with a huge chunk of ice, the horribly invasive, weakening touch of unfamiliar fingers wrapped around the crystallized core of her soul. The sensation was all-consuming, making it hard to move her limbs or form words.
It wasn’t working. Why wasn’t it working?
With great effort, her breath coming in shallow gasps, Hvergelmir willed her lips to move.
“Take . . .” she whispered, choking, hitching another short breath, “ . . . take it out.”
****
He didn’t know what he expected, but he knew what his companion had hoped for and he couldn’t stop the way his head shook slowly. Memories of his time with Hvergelmir were often some of the strongest, as were the ones with Iris, and he knew that what she had asked for wouldn’t have worked. Things were different then, there’s been something else that had triggered the transformation she was so desperate for.
He had a myriad of opinions. He didn’t voice them.
Instead, he contemplated the weight of her starseed in his hand and how it felt, warm and pulsing, in his grasp. Then, he wondered what the color would be; would it be golden like her eyes, a shimmering white-blue-purple like her hair?
Take it out.
The smirk graced the general’s face as his grip tightened slightly. “As the lady wishes,” he said with mock-sincerity. He withdrew his hand, grip still firm because, Hvergelmir had not specified what he was to take out.
****
It was hard to hold still. Hard to stand. Hvergelmir felt her whole body starting to go numb as Labyrinthite began to withdraw both his hand and her starseed, clutched within it — all except the mark on her shoulder, the place where her skin was always slightly warm. Everything else was flickering out like a candle in a snowstorm.
Hold on a little longer, one part of her said. Let him take it out. Maybe he has to try to take it out before your Transcendence kicks in. If not, it’s just like going to sleep — and that’s not new. Just let it happen.
The other part of her, fiercely instinctual, wanted none of that. The other part of her wanted to fight for her life, to struggle and get away and not let him take what he was taking: her life, all her lives past and future. That part would’ve fought beyond any pain and any fear. Some part of every creature was born with the blinding, scorching, burning desire to live.
It didn’t really matter which of the two drives might’ve won out. The numbness of having her subspace invaded, her starseed toyed with, was pervasive: her hands spasmed involuntarily and her eyelids fluttered; she choked on the way her lungs froze up in her chest. Consciousness would go if the starseed left her chest entirely, but until then, she was trapped in her own body, struggling to raise any arm in aid or protest. Her eyes watered at the edges, from fear as much as lack of oxygen.
Transcendence spared her none of that. It wasn’t coming. She had failed.
She was unworthy.
“ . . . please . . ., “ shivered on her lips.
****
He’d done it to toy with her, to remind Hvergelmir that he was dangerous and her trust in him would betray her. And - oh, it was tempting to keep pulling and take a look at the gem that made up the Cosmos’ knight. There was a desire within him, certainly, to claim a prize and deliver a warning in itself but he stopped right before he pass through the threshold and let go.
When his hand returned to it’s proper place on Earth, it was empty.
There were numerous reasons for his decision and yet - he voiced none of them. He’d let go in part because of what kindness Hvergelmir had shown him when he was at his weakest and in part because she had unfinished business with Alkaid and he would not hinder that. There was something else, something deeper that urged him to keep her alive and it wasn’t something he could understand so he pushed it downward. Buried it.
It would lay to rest with all the buried and lost things.
“Do not forget Hvergelmir,” he said slowly, voice low and dangerous. “I am not a friend and while I can be merciful, I am still very much a threat.” There was little space between them, inches at best and he looked upon her with an expression mixed of pity and warning.
“Looks like you’ll need to find yourself a sacrificial lamb,” he remarked cruelly, arm dropping to his side.
****
Hvergelmir settled back into her flesh, starseed back where it belonged, with a feeling of relief and miserable exhaustion. Labyrinthite was still here, still looking at her — still trying to impart a sense of fear into her, like he’d never quite understood that she already was afraid of him and always had been, but she kept on trying anyway. He didn’t understand her deep down, she supposed. She’d never asked him to. But it wasn’t important, none of it seemed important. It was all over.
Ida’s life, which had already been hanging by a slimmest of threads, now seemed to slip from her fingers. Hvergelmir stared ahead at Labyrinthite’s chest, the fastenings of his cloak, her eyes vague and unfocused.
“I wasn’t good enough,” she said bleakly, in a daze. Why? Why?!?
There would be no question of a sacrificial lamb. If she couldn’t take Ida’s place, she couldn’t justify sending someone else instead. It was an unfair thing to ask — and a cruel thing to do to someone. No one deserved to be treated like their life was worth less than someone else’s. It wasn’t Hvergelmir’s place to put Ida’s life over anyone else’s, no matter how her own feelings ran.
No. There were no more options left. Hvergelmir’s last chance — Ida’s last chance — had just died on the vine. Tears rolled silently down Hvergelmir’s cheeks.
After everything, she’d failed.
Heedless of the danger, the risk, Hvergelmir reached out to ball her fists in the fabric of Labyrinthite’s shirtfront. Then she let her weight fall forward into his, her head buried against his chest, and she howled and screamed out her anguish into the sky in a single, broken, tormented wail. There were no words to match the depth and breadth of some feelings. For some things, there was no language: only sheer and agonized sound.
****
He should have left. He should have stepped away and turned his back on her or vanished completely simply because he could. There was nothing he could, or rather would, do for the woman as the weight of her reality crashed over her. Ida was not a concern of his, nor would he extend any advice or help further in what he viewed as a fruitless endeavour to rescue her.
Yet, he felt locked into place as he watched emotions twist across Hvergelmir’s face. Labyrinthite felt like a strange third part, merely observing the interaction between the two of them without truly participating. He could register that she was speaking to him, but could not register if a response was warranted.
Even if she expected a response, Labyrinthite beared no answers for her. He didn’t understand transcendence as anything more than an obstacle that prevented him from taking or shattering starseeds. He knew what it felt like to have that resistance, that blockade pushing against him. In that not-future, Hvergelmir’s transcendence had forcibly pushed him away. In this timeline, Celsus’ had kept him from funnelling chaos into the knight’s starseed until it exploded.
The general did not know what it took to transcend. (Though he suspected that if it were anything like Alkaid’s ascension, it took absolute dedication.)
“You look for your answers - “ he cut himself off when the woman grasped at him. Alarm fluttered across his face as his uniform was grasped and her weight was laid upon him. Instinct demanded that he rip away, leave her to fall, despair in her grief.
Instead, once the flutter of shock dissipated, he let her cry into him trying to ignore the wails that reminded him of the one’s his mother had cried when Samuel died. It was uncomfortable and not something he wanted but he did not push her away. A tentative crept across her back, bare hand warm against her, to steady them both.
He would allow her to cry, as she’d done for him before, this once.
“Just once, Hvergelmir,” he mumbled.
Despair, he thought, thinking of the state in which the captive senshi had been, for death comes knocking and waits for no one.
****
Because he let her, she wept. She wept until her voice cracked and finally failed, and all that was left of her cries were miserable, self-pitying whimpers and soft sniffling. She wept until Labyrinthite’s shirt was soaked through in one large patch, and her shoulders had gone from shaking to still, soothed by the simple presence of a warm hand at her back. She wept until there was nothing left but the knowledge of all that she’d failed to do and all that would happen because of it. She wept for grief and for failure, but most of all, for Ida, who would never get to come home. Ida, who didn’t yet know that her frail hopes had crumbled. Hvergelmir wept until there were no more tears.
Then, knowing better than to expect any other sort of comfort from someone as shuttered and closed-off as Labyrinthite, she stepped back.
“Thank you,” she said hoarsely, in a voice that had been rubbed raw and scraped bare by tears and by shouting. Hvergelmir rubbed at her eyes, slicking away the damp on her cheeks and trying to gather herself back up. “I’m sorry about all this. The imposition.”
****
Labyrinthite stood stiffly, unable to remember the last time someone cried on him.
When she finally stopped, pulled away, he felt relieved. The hand pressed against her skin dropped, drawn back to his side with the fingers curling into his palm. His heels scraped against the concrete as he stepped away, throat feeling thick and mouth dry.
He felt a twist of something, guilt perhaps, when she thanked him and apologized. It felt unwarranted, unnecessary. Undeserved. Labyrinthite could not offer her comfort or aid, he’d played his part and there was nothing left to give.
“Consider it debts repaid.”
****
“There were never any debts,” Hvergelmir’s answer came absently, automatic. Her own arms coiled around her midsection, clamoring suddenly for the warmth that had gone when she and Labyrinthite had stepped apart. She felt cold, standing there by herself, and overly aware of how deeply alone she was in this moment: not just physically, with Labyrinthite having taken a greater remove, but in the larger sense of it all. She was on a path by herself, and maybe, if she thought about it, she always had been — but there had always seemed to be people nearby, on paths not like hers, but ones that sometimes still strayed within sight close enough to make her feel that her endeavours weren’t completely alien to everyone else.
Aquarius — it had been Aquarius first, now and always. Her dearest friend, her truest friend: but if anyone walked a path stranger and lonelier than Hvergelmir did (and she liked to think she was self-aware enough to realize that, truly, many people did), then surely it was Aquarius, was Tara, the lonely astronomer, a hermit Galileo who lived in a world with eyes that couldn’t open wide enough to see all that she saw. Her path had been dangerous and costly, and had hurt her very much; she’d nearly been lost forever. Now, the path was faded and hung on by a wounded thread, and had taken her to a point in the distance that Hvergelmir was forever desperately squinting to keep in her sights. Her lodestar. Her glimmering constant. Hvergelmir could not, would not, lose sight of her — but she dwindled so dimly in the distance.
Kairatos too — there was another path for him, one she’d thought had drawn so very, temptingly close to her own. In his guilty, tortured eyes, she thought she’d recognized something — in the soft, conflicted compassion that tempered his righteous anger, in the incredible stubbornness that compelled him to stay his own course regardless of the opinions of others. He’d listened to her . . . believed her . . . liked her . . . and she’d thought, maybe . . . But perhaps his path had drawn too close to hers, after all. The one she walked was a straight and fixed course, with no room for deviation no matter the nuance and no matter the personal feelings. She hadn’t heard from him for months, and then they’d butted heads at the Moon Palace, over what had happened in the Rift. Hvergelmir could only suppose she’d driven him away, in the end. Perhaps it was always going to happen, with him or with anyone. Perhaps they’d all drift off one day.
There were other friends, on a farther path: Babylon, Camelot, Ida. But in moments like this, she began to understand what she sometimes tried to deny: that their path never wandered very close to her own. They were people who cared about her, who supported her as a friend and a loved one — but they were not people who shared her convictions and her priorities. Their paths were fixed, too, and generally moved in a straight line, and it was a different straight line than the one Hvergelmir was on. She viewed them as though from a perpetual remove: close enough to see and to care and to worry, but not — as this entire, horrible failed experiment had just so painfully proven — not, not, not close enough to be of any help. She was no good to the lot of them. All she could do was watch impotently and wave from a distance as they struggled against the obstacles in their way.
Kerberos and Chariklo she’d lured off a farther path, managed to draw just a little bit closer to herself. Titan, too, seemed always so close to stepping off the path he’d been on and into the weeds, stumbling through the underbrush at her beck and call, no matter the hazard. But hazard was, truly, all Hvergelmir could promise — freedom and painful struggle and loss — and Kerberos and Chariklo, with all the torment they suffered, were proof of that. They’d left a bad path, but a path nonetheless, and she’d tempted them off of it and into untrodden territory, a hard wilderness: it was fraught with obstacles and pain, cutting at their heels like sharp rock until both of their hearts seemed to bleed constantly with the terrible struggle of it. It took bravery and strength to continue beating a new path. She wasn’t sure she’d given Kerberos or Chariklo or Titan enough bravery and strength to succeed. Perhaps she’d fail them, as she knew she’d failed Labyrinthite. Perhaps they, too, would realize how hard it was to chart a new course, and how useless Hvergelmir had been to them, and they’d turn back to the path they’d left with new assurance that she’d been wrong, insufficient to her task. Perhaps Kerberos and Chariklo and Titan would soon realize she was a failure, just as Kairatos had realized it, just as Labyrinthite had realized it — and just as Ida was about to realize it.
Perhaps her path led off a cliff, and they were right not to follow.
She looked back up at Labyrinthite, the grim witness to her incompetence. “I’m sorry I let you down,” Hvergelmir told him, her chin quivering with the last remains of mostly spent tears. “That’s the real thing I want to say. I’m sorry you let me talk to you these past few months, and I wasn’t any use to you.”
Hvergelmir sighed, holding out her hand for what she imagined was probably a final, polite handshake with someone who surely now understood she was no help to him or anyone else. She couldn’t imagine anyone wanting anything to do with her after this, after she left Ida to die — and Labyrinthite hadn’t exactly wanted much to do with her in the first place.
“I hope the world’s kinder to you someday.”
****
There were never any debts.
The words coiled around him uncomfortably, but he remained still and managed to keep an impassive expression as he looked down at Hvergelmir. As far as his relationships with the order-aligned went, theirs was perhaps the most unique. He was not a kind man, especially not to the opposing forces, and yet he tried to be kinder to her.
And that reminded him of what he’d said to that senshi, kindess has no place in war.
“You cannot let someone down who does not truly put their faith in you.” It wasn’t like he believed that Hvergelmir would have been able to truly help him and he’d burned the only bridge he’d had with the chance of purification. It wasn’t what he wanted any more, it wouldn’t work. He didn’t want to be saved. “Things change, I am a far cry from the man that sought comfort or relief from you. You can’t offer what you think is salvation to someone who doesn’t believe in it.”
Labyrinthite felt right at home with the monsters, it was time to stop pretending otherwise.
“If you cannot make your plans work, devise a different one,” he suggested as he stepped back. “If you give up hope, what left do you have to offer anyone?” He did not think Hvergelmir to be a leader among her fellow knights, but he did believe her to be clever or she wouldn't have survived this long with her refusal to bear arms unless it was to defend herself.
“The world has no obligations to me.” He already had lived a privileged life and there were few things that he wanted and could not have. “Nor does it owe anyone anything.” He didn’t take her hand, only shook his head at the gesture. “Self-deprecation is not a good look on you Hvergelmir.”
Labyrinthite turned his back on her and walked away.
****
Hvergelmir blinked rapidly, watching Labyrinthite turn and walk away from her. He did always like to get the last word in — but more than that, he’d refused her parting handshake. Whatever it was he’d done — and she wondered if he was aware of it, himself — she’d given him the opportunity to call this the end of their connection to each other, and he’d left the door just slightly ajar, instead.
Maybe he felt pity for her. Maybe he cared. Either way, it was something to hold onto. That, and his gruff words of support.
His words rang in her ear. His willingness, despite everything, to give her some form of advice.
If you cannot make your plans work, devise a different one.
Hvergelmir squinted out into the darkness, but Labyrinthite had been successful in redirecting her thoughts away from her sorrows and her dashed hopes, for the moment: she was no longer looking for Labyrinthite’s fading back in the growing darkness. The gears in her head were turning.
There is always a third option, she reminded herself. There’s always something outside of the choice presented to us. Think.
Alkaid had given her the choice: provide a new Transcendent, or Ida would die. She had failed at one option, and the other was beyond accepting. But Hvergelmir considered what else she knew: Alkaid had come offering. Ida’s value to her, to Metallia, had been exhausted. Alkaid was trying not to tip her hand, but it was obvious that the cards she had left to play weren’t very strong anymore.
Hvergelmir took a deep breath, pulling herself back together. It was time to consider the terms of her counter offer.
[fin]
Nuxaz
just in case you want the link so you can log it <3
