It had been a long night. It had been a long day. And it was shaping up to be another long night when Diryas turned the key in the ignition to start his car and the text from Tobias popped up on the center console.

’You said you’d think about it and let me know later. It’s been two days.’

Tobias wasn’t wrong. It had been two days, two days since Tobias had come to Diryas to issue him an ultimatum. Either Diryas got over what was bothering him so badly about Ell—no, Teegan—or Tobias was going to go get a month-to-month lease somewhere and move there with Teegan until he did.

Diryas hated ultimatums. He knew Tobias had said the same thing to Zebulon, but Zebulon was at least talking to Teegan. That was more than Diryas could say he’d managed. There was the odd text from Teegan, but those went unanswered. Some of them had even gone unread for days at a time until the sick feeling in Diryas’ stomach went down when he saw Teegan’s new name.

New name, because he couldn’t have his old one, could he? Not if he wanted to stay hidden from the people that had convinced him that whatever the Negaverse was doing was a worthy endeavour to fight for. Diryas’ lips pursed distastefully at the thought. He knew Ellio—Teegan was a smart man. How did Teegan manage to convince himself that all the energy and soul-stealing wasn’t cause to cut and run at the first opportunity?

How the ******** did Teegan make it all the way to captain before realizing he’d made a mistake? Diryas let out a frustrated groan, leaning his head back against the headrest, staring up at the upholstery.

Circles. It was all circles. This wasn’t the first time he’d spent time ruminating in his car, and this wasn’t the first time any of those thoughts had crossed his mind. This was an old debate with himself, at this point. On the one side, the part of him that knew it was lucky nothing worse than energy theft had happened to Zeb—on the other, the part of him that knew Teegan had tried deliberately to get away with as little impact on Zebulon as possible.

Oh, but he’d still drained him to unconsciousness.

But there was a point in that Zebulon was in better shape than Teegan. If he’d fought back, Teegan would have either gotten hurt or been forced to hurt Zebulon in order to not blow his cover as a dissident. Diryas knew this. He knew all of it. He’d had it repeated to him a thousand times by this point in various tones at various volumes.

Didn’t make it easier to come to terms with. Didn’t make it easier to understand that Teegan had been part of the force trying to take over the Earth, the force that—from what Diryas had heard—had very nearly succeeded. Destiny City was the only place any of them could power up without bringing down a horde of chaos on top of them. And a horde of chaos only left a captive one, maybe two options.

Corrupt, if they gave you that out, or die.

Had none of that occurred to Teegan before he’d purified out? Before he’d come to them to tell them everything, that he was done serving that purpose? Diyras supposed that was one of the things causing him pause. How could he ask the question, ‘how did you not know better from the beginning’ without causing yet another impasse?

After all, the fact that Teegan didn’t have a good answer was why he was still staying in the basement of someone else’s house.

Diryas grumbled wordlessly under his breath, tossing his head impatiently to get his hair out of his face as he turned the car back off. The parking garage was deserted. He could just power up and go for a run or something. That was something people did to calm down, wasn’t it? But the idea of going for a run didn’t appeal to him. But he had to do something. Otherwise he was going to be walking into a guaranteed argument when he got back to the house.

He needed space and time. Space to look at the problem more objectively and time to devote the care the situation required. Diryas didn’t want Tobias to go move out with Teegan. He didn’t even really want Teegan moved out if he was completely honest. And it bothered him that the other two couldn’t understand why Diryas was having such a problem trusting Teegan to come back into the house again, to the point where even communication was nearly nonexistent.

‘I told him you’ll come around eventually, you know.’

Thanks, Toby, but Diryas had rather wished he hadn’t. That was an expectation that felt a little unfair at this stage. That had been followed up by asking Diryas why he couldn’t get over it if Zebulon—the one actually attacked—was working on getting over it.

He didn’t have a good answer for that and he wasn’t going to find any answers sitting in his car in the parking garage.

Diryas turned the car back on.

He paused.

He turned the car back off and turned to reach into his bag. Inside an interior pocket, his fingertips touched and then closed around cool, smooth metal. It was a practiced motion, sliding it onto one of his fingers it’d fit. Mainly because he’d practiced it. After a mutter under his breath, Diryas found himself sitting as Imhotep in his car one moment and then sitting in a large chair the next.

The chair was polished wood, large, heavy, and upholstered. He’d come into one of the offices that had existed on his wonder. He pushed to his feet, going automatically to the window. Nothing but snow, but it was warm enough inside. Turning back to the desk, he pressed his ring against the underside of it and heard the click he’d been waiting for.

It was a pretty rudimentary hidden drawer. He’d found it the first time he came to his wonder just because it’d been hanging crooked on its track. It’d been empty before, but now it had a map Imhotep had been working on. He squinted at the drawing by the emergency lighting overhead until he found what he was looking for.

What better way to get his mind off of his disaster of a personal life than to wander around his wonder and see what he could see? Imhotep pocketed the map and made his way for the door leading out to the hallway and the flickering lights it contained. He passed doors left ajar, files on the floor inside rooms as if the inhabitants had left in a hurry. Nameplates with a script he couldn’t read hung outside each of the doors.

The equipment inside each room was easy enough to recognize as he turned the corner, edged past a half-open door, and crossed into another hallway. He didn’t have to wonder what his, well, wonder had been in the past. The signs of being a hospital lay everywhere around him. A thousand years had not much improved on the general design of a gurney or the appearance of a call light. Imhotep had to work with hospitals sometimes in his day job, so he considered it only fitting that his wonder also be a hospital.

Not that this was like any hospital he had ever worked in back on Earth. Here, sleek metal and glowing pipe lighting abounded and a lot of it looked like it must have looked before everything collapsed. Clean, sterile. Precise to the point where he half-expected a robot attendant to come toddling around the corner at any moment to chastise him for tracking dirt onto the tile.

It was a bit maze-like, the hospital, and he had to refer to his map to keep from getting lost. He recognized some of the writing on the wall, even if he had no idea what it said, making a left here and right there to end up where he had been wanting to go. It was a part of the hospital he’d hesitated to enter, before, blocked by a large steel door he hadn’t wanted to move.

One, it had a stale and faded but still distinctly unpleasant smell he couldn’t place. Two, it was more of a disaster than the other areas. Whatever had been over here, people had been much more in a hurry to leave it behind. Either what it contained didn’t matter, or it was dangerous.

But now seemed like a good time to give moving the door a chance. He tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. Somehow, he hadn’t thought it’d be. It swung open slowly, the hinges groaning and protesting the whole way. He would have thought they were rusty, except rust would have been out of place. Even though the door was steel, it was still immaculate after all of these years.

The room inside was dark, with only a little bit of the glowing emergency lighting. It was very foreboding, and Imhotep hesitated before he walked inside the room. As soon as he did, however, he had to throw up his arm to shield his eyes against the lights that flared to life. Tears pricked the corners of his eyes as he tried to squint around his arm to see what was in the room he’d entered and what exactly the lights were that were blinding him.

It turned out that the lights were just normal overhead lights, bright and sterile, but nothing particularly out of sorts. Imhotep reasoned that the currently emergency setting of his wonder must have left the lights waiting for someone to enter the room before they’d turn back on. Even still, they flickered now and then, telling him he had to be quick about looking around.

The weird smell was worse, here, but it was one that he realised he recognized. It wasn’t exactly the same, but there were few things that had the same sweet, musty scent as preservative. As his eyes adjusted, what he saw confirmed his forming theory about his location. Two rows of tables, one on either side of the room, mounted to the walls with rolling carts of tools and bowls nearby. Sheets on the tables themselves, covering something that each caused its sheet to form peaks and valleys over it.

Pulling a sheet gingerly away only added more confirmation as he came eye-to-socket with a desiccated skull with the remains of skin and hair stretched over it. He jumped back with a wordless shout and dropped the sheet back down where he’d found it. Diryas looked at the other tables—some empty, some with similar covered shapes—and then at the walls behind the tables. All the drawers… And each drawer had a label, some with writing he couldn’t read.

He pulled one open, steeling himself for what he knew he’d probably find. The handles were cold, so cold they’d iced over, and the drawer interior itself was full of ice crystals. It was almost enough that he couldn’t see what the drawer held, but he was able to brush away some of the smaller crystals . As the ice tinkled to the floor and shattered, Imhotep revealed a much better preserved head and face and, presumably, the body attached to it under all of the ice that had formed in the rest of the drawer.

He was in a morgue. The hospital morgue, certainly. On the one hand, it made sense that the hospital would have one. On the other, it was still a shock to find himself that close to remains. As the drawer started to beep what he realised was a temperature warning, he hurriedly pushed the drawer back into the wall. After a moment, the beeping stopped.

Reflexively, he wiped his hands on his pants.

So here was the morgue, then, filled with remains of people who had freshly died when it all ended. The residual power in his wonder was enough to keep the bodies that had been in freezers when everyone—from the looks of it—rushed to evacuate. It had provided an avenue for the bodies left on the tables to mummify in the dry, cool air of the morgue. Diryas looked back toward the first body he’d uncovered.

He wiped his hands on his pants again and turned his attention to the room at large. There was a sombering quality to the room now that he realized what it was. It was probably safe to assume that the people here had been Mercurians, probably even residents of his wonder. …Had he known them? Were any of these people friends, family, of his, left to languish here in the final days of his wonder? Had the fighting against Chaos already started when they died?

When had he died? He had the distinct feeling—a surety he couldn’t actually place—that none of the bodies were his. Was he somewhere else, then? Was he even on the wonder? Imhotep frowned and turned away from the cabinets just in time for the light overhead to flicker once more and die with a low, steady beep that reverberated around the area.

…Right. Time to go, then… Not that he particular relished the idea of lingering among the dead. He wasn’t squeamish, but there was still an unsettling quality about all of it. It wasn’t like he knew who they were, their names, any of that. He couldn’t read anything that might have told him that information. Did it even ultimately matter? Maybe not, but he felt they deserved a better end than lying perpetually in a morgue in an abandoned hospital.

He’d have to figure out later what to do with that information, however. A chill crossed his body and Imhotep found himself wanting to go back home. Home to Zebulon, to Tobias, to Te—

To Teegan.

He looked back toward the door of the morgue. He had been so ready to make Elliot a body lying in a freezer or on a slab, covered in a sheet. He had been so willing to make sure Elliot never had a chance to attack any of them again that he’d been willing to reduce his entire identity to a tag on a drawer. That had faded over the weeks, as he supposed the other two had been betting on, but his chest still clenched painfully when he thought of him.

The fact that Zebulon seemed to—to him at least—forgive Teegan so easily didn’t help matters. Zeb had gone from just as enraged to sitting him down to tell him he was going to at least go talk to Teegan. What had happened to solidarity? What had happened to protecting Tobias?

Except Tobias was the worst offender. He’d made it clear since day one that he wasn’t going to stop seeing Teegan, even temporarily. He’d tried in the time since to get Zebulon and Diryas to come around to his point of view. Imhotep didn’t think it’d worked. Until it apparently had, and now he was the only one left repeating what it was Teegan had done, why he was no longer Elliot in the first place but was now a stranger in their house, in someone else’s house.

Except he wasn’t a stranger, and Imhotep damn well knew that.

He wanted all three of them to talk it through with him as he processed the presence of dead bodies on his wonder, and he was going to have to deal with the implications of that sooner or later. He was going to have to take his car and drive home and talk to Tobias and Zebulon. Actually talk to them.

Grumbling, Imhotep glanced back toward the morgue door and then focused until he was glaring at his backseat instead. Powering down, he turned the car back on, put it in reverse, backed out of his parking spot, and headed home.