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After the meal with your companions, you brush off the splendors of the Meghaduta in one of its many hallways, leaning against cool sandstone with your head tipped back. Another adventure awaits, a plan formulated over the sweet and savory, the heady smell of spices, and the clatter of plates; to pluck the Thirteenth from the gaping maw of darkness and restore to it the light. You cover your eyes with the back of your wrist and chuckle. It's not the only thing occupying your thoughts however, as your fickle mind returns to the rows of mulberry trees outside, to the conversation you've had with Zero and those two plucky orphans. Her words left you feeling like you woke from a restless sleep; wrung out, exhausted. “Why he traversed the great expanse–why he risked life and limb… for you…”
When you came by to the sickbay in the Ragnarok, you'd asked . About how you winded back on the spaceship after you got carted off to that thin strip of horizon, about what happened to Zenos and where that teleporter came from, but neither your close friends nor the Loporrits could provide any conclusive answers, only conjecture. Everyone seemed content to let the dead lie. Even with your back firmly pressed against the wall, you feel unmoored. You take a moment to recollect yourself, regarding the ochre-colored floor tiles with a half-lidded gaze.
There are places in Sharlayan to revisit, other mysteries to unravel, errands to run, acquaintances to strike up, memories like the ones you're desperately trying not to relive now to drown out with blissful white noise.
Soft footsteps draw your attention. Your hand falls away, and you crane your neck to the side, cheek smudged against the stone. Sunlight crosses the corridor in bright slats, falling through the narrow windows higher up, but you've come to recognize the shadowy figure at the end of the halfway easily by now. Zero throws and catches her apple in her left hand, unhurried, almost lazily as she wanders over, and you half-expect her to ask why you snuck away like a thief in the night. Instead she takes the place at your side and pushes a foot flat against the wall, knee bent. She looks decidedly misplaced, a dark purple swell against a swathe of mellow brown, but casual too–like a bruise on a child's skinny knee.
"I don't remember this world of yours to be so bright." Her tone of voice dips at the end there, muffling the meaning.
There's a beat of silence, another one that borders on haunted before you break. "You just hadn't had the chance to discover very much of it before."
What did she really see of the Source aside from what Zenos deigned to show her? The tall, dense pines littered amongst the frozen wastes. The sprawl of dark hallways and abandoned imperial rooms. An empty, pockmarked stretch of moon. Snippets of a dinner, but you can't recall if the avatar had been present. You blink a couple of times, in rapid succession, watching the oblong table doom in front of you with Zenos at the head, boredly cutting into a slab of meat; his fine blonde hair falling around his face like a bower. Now why did you have to go and fixate on that? If Zero happens to notice your shuddery intake of breath, she's tactful enough to make no mention.
She keeps bouncing the little apple in her hand, her bright red deposit, and says, "No, I guess not. Zenos was rather scarce in his summonings. Not that I cared."
"You must've gotten enough eyefuls of me whenever he did." You laugh, wishing it didn't taste so sour. From the corner of your eye, you catch the sunlight unspooling across the floor like the long spindly legs of a spider. It hasn't reached your spot yet. You add, "For what it's worth, I thought you were very tough."
"Yet you managed to best us– him , I mean … " She catches herself in the involuntary admission, wide-eyed and white lips parted, a tip of tongue darting across. "You won. He died by your hand."
There's such an insurmountable distance between what Zero first uttered to you in the damp cellars of the fell court and what she'd said just now that the disconnect leaves you reeling. White-knuckled, your grip on your forearm turns painful. You want to dig your nails in, prod at the hurt a little like you sometimes tongued an aching tooth. It's not so efficient a distraction, not like getting into fistfights with gods or dungeon-diving an ancient research facility turned prison, but it would have to do.
Something of that discomfort must've shown on your face because Zero inclines her head and asks, "Did you mourn him?"
She punctuates the verb with an uncertain pause, narrowing her eyes in a way that's so wholly reminiscent of him you almost choke on the familiarity. Her expression then irons out, flattened and bolted down into a death mask once more.
It's a straightforward question, slamming into you and the guard you've kept up since you averted the end of the star like this huge inescapable wave. Dragged off-kilter, you're exposed like a nerve ending. Yet, it's not a wholly new feeling, and you're wondering how many quiet moments in between adventures you've spent tamping down a mini-meltdown like the one threatening to spill out right now, gradually building up all this weight. Zenos' death was a private thing. Something you've brought back from the edge of the universe; something you don't know how to share when pressed.
Zero regards you expectantly, half-hidden in the shadow of her hat that slants unbidden across the face. Her eyes carry a coolness particular to the Void and its simple, straightforward rules, dictating that the question she asked requires no loaded answer.
Besides, how can you explain that sometimes you wake up shivering under the covers, as if suffering from hypothermia, with a dull, hot throb in your thighs and the start of a curse stillborn on your lips, and that the only thing your dark, bottomless sleep has given you was the unshakeable belief that Zenos never completely died. He simply wrenched a shard loose from his soul and lodged it stuck into yours. In those dim, pale blue stretches before dawn, you could imagine that he perhaps thought of it as a proper parting gift, like scar tissue smiling across skin, inseparable despite his dawning absence. How else can you articulate this constant reminder that pulses in the bloodbuzz between your ears, a throaty rasp that sounds suspiciously like his voice?
Still, you owe her this much. Zero had been there too, after all, in the sea of stars; distorted, touched by Zenos' single-minded determination. You had to swallow down a rebuttal earlier, in the fell court, when the crystal shrugged off the darkness and Y'shtola mused it must've been Fandaniel's handiwork; hadn't you witnessed firsthand that self-same determination too?
"It didn’t seem appropriate." What you mean to say is that no, you didn't dare to. And yes. Yes, you have. "That's all."
Everything about you and Zenos is now rendered preverbal. Intense . He's the hand you never took, unrecognized, the blurred face in your peripheral, a pair of glowing eyes you blink away, bleary and barely awake in the cracks of dawn, together with the rush of fresh guilt from your conscious mind. You couldn't bury his body so you've lugged him around this whole time, becoming his open grave, carrying his mad grin and his wild eyes and his haggard last breaths within you like a washed-out bloodstain on the bed sheets. No matter how hard you tried to scrub him out with the knowledge that you'd finally given him what he wanted, Zenos stubbornly remains.
"I see… Well, I suppose there's no reason to start now," Zero says, grabbing the brim of her hat and tugging it way down. Her brow arches. You almost don't catch what she says next, sparrow-soft. "Or is there?"
What do they mourn in the Void aside from a meal lost, or the self-alienation with each bite of aether swallowed and digested? You're struck by a sudden urge to touch her then; to clamp your hand around her shoulder and shake gently, or to nudge her in the stomach, right there where her ribs give way to softness. Reassure her with some down-to-earth gesture that you can keep the dead man inside of you and still keep yourself too, but you don't think Zero would take kindly to you prying open her fingers and squeezing them. She's all sharp angles.
So instead you nod. Keeping your mouth shut, lest Zenos decides to come crawling out that way.