Chapter Text
“By the by...you see it too, yes?”
The lavender-haired man looks delighted as he kneels beside her. An achingly familiar man scowls, and her heart contracts in pain of remembrance.
“A familiar, I think. But so faint… however…”
“All I know is that it's trouble.” The scowl deepens, the golden eyes narrow. “Doubly so if it's her spitting image.”
Azem… The woman her unsundered soul used to be, back in this time. Do they really look so similar?
“It did not escape my notice, yes. Do you suppose it’s hers?”
“If not for the bestial ears, I could have sworn it was her…” he murmurs under his breath.
Her long ears twitch slightly. The man looks almost disgusted.
“Hm? Did you say something?”
“Nothing. Let’s go.”
“Now wait just a moment!…”
She watches them bicker for a bit, their easy banter somehow at once foreign and familiar. Like a forgotten dream, just at the edge of her memory.
She tries to explain, but as Elidibus has warned her, she can make no sound. Her presence is so thin… if only she had the strength to make herself heard…
Somehow, the friendly man persuades his companion to spare her some aether. Closing her eyes, she decides to trust. The sudden rush of energy makes her entire being tingle, and suddenly she can smell the faint scent of grass, feel the cool air on her skin as she solidified, empowered by the infusion.
So careful and precise. A bit more and she would have been violently aethersick. A bit less and she wouldn’t have become material.
She blinks blearily, suddenly at eye level with the pair.
“Oh, you even adjusted its size!”
He shrugs like it wasn’t a big deal. But she knows enough to understand - very few could have done what he just did.
“Just so we won’t have to crouch when talking to it.”
“Well then! Let’s start over shall we?” The other man gives her a wide, friendly smile. “Greetings! I am Hythlodaeus, chief of the Bureau of the Architect.. And sulking beside me is the most honorable Emet-Selch of the Convocation of Fourteen.”
Then she was right. It is them…
She tells them her name. Hythlodaeus is as warm and friendly as Emet-Selch is brooding and standoffish, and together they step through the doors and the view steals her breath away. And yet…
“Welcome, my friends, to the testing ground of creation at heavens' edge: Elpis!”
Elpis, but another name is on her lips before she can stop herself.
“Azys Lla…?”
Or what may have been the inspiration for it. A research facility atop a floating archipelago. A lot less foreboding, but similar nonetheless.
“Pardon me?” Hythlodaeus eyes her with curiosity, but she shakes her head. She cannot tell them.
All she can do is watch and listen. Her eyes dart over to look at Emet-Selch only to find him staring at her, golden eyes piercing her very soul. Dismayed, she averts her eyes, her chest tight.
"What secrets are you hiding, I wonder..."
What secrets indeed. If only she could tell him... but he would not believe her. And yet, a part of her yearns to lay it all out for him and let him judge the truth.
Remember us.
She never thought she would see him again. What is this cruel fate, this mocking coincidence? She thought she grieved enough, but her heart aches with a wound reopened.
They proceed into the facility, awash in the light and scent of flowers. A tranquil, calm garden, though she can see the strange animals prowling about.
She follows the pair as they go about their business, and absorbs everything she can. She doesn’t know how long she has, or if she would be able to come back.
The Elpis flowers catch her eye as they go about the day with Hermes and Meteion. She kneels beside them.
They begin to glow a deep blue.
“S-s-a…” Meteion takes in a deep breath and starts again. “Sadness. Deep, deep sadness. Something forgotten, something lost. What did you lose?”
She smiles ruefully and pats the girl on the bewinged head, keenly aware of the golden stare on her back.
The flowers are something known as an entelechy, reacting to akasa - or dynamis as Hermes calls it. Emotion. Its effects are counteracted by the aether…
Which if true seems like a thread to keep following. It all sounds like what is happening back in her time, and what was happening during the original Final Days.
But she is pulled away by the events of the day, and somehow she ends up sitting beside Hythlodaeus, watching Emet-Selch teaching a familiar whale-serpent to fly. A sanuwa, though the ancients are calling it something else. She wonders if anyone would believe her if she tells them where they really came from.
He speaks of Azem with such adoration. She must be a remarkable person. She would like to have met her… but who knows what that might do to the flow of time.
They may be carriers of the same soul, but as Seto said once, she is her and no one else. She is not defined by the soul she inherited, though it seems all who have been born with it share certain traits.
Indeed, when standing in the tomb of Archmage Tiuna, she had the oddest feeling…
But then, Emet-Selch glides down to the ground, the newly trained sanuwa beside him, and they carry on.
“I’m sorry, but… a whole room for a familiar? You cannot be serious. Even if it belongs to the honorable Azem, it's just an arcane being…”
She bites her lip. Hythlodaeus gives her a sharp look. He must see that she does indeed possess a soul, but he keeps quiet. The steward of Twelve Wonders continues to deny their request.
He doesn’t see her as alive. To them, she is as alive as an enchanted mammet is to the people of her time.
“Oh for the love of…” Emet-Selch rubs the bridge of his nose. “ Fine. It’ll stay in my room. Come along, you.”
He is off in a dramatic swoosh of his dark robes, and she has to trot to keep up.
“I have a name.”
“Ugh.”
He pushes the door open and doesn’t bother to hold it open for her, stomping inside still fuming at having his request denied.
She looks around. The modest room does have a couch. She can get some rest, even if it will be a little cramped.
She just begins to curl up on the plush seats when she hears an annoyed huff.
“What are you doing.”
She stops and looks up at the scowling man. For the first time today, they are alone, and her heart thumps hard and heavy in her chest.
“Trying to get some rest.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. That thing is barely large enough to sit on. Get on the bed. I’ll make myself something.”
He squints slightly as if remembering something. Then snaps his fingers.
An impressively large and ornate double bed pops into existence. She whistles.
The mattress looks fluffy and soft as a cloud…
A smug expression is enough to tell her he has been hoping for a reaction.
“Ahem.”
He seems surprised that she said anything at all.
“What now?”
It’s silly, but after hearing about Azem from Hythlodaeus she cannot help but try.
“I want that .”
“You can’t have it. It’s mine. I graciously gave you my own bed, be happy with that.”
“That bed looks so sad and lumpy. While this is so warm and comfy… please?”
“No.” He looks incredibly displeased, a deep frown making his face look so achingly familiar.
She launches herself at the feather bed and flops onto it face down.
“You little!…”
She feels the mattress bounce as he gets onto it and lifts her by the scruff of the neck, their faces close enough for her to see the web of shallow wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, feel his warm breath on her lips.
He looks absolutely livid. She smirks back at him.
His jaw muscles work as he stares at her, the anger changing into something else.
“If it wasn’t for the ears… I’d swear…”
By what quirk of celestia was she born some thirty years ago in the Skatay mountains, to Viera mother and a father she barely knew, ten thousand years after the sundering, yet so alike in appearance to a woman long dead she could pass for her twin?
“And you have a soul. Azem I know is very skilled, yes, but never was into the creation research and refinement. It would be beyond her to concoct a being such as you. And this hue…”
He no longer looks angry. Just thoughtful and… sad? His hand lets go of her and she straightens up, still searching his face.
“I don’t know what you are. But somehow… somehow…”
Somehow, here they are again. It hurts so much to look into his eyes, and yet she cannot not to.
Her fingers come up to caress his cheek, and she prepares herself to be soundly ejected from the bed and maybe even the room.
But the pained expression on his face is not something she ever expected.
“Damn you, Persephone… damn you…”
Persephone?
“Is this your answer? Did you have this familiar made in your image as a gift? Or pity?”
He grasps her by the chin and raises her head up towards him.
“You must have known how I feel about you. How I always felt. Is this all I can have of you?”
Azem is a title, she remembers. The traveler. Persephone… must be her name.
He pulls her in and before she knows it, he is kissing her, so desperate and demanding, just like she remembers it. Her lips part to welcome him back in. He tastes of that tea he likes, its name different here, in the Source and in the First, but it’s the same plant regardless.
Her fingers weave into his hair, longer than it has been when he wore Solus’ body, her fingernails scratching his scalp, eliciting the familiar sigh of pleasure.
“How did you…”
She silenced him with a kiss of her own.
Don’t ask me why. Please. Just one more time, let me have this…
She always knew their days together were numbered. They were enemies, after all, their secret relationship doomed to tragedy from the start. She did it anyway and would have done it again even knowing what she knows now.
There has always been something drawing her to him. Some unseen force, some forgotten reason.
Perhaps Azem - Persephone - had loved him too. Perhaps she had time to tell him. Perhaps not.
She pulls open her robe and drops it on the floor, her Hades doing the same, and though this body is different than the one she has known he feels the same. The fire and passion at odds with his usually restrained demeanor, and it hurts even as she smiles into his lips.
The open windows bathe them in the gentle moonlight as she rides him, chasing her pleasure. His golden eyes watching her face, hungry and full of longing. It is not her he wants, but Azem. But she is happy to oblige nonetheless… even if her heart feels like tearing itself apart.
Has it always been this way? Was he thinking of Azem when making love to her? Was he drawn to her or to the soul he thought might be the one he loved all those years ago?
The heartbreak in his voice when she turned out to not be strong enough to contain the primordial Light.
He pushes back on her, flipping them over. He sets a ruthless pace and she cries out in delight and pleasure before being silenced by his lips.
He finishes with a throaty groan, his fingers on her hips digging in hard enough to make bruises. She reaches for him.
But he is already pulling away from her.
“Hades…”
“Don’t!… you…” he stands up, his back turned to her. He rubs his face, his shoulders slumping. “Just a familiar. Just a familiar…”
He pulls on his robe and storms out of the room, leaving her alone. Hugging herself, she curls up on the unmade bed.
Just a familiar. Not Azem. She might as well be an animal to him. A thing.
Tears drop on the pillow, leaving wet spots, but she pays them no mind.
The gnawing longing in her chest grows even stronger. She doesn’t know what she hoped for with this tryst. To feel him against her again… only to lose him once more. To be rejected as less than human.
She sobs into the pillow. This is going to be a long night.