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The first time you meet him, he is six years old and he is drowning in your sea. You save his life.
You are not in the habit of venturing onto the sand— you are capable of it, certainly, but you don’t have the legs for it— but you have always had a bit of a weak point for children, and so you catch him in your arms and bring him to shore and flee before anyone comes to collect him.
You don’t see him again— not like that, not with blonde hair plastered dark to his face and lungs gasping air in such a curious way— for a very long time, but you do see him again, fishing in his rickety little boat far out to sea, and you smooth the waters around him and coax some fish nearer, and revel in the delight he exudes when he catches more than he expected.
)o(
The third time you meet him is the first time you take him to your bed, and you spend long moments just gazing at him, at how he seems to brighten the entire room by merely smiling, how the glow of his heart bleeds from his chest and his fingers and spreads warmth through your entire body ‘til you have him on top of you and you’re both breathless with laughter and aching with desire. You take each other apart like you’ve known how to do it your entire lives, as if this is the tenth or the twentieth time and not the first. You worship him, wholly and delightedly, watching him fall apart under your touch with your name on his lips. No prayer has ever sounded so beautiful.
It doesn’t last. It never does. They call him off to war and you’re there when he dies, your name the last thing escaping his lips as though he can see you, kneeling on the battlefield where you don’t belong.
)o(
You can feel his pull from where you’ve retreated into the depths of the water. You don’t answer him. He won’t know you three ways ‘til Sunday, anyway.
)o(
The second time you take him to bed you stay for longer.
You’ve come out of hiding again because you can’t resist the feeling of his warm skin against yours and he brightens when he sees for the first time— his very being shines brighter when you meet, clasping hands on the docks as you prepare to make voyage, across the ocean to the New World.
You spend the long months at sea together, and the crew whispers that he’s your kept boy but not when you’re anywhere near earshot because they know how you’d react. And if anything you’re the one kept by him. Gone, actually, you’re just gone. You didn’t realize how much you’d missed him between the last time you lost him and now, now you have him back and you may never let him go again.
He wears your shirts and when he calls you captain there’s a trace of respect in it but mostly he’s laughing. He traces the shell of your ear, the trident earring that is the symbol of your power as a god, fingers walking down every freckle and every curve of your body, and you let yourself fall apart for him like you’ve never let yourself fall apart before.
He doesn’t die young, this time; you stay with him as long as you can but the sea calls for you in a way it’s never called to him. You stay as long as you can bear but you’re still a god. No matter how much you wish your domain can be him and only him, it can’t be. It can’t be. You leave him for the ocean, and you visit when you can, but he gets married and has children and dies.
(He loved you ‘til the end, his partner tells you, and you grit your teeth and wish you’d been there for that ending, and you retreat back to the black water.)
)o(
Gods don’t die the same way as mortals do. They are forgotten, deteriorating to the point where they are little more than an idea that floats through the minds of mortals until they can find something new to latch onto; a body, usually, but anything living will do. There is a god living inside an old oak tree; you pass by every now and again, say hello. You spend years living as a statue, seeping into the ivy that works its way up the stones to wait, shivering.
He finds you there once, twice, another three times he sees you and doesn’t know, but he keeps coming back. You want to reach for him but you can’t, you shouldn’t. This is a world where he doesn’t need you, where he has everything he could possibly need (and you hope, gods you hope, that you’re right about that, that he isn’t spending his nights cold and alone, that he has someone at his back and his lips and his side like you could never be.)
)o(
Sometime after Earth’s people have fled their planet, journeying into the stars and bringing their stories and songs and the shatters of their gods with them, you realize you haven’t felt a pull from him in centuries.
You haven’t felt a pull from him in the millennia since he last stood in front of your statue, trident on his t-shirt and breath visible in front of his lips, but you assumed that meant he was just so far away from you that you couldn’t feel him (wishful thinking, you think bitterly.)
You’re alone now, really; the other gods scattered long ago, you only still existing because the sea is still here and there will always be fish to look after, and in a fit of loneliness you shape yourself a body, a child’s body, and wash up on the shore of a small village on a planet you barely know.
You’ve never tried to play mortal before. Never let yourself try to grow the way they do, develop the way they do. It’s something to do, you think, as a little girl stumbles across you curled up around a rock.
She takes you home and her parents set you in front of a fire to warm up. They make soup from the fish and make up a bed for you and you spend a few years there, growing up with their daughter, who has a voice like a bell and laughs at anything she finds funny, and you let yourself be a kid and have fun. You comfort her when her first boyfriends break up with her, grin with her when she has her first kiss with the woman she’ll eventually marry, and she asks you often when you’ll find someone and you’ll just shake your head because he’s long gone and everything you love is right here, right?
She dies too young and you scream so loudly the water parts for you. Her parents are dead and her wife lets you take her body with you, back to the sea she always loved for her final resting place.
You have no hope you'll meet her again, and so you lurk in the cold depths of the ocean and don't speak to anyone who prays for you. You cannot watch anyone you love die anymore.
)o(
Centuries later you scatter yourself on the teeth of a sea monster and find yourself reborn as the youngest scion of a royal family and you wonder if it means you might actually die for real.
That might be nice.
They call you Cassander and you select an eidolon to follow when you are nine years old. You name the first one that pops into your head because you want to scream that you are a god walking among them but you are just so tired. And for the first time in a long time, since the fisherman’s house, you have a family— two siblings, and two parents, and they love you and hold you and you start to feel warm again—
until Euanthe goes to boarding school and your parent the emperor becomes distant, and then things blur so quickly and the next thing you know you’ve been exiled and they didn’t even have the dignity to tell you as such to your face—
but then you look up and there he is.
You can’t even hear Godlove introduce you two because your blood is rushing in your ears, he’s here he’s here he’s here , you thought you’d broken the cycle but you didn’t he’s right here in front of you, alive and well and pale blue skin, bright pink hair, and a smile that shines brighter than the sun.
“Hi,” he says, and sticks out a hand. “I’m Mako Trig.”
And he’s had so many names in the time you’ve known him and none of them have been sweeter in your ears than this one.
“I’m Cass,” you say, and the weight of you still hangs heavy on your tongue but for the first time it doesn’t seem so difficult to bear.
)o(
You hate divines on principle— and they aren’t much worthy of the capital letter, either. They’re false idols. You are divinity incarnate. You are also a shit shot, and can barely make any food that isn’t pasta with squid ink, and you’re so awkward around people it takes you almost three years to tell your best friend you love her, but you are still a god. Divines are nothing compared to you.
)o(
He talks a mile a minute in your ear, just like he always has, but for the first time he seems in his element, like the stars have put him somewhere where he truly belongs. When last you met the tech hadn’t advanced enough that he could work through the mesh with his mind, but now he moves through security like water, like he was born to do it, like he has become a god of fiberoptics and neural links, dismissing alerts with the wave of a hand.
He brings down an entire building’s security in thirty seconds flat and when he turns his smile spreads warmth through your chest like fire, and you think oh no .
You’ve become a doctor so you can save people like you’d never been able to in the old days— sure, you saved him from drowning, but that was easy. On the battlefields, with a spear in his gut, hypothermic, the multitudes of ways you’ve watched him die, there was nothing you could do. Now you can. You patch him up more times than you count, and each time you silently beg him to make it the last time. If you have to watch him die again, you think, your heart is going to shatter into bits so fine you don’t think even you could piece it back together again.
)o(
The Apokine falls into the star and you are scattered, but you’re a god. You’ve been here longer than any of them— longer than Mako and Aria, longer than the star, longer than Righteousness and Liberty and Discovery and Rigour, longer than any of these people or their divines. And as long as the ocean still exists, as long as there are still fish there, you’ll always be able to reform yourself.
You pull yourself back together in time to shove Mako— stupid, beautiful, shines-like-the-sun Mako— out of the way of a bullet, and when he sees you he passes out. You look after him for the hours he’s out, and you’re just starting to panic when he reawakens.
He sees you, and he disbelieves.
“You’re fake,” he says.
“I’m not,” you reply.
“You died,” and he’s snarling, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. “You threw yourself into a star with a fucking Divine and you died, I felt it, I know.”
He felt it? “You—,”
“Go away,” he says. “I have work to do.”
)o(
Rigour’s still in his mind, and you tail him on his jobs, nudging danger out of his way, lighting his path, until one day he collapses to one knee, gripping his head, and you can’t stay in the shadows anymore.
It’s easy to reach into his head, but you don’t remember yourself until you’ve got it tangled around your hands and you hesitate. He’s not unconscious but he’s got a god’s hands in his mind and that’s not, that’s not something he consented to, and you almost withdraw until Mako says “I don’t know what you’re doing, but that’s the best I’ve felt in almost six years, so keep doing it,” and you yank.
It’s like his strings have been cut, and it takes all your strength to catch him and not drop Rigour at the same time. He’s unconscious again, and you know he’s going to be out for much longer this time, recovering from what that divine put him through. You ache to look after him yourself, but you can’t, you have to get rid of this thing.
It’s okay. You know where you can take him. You leave him outside Aria’s door, curled up as though he fell asleep there. You take the trident earring out of your ear and tuck it into his hands so he knows you’re coming back for him, and you take the snarls of Rigour back to the star you threw it in once before.
)o(
(Mako wakes up on Aria’s couch three days later with an earring shaped like a trident in his hands and his mind blissfully silent. Aria immediately falls on him, asking what happened, where he’s been for the last two years, why hasn’t he answered her messages.
“I— I was busy,” Mako says, and the excuse tastes like salt on his tongue and he grips the earring tight enough that it pricks his skin. “But I guess I had someone looking after me.”)
)o(
It takes you a while longer to piece yourself back together this time, and you don’t look the same— gold scales freckle your skin, hair dark brown and wavy against your back instead of blueish-black and curly— and you wonder if this means the end, means blood and death for you instead of immortality.
Only one way to find out.
You return to Counterweight, that fucking planet you always planned to leave forever someday, and you find a little place and make yourself a living as a piercer. It makes sense, with the medical background and the spears, and you find it therapeutic. No more death, no more sickness. Making people look good.
He comes in with your earring in his ear six months later.
He’s worn your symbol before, on the battlefield and his fishing boats and plastered across his t-shirts even when he didn’t realize what it meant, but it’s never been your earring, the one you’ve worn your entire long-life, and it makes the breath freeze in your throat.
“My usual guy dropped off the face of the planet,” he says. “I was wondering if you could— Cass ?”
You’re canceling your appointments today.
)o(
How did he know— how did he know it was you?
“I’ve been following you for all my lives,” wait what, “I’d recognize you at the ends of the universe.”
Wait, seriously, what?
“Your earring, you dumbass, it’s imprinted with memories— I don’t remember everything but I know I’ve loved you since we met and you’ve loved me for even longer, long enough to rip Rigour out of my mind and throw it into a star twice —,”
You kiss him then, because you have to, because you never said you loved him and he still knew somehow, and you’re probably crying as you cling to him in the shitty apartment over your shop but he’s whispering your name over and over, your true name, the one you’d forgotten and you didn’t know he knew.
The twentieth time you take him to bed it feels like the first time all over again but in the way the first time hadn't— he skims his hands over your skin with awe in his eyes, mapping out the planes of your body until you flip him over and kiss him 'til you're laughing, breathless, with the delight of two people who have their entire lives ahead of them.
)o(
This time, you don't have to watch him die, because he doesn't.
You get a small house on the coast where you can see every star in the sky. Aria comes to visit, bringing her wife and children, and you hold the kids on you lap and tell them every story you know from every corner of every world you've watched over.
The sea still calls to you. You slip into the ocean for weeks at a time to watch over sailors and fishermen and when you come back he's still there, eyes and smile shining like a lighthouse guiding you home.