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Falling asleep had been the worst part of Nezha’s days lately.
During the four decades that passed since he had been passed the burden of a broken country, Nezha was left very little of his own mind.
In the beginning, it was a miracle in itself that he never collapsed from exhaustion, with the amount of work he buried himself in. He spent his days attending meetings and discussing war strategies, because Nikara was a country built on war, and any peace would surely not last long.
And evenings he spent with Hesperian doctors who made him feel so disgustingly weak, Nezha often wondered if he ever had powers in the first place.
Over time, Nikara had started to stitch itself back together, mothers were able to feed their children again, and the rate of colonizing Hesperians slowly began to plateau once they no longer saw Nikara as an exotic country to spend their vacation in.
It should have taken much longer to heal such an aching country, but Nezha had always been destined to be a great ruler, and great rulers made sacrifices for the greater good. It was forty years ago that he sacrificed the whole of his heart for his people.
Nezha slowly retrieved bits of his mind back, shard by shard. The Hesperian doctors had long since terrified Chaos out of him, as they might say. Then they discarded his body and left Nezha with a bruised, broken soul.
He would be lying, though, if he was not secretly grateful for the constant agony his body had been put through. Nezha remembers, after every appointment, he struggled to even return to his bed, where he was not haunted by a single dream for nearly forty years.
Now, nearing his 62nd year of age, Nezha slept all but peacefully.
Because now, all he ever saw behind closed eyes was her.
Rin.
The whole of his broken heart.
In his dreams, he saw her spit flames toward her enemies, which he often was on the receiving end of.
He saw her smile at silly, crude jokes Kitay would say.
He saw the fire leave her eyes as she returned to nothing.
And tonight, in this dream, Rin spoke to him.
“Hello,” she says in the same small yet loud voice, and his heart pangs because he is reminded she really was just a child.
“Hello.” Nezha doesn’t know what else to say.
She steps closer, and he realizes that they’re back in Sinegard.
And she is just as he remembered her; unforgiving eyes and all. After all this time, Nezha is still convinced he’s never seen anyone quite so magnificent.
“You’ve gotten old.”
Nezha laughs at this, because it’s true. Not long after he became ruler, his long black hair became a stark grey, and it seems he’s gained a wrinkle around his eyes for each year that’s passed.
“Yes, well, I suppose I have. And you look the same.”
“Well, obviously. I’m dead.” She says it with a humorous sort of anger, but Nezha can’t bring himself to laugh.
Because she is dead. And she has been for a long time, longer than the years she spent alive.
Nezha falls silent, and Rin continues staring at him with the same gaze she saved for only him. The kind of gaze that said I want to say so much more.
Instead, she crosses the distance and takes his hand, and the memory of the last time she did this flashes in his mind.
Instinctively, Nezha flinches and pulls back slightly, which Rin notices.
“It’s okay. Come on.”
He knows he’s dreaming, and he can’t possibly hurt her anymore than he has, so he lets her lead the way.
“Where—“
“This is your dream. You should know.”
Rin practically drags him to a dark room, which Nezha soon recognized as the basement in which the Combat exam for the Tournament was held.
They stood there, side by side, in front of the pit, and Nezha suddenly longed for them to be the same naive and hopeful students again.
“I almost killed you that night. I think I could have.”
“I thought you were going to kill me, too.” A short pause.
“I wish you would have,” he confesses.
At this, Rin does not say anything, and Nezha doesn’t expect her to. But breathing feels a bit easier once he tells her that.
After what feels like a lifetime of nostalgia for days that could never return, he feels her lace her fingers through his again and finds himself trailing behind her.
He thinks he would follow her anywhere.
Nezha blinks, and as if they were never at Sinegard, he’s sitting in a sampan across from her. He knows exactly why his mind brought them here, and he can’t bear the dread in his chest.
This is where everything changed. This is where I lost her.
Rin runs her hand through the water, smiling, and Nezha thinks she must be imagining the fire is there. She doesn’t seem to notice the way he can’t take his eyes off of her. She never seemed to notice back then either.
“Rin.”
She turns her attention from the invisible dancing flames to him, and he takes in the color of her eyes with the moonlight reflecting, and they almost look purple.
In this light, Rin looks sixteen again, and he almost can’t see the pain and heartbreak that was etched onto her face when she was a living, breathing soldier.
“What?”
“Did it hurt?”
“When you stabbed me? Depends, are you asking about the first or second time?” She replies harshly but clearly amused.
Nezha laughs to himself, because he can’t help but be reminded of how cruel the gods had been to them. To him.
“I guess both.”
“The first time hurt more than the second.”
She continues, “It’s strange. It didn’t hurt at all the second time.”
He thinks about the night in the sampan they spent together, and he remembers the way she had allowed him to get so close to her. A wave of regret washes over him.
“Can you still feel the Phoenix?”
“No, not really,” she says with a sad smile. “I think, that night on Speer, it left me.”
Nezha silently nods and doesn’t press her anymore, because the last thing he wants to think about is the last night on Speer, when he held her for the last time.
Rin glances at him, and he somehow already knows what she wants to ask.
“I don’t feel the Dragon anymore, either. Our Hesperian allies made sure of that.”
“Does it hurt?”
“At first, it felt like my brain was being split apart. Now it just feels like my memory is slipping in and out. I can’t seem to remember much.”
Wordlessly, she takes his hand again and moves beside him. Nezha looks down at their hands clasped together and finds it strange how concrete, how alive she feels.
Her hand in his feels small and warm, and he never wants to let it go.
She speaks, and he’s taken out of his trance.
“I think I should go now.”
“Why? This is just a dream.”
Rin looks at him with a rare sadness in her eyes, as if he could never understand.
“It is a dream. But this is real. And I have to leave now.”
Nezha doesn’t want her to leave. Surely, this is just his mind’s way of waking him up.
“Please. Stay.” He feels his heart breaking even more.
She takes his face in her small palms and brings him into her embrace, with her chin resting on top of his head.
“I’ve been waiting here for a long time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Kitay left me a while ago. It seems that even the afterlife does not care for soulmates.” She tells him, with a sorrow in her voice he’s never heard.
“Wait...do you mean—“
“You’ve been so busy all this time. I wanted to see you again.”
With this, a horrible, heartbreaking realization dawns on Nezha.
Rin stayed in this realm, in a realm without Kitay. Alone in the same way Nezha had spent his time on Earth.
All of his past dreams were simply memories of her that haunted him; he should’ve noticed this one was different.
“I don’t want—“
“I know,” Rin cut him off, how she used to when she felt things that she was far too terrified to admit to him.
He lifted his head off of her chest and pulled her into his arms instead. This time, he would not hurt her.
“I’m going with you.” Nezha said with a firm resolve, something he rarely had when it came to Rin.
“You can’t,” she says, voice muffled from his embrace and the heartbreak she had been forced to swallow.
“Why? Why not? I’m old. I’ve ruled.” And I am so tired.
At this, she pulls herself back, her face set with eyes that did not match the firmness of her voice, “And you’ve been a great ruler. So you will stay. For our people.”
Nezha wished so badly for the chance be selfish.
But that was never Rin.
She was violent and harsh, but he knew it was for the same reasons she had chosen to die that night on the island of Speer. It was the cruelest thing she could’ve done. But it was necessary.
“I will go. And you’ll stay. We’ll be okay.”
Nezha wanted to cry so badly;he wanted to mourn for her so badly, but the tears would not fall.
She closed her eyes and pressed her lips to his forehead.
A kiss.
“I am quite certain we will meet again, Nezha.”
Oddly, he believed the same. History has always moved in such vicious circles.
Perhaps the next cycle would be kinder to them.
Without another word—one moment, he feels her next to him; the next, she’s gone.
He feels his heart crumbling in on itself, as he sits in the sampan and watches the stars.
Nezha recalls learning as a child that the stars in the sky were really just light and heat, held together by energy, placed there by the gods. He guesses now that people are the same, too.