Chapter Text
"Ty?! Ty!"
Troy Calypso was not used to running. He couldn't do it under his own power — not for long, anyway. In order to have the energy to run, he would have had to siphon the extra power from his twin sister. Power that should have been extra, but merely brought him up to just below the energy levels of a normal person. He was a constantly draining tank, a car with the gas cap left open, a cup with a not-insignificant hole in it that leaked nearly as quickly as liquid was put into it.
Chronic illness was a bitch.
Luckily, he hadn't needed to run for a very long time. His position as the Holy Father of the Children of the Vault meant that his followers were at his beck and call. Whatever he needed, all he had to do was ask. Of course, murder was the thing they were best at, the way bandits typically were, but there were some that seemed to have more than a few brain cells and could manage the more domestic tasks. He had spent a few long, comfortable years having the good fortune to be able to laze around like a spoiled cat.
So it was a strange sensation to be bolting across the gutters of Promethea as fast as his legs could carry him. Which wasn't very fast. He was becoming increasingly aware of that as he fell farther and farther behind.
But he refused to stop. Even if he had to crawl through the mud to get to his target, he would never stop.
Because the person he was chasing after was his twin sister, Tyreen Calypso.
Who was very certainly dead.
But apparently not actually that certainly, because she was right there in front of him, about a hundred feet away. Her back to him. Running from him. He would have thought he was mistaken, because why the fuck would Tyreen be running away from him, but he knew her anywhere. Anywhere. Regardless of their relationship, they were twins. He'd know her if every single one of his senses was stripped away. His soul knew her. It was the same soul.
He didn't know how she was alive, but he wasn't going to let her go. Not this time. He wasn't going to fail her again. Even if it meant leaving their goals behind, their worshippers, their connections, all of Pandora, even if he had to tie her up somehow and spirit her away back to Nekrotafeyo, keep her imprisoned there so she didn't get herself into any more trouble, he'd do it. If they'd become gods, they would have been invincible. But the journey to becoming gods was too dangerous. He wouldn't allow her to risk her life for it again.
Maybe that was why she was running. Maybe she knew that he'd crush their dreams in order to keep her alive. Maybe she loathed him for it.
Maybe she saw him as just another iteration of Typhon, removing her wings so she wouldn't fly too close to the sun and burn herself up.
But he didn't care. Let her hate him. If she never loved him again, he wouldn't care, as long as she was safe.
He was uncomfortably aware of the heaviness of his right arm. For a ridiculous minute, he considered tearing it from his skin, ripping out the spinal implant, discarding the prosthetic right there on the ground in a drainage ditch on the outskirts of Meridian. It was a stupid thought, but he was chasing after Tyreen. Tyreen. No thought was out of the question when it was his sister he was trying to catch up to. If it could gain him even a few extra inches on his twin sister he would have done anything.
Their chase led them into one of the sewers that ran off the side of the ditch, and he lost sight of her for a second. There were too many boxes stockpiled against the sides of the walls and too many bends and after just a few of them he found himself standing at a cross-section, hopelessly lost. Every branching tunnel looked the same, water drip-drip-dripping from the ceilings just enough to drive him a little bit insane. And he hadn't been paying attention to the turns he'd taken on the way in here, either. Even if she'd doubled around and gotten back out, he'd lose precious time and distance trying to figure out how to do the same.
He was also feeling a little bit like he might faint. Which was to be expected from all the running he had just done, but it still fucking sucked, having adrenaline flood your system just enough to give you that little bit you needed and then having it fall away.
Something moved in the corner of his vision, among the shadows. He whirled around and there was Tyreen, pressed flush against a stack of boxes branded with the Atlas logo.
It was her. He was one hundred percent positive that it was Tyreen. She wasn't wearing that garish outfit she loved so much (and garish, of course, didn't have to mean ugly or tacky — garish was eye-drawing, garish was captivating, garish was the Calypso twins) but instead a hoodie too big for her emblazoned with the symbol of the Children of the Vault, that comforting upside-down vault symbol splashed with crimson. It made sense — if she wanted to keep herself hidden, she couldn't exactly go around wearing the kind of outfits she had worn before that everyone instantly knew was the wardrobe of God-Queen Tyreen. Her leggings were form-fitting, like her other outfits, but they lacked any of the flashy accessories she normally would have dressed them up with. And while she normally would have rocked a pair of platform boots, today she wore a non-showy pair of combat boots. Much easier to run in, Troy observed. Had she been planning on it?
Her trademark jacket was gone. Completely. Not even the chains holding it around her shoulders remained.
But it was her. It was definitely her.
Troy felt a wave of emotion rush up his chest and make his throat tight.
Tyreen remained silent. Her eyes were wide, scared. Nothing like the expressive features she'd played up for the camera. And something else was there too — worry. Anxiety. What in the hell did she have to be worried about? Seeing him again? Had she been trying to throw him off her trail because she was sick of him? It couldn't be. She knew she could outrun Troy any day. She wouldn't have stopped and hid. It felt like she had wanted him to catch her, eventually. Besides, Tyreen wasn't the sort of person that would fake her death and slip away into the night. If she had really gotten sick of him, sick enough to ditch him, she would have confronted him about it. Told him exactly what she thought of him. Left him there to pick up his own broken pieces. Tyreen wasn't the sort of person who avoided confrontation. She thrived on it. She could afford to.
So why ...
Anyway, it didn't matter. Whether or not she was trying to get rid of him, he wouldn't let her. Not now. Not when he'd experienced what it felt like to lose her. Maybe that made him selfish, keeping her close so he would never have to feel like that again. He didn't care.
"Tyreen ..."
She flinched at the sound of her name. Flinching was out of character for Tyreen. She really must have been spooked by him. His head spun. She had to know she could have him on the floor and helpless in seconds, right? She'd seen it before — him on the ground, looking up at her, asking her to be merciful, to give him some of the energy she'd just leeched because he couldn't do it himself, because the only reason he was still alive was because she found it in her heart to be good to him. Because she loved him. Because he was her brother. Even though he kept getting in the way with his need for her infinite grace.
He reached out for her with his left arm. He'd always been hyper-aware of how that gesture looked to her, because usually it was in order to ask for her runoff. Certainly, she conflated it with the feeling of having to be life support once again for her sickly brother. But he wasn't thinking about that right now. All he could think about was drawing her into his arms. Protecting her from the rest of the world, even if the most he could do was be a barrier to keep anyone from getting to her.
Tyreen jolted away from him, her eyebrows drawing low and angry across her face. "Don't touch me, Troy."
If there'd been any doubt before about the authenticity of his sister standing in front of him, it vanished now. That was her voice. Somehow, impossibly, his sister was alive. And nothing, not even her, could keep him from reuniting with her, from holding her in his arms and telling her just how much he'd missed her, and goddamn it, she better not pull a stunt like that ever again, she better not let him think she was dead for that long ever fucking again, and fucking Christ, Tyreen, do you really hate me that much? To fake your own death to get away from me? I thought we were close, but maybe all you see in me is Dad. But I'm not Dad, Tyreen. I'm Troy. I'm your brother. And I always believed in you, no matter what Mom and Dad said or did. I'm the one who was always in your corner, and I'm always going to BE in your corner, no matter what. You don't have to run away from me, Ty.
The thoughts from before made a reappearance. How he'd considered taking her back to Nekrotafeyo, not letting her leave. Could he really say he was in her corner, that he wasn't Typhon, when he'd thought a thing like that without even a pause?
But he always found himself coming back to her, caught back up in her opulent orbit. Sometimes, he didn't hate it so much. Sometimes, he was grateful to be in her orbit at all. And it was so exhausting, to always be frustrated and fighting. If he tried, he could almost convince himself that he chose to be in her orbit. That he enjoyed the scraps he was given. He could delude himself into thinking Tyreen was fine with offering him more, but that he would turn it down, asking her only to give him enough to live and no more, because Tyreen was the one who was used to power, really. He wouldn't know what to do with it if he got it. He'd fuck everything up. All their carefully constructed plans.
So it was better Tyreen got the brunt of the power.
He was ready to tell her all of that, to say anything to convince her to come back to him and maybe run their empire again. This time, without becoming real gods.
But she shot off like a rocket, suddenly, and disappeared into the darkness of the sewer system, though Tyreen Calypso could never really disappear. Stars as bright as Tyreen didn't fizzle out. They turned supernova, forcing everyone to look at them, a thousand times brighter than any other star around them.
Troy immediately gave chase.
He was doing a fairly okay job of keeping up with her this time. If he wasn't mistaken, she was actually running slower now. He never lost sight of her, even through all the winding tunnels. He was stunned to see her stalling by corners several times, waiting for him to catch up. Maybe she really did want to reconcile with him. Maybe she was just testing him, seeing if he could rise to the occasion. A weird way of testing it, but it wasn't like he had any powers with which to do so instead.
He passed a few different pocket settlements on the way. People eking out a living where they could, rebelling against Maliwan and against the cult he and his sister had built from the ground up. Once he and Tyreen were on good terms again, they'd have to come down here and clear the place out, but right now, she was the only thing on his mind, and if he stopped for even a second to let these people get a look at who was sprinting down the tunnels, they'd be on his heels. And he wasn't entirely sure his sister would turn around and save him this time. Not right now, when everything between them was so uncertain.
Just when he thought he might not be able to keep this up another minute, he and Tyreen emerged into a room he didn't think could exist adjacent to the sewer system of an urban metropolis. The ceiling yawned above them, thirty feet up, and the room itself looked half the size of a gymnasium. It was almost entirely bare except for a spigot jammed into the wall on one side. The lighting was abysmal and yet somehow so harsh it felt like a conscious attack on his sight.
Tyreen stood there in a space just off of the center. As was usually the case, she took up the room without even needing to do anything, larger-than-life, even though Troy was more than a foot taller than her.
She wasn't moving. Just standing there, watching him. She didn't look angry or anxious or worried anymore. Now, she looked defeated. Like she couldn't keep up this touch-and-go. Like maybe she was ready to talk to him, sister to brother, twin to twin. Which was why Troy didn't worry that she was going to run off again as he walked into the room, even though his long legs meant he was rapidly closing the distance between them.
"Tyreen," he tried again. People generally followed that with something like, It's okay. It's just me. But she knew that. She'd said his name. She knew it was him. She wasn't running from an unknown assailant. And she hadn't been running because she thought she was in danger. She'd never feared Troy.
He came to a stop in front of her, a little farther away this time. She didn't seem like she wanted him any closer. He stood about five feet away — close enough to see her and speak to her, but far enough away to keep her comfortable.
"Ty," he said, drawing the cocky arrogance he normally spoke with out of his voice, leaving only the soft, reassuring tones he'd used to talk to her with, long before any of this Children of the Vault business. "Ty, what's going on? Is someone after you? Is that why you disappeared?"
It was a nice theory, because it meant she hadn't wanted to leave him behind — she'd just been required to, in order to pull it off. But who would scare Tyreen like that? He couldn't think of a single person. She'd even gone up against the Firehawk so sure she'd win that she hadn't entertained the thought of it going any other way. Tyreen didn't run away from people who made her nervous. She turned on them full-force and made sure they couldn't ever make her nervous again.
She didn't answer, so he tried again. "Was it because you wanted me to leave you alone? You could have just said that, Ty. You didn't have to pretend you were dead."
That was a slightly less nice theory, because it wasn't plausible. She would have told him. She would have said something.
He was about to guess again, but suddenly a shriek sounded throughout the room, echoing harshly off the walls, and with an earth-shattering crash that knocked Troy off his feet, a cage slammed down around him. One with bars as thick around as lampposts and spaces so thin there wasn't a chance of being able to slip through them.
Troy pushed himself up off the ground to see a person with black-and-teal hair standing next to Tyreen, his arms folded across his chest, smirking down at Troy as if he was nothing more than an exhibit in a zoo.
"Well, well, well," he sing-songed, hooking an arm affectionately around Tyreen's shoulders, "looks like I'm the cat that's got the bloody cream, now, aren't I?"