Work Text:
//
you crazy-ass cosmonaut
remember your virtue
redemption lies plainly in truth
//
Once grief had passed and rage had abated, Ikaris was left holding the body of a woman he had loved in an empty, blistered wasteland. His leader, his captain, his north star, who had said she loved them and then lied to them for thousands of years across thousands of lifetimes. Who he had trusted, who he had killed. Who he had shadowed blindly into the dark, had given up everything for in order to keep her secret, to follow her course, only to be told that the course was false, and all he’d sacrificed for it was hollow.
Ikaris had been on this planet seven thousand years, and at the end of all time he would only have seven days.
He could bear it, he thought. Earth had never held much sway over him. It was just a place where deviants lived, a place he had to protect because Arishem had ordered it so. What he could not bear losing were his memories.
And Sersi.
The name tasted familiar, a drip of honey on the tongue. They had been saviours and they had been gods, but in truth, the only thing he’d ever worshipped was her. He always wanted to be where she was, to feel what she felt, to love what she loved—and then she loved him, and he’d left her for it.
He could decimate any number of planets, kill any number of creatures, if it meant he would get to keep the remembrance of her smile, the way her nose scrunched, the joy in her eyes the first time they had looked down upon this blue planet, so small, like a strange, marvellous jewel she wanted to cradle in her palm.
And it was this—his love of her, his want of her, his long centuries of yearning—more than anything else that cemented in his mind what he must do.
So Ikaris moved Ajak inside, alone and unburied. He lowered her tenderly to the ground before leaning forward and pressing his mouth to her brow, wincing as flakes of cracked, bloody skin snagged on her hair. He swiped the strands away from his lips. He had screamed his throat raw and now all that was left were the iron and the salt. Eternals didn’t have parents, but this felt close to grieving one.
I’m sorry, he’d murmured, half in mourning and half in resolve. Please forgive me. I am going to protect them the way you wouldn’t. I am going to save them all.
And then he left her there for carrion.
//
the self is not so weightless, nor whole and unbroken
remember the pact of our youth
where you go, i’m going, so jump and i’m jumping
since there is no me without you
//
London, even these many decades past its filthiest, still smelled to him like ash and burning. Ikaris had never liked it, but it was where Sersi had settled. She had a knack for turning these distant horizons into home. The last time they’d lived here together, this had been a far-flung Roman province; now it was the shadow of a fading empire, the streets frosty with sharp winter breeze.
It was selfishness that brought him to this lonely city, he could admit it now. He stalked the streets, tracking the deviant, breathing in that too-sweet smell of impending rot, of something just on the other side of gone, and he thought about how he could leave well enough alone. With the Emergence just a week away and Ajak no longer around to interfere, he could just step back and let it happen. Let the others handle the deviants. Let Tiamut erupt from the earth and devour all in its awakening. Let his family be swallowed by the bliss of oblivion, let them relive this lie again and again and again. The burden would not be his any longer, and perhaps in their next lifetime, he may even meet Sersi, may even love her.
Yet it hurt, the knowing. Angered him, too, that Ajak could let him—for five hundred years—live in exile, alone, only to change her mind with seven days left to go. I will follow you to the end, Ajak.
I will see our mission through.
I will make all of this worth it again.
They were soldiers, and soldiers had orders. Ikaris had seen enough of humanity to know what happened to defectors, seen enough war to know that there were larger things at stake than their individual loves.
But he couldn’t let it go without seeing Sersi. It was a weakness he still hadn’t learned to live around. Even if he had to make up a pretense, even if he had to lie, he would swallow the lump in his throat and strip the terror from his spine if it meant he could smell the gardenia in her hair and see the stars shine from her eyes. Even if she loved someone else—and he knew she did, now—it was enough to be near her.
If he had the choice, if he were master of his own fate, he would love her in every timeline, over and over and over again. No matter where they found themselves in this universe of black space and infinite void, she would be his light in the darkness, the gentle promise of eternal love.
Then the wind changed direction, and he caught that musty animal scent again, the whiff of blood on teeth, and something that was hauntingly, disturbingly, like Ajak.
Just guilt, he assured himself as he sped up. Just a spectre of my own mind’s making.
And then two more familiar scents, muddled with a third that was new—Sprite’s bright, bitter grapefruit; Sersi’s warm green gardenia; and a rich frankincense-and-benzoin that gave him pause. Ikaris was running now, barrelling towards the deviant with little regard for the protesting Londoners in his wake.
He cut left through an alley, diving through the open kitchen door of a greasy halogen restaurant, hopping over counters before crashing into the window of a chemist and out through its back door, leaving blaring sirens behind him.
Fear spiked through the air—tangy and metallic, and he had to shake off the memory of the last time its reek stung his nose. Sprite was on the ground and Sersi was screaming and, without much thinking about it, he hurled himself at the deviant. They were a whirl of tendon and tooth. Glass chimed to the floor around them and vaguely, Ikaris was aware of the faint buzzing of dim fluorescents in a tattoo parlour. He pushed himself to his feet just as the deviant dove towards him.
On instinct, he flung his hands up, catching the creature’s teeth on his forearms. For a fraction of a second all he could feel was the pressure of its jaw, clamping down on bone, exerting pressure enough to shatter a human, but Ikaris was an Eternal, and he was made of stronger stuff.
A sear of golden light illuminated the ruins of the parlour—live wires, dripping sparks and crackling with heat, upended chairs amidst the rubble—and the deviant was thrown from the building, crashing into a streetlight with a groan of metal.
He stepped out onto the street. Disbelieving eyes met his own.
“Ikaris!” Sprite called, surprised.
“Evening, ladies,” he said, his heart in his throat. Long time no see, he wanted to say, but that wasn’t strictly true. There was a groupchat, one he pretended not to stalk, and Sersi liked to send photos—of her, eating gelato under the Duomo, on a beach in Hawai’i with a dark-haired somebody whose presence made Ikaris’s stomach clench in the worst way, at a club with Sprite, who would steal other girls’ faces but could not change her own stubborn eyes.
Do you blame me? he wanted to ask. Do you hate me? What are we now?
Is it too late to salvage the pieces of who we used to be?
He was so lost in the sight of her that he didn’t notice the deviant dragging itself up onto its front legs and lunging towards him until Sersi shouted.
They collided into a bus. He tumbled, taking the brunt of the force with his shoulder as he was thrown to the ground, flinging the deviant away as clouds of drifting petals fell from the sky.
And then Ikaris was airborne. He’d always been more at home flying than he had walking; Earth’s gravity made him feel tethered, like a bird that had voluntarily clipped its wings. He was most himself soaring through the ether, bounded by the boundless beyond. He’d only ever stayed rooted for her.
The deviant leapt at him again, claws extended and tongue lolling, dripping long threads of viscous saliva. He evaded it easily, scorching it twice more as it hurtled to a stop on the other side of the bridge, carried forward by the force of its own momentum. It was still smoking slightly from where cosmic energy had melted its skin away, peeling back to reveal slick blood and blue sinew. He blasted it again, from closer range this time, and it crashed through the bridge and into the river below. The Thames had seen worse, he was sure. He'd had the bad luck to pass through London in 1858.
He turned back to face Sersi.
Loving her had always come easily, the simplest thing he’d ever done. Through all his self doubt, through all the lonely midnights and empty dawns, this was the one thing he knew without question, that he accepted without hesitation. She was a marvel, always had been.
It was the little things—the tilt of her head when she was satisfied, the way her mouth curled when she was pleased. The tug of her fingers through his hair as he leant forward to press his lips to hers. I love seeing you smile, she’d said once. You look so unburdened.
Ikaris carried tension in his bones. It had become something biological, as sure and as steady as the energy that swept through his veins. But Sersi, Sersi was always peace. Sersi was ease. Sersi could not steel her heart enough to let this planet die, so he had to make that decision for the both of them.
“You’re back,” she said. The words were simple, ungarnished, but they carried the weight of centuries. You left. You didn’t tell me. Why now?
“I’m back,” he said. “We should talk.”
There was so much—and so little—to say.
“Okay,” she told him, but there was a note of reluctance in her voice. She knew, too, that they stood on a brink. That they were fast approaching some point whence there was no return. “Give me a few minutes. I...owe someone an explanation.”
She pronounced someone carefully, but there was no hiding who she was talking about.
The man stood behind her, stocky and solid, wild-haired and sad-eyed. He lingered back, unsure if he was intruding, and Ikaris fought the urge to say yes, you are. This started long before you, he wanted to tell the stranger, and this will continue long after you are gone.
But it was his own fault they were here anyway, standing opposite each other with a sea between them, and the least he could do was not be a brat about it. Ikaris nodded, striving for grace and probably ending up somewhere closer to a grimace.
Choose me. He ached to say it, but Sersi was already walking away. Say the word and I am yours.
It wasn’t his speech to give anymore. He’d forfeited the right after Tenochtitlan. The best he could hope for was to spend the last fragments of forever by her side.
//
hear those bells ring deep in the soul
chiming away for a moment
feel your breath course frankly below
see life as a worthy opponent
//
Perhaps Ikaris had been a fool to believe he could do this. Could look Sersi in the eye and destroy her. But he had to try, didn’t he? Just try, and serve to the best of his programming.
Perhaps like Ajak, he’d let this planet get the better of him, this place where creation was taken for granted, and each day lived like it was the last.
Perhaps this was inevitable.
They were just heavenly bodies, the lot of them, floating amidst the unrelenting expansion of the universe, and for a time, they had each other. And life had meaning.
But what was left for him after this?
There was no staying with the Eternals now. There was no happily ever after, no matter how Sprite changed the ending. He had failed his one and only aim—or perhaps he’d discovered it far too late, and that was the greater tragedy. Icarus was always destined to fall, from the very first day received his wings.
How could you promise a boy flight and expect him not to rejoice in the amber warmth of the sun?
How could you give a boy a heart and expect him not to love?
How could you tell him the lie of purpose and expect him not to believe it?
There would never be another fate for him. There never had been.
Ikaris bent close, laying his forehead to Sersi’s. Her breath came in sharp, shaky gasps. He wanted to kiss her, and from the way she cradled him she would not have minded—he would have been a faithless lover if he couldn’t tell this after five thousand years—and yet he knew just as well that she would hate herself for it after, when she thought of Dane, and the life she’d built among the humans, on this earth where the sky was a bright, boisterous blue.
Perhaps someday they would stand beneath it together and look up at the stars.
Perhaps she would even think of him, her boy who had come from a distant planet to share with her a finite love.
Perhaps she’d even mourn.
She leaned forward, her breath soft against his cheek. Ikaris, she was murmuring, but under that he could hear, like an undertow, the soft current of what have you done. And then, alarmed, “Ikaris!” when he pulled away, untangling himself from her embrace. What are you going to do?
But what hadn’t he done? What wouldn’t he do, so long as it was for her? He had helped kill a Celestial. Had murdered the very being they were put on this blue planet to save. What heights of madness would he leap to next, so long as he could keep her safe? Who was next—Arishem? Kronos? Planet by planet, system by system, would he subvert them all?
It wasn’t a choice he could trust himself to make. There was no judgement left unclouded. He’d always wanted to be where she’d been, feel what she felt, love what she loved—and she loved this earth, so he’d helped her save it, even when it stood in the way of billions of new lives.
When the variable is compromised, you remove the variant. You removed the possibility of compromise.
He helped Sersi to her feet, hands lingering over the calluses of her palm. Drinking in the way she looked in the sun, the desperation in her eyes as she realised what he was about to do. She didn’t want him to go, and that was comfort enough.
For him to stand here and love her, the Celestials would have needed to create the entire universe first.
So that they had loved—it was meaning enough.
One way or the other, this would end in oblivion.
And that was reason enough.
Perhaps, when his cells and his molecules were scattered across the ether, when he was displaced matter becoming one with the universe, the stars would remember her, and that remembrance would be branded into the divine arithmetic of the endless deep. The cosmos would love her on his behalf. That would be his immortality.
Perhaps, perhaps—for there would never be any knowing anymore.
And then he turned away.
And Ikaris rejoined the universe.