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The first opportunity they’re afforded to leave Agnus Castle—for true, and for real; not just a quick overnight camping trip to Hope’s Rest filled with tears and exhaustion and resolve —comes from Ghondor, three days after dethroning the false Queen and taking the territory for their own.
(Comes three days, Mio thinks, after what would have been her last.)
The chaos and confusion of those first few days has calmed down into something resembling order as the Lost Numbers have taken charge; the Agnian soldiers stationed to the Castle have started to slowly accept the truth of the world, and it’s among that newborn calm that Ghondor points out that they’re going to have to start shipping the freed prisoners back to the City sooner rather than later—not only do most of them desperately wish to return home, but the Castle is just quite frankly not stocked to take in such an influx of people.
“They’ll need some muscle for the trip back, though, just in case” Ghondor says, and eyes them as a whole. “Ouroboros could handle that, yeah?”
The faint doubt in her voice is a little annoying, but Mio knows it comes from concern—a concern she shares. Six weeks in a cell under the care of a man who cared for them not has not left any of her friends in the best shape; they’re thin and pale, even after a few days of sun, proper rest, and proper food.
Soldiers like them—they’re hardier than the City folk, they’d been told, on that initial tour after Eunie had complained about having to take all the stairs down; up makes sense, she’d said, can’t well climb without handholds. But we could just jump down.
Monica’d raised a brow. Maybe you lot could, she’d said, we’re a little more delicate than that, I’m afraid, kiddos.
It had been hard to wrap her head around—Agnians were stronger, generally, than Kevesi, sure. But Kevesi could take a lot more damage in turn—their Healers were the stuff of nightmares, because they just didn’t stay down—so it all balanced out. Learning that, beyond all that, they’d been… engineered to be like this, a bit, had been deeply unsettling. Another way in which they were other to those precious lives of the City—to the way humanity was meant to be.
But all this means that now, Mio is very, very aware of just how different their limits are to most. And it means she knows exactly what it would have taken, to get her friends looking as bad as some of the freed Lost Numbers they’re going to escort back home.
Guilt curdles through her as she curls her fingers into fists. Her nails bite little half-moons into her palms.
“We can handle it,” she says. “Promise, Ghondor.”
After that, things get sorted out fast. That first group—the ones who have been kept away from home the longest, the ones who need more intensive medical care than the Lost Numbers taking charge of the Castle can offer—are quick to file into the Levnis they’ve commandeered, and they pile in after them.
Noah on one side, Sena on the other. Both of them tense as the Levnis becomes crowded to its absolute limit, and all Mio can think of is six weeks spent in a cage. Carefully, cautiously, she takes their hands in her own; Sena gasps and trembles as she clings back desperately. Noah jolts at her touch, offers her a sad smile, and gently tugs his hand free with a wince—the bandages wrapped around his knuckles shine white in her vision as he does so, and she feels like slapping herself.
“Sorry,” she whispers, and Noah shakes his head.
“Don’t worry about it,” he murmurs, just as quiet, his lips right by her ear to be heard over the rumble of the Levnis’ engines as they roar to life.
Their pilot grins back at them as they take off—his demeanor much warmer than the reception Mio had honestly been expecting, after her experiences with the rest of the Lost Numbers.
“Homeward bound, folks,” he says. “Hold on tight—I’ll do my best to make this trip a quick one!”
He sticks to his word, at least—they’re within City limits by the time the sun has turned over enough in the sky to signal afternoon; from the deep orange the clouds are slowly being painted and the time blinking in the corner of her Iris, it’s basically bleeding into evening, actually. Mio thinks of a week and change spent out at sea, and can only be thankful that this time, they’re traveling as the Levnis flies.
Touching down, exiting the Levnis—it’s crowded, emotional. Word had been sent ahead of their arrival, it seems, and family members of those long imprisoned Lost Numbers have come out in droves to greet them home. Mio sees tears and hears laughter and sobs and high-pitched cries of things like mummy! and daddy! and has to fight down tears of her own.
Sena’s still clinging to her when Monica parts her way through the crowd, grinning at them brightly. Concern flickers across her expression when she takes them in—those of them that aren’t Mio, at least, and wow, she can really see it, in that moment; that thing they called being related, as her lips twist in a scowl identical to Ghondor’s—but not for long, because that grin cannot be denied. She claps a hand to Noah’s shoulder.
“Well, well, you crazy kids,” she says. “How does it feel, huh? To have made it out of that alive?”
Mio’s breath catches; her heart skips a beat. Sena’s tugging at her arm, murmuring a soft, worried Mimi? but she can’t focus on that, because the rest of them have burst into laughter, and Noah is shaking his head.
“Really, Monica?” he says. “That’s the first thing you ask us?”
Monica shrugs. “How’s about this, then, hmm?” She softens, and that hand on Noah’s shoulder…nothing about it really changes, but it seems less like a hold of camaraderie, or congratulations, and more as if it was meant to be…an embrace. Comfort, or the like. “You did good, kids,” she says. “You did good.”
Noah swallows. “Not really,” he says. “That…that was all…” His eyes cut to Mio, and she wants to run.
“None of that,” Monica scolds, and lets go of his shoulder to flick him on the forehead. “Take the compliment, Noah.” She frowns at them. “Take a trip to medical, too, maybe,” she suggests. “Hit the barracks, at least.”
“That’s where we’re headed straight after food, promise,” Eunie says. “Queen’s wings, but I’m starving.”
“Torpedo wraps,” Sena murmurs dreamily.
Monica laughs. “Well, off with you, then!”
And so, leaving the people of the City to their reunions, Ouroboros slip away. They order a whole spread of torpedo wraps in as many flavours as they can afford—or rather, that the stall can afford to give them without running out of ingredients, because, with tears in their eyes and a smile, their server tells them that, just this once, it’s free of charge.
Mio wrestles with the urge to insist she, at least, pay. She’s not the one who spent the past six weeks starving.
Playing the part of M was no dream, true. It was hard, and cold, and lonely. But in the end, that’s all it had been: a long and lonely wait, while her friends truly suffered in the depths of the opulent palace she could walk the halls of freely.
“Mio?” At the call, she starts, and whirls, wide-eyed, to see Lanz frowning at her. Of all of them, he’s the only one besides Sena who hasn’t seemed to suffer any significant weight loss. “You good?”
She swallows. Smiles. “I’m fine!”
His frown deepens. “You’re just like Sena, is what you are,” and it’s at those words that Mio realises: she’s alone. No Sena on her arm, no friends by her side. She blinks, and Lanz sighs. “We decided we were going to go sit in the park to eat,” he says, “but you just…blanked out on us. You good?”
“I…I really am fine, promise,” she says. “It’s just…a lot has happened. I’m still wrapping my head around it.”
Lanz nods thoughtfully. “I can get that,” he says finally, and hands her one of the torpedo wraps he holds cradled in his arms. Quietly, she takes it, and bites into it as they start to walk. To catch up with the others.
The spices explode on her tongue, warm and somehow familiar—not to her, but to the girl who had inhabited this body before she did. The girl whose memory lingers, even if nothing else of her does. It tastes like home, and tears prick at Mio’s eyes.
“Lanz,” she says, voice a little rough, and has to cough to clear her throat. “Do you…hate me?”
“What?” he stares at her like she’s crazy. “How… why would I hate you, Mio?”
“Because, I…” she picks at her wrap, suddenly not really hungry, but also deeply not willing to waste food. Because I left you there, in that cell. I let you think M was me and that I was going to die.
Because I didn’t die.
She takes another vicious bite. Forces her jaw to work it into paste to swallow it down with the bitter insecurity. “My Homecoming…” she says, and thinks of her bare neck—M’s neck that is now hers, for the rest of her life, her life with no limit beyond the simple passing of time; “I…I got to live past it. I’m not…I’m not a tenth termer, anymore. I’m on my eleventh.”
The last word said on a breath; on a sob. Discounting the people of the City, discounting the Moebius and their eternity…Mio is, currently, the oldest person alive. The oldest person to have ever lived on Aionios.
You’d think it a relief, wouldn’t you? Finally, finally, she’d realized—she wanted to live. She wanted so much more than just those ten years. But now that she’s got it…
It’s hard to reconcile. It’s hard to reconcile, that she’s still alive. The she gets to stay that way, just like she wants.
The she gets to live, free of such a dreadful deadline looming over her every breath, ticking every second down, when her friends still wear their term markers like a brand she can’t ignore, bright and burning—when, back home in Gamma, Teach’s Homecoming is in turn barely a month away.
“...yeah?” Lanz says. “I don’t…see the issue.”
“If we don’t…if we don’t find a way to break the cycle soon,” Mio says. “If we don’t find a way to fix things, I…” I’ll be the only one of us left alive. And I don’t want that.
She thinks of N, life after life after life, meeting with Z in that place between, breaking a little more each time before finally shattering entirely. She’d understand him a little more, then, she thinks. She fears.
A weight, warm, atop her head. She blinks, as Lanz scrapes his knuckles across her scalp, messing up her hair.
She yelps, and ducks out from under his attack. “Hey! You’re lucky I had Eunie cut my hair already; if this was still long, do you have any idea how long it would take me to get those knots out— hey!”
Lanz scoops her up under his arm, and just…lifts her! Like she weighs nothing, just hefts her up and tosses her over his shoulder! It’s a miracle she doesn’t drop her wrap; it’s a miracle Lanz in turn doesn’t send his own armful of food flying everywhere.
“Mio,” Lanz says patiently, “you are being ridiculous.” Before she can protest, he glares at her, right into her eyes. “Me and Sena…believe me, we’ve gotten an earful over the past few weeks, so it’s my turn to bore this into your thick skull, okay?”
He waits, and slowly, Mio nods.
“Okay,” he repeats, and takes a deep, shaky breath. “Mio… never feel guilty for being alive,” he says, “even if you’re alive when others aren’t. We’re happy about this, Mio! You lived past your Homecoming! Even if the circumstances are, you know, a little different from what the rest of us are going to have to aim for…that’s a miracle, Mio. We were in the pits of despair, but you’re still with us and you’re still breathing, and that was enough to pull us out. You getting to stick around a little longer than the rest of us, as things stand now…that’s not something to feel guilty over, Mio. That’s hope, get it?”
Mio flops down, rests her forehead against his back. “You can’t just say stuff like that, Lanz,” she says, crying.
“Well…it’s true,” Lanz says. “So there.” A pause. “Love you, Mio.”
She sniffles. “Love you, too.”
In M’s memories, there’s one particular life that’s painful to think upon. Mio’s shied away from it instinctively, not wanting to brush up against the grief that soaks each and every memory from it.
A son. Just enough time left to her that she got to see those early years—his first fumbling steps, his first fumbling words. Mio doesn’t let herself learn his name; it would, she thinks, genuinely kill her a bit inside, to lay a name to that inherited grief.
But—under the grief, there’s happy memories, too. A celebration of each year of life, in a way wholly unfamiliar to how soldiers of Agnus and Keves mark their own birthdays.
A cake, decorated with blazing candles. M’s voice, soft, as she cradled her boy close, and whispered in his ear, make a wish!
It’s not Mio’s birthday anymore—that came and passed with the Homecoming—and she has no cake before her, no candles lit up to mark her miracle eleventh year…but still. She’s been through enough, she thinks, that it has to count. It’s only fair. It’s only fair.
She squeezes her eyes shut, and wishes—
For a twelfth year and more beyond it.
For her to not be the only one who gets to know the dizzying, incomprehensible weight of living past that final term.
Please, she hopes— prays, to use a term dug up from M’s memories with a context that is, admittedly, still a little fuzzy to her— please.
Just give me this.
Just let me have this.
Just let us reach…a happy ending.