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Till is eight, at the end of it.
Ivan peers over his shoulder, pressed to his side—moths drawn to flame and all that. The fringes of his hair fall over his eyes, his lips pursed and shoulders hunched. He’s never seen him draw, but like this, it looks like he knows about everything Till does. Nothing is more deafening than being known for what you can do; right now, the most important thing is the attention he’s stolen, and how everything he does is under scrutiny—but that’s the way they’ve been raised.
“Is that a head?” Ivan asks, pointing to his sheet. “Face?”
Till grimaces at him. “It’s obviously a pebble. Look properly.”
“The pebble you picked up and named yesterday?” He says. “What was it? George?”
His eye twitches. “Can’t you shut up?”
Ivan shrugs. He has that effortlessness that comes with being home in your skin. “Okay—okay. I won’t bring up the pebble you picked up and named yesterday ever again. George.”
“Go away,” He snaps. “Why do you always butt in my stuff?”
Ivan frowns. “I like being around you.”
His pencil stills.
It's weird. Off putting. Ivan is the first to go after practices, first to come, first in everything. He breathes, and they smile. He sings, and all things fall into place. He is the embodiment of righteousness, the etymology of perfection—Ivan. But suddenly everything makes sense.
“...fine,” Till ends up replying, giddy and reeling in being wanted alone. “But only as long as you don’t steal my pencils or wipe your snot on my clothes or whatever.”
It’s Tuesday, and Till is eight, and it’s the first time he’s looked at Ivan. Of course—everything begins from something.
“Just ’cause we’re friends doesn’t mean I’ll let you take my stuff.”
“We're friends?”
“Uh—yeah? Why else are we even together?”
“Oh. That’s—that’s nice. Friends. With you.”
“Obviously. Come here.”
“Do you think,” Ivan starts one day, laid against the velvet of the grass, clouds overcast above their heads, “that you’ll make it to the Stage?”
Till rolls his eyes, confidence a moral right. “Clearly. It’s not that difficult, making it there.”
Ivan gives him a sideways glance. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “I suppose the difficult part would be winning it.”
Till hears what he doesn’t say; the difficult part is surviving. It’s always been that, but the unspoken principle is never saying it aloud—something about making it more real than it should be.
But he can’t help it. “You won’t lose till you are against me right?”
Ivan cracks a grin. His smile is a sharp thing, fangs and everything, practised all the same. “I wouldn’t want to be against you at all,” he says, earnest in that way of his. “But if you say so.”
He sits up, running his fingers along the grass; sticking to his palm and the soil between his fingers. A few kids shout in the distance, skipping and running. If some of them wave at him or Ivan, he can’t tell—uniforms tattered and mud-brown, faces all toothy grins and twinkling eyes.
Within this garden that stretches far and beyond, they are the happiest they will be. Those who know not the outside world seek less of it.
Till yawns, falling back down; Ivan rolls over and curls to his side. It’s a quiet kind of day.
“Flower crowns,” Ivan muses, sparing him a glance. The books in his hands seem thicker day by day. “You make them?”
Till preens. “Naturally. What, the almighty never learned how to?”
“No—I don’t know everything,” he says idly. “You have a history. With them.”
He raises a brow, nudging Ivan’s arm and demanding, “What do you mean?”
Ivan flips a page. The writing in the book seems almost indecipherable, small faded text and long words, yellowed and worn. He looks him in the eye and says, “I met you because of it.”
Till’s hands slip tying the flowers together. He wonders, briefly, if they are real. “You’re kind of weird,” he mutters, suddenly too concentrated on his work. “That makes no sense.”
Ivan shrugs. “Then,” he says, staring at the sky, red like the end of the world usually seems in his books, “it was the moment when everything made sense.”
Till furrows his brow, and thinks that doesn’t make sense at all.
There is a certain deftness that comes with playing the flute; Till blows into the embouchure, upright and languid—one, two, three, four. He presses his fingers note by note, seamless and liberated, begins without an end. It’s nothing like singing, where his throat runs dry and his tongue gets tied, where the instructors loom over his head and make him a nightingale behind the many palisades of the garden. There is no proving the world that his voice can reach something.
This is soft, quiet almost; a personal vice of sorts. He plays on the grass on the days the light isn’t too bright out, beneath an apple tree when they keep him for long enough and on the days it rains, all furious thunder and earthy petrichor, he writes everything he can play in his knowledge.
Ivan sees it, because nothing escapes him these days, and declares from behind, “I like it when you play.”
It’s enough for his trajectory to shake entirely. He swivels and defensively says, “What are you doing here?”
“Listening to you,” Ivan replies, settling beside him, cracking his book open. “You’re done?”
Like it is a challenge, the way he knows will set Till off; paired with unbridled attention that they’ve never gotten the right amount of. It’s unnerving and exhilarating and everything he’s been given short of, and so he says—
“Not yet.” He scoffs. “Sit down.”
Ivan looks at him, as he always does. Like he’s finally bested him somehow.
He loses his flute. Asks everywhere he goes, anyone he sees. Ivan trails him around, like a lost little thing, and at the end of the day, when the sun brinks on the horizon, they fall together under a tree shade.
“I don’t get it,” he speaks up at last. “Why would anyone want my flute?”
“I don’t know,” Ivan replies absentmindedly. He looks across the field and resolutely says, “I’ll look for it in your stead.”
Till groans. “It's just—whatever. Tell me if you find anything.”
Ivan nods, getting up. And then, just as he does, he abruptly asks, “What will I get out of it?”
Till narrows his eyes and shrugs. They've had enough transactions for a lifetime. “It’s not like there’s much I can do for you,” he points out. “I’ll get you a flower crown or something.”
Ivan somewhat beams. “Okay,” he says, “I’ll return with it.”
And that has to count for something, right?
Ivan finds his flute. It’s just as he had lost it; no sign of grime, nothing at all. Till holds and examines it for an hour, like even he is unsure of its actuality, blowing into it and whistling out a tune he’d learned first.
When he asks Ivan where he found it, he only smiles vaguely and says; “You should begin looking at unassuming things first.”
Ivan parades the flower crown like a trophy. A few kids gape at him, others laugh. It should be nothing short of humiliating for him, but he waves at them and flaunts it even further—these are Till's favourite flowers, no you can’t touch them—it’s almost as if that is the most hallowed thing he’s won. Been allowed to.
He is sure that if he were to look at Ivan in the distance, he would find him looking right at him; a broken compass needle always points in the same direction. Till lets him, and doesn’t look his way.
And in the next week, Till loses his pencils, all one by one; sometimes when he falls asleep drawing, when he's away for practice, when he's writing.
After Ivan finds—returns?—his thirtieth pencil that month, he only scoffs and throws a paper with his stupid, awful face drawn from memory. That results in more lost pencils and even more of Ivan’s face all over his papers.
“This,” Ivan says, holding out his palm wherein lies a vaguely deformed insect, “is for you.”
Till glances at the insect, whose legs pathetically stick up in the air, and swallows thickly. But not being raised at all aside, he knows how to play nice at the very least, so he replies, “That’s—really. Good. You can bury it over there or something.”
Ivan nods airily, running to the spot and crouching, digging up the earth and patting the soil. It feels discerning, having this extent of control over someone—keeps him on the level with the fae who steal names and the sirens who sing; the Segyein who are neither from the tales Ivan brings to life nor the ones that they sing for, who stand a little too close to reality, even closer to them.
There was a time once—from where all the stories begin—when people like them dreamed of things beyond the horizon. They had left their marks and sung their stories, believing in the creation before the end. But everything that begins comes to an end; there is no place where the sun shines forever. It’s easier to submit to those who show you the least. An insect in your palms will only know its warmth crushing it alive before the sun.
Ivan's head rests on his shoulders; his hair tickling Till’s chin, the insect long gone—he’s reading him a book, a fairytale. It’s a weight lighter than anything he’s shouldered, and the gravest.
Ivan falls sick. It shouldn't be possible by any means whatsoever—it’s the middle of June, sweat trickling down his back, cicadas buzzing outside—but he breaks all kinds of uniformity, so he’s stuck inside a room, coughing away his day.
Till stands before the door, hands on the knob, listening because he can’t be seeing.
Mizi puts a hand on his shoulder. “You two are hardly ever separate,” she says, tugging him away. “We should let him rest!”
“He hates that,” Till replies dumbly. “Hates being missing out. I could—I don’t know—read him one of his stupid books.”
“He won’t be listening,” Sua pipes up behind them. “Don’t waste your time. He’s asleep, likely.”
“Also you hate reading,” Mizi adds unhelpfully.
Till lets them drag him away, prattling about those who fall sick in summers and how lonely they hardly feel since they're all asleep, and thinks that sounds very, very wrong.
Mizi and Sua have a world of their own. It’s a whole ecosystem, even, where the stars shine brighter than it does for everybody else, but never charring, never stinging. Till, at his best, is only an orbital being. There is no place for a third in a system where stars revolve around each other.
He can’t bear to be the Icarus in their tale, flying too close and falling too far. So, instead, he slips out of their sight. He has a feeling Sua notices, but she says nothing, dragging Mizi along—her world small as it is, where all roads lead to the same place, and Till is not at liberty to feel bitter. He nimbly sidles back to the quarters, to the door behind which Ivan lies on the bed. It’s cool against his cheek.
Pressing his ears against it, all he can hear is Ivan sneezing and hacking, quiet in his pain like that. A little part of him wonders if he were made like that. He doesn’t like it.
“Ivan,” he calls, only above a whisper. “Ivan.”
A cough. Some shuffling. “Till?” Ivan rasps. His voice sounds scratchy.
Till rolls his eyes and bristles. “It’s not like they let me anywhere,” he mutters, “Aren’t you bored?”
A pause. “No—no I’m not,” Ivan answers roughly. “You can go away.”
They know each other more than they will ever be known. It’s not something everyone can say, since there will always be someone who will know you better than the last, but Till is sure of it, holds it like a certainty among everything he has: he will not be learned better by anyone else. Of course; everyone holds different parts of you, but someone has to hold the largest—the best. It’s not easy putting together pieces that have already been stuck with glue and pure will, yet someone has to do it.
But Till knows Ivan a little better too. Shouldn’t that, then, mean something?
“Not happening.” He clicks his tongue. And, since the easiest truths often tickle down like a downpour in spring, he boldly announces: “You’re my best friend and you are not going to die alone.”
On the other side, he hears something and Ivan coughing. “I’m not dying.” He replies, somehow sure of it. “And I’m kind of your only friend.”
“Tough luck. Deal with it,” Till brusquely says. His cheeks feel degrees warmer than they should. He exhales. “I don’t have easy replacements for you.”
“Good,” Ivan murmurs blithely. His voice is a little strained.
“Good.” Till repeats. At the very end of it, they are both born misplaced, nothing to their names; it’s only natural to stick together—you tend to like those who mirror you just enough to appear human.
Till fights back. He resists. He shouts, yells, leaves his mark.
But of course: just because you have will, doesn’t immediately guarantee anything. He does not succeed, and Ivan watches them take him away.
Well. It’s sometimes like that.
“Till,” Ivan whispers. His hands are always cold, the way the Segyein and corpses often are. Till almost misses it. “Look at me.”
His eyes are bruised, he thinks. Maybe his jaw’s broken too. Maybe there’s more, all over his body; scattered like stars. He doesn’t know how Ivan can look at him and still feel something. “D’you think they’re coming back?”
“No,” Ivan softly says. Till hears him draw a slow, deep breath. “I’m going to remove your collar. Don’t move.”
It’s funny, how Till never quite figured out how he did that—why he knows in the first place. It's like some thinly veiled secret he can’t be let on. Ivan always makes quick work of them; his hands have that dexterity that they harness with a strange sort of worldliness.
Ivan gets collared rarely. He is pliable under their gaze, infallible in their hold. He lets them flaunt him, disguising their overbearing despotism as something digestible, something easier to hold in their small hands. He knows them better than anyone else here, knows the ugly feeling of being wanted just to serve a purpose, but the thing about letting someone hold your life before you is that it’s easier to be alive than fight to live. He somehow outwits the collars and muzzles that Till returns with each time, and asks nothing, says even less. It makes Till sick.
The collar clanks beside him. Ivan presses his fingers against the pulse point of his neck—if anything, it’s more for himself than for Till. His only act of selfishness, among everything selfless he’s done in the name of nepotism. With a heart as big as his, you can’t help but want to break it into pieces for others to hold.
“They’ll come at midnight,” Ivan’s voice cuts through the silence. It’s heavy, almost sombre; the kind that melds into his songs, sometimes. “At best, they’ll keep you for half a day—once they deem you presentable enough—and send you off with the collar. Don’t fight back. Talk even less.”
“Don’t boss me around.”
“Would it hurt you to listen to me?”
He flinches. “You aren’t doing me a favour.” He bites back. A wounded animal will always bare its fangs. “I never asked you to be here.”Anger is safer than the unnerving vulnerability of being known. Kinder to the both of them.
But he can’t see Ivan, right now; barely notices his silhouette, crouched before him. He can’t see the divot between his brows or catch the quiver in his hands. Seeing someone like him feels like holding the universe in your eyes—he’s set for a fall. But then again, there is a time for everything.
“It’s not a favour,” Ivan eventually says, “I can do as I like. It's not like you ask me to be with you either.”
That is what scares him the most: if one day he were to look at Ivan and get pulled into his innate kindness, what, then, will there be left of him? A favour is easier to balance out; a loan of sorts. A debt, even. But kindness is tacky—difficult to reason with; if it were finite in the form of the underworld’s pomegranate seeds, he would swallow them whole and offer whatever left of his liberty in turn—and isn’t that a dangerous set of revelations? You will always seek out the brighter, bigger things in the sky. No one asks about the stars that your eyes can’t trace. It’s human nature.
“There is only so much I can do for you,” Ivan murmurs. Softer. “Nobody can be everywhere all at once.”
His hands ghost over his skin until he can’t see Ivan altogether, and a part of him wonders if he was there at all.
The cuffs bruise, the collar blinks red. The room is quiet. Stifling.
They come at midnight. This time, the only form of his resistance is not fighting back at all.
When Till sees Ivan next, he’s lying on the grass, eyes glaring up at the sun unflinchingly. It’s the closest thing to a sun they will have on a planet that revolves around no star but beings that believe in nothing brighter than themselves.
It’s quiet, strangely so, but as it often is, with the way neither the wind hums nor the birds sing. Till takes a bite from his apple and falls beside Ivan with the familiarity of having done this countless times before. This is easy. This, he knows.
Ivan glances at him. It’s a short, piercing look—the one he often gives to the other kids, sometimes the Segyein. Till doesn’t return it.
He raises a brow. “Stop being weird.” He says, furrowing his brows, “I don’t get what’s wrong with you.”
Ivan narrows his eyes and warily responds, “Define weird.”
Till shrugs. The apple is bruised, almost unbearable—but still, he bites into it and lets the taste sit on his tongue for a few minutes. “When you look like that,” He says sagely.
“I don’t know what I look like right now,” Ivan says mildly. He gathers himself in his arms and presses his knees to his chest. “But if you’re saying so then—okay.”
“I think you should stop taking my word for principle.”
“Okay.”
“That’s counterproductive.”
“Right.”
Till groans. “Just—shut up.” He mutters. Everything he had scripted in the back of his mind in big bold just to talk to Ivan seeps out of his mind like sand in an hourglass. He scratches the back of his neck, back at the same place.
“Till?” Ivan prods. “Till. Say something. You look dumb.”
“Ugh—just,” he stumbles, because that’s how he’s gotten by all this while, and blurts, “I’m sorry, okay?”
Ivan blinks at him. Once, twice. Three times. He looks at him with an odd sort of incredulity, bordering abstrusity. Like Till is a problem from their aptitude tests, the ones Ivan cracks with his eyes closed.
“Say something,” Till prompts—demands. He fiddles with the apple core in his hands, careful with it all the same; even those undeserving of attention deserve a taste of it if only to fuel a chase for something they’ve been bereaved of so long. To have loved and lost, in principle, is always kinder.
Ivan shakes his head and sighs. He places his chin on Till’s shoulder and pokes his cheek. “You shouldn’t apologise to me,” he says. His touch is the kindest thing he’s ever known. “I’ve nothing to forgive you for.”
Till cups his face; Ivan’s eyes are deep, like they will swallow him whole, and here, there is more in his hold than he’s ever had. “Let me,” he insists, because Ivan will let him anything. Everything. It’s the scariest thing he knows. “Let me.”
Ivan nods numbly and wraps his arms around his sides, like he knows nothing else.
His own reflection scares him, sometimes. It’s nothing short of shameful, but will always be a testament to what he's survived, a reminder of sorts: there are scars on his cheekbones, his pupils shake, and blemishes littered all over his face—all that. It’s a testament that he’s human; lived and hurt and lost like everyone else before him.
It makes him a little bitter. It’s not like every human has had to prove to be one. He hangs onto it like it had been engraved on his lifeline and decides himself entitled to it simply because it’s the only thing he’s gotten his hands on. Then again—in a place where you have to learn yourself among beings that pride in having you the most, where it’s their home before your resting place, there is no way of knowing where you really stand.
At the very end of the day, the Segyein do not scar; they do not survive the crushing weight of knowing yourself the best and the least. Till thinks that if he were to find one staring itself back in the mirror, he would only see himself.
“Have you ever seen a meteor shower?”
Till pauses. “What?”
“A meteor shower.” Ivan shrugs—vaguely doing the thing he does when he’s not sure what he means either.
“No?” He raises a brow. “I’m not gonna know what you’re trying to say if you’re not gonna say it.”
“It’s,” Ivan trails off. He’s looking at something that isn’t even here.
Till scoffs. Getting something out of him without fighting with the absurd logistics of his awfully sharp brain that can’t ever seem to feel his heart is like obtaining blood out of a stone. His brilliance feels like a doomsday—aren’t geniuses supposed to be facile? “It’s what, Ivan?”
“It’s really.” He inhales sharply. “Pretty?”
For someone he’s known most of his life, Till knows very little about Ivan. They are the same age, else give or take a year or two; flinch the same way at the face of needles and syringes, narrow their eyes at the world as if they are big enough to shoulder its entirety. He had believed, somewhere sometime, that there was no way Ivan bled the same way they did—maybe that if he cried, he would be quiet, and pearls would fall from his eyes instead. If he wounds himself, maybe he would bleed ichor. Maybe if they were not who they were forced to be, he would laugh and everything would make sense.
If it were not for what it is, maybe Till would know everything earthly about him: he’d know his favourite colour, his favourite dish. He would know what he misses the least and who he loves the most. And Ivan would smile, not how he does now which is all a practitioner's technique for him, and tell him everything.
He doesn’t know how to read between the lines, not like Ivan does. He doesn’t know much, he can’t learn more if there isn’t any. No matter how hard he tries, he will only hear what Ivan wants him to know—if anything, that’s what they’ve learned all along. Be nice, Till, mould yourself in a smaller receptacle, small enough to fit in their palms—don’t fret, that’s what you’ve been melded for all this time—be quiet, Till, those who have not heard the reverberation of a yell will yearn for the only thing they know; an encore of your sweet song.
“You’ll see it with me next time,” Ivan says resolutely. His voice is heavy, solemn in the way he becomes when he tries to pluck the stars for Till—something in his eyes that kindles a fire. “It will happen again, and you will see it and know immediately.”
“What does that even mean?” He scowls and jabs Ivan. When Ivan smiles, nothing makes sense. It’s the closest thing to divinity he’ll ever be let on. Who’s he to complain?
“When we leave, Till,” he says, and suddenly it’s all scary and thrilling and — “when we run away from here, a place farthest from here forever, you will get it. You will see it.”
It’s a disaster waiting to happen—how he sets Till’s heart on fire. A wonder, how far it’ll spread before it consumes him whole.
And then it’s just like that: when we escape, when we leave, when it’s over. It’s never if with Ivan, never that hypothetical scenario wherein they fall as harshly and devastatingly—after all, Icarus’ flight was only a precautionary tale. Till—as awful as it sounds—desperately wishes he’d let go of it.
He hates it. Hates the way it makes him feel, every time Ivan plants hope in him; he waters it and lets it flourish like it’s of no consequence. He talks less and sings louder, smiles wider and the Segyein praise him better, shushes Till and intercepts every blow his way. It’s infuriating, even, how sure he is—but he tells him nothing. And none of the surprises Till gets ends in anything good, so he has every right to be wary; he pries and pushes, waits for the blow, to wake up thrashing and screaming, and nothing happens.
It looms over his head like an impending countdown, something catastrophic as it is, and Till waits for it—braces himself as Ivan pulls him along and tells him about the planet they never saw and the place they never had.
His cheek stings, eyes burn. If he really puts his mind to it, he’ll feel his whole body aching. Shivers down his spine, tingles in his arms and legs. He doesn’t quite remember what he’s here for this time around, and he’s seeing stars already—you will always defend the honour you had been born starved of. It’s the general course of things.
It hurts. He’s human, and so it hurts. What a punchline.
He loses track of time. It’s strange, how the only time Ivan listens to him after every time Till has asked him to stop bothering, Till waits for him. But that’s what he’s been doing all the time: he waits for Ivan to let go, waits for him to snap, for him to take his hand and show him the world. He’s been waiting forever and will do it longer because it’s the very thing he’s known to do. They aren’t made of the same stuff, Ivan and Till—farthest points on the same plane, north and south, east and west. Things that shouldn’t meet, and now that they have, it creates a paradox of sorts.
Till isn’t exceptional, really, at all. He knows this before anything, above everything. He draws, but he isn’t the best. He sings, but that’s what everyone does. He runs, but he can’t go far. There is always someone better, brighter in the market, and Till doesn’t even make the cut. He’s always someone’s other half, not the smartest, not the kindest. If he’s a planet, he’ll need an orbit. If he’s a star, he’ll be nobody without anyone to shine upon. If he’s the centre of all things, he’ll pull everything he finds to assuage himself. He isn’t the best, because the best things don’t get discounted and sold and damaged, but he knows how to try. He can’t try the best, but he does try his best.
It doesn’t take him anywhere far. There you have it—when they leave, he won’t have to be exceptional to begin with; there is no competition in a place where you are who you were meant to be all along. It won’t matter if he’s an asteroid or a moon, if he dreams big or small, if he can beat someone at their own game or not. Maybe he’ll have a small place in some sleepy corner, where he would look out the window and the grass would be real as the sky; he’d learn gardening and weave flower crowns over one another, crown Ivan’s head with them all. And they would lie under the stars, where Ivan would name each of them for him, and he would laugh and remember every one he could wish upon.
Maybe he would draw, maybe he wouldn’t pick a pencil ever again. Maybe he would learn something else, like cooking or dancing, and he would never let go—there would be no one to compete with, so he’d be the best. There would be nobody he would beat, and Ivan would watch him somewhere near, and everything would come along just like that.
Till, in that moment of bravery, closes his eyes instead.
But wouldn’t that be just right? He’d live with uncertainties and variables instead—very few people live forever, but maybe he would simply live longer and die with wrinkles on his face and ailing limbs. He would have the same people by his side, but they wouldn’t be the only people for him to learn. There would be no certainty like this, growing up knowing nobody likes weeds in their garden.
What if he were born on a planet farther away, so that when he would look around there would be people with a face just like his? What if he loved a little better because he had enough to give?
Would you love something you’ve never seen?
Oh. Here it is—Till is mourning—
“—Cheer up, Till,” a murmur, “Cheer up.”
This comes to him first: a rustle, a hand carding his hair. His neck feels stiff, almost bruised, but he can’t feel the collar. His fingers are digging into something, and he feels a thumb press to the pulse of his neck.
His eyes snap open at once. Everything begins to add up now—all he sees is Ivan.
And it’s the beginning, all this. Till is running—and he doesn’t run fast, but it matters little now; Ivan’s hand in his grasp, a step after the other, the world behind them. They’re panting and laughing, and he doesn’t know where he’s headed, it’s thrilling like that—but oh, this is his last disappearing act. Everything beyond this will just be firsts, all the things he’d never been taught and the things he’s never learned.
The meteors dance with them in their rejoice and paint them a fairytale; it’s beautiful and exhilarating and real and he doesn’t know what to do with any of it. His cheeks ache like they have never before—he doesn’t think he’s ever giggled something boyish like this.
But they’ll have all the time in the world—he’ll learn how to map out Earth in the sky and call it his, leave his mark on everything he touches because he’s never had anything to ruin; they told him it’s all he does, ruin in his wake, a taunt: you will forever be closer to us than any human you’ve touched. But how could it be true, with the way he’s more alive than they’ll ever know? How could it be true, when he’s only lived? How can it be true, when all he’s done is create?
And he hesitates.
In a place like that, who is worthier than who?
Ivan stumbles. His face morphs into something else like it was something he’d visioned already—nobody knows how Till’s world works better than him. After all, he tends to everything that grows and anything that aches in it.
“You can’t have everything everywhere,” he says, gripping Till’s hand like a lifeline between his fingers. “No one can. We don’t play Gods, Till—”
“If I don’t look back,” he inhales. “Will I ever see them again?”
Ivan’s eyes soften. Till doesn’t know how he does it.
“I don’t know,” he whispers, throat tight, something he’s picked up from Till. It’s all he knows; picking up little trinkets from others and eking out his own from nothing. “I don’t know.”
You have to lose something to gain anything. It’s the law of things, an order of sorts. Something’s always got to give—it’s what they know best.
“And Mizi?” He can’t help it. “Sua? Everyone?”
It makes him a little mad. Mad at Ivan, for choosing him. Mad at himself, for loving so less. At the universe, for everything. But he can’t help it at all. They shouldn’t have to choose, shouldn’t have to quantify something like that—but he can’t help wanting.
Ivan hangs his head low. “I’ve been selfish,” he belatedly says. Meteors fall behind him in the gentlest, sorriest way. “But one of us has to be. What was I meant to do?”
“You’re kind of stupid,” Till spits, sniffling. “You aren’t meant to shoulder this sort of thing alone. Shit.”
Ivan laughs, something ugly and free and utterly his. He has that snaggletooth that peeks at him, dimples that aren’t quite defined. It’s the kind of endearing that you can’t place your finger on.
An alarm blares from somewhere far away. It’s systematic, a code for something; the message is clear. Ivan’s hand stiffens in his hold. “We’ll figure it out,” he says, desperation seeping through Till’s bones. “We’ll—do something. I’ll do something. It will happen but it won’t matter if you aren’t there so—”
“Shut up,” he snaps, “There won’t be anyone after if we don’t go first. Fuck, I don’t know—just. Let me.”
Something hurts in his chest, like a hiccup stuck in its making, and he glances behind; everything he’s had, everything he’s lost, all a place he doesn’t even know his way to, there’s a beep in the distance and he’s—
He’s sprinting. Dragging Ivan by his hand and going nowhere—they have nowhere, he realises, nowhere to go, nothing to be, but they can make one like they always have. They can do something. Make it up. Break it over. Carve out a place. There is only a certain extent to which you can fall—and everything after is a testament to your invincibility; there can’t be anywhere for them to go but up. Beyond this. Farther, better.
So he runs, ragged feet and bruised face, heart racing and eyes burning, along the expanse of the wasteland. They are jigsaw pieces that don’t fit, the parts that hold a fragment, but never make a story—but everything goes somewhere. It has to mean something. This has to become something.
“—let you what?” Ivan asks in between. And there’s so much to that: let me hold you, let me know you, let me have you—how is he supposed to say that at all? Squeeze words out of something so astronomical?
Ivan will let him, regardless of whatever he thinks, however he feels. Things like this don’t dwindle easily. Anyone will baulk at the extent of his benignity. I can’t know what you need if you will not let me give, Ivan had said to him once, when he had shouted at him for the closest reason he could find—it echoes through his mind each time. This is exactly the sort of thing Ivan can’t know; he will find a way to pluck the stars out of the sky, and then there would be none for him to wish upon. He will say something equally absurd—like how is your wish anything but mine?—and think it solves everything. He’s cruel like that.
“Let me see you,” is what he says instead, lost in translation. “Stop trailing behind. I can’t drag you forever.”
“But you do,” Ivan insists, and Till can’t see that awful grin on his face, but instinctively knows it’s there.
“Someone has to.” He narrows his eyes. The wind nibbles at his cheeks. It’s so cold. “I have to.”
“I would let you leave me behind,” Ivan says with all the finality in the world. It sends a shiver down his spine, and he deliberately ignores it, like he’s always had with every warning sign in his way.
So Till clenches his hand tightly, the world wholly fitted in his grasp, doesn’t look back—he will not leave anything behind.
He’s stuck around all this while, and it can’t mean anything till the end. He won’t let it.
This is how it begins: nothing so big as an astronomical bang or the birth of a star—it’s always quiet, in the beginning. There is always room for something after. It happens, and it means something eventually, and there can’t be nothing after everything. But again; very few things stick around forever. If everything can’t last that long, how can nothing?
The meteors boom, the stars sing. It’s like they’ve waited for this for a long while—something the universe had conspired all along, finally coming together.
can we become more
than half of a union we're chosen for?
where I am your best half
and I am yours
— We Become We, Journey To Bethlehem - Fiona Palomo, Milo Manheim, and The Cast