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"Why?"
Rain is the only answer Antoine gets, soaking him to the bone and hiding his silent tears. The bone of his mask is cracked and shattered, clothes ripped, hair plastered to his forehead. Blood is mixing with water from his scratches, burn marks and broken bones ached.
All of it was manageable, familiar.
The pain in his heart was not.
"After all we'd been through together. Why?"
The only light he can see comes from the streetlamps far below, and the glow from the villain across from him. The one he thought reformed. The one he tried to hard to forgive, that he spent hours tending to and helping. The villain that he fought against his very nature to protect, to heal. The one he had thought he formed a bond with.
Calysto didn't say a word.
He stood, motionless, expression more shut off than Antoine had ever seen it.
And it hurt, dammit.
"I thought… I thought you-"
"That what?" The light around Calysto bent, casting him in unnatural shadow. "That I'd changed?"
His chest felt like it was caving in. Even though Calysto was right- what reason did Antoine have to believe him? A few weeks of bonding over scars and laughing about their allies and sitting too close on the couch, locking eyes too long during comfortable silences, staring at the stars they loved so much in places nobody else could find them-
"I thought… I thought we had something."
The rain poured around him, and the concrete of the rooftop cracked with his unstable thought process. He was probably messing with the integrity. He was probably losing control. He couldn't find it in himself to care.
Calysto made a sound like he wanted to laugh, but couldn't force the sound to come out right. Steam fizzled off the warmed concrete around him- like he couldn't control himself either. Like he wished he could be anywhere else but here.
"You don't have to do this." Antoine's voice cracked around the syllables. "You don't want to. I know you don't. You don't want to be the bad guy."
Calysto didn't move.
Goddamn it, why didn't he move.
"You don't want this. You can still come back."
Antoine didn't say he'd forgive him. He didn't know if he was capable. But he couldn't let Calysto ruin himself like this, not when he knew how much the star bender hated himself for being a villain. Fuck what Antoine wanted- they couldn't go back to that. Not again.
Calysto's icy expression seemed to shatter at the corners, before the lights around him disappeared. Antoine's heart dropped.
"… You're wrong. About us. About me. I can't be anything more than this."
The lights below dimmed. Cracks spread across the rooftop. They didn't reach Calysto's figure.
(Antoine could never let them hurt him. Not really.)
"…Goodbye, Moonbeam. Maybe we'll find each other in the next life."
When the lights came back on, Calysto was gone. No steps, no noise, no trail to follow.
Antoine let the building crumble.