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Sometimes, Yuri wishes she didn't have such a power.
Sometimes, she wishes she had dragged the dead-weight of her memories forward with the burden that the past was carved in stone now — that no amount of wishing would bring it back. But she doesn't and she can't, and she thinks that for every wound stitched closed by the warmth of her memories, another is torn into the fragile muscle of her heart. It burrows itself into a cavity between her ribs and rots, the familiar buzz of salvation twists into something more burning.
It's tantalizing — her fingers brush against the idea of forever. of redoing every mistake and of a perfect future. They close around nothing but air, heavy with grief.
It’s a horrible burden for a person to bear, Yuri can’t help but muse to herself. She supposes it’s hardly relevant to anyone anymore, there’s nobody to care about how many years were stolen from her. From him, too. Then again, she thinks this is the nature of godhood, divinity. The nature of time, too. To sacrifice. It’s why she does this at all, why she meticulously rewinds over and over again.
And maybe for him too, even if she doesn’t like to think about it.
--
Niki liked the village downstream from her mountainous abode.
There’s a pool at the base of the river, winding enough to never crash violently against the rocks like it does just a little higher. The village kids would stumble down to the stream on the hotter days, splashing themselves and each other with the cold water. They liked her, she knows. Or they liked what she could do, but it’s all the same anyway. They’d giggle gleefully as she glided across the sheen of ice beneath her feet, trailing behind her as it melted into water. They’d hold her hands as she twirled them across the stream on a draft of ice, only for an unsuspecting one to be plunged downwards. It makes- made her giggle, the way the rest would clutch a little harder at her.
Her favourite part, however, was the nymph at the bottom who’d always laugh with her when a kid reemerges, soaked and sputtering with river water. She remembers a lot, but her fondest memories are blurred with the patter of footsteps and breathless laughter as they steal food from the windowsill of the bakers. They’d sit at the stream and cackle, free. Every nymph, born of sun, rain, forest or desert or ice, was her family of course — children of Mother Nature, born of the Earth's love for her creations — but Skew was special. He was mean, rough around the edges. She supposes she was just as bad, enabling every last one of his endeavors with a grin as sharp as ice.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” Skew hisses, its voice as sharp as the spines that line his being. But still, he laughs as he stumbles, leaning against her as it shakes its head. It’s her favourite part of these heists, when all that exists is the bread cradled in their arms and the burn of her lungs as she laughs so hard she doubles over.
“You’re the one who tripped over your own feet, dumbass,” she huffs between giggles.
Burning isn’t a sensation she’s used to. Still, she thinks she doesn’t mind it much if this is what it feels like.
--
The lava of the prison jumps at her feet, singing hisses of hatred, and she stares at it, unimpressed. She’s learnt to despise the heat, and what it represents. She feels herself blinking away the drops of haze that mist at the corners of her eyes. She stares at the slumped figure of Elo. The prison knows she doesn’t belong there. She knows that too.
The heat is unfamiliar, and she thinks the sulfur tastes like the smoke of the blacksmith. She hates it.
But she has no choice, not really. It is her responsibility to uphold the timeline, to prune the dying edges and wrangle the loose ends. That’s why she’s here, and that’s why she does this, and that’s why she can never go home. Because her home is here now, in between the gaps in time. She inhabits the seconds between moments, and the void between seconds and hours.
She has given up the river for the stream of time, and she’s not quite sure if she should regret it. She thinks it might be too late to. How ironic.
--
Godhood consumes Skew entirely.
It’s not surprising, not when it’s like a spark lowered into kindling. Divinity is the kind of thing that can’t be content coexisting with the rest of your identity. It can’t make a home for itself in the darkest corners of your mind, can’t grapple with the warmth of your beating heart. It’s volatile, it floods your vision and grips your heart and twists it out of your chest with its hand covered in ichor. It beats, and you watch as air rushes to fill where there was once something human.
It’s unavoidable, really, but she can’t help but be a little concerned. Maybe Skew is right, and she could never really understand, but by the Stars does she want to. “I can,” she insists, twisting to block him from turning away. Her voice is void of the laughter she used to find so easily back at the creek. “I can understand, just fucking tell me!”
It stares at her, blank. She doesn’t know if it makes her sad, or just angry. She wants to be angry, but she doesn’t think she can. It’s an exhausting realization, that her emotions fester in her chest and rise to the back of her mouth like bile. She just wants him to say something. Anything. Anything would be better than this unnavigable cavern of silence.
Instead of saying anything else, it takes her wrist and everything burns.
She thinks she sees the universe die, and then be reborn. She sees everything there is to be seen, the way the world turns and turns and turns with no end in sight. She sees the dotting of people, moving, shifting — dying. And suddenly she thinks she understands. She sees everything, and it all becomes nothing. The stars are burnt into the back of her eyes and she thinks she could never see anything else again, not when they glow so brightly, even in the echoes of her memory.
She blinks, and time moves a little slower. Or maybe she’s just moving faster. Whatever it is, it’s unnatural, and every small flinch feels artificial. Her body feels heavy. She wants to go home. The closest thing to home is him.
She wakes up to white marble and a new weight on her shoulders.
--
There were no stars in the sky above the pantheon. The night never falls.
The white marble of the columns that shoot upwards, shimmering in the eternal summer sun. It’s beautiful, intricate. A dwelling befitting of Gods, an impressive building surrounded by an equally impressive gate. Yuri has been keeping it since she’s become a god. Sometimes, when it’s quiet, she goes down to the fighter layer. It’s the only layer she can stand to be on, lingering around the temples that soothe the itch at the back of her mind whenever she leaves the pantheon.
But today, she lingers around the Hall of Thrones. It’s quiet. It has been since… everything, really.
She doesn’t know what to do, or where to go, or what to say. She fumbles for the right words, the right look. When she messes it up, she starts over. Nobody knows. Nobody knows except her. Nobody will ever know, and nobody will ever remember. She will remember enough for everyone.
It’s a horrible burden, but what choice does she have but to keep moving? Not always forward, not always linear, but always moving.
--
Shamefully, her goal of bridging the yawning chasm between the two of them gets pushed to the back burner. It’s a reasonable thing, she tells herself, when she has so much more to do, so many important things that tick, tick, tick away every second she’s not fixing things, taking responsibility for the things that are now her burden. She doesn’t have time to do anything but spare him a passing glance and hope it understands what she means to say, when she can’t even bring herself to say them. I’m sorry. I understand. You’re not alone anymore.
It’s for him, it’s all for him. She’s fixing all of this so she- they can go back to when their biggest problems were sandstorms that pushed them into deeper caves, carrying as many ores as they could fit in their arms just to drift them along the river, a little too quickly for scurrying hands to catch.
Selfishly, she can’t bring herself to think about it much anymore.
It’s still there, dreams of something just barely out of her reach. She just doesn’t think about it much when she wakes up. It’s ironic that she of all people has the least time. She has constant things to do, and every second that passes is a year wasted, another problem that goes unsolved. She doesn’t like to think of herself as a martyr. She’s far too big of an asshole for that. But maybe, just maybe, if she fixes this, she can redeem herself just enough to enjoy the feeling of desert sand beneath her feet and rushing water.
Is it still altruism if she does it for herself? She thinks there's no one in the world who could give her an answer.
--
She knows she should let the river of time wash away this, too. After all, it’s all she’s been doing recently. It’s hard to remember the last time she’s felt ice water stinging her skin, the way her hair twists and turns underwater like a nightmare just waiting to grab the next poor, unsuspecting victim and drag them to the bottom of the river. She can’t, the Stars know she can’t. And perhaps that’s why she thinks of it at all.
It’s the one thing that tethers her to her humanity, the one thing she’d take a knife to like a cancerous tumor or a gangrenous limb. But there’s nothing to cut off, nothing to kill but a memory that is too precious for her to drown. She doesn’t remember if she loved him more than she hated him.
The longer divinity flowers in her chest, the more Skew’s humanity starts to disgust her.
It’s an odd thing, to use human as a synonym for feeling but she can’t help but think there is more to godhood than what he makes of it. And perhaps she’s a little bitter that between the two of them, this was thrusted upon her against her will. That this wasn’t a responsibility she chose, but how could she give it up now? Who was there to take her place in an ending labyrinth of mirrors and flashbacks.
It was her burden to bear, and there’s a reason she was the one to carry it. Maybe. Or maybe she just wants to believe that there was a reason for her suffering, her isolation. She wants to believe it has meaning. That there’s an end to it.
She just wants someone to tell her she’s done well, but there’s nobody who can. Not anymore, anyway.
--
“Would you ever wanna be human?” She asks one day, as the moon's light bathes the world in an unearthly glow, cold and unfeeling. It ripples across the river as she shifts. It’s a stupid question, she knows. There’s nothing humans could have that was better than this — better than embracing the earth and feeling her love you back. She could never give up the hum of her mother.
“No, what the fuck?” Skew sputters, indignant, and she laughs. “They’re so fucking boring.” And she supposes that was the end of that.
The stars are beautiful, and nothing is wrong.