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His mind, silent and screaming all at once.
His awareness, slipping, not lost but loosening, peeling at the edges like old paint.
His thoughts, if they could be called that at all, drift. Not quite his, but not quite foreign either.
No beginning. No end.
No sound, no edge, no form.
He exists in the Sea of Nihility the way a pearl exists within an oyster. Enclosed, protected, and forgotten. A foreign object swallowed up and reshaped until it could be claimed. He isn’t drowning. He would prefer drowning. Drowning implies struggle, resistance, the possibility of surfacing. This is a sinking without motion, a fall without gravity, a quiet, depthless erosion.
His name is Aventurine.
It feels like a lie here.
The Sea of Nihility holds him like a vice, like a mother might hold a child against her breast if she wanted to smother it. He is suspended, mind adrift and vision full of nothing. Not grey. Not white. Not even black. A colorless void that strips even memory bare.
He entertains the idea, briefly, of giving in.
Not for the first time. Not for the last.
It’s a small idea, small enough to cup in the hollow of his palm if his hands still knew how to form shapes. A yielding, a ceasing, a stillness deeper than still. If he just… let go. Allowed himself to come undone, memory by memory, until he is no longer aware of where he began. Or if he ever began at all.
He does not panic. He should.
But panic would mean something still matters.
The Nihility asks nothing of him. It demands nothing. No clever words, no numbers, no stakes. It would not betray him.
Let his thoughts unwind from the spool of himself, thread thinning until it vanishes. Let it all melt into meaningless static, into that soft, empty hum, like the absence of waves. It would be easy. Frighteningly easy. There is a comfort in meaninglessness. In not having to remember the names and faces of people he outlived, in not having to be Aventurine at all.
There was peace in that.
But not peace enough.
Not when there was the capsule like a lifeline in his palm. Not when there were eyes that looked up at him with such unbearable clarity. Not when there was Kakavasha.
He thinks of that little boy on Sigonia. Of rough shoes and rougher sands and laughter that rang too loud in a world too quiet. Of the boy who didn't know what he looked like, because mirrors were a luxury, because the Avgins preferred to travel by the cloak of night where everything was pitch dark anyway, because no one had time for vanity when there were places to go and no promise of staying long enough to see the next sunrise.
That boy had never seen his own face. But he knew who he was.
Aventurine does not.
The thought alone was enough to send a ripple through the void. A memory, faint as breath on glass, surged forward.
The last time he saw himself. Not the man, not the Stoneheart, not the polished mask. But the boy. Small. Underfed. Too bright eyed for a world that had already disappointed him. Wearing shoes that didn’t fit and carrying dreams far too large for the shape of his body. The same boy who’d looked up at him with wonder when they met. The boy who hadn’t recognized him at first.
He remembered the pause. The moment where recognition faltered.
“Is that me?" the eyes seemed to ask.
And he could not answer.
Because the truth was, no.
It wasn’t.
He was taller now. Older, sharper. Hardened. Hair brushed differently, stance straighter, eyes lined with a thousand things that they should never have seen. The boy he used to be would not have known this version of himself. Would not have liked this version of himself.
But he had looked up anyway, and said, "I know you can do it."
You can do it. What’s left of you, older than your mother ever got to be. What’s left of you, your grief aging in place. Time stretching too long and pulling your face along with it. You have mourned them longer than you have known them. But he remains, doesn’t he?
He never saw what he grew up to be. Thank the mother goddess he didn’t.
You never knew your father, but you remember something almost like his hands. Rough. Calloused. Never cruel. Always tired. You remember your mother’s voice, soft when she could afford to be. You remember the way she held a coin, not to flip it, but to save it. Neither of them lived long enough to see what you’ve done with yourself. That is the mercy of it.
What would they think, seeing you now? What would he make of your hands, careful and smooth, never tired the way his were? What would she say, seeing your eyes, colder than hers ever managed to be?
Would they even know you?
But I’m still here, whispers the little boy. He doesn't blame you. He should, maybe. But he doesn't. He looks up at you with eyes that are far too trusting, and he says, “I know you can do it,” and you believe him even when you shouldn’t.
Especially when you shouldn’t.
Because if you can’t do it, if you give in, if you let yourself drift, if you fall into the Sea and never return, then it isn’t just you who dies.
It’s him.
That bright, impossibly earnest child. The one they raised. The one they loved. The only version of you that ever made sense.
So he stays. Not because he is strong. Not because he is brave. Not because he deserves to. He stays because to let go would be to bury that little boy too. And he never got a chance to grow old.
Do it for him.
The thought forms like a mantra. It shivers through the void, the only shape that holds.
Do it for the boy who still believed the world could be kind. Do it for the boy in the tattered jacket and the shoes just a little too big for his feet. Do it for the part of yourself that is still smiling somewhere, even if you can't remember how right now.
His hand, curled into a fist in the nothingness, a futile gesture.
His jaw, hard set, as if the tension alone might tether him to meaning.
His thoughts, sluggish, scattered, but definitely thoughts, gather. more stubborn than the Sea that tries to claim him.
Even as the Sea pulls, quiet and constant, even as it cradles him in apathy and offers the seductive comfort of meaninglessness, he holds on. Not for Aventurine. Aventurine is a mask. An eternal gamble. A coin flipped and landed on its edge.
He holds on for Kakavasha.
He will not dissolve. He will not drift.
There are no mirrors here, but he remembers how the light looked in that boy’s eyes. He remembers what it felt like to believe he could become someone worth looking up to.
The Sea cannot have him. Not yet.
"I’m not ready to go," he whispers.
And whether the Sea heard him or not, he doesn’t know.
But he would keep saying it.
Again.
And again.
Until even the void had no choice but to listen.