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The void hummed with the low throb of radiation and collapse—an endless unraveling stitched thin by her will and the suit's refusal to fail.
Helia hovered in the space-between-spaces, still as machinery, every muscle caught mid-coil. Her body held together by exo-magnetic tension, her thoughts by less than that. Above and around her, blades hung weightless in slow, perfect orbits, glowing orange with residual charge, like half-shattered halos.
On the surface, she was composed: shoulders squared, eyes dulled with the emptiness that only heavy exhaustion brings. Still enough to seem invulnerable, but inside, her grief never settled. It tensed beneath her ribs like something molten, hot and heavy, like a fault line overdue for rupture.
Her posture was that of someone suspended in an impact that never landed.
Her body was armored, but her mind was haunted.
The void didn’t offer peace—only perspective.
This wasn’t a place so much as a pause—an entry into liminal space, stretched thin between thought and afterthought, action and aftermath. The suit’s interface ghosted across her vision, registering motion in half-familiar spectrums—fading echoes of battlefields, starlight bent through repeating sadness.
Other Helias passed in and out of view, blurred by lightspeed memory. None of them could see her—she wasn’t here to interfere.
Fragments of reality, seemingly isolated as individual planets, stuttered like neurons at the end of their lifespan. Fractured timelines strung like veins across dark matter, pulsing once and flickering, vanishing in the distance. Each one dying like the end of a thought, each flare a world that had failed. A version of herself breaking apart. A version of Coralie lost.
Each rotation of the rotors shifted Helia’s focus, igniting shards of alternate pasts. Echoes of Coralie as strands that she couldn’t touch. Not always the same snarky laugh, not always the same sharp deflections—but unmistakably her, always gone before the end.
Some of them bled out mid-sentence, eyes still open. Others crumpled beneath the weight of steel, their bodies twisting under the force. Sometimes it was sudden—rubble and flame where a voice had just spoken; one vanished in a blast Helia never saw coming, just a flicker of static where Coralie had stood.
There were versions of her who died because Helia tried to save someone else first. Just a moment of miscalculated hesitation, a split-second of turning towards another voice, another plea for help. As Helia turned back, she’d realized it had been a feint. The attack wasn’t meant for the one she saved. It had always been for Coralie. And by the time she looped back—panting, disoriented—there was no life signal left at all.
Some had laughed in the moment before it happened, as if they’d already accepted it. Like Coralie had already read the ending and didn’t think it was worth rewriting. Hair half-singed by an experiment gone wrong. “Figures,” she muttered, almost fondly, before she shorted out.
And once, she had smiled, blood in her teeth. Not because it didn’t hurt. But because Helia had been there—at the end, at least. She reached up, touching Helia’s cheek with trembling blood-wet fingers. “Glad it’s you,” she whispered. Her voice shook, but her final, crooked grin didn’t. Her hand left a warm, crimson streak down the side of Helia’s face before it slipped.
Other versions of Coralie were gone before Helia even knew what they meant to her. They revolved around each other’s lives—constant, unspoken, yet misunderstood. She had watched them work together effortlessly. Argue, but never for long. Laugh in ways that softened even the hardest days. And they never once thought: this is what I can’t live without, not until it was already gone.
Some died not knowing they were loved at all. Not because it wasn’t true, but because Helia hadn’t found the words, or hadn't believed she was allowed to say them. Coralie never got the chance to know. Helia hadn’t realized she’d been loving her the whole time. Only when her body fell limp—only when her voice didn’t come back—that was when it hit. Too late, every time.
There were timelines where Coralie was the one who made the choice. Where no one stopped her soon enough. Where no one even knew she needed stopping. She left behind a note and nothing else. Just handwriting Helia knew better than her own—You’ll understand, it said. You always do.
And once—only once—there was a Helia who raised her weapon to Coralie’s face, following orders. She had convinced herself that it was tactical, and believed it to be necessary.
“I told her to close her eyes,” That shadow of herself had cried, again and again, repeating it like it made a difference, like her mantra might undo it. “I told her to close her eyes, so she wouldn’t see me—”
But Coralie had never looked away. She’d just held Helia’s gaze, all the way through the barrel flash.
And Helia—both there, and in the void—could still feel it. The memory didn’t soften with time or distance. It clung to her like smoke in the seams of her armor. She could still see the exact angle Coralie’s head had tilted, the way her breath stopped, the way her name—Helia—never left her lips.
That timeline had collapsed like a lung. She never went back to it.
She drifted by like a filament drawn through voltage—charged and radiant. The suit had limits, and she had tested them. She could never stay, never intervene. Couldn’t alter the past, or drag any version of Coralie forward with her. She couldn’t even speak. Her presence was nothing more than a pinprick in reality—a brief gravitational shimmer, too phantom-like to change anything. Just another figment in a galaxy already dying. All she’s ever allowed is remembrance. Only observation. Only aftermath.
Helia didn’t know how long she’d been here. There was no concept of time. The blades continued their cycle, silent above her head. Memory flashed with every rotation: ash instead of snow. Laughter mid-sentence, cut short. Coralie reaching for her, falling. Coralie bleeding out with forgiveness in her eyes.
She wasn’t sure which haunted her more: the outcomes that ended in violence, or the ones that left only silence, only absence behind. Just her, standing in the ruin, staring at the space where Coralie had been. Still, the pattern had become inescapable. No matter the universe, no matter the variant of herself or the shape of the war—there was always a Helia. And a Coralie.
In every timeline, there’s a me. And a you. And in every one… you die.
She wasn’t sure how many more she could watch. How many more endings she could carry behind her eyes—eyes that didn’t look like hers anymore. Gold, artificial, refracting starbursts, etched with the residue of too many witnessed deaths.
The battlesuit didn’t ask her to watch, but it let her. And maybe that was worse—because she kept doing it. She came back, again and again. As if bearing witness might rewrite just one ending.
Some part of her had made peace with that improbability, or pretended to. Because in one plane of existence—pulsing under all the pain—one Coralie had made it. Somehow. Against every pattern, against the logic that every other world obeyed—she lived.
But in this one—ours—you’re still here.
That thought alone was enough to pull her back through the electric memory-burn. It caught in her like a voice she wasn’t sure she’d heard, but still remembered how to follow. It drew Helia back like a gravity well. The brutal, aching certainty that hers was the version she couldn’t afford to lose. That this reality, of all the countless broken ones, might still be worth something, might still hold. She didn’t know for how long. But that didn’t stop her from returning.
The world snapped back into place, brittle and bright. It always came too suddenly. One moment, she was suspended in dying light—memories flickering like torn film across the dark—and the next, breath rushed into her lungs like she'd been holding it too long.
The suit dissolved away first, with mechanical finality, peeling back its layers of heat and argentine steel until her skin felt cold from the exposure. The pressure released from her limbs, and the alloyed wings—those orbiting remnants of her will—receded one by one into silence.
She blinked, and the multiverse unthreaded. Behind her eyelids, the gold fractured. Her burning clarity—overwritten with too many endings, too many last sights—dimmed, dissolved, and gave way to her own eyes again, bleeding back into mauve. Her vision blurred, not only with the shock of stillness, but with the weight of tears she hadn’t let fall.
What replaced it wasn’t the end of the world. It was just a room. A high deck washed in starlight, the curve of the viewport dome opening onto a sky that no longer folded in on itself. It was quiet—a breathed-in, lived-in quiet. The regulated hum of a station’s systems, nothing more. Low, continuous, almost comforting.
And there, her silhouette framed in the wide mural of space, stood Coralie. Like a constellation drawn in real time, made of lines Helia knew by heart. She looked small against the stars—already small, and made smaller by the weightless sprawl of what lay beyond. Her outline was steady against the glass, perfectly at ease in the vastness beyond it, standing with her back to the room, her tail mid-sway, the white tip brushing the back of her calf.
She looked at the stars like she knew them. Like this was a moment she’d lived before, and they’d been waiting across a hundred lifetimes to meet her gaze again. The window curved above and around her like a planetarium dome, haloing her in soft blue. Moonlight caught on the white of her bob, casting a faint sheen across the black lengths of hair that fell below, like a thick stroke of ink. Her ears tilted in that subtle, thoughtful way Helia knew well, as if tuned to something distant—something only she could hear out there in the dark. She watched the galaxy not just like someone searching, but like someone being called home.
These were the moments Helia came back for. The proof of breath and body, untouched by ruin. The fact of Coralie’s existence, cast in light she hadn’t yet burned out of. A ghost pulled back into reality. She wasn’t a memory, or something yet waning on borrowed time. She was here, now, wrapped in a glow that hadn’t dimmed into elegy.
She’s always like this with the night sky. Like she’s waiting for something in the quiet that I’ve never known how to perceive. I don’t know what calls to her out there. I don’t understand the universe. But I understand her place in mine.
Then it came again, the stutter of recollection behind her eyes, unbidden.
Without the clarity that came with sunfire—without her gaze shining like a supernova, the heat flare of golden optics—it was only a rupture bleeding through at the edges of her vision, like something half-remembered forcing itself back into shape. Untethered from being suspended in liminal space, lit from within by omniscience, the visual was less vivid: blurred fragments, splinters.
A reactor door sealing with hydraulic finality. Coralie’s palm pressed to the glass, her fingers leaving smudges in the condensation. Her mouth shaped around words Helia couldn’t hear.
A medical tent washed in sterile light and the filtered sound of machinery. Helia rushing in through the flapped doors—breathless, too late—only to freeze. Coralie lay still on a cot, covered to the chest in a thermal sheet. Her ears hung slack, her tail limp over the edge, bent where it shouldn’t have been. The monitor had already flatlined.
A rooftop at night, wind cutting sharp across concrete highrises. Coralie leaned against the edge of railing with her hands in her pockets, the city light cascading pale across her skin. She glanced over her shoulder, pausing with one unreadable look, then took a step forward into the open air, her coat flaring in the descent.
And then—the one burned in deepest, a stain in Helia’s mind.
A flash of red, too fast to dodge, too precise to be anything but deliberate. Coralie caught in it like paper under flame. The puncture was clean, merciless—right through the chest, angled sharp. Her body bowed under the impact, suspended mid-motion, limbs jolting as if her system couldn’t decide between fight or collapse. The air around her shattered, torn open by the force, like space itself had flinched. For a breathless instant, Helia didn’t understand what she was seeing. Just Coralie, frozen in that impossibly red frame, outlined in piercing black.
She ran, but there was no undoing it. Her name tore from Helia’s throat before her knees even hit the ground. When she reached her, Coralie was already at death’s door. Pale, torn, blood soaking through the front of her jacket, head tilted like she was just about to say something and hadn’t gotten the chance. Her ears drooped, her hands scrabbled at her chest, fingers smearing through torn skin and fractured bone, fragmented ribs. No scream—only a shuddering intake of breath.
Helia’s voice—a sharp crack in the stillness—cut into her final moment.
The world didn’t fade. It buckled.
I’ve seen her vanish in every way a person could vanish. Known who she is to me across a thousand endings. But in so many of them, how many versions of me failed to hold onto her? How many watched her die without ever understanding why?
Helia stepped forward at last, crossing the room in slow, steady strides. Her boots struck the floor with low, metallic clanks—still a more gentle sound than what reverberated through her thoughts. She moved like someone crossing over a threshold in their return from war.
Taller by more than a head and built heavier in form, broader through the shoulders, Helia’s frame cast a long shadow as she approached the astronomical station’s vista. The light caught on the angles of her body—marked by muscle, by survival, by every burden she’d carried across the broken lattice of alternate worlds. In the moonlight, her shadow stretched long across the floor—vast, towering, and threatening to consume. It looked like something that might eclipse even herself. As if the weight of everything she’d seen and everyone she couldn’t save had grown limbs and swallowed the person beneath.
To Helia, it appeared like something capable of extinguishing everything she held dear. A reflection of all she’d failed to protect. It grew menacingly, so much that it could blot her out entirely. A shape that could overshadow Coralie entirely too—if she let it.
She came to stand beside her regardless, close enough that the hem of her coat brushed Coralie’s sleeve. Close enough that the warmth between them unwound what her own strength never could. So much that the aching, foreboding feeling began to lose its teeth. And as they stood in parallel, their shadows, initially stark and separate in contrast, began to merge. Folded into one shape, the distortion eased, no longer resembling a threat. The edge dulled. What once loomed lost its weight. The longer they stayed like that, the quieter the storm inside Helia’s head became.
For Helia, the nearness was everything. Because after everything, just standing beside Coralie felt like a mercy that had been hard won. There were versions of herself that had never made it this far. That had reached for her hand too late, or not at all. This—this closeness, unshattered and intact—was the moment they had never been able to touch, was the point where every other path had fallen short.
Her body still throbbed with the weight of every ending she couldn’t rewrite, still carried the echo of each timeline where she’d failed to hold on and redeem every life that had vanished. That strain had wired itself into her reflexes, tuning her instincts to ready herself for whatever came undone next, to expect everything to slip through her hands. But being beside her exerted its own kind of gravity. It wasn’t salvation. It didn’t undo the damage. But it was the closest thing to grace she’d ever been allowed to feel.
For a moment, Helia only looked outward. The stars beyond the observation shield spilled across the open sky like static unraveling across a perfect black canvas; impossibly far, impossibly soundless. Some glowed steady, others pulsed faintly, as if breathing. The nearby moon hung immense and brilliant, its surface etched in soft gray, haloed faintly by the thin atmospheric glare.
Her gaze stayed fixed on the galaxy, drinking in the depthless hues, color seared into the lens of being. Light bled gently across the frame, luminous waves bending against invisible particles, refracting through the curve of glass. A view too expansive to hold in words.
The sight should have overwhelmed her. Earlier, it would have. But standing here now—beside Coralie, alive—everything stilled.
Helia caught the slight shake of Coralie’s ears—barely discernible, the kind of movement shaped by long familiarity, not thought. And with it a shift of posture so minor it might have gone unnoticed by anyone else. But to Helia, it said everything. I know you’re here. I know it’s you.
Only then did her eyes drift, drawn to the woman beside her. To Coralie, still facing the interstellar scape, still listening to something Helia would never quite be able to hear. The stars reflected across the wide arc above them, seamless and clear, casting the sky in crystalline focus, scattering light along her profile like the view had chosen her as its anchor point.
“You’ve looked at the stars for so long tonight,” Helia spoke, and for a moment, the rest of the universe stopped moving. “Were you waiting for them to say something back?”
A faint flicker touched the corner of Coralie’s mouth, almost imperceptible. She didn’t turn, but her voice carried the smallest hint of devilry. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous,” Coralie chided dryly.
Her tail gave a low wag—once, twice—as if amused on her behalf.
“They’re quiet,” she added, after a pause. “But I like that. That’s enough.”
Coralie’s hands came to rest on the railing, fingers curling loosely around the bar as she leaned just a fraction closer to the spatial sprawl beyond. The brushed metal caught a prism of refracted light, scattering stained glass fragments and multicolored bands up the inside of her wrists—glimpses of rose, coral, and violet, layered in unison as a blushing afterglow.
Helia’s attention held onto Coralie, and it stunned her. For a few seconds, it struck her breathless, deepening from a slow surrender into awe. The tilt of her head, the gentle fall of her bangs catching the spill of cosmic light in silver-blue highlights, almost gleaming. The curve of her cheek kissed with the color of distant nebulae—dusky golds and spectral hues pooling over the slope of her jaw.
Starlight etched itself along the dark frame of her lashes, delicate as frost. And in her eyes, planets hovered, framed in her pupils like crystal lenses—mirrors of everything vast and far that she somehow made feel near. The galaxy had never looked more breathtaking than it did cradled in her gaze—entire horizons made visible only because Coralie was looking back. The soft, suspended weight of them drawn into her orbit felt like a vision conjured from the afterimage of some impossible prayer Helia hadn’t known she was still whispering.
Something ached in her chest, from the way beauty could sharpen when it came with fear. A marvelment whetted by terror, which only arrived when you were allowed something so irreplaceable, so radiant, you were already bracing for its loss. Coralie’s presence, full and illuminated and heartbreakingly within reach, undid her.
And she was beautiful, almost painfully so. Striking in a way Helia hadn’t realized could still unmake her. Not from the lunar view, or the silence of the cosmos, but because all of it only made her shine brighter. Helia could still barely breathe. Her throat tightened, thick with the weight of everything she’d seen—and everything she might never deserve to see again. A lump rose behind her sternum, sudden and solemn.
I’m always afraid that there might be a final night I get to have with her.
Their silhouettes shimmered faintly across the curvature of the viewing panel with iridescence—two figures glinting in glass and ambience. Helia’s own outline appeared crisp, clear, clean-cut; unmistakably an individual meant to exist, as if solidified with intention. A shape too impervious to be misinterpreted for anything else.
But Coralie—her likeness didn’t seem to follow the rules.
It was distorted, indistinct at the edges. Not out of focus by distance, but by the way light refused to catch her properly, skimming past without landing. It rippled with the effort, her image slipping slightly out of perspective, blurred like a hologram caught mid-transmission.
She looked delicate at that moment. Not weak—never that—but like something tenuous, out of phase with the world. Her mirrored form seemed less engraved than Helia’s, as though the windowpane couldn’t tether itself onto her projection fully. She wavered like a particle resisting observation, as if unwilling to be painted in motion.
It seemed as if the heavens themselves hadn’t finished deciding whether to let her remain, and continued pulling for her return with a thick band of gravity, calling her back across some threshold she’d outrun but not escaped. As if she was already overdue for retrieval, vulnerable to erasure, ready to be smudged out by time and by fate once more. Like she could disappear again just by lingering a moment longer than destiny permitted.
Helia blinked once, slow, but their reflections didn’t change.
I don’t know how many versions of me never got to tell you what was most important. Or how many would’ve given anything to trade places with you, begging to be the one taken instead. But this one—this Helia—knows better. She knows what it means to lose you, and what it had cost to have you returned. She’s not wasting the time you gave back to her.
Coralie’s ears flicked again, the one nearest Helia perking subtly forward, drooped but alert, as if trying to catch a frequency just beyond the edge of speech. She didn’t move otherwise, but her body read through the silence beside her like a change in air pressure.
For a while, she let the quiet stretch between them, as if weighing its shape in her palm. Her tail had gone still, tensed into a halfway lift, poised like it was on lookout.
“You’re not usually this broody when we’re alone,” she remarked at last, her voice cutting through, but not unkind. There was a trace of playfulness there, lightly teasing but emotionally perceptive, like she was trying to coax something out of Helia without pressing too hard. A tone she reserved for when she knew the weight wasn’t hers to carry, but offered her steadiness anyway.
“Did something happen?” she added, not turning fully, but angling her head just enough for her ears to swivel towards Helia, making it clear she was listening—really listening, with unannounced acuity, cast into the space Helia hadn’t filled.
It would’ve been so easy for Helia to lie, to say that she was fine. That the view had just made her thoughtful, reflective. That it wasn’t the echo of every dying Coralie still burned into the backs of her eyes like afterimages that wouldn’t fade. That it wasn’t guilt, or astonishment, or the impossible miracle of still having this Coralie alongside her.
Instead, her thoughts surfaced again, welling up through the cracks, raw and silent—unvoiced, yet desperate in their clarity:
Let this be the one where I get it right. Let this be the iteration where I don’t lose her again.
Helia’s eyes lowered, catching on the edge of Coralie’s collar, where the fabric of her blazer folded open just enough to expose the thick seam of unevenness along her skin. Pale ridges traced just beneath the hollow of her throat, half-obscured by shadow—barely visible—unless you knew what to look for.
The full story lived beneath: not just the surface scar, but the bruised flesh once split wide, the ribs fractured from within, the hollow puncture that had carved clean through. The scar had warped diagonally across her chest, deeper and jagged along the side where the blade had torn inward, shearing through tissue and shattering bone. Closer to the heart than anyone should have survived. A patch of flesh that never quite relaxed, like the body still remembered being opened. Faded in appearance, but not forgotten.
Her hand rose, hovering over the center of Coralie’s chest. Fingers splayed, she let her palm settle just above the piercing point of entry, the place where the killing blow had landed. Along the grain of a wound that should’ve ended everything. That spot—that exact spot—was evidence of where Coralie had died in her arms.
Her touch was purposefully light, for something she didn’t dare press too hard against.
Coralie didn’t flinch—and she never would, not from Helia’s touch. That kind of contact, no matter how heavy with remembrance, was never something she’d recoil from. Instead, her hand—small and certain—reached up to meet Helia’s, slender fingers settling on top of hers. To steady it, to steady her. To remind her that the body beneath her hand was living, whole, here.
Not just a soothing I know, but I protected you once, I’d do it again.
And beneath that, more fiercely: It was my life to give, and you were always worth it.
The gesture was small, but Helia felt it like a ripple across the surface tension between them.
Only then did Coralie turn her head, letting the motion carry full meaning. Her ears canted toward Helia, her bangs catching in the starlight. She met her gaze as something level, without urgency or expectation, eyes calm. Not asking for an explanation, just being there to meet it, whatever it was. Offering presence the way only she could: undemanding and utterly immovable. There was never anything tentative in her stillness. She wasn’t bracing for the weight Helia carried. She was making room for it.
And as their eyes locked, through the depth of being seen, Helia felt herself drawn inward—weightless—like a celestial body nudged into a tidal locking. Coralie looked at her like she could be an anchor cast into the void that she’d been drifting through. And Helia, still reeling from every loss, wanted nothing more than to take hold.
I’ve seen you die in every color of the spectrum.
And I loved you. Every time.
For everything Helia hadn’t said aloud, her face conveyed even more. In the way her eyes held Coralie, like they couldn’t fathom another focal point; so wholly it was as if nothing else in the room had mass. She looked at her like she’d spent lifetimes scraping through wreckage just to see her like this. As if a nightmare of blood and shrapnel lived in her lungs, but this—this—was what kept her breathing. As if Coralie wasn’t just someone she loved, but the reason she could still love at all. The reason her heart still bothered to beat.
Outside, the stars drifted in slow rhythm, an ancient procession across the firmament, reflected in the glass like memory shards scattered across the dark. The glow of celestial bodies painted streaks across the pane. Distant constellations glittered through, their light fractured into delicate nebular swirls, cast across everything in the room. Photons—light-years in transit—arrived at last, just to meet them here. Time didn’t pass so much as hover, like gravity had been momentarily undone.
Then, something streaked across the edge of the sky—swift, dazzling, and lustrous. The arced tail of a comet skipping past the cosmic veil. It flared, then vanished, like a single note sung across the vacuum.
Coralie’s voice came quiet—appreciative, wonderstruck.
“Did you see that one? Wasn’t it beautiful? Bet we won’t see another like that for years.”
If there was anything more eye-catching than a star carving firelight through the endless expanse, more profound than an astral wanderer breaking its trajectory through eternity, it was Coralie—here, watching it with her.
Sometimes I think every star is a version of us.
Maybe I won’t get another night like this. Maybe I will.
But even in this timeline—I’m staying until the end.
I’ll carry us both forward. However far we get. This reality is stitched together by our will. If it frays, we fray together.