Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The release comes with paperwork, a stoppered glass vial, and a pair of weapons passed safely back into openly waiting hands. 

Both knuckledusters gleam fresh with polish, the enamel shells turned newly glossy where they catch beneath the light, the metal backing cold as he slips them on, one at a time. A shadow flows in pantomime with the movement, as they match into a perfect fit. The weight is nearly nothing, but with it, the cork on his relief finally pries itself loose.

The tension that built in their absence fizzles up in a froth, and slowly, resoundingly, dissolves away.

The waiting room swallows it up in a cold gel, time transfixed into something languid and slow. 

His right fist clenches. The binding tightens. The prongs don’t trigger, but he can feel the reflex, along with a weak, burgeoning need to test it. It pulls back, like a string, like anything magical when wound up with emotion, waiting to be plucked. To sing that first note.

Just a thought, and he’d have it confirmed. A simple test. He would know it hasn’t been tampered with. The harm isn’t rooted in trying. He—

He refrains, for the sake of upholding a quality of composure.

Memory serves up nothing, elsewhere. He can’t recall the last time he sat down and actually performed maintenance on his weapons, let alone himself. Cera was nice to do it, but the courtesy, like any meaningful condolence, is often one wasted on him. It’s a poor use of time. They’ll just get scuffed up and dirty again, only to function anyway, to withstand the way Nonsurat made them to. Same story, same end. 

He seems to keep learning that tale over and over again, always caught up in the eddies of a larger storm worth weathering, never quite letting himself forget. 

The vial stays heavy in his other palm, shape slippery against the pilled fabric of his glove. It rolls in with the slosh of liquid, back and forth in loose motion. His fingers remain reluctant to contract around it, dancing around the issue. 

He’s been holding them still for the past five minutes with a series of barely suppressed fidgets, and there’s no place to set the thing down, not without threat of it tipping over and trundling away to be lost into some hidden tile crevice. Cera will make him wait if they have to prepare a replacement.

So he keeps waiting, hand cupped awkwardly at his side. 

It looks—and feels—unnatural. This passive behavior. Maintaining it. The paper-thin facade. He feels stupid, and out of place sitting on the small stool that was pulled from the closet for him, stringy threads of cobweb still clinging to the feet. The icing on the cake.

Of course, he could always drop it. The vial. The poorly done act. But.

Excuse him, for being so wary. 

Mir Falspar is—if he really has to force himself to admit it, teeth grit and newly tense—feeling better than he has for a while. 

Certainly in a measure of weeks, maybe months. Dubiously, the past year at large. Begrudging as he is to accept it—and even less to pay heed to it—the medic’s skill cannot be denied, and the alliance would claim to supply no less. At least they can still follow through on that promise.

Yet, Falspar can’t shake off the unease that stirs to life with each small action as they follow along the designated routine, criss-crossing like constellations as he’s led through each step of his departure. The medic waits patiently as he signs his name with narrow loops of cursive script, tight enough to squeeze out the blank spaces between as the pen cuts this way and that, not rising from the paper until M. Falspar Percival has been declared in dark blue ink. It feels strange—writing something down. Too large and physical. Holding the pen. Like it’s not his hand, moving it. Not his marks, left behind on the page. 

Immaculate evidence of his control, that he can perform it all without really being there to dictate how.

His index finger twitches. He's not dropping the vial. The handwriting looks too neat, and it’s bothering him. He stamps out the immediate urge to rip the bottom off in one clean strip. 

It’s hard to work him into this particular state of nerves, but that’s not quite true, is it? Because lately it’s been getting easier. 

But the medic cannot gain another reason to keep him here. 

Mir Falspar quietly places the pen in the center of the page and slides both back across the desk. The hiss of paper rings in the air, scraping along the edges of his hearing like nails over glass. His finger twitches again. His knuckledusters give no response, because he still isn’t letting them.

Something silent and heavy coils down his back and waits, ever vigilant for a sign of danger. Fright punctures his lungs each time a wayward glance drifts near the fracture running lateral through his pauldron. The one that’s gotten exceptionally wider in the past week, the pearly metal crumbling, the silver band split through, unearthing a peal of shadow beneath. The urgency that was once waving politely in the distance has turned to pounding louder and louder on the front door until there’s an answer, and he’s not giving one.

Even now, as Cera places a black binder clip on his file and prepares to bid him farewell from their care, their pallid eyes stray a little to his left, and linger, meaningfully. 

But they don’t ask, and Mir Falspar continues to not tell.

They could, and he might. He just might. There’s always the chance it’ll break the lock, another spin of the roulette wheel, another illusion of a choice granted to him for that single, spontaneous moment that could, maybe, end up real this time. But no one on this side of the mirror ever feels like being honest enough to expect honesty in return, and in fairness, one only gets what one is first willing to give.

The exchange drums along as expected. Nothing new is said.

Mir Falspar’s mind is elsewhere as he brushes his free hand down the broken seams of his sleeve, dark fabric torn and gnawed at by the invisible teeth of this world, that shining mirror always hungering for more, before abruptly returning both fists to their neutral position behind his back. He squeezes the glass, silently proving something to himself. 

The entire topic of “shoulder injuries” can be shelved once more, as it has been since it first emerged as something with potential to be spoken about. As he continues to commit to pretending it’s not something that reaches back beyond that, down his throat and deeply uncomfortable. It all gets packed into a box and pushed back into its place among the layers of dust, where he can stack more and more and more on top of it, until it’s all but forgotten beneath other matters.

He didn’t come here under some misguided attempt to fix any of that, dismissive hand wave for it and all. He didn’t even come here—that is, to say, he doesn’t recall anything happening that would have gotten him to go through with the idea willingly. There’s a difference between resigning himself to slink off and curl up to endure the reset of a painful but otherwise unimportant injury, and fully knowing he’s too hurt to recover from one that screams an imminent shattering.

Even then, he struggles to be convinced of the necessity. He just gets back up, either way. It’s not any of the medic’s business.

And it wasn’t, until a week ago, when he turned up at their doorstep in a delirium, and at least had the decency to knock before collapsing unconscious, sprawled beside the plaster trim, as the official report declares. They let him read it, rather pointed in their silence. Eyes narrowed, hands folded, the picture of casually skeptical as they waited for him to interject with more detail. Mir Falspar wasn’t sure what he could add without it becoming blatantly clear he was making it up.

Again, nothing said, nothing gained.

He doesn’t want to know what kind of field day Arthur might have decided to have about the whole affair—Or for all he knows is still having, out in the great beyond. This must be delightful for him. The divine retribution is enacting itself, and he doesn’t even need to lift a finger to dial.

Or was Nonsurat being serious, encouraging him to take a break and consider their—offer. 

His warnings, if words given with his particular brand of watery-eyed glances and wringing hands can even possess the heat to be called that, are usually far less intent on inflicting bodily harm. You’ll get what’s coming to you is the kind of sentiment Dark would package up and pretend to follow through on. Dark, who’s been flitting by at random intervals the last week, like this is some spectacle he has to see. Like it’s not giving Mir Falspar a heart attack each time and the medic several terrible, baseless ideas. 

And if he could just. Say something. Not. To him, it’s not. If he could explain—

The tether starts to slip.

No. He’s—Not. Irrelevant. It’s irrelevant. Falspar is putting it out of his mind. He can think about it all he wants out there, three steps to the right, beyond the whitened threshold of the medic’s sterile little box. He has played nice about this whole, unnecessary ordeal, let them prod at him and ask all the meaningless questions they want, and he is getting out while he can still see the gap of opportunity held neatly open before him.

“That will be all.” Cera’s voice floats, and they rise with him, inclining their head in a polite bow. They still do, for all intents and purposes, tower over him when upright. They meet his gaze one final time, off-balance as it is. 

“I won’t be telling you not to find any new reasons to come back here,” they say, head tilting up just a tad. “Because we both know you’ll take that as an excuse never to show your face again." 

Mir Falspar blinks in the most innocuous manner he can manage—which isn’t much—and then settles for spearheading his response into a glare.

Cera waves him off. “Go, and just stay out of trouble.” 

They say it like they think that may be a challenge for him, despite his quite frankly excellent record of carrying out assignments. He doubts they understand the full extent of it, but he’s not going to stand here and argue.

The medic has a certain immunity to all of this, gifted to them by virtue of their position. Wrapped in the same soft, ashy robes they’ve always had, just as weaponless as they declare their oath deems necessary. They watch him with a hint of a smile in their calm eyes despite their harsh tongue, because they’re genuinely one of the nicer reflections around here, and that gets them by just fine.

It’s more unsettling than anything else, Mir Falspar thinks, feeling the way the observation rattles inside him. Having to rely on nothing but words, and trust that to be an adequate defense.

Lucky him, about to go and attempt the same. 

Mir Falspar turns to face the exit, steel soles clicking in a stuttered, off-beat rhythm. Uncertain. The short distance still makes his head swim, and he fights against the way it pulls his vision apart, unfocusing it just a little, near the edge. He's fine. He's rested. He doesn’t want to keep sitting around playing useless card games, and slowly losing what little is left of his sanity.

Because as soon as he steps out, the timer will begin anew. His shoulder throbs, numbly. He’ll be back under Arthur’s thumb, back to the deadline, back to the miserable option of making his choice final.

He wishes he could just give it to someone else.

It doesn’t matter that the clock has been temporarily frozen, the hands caught between his fingers, stifling the bleed of precious minutes and seconds. It doesn’t negate the reality that it’ll continue to tick towards the inevitable, whether he stays in here or not.

He’s not a strategist, in the end. He doesn’t know how to construct an immaculate winning plan that will save the day. He's just the bodyguard. He just acts, before he even needs to think.

So he does.

Mir Falspar leaves the infirmary behind, and prepares to go face down his own personal nightmare with absolutely no idea how.

–

Unfortunately, his own personal nightmare doesn’t seem to want to be facing him. 

It goes like this.

This place, the sealed globe of enchantment that is the dimension encasing the Mirror World, functions under a strict system of carefully made rules. They span from one to the next like silky strings in a giant web. Interconnected, always. Thin and gossamer and binding. Pick at one, and the rest will chase down the vibration. Struggle, and they’ll start to close in.

The grand, amazing mirror at its heart is believed to catalog everything. All the happenings of its residents, the status of this world and the stolen glimpses of the one it reflects. A living source of all possible records tucked away behind a pristine silver surface, crowned in gold and framed by feathered wings. 

Locked, with only Dark Mind possessing the key.

Mir Falspar doesn’t keep anything as extreme as a hitlist, but it’s still very easy to trace a line from A to B and pinpoint—with the aid of an immensely powerful magical artifact or not—who's most likely to be at the top of it, if he did.

It’s no secret he and Dark Meta Knight don’t get along. 

No one is calling their interactions personable—not even Arthur, in his worst moments of jest—and least of all the long line of assailants Mir Falspar has personally thrashed into piles of glittering pieces while Dark scoffs or shrugs or rolls his eyes in an inherently overblown, grating and particularly frustrating kind of manner that’s just wholly unnecessary when it’s his life on the line and he can’t even take that seriously, for star’s sake. 

Half the fights they start between one another have to be cut short by Mir Falspar himself, because his self-restraint has always been a tenacious, brutal thing that chokes him out of most unprofessional decisions before he even gets a thought directed toward making them, and Dark certainly isn’t going to do it. Dark doesn’t care that Mir Falspar is one small thread-snapping disaster away from figuring out how to throttle him to death when the physiology of their species doesn't even allot him a neck. Dark is hardly more than an arrogant little gnat who’s made it his life’s purpose to inconvenience Mir Falspar as often as possible, in every way imaginable, endlessly, and forever.

It’s infuriating. It’s stupid. It’s—

Not worth the breath.

Just a scrawny little scrap of a knight with big, useless talk and a poor sense of execution. Shameless, fickle, star-shattered fool. Mir Falspar could threaten to rip him in half and he doesn’t even blink, doesn't even consider if—

He’s getting off track.

It was harmless, once. Funny even. Fine. Before reasoning came back to bash him over the head with a cinder block of stone cold reality, and he finally woke up from the daydreaming.

So—the issue. Free now, to dog his steps and ping pong off the secluded walls of his mind. 

Mir Falspar is not expecting Dark to raise a glass and cheer at his release. In fact, he’s almost certain the other is just waiting to bombard him with whatever haphazardly crafted slew of insults is sitting locked in at his top ten worst possible sentence constructions of the day, upon his inevitable return to roaming the halls. He’s practically counting on it, and when that blows off, and Mir Falspar finally gets the chance to open his mouth and cut to it, Dark will throw in something equally as vapid and useless and banal, and they’ll argue about nothing, for nothing, for hours, and Falspar will once again have to stand there and contemplate asking himself if this is worth anything, anything at all.

And maybe then he’ll wake up, and get back to work.

But that all relies upon actually finding him. Dark. Scourge of his patience. Incessant pest to curse the skies. Meager, little—

Which he’s currently failing to do.

It doesn’t bode well.

Roughly three hours have passed. The knight is still missing. 

Mir Falspar has lagged the entire way to his room and the untouched state of upheaval he left it in, done a loop of the central hall, and even checked, briefly, the lookout post at the top of the base. Clambered up over the nerve-shattering creak of each plank and refused to think of them snapping away beneath his feet. Focused onward, towards his goal, just to come back embarrassingly empty handed. Dark might actually be off-base, considering the lack of subsequent whining taking up all the oxygen in the air. Mir Falspar is, usually, told about developments like that eventually. 

If anyone knows about it, that is. He’s the one who’s supposed to keep regular tabs on Dark’s whereabouts. 

And it’s…unlikely, and unwise to assume, but in his professional opinion not unheard of for Dark to successfully skate a chaperone and go it alone beyond the safety of their half-crumbled, hole-filled walls. 

Go figures. This just can’t be simple.

Arthur would know, because knowing Arthur he’d put in the effort to orchestrate it. Irritatingly, Mir Falspar is not currently in an advantageous enough position to go and ask if he did. 

Not that he’d want to, and not that he’d get a straight answer, for the trouble. Not now, of all times. 

He supposes he has that in common with Dark today. Circumventing long talks that lead nowhere with people he doesn’t like. Yes, fine. Might as well buddy-up about it.

But waiting around for him to show his smug face is a luxury in itself, and Mir Falspar is beyond aware it’s not one he gets to entertain having. 

So, he cuts his losses, and goes to the next best source.

“Oi,” he announces. Real promising. “Have you seen Dark today?” 

Mir Falspar says it all blandly, without fanfare, prompting Mir Dragato to turn around in a graceful swirl of soft pink, pale gold, and immediate suspicion. The thief gawks upon seeing him. It’s unclear if it’s about the question, or who’s asking it.

Around them, lunch hour churns on in full swing. They stand in the dip of tables and chairs that Mir Falspar took about three minutes to navigate with painstaking grace. The chatter peters down just low enough that it fails to disguise the rough scrape of his voice, and a few reflections glance over with a sudden uptick in interest. Mir Dragato’s underlings, mostly. Falspar’s familiar with them.

Falspar’s also not exactly sure why they’re looking at him like that. Heads swiveled, eyes intent. Most of the group should understand it's better to get up and leave, right about now. 

Instead, they all duck beneath the brim of someone’s feathered cap to whisper conspiratorially, clustered close like it’s the sole umbrella standing against an incoming rainstorm. 

Around him, the air begins to tingle with a nearly unnoticeable buzz.

“Fals?” Mir Dragato’s bright eyes are wide, sparkling like two pink gems. A small, sincere sort of smile rises at the corner of his mouth, and Mir Falspar ignores the part of himself that instantly wants to abort. 

He has—complex feelings. About Dragato. Some of them are softer than others, but the time for them is not now.

He doesn’t exactly have the best history with deriving a personal life away from his job, because the solution has usually been to mash them blindly together, and forgo the complications of the rest. There is nothing about Dragato that isn’t personal. And that’s. Hrgh.

This isn’t a good idea, for several reasons, and he’s aware of that, but it is one of the few options he has at his disposal. A lot of information passes through Dragato. He’s a thief by trade, and he deals in more than just glittery trinkets. 

“I don’t believe it.” Mir Dragato’s voice is thick and syrupy, like honey, flowing in a soothing coil. He comes closer, side-stepping a chair as one heel is meticulously placed before the next. “You’re back?”

“Yes,” Falspar says, and there’s a touch of strain to it, because it feels like a lie. He shifts one foot back, and repeats himself, in lieu of a nicer greeting. He is here on business. His business. Is that still personal? “Have you seen Dark?”

Mir Dragato’s welcoming expression pops like a balloon. The invisible current becomes localized around the two of them, frizzing the end of the other’s ponytail. It washes over Mir Falspar, settling in the gaps between his sleeves and his skin, sparking off his armor, his hair, and tapering off his dormant knuckledusters. 

They didn’t exactly part on the best terms. 

Because he told Dragato maybe they shouldn’t be speaking to each other anymore. 

And he still kind of means it.

Mir Falspar shifts silently from one side to the other. The shock doesn’t threaten him, really. He holds several inherent resistances to the elements, so the most it could do is daze him. He finds it more alarming to consider what would happen if Dragato were to reach out, and do something small, like take his hand. That could be—Dragato tends to make everything feel skewed, a little to the left. It’s disarming. 

There’s a sudden thud, followed by a clatter to his right, near the bin of silverware and unused plates. Mir Falspar spares a fraction of a second to glance that way, spots nothing but a pitiful gathering of forks on the ground, and lets his eyes flit back to the thief. Mir Dragato raises a single, expectant brow. 

Falspar gets the sense he’s underestimated this particular encounter.

“Seriously,” Mir Dragato begins, once the silence has stretched into uncomfortable scrutiny. The on-lookers hold their breath. The disdain ramps up slowly, making each syllable twang sharp between them. “You end up in the hospital for a week, and that’s what you ask?”

Mir Falspar doesn’t fidget at silence. His counterpart does. Still, he gathers himself up a little taller and locks both fists behind his back, struggling to cram himself back into an image of normalcy. Knowing it could be worse. Knowing Arthur could show up at any moment, just announce what’s going on to everyone, and trap him into answering, like that. 

Dragato doesn’t know there’s an offer sitting on the table. No one does, save Arthur, and Nonsurat, and—

Falspar swallows around the cloying wad of hesitancy taking up residence in the pit of his throat, the motion imperceptible behind his mask. He’s not usually so flighty, but there isn’t time to explain… Any of this. There is only pushing onwards, full speed ahead. 

“Yes.” The word croaks a little. “Have you seen him? Today?”

There’s always been an edge of refinement to the way with which Mir Dragato controls himself, tipping his posture back just a smidge, hand perched carefully on his hip, eyes leveling out clean with Falspar’s. Like a blade, lined parallel with its target, so as to cleave it perfectly in two.

Asking three times is too many not to arouse suspicion, but Mir Falspar’s not stupid. He looks stupid asking, he knows that, he really does, but this was a conversation that was always going to need a hefty commitment to railroading from the very start. He’s not going to risk acknowledging anything else. He’s not here for anything else, despite whatever history there is to be said between Dragato and him. Let the mirror deign to humor him a little longer, and grant him this one mercy. 

If Mir Dragato gets so much as an inch, Falspar knows, knows he is going to give him the whole mile before he even knows where his feet are taking him, and this mess will only grow an infinite amount of times worse, for everyone.

“Why do you ask?” Dragato says it neatly, rubbing the fabric of his glove between two fingers. A few peachy sparks pop out. They dance along his wrist, rather hypnotically.

Hrngh. Ok. “He’s been absent.” That’s true. 

Mir Falspar still grimaces. He wishes he could stop talking. “It’s suspicious.” 

Which is also true. Generally. Grhh.

Mir Dragato plucks the reason from the air and chews it like gum. He doesn’t seem to care for the taste. 

He shifts his stance, arms crossing and weight canted to one side. His cape fans out like a starburst at his feet. His eyes flatten into hooded slits, the gold liner sharpening where it wicks outwards. He blows a strand of hair out of his face. The judgement is coming.

Falspar doesn’t say what he might actually be trying to ask of him. Doesn’t run a hand down his face and say, tiredly, I just need your help, Dragato. Because no one does that. Because then Dragato is going to have to prove who he really is, and Falspar doesn’t want to know. He will put it off forever. He will save them both that cruel, thankless fate.

“No, I haven’t,” the thief says sweetly, just like that. The world keeps spinning. The static stops. “Now, isn’t there something else you’d like to tell me? Something maybe a little more important.”

Mir Falspar stares at him, kind of bleakly. It doesn’t matter, because it all looks the same on his face. 

It’s a way out. A way to cushion the blow. And if he was already well into the throes of exhaustion, he might take it. Because it’s easy to forget with Dragato. Because it’s a shelter he doesn’t quite deserve, doesn’t quite understand, but so desperately lacks.

But he’s—aware. He has managed three days of dreamless sleep thanks to that miracle little knock-out potion, and this is his reward. Excruciating awareness of his actions. He's getting the distinct impression it’s only the start.

Even now, Dark still finds backwards ways to mess with his life. 

“No,” Mir Falspar parrots back, but it’s flat, and lacks any bite. He’s not going to start an argument, and ripping out the guts of a discussion and throwing them aside is a good enough method for him. He’s going to have to take Dragato on his word. That’s that.

He pivots, cape flashing, and starts to walk away. 

“Wh—Fals,” Mir Dragato scolds him—scolds him, like this wasn’t going to happen from the start, and Falspar doesn’t stop moving, ignores the sudden surge of indignation flushing out the cold, and refuses to turn back even as the thief tacks on an appalled scoff. 

Maybe it is kind of a rotten move, but there’s no room to apologize for it. The air bristles, electricity rumbling, and Mir Falspar fights the way his teeth try to bare in return. 

It’s just a bunch of posturing, from both of them. It always is, because Dragato doesn’t really expect a retaliation, and Mir Falspar knows, without even having to pick up the shovel and unbury the evidence, that he’s usually not going to get one.

The carpet absorbs the harsh sound of his sabatons stomping away, reapplying the lines of separation between the two of them. A glance at the periphery shows eyes toward Dragato, the sound of chairs knocking back and a loud hmph.

Mir Falspar drags a line through the name on his mental list, and goes back to searching. 

–

The base of operations for the Galactic Star Alliance has always been in literal ruins. 

Separate from Radish Ruins—but not so different. More carved marble than tanned, sanded limestone, but crumbling apart in a slow drawl towards dust all the same. The base is a mountainous pile of odds and ends from the outside, but structured with a network of tunneling halls from within, sloping up in a gradual corkscrew towards the top. There, it expands out into a dome, a receiving area of sorts from which the commander can pretend the world is his palace and it all curves in towards him. It was, once, a place for visitors to marvel, on the rare occasion they had one.

That spiral goes down, too. Down to the residential level, down further for the old training rooms, storage, and the infirmary, another for Nonsurat’s workshop and forge, and snaking through the darkness to go deeper still. 

The ground level is pleasant enough, though. While the outside shell remains leached of most any color beyond a stark white, mirage-like when looked at from the far horizon, the interior is peppered with the opposite. Globes of orange, star-filled glass, heavy moth-bitten curtains in all shades of garnet, ochre rugs thrown over cracked green tile and silver running whorls through the walls. Most in the Mir GSA are of the scavenging mindset, and plenty of things find themselves falling loose from the clouds reigning high above.

An exit bends into sight. Mir Falspar winces to himself. The illusions strung there are always the thickest—a needed measure to obscure their presence to outsiders—and potent enough in magic that even Mir Falspar, who can't feel it in a sixth sense the same way a mage might, still has to blink through the brief headache it inflicts.

He mentally braces himself as he approaches the end of the hall, faint eyes dipping to the corner of his visor to trail along the outer edge. Several windows are propped open in a myriad of odd shapes, letting in fresh air through lopsided squares, wobbly circles, and a few actual holes that might have been from past weapon malfunctions. Rebar—broken into pieces and reapplied, not set within the wall itself—crosses the gaps of most, filling role as braces for invisible panes.

The sky percolates through them, possessed by a spirit of stillness. It's just moderate enough in sun cover today that the temperature has entered into an unwinnable battle of too mild to be called either warm or cool. There’s weather here, of course, but true seasons are locked to their respective zones. The alliance has always existed in a purgatory-like bubble of imperceptible fluctuations, the downside of living in half-shadow beneath permanent cloud cover. They get rain sometimes, occasionally windstorms, and on a good day, a nice calm mist.

There's also the meteor showers, but they're not much of anything, compared to what's up in Candy Constellation. 

Mir Falspar slides away the rings of a blackout curtain, and steps out to meet the next trial that awaits him.

He did pick something up to eat along the way. An apple. Because the medic threatened twice to dart him and drag him back if he didn’t at least try to follow through with their prescribed routine, and he doesn't want to invoke their ire, regardless if he currently has a promising head start at running.

Three meals, a full cycle of sleep, somewhat adequate breaks and not just envisioning the idea of doing any of it while he patrols. It reignites the flame of tension in his chest. Falspar doesn’t need all that, really, truly, built in the image of species meant to survive the isolation of space, to persist despite absence, to endure. He just...

He can't risk losing any more time to the roiling undertow of unconsciousness, and it does, admittedly, feel less awful to function this way. In... A healthy. Manner. His muscles aren’t wrung up in agony over the idea of sitting in place for five minutes, and the back of his head doesn’t feel like it’s been smashed against a rock several times. 

It’s still there, though. The disquiet of stress. Small flickers of unease, popping like sparks in his blood. The subconscious hitch that comes with every few steps, like he needs to double back, and start again. Fangs caught in his cheek, worrying and working away at nothing. But it's—lighter than it was. He can take a full breath, and breathe it out smooth. Clean, and calm.

His arm isn’t quite so numb.

The previous… week. Hesitantly, if it can really be called just that—pans out to reveal itself as one long, incomplete blur, prior to his abrupt confinement. The days smear together like fresh paint, muddied in some areas and charitably abstract in others. He doesn’t want to recall it, exactly. Those little details, like splinters under his skin.

Because he knows it was. Panicky. Rough. A maelstrom of paranoia eating him alive, slamming him to the floor and crushing, crushing, breaking under a strain that just wouldn’t abate, that couldn't escape his hard-buckled grasp as he fought to pull it down with him. 

Don't you think, Arthur had said, dazzling and magic, lit beneath the glaring beam of a false spotlight and a shadow that almost moved in time with each precise counterstep, it's about time we had a new general?

Because what was he supposed to say, in the face of such an—an. An offer? It had all been out of the blue. It had felt staged, and then it had felt like the encroaching shift a bad dream, and then suddenly it was all so very real and bright and dangling there above his hands, ringing, waiting, and he shut down before his body moved forward and his mind didn’t.

He couldn’t just—take it. That's obscene. That gemstone. This kind of position. He—

He still had so much to do. He had loose ends to be tied. He had a life, he thought, that was never meant for more than this, but what if it—it could be? Should it be? What would he be, if not the necessary sacrifice to the safety of others? What would he become, untethered and unspoiled from his granted purpose?

Who would you become, his mind mutters, disgusted and solemn in its judgement, and Mir Falspar...

He couldn’t figure out how to face him now, of all times, to this sudden and desolate end. Not yet. Not like this. Not when there was a burning crater amidst the salted fields of common ground, corroding away into nothing. Not when Falspar was so sure that if he opened his mouth and used his voice, tried to speak up past the film of anger and apathy, it was going to break on him, and he was going to break, and do something horrible, and cry. 

I’m sorry, is what he remembers thinking to the darkness, frozen there between the wall and his bed, arm crushed to his side as he stared at the fraying edges of the rug and rough, diminutive bumps in the grout. Lit, eerily, from the crack under the door. Blistering with icy numbness, with cold needles and teeth. The blank paper pages curling from where they'd scattered over sticks of graphite, and pen tips, and tightly sealed ink, watching as they slowly solidified into stone. Broken bits of gravel, chipping off the walls. Glinting, winking, warning. 

Footsteps. There were footsteps in the hall. She was coming. I’m sorry. The shudders wracked through him, and he swears he heard it. The Mirror twinkling. The crack widening. Again. Tink. And again. Snap. And again. I’m sorry. He was so sure. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I'm so sorry. I didn’t tell you any of it. Because it’s meaningless. But I’m sorry, and now I’m going to die. 

He catches himself on a wet, reedy gasp, wedging clean out of the thought with a pop. He lived—Clearly. Maybe not so clearly. Because he doesn’t know when that was, exactly. Doesn’t know if it was wholly real, or another apparition made up of all the wriggling terrors that squish underneath his feet.

But scaring himself off with that is, sort of, counterproductive.

If he closes his eyes, and he remembers to control himself, then that brilliant, sparkling gem is still there waiting for him. Suspended in time, where it’s safe to watch. Still resting in the palm of a pristine white glove, glowing a shade of yellow so bright it makes his head hot, and his mouth cotton, and his thoughts melt away. Dragato’s sweet voice is still chattering on, growing soft with concern, and then loud, and blurry, and painful. A dream, so vivid, of choking on darkness and water and Dark, drowning him out, only to wake beside the medic with dirt in his hair and a certainty that moments ago, he was already well past gone.

You’re weak, Cera had told him, straightforward and unsparing of any delicacies, and I don’t mean that as a manner of prowess. I’ve never seen someone in such an extreme state of fatigue; this is no way to perform your duties. It’s a wonder the Mirror hasn’t declared this some violation of nature and forced you to reset—Reflections don’t have the luxury of existing in a critical state this long. We don’t often get the chance to bounce back from these things. Without intervention, you’d have been nothing more than a pile of shards too delirious to pull themselves together for weeks. 

But you’re also very lucky, Falspar. Someone was looking out for you.

And that had almost been worse. The dread bloomed white, rimming his vision, grim and spectral. It’s the part that makes his stomach contort into knots, blood lolling up in his veins and he thinks he could gag on nothing.

Because he. He just doesn’t know how else he would have ended up at the infirmary. He can’t recall what he was doing the preceding day—can only assume he doesn’t want to comprehend it, really, if he was in such ghastly shape. Dragato should have been out on a job. Other reflections don't touch him. Dark wouldn't have dared, and he’d probably start having an allergic reaction even if he did.

Only Arthur would make the rounds of a conscious effort to keep him present in that way. Tethered to the firmament of the world. Alive, and upright, and right where he can see him, leering in self-gratified mischief. Only Arthur would go through the trouble of staving off a real shattering from occurring, because that’s just par for the course. That’s what makes the game so fun for him.

Mir Falspar doesn’t want this added to his debt. Mir Falspar already knows that his wants are not, and have never been, part of the equation.

It’s too much to contend with all at once, so he yields to the medic’s pressure, and sits with his apple instead. When he looks down, he's almost bewildered to see it survive unblemished in his clenched hand. Small battles, small victories. 

He hooks two fingers beneath his mask and pries it up with some level of force. He keeps the band taut, so it won't jostle, and the pressure flattens down his mohawk. Falspar squints up at the hazy sun as he brushes threads of crimson hair out of his face, eyes welling a dreary orange.

Lifting his hand, he bites into the green peel of the fruit, taking it apart in slow, methodical chunks.

It’d be faster to slice it. More efficient and therefore more appealing of an option to him by default, but Cera had taken the liberty of executing that task themself, back in the infirmary. Falspar doesn't cut with anything more than a sigh, and he’s not going to use his hands to tear the fruit in half like some power-crazed fanatic. This is better than nothing. Cera should be appeased, even if he isn’t. He scarcely sees a point in staggering out snacks when he could just combine everything into one nebulous, single dinner. Or something.

He doesn’t really remember if he’d been doing so much as that, last week. 

But it is… Nice. To just be still, and chew, and catch hints of blue among the edges of pale, grayish-green sky.

Mir Falspar’s heart yearns desperately for the thought of nice things. 

He eats down to the core and pops it into his mouth, pinching free the drying stem before spitting the seeds out into his palm. Which is. Kind of gross when he thinks about it and he drops them almost instantly with a flaky, off-kilter shake, struck with the acute urge to care. They scatter across the patchy grass, plinking off round stones. He kicks a thin layer of pale dirt over them, then gets distracted by the gray smear of dust left clinging behind on the bowed metal edge. 

He spares a few meager seconds crouched down, rubbing it out. Then catches himself, wasting time on long-forgotten idiosyncrasies, and puffs out another sigh. 

For now, he shoves his mask back down, and walks on.

The trails lead no where. They split frequently and reconfigured into new paths that end under slabs of crumbled rock, bent gates, and a singular star block. Mir Falspar ignores each, following his own route from time and time again spent pacing the seams of the alliance's designated zone. 

Dark isn’t in the outer ruins—and if he is, he is doing a strangely decent job of concealing it from him. Dark is loud, usually. Loud and obnoxious and alarmingly bad at presenting himself as anything but a target most days, given his tendency to palter and slap big weighty signs over his joke of an elevated status.

Falspar isn’t stupid enough to start calling for him. Though he might answer, albeit through a deliberate show of popping up and strolling leisurely past him, chest puffed out and wings flared like that makes him appear any better than a startled Gordo, doing so out here it would warrant trouble. They keep themselves isolated, yes, but that doesn't account for those who take the risk of coming straight to them.

Mir Falspar's fists tighten in caution.

The Ninja Clan watches the alliance intimately from across their border. Watches Falspar very close, because any appearance of his often means Dark is nearby, and vice versa. He’s not granting them a free invitation to try something, ambling around like he's lost the knight. He is not going to spend the evening plucking throwing knives from his back then dodging the medic’s eye until the wounds reset. 

He is going to find Dark, and when he does, they'll finally—

Mir Falspar stops, cape brushing over middling cobblestones and small twists of metal as the rose fabric settles unevenly across the ground.

He’s going to find Dark and, well. And what?

He hasn’t thought through this completely—has been trying not to get too far ahead of himself before he finds more reasons to stop. Because he—he should stop. Because what. Would they just—sit down to tea and cookies and chit-chat? 

Are they really going to. Just. Talk?

Yes, he answers resolutely, to himself and the absent void where his self-preservation long ago receded into itself and has since not returned, but it doesn’t settle the apprehension bubbling in his chest. He wants to class the hardest part as just finding him, but that’s a lie. That honor is solely reserved for the mountain it is to get Dark to take anything seriously, to be sincere about something. It’s pretending Falspar doesn’t want this to end in anything but shards, shattered, and broken, and more irreparably ruined than they already are.

It means trusting him, when there is no good reason left.

His shoulder, so placid and content since his release, jolts with a harsh twang.

Full-fledged numbness goes shooting down his left arm, the feeling spearing straight to his soul. Falspar curses and clutches it, nearly doubling over as he tries to squeeze the feeling away. His breath quickens, turning thin as it slides through the thin, frantic bite of pins and needles. The world wavers, silvery and too bright, and starts to tip sideways. 

Stupid, stupid, stupid. He shouldn’t be thinking about this now.

He leads with the motion and ducks under a crumbling alcove, still fit with the thirds of a glass window, and presses his back to a wall crawling with roots, encased in the growing afternoon shade. He starts to slide, and fights with the need to hyperventilate. If he doesn’t move, it’ll be fine. If he doesn’t move, nothing will happen.

He blocks out the sound of chipping glass, the way it skates higher and higher like a wail, and counts to himself in rounds of four. His senses kick into overdrive and scatter, struggling to remain alert, scouring for signs of danger over the awful feeling of nerves trying to split apart, of the mirror looming behind him, of cold silver, reflecting the mocking image back at him. 

He strains to hear past footsteps, the footsteps wading through the dark. 

A shadow passes overhead. Mir Falspar blinks, the attention for his surroundings turning keen.

The grass is flattened, the dirt roughed up where his heels are pressing into grooves that don't match. 

He looks up through the dilapidated ceiling. The sky is vast as the sea, streaked with calm threads of cream-colored clouds. 

The whisper of metal pulled against leather is the only warning he gets before a smoke bomb rolls off the lip of the marble, and bursts at his feet. 

They’re already here.

Mir Falspar drops into a tight roll just as a single shuriken plinks off the stone behind him. He springs out into the open air of the hillside, trails of smokey vapor clinging to him and eyes squeezed shut. They fly back open as he stumbles on the landing, coughing out a breathless wheeze at the shock that rattles deep into his shoulder. He keeps clutching it, hand hanging limp and useless as his cape lashes behind him, knuckledusters silent as he barely catches himself back upright and sprints unevenly for another busted up wall. 

Three sharp whistles sound out across the air. Mir Falspar dives for cover as another round of blades go whistling over his head, nicking a strand of dark red from his mohawk. He sucks in a hard breath as he crashes into the dirt, gravel digging into his side. His shoulder aches, tremors rolling through him, but it’s nothing. It's nothing. He doesn’t have time to be dealing with this. He lays there, half sprawled and gasping on air, and listens as hard as he can.

Silence paints itself over the clearing, falsely serene. 

Mir Falspar spares a few moments more of panic, and then clamps down, ripping into the meat of it, shredding the feeling, a hidden snarl pulling back on his face as he tells himself this is a stupid way to die.

He's back. The spiked prongs spring out from his knuckledusters with a clean shnk, and slowly, letting go of his shivering arm, left hand unable to clench in a complete fist, Mir Falspar rises to his feet to survey his attackers.

Three ninjas, dressed in various shades of off-white, watch him from across the wiry grass. The hillside twinkles in the sunlight, littered with glints of iridescent glass and strewn pieces of marble. One of the ninjas discreetly tugs aside their cowl and lifts a hollow reed to their lips.  

Mir Falspar ducks back down just as a blow dart flies at him. More knives bounce uselessly off the pale bricks, musical in sound.

“What do you want,” Mir Falspar shouts at them, and it splinters, echoing off in random directions. Admittedly, he's finding himself more irritated in this exact moment than afraid. He peeks over the wall slower this time. A second dart pings off his mask, and he suppresses the flinch.

This brand of concentrated antagonism is always set aside for him, in particular. He knows why, but that's not what particularly matters here.

“You’re trespassing on the alliance’s grounds,” he snaps, vitriolic. Again.

The first two ninjas, a Moonja and Bio Spark, each glance to the one in the middle, the shortest, with a chalky gray hood and dull green eyes. They step forward, sandals silent on the ground, and Mir Falspar immediately starts to growl. The sound kicks out of him without thought, motoring on down the hill.

“We’d like an audience with the realm’s heir,” the small ninja says, volume fortressed on an air of confidence. It's a bold request to be making, but unoriginal, especially for the Ninja Clan. They scan the grounds, obviously hoping he’s in earshot. “We have something of interest we'd be thrilled to discuss with him.”

So do I, Mir Falspar thinks, bitingly sardonic about it, and only growing further incensed at the notion. “That’s not happening.”

He cracks his knuckles, left hand curling shakily over the right. He can play up the intimidation factor, if he has to. "Five seconds." 

“Perhaps you’d like to bear as a witness,” the ninja hedges, voice slipping higher, and abruptly they seem younger than Mir Falspar would like, making unruly offers and poking at him like that. New member, maybe.

Which. Is not something Arthur is going to like.

This time, Mir Falspar takes full stock of what’s around him. Rubble, rocks, and the ruins, always the ruins, but that’s more than enough. 

“We can have it arranged,” they call out, just a little louder. The other two shrink back, turning fretful. 

Trespassing, he wants to remind them. Courtesy does not apply.

With his right hand, Falspar stoops down to grab hold of a solid marble wedge, larger than his fist and embedded halfway into the ground. The surface is slick with fine dust.

He’s not going to heed anything they say, because the last time he honored the idea of an uneasy truce he took several needles straight to the arm and Dark would just not shut up about it—and moreover, refused to comprehend that yes, this did mean they were leaving the mansion before star-blasted Gobbler showed up, because Mir Falspar wasn't that far off from a tranquilizer-induced coma and Dark had already had two attempts on his life, someone was probably going to try a third. 

Dragato wasn’t happy they were leaving, either. No one was happy. Least of all the pile of shards left in his wake.

It takes all of a second to pry the rock loose with a small grunt, and in a flash of movement, lob it straight at their heads. The small ninja jolts and falls backwards, breaking their little triad as the other two go scattering at the sight of marble tearing loose a chunk of earth before them. Mir Falspar already has another scarily sizable rock in hand and flings it before they can recover enough to rain knives upon him. 

It lands several feet away from a cloud of petals, the delicate pink swept away in an invisible gust as the Moonja vanishes from sight. Mir Falspar’s aim is off. His left arm gives a few weak spasms, the feeling slowly returning with a faint buzz to his fingertips.

He picks up another rock. Accuracy doesn’t matter much when the force alone is enough to shatter someone on impact. One of them just has to get unlucky. 

The Bio Spark flees as well. The ninjas, when faced with a penalty as harsh as his, often turn back from fights. Because like the Mir GSA, they’ve lost a lot of members in the lightworld, and were forced to adapt under the new constraints.

They're a scarce group. But unlike the alliance, most of them stayed. 

The last remaining ninja scrambles to their feet and reaches back for their katana, even as Mir Falspar rises up as well and steps over the wall, weaves past a fallen pillar, and starts towards them with a practiced, predatory silence. Their grip fumbles, going panicked when the space cuts down to only a few paces more in a handful of short seconds. Close enough to see the grooves of a mock star carved into their headband, to catch the flicker of Mir Falspar’s pupils through his visor, and only then do they turn their back on him and try to bail.

A fist draws back with a rush of air.

But Mir Falspar stops, just shy of the range he needs to lunge forward and seal off their escape. 

He watches them run, a blot of monochrome fabric that stands out a shade too dim among the rest of the blanched landscape, knowing well there’s still time to pursue, and that he can overtake them before they hit the border of slender trees and gain grounds again to argue that he’s the one overstepping. He could shatter them instantly. It will all be in the mirror's hands, then.

Yet he doesn't move to kill the ninja, like he should, like his job plainly demands of him. 

It’s only him they were threatening, he reasons, and much to their chagrin they didn’t even land an actual hit. 

Dark’s not out here. He's checked. There’s no one he needs to be guarding. There’s no one he’ll have to lay his life down for again, if he takes up the offer he’s been dreading to consider how much he might actually need, if he's going to. If he's going to change anything.

He could rise beyond this dreary routine. He has spent so long dismissing the thoughts of what he isn’t allowed to have, and half that thinking he still had a chance to try for it anyway, because what was the harm?

But not like this. He never thought it was going to be like this.

So he watches the ninjas disappear on the horizon, wondering if he’ll still be around to greet them when they inevitably come back. 

–

“You work very hard,” the medic had told him, just after he’d first woken up in that sterile, silent room, and tried not to let the fear in his chest explode outwards in a violent, deadly blaze. “Some would think it’s too hard.”

There had been the taste of something strange sticking to his tongue. Sharp, and filmy, and he had latched to it with mounting, incredulous horror, the dread writhing under his teeth as he was convinced it must of been from blood, old blood, and he didn’t know whose.

His mask was gone. His weapons were missing. He flexed and reflexed his fingers and nothing triggered.

There'd been other problems. 

“That doesn’t matter,” Mir Falspar had answered instantly, bulldozing past the soft core of their point. Too busy shoving down everything to divert towards a means of escape. There was a vent on the ceiling. That seemed unlikely. There was a door, with an opaque window, and a round handle, the medic's lank form situated deftly between it and him. He could dive for it, but. But.

Cera moved. Hands unwinding from their robes. Holding something sharp and glassy, and perfectly at ease. If the medic got any closer he was going to crawl under the cot and live there for the rest of his life.

Hah, Mir Falspar had thought. Ahahha. Because he didn't know how to laugh, and the hysteria was making his throat convulse in a way distinctly unlike one.

He could—rank. Pull rank. Rank. And he'd opened his mouth and remembered none of it mattered, because the medic can gainsay anyone they manage to wrestle into the infirmary. Because he was in the infirmary.

But—no, what if this was Arthur? And this was a test? Arthur was here and he was pretending to be the medic. Stars, why. Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he do that? He had every reason to do that.

Black crawled up his vision. Mir Falspar was disoriented, and stressed beyond stress. He had been in an entirely new dimension of living: that of being ninety-percent sure he was dying. 

Cera had shifted towards analyzing him with an alarming degree of scrutiny, and maybe some concern. It was very un-Arthur like.

“I—” What had they said? Work. He had to get back to work. “Have to. It’s my job to keep everyone safe.”

“Everyone but yourself,” Cera countered, calmly, and seemed rather displeased when Mir Falspar only answered it with a puzzled and vaguely despondent look.

That initial set of hours had been a frenzy.

The adrenaline faded, gradually, and exhaustion crowded back in. He felt like a ceramic pot that had been smashed and put back together with soap instead of glue. Structural integrity deeply comprised. Every movement was lagging a step behind and the floor was looking like a very inviting place to take a brief respite from all this tension. Not to sleep. He couldn't sleep. She would be there, and it would be worse.

Examinations were happening. Mir Falspar doesn't like being touched, but the medic had narrated as they went along, and his fuzzy thoughts had liked that, had clung to the background noise as each hand was flexed and light shone into his eyes.

He flinched when they'd pried at his glove. Clutched his arm and growled as Cera concluded there needn't be any more tests for now. A scout was called by, feather cheerfully bobbing in their hat as they stood at firm attention. The report was sent off to Nonsurat. Mir Arthur didn’t pop out of thin air and reveal this was all an elaborate ruse to freak Falspar out. 

Eventually, Cera had brewed tea and conjured a clipboard into being. They kept asking him things, and scribbling, and asking, and scribbling, and offering him slices of melon. It had seemed insignificant, and Mir Falspar had wanted nothing more than to rip the door off the hinges and run out into the forest of his responsibilities, so numerous and overgrown that there would be no possible reason great enough to lure him back, to free him from the maze. 

Around the third time, Cera stopped idly encouraging him to eat and instead announced they were throwing in half a banana and going to extend his stay if he didn’t start. 

Mir Falspar ate. And sipped his tea. Stared at the rind, and only then did it actually occur to him that he was hungry, and that he didn’t know what day it was supposed to be, or if the sun was even up, and if anyone was guarding the base. He didn’t know how long he’d been in there. The clock was on the medic’s desk, ticking, ticking, and turned away. He’d been losing time, the whole time. 

Arthur was going to be mad.

That had been round two of panicking. Cera made some more tea. Falspar ended up back on the cot with a plate of fruit on his lap that he wasn’t allowed to remove until he finished it, like some kind of childish torture method he’s still incredibly mad at for having essentially worked.

Through it all, there had been an absence of follow-through for his shoulder, and he hadn’t even noticed. Cera’s attention always fluttered away from it. The alliance had long since collectively learned not to acknowledge it, so it wasn’t peculiar. He didn’t realize it had been part of a plan. They'd been working his defenses, searching for weak points, and waiting for him to let one slip.

“You have a sharp eye,” they’d been saying, about three nights into his detainment. “Tell me, how is his doing these days?”

Mir Falspar froze. They’d been talking about Dark. Falspar, more specifically, had been on the verge of throwing himself into another one-sided lecture about him. He's not some big shot prince. Everyone just thinks they can play to his ego and it'll get them a leg-up on someone else. It's meaningless. He's not special. There were four cards in his hand and Cera had three. A game of go-fish, slowly being forgotten before them.

Dark is always going to conjure up specific questions like that. The knight had gone around flagrantly pushing his scar as part of his image for years. Left a slash in his visor, just to prove it. Insisted that it stay. That it keeps him looking just as cool as he is on the inside.

Mir Falspar's expression flattened into a strange frown. The acknowledgement hadn't sit right. 

“How should I know that,” he’d said to Cera, and meant it, bristling a little because he didn’t, and had never been asked to weigh in on the matter before. “That's not my job.” And it should have been as simple as that, and the conversation could swivel back around to who had more eights, and whether or not Falspar could trade a victory into a getting out of there sooner.

He should’ve made something up, in hindsight. Played at being ignorant about it, and not genuinely lost. Exemplify what his counterpart likes to be instead. Clueless. Cowardly. Foolish. Because he—

He doesn’t think about Dark’s eye, usually. 

He doesn’t like to think about Dark’s scar, because every time he does it feels like something about it is wrong, like he’s mixed up the story with something else. His head starts pounding, a weight probing at the side of his temple, and it feels dangerously close to admitting to some kind of failure.

And it doesn’t make sense, because Dark always had it. Mir Falspar should be more than used to it by now, but sometimes he feels like he didn’t truly become important until after she’d left. After Garlude snapped, and tried to gouge it out, for nothing more than to prove a point. Everyone had certainly been talking about it then.

And Falspar has—Had. Complicated feelings about it. They're worth nothing now.

He doesn’t really think about that day, either. He had carried out his purpose, and carried Dark back with him, blood smudged on his hands from wounds that were meaningless, that would reset, that were nothing, too superficial to be worth remembering. He just had to make it back to Arthur, and things would be fine, and then he did, and they were.

Everything had turned out just fine.

And still, there are those brief moments where he doesn’t quite catch himself, and time seems to slip, skip a beat and suddenly he’s there staring blankly at the thin little line that tilts diagonal across Dark’s left eye, and is gripped by the unshakable idea that he should be doing something he’s forgotten, that he’s left something behind. 

That it’s wrong. That he has it wrong. Something’s wrong.

But that has nothing to do with how Dark’s eye is, or isn’t. It’s not his job to ask after it, or check on it, or start fretting around and worrying when all he really needs to do is prevent the next act of harm, and he’s no longer foolish enough to think he could just go out of his way to do any of that under the table, anyway. 

He and Dark don't actually talk to one another. They just throw things, and find out what sticks.

“That didn't stop you before,” Cera had replied, and something about that wasn’t just infuriating, it was still wrong. "I though maybe you'd both discussed it."

“Things used to be different,” Mir Falspar insisted, shoulders hiking up, hackles rising. Defenses, slamming back into place. “And we don’t talk about it.”

Cera let him win that battle. Not at the game of cards.