Archive of Our Own

Saturn had been watching Jupiter leave for four and a half billion years.

Alright, maybe not in the literal sense, definitely not in the literal sense. He’d only watched Jupiter leave him, truly leave him without knowing if he’d return, once. But that one time still liked to reappear in his nightmares, and he hadn’t told Jupiter that, hadn’t told anyone, because acknowledging it meant admitting that this had hurt him more than he wanted to reveal, because it meant telling others that he needed help rather than offering it or hiding it.

He couldn’t say how many times he’d done exactly that before, though surely not many.

And it had always been with Jupiter, only Jupiter, his other half in every way but physically.

Jupiter was always there, warm in the orbit beside his own, his gravitational pull as constant as Saturn’s own core spinning within. But there were different kinds of presence, and somewhere in the grinding weight of millennia passing them by, Jupiter’s had changed. Of course it had all started after he’d crossed the Asteroid Belt and destroyed those rocky planets, after they’d ejected X and chose to hide it rather than coming clean, because of course it had, he would be truly insane to think nothing would change from that, but Saturn had thought they’d eventually heal.

That they would grow just as close as before, that he would have Jupiter by his side forever.

And then he’d started noticing, and he’d never quite stopped.

At first, it was just searching glances in the direction of the Inner Solar System, like Jupiter was still haunted by the ghosts of the planets he’d destroyed. Then it was only compounded by the idea Uranus had given him to keep the Asteroid Belt in check and how Jupiter had picked up the burden and just kept it orbit after orbit, year after million years. As if keeping enough asteroids from hitting the inner planets might balance the scale that’d tipped the moment he’d changed his orbit and destroyed what he had.

(The moment he’d changed his orbit for him.

That was the part nobody said out loud, not even Uranus during his most cutting accusations, not even the Sun during his worst breakdowns. Jupiter had moved inward to be closer to Saturn. The Grand Tack, that catastrophic shift that had destroyed dozens of early rocky planets and scattered debris fields across the system and ultimately ejected Planet X into the void, had started because of him. Jupiter had wanted to close the gap between their orbits, and the universe had answered with carnage and the death of forming planets and guilt, and Saturn had stood right beside him while the consequences rippled outward and told himself that it wasn’t his guilt to hold, that he hadn’t been the one to move.

He’d just been the reason. The one who’d said Great idea! Hurry, before he—)

Saturn had stood beside him through every moment after, stretches of time too vast to reference with anything more than years. He’d said we’ll have to live with that and then he’d lived with it, watched Jupiter crumble and put himself back together over and over again, told himself that being supportive was enough, that being the one who kept reassuring Jupiter, who never once said I helped, I was there too, my gravity was half the force that threw him, and you did it because you loved me and that makes all of this my fault in a way neither of us can fix was enough.

But he knew it hadn’t been, not even close.

And now he was floating alone in rogue planet territory, his rings—the halo above his head he’d loved for millions of years and now couldn’t figure out how to feel about—shedding ice and dimming by degrees, the void around him so cold he could feel it in his teeth and his hands and every inch of skin. He had no idea how long he’d been out here, drifting in the same spot while Jupiter had already left him behind, had thrown himself into saving a million planets like duty alone would keep him from cracking apart now that they’d learned some of the forming planets had survived.

When Jupiter saves a million planets, then we’ll forgive him.

SIMP had taken the number those furious little rocky planets had flung at Jupiter like an impossible demand and turned it into marching orders for everyone: a million each, separate directions. Saturn had watched the other planets scatter into the dark like debris from a collision and he’d thought I should go too, and then he’d thought I can’t move. And then he hadn’t.

(He twisted the rose gold ring on his left ring finger, the one Jupiter had given him after their first billion years, had kissed stars knew how many times, the one that reminded him of Jupiter’s hair when it caught the light, and pressed his thumb hard against the band until the olive skin beneath went white. I love you, he thought, but there was no answer and—)

He’d stayed. He shouldn’t have.

The million-planet count (for each of them, stars, that was seven million planets) wasn’t going to fill itself.

Not to mention that SIMP’s patience ran on a fuse so short he could practically hear it sizzling; he’d seen how she’d looked at Sedna when the dwarf planet had talked back, a look that said I will remove you from the equation, and he hadn’t thought much of it then past that she had a startling personality. Now, with the rest of the planets away, farther than they’d ever been, that thought kept returning over and over again. But every time he thought about going, his core seized, sharp as a splinter of ice driven through him. So instead, he’d just stood here and watched his rings shed ice into the void and hated that he couldn’t even manage to cry about it.

He cried about everything: he’d cried when Astrodude told him what an anniversary was, he’d cried about the revelation with his rings (a revelation he still hadn’t fully puzzled out), he’d cried when Jupiter had finally returned and he’d thought things might be better. Now, when it might be warranted, there was absolutely nothing, and the irony of that wasn’t lost on him so much as it sat on his chest like dead weight alongside the thing eating him alive, second by second.

He swept his hair behind one ear, then the other, the motion automatic and elegant even when nobody was watching, and let out a long, pitchy sigh into the empty dark.

The strands laid against his shoulders caught the thinnest light from a distant star cluster, and he noticed with a vague kick in his core that the gold was duller than it should have been. The pale gold at the ends had lost its shine, the whole fall of it hanging in uneven, too-loose waves that would have horrified him not that long ago and now just was evidence of how thoroughly everything had come apart.

Everything.

His own voice kept coming back first, and that was the worst part, the sound of himself lecturing someone else about loyalty while his own hands were filthy with the results of it. You went against every planet in the Solar System for your own selfish reasons! I am very disappointed in you!

He’d said it and stood there with his chin up and his voice steady like he had any right at all.

Saturn had lashed out at Uranus because it was easier than lashing out at himself.

And then Uranus’s response, the one that’d cracked his composure clean in half: the contempt in his face, the hurt underneath it that Saturn hadn’t been perceptive enough, or brave enough, to see in the moment but could now, could see every time he replayed the memories for the millionth time. Oh, that’s rich coming from you, Saturn. Planet X told me how you also played a part in his expulsion!

Saturn had just stood there with nothing to say to make it better.

He’d called the ejection a mistake, but the word had collapsed under what it was trying to carry, and he’d known it even as he said it. He’d never even apologized, not in any way that counted, sure, he’d tried, but trying without result was worth barely anything at all, and nothing in the face of what he was apologizing for. He’d apologized to his moons and given them the action they needed to see, so why couldn’t he do that for X? Jupiter had, he knew that. He’d told him, and even more than that there was a quality in the few interactions he’d seen between them since they’d left the Solar System, not the bitter hatred and need for revenge that had been there not so long ago but a careful truce of sorts Saturn could only look at from the side.

He was just doomed, it seemed, to be part of things… but never quite enough to matter.

He wound a strand of hair around his index finger, tugged it free, and stared at a distant smear of stars. The chain at his throat pressed cold against his collarbone; everything metal had gone cold out here, even the gold, which was supposed to be warm, had always been warm. He should really take it off. Consider it a part of the Saturn he’d left behind in the Solar System.

He was a new Saturn now, and he had to be.

But.

“What are you doing?”

Saturn flinched at the abrupt question, arms reflexively rising to curl over his chest even as he recognized the voice that’d interrupted him. Recognized the gravity curling on the edge of his awareness, a gravity that’d burned itself into his dreams and his waking hours alike. “Brooding,” he managed in response, keeping his eyes on the stars and attempting a lighter tone than his entire being wanted to assume. “It’s gothic. I’m thinking of taking it up as a hobby.”

“I’d give up. You’re terrible at it.” X’s huff might have been amused, but Saturn couldn’t read it properly. “Too much gold, and far too dramatic.”

Saturn’s nails pressed into his palm, his thumbnail digging into the underside of his wedding band, and forced himself to turn around.

What he saw was exactly what he’d expected, except for every part that wasn’t.

Planet X stood several feet away with his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, and the first thing Saturn registered wasn’t his face but the coat itself, a heavy midnight-blue overcoat with black fur lining at the hood and the lapels and the hem, falling to his knees. It swallowed his entire frame and made him look smaller than he really was. Saturn had to stop himself from saying that aloud, knowing X very much wouldn’t appreciate the candid words.

Before he knew it, he started studying every detail of his appearance like he was staring at a crime scene.

(And he was, but he wasn’t, because X didn’t deserve for that to be all he was.)

An asteroid floated at his shoulder, one that gave him a brief flare of recognition but nothing else; Saturn moved on from it after a single moment, the blue-painted face making him feel vaguely uneased. X’s midnight-blue hair fell over his shoulders in messy tangled waves, darker than he remembered, and when Saturn’s gaze snagged on the pale X-shaped scar, one line bisecting his left eyebrow and extending down towards his cheekbone, the other cutting across the bridge of his crooked nose and up towards his hairline, his gut twisted hard enough that he had to force his attention somewhere else, which turned out to be his eyes, which turned out to be worse.

They were black from edge to edge, no whites left.

They hadn’t been that way before. Not when he’d returned, when they’d been midnight blue and sharp as a blade, constantly scanning, filled with anger and resentment, missing nothing. They’d still held the brightness of sunlight during all of the years X had clung to the system’s edge through what Saturn could only think of as sheer stubbornness, refusing to fully leave even after Jupiter and Saturn had ejected him and told the lie that made the Sun tell him Good riddance.

Maybe that made him a better planet than either of them would ever be, or maybe he just always had been.

His shoulders were hitched up in the posture of permanent guard, his gravity pulled in close to his body like armor; condensed, personal, a warning Saturn didn’t need words to translate. His expression was so blank it had to be costing him effort; a tiny furrow sat between his brows, one Saturn would have missed if he hadn’t been looking so closely, and a tension held in his sharp jaw that wasn’t anger. It sat on his angular features like a bruise that hadn’t finished forming. Beneath the open coat, Saturn caught the dark blue of his shirt, sleeves pushed up to his elbows even in the cold, and the practical black of his boots and jeans.

He dressed like someone who very much expected what it was like out here.

Saturn, in his white ruffled V-neck and skinny black pants and heels, dressed like someone who’d expected to be looked at and was now learning what it felt like when no one was around to do it and just how impractical it was. (Very.)

Stop looking, he told himself, and dragged his eyes over every detail a second time anyway.

And then again.

Saturn had spent four and a half billion years not looking at him or thinking of him, and now he couldn’t stop, and he didn’t know what to do with that except stand right where he was and keep staring.

“You’re staring.” Planet X’s voice was thin and annoyed. “Think you’ve done that long enough, or do you need another few million years?”

“I’m—!” Saturn coughed and swept his hair over one shoulder in one quick motion, the bracelets at his wrist sliding with a chime that sounded too loud in the void around them. “I’m observing, darling. Not staring! There’s a difference.” X arched one eyebrow, judgment clear enough in the expression. Saturn tugged at a strand of dim, tangled gold. “Your—ah, your eyes are fully black. When did that happen?”

“Gradually. It finished not that long ago.” Saturn watched as he shifted his weight forward onto his toes in his black boots, rocking slightly like he couldn’t decide whether to come closer or bolt. “What? Does it bother you? Against your delicate sensibilities?”

“No,” he protested, “it suits you. Very menacing. Very—X?”

Saturn sent him his best attempt at a smile.

X just stared at him for a moment before huffing, “Thanks, I think.”

He drifted a little closer, his coat furling around his knees. The cold that radiated from him hit Saturn through the thin white fabric of his shirt, goosebumps climbing the olive skin above his collarbones where the deep V-neck left him exposed. He crossed his arms and told himself off for not materializing a better outfit, not even acknowledging that this far from the Sun, still adjusting to the pull of rogue planet territory, he didn’t have the strength for it. “You look different too, you know.”

“I do?”

He knew his rings were a little thinner thanks to the lovely orbit change debacle, but was it that easy to see?

“You’re not as…” X tipped his head to the side, eyes tracking over his entire frame just like Saturn had just done to him. “Bright. Haven’t you noticed?”

Saturn uncrossed his arms, feeling stripped bare.

“No,” he said, defensive even knowing he’d just recognized a dullness in his gold himself not that long ago. “I feel perfectly fine! Perhaps your eyes are too adjusted to the dark. You’re dulling me yourself.”

X’s mouth twitched up in one corner. “I’m dulling you? Yeah. No. It’s the lack of sunlight, darling.” Saturn had to bite back a wince at the sharpness of the stolen word. “That’s what being a rogue planet means. You get these—” He motioned to his newly pitch-black eyes. “, and you start running colder.”

Saturn’s hand went to his hair instinctively, fingers wrapping around several loose curls that laid over his shoulder, just as dull as they’d looked before.

“I’m going to look like you?”

“Stars above, no need to make it sound like an insult.” X’s mouth pulled sideways into neither smirk nor sympathy, landing somewhere in the uncomfortable space between them. His crooked nose caught the starlight at an angle that sharpened the bridge of it. “But yes. You’re being starved of sunlight, but right now your core’s still running hot, fighting the change. You’re too warm to make the full transition yet.”

“You’re too warm,” Saturn muttered childishly, fixing the lay of his hair.

X raised an eyebrow, the scar pulling with the motion. “I run cold. It’s kind of my thing. Ice giant, remember? Or maybe you don’t. You did always seem so keen to forget, Saturn.”

He frowned, shoulders hiking up.

The words hit exactly where X probably wanted them to, and Saturn wanted to be annoyed but all he could muster was an aching hurt deep in his core.

“Stop—! Just… did you—did you need something from me?”

“I want you to stop deflecting.” X pulled his coat tighter around himself, the fur at the lapels catching against his fingers, and Saturn had seen that gesture before, during that brief terrible time when X had taken Jupiter’s orbit and Saturn had been too ashamed to look at him directly, and the familiarity of it landed like a slap. “SIMP asked me to check on you, again. You’ve been in the same spot for three days, and you do know you’re supposed to be following your duties, right?” His mouth pulled sideways, his default blankness cracking briefly into what might have been frustration or grief before it smoothed again. “Stars, Jupiter’s thrown himself into them like it’s the only thing he has left.”

Saturn’s hands closed, his stacked rings pressing into the palm of his hand.

(Didn’t that feel true.)

“I’ve been thinking.” His eyes fixed on one particular distant star.

(Were his golden eyes duller too? He’d seen the sheen of the other planet’s eyes and been too cowardly to check his own. He probably had the strength to materialize a mirror, but—Saturn didn’t want to see. Not really.)

“About what?”

X sounded curious.

Saturn couldn’t imagine he truly was. It was him, after all, nothing special. Just the gas giant who’d said On it! when Jupiter had called for help and then used his gravity to hurl a screaming planet into the void. Just the gas giant who’d argued against going after X. Do you want more planets to be destroyed? Who’d then stood there and lied to the Sun about it and told Jupiter they’d just have to live with what they’d done. Just the gas giant who still couldn’t speak to his own husband when he knew Jupiter would probably understand.

(What if he didn’t, though? What if—?)

His jewelry had been a part of him for so long. It’d been so important, because—

Why? Because it gave him something to use as a distraction, something to use as part of the performance of Saturn.

(He hated it. He hated it more than he wanted to admit, because if the jewelry was part of a performance then what was underneath it? Saturn had been avoiding that question for roughly four and a half billion years and he was not about to stop now, not alone and definitely not with X watching him like that.)

“Yoo-hoo. Still awake in there?”

Saturn’s shoulders pulled towards his ears involuntarily, his earrings brushing the collar of his shirt. He caught himself and forced his shoulders back down. It didn’t really help like he wanted it to. He still felt small, and Saturn wasn’t supposed to feel small; that was the whole point of the gold and the careful elegance, to take up space as Jupiter did, except Jupiter did it with mass and Saturn did it with presence and right now his presence was failing him spectacularly.

“Uranus called me a hypocrite for getting onto him about helping you,” he finally managed.

His voice was stripped of its usual music.

He’d had versions of this speech prepared over the time X was conducting his revenge, an apology of any sorts for the planet he’d failed most, and absolutely not a one of them had accounted for how X’s silence would sit against him, enormous and completely immune to charm. Every rehearsed line felt false before it even left his throat.

So instead he just spoke.

“He was right. I stood there lecturing him about loyalty and selfishness while still carrying a four-and-a-half-billion-year-old secret, and I told him I regretted what I did to you, but I didn’t—” He trailed off, ducking his head and curling his fingers together. “I’ve never apologized. Never directly to you.”

X shifted in place. His gravity was pulled in tight, how it always was, close to his body like a coat buttoned to the throat, and Saturn’s own gravity, which had been reaching sideways towards Jupiter’s absence for hours, for days, maybe longer, that stupid reflexive reach for a warmth that wasn’t there anymore, started to reach for him instead.

Saturn’s jaw tightened when he felt X’s gravity recoil from the mere attempt, his eyes visibly narrowing.

“You’re good at that, you know,” X drawled. “Have you been practicing?”

He hadn’t moved physically, but Saturn swore it felt like he’d taken several steps back.

Hands in the pockets of his coat, the black fur lining bunched at the lapels, his weight settled on his heels like he could stand there for another four and a half billion years and not mind, and maybe he could; he’d done it before. “Confessing. The delivery, the timing.” One hand came out of his pocket in a short, economical gesture, nothing like Saturn’s sweeping motions, and pointed at him once, then tucked back. “That little dip of the head, like a sly little addition to the words. It’s a skill.” He paused. Saturn could feel those black eyes fixed on him with a focus that made the skin prickle beneath every ring on every finger. “And we both know you could make an apology sound sincere whether you meant it or not.”

Saturn opened his mouth and then immediately closed it, eyes stinging.

His fingers found the chain at his collar and pressed it flat against his skin, and for a terrible second he couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wouldn’t prove X right. Because X wasn’t wrong; X was never wrong about other people, that was the whole problem with X, he watched and he watched and he saw things you didn’t even know you were showing. Saturn could hear himself even now. The musical lilt buried under the flatness. The careful arrangement of vulnerability, angled towards X like a monologue turned just enough towards the back row that they’d catch the shine.

He’d been doing it his whole existence.

Making ugly things sound manageable. Telling Jupiter we make things right from now on and meaning we bury this and we never speak of it and eventually the guilt will dull and we will be fine. Saying I know! I guess we’ll… have to live with that about the destruction of forming planets and the ejection of another person into the void, like living with it was just a thing you could decide to do, like it was putting asteroids in order or falling asleep next to the one person you trusted most.

(And Jupiter had believed him. That was the worst part, wasn’t it, not that Saturn had lied, he’d always known he’d lied, but that he’d made the lie sound beautiful enough that Jupiter had trusted it. Had trusted that living with it was something they could manage. And then he’d spent four and a half billion years living with it, alone inside it because Saturn had made it sound like they were carrying the weight together when really Jupiter had been carrying all of it and Saturn had just been standing next to him looking supportive, telling him to pull it together and hurting him more just trying to help him.)

“Then what would you want from me?” Saturn asked.

He caught himself lowering his voice in a desperate sort of plea, and he couldn’t tell if it was real or if it was another layer of the same performance, quietness as sincerity, restraint as proof. He didn’t know anymore. He’d been performing so long that he couldn’t always find where the performance ended and the rest of him started. Wasn’t that so sad.

“If not words, what?”

X looked like he was weighing the question instead of preparing to dismantle it.

“I didn’t say not words.” X rocked once on his heels, that involuntary motion Saturn had never been close enough to notice before, or had just been too busy looking away from to catch. “I said you could fake them. There’s a difference.” The scar above his eyebrow pulled taut when he frowned, pale and slightly raised, evidence of a violence Saturn had been complicit in and never once acknowledged to X’s face. Saturn’s eyes caught on it. “What I’d consider not easy—” X’s voice roughened, and his shoulders hitched up and then dropped, like a shield rising and falling. “Is showing up. Showing up and staying. Not leaving when things get uncomfortable. Or giving up on—”

And then he flinched, a motion that looked like it had caught him off-guard.

Saturn saw it and didn’t know what to do with it.

“Jupiter couldn’t do it,” X abruptly continued, his voice back to its clinical, diagnostic register. “He couldn’t face me. He kept running—into the banishment the Sun gave him, into his guilt, into this whole stars-damned crusade of saving every stray planet he could find.” His mouth pulled back in one corner, fangs flashing. “He’s still running. Even from you.”

Saturn’s gravity pulled sideways on reflex, that same useless pull towards a warmth that wasn’t there, and he yanked it back before X could feel it.

Because he remembered Jupiter brushing past him after he’d come back from the Sun’s imposed banishment and said, Saturn, not now, sorry, and Saturn had accepted it. He’d just stepped aside and let Jupiter walk past him towards duty because that was what Saturn did, that was what he had always done, waited and told himself that eventually Jupiter would turn around.

(He always turned around. He always turned around. Except this time he’d kept walking and Saturn was standing here and his rings were leaving him and he was so, so cold and he couldn’t convince himself to move, and his gravity kept reaching for someone who wasn’t there, and he wanted his husband, and—and Jupiter hadn’t turned around.

He hadn’t turned around.

He hadn’t—)

“He’s loyal,” X said, shrugging. “But he still thinks he deserves to be alone because of what he’s done. And loyalty without presence is just—” He waved one hand, brown fingers cold-knuckled, bare of any adornment, and against Saturn’s clasped gold-stacked hands the contrast was so sharp it looked staged. “Running dressed up as devotion.”

Saturn’s exhale ghosted between them, gone before it formed. “He’s not—!”

The defense rose on instinct, the same reflex that had governed a whole existence of standing between Jupiter and anything that might crack him open, and for the first time Saturn heard himself doing it and thought I sound like a recording. The same words. The same tone. The same reflexive shield thrown up around a person who hadn’t asked for it and maybe didn’t need it and definitely wasn’t here for Saturn to protect right now.

The words died, replaced by yet more.

“He’s just trying to fix things,” he said, smaller, and even as the words came out he could hear how thin the justification was.

“No. He’s trying to outrun what he did.” X’s voice sharpened, and then cut off. Saturn watched him chew at his bottom lip hard enough that the skin whitened, and something in Saturn’s chest flinched before he could stop it. When X spoke again the sharpness was forced level, a control that looked more exhausting than the anger. “Yes, those rocky planets are mad at him. They have a right to it. But a million planets won’t bring back the ones he destroyed. They won’t give me back the—”

The years and years and years and years and years and uncountable years you stole from me.

Saturn could hear the frustrated sentence’s end even with X’s voice cutting out.

“I know,” he whispered.

“Jupiter sure doesn’t. Now he’s convinced he’s going to be like me, and I don’t think we want Jupiter starting on a four and a half billion year revenge scheme.” X shot him a smirk and then lost it before Saturn had a chance to do much more than register it. “He’s run away, and he’s only thinking of himself. Not you, Saturn. You know it.”

Saturn looked down at his wedding band, the rose gold one, the one Jupiter had given him after their first billion years, the one Jupiter had kissed more times than Saturn could count, the one that reminded him of Jupiter’s hair when it caught the light, and could only feel a twisting sense of nausea and an even more horrible one that X was right again.

He pressed his palms flat against his thighs and held them there. His bracelets slid down and settled against each other with a sound that came and went. “I don’t know how to fix this,” he admitted, feeling a million times smaller than he was. “Any of it.” When he lifted his hands, his fingers crept towards his hair with the instinct to sweep it behind one ear, and he caught himself, curling both hands into fists against his thighs instead, nails biting crescents into his palms. “My rings, the guilt, Jupi, you.” There was a new lump in his throat, a familiar one that just kept growing until he felt choked of air by it. “I’ve spent my whole existence being Jupiter’s everything. His best friend. His spouse. His support. The one who stood beside him and told him not to reveal it, because if he did then I might have lost him, and then I did, and he came back but it hasn’t been the same, and I—”

He hadn’t meant to say that.

The words had just come out how his tears usually came out, fast and unbidden, except these were worse because he couldn’t blink them away after. X was hearing every single one of them.

“—and now he’s gone and I don’t—” His next breath shook on the way out and he pressed his teeth together against it. His eyes burned, but nothing fell. These tears weren’t like the usual free-falling he was used to—they sat behind his eyes and refused to fall, heavy and scalding and stuck. Again. “I’ve never lived without him. I don’t know who I am without him.” His shoulders slumped. “And I know that’s pathetic.”

“It’s not pathetic. It’s annoying.”

A laugh tore out of Saturn before he could stop it, high and cracked, so far from how he usually laughed, so far from the warm chiming sound he’d crafted over millennia to soothe and sound perfect, nothing that belonged to the Saturn who performed grace and composure. Saturn’s hand jerked towards his mouth before he caught himself.

“Did you just call me annoying?”

“I’ve been calling you annoying for four and a half billion years.” X uncrossed his arms, rocking once on his heels, that involuntary tic again, and for a second his mouth pulled unevenly, one side lifting without the usual edge behind it, and something turned over in his chest at the sight of it. “You just couldn’t hear me.”

No. He couldn’t. He hadn’t even known to think X was still out there, because Saturn had banished thoughts about him from his own brain, had seen how the guilt strangled Jupiter and known he couldn’t let it do the same to him, and so instead he’d chosen avoidance and falsely letting it go, and where had that gotten him?

“No, I couldn’t,” he said, even if he knew X was making a joke of sorts, “Because I wasn’t looking. Every time I thought of you I made myself stop, because that meant acknowledging what we did.” He reached up and adjusted his dimmer, slightly smaller set of rings with the absent thought of and I did it again. “What I did. What Jupiter did for me that started all of this.”

(For him, his mind repeated just as it had before. Because of him. The Grand Tack had happened because Jupiter had wanted to close the gap between their orbits, had wanted to be closer to Saturn, had crossed the asteroid belt at Saturn’s urging, and Saturn had said great idea, hurry and stood right there while the consequences and Jupiter’s gravity rippled outward and destroyed forming planets and scattered debris and ultimately gave Jupiter and Saturn the ammunition to throw X into the dark, and Saturn had told himself it wasn’t his to carry because he wasn’t the one who’d moved. He’d just been the reason. And the reason had spent all of it draped in gold and standing beside the one who’d done the moving and spent those years telling everyone, including himself, that they were fine.)

“So I pretended the lie was the truth.” His voice cracked on truth, and he pressed through it, thin. “Pretended you’d left for good and never talked about you and tried not to think about and let the time pass. For four and a half billion years.”

X didn’t respond. The silence just stretched and stretched, and for a terrible moment Saturn thought he’d ruined it, said too much or too little, performed when he’d meant to confess or confessed when he should have just stood there and been present the way X had said, the way nobody had done for X, the way Saturn specifically had failed to do since the night they threw him out, because looking away was easier and looking away was what he did best, underneath all the performance and theatrics.

His fists hung in front of his body, knuckles pale. He could feel his core twisting and turning under the weight of every word, and his gravity had gone very still, hovering close to his body how X’s always did. He didn’t know what to do with his hands.

He curled them tighter.

X shifted his weight, exhaling roughly. “I’m almost surprised, Saturn. That wasn’t a performance, was it?”

Saturn’s throat closed.

He blinked hard, twice, and the burning behind his eyes still didn’t fade away or break through.

“So was that your apology? Because if it was, it’s your worst one. Lacks all of your usual performance. Terrible delivery.”

Saturn breathed out what might have been a laugh if his chest weren’t so tight. “That’s because it wasn’t—” But the words died, because explaining that it wasn’t an apology and it wasn’t a performance was the first step towards turning it into one, and he was so tired of the spiral, the endless recursion of sincerity folding back into craft until he couldn’t locate which layer was him and which was the act and whether it mattered. Stars, he’d ruined himself in the process of pushing away his biggest mistake.

“I know,” X said. He tipped his head to the side, black eyes boring into him. “It wasn’t an apology. So try again. Apologize now.” The corner of his mouth turned up. “I’ve got my listening ears on.”

Saturn straightened his spine, forcing himself into standing up, his gait unsteady like it was the first time in a very long time and he wasn’t sure if his legs or his gravity would take it. His wedding band was cold against his skin. His gravity—ever-reaching for an absent Jupiter—went still, completely reined in. He turned his face up to look right into X’s eyes.

(Oh, stars. He was going to have to do this.)

“I’m sorry, X.” His voice came out steadier than he expected, which lasted about two words. “I’m sorry for—for what I did to you, for helping Jupi—Jupiter eject you, for—” His voice seized, and he forced through it, each word pitching higher than the last. “For lying to the Sun. For keeping that lie. I stood right there and told him you’d chosen to leave and explore other solar systems, and I—I knew you were still out there, screaming, getting hit by asteroids, and I lied—”

He pressed his knuckle against his mouth.

(This was the part he was bad at. Setting down every shred of his pride and standing there with nothing between him and the other person’s judgment. He was bad at that, but he was going to try.)

“I’m sorry I called you unlikable,” he continued, his eyes stinging, the tears rising past anything he could control or use, “when you were the only one brave enough to want to tell the truth. You said confess and Jupiter and I refused, and—and you were rightfully angry with us, and I just said you were unlikeable and then I helped throw you into the dark for it, and I spent four and a half billion years pretending you didn’t exist because it was easier than—than this.” He gestured between them with one shaking hand. “And I never came to find you, and I never let Jupiter try. I’m sorry the closest thing you got to remorse from me was nothing but an oh no while you were—”

His voice broke.

Saturn gasped and pressed both hands over his face because the tears had finally decided to show up, coming all at once as they always did with him, sudden and completely undignified, his nose running, his breath hitching in sharp little sounds that were mortifying to hear coming out of his own mouth. His earrings pressed cold against his fingers where his palms covered his cheeks. Planet X stayed quiet while he broke down. Saturn swallowed hard and wiped at his face with the heel of his hand, sniffing. A strand of hair stuck to his damp cheek. “Sorry,” he mumbled through his fingers, pushing the strand away and smearing old mascara or tears (probably both) across his cheekbone. “That was supposed to be—I was trying to be—” He sniffed again, harder. “I’m a mess, I know I’m a mess.”

“It wasn’t bad. Your… apology.” X sounded weirdly startled, like his unexpected and uncontrolled tears had knocked something loose in him that he hadn’t expected to come free. Saturn peered at him through his wet lashes only to find that his hands had come out of his jacket pockets to hang loose at his sides, his expression just that much looser and easier to read. “But wow. That’s a lot of apologies,” he added after a minute or so, his voice holding an edge of forced composure Saturn easily recognized. “Any others up there?”

Saturn sniffed and pushed his hair back from his face, ignoring how his fingers tangled in the duller gold yet again. "I've had a lot of time to think of them."

"Four and a half billion years?"

"Three days, I suppose." Saturn caught himself reaching for his wedding band and curled his fingers against his palm instead, pressing his thumbnail into the meat of his hand next to a still-stinging mark. "The thinking of apologies is new. The guilt is old."

X made a sound that might have been a laugh, dry and short, his shoulders dropping half an inch under the heavy coat. "You sound like me before I got tired of being angry."

"How did you stop?"

"I didn't, not completely." X pulled his coat tighter, the fur-lined hood casting shadows across the scar and the sharp line of his jaw. "I got tired of it being the only thing I was. Anger's exhausting—eventually you have to decide what else you want to be."

"And what did you decide?"

"I'm still deciding." A silence, and X's black eyes found his, held. Not unguarded—X was never unguarded—but something in the set of his mouth had loosened, the held line of it easing by a fraction. "I haven't forgiven you." The words landed clinical, and Saturn felt his chest cave towards them before X continued. "But I think I'm heading there. Slowly." He pulled one hand free of his pocket to scrub at the back of his neck, a gesture so uncomposed it looked borrowed from someone else. "I'm tired of it, Saturn. Being angry at you. I want to be done carrying this, and that's not the same thing as forgiveness but it's—" His jaw worked. "Close. For what it's worth."

Saturn's breath left him in a sound he didn't plan.

His rings brightened, a warm flare that caught what gold was left in his hair before it steadied, and he stood there with his hands at his sides, the bracelets silent, the rings still.

He'd braced himself for X to lay out every failure one by one. He hadn't braced for this.

"You—" The whisper came out before he could shape it. "You want to?"

"Don't make it a thing." X's mouth pulled sideways. "Carrying it costs me. I'd rather set it down than keep dragging it around to prove a point. You were scared. You were following Jupiter. You didn't want to lose him and you were terrified of what the Sun would do." He paused, his attention sliding towards the dark for one beat before pulling back. "I understand that now. I didn't then."

"And now?"

"Now I've spent enough time being the—" X faltered. Started again, and this time his voice stumbled, catching on a consonant before he pushed through, his hand coming up to rake through his dark tangled hair in an agitated motion that left it worse than before. "Being the villain, or whatever, to know it doesn't help. Jupiter's guilt ate him alive, yours made you avoid, and neither of those is justice. Neither was revenge."

His jaw clenched on the last word, held, and Saturn watched the muscle work beneath the skin of his cheek as X's attention drifted sideways, towards the dark where the dwarf planets had been before SIMP had scattered everyone. He caught himself doing it and pulled his eyes back, but not before Saturn registered the direction.

(What was out there?)

Saturn held his wedding band between two fingers, the rose gold warm against his skin, the only warmth in this entire freezing void besides what was left in his own core, and thought about Jupiter. His husband, who'd looked at Planet X with those proud eyes and said he was always one of the good ones. His husband, who was out there right now throwing himself at a million lost planets, trying to balance a scale that would never level, because Jupiter had changed his orbit for love and the universe had made everyone else pay for it.

“There’s something else,” Saturn said.

X’s eyes, which had drifted, snapped back, and his shoulders hitched up a fraction under the coat, the fur at the collar bristling. “Stars above, there’s always something else. Let’s hear it.”

“You don’t have to sound so resigned about it,” Saturn said, and caught himself with a trace of his old playfulness through all of it, the corner of his mouth pulling up, a trace of his usual smile.

“Occupational hazard; talking to you people always seems to come with bonus rounds.” But his voice carried no edge and he didn’t step back, and his boots stayed planted where they were. “What is it?”

Saturn tipped his head back and stared at the edge of his rings. "When you came back, after the trial, after everything, I tried to talk to you alone, and you—" He pushed his hair back from his face, hands catching in tangles. "You didn't let me."

"I remember."

"You said you liked my rings. You were being cruel on purpose."

"I was." X pulled his hands from his pockets and crossed his arms, tight, his coat bunching at his elbows where the dark sleeves underneath had been pushed up to expose his forearms, bare and cold. "Am I supposed to say I wasn't?"

"No! I just—then you called Uranus and Neptune over, welcomed them like old friends, spent the whole time talking to them while I just stood there." Saturn's voice didn't waver, but his right hand had found his rose gold ring again, turning it with a careful, grinding pressure, the skin beneath going red. "And then you said why are you still here and you were so mean and I left and we never—I never—" He broke off, shifted his weight and pressed his lips together hard enough that they stung. "I never brought it up again, and neither did you."

"No." X looked down, jaw visibly working. "I didn't."

"Why?"

X's focus locked somewhere beyond Saturn's shoulder. The words came out reluctant and rough, like something dragged up from where it had rusted shut. "Because I was still angry, at Jupiter mostly, but you were there, you were always there, standing beside him, making excuses, looking at me like I was the problem because I wouldn't let you bury what you'd done." His voice went lower, the scar across his brow tightening with whatever his mouth was doing beneath it. "And because being cruel to you was easier than being cruel to him. He was felt too guilty already. It was like punching down. You were—"

"Easier to hurt?" Saturn's jaw trembled.

"Yeah." X's arms tightened across his chest, coat creaking at the shoulders, and he looked away, down at his own black boots planted on nothing. "Easier to hurt. An easier target. And you hid your guilt better."

Saturn’s core twisted tight. He’d spent billions of years being the accessible one, the pleasant one, the one you could dismiss and he’d just sweep his hair behind his ear with a smile and say of course, darling and never push back. The rings on his fingers would catch the light, the bracelets at his wrists would chime with every graceful gesture, and everyone would see the gold and the beauty and the poise and assume that someone who looked like that couldn’t possibly be hurting underneath it.

X had seen that, had known the depth of guilt wrapped around his core and recognized the softness and aimed for it with the precision of someone who’d had four and a half billion years to figure out where it would hurt.

“I knew what your rings were made of,” X said, still not looking at him, his voice gone quieter while his arms cinched closer, that tell, the one Saturn was learning to read, the hands opening and closing against the cold dark air. “When I said that about their size. I knew they were a dead moon; I’d spent billions of years watching your solar system, watching you, of course I knew.” He chewed at his bottom lip hard enough that Saturn caught how the skin blanched under his teeth. “And I still said it, because I wanted to see if you’d flinch.”

“Did I?”

“No.” X’s crooked mouth twisted, the default line of it pulling into something uglier. “You looked confused. Not about the moon, you knew that, but you didn’t have any of the details. The name, what happened, how it happened.” His fists closed at his sides, the knuckles whitening against his skin. “I was counting on you wanting to know more, so it would keep eating at you.” A second. “Great aim, eh?”

Saturn thought about that, the moon he’d been wearing for so long, the weight of I KI-I-ILLED MY MOONS!!! that had torn out of him when he’d finally understood the basics, even if the specifics were still locked somewhere in his core, inaccessible, the name and the circumstances and the exact shape of his failure hidden behind a wall he couldn’t crack. X, watching from the dark, had known the details the whole time, had seen Saturn’s partial understanding and calibrated his cruelty to exploit the gaps.

“That’s—” Saturn started, then let go of his ring, pressing his palm flat against the black fabric of his pants, the stacked gold bands clicking against each other as his fingers settled. “That’s quite horrible.”

“I know.” X met his eyes, and his expression hadn’t shifted, but his shoulders had drawn in under the heavy coat, the fur lining at the lapels pressing closer to his jaw, hunched tighter than before. The closest thing to grief Saturn had ever seen from him.

“Truly, that’s one of the worst things anyone’s ever said to me, and I didn’t even have the full picture to understand how deep it went.”

“I know.”

“Were you going to tell me her name?” Saturn said. The question came out quiet, his eyes dropping to the cold air between them. “If I’d asked? If I’d pushed?”

X’s expression tightened, and the silence between them stretched until he sighed. “No.” He uncrossed his arms, the motion rough, and turned his head away. “I was going to let you figure it out on your own.”

“That’s worse.”

“I know.”

They floated there with all of it between them, Saturn’s rings shedding another curl of ice that he didn’t try to catch, because he was too busy thinking about the version of himself who’d stood before Planet X that day, trying so hard to bridge a gap he’d helped create, and been dismissed with a why are you still here? that had sent him back to his orbit in silence.

He waited for X to tell him to leave, expected it, the familiar pattern of being the one who was easy to discard.

X didn’t.

“Can I ask you something?” Saturn asked after a longer bout of silence. He laced his fingers together to keep them still, gold rings pressing into the spaces between his knuckles.

X’s eyes narrowed by a fraction.

“You’re asking. That’s new.”

"I'm trying something different, since my usual approach of pretending everything's fine has been such a spectacular success." He kept his hands knotted. "When Jupiter stopped me from confessing at the trial—when I tried to tell the Sun what I'd done and Jupiter looked at me and said—" His voice thinned to almost nothing, the bracelets at his wrists trembling against each other. "Saturn, just… stop. Everyone knows you are just trying to be a good friend but… no need to make things up. In front of everyone." He swallowed. "Like my guilt was something I'd invented to be closer to him. Like I was the loyal husband saying anything to share the fall and everyone just—nodded." His thumbnail found the underside of his wedding band and dug in. "You were there. You didn't push it. You didn't say no, actually, he did help, he was part of it. Why?"

X locked up. Even the cold radiating off him seemed to hold.

"Did you forget I was there?" Saturn's hands were shaking in their knot, the bracelets trembling against each other with a sound so muted only the void could hear it. "Did my guilt not matter enough, or—?"

"Oh, it mattered." X uncrossed his arms long enough to gesture at the dark between them with one hand, a sharp dismissive motion. "Give me some credit. I planned the trial, the revelations, Jupiter's banishment—you think I left a anything unaccounted for?"

(But you did, he thought, you didn't account for Neptune.)

The muscles in Saturn's neck locked. "You planned it?"

"I'm very thorough when I'm being terrible." X shoved his hand back into his coat pocket, shoulder hitching against the cold. "When Jupiter said that—no need to make things up—I knew exactly what he was doing. He was rewriting you in front of the entire Solar System. Turning you into the good friend, the innocent bystander, the pretty one who'd never." His teeth caught his bottom lip. "And I let him. Not because I believed it, and not because I forgot you were standing right there with your mouth open and your hands shaking and your guilt written across every inch of you." His voice dropped. "Because letting him protect you like that made the punishment worse. He thought he was saving you from the fall." X's black eyes held sharply on his. "I let him think that. Because the version of events where Saturn is innocent and Jupiter carries everything was already the version that was going to eat him alive. I just had to sit back and watch it work."

"And then you sent him into the Kuiper Belt alone."

"With four and a half billion years of guilt for company, yeah." X's jaw worked once. "And you—look, I knew what separating you would do. That was part of it. You were the reason he moved in the first place. The catalyst." His voice scraped lower, and his hand escaped his pocket again to rake through his dark hair, leaving it worse. "You just stood there looking golden and sad while I got pelted by asteroids, so—yeah. I wanted you to feel what that was like. Having someone ripped away."

Saturn's hands opened at his sides. He didn't have a response to that, and he wasn’t even sure one existed.

"That's—!" he started.

"Calculated, petty, extremely well-executed, and not even fully my own fault." X's mouth twisted, ugly and self-aware. "I rotted in the dark and planned who would hurt and how much. I'm not going to pretend otherwise." He shifted his weight, jacket scrunching on his shoulders. "I'm not proud of it. But I did it, and I wanted it then, and I..."

His voice trailed off.

"But you're telling me now," Saturn said, feeling oddly like he should sooth the look on his face. "That's different."

"That's debatable." But something in X's posture eased, half an inch, the rigid brace in his spine loosening. "I care now. About what I did. And that's not better, it's just—" He made an irritated sound through his teeth. "Stars, I'm bad at this."

"You're not."

"I'm objectively terrible at this, Saturn, please don't patronize me while I'm confessing." But his eyes caught Saturn's, and the hard line of his mouth had softened by a fraction. A flicker of something far softer laid underneath it, gone before Saturn could name it. His eyes drifted sideways.

Towards wherever the dwarf planets had gone before SIMP scattered everyone, he absently noticed.

Saturn hadn't asked about the dwarf planets. He'd noticed their absence like he might have noticed a tooth missing—by running your tongue over the gap and flinching. Sedna, Quaoar, Orcus, Gonggong (those were their names, weren't they? Saturn had known there were other dwarfs, but stars he'd practically forgotten them, hadn't he?) were all gone. He couldn't feel their gravity at all. SIMP had said they'd be arriving late, and then they'd arrived looking shaken, and now they were gone, and no one was talking about it.

Had they been sent off on their own missions already?

He dug his thumbnail into the underside of his wedding band, the rose gold biting a line into his skin. "I've been angry about it—what he said. No need to make things up. He made that choice for both of us without asking, and I had to just stand there and be the good friend, be the loyal husband, because correcting him in that moment would have meant—" His voice cracked, high and ugly, the kind of sound he'd have bitten back around anyone else. "He looked at me, X. Right in the eyes. And he smiled, like he'd just done me a favor. Like he'd just saved me from something. And I couldn't—" His hand went to his hair, found it already tangled where he'd been pulling, the roots rough under his fingertips. He let it drop. "Everyone believed him. Of course they did. Saturn, who'd never do anything wrong, Saturn who's just being a good friend, isn't that sweet, and meanwhile I was the one who said Great idea, hurry and On it! and helped throw you into the void, and Jupiter turned all of that into making things up and nobody questioned it because nobody ever thinks I'm capable of anything real."

X scrubbed one hand over his face, a gesture so tired it caught him completely off guard.

"Yeah," he said. "I watched that happen. Him... rewriting you, you letting him."

Saturn hadn't expected X to frame it that way—rewriting?—and honestly hadn't expected anyone to, because that wasn't something that he wanted anyone to point out, let alone think about himself, the fact that it was always Jupiter protecting him. Protecting him and deciding for him. Jupiter smiling at him and taking all the blame on his shoulders like he thought it was mercy while the door closed.

"Do you resent him?" X asked, blinking at him. "For that?"

"I resent him for not seeing me." Saturn's throat compressed so tight the words had to force through. "For deciding who I was in front of everyone without asking if that's who I wanted to be. For being so consumed by his own guilt that he forgot I was guilty too." His jaw clenched until his teeth ached. "But I don't resent him for loving me. He'd be destroyed if he knew, and that's—"

His voice gave out. He pressed his lips together and forced air through his teeth.

"Unbearable," X finished.

Saturn nodded.

"Right." X crossed his arms, uncrossed them, shoved both hands into his coat pockets in a motion that looked like frustration with his own limbs. "I can't believe I'm about to give you marriage advice, so mark this day somehow, tell your moons, I don't care." He fixed Saturn with that black gaze. "When you talk to him, he's going to try to take the blame for this too. He'll say it's his fault, he should have noticed, he's sorry. Your instinct is going to be to comfort him." His mouth went thin. "Don't."

"I—"

"I mean it. He does this thing where he absorbs everyone's pain so he doesn't have to watch them carry it, and you let him because you've always let him, and then he's drowning in guilt and you're standing there with nothing and somehow that's supposed to be love." X's voice had gone rough, too fast, like the words had been sitting loaded for a long time and he'd accidentally pulled the trigger. He cut himself off. "Make him look at you. Not shield you or try to save you. Look."

Saturn stared at him, chest tight, the backs of his eyes burning. "How do you know all—"

"I had a lot of time to watch." The scar across X's brow caught the thinnest edge of light. "A lot of time to want things I was never going to get." The words came out dry, self-deprecating. "Someone who'd look at me. Not through me just to look at someone else. At me. Turns out that's a whole thing you can want."

Saturn's chest did something complicated.

"And I've been learning that recently." X's voice thinned, quieter, and the reluctance in it was so visible it looked like it physically cost him. His hand started out of his pocket, caught itself, shoved back. "That people don't just stop caring because you made a mistake. That forgiveness isn't—" He cut himself off. His jaw worked. "Someone reminded me of that. Not long ago."

Saturn wiped his face with the back of his hand, smearing dampness across his cheekbone. "Who?"

X's expression shuttered, automatic, the blankness settling over his angular face. "Doesn't matter."

But his hand at his side had uncurled, fingers loose and open, the tension gone from his wrist, and Saturn watched it settle against X's coat and wondered whose name he was keeping behind his teeth. “You’re not invisible.” The sentence came out rough, bordering on annoyed, like he resented having to say it out loud. “You spent four and a half billion years standing next to the biggest planet in the solar system and convinced yourself that made you smaller.”

“I am smaller.”

“Not in the way that matters.”

Saturn twisted his rings once, the stacked bands catching against each other with a sound like tiny bells, and then made himself stop. Ice drifted from him that he’d never get back, but the ache in his chest had shifted. Still present, but rearranged, like furniture moved to let more light in.

“Do you think he’d be happy?” Saturn asked. His voice had gone soft, unguarded in a way he couldn’t seem to help. “Jupi, if he knew we were—whatever this is. Talking?”

“Friends.” Completely deadpan. But X’s mouth twitched, the left side pulling up a fraction before he caught it. “The word you’re looking for is friends. And I don’t know, probably.”

“I think he would.” Saturn shook his head, fingers winding through the dulling waves of his hair. “When he saw you with Uranus and Neptune, do you know what he said?” He couldn’t help the fondness in his voice. “He said you were always one of the good ones. Like he hadn’t spent four and a half billion years lying about you. He’s so spectacularly complicated, my husband. It’s so…” His smile went soft. “Jupiter.”

“All of you are complicated. It’s exhausting.” But something in X’s voice had eased, the hard edge worn to something Saturn hadn’t heard from him before. “If he loves you like you say he does, like I've... like I've seen he does, he’ll be happy you have someone. Even if that someone technically tried to destroy the solar system and would have let you go mad from the isolation of a new orbit.”

“He’ll be relieved,” Saturn said, “that I’m not alone. That someone’s been—” He trailed off and pushed his hair off his forehead. “That you checked on me. Jupi doesn’t hate you, you know?”

X’s whole body locked, not his usual controlled stillness, but the involuntary kind, like Saturn had said something that hit a nerve he hadn’t known was exposed.

His frame locked under the coat, the fur at the collar pressing close to his jaw.

“His feelings about you are far from that.” Saturn watched X’s scar crease, watched his shoulders climb towards his ears. “He talks about you like—I don’t even know how to describe it. Pride and guilt mixed together with a million other things. He watched you here and he looked proud, X.” His voice went lower. “Proud.”

X’s throat worked above the dark collar of his coat, and he turned his head half an inch to the side, presenting the scarred profile rather than meeting Saturn’s gaze. “He doesn’t—” His voice had gone rough and uneven, nothing Saturn had heard from him, and he scraped the sound out of his chest before trying again, hands balling at his sides. “He doesn’t get to be proud of me.”

“Maybe not.” Saturn kept his voice steady, careful. “But he is anyway.”

X didn’t respond.

“If you don't leave soon, someone else is going to be ordered to check on you,” X said finally, and his voice had mostly recovered, though the crack running through it was audible enough to notice. “By SIMP. And they won't be as nice as I am."

The corner of Saturn’s mouth curved, close to his usual smile. “And yet you’re still here.”

X scoffed. “Habit. You’re annoying, but you’re less annoying than most of the rogue planets.”

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”

“It wasn’t one.” But his mouth had pulled sideways in something closer to a real expression than anything Saturn had seen from him all evening.

And then X reached out and pressed his cold fingers against the back of Saturn’s hand.

The cold was immediate, sharp, like touching metal in winter, and Saturn’s breath caught before he turned his hand over and laced their fingers together—an instinct he couldn’t have stopped if he’d tried. X’s hand was smaller than his, completely bare, no rings, no bracelets, just cold that went all the way to the bone. Saturn’s own hand was stacked with gold on nearly every finger, the bracelets at his wrist pressing against X’s bare forearm where the sleeve had ridden up. He was aware, suddenly and completely, of every piece of jewelry he wore, the weight and excess of it against X’s stripped-down nothing.

“You’re freezing,” Saturn said. His thumb moved across X’s knuckles without thinking about whether that was allowed, tracing the ridge of bone under his skin. “How do you live like this?”

“Got used to it.” X didn’t pull away, and his fingers tightened once, just enough for Saturn to feel it, the tendons in his hand flexing against Saturn’s palm. “You’re warm.” His voice snagged, went quieter. “I forgot what warm felt like, before I came back. And then it still felt wrong. Like it didn’t belong to me anymore.”

Saturn thought about Jupiter. His warm hands, his warm voice, how he used to pull Saturn close and press his lips against his temple and call him honey. The grief came sudden and aching, and the longing beside it, and the fear that he’d never be warm again.

(But this was something, wasn’t it? X’s cold hand in his.)

“I should ask you something,” Saturn said. “About my rings. About what you said earlier—the name, how it happened.”

X’s hand tightened for a half-second, then smoothed. His grip didn’t change. “What about them?”

It wasn’t really a question, Saturn realized. More like permission. X already knew what he was going to ask. Had been the one to plant the seed in the first place, not that long ago, when he’d looked at his rings and said the cruelest possible thing draped in false kindness because he’d known exactly what they were made of and Saturn had and hadn’t at the same time.

The same X who was now holding his hand and waiting.

“I—” The words stuck. The chain at his collar pressed taut against his skin. What was her name? What did she look like? Did she know, before the end, did she know I—?

“No.” Saturn swallowed hard and looked down at their linked hands. “Not yet. I’m not ready.”

“Okay.” X’s fingers stayed steady against his, warming fractionally where their skin pressed together. “When you’re ready.”

“You’ll tell me?”

“Yeah.” Something shifted in X’s voice, not his usual dryness but what lived underneath it, careful, edging towards kind. “Sure, Saturn. I’ll tell you.”

Saturn squeezed his hand once, the gold rings pressing into the spaces between X’s knuckles.

“Thank you,” he said. “For coming to find me. For being here. You didn’t have to be.”

X froze. Saturn could feel it through their linked hands, the way his fingers clenched tight. His eyes fell to where their hands met, the frost forming a thin line along the seam where their skin pressed together. For one second, then two, he held an expression Saturn couldn’t parse. Or could, but didn’t want to, because naming it felt like it would break something that hadn’t finished forming.

Then it was gone, packed away behind his usual blankness.

“Technically it was an order from SIMP, but... no,” X agreed, his voice back to its dry register. “I didn’t.” He let the quiet sit. “But you looked pathetic, and I was bored.”

“You’re terrible at this.”

“I know.” The muscles in X’s cheeks pulled tight against the scar across his nose. A suppressed smile, a real one, and Saturn could read it now, could see the shape of it before it reached his mouth. “You’re not much better.”

They stayed like that, hands linked. Neither of them seemed inclined to acknowledge that they were holding hands at all, which suited Saturn just fine. He’d learned long ago that naming comfortable silences was the fastest way to kill them. “There’s something I should mention,” X said after a while, his thumb shifting once against Saturn’s knuckle, cold skin catching the edge of a gold band. “Since you’ve been out here.”

Saturn's brows pinched together. “That sounds quite ominous. Should I be worried?”

“No.” X pressed his lips together, his eyes drifting to some point past Saturn’s shoulder before snapping back. "I talked to Uranus. A while ago, properly—a real conversation. Uranus and Neptune.”

Saturn's mouth opened without any words to follow it.

Uranus. The name dropped through him. Uranus, who’d looked at him with such contempt that Saturn could still feel the shape of it behind his ribs when he pressed too hard on the memory. Uranus, who’d called him a hypocrite and been right, who Saturn had still been avoiding because facing him meant admitting he’d spent billions of years being exactly who he’d lectured someone else for being. And underneath all of it, the guilt and the avoidance and the shame, something warm. That Uranus had cared enough to be angry. That he’d cared enough to say it to Saturn’s face when everyone else just smiled and moved along. There was love in that. Scalding, graceless love, but love.

“How—?” He started, then closed his mouth, his free hand drifting to his collar, fingers worrying at a loose thread until it pulled taut. “How is he?”

“Better than he was.” X’s mouth twitched sideways, carrying something Saturn couldn’t fully read. “Still figuring things out, still—” He gave up on the right word and described the shape instead. “Still him. Makes terrible jokes, tugs at his braid when he’s nervous. He’s been hauling around a lot of things he never said out loud.” His eyes flicked to Saturn. “Sound familiar?”

Saturn didn’t laugh. He was too busy remembering the last time he’d spoken to Uranus directly. The anger in his voice, the hurt underneath it like a second voice speaking at the same time, how Saturn had stood there and taken every word because he had no defense and they both knew it.

I am very disappointed in you.

And then Uranus had thrown his complicity back in his face, and Saturn had crumbled, and called X’s ejection a mistake with that inadequate word, and told himself that covered it. It didn’t cover anything.

“I hurt him,” Saturn said, barely above a whisper, his fingers twisting the loose thread until it snapped free. “During our argument—I was so focused on being angry at him for what he’d done that I didn’t stop to think about what was underneath it. What it cost him to say any of it to my face.” He shook his head. “I treated him the way everyone always treats him, and he deserved better, and I—” The theatrical rhythm was creeping back into his voice, and he heard it, and let it stay, because sometimes the performance was how he got to the truth. “I am going to have to grovel, aren’t I?”

“Probably.” X huffed. “Stars above, I wish I could see that.”

Saturn surprised himself with a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Charming.”

“I try.” X shrugged under his coat. “When I apologized to him, I just—told him. Everything I’d done, everything I should have done differently. He didn’t forgive me, not all the way, but he listened. And now things are—” The muscles along his jaw worked, and his eyes went somewhere Saturn couldn’t follow. “Different.”

“Different how?”

“He knows my name.” X’s eyes met his, and for some reason Saturn thought he knew there was something intentional in how he held it. “My real name. I told him, before SIMP sent him out.”

The sentence landed strangely. X hurried through the words real name like he didn't want him to fully register them, and the stars must have been on his side, because the last part of his sentence stole his attention so much more. Mostly for how X’s voice had gone careful on sent him out, carrying weight the words around it didn’t.

“Sent him out,” Saturn repeated. His voice dropped its theatrical register, going quiet enough to catch him off guard. “You mean the quota. The one I've been avoiding.”

“Yeah.” X’s gaze dropped to their linked hands. “He’s been deployed, remember? Separate direction from Neptune, separate from everyone. All sent to different ends of the galaxy by SIMP’s orders.” Saturn already knew about the quota. He'd watched the others leave three days ago, had stood right here while their gravitational signatures pulled away one by one and done nothing. The deployment wasn't news. But—

But what X had just told him—separate direction from Neptune—was…

Saturn had learned to observe the two of them after everything that’d happened, and he knew the ice giants leaned on each other for support they’d never gotten from anyone else (even from him and Jupiter, a fact that still poisoned his core). He knew he should have expected it considering she’d said different directions and a million planets each, considering he’d watched each of them leave while telling himself he should too and doing the opposite.

The thing was… he’d seen Uranus and Neptune leave in the same direction, hadn’t he?

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and tried to bring back the memory, but it was frustratingly out of reach. Maybe he’d just imagined that, thought of it as so right that his mind—caught in as much turmoil as it was—had filled it in for him. And if that was it, then SIMP had definitely pulled ice giants apart from each other.

Both of them out there now, alone.

When isolation was what had hurt Neptune so badly in the beginning, when isolation was what had hurt Uranus in an entirely different way.

“What—How far apart?”

X's jaw clenched hard enough to ache, and when he spoke again his voice had a serrated quality Saturn had only heard him aim at Jupiter. “Far. And they can’t come back until they save a million planets each—" He scoffed, high and angry. "—because apparently that’s how SIMP thinks this works, like that’s a reasonable thing to ask of someone who just left their entire—”

He cut himself off.

X’s mouth pressed so thin his lips went colorless. His frame had stiffened—not composure. More like someone who’d just heard a recording of their own voice saying something they’d only ever thought. His eyes darted once towards the Kingdom’s center, quick and involuntary, and then back to Saturn with a speed that told Saturn everything the dart itself had.

What Saturn caught in that half-second wasn’t anger, wasn’t sarcasm. It was fear, not the kind X wore under his coat like a second layer, but immediate, the kind that hits when you’ve spoken against the wrong person and even being alone in the void with one witness isn’t enough to make it safe.

“X?” Saturn said carefully, because the temperature between them had dropped.

“Forget it.” X pulled his coat tighter with his free hand, sharp enough to make the fur at the hood bristle. His voice had overcorrected so hard into flatness that it looped back around to sounding panicked. “She has her reasons. The quota makes sense at scale—big galaxy, lot of lost planets, we can’t just—the math checks out.”

The math checks out.

He had a feeling X didn't really believe that line.

Saturn didn’t push. He’d learned enough about X tonight to know that pushing would seal the crack shut, and this crack ran in a direction he needed to understand. It joined what he was starting to think of as the collection: SIMP’s look at Sedna, the dwarf planets’ vanishing, the way X kept looking towards the dark, the word kingdom that never sat right, Gonggong’s answer no one would explain, and now this—X speaking against SIMP’s orders with the fear of someone who understood consequences.

“She sent Uranus out alone,” Saturn said instead, and his voice surprised him. Not the theatrical quiet he used to make people lean closer. What happened when something mattered too much to dress up with performance. “Away from Neptune.”

“She sent everyone out alone. That’s the point.” X’s voice had gone thin, brittle. “You can’t organize anything if you’re scattered across—” His teeth caught his bottom lip hard enough that the skin blanched. “It’s not my call.”

“No,” Saturn said, and ran his thumb once across X’s knuckles, unhurried and purposeful. “I suppose it’s not.”

They stayed there while Saturn let the silence hold, because he was learning that silence with X was never really silence. It was the sound of someone deciding what to do with what they’d just revealed. X was deciding hard, his jaw tight, shoulders drawn up under the coat, fingers curled around Saturn’s with a grip that had shifted from steady to tense without either of them acknowledging the change.

“I should be out there too,” Saturn said. His voice came out level, observational, like he was describing a weather pattern that happened to be occurring directly on top of him. “That’s what you came to tell me, wasn’t it? That SIMP’s noticed I haven’t left.”

“That’s what I came to tell you.” X met his eyes, and whatever had been cracking in his composure over the last few minutes had been sealed back over, badly. Saturn could see the seams. They both knew it. “Three days is a long time to be sitting in one spot when you’ve got a million planets to find. Unless you've got some super secret abilities you're hiding from us."

Saturn gave a half-laugh. “And you think I should go?”

“I think—” X tried. Started, faltered, tried again, and the hesitation looked like it hurt, his jaw working through a thought that resisted becoming words. “I think you should do whatever makes sense to you. Not to SIMP, not to—” His jaw worked. “Not to me.”

Saturn held his gaze.

Something had shifted. In X, and in himself. X had just told him to think for himself, in a kingdom with three rules and zero tolerance for dissent, and said it twice now, counting the rant about SIMP’s quotas he’d tried to swallow. Both times his voice had carried the specific fear of someone who knew what it cost to say things out loud in this place. And the suspicions Saturn had been pressing down since they’d arrived pressed back, harder than before, and for the first time the edges gave, just enough for Saturn to think: this isn’t right, and I’m not the only one who knows it.

He straightened. “I’ll go,” Saturn said, and he meant it, and it wasn’t for SIMP. “I’ll deploy on my mission. But I’m heading in whatever direction you last saw Uranus going, not wherever SIMP wants me. I have plans, darling.”

X blinked, a full genuine blink that broke his composure wide open for one startled second before he pulled the mask back. “That’s not—SIMP assigns directions, you can’t just pick your own—”

“Then SIMP can come find me and reassign me herself.” Saturn tipped his head, giving X the wide eyes and the angle of his chin that Jupiter had never once been able to say no to. “I’ve been sitting here for three days doing nothing.” He tossed his hair over one shoulder. “She should be thrilled I’m moving at all.”

X stared at him, jaw clenching and unclenching.

“Fine.” The word came out rough, scraped thin. “But I’m not covering for you when she asks.”

“You won’t have to, darling.” Saturn squeezed his hand and felt X’s cold fingers tighten back for barely half a second. “I’ll be long gone.”

He failed to suppress a warmth his face rarely showed. It made him look younger than he had any right to, made Saturn’s core ache with a desperate and very old pain. “You’re going to be a terrible rogue planet.”

“Oh, the worst.” Saturn’s rings caught the thinnest light as he straightened his shoulders, dim but present. "I'll complain every second about the lack of sunlight."

“That tracks.”

 X’s hand tightened once more in his, and then loosened. Saturn didn’t let go yet.

“Thank you,” he said. The words carried everything he couldn’t fit into them. “For coming to find me, X. I appreciate it.” He squeezed his hand again. “I appreciate you.”

“Don’t thank me.” His voice was quiet enough that Saturn had to lean in to hear. “Just find him.”

And then X let go of his hand, and his gravity pulled in tight, and Saturn felt like he was floundering without something to grab onto, just the overwhelming wall of the rogue planets’ gravity all around. “Find Uranus, and find Jupiter, and save those million planets, and—” He huffed. “Guess we’ll see what happens then.” His eyes flicked to the asteroid on his shoulder.

“Guess we’ll see,” Saturn agreed, his voice much softer than X’s. “Which way?”

X understood him without the rest of the question. “SIMP sent Uranus that way,” he said, jerking his head in one direction before realizing that probably didn’t narrow it down and instead jabbing his pointer finger. “You’ll probably catch up to him. There’s a good view of a nebula that way, and I think Uranus won’t be able to resist it.”

Saturn pressed one hand over his mouth, shoulders slightly shaking with his laughter.

“I think I can agree with that.”

X’s hand dropped, both sliding into his jacket pockets, and they both stared at each other for a second. “Goodbye, X,” he finally murmured. “I hope I’ll see you soon. In good circumstances.”

It wasn’t even that long ago that X had stood in front of him with his hands fisted in those same pockets, braced like he’d expected the ground to move, and said You should have. You really should have, Saturn, and Saturn had crumbled. Had twisted his wedding band and whispered But I didn’t, and X had said You didn’t, and that had been the start of it.

And now he had a weight off his shoulders—not fully, because that weight was unimaginably large—and he had a goal on his mind, and Saturn wasn’t going to let anything stop him.

He started moving.

One foot after the other into nothing, and behind him he could feel X’s cold presence hold for a moment, watchful and still, and he heard a quiet, “Goodbye, Saturn,” before the pull of his gravity started drifting the other way, back towards the Kingdom. The distance widened with each step, cold filling the space where the warmth of someone else (the general warmth of having someone to speak to more than actual warmth—X was freezing) had been.

Saturn kept his eyes forward, because he knew turning around for one last look would only make this harder, and he needed the momentum.

He was colder than he’d been three days ago—he could feel it, heat leaving in increments, warmth trading itself for distance. Uranus was out there somewhere dealing with the same. They were both alone. Saturn wasn’t used to it.

But Uranus was. He knew that.

Saturn had never given him enough credit for being who he was despite how little the rest of the Solar System had paid attention to him besides, apparently… jokes. He was going to find him, and say every single thing he should have said when he’d approached Uranus after X’s departure, and if Uranus told him to leave, he’d come back and say them again.

Saturn was, if nothing else, persistent.

He’d spent billions of years being persistent about the wrong things.

Time to try the right—

His moons were still at the Kingdom. The realization hit him like an asteroid collision, falling into place like it should have three days ago.

He’d left his moons at the Rogue Planet Kingdom.

He’d just wandered out into the void to think, and they’d been there the whole time, and this was the first moment in three days he’d thought of them at all.

Titan, who’d stood in front of the entire Moon Club and tried to keep order when the Sun had caught them. Enceladus, who’d explained, patiently and carefully, like he was afraid of making Saturn feel stupid, why the rings were melting at one astronomical unit. Dione, who’d said it’s okay, you’ve improved a lot after Saturn’s apology with such quiet sincerity that Saturn had cried for twenty minutes. All of them and more back there, surrounded by rogue planets with rules about permanent loyalty and a leader whose patience Saturn had watched erode in real time.

He didn’t know what SIMP was doing with the moons. That was the part that tore at him now.

 SIMP’s deployment orders had been for the planets only—a million each, separate directions. She hadn’t mentioned the moons at all, and that was either because they were irrelevant to her plans or because they were too relevant to discuss in front of everyone. Saturn had been standing right there when PSO delivered the moons to the base with that unsettling grin—Welcome to your new home, friendos—and felt nothing at the time, too busy drowning in everything else. Ganymede had told Jupiter later what PSO said during the trip, the I just thought it was super cool how you almost destroyed the Earth, laughing about it, impressed by the wrong thing, and it had struck Saturn as disturbing and he’d done nothing with it, and now the memory kept circling back, each loop tighter than the last, refusing to resolve into anything he could act on.

Were the moons still meeting? Were Ganymede and Europa and Titan still organizing, still leading, still doing what they’d spent the last tumultuous while doing? Or had SIMP separated them the way she’d separated everything else—Uranus from Neptune, the dwarf planets from everyone, the planets from each other?

Saturn didn’t know, and he should have asked X before he drifted out here.

He should have checked.

(He was getting better at this. He’d learned Dione’s name, and Enceladus’s, and he’d apologized in front of everyone, and they’d forgiven him carefully, conditionally, enough to keep going. He was getting better. He just kept discovering new ways he’d been bad.)

Guilt pulled at him, as familiar as gravity, but he forced himself to let it pass.

Titan could handle himself. The moon who’d helped organize a revolution and then learned how to stand down from one could handle whatever was happening at the Kingdom base. All of his other moons had handled themselves for stars knew how long while he’d been the self-important planet he was. Their moons had fought against Planet X, had known something was wrong and chosen to fight against it when Saturn had given in with the useless idea that he deserved it all. They had teeth and smarts. He had to trust them to use them.

Even so….

Brown dwarfs with thirteen times Jupiter’s mass, rules about permanent commitment, a leader who’d looked at Sedna like she was an equation to solve—their moons were brave, but bravery had limits against something that could compress a moon to thirteen centimeters.

He should go back for them.

Saturn turned the idea over in his head as he walked, feeling the weight of it against the decision he’d already made. Going back meant returning to SIMP’s jurisdiction, and if she’d noticed Saturn heading in the wrong direction, going back might mean never being allowed to leave again. And if he went for his moons instead of Uranus, the promise he’d just made—the one X had pushed him towards—would die before it started.

He couldn’t do both.

Saturn closed his hand around his rose gold ring, and for the first time he didn’t twist it or press down on it, just held the cold metal.

And he chose Uranus.

The choice was ugly and necessary, and he’d live with it the way he’d lived with every other wrong turn in four and a half billion years. This time he was choosing with his eyes open, knowing what he was giving up and deciding anyway. I’ll come back for you, he thought, and directed it at Titan, at Enceladus, at Dione, at every moon whose name he’d only recently learned and every moon whose name he still hadn’t. I’ll come back. I promise.

It wasn’t enough. Promises made inside your own head rarely were.

But it was what he had, and he held it alongside the memory of X’s cold hand in his and the direction he was walking and the fading warmth of his rings, and kept moving. He kept moving, and he kept thinking, because his thoughts were all he had.

And then he thought about Jupiter, because he couldn’t help it.

He’d been thinking about Jupiter in some capacity for four and a half billion years, and three days of sitting in the dark hadn’t broken the habit so much as changed its key. Jupiter was out there too, somewhere in this impossible galaxy, saving his million strangers one at a time with that relentless devotion he brought to everything he touched, pouring himself into other planets’ problems because he’d never learned how to sit with his own. Saturn could picture him so clearly it made his teeth ache: the set of his jaw and the stubble dotted across it, the weight carved into the lines around his mouth and the exhaustion he was probably facing, how he’d look at each rescued planet with those warm, careful eyes and wonder if this one brought the count closer to forgiveness. And Saturn suspected that somewhere beneath the wondering, Jupiter already knew no number would ever be high enough.

Jupiter, who had moved the heavens for Saturn.

Moved literal worlds for him, catastrophically.

Saturn had let him, and the universe had charged everyone else for it.

He missed him with a ferocity that felt physical, a compression behind his ribs that reached all the way to his core, and he wanted to be angry at him—was angry at him, still, for shouldering everything alone like love was a solo act—but the anger couldn’t hold against the missing. Saturn kept walking, his hand still cold from holding someone else’s. Jupiter would have understood that, if Saturn had told him. Jupiter would have said I’m sorry and meant it completely and then immediately tried to fix it himself, because that’s what Jupiter did, and Saturn would have let him, because that’s what Saturn did, and neither of them would have fixed anything because they’d been running that loop for so long it had worn a groove in spacetime. But X had said, don’t let him do that. Make him look at you.

And somewhere in the dark, Jupiter was rescuing his millionth planet with no idea that Saturn was walking towards the ice giant they’d both spent billions of years failing to see. And X would be drifting back towards the Kingdom by now, Guillermo at his shoulder, hands shoved in his pockets, that brittle fear still sitting under his composure. X, who’d told Saturn he’d spent four and a half billion years replaying every conversation until he’d worn grooves in them, who’d planned an entire revenge around Jupiter and his suffering and watched them both accept it like a debt come due. The same X who’d turned his head away when Saturn told him Jupiter was proud, his face unreadable.

They were all tangled up in Jupiter, every one of them, orbiting him even now, even out here where orbits weren’t supposed to work anymore. Jupiter, who loved so hard and so badly that the people he loved kept getting crushed by the gravity of it.

Jupiter. His husband.

Saturn lifted his hand and studied the rose gold ring that stood for the best part of his existence. I love you, he told it, told every version of Jupiter he’d ever known. He pressed a kiss to the cold metal and then finally let his hand fall, turning his attention to the dark ahead.

He had a million planets to save, apparently.

And he was going to start with the ice giant who deserved someone who’d truly look at him.

Someone beyond his fellow ice giants—who deserved the same thing themselves—and then, when he’d earned the right, he’d find his way back to the husband who’d forgotten how to look at anything except his own guilt. And hopefully by then Saturn would know who he was without Jupiter beside him, and he’d have the words that he needed to say. He’d spent his whole existence being the pleasant one, the agreeable one, wearing those faces while everyone else fell apart. He wanted to be something better. A version of himself that could stand in front of Jupiter and say you hurt me and mean it without it being the end of everything.

A version of himself that could stand in front of Jupiter and say I love you and mean that too.

(That version of himself had existed for billions of years, and would keep existing no matter what happened. Saturn knew that for a fact of life.)

Saturn pressed his thumb against the now-warm rose gold band one final time before letting his hand drop, picking up speed as quickly as he could.

He had some distance to cross, after all.

And plenty of space to look through for an ice giant who’d always felt hidden from him.