Archive of Our Own

Dark Pit’s first thought was that Pit was heavier than he looked.

His second was that this was impossible.

Pit had always moved like sunlight did—too fast to pin down, all careless momentum and bright noise and stupid little laughs at the worst possible times. Even unconscious, even crumpled across Dark Pit’s arms with his feathers scorched black at their ends, he should not have felt this heavy.

But he did.

He was deadweight in the most literal sense. Warm, barely. Breathing, barely.

Dark Pit hated him for it.

“Don’t,” he said through clenched teeth, though Pit could not hear him. “Don’t you dare.”

The words came out thin against the screaming wind.

The world below the Chaos Vortex blurred into broken color. Ruins. Clouds. A distant, ugly smear of fire. Dark Pit did not look down. He held Pit tighter under the shoulders and knees, as if a better grip could keep the idiot from slipping out of existence.

Pit’s head lolled against his chest.

There was blood at the corner of his mouth. Not much. That made it worse somehow. A small, human-looking amount, bright against skin gone frighteningly pale.

Dark Pit adjusted his hold.

Pit made a sound.

Not a word. Not even a groan. Just air catching in a throat that was too damaged to use it properly.

Dark Pit’s own breath caught with it.

He froze.

For one stupid second, he thought Pit had spoken.

Then the pain hit.

It began under his ribs: a narrow pressure, sharp enough to make him suck in a breath. It spread upward through his lungs, cold and constricting, until every inhale felt shallow. Wrong. Like he had forgotten how much air a body needed.

He stumbled.

Pit’s weight shifted in his arms.

“No.” Dark Pit’s voice came out harsher now. “No, no—stay still.”

Pit was not moving.

That was the problem.

Dark Pit dropped to one knee on the broken stone, too fast, jarring Pit despite his grip. His own knee struck hard enough to hurt. The pain was clean. Immediate. His.

He almost welcomed it.

Then Pit’s chest failed to rise.

Dark Pit stared.

The silence around them was impossible. There was still wind. There was still distant battle, somewhere too far away to matter. There was the crackle of ruined magic in the air, the bitter smoke from burned feathers, the metallic smell of blood.

But beneath it all was an absence.

Pit’s next breath did not come.

Dark Pit pressed two fingers to the side of Pit’s throat.

Nothing.

His fingers shook. That was irritating. He made them stop.

“Come on,” he muttered. “Come on, you useless little—”

A beat.

So faint he might have imagined it.

Then another.

Pit’s pulse fluttered beneath his fingertips, weak and uneven. It did not feel like a heartbeat. It felt like something trying to remember how to be alive.

Dark Pit inhaled sharply.

Pain lanced through his chest.

He jerked his hand back from Pit’s neck and pressed it over his own sternum.

His heart was racing.

No—not racing.

Stuttering.

Once. Twice. A pause so long that the world narrowed around it.

Dark Pit stood too quickly, dizziness rolling through him. The stone beneath his boots tilted. His vision washed pale at the edges, as though someone had dragged a white cloth over the sky.

He grabbed a ruined pillar with one hand.

Pit lay where Dark Pit had set him down.

Still. Pale. Breathing in brief, ragged fragments.

Dark Pit could feel every one of them.

Not hear. Not see.

Feel.

When Pit’s lungs seized, something in Dark Pit’s own chest tightened in answer. When Pit’s heartbeat lost its rhythm, Dark Pit’s pulse stumbled after it like a reflection lagging a fraction behind its source.

His hand slipped against the stone.

“No,” he said.

The word was quiet.

Not frightened. Not yet.

Just angry.

He looked down at Pit. At the ruined wings, at the ash-dark feathers stuck to his skin, at the slack line of his mouth. Pit looked smaller without his stupid confidence animating him. Smaller, and horribly breakable.

Dark Pit had seen him hurt before. Pit got hurt constantly. He would get slammed into walls, shot out of the air, nearly swallowed by whatever monstrosity was terrorizing the world that week, and then grin afterward like it had all been a funny story.

This was different.

This was Pit without the part that came back.

Dark Pit crouched again and shoved an arm beneath Pit’s shoulders.

“Get up,” he said.

Pit did not move.

“I said get up.”

The anger in his voice cracked on the last word.

Dark Pit went still.

The Rewind Spring. He needed to get Pit to the Rewind Spring. That was the only thing that mattered. Palutena had said it—somewhere between the shouting and the collapse and the awful realization that Pit had burned himself apart to save him. The spring could restore him. It could take him back before the damage.

Before Dark Pit had watched him fall.

Before Pit had decided, without asking, that Dark Pit’s life was worth more than his own.

The thought made something hot and poisonous rise in Dark Pit’s throat.

Of course Pit had done it.

Of course Pit had smiled at death and called it the right thing.

Of course he had made Dark Pit’s survival into another one of his stupid, shining choices.

Dark Pit lifted him again.

Pit’s head tipped against his shoulder. His hair brushed Dark Pit’s jaw, soft with sweat and ash. The contact should have meant nothing. It was nothing. Pit was injured; Dark Pit was transporting him; there was a spring; there was a solution.

Simple.

Necessary.

Dark Pit took one step.

His heart stopped.

Not fully. Not for long.

Just long enough for terror to punch through him with cold, bright clarity.

He gasped. The sound scraped his throat raw.

Pit’s pulse faltered beneath the hand Dark Pit had braced over his chest.

The same pause.

The same terrible hesitation.

Dark Pit looked down at him.

For an instant, he could not tell where the weak rhythm was coming from. Pit’s body lay against his. Dark Pit’s palm covered the space above Pit’s heart. His own chest hurt beneath it, echoing every ragged, failing beat.

A second heartbeat.

Inside him.

“No,” Dark Pit whispered.

His grip tightened until Pit’s tunic bunched in his fist.

The Mirror of Truth had made him. Fine. He knew that. Everyone knew that. A stupid piece of divine glass spat out a darker version of Pit and expected him to accept the name, the face, the comparisons. Dark Pit had fought every day since then to make himself more than that.

Different weapons. Different allies. Different choices.

Different.

But this—

If Pit’s heart stopped, would his?

The question opened inside him like a wound.

Dark Pit wanted to throw it away. He wanted to laugh at it, sneer at it, crush it beneath his heel with every other thing that had ever tried to tell him what he was.

Instead, he held Pit closer.

Not gently.

Desperately.

“Stay alive,” he hissed into Pit’s hair. “You hear me? You don’t get to do this.”

Pit’s breath shuddered against Dark Pit’s collarbone.

Dark Pit’s lungs unlocked at the same time.

He went rigid.

There it was again.

Not sympathy. Not worry. Not some pathetic burst of concern for the idiot who had nearly gotten himself killed saving someone who had never asked to be saved.

A response.

A command written into Dark Pit’s body.

Pit breathed.

Dark Pit breathed.

Pit’s heart stumbled.

Dark Pit’s followed.

His stomach twisted, warm and sick at once.

He hated the warmth most of all.

Because beneath the fear—beneath the fury, the choking certainty that his life had never belonged to him—there was relief.

Pit was still here.

Dark Pit could feel it.

And he could not tell whether that relief belonged to the bond, to fear, or to something far worse.

Something that had been growing in him long before Pit started dying.

Dark Pit forced himself to move.

The Rewind Spring was ahead. It had to be.

Palutena had said so—her voice, normally so smooth and irritatingly certain, had fractured through the divine communication in a way Dark Pit had not known it could. There had been instructions. Directions. Warnings.

He had heard none of them properly.

Only **spring**.

Only **alive**.

Only the thin, erratic beat beneath Pit’s skin and the answering violence in Dark Pit’s own chest.

He shifted Pit higher in his arms and started forward again.

The path was narrow, half-swallowed by ash and the leftovers of ruined magic. Broken stone bit through the soles of his boots. Each step sent a shock up his legs. Each step was something he could name: stone, impact, pain.

Mine.

Pit’s weight pressed into his forearms. That was harder to name.

His body knew Pit too well. It knew the shape of him without being taught. The bend of his knees against Dark Pit’s hip. The warm slackness of his arm across Dark Pit’s shoulders. The unsteady breath dampening the fabric at Dark Pit’s neck.

Dark Pit hated that knowledge.

He had never held Pit like this before.

They had fought. Obviously. They had traded arrows and insults across entire ruined landscapes. Pit had knocked him out of the sky, Dark Pit had returned the favor, and neither one of them had ever needed to acknowledge the way their bodies matched in motion.

Fight long enough against someone made in your image and you learned their timing.

That was all this was.

A familiar weight. A familiar body. A familiar pulse.

Nothing else.

Pit inhaled sharply.

Dark Pit’s lungs seized.

He stumbled again, shoulder clipping the wall of a collapsed archway. Pain flashed bright along his upper arm. Pit’s head knocked lightly against his chest.

Dark Pit swore and dropped to one knee before he could fall.

“No,” he snapped, though he did not know whether he was talking to Pit, his own body, or the thing between them. “No. Don’t start that.”

Pit’s eyelashes fluttered.

For one second, Dark Pit thought he was waking.

Hope rose in him before he could stop it—quick and ugly and hot enough to make him sick.

Pit’s eyes did not open.

His mouth parted. A breath slid out of him, slow and ragged.

“Dark…”

The sound barely existed.

Dark Pit went completely still.

Pit’s brow pulled together as if he were in pain. Of course he was in pain. His wings were burned. His skin was cold. His heart was failing. There was probably nothing in him that did not hurt.

Still, hearing his name in Pit’s voice felt like a blade caught under Dark Pit’s ribs.

“What?” he said.

Too fast.

Too quiet.

Pit did not answer.

Dark Pit waited anyway.

The silence stretched.

He looked down at Pit’s face. Their face.

Same shape of jaw. Same nose. Same mouth. Even now, with Pit bloodless and unconscious, Dark Pit could see it. The proof. The stupid, inescapable proof of what everyone saw when they looked at him.

Not Dark Pit.

Pit, wrong.

His grip tightened.

“I’m here,” he said, before he could stop himself.

The words landed between them.

Dark Pit wished he could take them back.

Pit’s expression loosened a fraction. Not awake. Not aware. But the tension in his face eased, as though some part of him had heard.

Warmth moved low in Dark Pit’s stomach.

He hated it immediately.

It was nothing.

It had to be nothing.

The bond. The connection. Some magical reflex making him react when Pit reacted. The same way his pulse had followed Pit’s. The same way his breath had shortened when Pit could not breathe.

That was all.

He was not comforted by Pit trusting him.

He was not relieved Pit had called for him.

He was not—

Dark Pit stood so abruptly that his vision flickered black.

For a terrifying instant, the world disappeared.

Not darkness. Not unconsciousness. Worse.

Absence.

The broken path vanished. The wind vanished. The smell of smoke and ash vanished. There was only a hollow pressure inside his chest and a distant rhythm slowing, slowing, slowing—

Dark Pit’s knees nearly gave out.

Pit’s heart.

He could feel it.

He did not know how. He did not want to know how. But there it was, no longer a faint pulse against his fingers, no longer something he could blame on proximity. It beat somewhere behind his eyes, low in his throat, beneath his own skin.

One.

Two.

A pause.

Dark Pit’s own heartbeat faltered with it.

He clutched Pit against him hard enough that it had to hurt.

Pit did not wake.

“Don’t do that,” Dark Pit whispered.

The words came out ragged.

He pressed his face briefly into Pit’s hair, more to steady himself than anything else. Smoke clung to it. Beneath that, there was something clean and familiar—the scent of sky, maybe, or feathers warmed by sunlight. Dark Pit had no name for it. He did not want one.

He pulled back immediately.

His face burned.

No one had seen.

That did not make it less humiliating.

He started walking again.

The path bent sharply around a ravine. Below, clouds churned in gray layers, thick enough to swallow a body and never give it back. Dark Pit kept his eyes forward.

His wings twitched behind him.

Pain tore across his back.

Not his pain.

He knew that now.

Pit’s ruined wings shifted weakly against Dark Pit’s arm. Dark Pit felt the movement in his own shoulder blades—a phantom flare of heat, feathers scorching away one by one. He bit down hard enough to taste blood.

“Stop,” he said.

Pit’s wings sagged.

The pain faded from Dark Pit’s back in a slow, nauseating retreat.

He could not keep doing this.

That thought arrived cleanly.

Not carrying Pit. He could carry him. Pit was light. Pit was nothing. Pit was a problem he could solve if he just got him to the spring.

He could not keep feeling him.

He could not keep being answered by him.

Every breath Dark Pit took had become a question. Every heartbeat was a demand. Every flicker of relief, every surge of fear, every involuntary warmth in his own body had been made suspicious.

Was it his?

Was anything?

His foot slid on loose stone.

The world lurched.

Dark Pit caught himself against the cliff wall, twisting so Pit’s body took none of the impact. The motion was instinctive. Immediate.

He noticed it afterward.

Of course he had turned.

Of course he had protected Pit’s head.

Pit’s death would kill him.

That was all.

The explanation came quickly now, too quickly. It slid into every thought before Dark Pit could examine it.

He did not care about Pit. He cared about living.

He did not hold Pit carefully because Pit was precious. He held him carefully because his own life was strapped to Pit’s failing heart.

He did not feel sick when Pit made that weak, broken sound. He did not feel the urge to demand that Pit open his eyes, look at him, say something stupid and alive.

He was afraid.

That was normal.

Fear was useful.

Fear made you move.

Dark Pit adjusted Pit in his arms and kept going.

Ahead, through the trees and the haze of smoke, something shimmered.

Water.

Light bending across it in pale, impossible colors.

The Rewind Spring.

Relief hit him so hard it made him dizzy.

His heart—his own heart—kicked violently against his ribs.

Then Pit’s pulse skipped.

Dark Pit nearly screamed.

He broke into a run.

The Rewind Spring did not look like salvation.

Dark Pit had expected something grander. A monument, maybe. A temple built high enough to scrape the clouds. A sacred pool guarded by some unbearable god with a rulebook and a smug voice.

Instead, it waited in the center of a ruined clearing like an open wound in the earth.

Water filled a shallow basin of white stone. It did not ripple with the wind. It glowed from somewhere beneath its surface—a thin, silver-blue light that made the surrounding ash look blacker, the broken columns sharper, the blood on Pit’s mouth too red.

Dark Pit stopped at its edge.

For one beat, he could not move.

The spring made everything quiet.

Not truly quiet. The wind still moved through the shattered trees. Somewhere behind him, rubble shifted and fell with a dull crack. His breathing came too fast, too loud, dragging in and out of his throat.

But the spring swallowed the rest.

It swallowed the distant war.

It swallowed the gods’ voices.

It swallowed every possible future except the one in Dark Pit’s arms.

Pit was dying.

Dark Pit could feel it.

His own heart had become a broken metronome, striking hard, hesitating, trying to keep time with the fading rhythm pressed against his chest. Every pause in Pit’s pulse carved out a matching emptiness beneath Dark Pit’s ribs.

He lowered Pit onto the stone.

Carefully.

Too carefully.

Pit’s body looked wrong without movement. His wings spilled across the ground in ruined white-gold layers, charred at their edges and bent at angles feathers should never bend. His face had gone gray beneath the ash. The usual soft animation of it—the stupid smiles, the raised brows, the open confusion whenever someone insulted him too subtly—was gone.

Dark Pit hated the stillness.

It looked too much like an answer.

“Okay,” he said.

The word scraped out of him.

He looked at the water.

Then at Pit.

Then at the water again.

No instructions. No Palutena explaining what to do. No Viridi pretending not to care. No one to tell him whether he had made it in time, whether the spring would take someone who had burned so much of himself away that there was barely enough left to bring back.

Dark Pit crouched beside Pit and gripped the front of his tunic.

“Wake up.”

Pit did not move.

Dark Pit’s chest tightened.

“No. That’s not—” He swallowed. “That’s not how this works. This is the spring. You’re here.”

His fingers curled harder in the fabric.

Pit’s head rolled slightly with the motion.

A thin breath escaped him.

Dark Pit stopped.

The breath pulled something through his own lungs—an involuntary hitch, a sudden pressure, as if his body had been waiting for permission to inhale. He released Pit’s tunic so quickly his hand struck the stone.

Pain shot through his palm.

Good.

He pressed it against the ground, feeling every rough grain bite into his skin.

Stone. Cold. Blood. His.

Not Pit’s.

Not borrowed.

Not reflected.

His heart skipped.

Dark Pit’s breath caught.

“No,” he whispered.

He looked down at Pit’s throat.

Nothing moved.

He pressed two fingers there.

The pulse was there. Barely.

A flutter.

Another flutter.

Then nothing.

Dark Pit stared at his own fingers.

The entire world narrowed to the place where his skin touched Pit’s skin.

One second.

Two.

Three—

His own heart stopped.

Not metaphorically. Not in the dramatic way people said it when something scared them.

It simply failed to beat.

A hard, terrible absence opened in his chest.

Dark Pit jerked backward with a strangled sound, one hand flying to his sternum. Air would not come. His lungs clenched down around nothing. The clearing tilted sideways; the white stone of the spring stretched long and bright and unreal beneath him.

Pit’s pulse returned.

Dark Pit’s did too.

He collapsed forward over his knees.

A sound came out of him. He did not recognize it as his.

It was too small.

He braced both hands against the stone and tried to breathe.

In. Nothing.

Again.

The air caught halfway down his throat and broke apart. His chest spasmed. His vision filled with harsh white points that blinked in and out like stars drowning under water.

His fingers curled against the ground.

He could not feel them properly.

He could feel Pit.

That was worse.

Pit’s heartbeat shivered beneath the silence, weak enough that Dark Pit could not tell if it was truly there or if he was forcing the rhythm into existence with terror alone. A pulse in the spring. A pulse under his hand. A pulse under his ribs.

One body.

Two bodies.

One body.

Dark Pit swallowed hard and gagged.

“No,” he said again.

The word had lost all force. It was a breath. A sound dragged out of him because he could not make any other.

The Mirror of Truth.

The thought came uninvited.

Silver glass. Cold light. Pit’s face staring back at him from a surface that should have shown no one but himself. A shape pulled from a reflection. A person—he was a person—given a body and a voice and then named for what he was not.

Dark Pit.

Not Pit.

The name had always been an insult.

Now it became a sentence.

Not Pit.

But only because Pit was there first.

His heartbeat stumbled again.

Pit’s did too.

Dark Pit doubled over.

His stomach lurched violently. He got one hand over his mouth before anything came up, but the motion tore through his ribs. His breaths came shallow and rapid through his fingers. Every inhale stopped short, like his body had forgotten the end of the movement.

He tried to count.

Four in.

Hold.

Four out.

He had heard someone say that once. Maybe Palutena. Maybe some human soldier who had thought calming down was as easy as following an instruction.

One—

His breath shook apart.

Two—

Pit’s pulse faltered.

Dark Pit’s count vanished.

He looked at Pit.

He should not have.

Pit lay beside the water as if he had already been arranged for burial. The sight struck Dark Pit with a sudden, irrational fury.

He grabbed Pit by the shoulder.

“Do something.”

Pit’s body rocked weakly beneath his hand.

Dark Pit’s throat closed.

“Move,” he said. “Breathe. Wake up. You—”

His voice broke.

He shoved Pit’s shoulder once, not hard, not enough to hurt him, just enough to make the body in front of him become a person again. To force some sign out of him. A groan. A stupid complaint. A hand batting Dark Pit away.

Anything.

Pit gave him nothing.

Dark Pit’s hand stayed on Pit’s shoulder.

The fabric beneath his palm was warm.

That warmth was unbearable.

He snatched his hand away.

He could not do this.

He could not stand here and watch Pit die. Not because he would die too. Not only because of that. The thought rose, and he crushed it immediately.

It was because of that.

It had to be.

If Pit died, Dark Pit died. Simple. Practical. A survival instinct. Any living thing would panic when its own body started failing.

That was all it was.

Not grief.

Not the sight of Pit’s face empty of its usual sunlight.

Not the remembered shape of Pit’s voice saying his name, soft and half-conscious against Dark Pit’s shoulder.

Not the terrible certainty that if Pit was gone, something in the world would go quiet forever.

Survival.

Dark Pit clung to the word until it hurt.

“Fine,” he breathed.

He stood.

His legs almost folded under him.

He caught himself on the edge of the basin, fingers slipping against smooth stone. The water glowed beneath his hands, silver light crawling over his skin. It made the blood in the cuts across his knuckles look black.

Fine.

He could do this.

He did not know how, but he would make the spring work. He would throw Pit into it if he had to. He would tear the whole damn basin apart stone by stone and force whatever old magic slept inside it to give Pit back.

His body lurched forward before his mind caught up.

Dark Pit shoved both hands into the water.

Cold shot up his arms.

Not ordinary cold. It went through his skin, through muscle and bone, and struck somewhere behind his heart. The spring’s light flared under the surface. It climbed his wrists in thin silver threads.

Then it crossed the space between them.

Pit’s body jerked.

Dark Pit ripped his hands from the water.

The glow followed anyway.

It spread across the white stone in branching lines, winding around Pit’s shoulders, his throat, his wrists. It gathered beneath his ruined wings. The burned feathers trembled.

Dark Pit stumbled back.

“No,” he said, but he did not mean stop.

He did not know what he meant anymore.

The spring brightened.

Pit arched sharply off the ground.

Dark Pit’s own spine locked in response.

Pain tore across his back.

He screamed.

The sound escaped before he could bite it down.

Fire exploded beneath his shoulder blades—bright, feathered, unbearable. For a wild second he saw it: wings burning. White feathers curling black. The sky rushing past. Pit falling.

Dark Pit clawed at his own back.

There was nothing there.

No burns.

No smoke.

Only skin and cloth and the phantom certainty that he was on fire.

Pit’s wings shuddered again.

Dark Pit fell to his knees.

His palms struck the stone. The impact jarred through his arms, but he barely felt it. His heart was beating too hard now, violently, as though it were trying to make up for every beat it had missed. Each thud hurt. Each one came with a second, fainter echo that did not belong to him.

His vision narrowed around Pit.

Light poured from the spring in sheets.

It washed over Pit’s face, erasing the ash, the gray pallor, the blood at his mouth. It sank into the scorched feathers. One by one, the broken edges of his wings began to shift.

Dark Pit could not look away.

He could not breathe.

Pit’s chest rose.

Once.

Dark Pit’s lungs dragged in air so suddenly that it hurt.

Pit’s chest fell.

Dark Pit’s did too.

Again.

Again.

The rhythm strengthened.

Pit’s pulse rose beneath the light—faint, then clearer, then firm enough that Dark Pit could feel it without touching him. It moved through the clearing like a drumbeat. It moved through Dark Pit’s bones.

Alive.

Alive.

Alive.

The word came with each beat until it stopped meaning anything.

Dark Pit pressed both hands over his ears.

It did not help.

The heartbeat was inside him.

He bent forward, forehead nearly touching the stone, and tried to make himself smaller. His wings curled around him on instinct, dark feathers trembling at their edges. He wanted out of his body. He wanted out of the clearing. He wanted out of every moment that had ever led him here.

He wanted the heartbeat to stop being his.

Pit inhaled.

A full breath.

Deep enough that Dark Pit heard it from where he knelt.

The spring’s light receded.

Silence rushed in after it.

Dark Pit stayed frozen.

His own pulse was still hammering.

Pit’s was steady.

Steady.

Steady.

Dark Pit lifted his head slowly.

Pit lay motionless beside the spring.

But he was no longer gray.

The burns across his wings had faded beneath a wash of new, clean feathers. The blood was gone from his mouth. His face had color again. His chest rose and fell in calm, even breaths.

Alive.

Dark Pit should have felt relief.

Instead, he started shaking.

It began in his hands. A tremor so small he tried to ignore it. Then his arms. His shoulders. His ribs. The shaking spread through him until he had to brace one hand against the ground to keep from falling over.

Pit was alive.

Pit was alive, and Dark Pit was alive, and neither fact felt like victory.

It felt like a lock clicking shut.

Dark Pit could not make himself stand.

The clearing had settled into the kind of quiet that came after destruction: not peace, exactly, but the temporary exhaustion of things that had spent all their violence. The Rewind Spring shone dimly in its basin. Its light had withdrawn beneath the water, leaving only a pale tremor along the surface.

Pit breathed.

Dark Pit heard every breath.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

Too even. Too calm. Too alive.

His own lungs had not found the rhythm yet. They kept trying to outrun it. Short pulls of air. A pause. Another shallow inhale that scraped against his throat. He pressed a hand flat to the center of his chest as if he could physically hold his heart in place.

It beat hard beneath his palm.

Once.

Twice.

A third time, steady enough that fear flashed through him again.

He hated that he could tell.

Pit’s pulse had become a sound in the room. Not audible—not really—but Dark Pit could feel it threaded through everything. Through the white stone under his knees. Through the spring water. Through the raw, shaking muscles in his arms.

He tried to look away.

His eyes returned to Pit anyway.

Pit lay on his back beside the basin, one arm bent loosely at his side. His wings had settled around him in soft layers of white and gold. Clean now. Whole. The last of the ash had vanished from the edges of his feathers.

It looked wrong.

Not because Pit was healed. Dark Pit had wanted that. He had dragged Pit through broken stone and smoke and his own choking terror for exactly that.

But the healing had been too complete.

The spring had erased the evidence.

It had taken the burned wings, the gray skin, the blood, the broken breaths—and left Pit looking almost peaceful.

Like he had not been seconds from death.

Like Dark Pit had not felt every second of it.

Like nothing had happened.

Dark Pit swallowed.

His throat hurt.

“Of course,” he muttered.

The sound was barely more than air.

Of course Pit got to come back untouched.

Of course Pit would wake up eventually, blink once or twice, and turn the whole thing into a story. He would apologize for worrying everyone. He would smile at Dark Pit with that stupid, open expression, like Dark Pit had done something good. Like he had made a choice.

Dark Pit’s stomach turned.

He dug his fingers into the stone.

The skin on his knuckles split where the spring water had softened it. A thin line of blood appeared, bright against his dark glove.

He stared at it.

There.

Proof.

Blood was blood. Pain was pain. His hand hurt because he had pressed it too hard against stone. No magic had placed the cut there. No heartbeat had told it to open. No one else’s breath had made it sting.

Mine, he thought.

The word did not settle.

Pit shifted.

Dark Pit’s head snapped up.

At first, it was barely anything. A twitch through Pit’s fingers. The faint curl of one hand against the ground. His brow pulled tight, then loosened. His lashes trembled.

Dark Pit stopped breathing.

No.

No, not yet.

He was not ready.

Pit’s face moved again. His mouth parted on a quiet exhale, and one of his wings flexed—only slightly, feathers brushing stone with a soft, dry whisper.

The sound went through Dark Pit like an arrow.

His heart lurched.

Pit’s did too.

Dark Pit scrambled backward so quickly that his palm slid through the thin smear of blood on the ground. The sight of it made his stomach clench. He wiped his hand on his tunic without looking.

Pit was waking up.

That should have been good.

It was good.

It had to be good.

The bond had stabilized. His own heart was still beating. His lungs had stopped locking closed every time Pit drew breath. The immediate threat was gone. Pit was alive; therefore Dark Pit was alive.

There was no emergency anymore.

There was only Pit.

Pit, breathing.

Pit, healed.

Pit, beginning to return to himself.

Dark Pit could not get far enough away.

He got to his feet too fast. The clearing tipped sharply. Light flashed behind his eyes, and he caught himself against a cracked column at the edge of the spring.

The stone was cold against his shoulder.

He pressed harder into it.

Pit’s lashes fluttered again.

Dark Pit looked away.

He stared into the trees instead. At the burned branches. At the shredded strips of cloud caught between them. At anything that did not have Pit’s face.

Behind him, there was a small sound.

A breath changing shape.

Not speech.

Not yet.

Dark Pit’s entire body went rigid.

He could feel Pit’s awareness coming back before he saw it. A shift in the rhythm. A subtle, impossible adjustment in the heartbeat that had been terrorizing him for what felt like hours.

Pit’s pulse quickened.

Dark Pit’s followed.

He pressed his fist against his mouth.

This was ridiculous.

He had fought gods. Monsters. Armies. He had been created by a cursed mirror, shoved into the middle of a war he had not asked for, and made a name for himself anyway.

He did not panic because someone woke up.

Except Pit was not just someone.

That was the problem.

Dark Pit squeezed his eyes shut.

He saw Pit dying anyway.

He saw the slack weight in his arms. The dead gray of his face. The way his wings had hung like they no longer belonged to him. He felt the terrible silence in his own chest when Pit’s pulse vanished.

His vision swam.

He opened his eyes immediately.

The spring blurred before him.

Breathe.

He tried.

In.

Out.

The breath did not reach the bottom of his lungs.

Again.

His ribs tightened.

Pit moved behind him.

Dark Pit flinched so hard his shoulder struck the column.

Pain burst along his back.

He almost laughed.

Of course he could still feel it there. The phantom fire. The memory of Pit’s wings burning itself into the space beneath Dark Pit’s own.

He dragged a hand down his face.

His fingers came away shaking.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

The command was aimed at Pit, at himself, at the spring. At the whole stupid universe.

Pit’s breathing changed again.

Closer to waking.

Dark Pit could not stop listening.

He could hear every slight catch in the inhale. Every soft release. He could hear the living shape of Pit return one piece at a time, and it made the clearing feel smaller.

He imagined Pit opening his eyes.

Purple meeting blue.

The same face looking back at him, except alive in a way Dark Pit had never been able to understand.

Pit would see him.

Pit would smile.

Pit would thank him.

Dark Pit’s chest constricted so sharply that he doubled over.

No.

He could not let him.

Not yet.

Not while his hands still shook.

Not while the word *alive* kept repeating in his blood until it sounded like a threat.

Not while every soft, unbearable beat of Pit’s heart seemed to say that Dark Pit had never been alone inside his own body.

He pushed away from the column.

His legs felt unsteady. Wrong. The ground seemed too far below him, as though he were already falling.

Good.

He should leave.

That was what he did. He left. He went where he wanted, when he wanted. He did not wait around for grateful looks or awkward explanations. He did not stand beside Pit like some obedient shadow waiting to be told he had done well.

He took one step toward the treeline.

Pit inhaled.

Dark Pit stopped.

The breath behind him was deeper this time. Slow. Deliberate.

Awake.

Dark Pit’s pulse struck painfully against his throat.

He did not turn around.

He could not.

The space between one second and the next stretched thin and shining.

Behind him, Pit’s fingers scraped softly against the stone.

Dark Pit’s shoulders locked.

The scrape of fingers against stone was barely a sound. It should have meant nothing. A body waking up. A hand finding purchase. Proof that the spring had worked.

Instead, it went through him like a blade.

He stood with his back to Pit, one foot pointed toward the treeline and the other rooted to the white stone. The air felt too thin. It had smelled like ash a moment ago; now it smelled like water and wet earth and something bright enough to make his stomach twist.

Behind him, Pit breathed in again.

Then, hoarse and soft:

“Pittoo?”

Dark Pit’s heart slammed once against his ribs.

The next beat came too fast.

He hated that name.

That was what he told everyone, anyway.

Pittoo. Like he was a joke. Like he was a smaller, stranger version of something Pit got to claim first. Like a nickname was enough to sand down all the sharp, impossible edges of being made from someone else’s reflection.

Dark Pit had told Pit to stop saying it more times than he could count.

Pit never had.

And now, after the spring, after the failing heartbeat and the fire beneath Dark Pit’s wings and the certainty that he had been dying in someone else’s shadow, Pit’s voice said it again.

Pittoo.

Dark Pit could not move.

The name warmed somewhere low in his stomach.

He despised himself for that.

Pit shifted behind him. There was a faint rustle of feathers, careful and uncertain.

“Pittoo,” Pit said again.

Not louder.

Just more awake.

Dark Pit’s pulse raced.

He pressed his nails into his palms.

Do not turn around.

If he turned around, Pit would see him. Not the version of him that smirked during fights and vanished before anyone could decide they understood him. Not the convenient rival. Not the mirror image with a different color palette.

This.

Shaking hands. Shallow breaths. Blood drying across his knuckles. A heart that still did not feel entirely his.

He took another step forward.

“Dark Pit.”

Pit’s voice caught slightly on the name.

That stopped him too.

A stupid thing. Nothing. Just Pit correcting himself.

But it sounded careful.

Like Pit had heard every time Dark Pit snapped at the nickname and, for once, was trying.

Dark Pit’s throat tightened.

“Don’t,” he said.

Pit went quiet.

The silence was immediate. Obedient.

Dark Pit almost turned around then.

Instead, he stared at the treeline. A line of charred branches cut across the pale sky. Beyond them were roads, ruins, enemies, gods, whole continents full of places he could go. Anywhere but here.

Anywhere but near the person whose heartbeat had nearly dragged him into the dark.

“What?” Pit asked after a moment.

His voice was still rough. Weak in a way Dark Pit had never heard before.

The sound made anger flash through him so fast it nearly felt like relief.

“Don’t talk,” Dark Pit said.

Pit was quiet again.

For two breaths.

Then, quieter, “Okay.”

Dark Pit closed his eyes.

That was worse.

Pit was not supposed to listen that easily. He was supposed to argue. Make some stupid joke. Ask whether Dark Pit had missed him. Smile in that way that made Dark Pit want to hit him and stay close enough to see it again.

Instead, Pit said okay.

And Dark Pit could hear the exhaustion beneath it. The confusion. The carefulness.

Pit was alive.

Pit was hurting.

Pit was trying not to make it harder.

The thought entered Dark Pit’s chest and found something already bruised.

He turned.

Slowly.

Pit was propped up on one elbow beside the spring. He looked smaller than he should have. His wings were whole again, but they lay unevenly across the stone, one bent protectively around his side. His hair was still damp where the light had washed over him. His eyes were open.

Blue.

And the same, almond shape as Dark Pit’s.

Except Pit’s were unfocused with exhaustion, rimmed red, and still somehow soft.

They found Dark Pit immediately.

Dark Pit forgot how to breathe.

Pit’s face changed.

Relief moved over it—not dramatic. Not a smile, exactly. Just the tension leaving his brow, the faint loosening around his eyes.

As if seeing Dark Pit made the world make sense again.

Dark Pit’s stomach turned warm.

No.

No, that was the bond.

Pit was probably sensing it too. Some magical recognition. A reflected thing recognizing its source. That was all.

It had to be.

“You’re okay,” Pit murmured.

Dark Pit laughed.

It came out wrong.

A short, sharp sound that cracked before it could become anything like humor.

“You’re asking me that?”

Pit blinked slowly.

“I wasn’t asking.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “You are.”

Dark Pit wanted to say something cruel.

The words lined up easily. *You don’t know anything.* *You almost died.* *You don’t get to decide that.* *You don’t get to look at me like you’re relieved.*

None of them left his mouth.

Pit’s gaze dropped.

To Dark Pit’s hands.

Dark Pit looked down too.

His fingers were trembling visibly now. His gloves were scuffed and wet from the spring; blood had dried in the creases of his knuckles. He curled his hands into fists.

Pit’s expression tightened.

“Did you get hurt?” he asked.

Dark Pit’s chest seized.

The question was so normal it felt obscene.

Pit was the one who had been burned alive in the sky. Pit was the one who had stopped breathing. Pit was the one who had been carried like a corpse to a pool of magic because there had been nothing else left to do.

And he was looking at Dark Pit’s scraped hands.

Dark Pit’s own heart thudded hard.

Pit’s pulse stayed steady.

The difference made him dizzy.

“I’m fine,” Dark Pit said.

Pit kept looking at him.

Dark Pit hated being looked at.

Especially by Pit.

“You don’t look fine,” Pit said.

“I said I’m fine.”

The words snapped out of him with more force than he intended.

Pit flinched.

It was small. Barely there. But Dark Pit saw it.

Guilt struck him so quickly he turned angry again before it could settle.

“Stop doing that,” he said.

Pit’s eyebrows pulled together. “Doing what?”

“Looking at me like that.”

Pit stared for a second.

Then he looked away.

“Oh,” he said.

The word was quiet enough to hurt.

Dark Pit’s throat closed.

He had wanted Pit to stop looking. That was what he said. That was what he always said: go away, stop following me, mind your own business, quit acting like we’re friends.

Pit was listening.

He should have felt relieved.

Instead, something inside him panicked harder.

“Not—” Dark Pit started.

Pit glanced back at him.

Dark Pit stopped.

What was he supposed to say?

*Not like you care.*

*Not like you’re afraid.*

*Not like I matter to you.*

Those were worse. Those were things he had no right to demand, especially now, especially with Pit still pale from death and sitting beside the spring because Dark Pit could not decide whether to leave or remain.

The silence grew.

Pit’s fingers curled against the stone.

Dark Pit saw the movement and felt a phantom echo in his own hand. Not pain. Not exactly. Just awareness. His skin crawled.

Pit noticed Dark Pit watching.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then Pit lifted his hand slightly.

Not toward him.

Just enough for Dark Pit to see the tremor still running through it.

“I’m sorry,” Pit said.

Dark Pit went cold.

“What?”

“For…” Pit looked down at himself, at his wings, at the water. “For making you carry me. And for scaring you.”

Dark Pit’s heart slammed painfully against his ribs.

Pit’s voice had no joke in it. No easy brightness. Just a simple, exhausted apology, offered like he thought he had genuinely done something wrong by almost dying.

Dark Pit could not stand it.

“You didn’t make me do anything,” he said.

Pit looked up.

Dark Pit regretted the words instantly.

Because that was the problem.

Pit had not made him.

The bond had.

The Mirror had.

Fate, magic, whatever cruel thing had tied his breathing to Pit’s and called it an accident.

Pit’s face softened in a way that made Dark Pit want to tear the whole clearing apart.

“You still came,” Pit said.

Dark Pit’s mouth went dry.

Of course he came.

He had no choice.

Except that was not true.

Or maybe it was.

The thought split open inside him again, sharp enough to make his vision blur.

“I had to,” he said.

Pit’s expression fell just slightly.

It was almost nothing.

Dark Pit saw it anyway.

The warmth in his stomach curdled.

Pit nodded once. “Because of the spring?”

Dark Pit stared at him.

Pit did not know.

Of course he did not know.

He did not know what Dark Pit had felt when his pulse vanished. He did not know that every time Pit stopped breathing, Dark Pit’s lungs had forgotten their purpose. He did not know that Dark Pit had been carrying more than his body through the ruins.

He had been carrying the fact of himself.

Dark Pit’s fists shook at his sides.

“Yeah,” he said.

It was the easiest lie he had ever told.

Pit gave him a tired little smile.

Not bright. Not effortless. Still, it was there.

“Thanks, Pittoo.”

Dark Pit’s heart raced.

Dark Pit looked away before Pit could see the betrayal on his face.

The treeline swam in and out of focus.

He fixed his eyes on a blackened branch and tried to count the cuts in its bark. One. Two. Three. The numbers slipped apart before he reached four.

Behind him, the Rewind Spring made a soft sound.

Water touching stone.

Pit breathed.

Dark Pit’s chest answered.

He hated that the answer came before thought.

The relief from hearing Pit’s pulse had already begun to sour. It sat hot beneath Dark Pit’s ribs, tangled with the stupid warmth that always appeared whenever Pit said *Pittoo* in that voice—careless, fond, entirely unaware of what it did to him.

Except Pit did not sound careless now.

He sounded tired.

And Dark Pit had made him look hurt.

Good, some part of him said. Good. Let him be hurt. Let him understand that he did not get to nearly die, drag Dark Pit after him, then wake up smiling like they had merely lost a sparring match.

The thought did not make Dark Pit feel better.

“You should lie down,” he said.

Pit blinked.

Dark Pit kept his gaze on the trees.

“I am lying down,” Pit said after a second.

Dark Pit’s mouth tightened.

Of course he was. Of course Pit could still make a joke while his voice sounded scraped raw and his wings had only just grown back from ash.

“Then stop moving.”

“I wasn’t moving.”

“Stop thinking about moving.”

Pit was quiet.

Dark Pit realized what he had said.

Heat crawled up the back of his neck.

He crossed his arms, trying to make it look deliberate. “The spring healed you. That doesn’t mean you’re suddenly invincible.”

Pit hummed softly.

Dark Pit had no idea what that meant. Agreement, probably. Or amusement. Or Pit had closed his eyes again and was falling asleep, which would be fine. Great, even. Dark Pit could leave if Pit fell asleep.

He could leave.

The thought should have been easy.

There was a whole world outside the clearing. Viridi’s forces would be somewhere nearby. Palutena had probably noticed the moment the spring activated. There would be a mission waiting. A monster to fight. A god to insult. A place that was not here.

All Dark Pit had to do was turn around, walk to the edge of the platform, and fly.

His wings twitched.

Nothing happened.

A brief, stupid jolt of panic went through him anyway.

Dark Pit’s shoulders stiffened.

He tried again.

The muscles at his back pulled tight. Feathers lifted, then settled. There was no familiar shift in the air, no answering pressure beneath his wings, no sensation of the sky catching him before he fell.

Pandora.

The thought came with a sick twist.

The power in him was gone. The borrowed flight, the shortcut through open air, the thing that had let him move without waiting for gods or orders or anyone else’s permission—gone with the creature that had crawled out of him at the spring.

He had known that.

He had watched it happen.

But knowing did not change the sudden, crawling certainty that he was trapped.

Behind him, Pit said quietly, “Your wings hurt?”

Dark Pit flinched.

“No.”

Pit did not answer immediately.

The pause was worse than a question.

Dark Pit could feel him looking again. Not in the sharp, invasive way Dark Pit imagined people looked at him when they saw only a failed reflection. Pit’s attention was gentler than that.

Dark Pit wanted to shake it off.

He wanted to turn around and tell him to quit staring.

Instead, he stood perfectly still.

“My wings are fine,” he said.

Pit’s voice came soft behind him. “Okay.”

The word landed too easily.

Dark Pit’s jaw clenched.

Why was he listening? Why was he not arguing? Why was he letting Dark Pit make the rules as though Dark Pit had any idea what the rules were anymore?

Because Pit was tired, obviously.

Because Pit had almost died.

Because Dark Pit had told him to stop talking.

A pulse beat once beneath Dark Pit’s ribs, hard enough to hurt.

He pressed his knuckles against his sternum.

Pit was alive.

He was still alive.

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, Dark Pit kept seeing him motionless at the edge of the spring. He kept seeing his own fingers at Pit’s throat, waiting through those impossible seconds for a pulse to return. He kept hearing himself say *I’m here* in a voice that had not sounded like his.

“Dark Pit?”

His name cut through the clearing.

Not Pittoo.

Not this time.

Dark Pit turned despite himself.

Pit had shifted onto both elbows. The motion looked small, but it made the white feathers around his shoulders slide over the stone. He looked exhausted. His hair fell into his eyes. There was still a faint tremor in one hand.

Alive, Dark Pit’s body said.

Dark Pit hated it.

“What?”

Pit seemed to consider his words.

For once, he did not rush into them.

“I know you said you were fine,” he began.

“I am.”

“Right.” Pit nodded carefully. “But you’re shaking.”

Dark Pit looked at his hands.

They were.

Not violently anymore. That almost made it worse. The tremor was subtle enough that anyone else might have missed it, a faint instability at the tips of his fingers.

Pit had noticed.

“Cold,” Dark Pit said.

Pit glanced at the spring, then at the cloudless patch of sky above them. “It’s warm.”

“Then I’m hot.”

Pit’s mouth twitched.

Dark Pit glared at him.

The twitch disappeared at once.

“I’m not trying to annoy you,” Pit said.

“You’re doing a terrible job.”

“Sorry.”

Dark Pit did not know what to do with that either.

Pit looked down at the stone between them. His fingers traced a loose line through the pale dust left by the ruined clearing. He did not look like the hero of Skyworld just then. No bow in his hand. No goddess speaking through his mind. No smile wide enough to make everyone nearby relax.

Just Pit.

Quiet.

Fragile in a way Dark Pit had never been allowed to see.

The sight made something in Dark Pit’s chest fold inward.

He looked away too late.

Pit noticed.

“I really am sorry,” Pit said. “About before.”

Dark Pit’s throat tightened.

“You already said that.”

“I know.” Pit’s gaze stayed lowered. “I just… I don’t remember all of it. I remember the Chaos Kin. And falling. And then you.”

Dark Pit went cold.

Pit continued, unaware.

“You were carrying me.”

Dark Pit’s hands curled into fists.

“You were barely awake,” he said. “You don’t remember anything.”

“I remember enough.”

“Then you remember wrong.”

Pit looked up.

Their eyes met.

The sameness was unbearable.

Same lashes. Same shape. Same face. But Pit’s expression had none of Dark Pit’s suspicion in it. He looked at him as though Dark Pit were something worth recognizing. As though the person standing across the clearing was not an accident of magic, not an echo that had wandered too far from its source.

Dark Pit’s heartbeat became loud.

Pit’s did not change.

That fact should have helped. It did not.

“I remember you saying something,” Pit said.

Dark Pit’s breath stopped.

No.

Pit’s brow furrowed in concentration. “You said…”

“Don’t.”

The word came out sharper than Dark Pit meant.

Pit stopped immediately.

The silence afterward had teeth.

Dark Pit could feel heat under his skin. His face had gone hot. His chest had gone cold. He wanted to tear the memory out of Pit’s head before it could form into words.

*I’m here.*

He had said it like a promise.

Like a confession.

Like he belonged there.

Pit watched him for a long moment. Then he nodded once.

“Okay,” he said.

No argument.

No curiosity.

No smug little smile.

Just okay.

Dark Pit’s anger had nowhere to go.

It turned inward so quickly it made him dizzy.

He wanted Pit to ask. He wanted Pit to understand. He wanted Pit to stop looking so accepting, like Dark Pit’s silence was not a punishment but a boundary.

That was worse than being chased.

Dark Pit took a step back.

Pit’s eyes followed him.

“I should go,” Dark Pit said.

The sentence had been waiting for him. It felt familiar, comfortable in the way a blade was comfortable: hard, cold, useful.

Pit’s expression shifted.

Not much.

But Dark Pit saw the disappointment before Pit could hide it.

Something warm and awful moved through him.

Pit said, “Do you have somewhere to go?”

“Obviously.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere not here.”

Pit winced.

Dark Pit immediately wished he could take it back.

He did not.

Pit looked toward the trees, then back at Dark Pit. “You can stay until you feel better.”

“I told you—”

“I know.” Pit’s voice remained quiet. “You’re fine.”

The word was not mocking.

That made it unbearable.

Dark Pit looked down at the spring. The water was still now. Perfectly still. It reflected the sky above it, pale and empty.

For an instant, he saw two figures in the surface.

Pit on the stone behind him.

Dark Pit standing at the edge.

Same outline. Same wings. Same head bowed slightly forward.

One of them had almost died.

The other had felt it happen.

He stepped away from the water so fast his heel caught on broken stone.

The ground vanished beneath him.

Dark Pit lurched backward.

For one breathless second, there was nothing under his feet but open air.

His wings snapped outward by instinct.

They did not catch him.

Panic slammed through him.

He reached for the sky and found nothing.

Then a hand closed around his wrist.

Pit’s hand.

Warm. Unsteady. Real.

Dark Pit hit the stone hard on one knee, dragged back from the ledge by a grip that should not have been strong enough. Pain shot through his leg. He barely felt it.

Pit had pushed himself half upright. His face had gone pale with effort, his fingers locked around Dark Pit’s wrist.

Their hands matched.

Same knuckles. Same shape. Same blue-gray veins beneath the skin.

Dark Pit stared at them.

His heart pounded.

Pit’s pulse moved beneath his fingers.

Not inside him.

There.

At the wrist.

Separate.

For a fraction of a second, Dark Pit could feel the distinction.

Pit let out a shaky breath. “Careful.”

Dark Pit yanked his hand free.

The warmth of Pit’s fingers stayed behind anyway.

“I had it handled,” he said.

Pit’s mouth opened.

Then closed.

He looked exhausted enough to fall over.

Dark Pit looked away first.

“Don’t move,” he muttered.

Pit blinked. “I thought you were leaving.”

“I am.”

“Okay.”

Dark Pit’s chest tightened.

He hated that answer.

He hated that Pit would let him go.

He hated that Pit’s hand had felt warm around his wrist.

Most of all, he hated that after everything—after the dying, the panic, the proof that his life could collapse around someone else’s heartbeat—some traitorous part of him still wanted to sit beside Pit instead of walking away.

He stood there for several seconds.

Then, without looking at Pit, Dark Pit moved back from the ledge and sat down on the far side of the spring.

Not close.

Not close enough to touch.

But not gone, either.

Dark Pit sat with his knees drawn up and his wings folded tight enough to ache.

Across the Rewind Spring, Pit watched him for a moment.

Then, mercifully, he looked away.

The water lay between them—clear and still, holding the color of the sky without belonging to it. Its surface reflected the broken ring of stone, the ruined trees beyond, the torn white of clouds.

It reflected them, too.

Dark Pit kept his eyes on it anyway.

Two angels sat on opposite sides of the spring.

Two identical silhouettes.

Pit’s wings spilled pale against the stone, clean and soft in the afternoon light. Dark Pit’s were darker, sharper at their edges, held close as if they expected the world to strike first. From a distance, their bodies aligned too easily: same shoulders, same hands resting near their knees, same slight tilt of the head when they were tired.

Same anatomy.

That was the part no one ever got tired of noticing.

Dark Pit had heard it in every stupid pause. Every narrowed gaze. Every startled, “Pit?” followed by, “Oh.”

Same face. Different color. Different attitude.

As though a changed palette could explain a whole person.

Pit shifted on the stone. His shoulder brushed one of his restored feathers, and he made a faint sound under his breath—not pain, exactly. More surprise. His hand rose to touch the wing.

Dark Pit watched despite himself.

Pit’s fingers moved carefully through the new feathers. White. Gold. Unscarred. The spring had returned them exactly as they had been before the Chaos Vortex burned them away.

No trace.

Dark Pit looked down at his own hands.

There were still cuts across his knuckles. Blood, dried dark in the lines of his skin. The spring had not touched him. It had not needed to. He had not been dying.

Not in the way Pit had.

His fingers curled.

The skin pulled tight over his bones.

Same hand, he thought.

Pit’s hand could hold a bow. It could pull an arrow back and make a crowd of enemies scatter. It could reach for someone without making them flinch. It could press against Dark Pit’s wrist and make him feel, for one humiliating second, safe.

Dark Pit’s hand shook when nobody was looking.

He shoved it beneath his opposite arm.

Pit noticed anyway.

Of course he did.

“You should clean those,” Pit said softly.

Dark Pit’s head snapped up. “What?”

“Your hands.” Pit nodded toward them. “They’re bleeding.”

“They’re fine.”

“They don’t look fine.”

Dark Pit laughed once.

The sound was flat.

“Everything looks fine to you.”

Pit blinked.

The words hung there.

Dark Pit wished he had not said them. Not because they were untrue. Because Pit’s face changed when he heard them.

The warmth went out of it.

His eyes lowered.

“I know things aren’t always fine,” Pit said.

Dark Pit felt the answer like a slap.

Of course Pit would say that. Softly. Honestly. As if he had any idea what darkness looked like from the inside.

Pit had been hurt. Dark Pit knew that. He was not stupid. Pit had been thrown into battles by gods, ordered through wars, asked to keep smiling when the world was burning. He had just died—or almost died—for someone who had not even been able to say thank you.

But Pit’s pain did not look like Dark Pit’s.

Pit carried it like weather. It passed over him; he got wet; then the sun came back.

Dark Pit carried his like a name.

“You don’t know,” Dark Pit said.

Pit did not argue.

That should have made it easier.

It did not.

Dark Pit looked back down at the water.

The reflection had shifted with the light. Pit’s image rippled faintly where a breeze moved over the spring. Dark Pit’s image broke apart beside it.

He watched their faces distort.

Pit’s smile was gone now. Still, the shape of it seemed to linger at the corners of his mouth, as if joy had left an imprint there. Dark Pit had the same mouth. He knew because he had stared at it in mirrors, trying once—twice—to make the expression appear.

It never looked right.

On Pit, a smile opened his face.

On Dark Pit, it showed teeth.

He wondered whether Pit had ever had to practice being happy.

The thought made something ugly turn in him.

Pit had not been made in a mirror.

Pit had not opened his eyes to someone else’s name already waiting for him.

Pit had not been called an imitation by people who could not be bothered to learn the difference.

Pit did not have to prove that every choice he made was not just a darker version of someone else’s.

And Pit did not have another heartbeat hiding beneath his own.

Dark Pit pressed his palm against his chest.

Pit noticed.

Dark Pit knew he noticed because Pit went still across the water.

“Does it hurt?” Pit asked.

Dark Pit almost said yes.

The word rose easily. It would have been true, in a way. His chest hurt. His ribs felt too tight. His lungs still seemed too shallow. His heart had not stopped racing since the Chaos Vortex.

But *yes* would invite the next question.

*Where?*

And Dark Pit had no answer that would not make him sound insane.

In his chest.

In Pit’s chest.

In the space between them.

In the place where Dark Pit ended, if there even was one.

“No,” he said.

Pit looked like he wanted to say something else.

He did not.

Dark Pit hated him for that, too.

Hated that Pit respected the lie.

Hated that Pit made it possible to keep lying.

He let his hand fall away from his chest and stared at the spring again.

“Do you ever look at me,” he said, “and wonder what went wrong?”

Pit’s head lifted.

Dark Pit’s stomach dropped.

He had not meant to ask it aloud.

The question sounded different in the air. Smaller. Not cruel enough. Not armored.

Pit did not answer immediately.

Dark Pit’s face burned.

“Forget it.”

“No.” Pit’s voice was quiet, but it held him there. “I don’t.”

Dark Pit looked up.

Pit’s expression was not pity.

That almost made it worse.

“I mean,” Pit continued, haltingly, “I wonder why you had to be made the way you were. By the Mirror, I mean. And why it put you through all this.” He glanced at the spring, then back to Dark Pit. “But I don’t think something went wrong with you.”

A laugh tried to force its way out of Dark Pit. He swallowed it.

“Of course you don’t.”

Pit frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you don’t have to.” Dark Pit’s voice sharpened. “You get to look at me and see whatever makes you feel good. A rival. A friend. Somebody you can call Pittoo so you don’t have to think too hard about what I actually am.”

Pit flinched.

Dark Pit saw it and felt a brief, vicious satisfaction.

Then the satisfaction curdled into disgust.

There. That was him.

Pit had almost died, and Dark Pit was still standing here trying to make him feel worse. Pit had been healed for less than an hour and Dark Pit was carving pieces off him because he did not know where else to put his own pain.

Pit looked down at his hands.

Dark Pit wished he would argue.

He wished Pit would get angry. He wished he would call Dark Pit unfair, cruel, impossible. Then at least there would be something familiar to fight.

Instead, Pit said, “I call you Pittoo because I like it.”

Dark Pit went still.

The sentence was so simple that it took a moment to hurt.

Pit continued before Dark Pit could make a joke out of it.

“I know you don’t like it. Or—you say you don’t.” A faint, tired smile touched his face and vanished. “But it’s not because I think you’re less real. I don’t.”

Dark Pit’s throat tightened.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“No.” Dark Pit’s voice came out too loud. The spring water trembled with it. “You don’t get to decide what I am.”

Pit’s eyes widened.

Dark Pit stood before he realized he was moving.

The stone beneath him scraped against his boots. His wings flared hard behind him, every feather lifting in agitation. He did not look at Pit. He could not.

“You don’t get to tell me I’m real like it’s something you can give me,” he said.

Pit was silent.

Dark Pit’s chest heaved.

“I wasn’t asking you,” he added.

The words struck harder than the others.

Because they were a lie.

He had been asking.

Every time he picked a fight with Pit. Every time he waited to see whether Pit would come after him. Every time he said *stop following me* and listened for footsteps anyway.

He had been asking Pit to look at him and find something separate.

Something worth keeping.

Pit shifted behind him. Dark Pit heard the soft drag of feathers across the stone.

“I know,” Pit said.

Dark Pit’s shoulders tensed.

Pit’s voice was gentler now. Too gentle.

“But I can still mean it.”

Dark Pit closed his eyes.

For a moment, he saw the spring’s reflection again.

Pit’s face in the water.

His own face beside it.

One made to smile. One made to sneer.

One allowed to be a person before anyone decided what he represented.

One forced to become an answer to someone else.

The same anatomy. The same mouth. The same heart, maybe, if the awful rhythm inside Dark Pit was telling the truth.

And still Pit could say it like it was easy.

*I don’t think something went wrong with you.*

Dark Pit’s breath shook.

“Then why do I feel like this?” he asked.

He had not meant to say that, either.

The question escaped before he could break it into something sharper.

Pit did not answer right away.

Dark Pit could hear him breathe.

He hated that he could hear it.

He hated that some part of him calmed when the rhythm stayed steady.

After a long moment, Pit said, “I don’t know.”

Dark Pit laughed, and this time it came out like a broken sound.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me neither.”

He turned toward the treeline.

This time, he did not pretend he was leaving because he had somewhere better to be.

He left because Pit’s face was too much like his own.

Dark Pit made it three steps before Pit said his name.

“Dark Pit.”

Not *Pittoo.*

The restraint should have made it easier to ignore.

It did not.

Dark Pit stopped with his back to the spring.

His wings remained half-flared, every feather tense. He could feel the shape of them without looking: darker than Pit’s, narrower in silhouette, edged in a black-blue sheen that drank the afternoon light instead of reflecting it.

At least they were different.

At least there was that.

Except the bones beneath the feathers were the same.

The joints moved the same way. The same muscles ran along his shoulders. The same ache formed between the blades when he held himself too rigidly. If Pit could burn his wings to nothing and Dark Pit could feel the fire in his own back, then what did color matter?

A stain on the same page.

“Don’t,” Dark Pit said.

Pit did not answer.

Dark Pit waited for the inevitable question anyway.

*Don’t what?*

*Don’t leave?*

*Don’t act like this?*

Instead, Pit said, “You can go if you want to.”

Dark Pit’s jaw tightened.

“I know.”

“I’m not trying to stop you.”

“Then stop talking.”

The words came out automatic. Easy. They were the kind of words Dark Pit knew how to use. He could make a wall out of them in seconds. He could stack them high enough that nobody had to see he was shaking behind it.

Pit went quiet.

Dark Pit took another step.

His knee buckled.

It was not dramatic. He did not fall. His leg simply stopped answering for half a second, folding under him with an ugly jolt that sent pain up through his thigh.

He caught himself on the trunk of a dead tree.

The bark dug into his palm.

His breath came out in a sharp, involuntary sound.

Behind him, feathers rustled.

“Don’t get up,” Dark Pit snapped.

Pit froze.

Dark Pit hated the immediate stillness. Hated that Pit had obeyed before Dark Pit could pretend he had not meant it.

“I mean—” He swallowed. His hand trembled against the bark. “You just got healed.”

“I know,” Pit said.

“You don’t look like you know.”

“I feel okay.”

Dark Pit laughed once, without humor.

“Yeah. You probably do.”

The words were aimed at Pit, but they landed in Dark Pit’s own chest.

Pit probably did feel okay.

Pit had been given back to himself. His pulse was steady. His wings were whole. His face had color. The spring had reached backward through time and pulled him out of the moment where everything hurt.

Dark Pit had watched it happen.

And somehow, watching Pit become whole again had made Dark Pit feel less whole than before.

He pressed his forehead to the dead tree.

The bark was dry and rough.

It did not answer him.

Good.

“You’re mad at me,” Pit said.

Dark Pit’s fingers curled.

“No.”

Pit hesitated. “You seem mad.”

“I’m always mad.”

“Not like this.”

Dark Pit lifted his head.

For a second, the clearing blurred around the edges. The trees, the spring, the open sky—all of it went thin and unreal. Pit was the only thing that stayed sharply defined.

Of course Pit knew the difference.

Of course he had spent enough time fighting Dark Pit, chasing him, calling him stupid nicknames, looking at him with those same damn eyes, to know when the anger was real and when it was covering something else.

Dark Pit wished Pit did not know him.

He wished he could be unknowable.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Dark Pit said.

Pit was quiet for so long that Dark Pit almost turned around.

Then Pit said, “I know you hate being treated like you’re me.”

The words struck cleanly.

Dark Pit’s hand slipped on the bark.

“I know you don’t like being told what to do,” Pit continued. “And I know you hate when people act like your choices don’t count just because the Mirror made you.”

Dark Pit went still.

Pit’s voice was quiet, strained with exhaustion, but it did not waver.

“And I know you came back for me.”

The world narrowed.

Dark Pit turned around.

Pit was still sitting by the spring. He had not tried to stand. One wing was folded over his legs, and his hands rested carefully in his lap. He looked small against the shattered white stone.

But he was looking directly at Dark Pit.

Not through him.

Not at a reflection.

At him.

Dark Pit’s chest hurt.

“You don’t know why,” he said.

Pit’s face changed.

Not much. A flicker of confusion. Then concern.

Dark Pit could not stop now.

“You don’t know why I did it,” he repeated. “You think I came because I wanted to. You think that makes it some—some big thing.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Pit’s hands tightened in his lap.

Dark Pit felt an answering tension in his own fingers. He shoved them into fists.

“You almost died,” he said.

Pit’s expression went very still.

“And I felt it.”

The words came out quieter than the rest.

The spring seemed to hold its breath.

Dark Pit did not know what he expected. Pit to laugh? To look confused? To say he had been unconscious and could not have known what Dark Pit meant?

Pit only watched him.

So Dark Pit kept going.

“Your heart stopped.” His voice cracked on the word *stopped*. He swallowed hard. “And mine did too.”

Pit’s eyes widened.

Dark Pit laughed again. It sounded worse this time.

“Funny, right? You get yourself killed saving me, and I don’t even get to decide whether I follow you.”

“Dark Pit…”

“Don’t.” His voice snapped back into place. “Don’t say you’re sorry.”

Pit closed his mouth.

Dark Pit’s heartbeat pounded in his ears. Under it, he could feel Pit’s: steady now, steady enough to make him want to tear his own chest open just to prove there was only one in there.

“I could feel you breathing,” he said. “I could feel it when you couldn’t. I felt your wings burning. I felt—”

He stopped.

The clearing tilted.

Pit’s burned wings flashed behind his eyes. White feathers turning black. The smell of smoke trapped in Pit’s hair. The limp weight in his arms. The horrible second when his hand found nothing at Pit’s throat.

Dark Pit’s breath shortened.

“No,” he muttered.

Pit leaned forward instinctively.

Dark Pit took a step back.

“Stay there.”

Pit stopped.

Dark Pit pressed a hand to his chest.

His heartbeat was too fast. It had become a frantic, useless hammering. He tried to listen beneath it, to find the second rhythm, to prove it was gone now.

He found nothing.

That scared him more.

What if it had never been there?

What if he had imagined it?

What if he had not?

“I don’t know what I am,” he said.

Pit did not speak.

“I don’t know if I saved you because I wanted you alive.” Dark Pit’s fingers dug into his shirt. “Or because I wanted to live. I don’t know if I was scared for you, or scared for me, or if there’s even a difference.”

Pit’s face softened.

Dark Pit wanted him to stop looking like that.

“I don’t know if anything I do is mine,” Dark Pit said.

The confession hung in the air.

There it was.

Small. Ugly. Unprotected.

He had spent all this time fighting to be different from Pit. Different choices. Different weapons. Different allies. Different name. Different voice, even when the sounds came from the same throat.

And suddenly all of it looked like a reaction.

A mirror could not make anything new. It could only reverse what was already there.

Maybe Dark Pit’s whole life had been a reversal.

Pit went right; Dark Pit went left.

Pit smiled; Dark Pit scowled.

Pit trusted; Dark Pit doubted.

Pit saved people; Dark Pit insisted he did not need saving.

A negative image. A shadow cast by someone else’s light.

Dark Pit’s face twisted.

“I hate you,” he said.

Pit flinched.

The words were true.

They were not enough.

“I hate that you get to be happy,” Dark Pit said. “I hate that you get to look like this is easy. I hate that everyone looks at you and sees a person, and then looks at me and sees what happened when you looked in the wrong mirror.”

Pit’s mouth parted.

Dark Pit did not let him answer.

“And I hate that when you smile at me, I—”

His voice died.

The warmth rose anyway.

Low in his stomach. Treacherous. Familiar.

Pit’s face, soft with relief when he had seen Dark Pit alive. Pit’s hand around his wrist. Pit saying *Pittoo* like it belonged to him, like Dark Pit belonged somewhere.

Dark Pit’s throat closed.

He looked away.

“I hate that you make me feel better,” he finished.

Silence.

The words were not what he had meant to say.

They were worse.

Pit did not move.

Dark Pit did not look at him.

He waited for something humiliating: pity, maybe. A gentle voice. Pit saying that was okay, that he did not have to hate himself, that they could figure it out together.

Any of it would have been unbearable.

When Pit finally spoke, his voice was almost too quiet to hear.

“I’m not happy all the time.”

Dark Pit’s jaw clenched.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.” Pit looked down at the spring. “But I don’t want you to think I don’t understand pain just because I smile.”

Dark Pit wanted to tell him he did not understand.

He wanted to say that Pit’s sadness still had a place to go. Palutena. Viridi. Skyworld. Friends. A world that had known Pit long enough to forgive him for being imperfect.

Dark Pit had been born already unwanted by people who had never met him.

Before he had made a single wrong choice, he was a problem.

Before he had spoken, someone had named him after someone else.

Pit was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, “When I first met you, I thought you were just trying to beat me.”

Dark Pit scoffed.

“I was.”

“Yeah.” A faint smile touched Pit’s mouth. “But then I kept seeing you show up when things got bad. You helped against the Reapers. You helped with the Chaos Kin. You help people even when you act like you don’t care.”

“I don’t.”

“Maybe.” Pit’s smile faded, but his eyes stayed steady. “But you still do it.”

Dark Pit looked at him.

Pit continued, “That doesn’t seem like a mirror to me.”

The warmth in Dark Pit’s stomach became unbearable.

He wanted to reject it. He wanted to tell Pit that was naïve, stupid, wrong. He wanted to say that saving people did not mean anything. That anyone could do the right thing if their own life was attached to the outcome.

But Pit had not said *you’re just like me.*

He had not said *you’re better than you think.*

He had only said: *I noticed.*

Dark Pit did not know how to survive being noticed.

His breath shook.

Pit’s eyes flicked toward him.

Dark Pit turned away immediately.

“Don’t make it weird,” he muttered.

Pit’s expression softened.

“Okay,” he said.

Dark Pit hated that word.

He hated the way it made room for him.

Dark Pit stayed facing the trees.

He could hear the spring behind him, quiet now except for the occasional whisper of water against stone. He could hear Pit breathing, too—of course he could. Slow. Even. Alive.

Every breath hooked somewhere inside him.

He told himself he was only listening because Pit had nearly died.

He told himself that if he stopped paying attention, Pit might stop breathing again.

He told himself a lot of things.

None of them changed the fact that he had not left.

Pit did not speak for a while.

Dark Pit could feel the silence waiting between them, not empty exactly. There was no pressure in it. No demand for an apology. No attempt to make Dark Pit explain himself better, softer, in words Pit could carry without getting cut.

That should have been a relief.

Instead, Dark Pit felt himself bracing for the moment it ended.

He almost wanted Pit to say something cruel.

Cruelty would have been simpler. A fight had rules. Someone attacked, someone answered. There was a winner, eventually, or at least a direction to move in. Dark Pit knew what to do with anger. He could wear it. He could sharpen it. He could turn it outward until nobody noticed it had started as fear.

But Pit had heard him say *I hate you.*

He had heard him say *I don’t know what I am.*

And he had stayed quiet.

Dark Pit’s throat tightened.

“You can say it,” he muttered.

Pit’s voice came from behind him. “Say what?”

“That I’m insane.”

Pit was silent for a beat.

Then, “I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Liar.”

“I’m not.”

Dark Pit turned halfway around.

Pit had shifted back against the low wall of the spring basin. He looked tired enough that the effort of holding his head up seemed deliberate. His wings were tucked close around himself now, white feathers overlapping like a blanket.

He looked warm.

Dark Pit hated him for it.

“I almost started screaming because you stopped breathing,” Dark Pit said. “I could feel your heart in my chest. I still can’t tell if I’m imagining it. And when you look at me, I don’t know whether I want you to go away or—”

He stopped.

Pit waited.

Dark Pit looked down at his own hands.

The cuts on his knuckles had stopped bleeding. Thin red lines marked the places where the stone had split him open. He pressed his thumb into one of them until pain bloomed.

Mine.

He needed it to be his.

“What?” Pit asked quietly.

Dark Pit shook his head.

Pit did not press.

That patience made Dark Pit’s skin crawl. Not because it was bad. Because it was good, and Dark Pit did not know how to accept anything good without waiting for the cost.

“You should hate me,” Dark Pit said.

Pit blinked. “Why?”

Dark Pit laughed under his breath.

“Because I said I hate you.”

“You also said you saved me.”

“I said I had to save you.”

Pit’s expression shifted, almost imperceptibly.

Dark Pit saw it and regretted it immediately.

There it was again—that faint, stupid hurt. Not dramatic. Not angry. Just Pit absorbing the words and trying to understand them without turning them into something worse.

Dark Pit had seen enemies take arrows to the throat with more noise than Pit made when someone rejected him.

“You’re not getting it,” Dark Pit said, harsher because he could not stand the quiet. “I didn’t do it for you.”

Pit’s gaze lowered.

Dark Pit’s chest hurt.

“I did it because I didn’t want to die,” he continued. “That’s it. That’s the whole reason.”

It was not the whole reason.

They both knew it.

That was the unbearable part.

Pit looked at the water for a long time. The spring’s pale light moved across his face. For a moment, reflected in the surface, Dark Pit could see them both again: two nearly identical faces separated by a thin, shining strip of water.

Pit looked peaceful in the reflection.

Dark Pit looked like he was about to come apart.

Then Pit said, “Wanting to live is a good reason.”

Dark Pit stared at him.

Pit looked up.

“Seriously,” he said. “It’s not selfish to want to stay alive.”

The words landed softly.

Too softly.

Dark Pit had expected an argument. He had expected Pit to say that Dark Pit had done something noble, something brave, something that had to mean he cared. He had prepared himself to deny it until the denial became sharp enough to cut them both.

Instead, Pit gave him permission to be selfish.

Dark Pit did not know what to do with that.

“You don’t understand,” he said.

Pit’s mouth opened, then closed again.

Dark Pit swallowed.

The truth was there. Not the whole thing. He could not say the whole thing. He could not say *your name makes my heart race*. He could not say *I wanted you alive before I knew I would die with you*. He could not say *when I held you, I felt like I had found the only place I was supposed to be, and it terrified me.*

But there was a smaller truth.

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to want anything else.”

Pit’s eyes widened slightly.

Dark Pit looked away as soon as he saw it.

The trees had become dark shapes against a darkening sky. The daylight was slipping away. Somewhere far off, a bird called once and fell silent. The war would find them again eventually. It always did.

But for the moment, the world had narrowed to a spring, an injury that was no longer visible, and two heartbeats that Dark Pit could not separate.

“I was made because of you,” Dark Pit said.

Pit did not interrupt.

“Everything people know about me starts with you. I have your face. Your wings. Your voice.” His voice caught; he forced it flat again. “Even my name is just yours with something added to it. Like I’m an afterthought.”

Pit’s gaze dropped.

Dark Pit continued because stopping would mean admitting he wanted Pit to answer.

“And now I find out I might die if you do.” He laughed once, bitterly. “So what am I supposed to think? That I get to make choices? That I get to care about things for my own reasons?”

“You do,” Pit said.

Dark Pit spun toward him.

“No.”

Pit went still.

“No, you don’t get to say that like it fixes anything.” Dark Pit’s wings lifted, feathers shaking. “You don’t get to tell me I have choices when you’re the reason I might not even get to keep breathing.”

Pit flinched.

Dark Pit’s anger rose higher because he had hit something.

Good.

He wanted it to hurt. He wanted Pit to understand just once what it felt like to be trapped inside an answer someone else had already written.

But Pit did not look angry.

He looked devastated.

The sight turned Dark Pit’s stomach.

“I didn’t choose that,” Pit said.

“I know.”

The admission slipped out before Dark Pit could stop it.

Pit stared at him.

Dark Pit’s throat tightened.

“I know you didn’t,” he said again, quieter. “That doesn’t change it.”

It was the closest thing to an apology he could manage.

Pit looked down at his hands. The same hands that had caught Dark Pit at the ledge. The same fingers that had trembled after the spring brought him back. The same shape as Dark Pit’s hands, but somehow gentler.

“I don’t know how to fix it,” Pit said.

Dark Pit almost laughed.

Of course he did not.

Nobody did.

The Mirror was broken. The bond was invisible. The spring could rewind a body but could not undo the moment Dark Pit had realized he was never entirely alone inside his own skin.

There was no weapon to shoot. No monster to defeat. No god to outsmart.

Just a fact.

Pit lived, and Dark Pit lived.

Pit died, and Dark Pit—

Dark Pit pressed both hands to his chest.

His heart was racing again.

Pit’s was steady.

The difference made him feel sick.

“Don’t,” Pit said.

Dark Pit looked up sharply.

Pit had pushed himself forward a little, but he had not stood. His eyes were fixed on Dark Pit’s hands.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Pit said.

Dark Pit stared.

“I’m not.”

“You’re pressing really hard.”

Dark Pit looked down.

His fingers had knotted in his shirt. His nails were digging through the fabric into the skin over his sternum. He had not noticed.

He let go.

Red half-moons marked the skin beneath his collar.

Pit’s eyes tracked them.

Dark Pit covered the marks with his palm.

A heat rose behind his eyes.

He blinked hard until it went away.

“I’m fine,” he said.

Pit did not answer.

The silence was unbearable.

Dark Pit’s hands began to shake again.

He could leave. He should leave. He could force his legs to move, walk until the spring was behind him, until Pit’s breathing was only a memory.

But he knew that was a lie.

He would hear it anyway.

He would feel it anyway.

He would wake in some far-off ruin with his hand pressed over his own heart, counting a pulse that might belong to either of them.

And if it ever faltered again, he would run back.

Not because he wanted to.

Not because he cared.

Because he had to.

He hated how much that excuse sounded like mercy.

Pit spoke so quietly Dark Pit almost missed it.

“You don’t have to stay.”

Dark Pit’s body went still.

Pit was looking at him now. There was no smile on his face. No expectation. No trap in his voice.

“You can leave,” Pit said. “I mean it. I’ll be okay.”

Dark Pit stared at him.

The clearing seemed to expand around them. The path through the trees opened wide. The sky above was turning deep blue, empty enough to disappear into.

There was nothing physically stopping him.

No orders.

No hands on his wrists.

No goddess telling him where to go.

Only Pit, alive behind him, giving him the one thing Dark Pit had convinced himself he did not have.

A choice.

Dark Pit looked toward the trees.

His feet did not move.

He hated them for it.

He hated Pit for noticing.

He hated the slow, dangerous warmth unfurling behind his ribs.

Pit had not asked him to stay.

Pit had not told him to.

Pit had simply made room.

And Dark Pit did not know whether that made the choice his.

Or whether it made it impossible to leave.

Dark Pit stood at the edge of the clearing until the sky went dark.

The last light drained from the clouds in thin, bruised streaks. The trees became black silhouettes. The Rewind Spring held onto its glow, pale and cold, turning the stone around it silver.

Pit did not ask again.

That was the worst part.

He had offered Dark Pit an exit. A real one, apparently. No chasing him down. No cheerful insistence that they should stick together. No reaching out with that stupid open hand of his and pretending Dark Pit was not allowed to refuse.

Just: *You can leave.*

Dark Pit had wanted freedom.

Now it sat in front of him like a door he could not make himself open.

He hated Pit for giving it to him.

He hated himself more for staying.

The spring’s water reflected the first stars. Dark Pit watched them shake whenever the breeze moved over the surface. Pit’s reflection lay beside them, dim and stretched across the stone. His eyes were closed now.

Dark Pit’s chest tightened.

He did not know whether Pit was asleep.

He did not know whether he was pretending.

The difference should have mattered.

It did not.

Dark Pit kept listening.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

Pit’s breathing had settled into something slow and quiet. Every few breaths, there was a faint catch—nothing dangerous, probably. The spring had healed him. The wounds were gone. The fire was gone. He was fine.

Dark Pit flinched at the thought.

Fine.

The word had become a threat.

He sat down again.

Not across the spring this time.

He chose a place near the ruined wall, halfway between Pit and the treeline. Far enough that no one could call it closeness. Near enough that he could hear Pit breathe without having to strain.

The distinction felt pathetic.

He made it anyway.

For a while, nothing happened.

Dark Pit stared at the ground between his boots. Pale stone. Thin weeds forcing themselves through cracks. A small insect crawling across the edge of a broken tile, moving with no concern for gods or monsters or mirrors or the fact that someone’s entire sense of self had cracked open beside a pool of impossible water.

He watched it disappear beneath a loose shard of stone.

Lucky thing.

It only had to be itself.

Behind him, Pit shifted.

Dark Pit’s shoulders drew tight.

He waited.

“Are you still here?”

Pit’s voice was thick with sleep.

Dark Pit did not turn around.

“No.”

A pause.

Then Pit made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

Dark Pit’s stomach warmed.

He wanted to be furious about it. He had said no. Pit should have accepted it. Pit should have gone back to sleep without sounding pleased.

But Pit only said, “Okay.”

The word was barely audible.

Dark Pit’s hand curled against the stone.

Pit’s breathing slowed again.

Dark Pit should have left while he had the chance.

Instead, he stayed until Pit fell asleep.

He knew the exact moment it happened.

The rhythm changed. Pit’s breaths deepened. The tension left his body in increments too small for anyone else to notice. His wings loosened around him, feathers spreading across the stone.

Dark Pit watched one white feather lift in the breeze.

It settled again.

He thought of Pit’s wings burning.

His own back began to hurt.

Dark Pit reached behind himself before he could stop it, fingers pressing into the muscles beside his shoulder blade. No burn. No scar. Nothing. The pain was only memory.

Or not only memory.

He lowered his hand.

The spring glowed between them.

Its light made Pit’s hair look almost white at the edges. It touched the curve of his cheek, his closed eyelids, the line of his mouth. Without the usual smile, without the constant movement of expression, Pit looked younger.

More like Dark Pit.

That was not right.

Dark Pit looked away.

He had spent so long trying to make their differences visible that he had forgotten the worst thing: when Pit was asleep, he did not look like a version of Dark Pit at all. He looked like himself.

That should have been comforting.

Instead, it made Dark Pit feel hollow.

If Pit could simply be Pit, without effort, then why did Dark Pit have to keep proving he existed?

The answer came too easily.

Because nobody had asked him to.

Nobody had wanted him before the Mirror made him.

The thought was old. He had carried it so long that it barely hurt anymore—until tonight, when everything hurt.

Dark Pit drew his knees up and rested his forehead against them.

He tried to remember the first thing he had felt after coming out of the Mirror of Truth.

Not the first thing people said. He remembered that too clearly: surprise, suspicion, the immediate scramble to decide what category he belonged in. Enemy. Copy. Dark version. Problem.

He meant before that.

Before names.

Before Pit looked at him from the other side of the glass.

Had there been a moment when he was only himself?

A breath before the world compared him?

He could not find it.

His memory began with being seen.

It began with Pit.

Dark Pit squeezed his eyes shut.

The warmth under his ribs returned.

It was unbearable how it kept happening.

Pit was asleep. Pit could not see him. Pit could not call him Pittoo or look at him like he mattered. There was no reason for Dark Pit’s body to feel that soft, traitorous pull.

Unless it had nothing to do with the bond.

The thought terrified him more than death had.

If the feeling was not forced, then it was his.

If it was his, then he had wanted Pit alive for reasons that had nothing to do with self-preservation.

He had wanted Pit to wake up.

He had wanted Pit to look at him.

He had wanted—

Dark Pit pressed the heel of his hand hard against his mouth.

No.

He refused.

Pit was the source. Pit was the original. Pit was the reason Dark Pit’s pulse had faltered, the reason he could not breathe, the reason the world still felt too narrow around his own body.

Pit was not allowed to be anything else.

He could not also be the reason Dark Pit felt warm.

That would be too much.

That would mean Pit occupied every part of him: his body, his past, his name, his future, and now whatever pathetic, aching thing was trying to bloom behind his ribs.

Dark Pit stood up abruptly.

The movement made his head spin.

He caught himself against the ruined wall, breathing through his teeth.

Pit stirred at the sound.

Dark Pit froze.

Pit’s eyes did not open. His brow only tightened for a second before smoothing again.

Dark Pit watched until his breathing settled.

Then he looked toward the trees.

He could leave now.

Pit was asleep.

No goodbye required. No questions. No need to explain why he had stayed through the night only to vanish before morning. That was what Dark Pit did best. He appeared, caused problems, helped when nobody expected him to, and disappeared before anyone could ask what it meant.

He took one step.

Pit’s hand moved.

Only a little. His fingers flexed against the stone, searching through sleep. They came to rest near the edge of his wing, open and loose.

Dark Pit stared at them.

Same hand.

Same shape.

Pit’s fingers were relaxed even in sleep. Trusting. As if the ground would stay beneath him. As if waking up was guaranteed.

Dark Pit looked at his own hand.

It was clenched tight enough to ache.

The comparison made him nauseous.

He walked back before he could stop himself.

Not all the way.

Just close enough to sit beside the broken wall again.

Pit’s hand remained open on the stone between them.

Dark Pit did not touch it.

He could not.

But he watched it for a long time.

Then, very carefully, he opened his own hand beside it.

There was still space between their fingers.

A few inches.

Enough to prove they were separate.

Enough to hurt.

Dark Pit stayed awake until dawn.

He did not mean to.

At some point, the night simply became too far gone to sleep through. The stars thinned above the clearing. The Rewind Spring dimmed and brightened in slow, colorless pulses. Cold gathered in the cracks between the stones and crept through the soles of his boots.

Pit slept beside the spring.

Dark Pit counted his breaths.

He told himself he was keeping watch.

There were enemies everywhere. There were gods who lied and monsters that crawled out of holes in the sky. There was no reason to assume the quiet would last, especially after the Chaos Kin, especially after Pandora, especially after everything that had happened in the past few hours.

Keeping watch was practical.

Keeping watch had nothing to do with the fact that each soft rise of Pit’s chest settled something in Dark Pit’s own.

It had nothing to do with the way Dark Pit’s eyes kept finding Pit’s hand.

Still open.

Still a few inches away.

The space between them had not changed all night.

Dark Pit had not touched him.

That was important.

It had to be.

He sat with his back against the broken wall, wings drawn close under the weight of the dark. His hand rested palm-up on the stone beside him. The fingers had gone cold. He could have moved them. He should have moved them. The position was stupid; it made his wrist ache.

But he left it there.

Pit’s hand lay opposite his, beyond the narrow strip of empty stone.

Same shape.

Different.

Dark Pit stared at the distance until his eyes hurt.

The cruel thing was that it was not even far.

If he leaned forward, he could close it. If Pit shifted in his sleep, their fingers might brush by accident. It would take nothing. Less than nothing.

A mistake.

Dark Pit held perfectly still.

He imagined the touch anyway.

Pit’s hand had caught his wrist earlier, warm and trembling with exhaustion. Dark Pit had felt the pulse there, steady beneath the skin. Separate. Real. He had ripped himself free as though the contact had burned him.

But it had not burned.

It had done something worse.

It had made Dark Pit feel, for a moment, that the boundaries of his body were clear.

Pit’s pulse had been in Pit’s wrist.

Dark Pit’s had been in his own chest.

Two different rhythms. Two different bodies.

And yet he had felt Pit dying anyway.

Dark Pit’s fingers curled slightly against the stone.

The space between them remained untouched.

Behind closed eyes, he could still see the spring’s light climbing over Pit’s body. He could still see the color return to Pit’s face, the feathers reforming along his wings. He could still hear the awful silence before Pit’s heart began again.

Alive.

The thought no longer brought relief.

It brought dread.

Pit was alive.

Which meant Dark Pit was alive.

Which meant tomorrow existed.

And the day after that.

And every day until the next time Pit threw himself into danger for someone else, smiling through it as though a life was a simple thing to spend.

Dark Pit’s throat tightened.

He had no right to be angry about it.

Pit’s life was Pit’s.

That was the whole point, wasn’t it? The point Dark Pit had been trying to claw out of the world since the first time someone looked at him and saw a shadow instead of a person.

Pit was allowed to make choices.

So why did every choice Pit made feel like it had a hook in Dark Pit’s ribs?

Dark Pit pressed his palm flat to the stone.

The cold grounded him.

Mine, he thought.

The hand was his.

The ache in the wrist was his.

The breath in his lungs was—

Pit exhaled in his sleep.

Dark Pit inhaled.

His eyes opened.

For one breathless second, the rhythm lined up so perfectly that Dark Pit could not tell whose chest the air belonged to.

He sat motionless.

The clearing waited around him.

Then Pit shifted, rolling his head slightly toward the spring. His hand dragged across the stone as he moved. It stopped closer than before.

Not touching.

Never touching.

Dark Pit looked down.

The distance had narrowed to the width of two fingers.

His pulse quickened.

He hated himself for noticing.

He hated Pit for moving.

Pit was asleep. He had not done it on purpose. That made it worse. Dark Pit could not be angry at him for something innocent. He could not turn it into a fight. He could not make Pit take the hand back and give him his precious, painful space.

So he sat there and stared.

The sky began to pale.

At first, it was only a thinning of the dark beyond the trees. Then gray gathered at the edges of the clouds. The stars disappeared one by one, swallowed by the coming day.

Pit stirred.

Dark Pit immediately pulled his hand back.

He did it too fast.

His fingers scraped against stone.

Pit’s eyelids fluttered.

Dark Pit’s heart slammed against his ribs.

He stood.

The movement was abrupt enough to send a spike of pain through his knee. He ignored it. His wings snapped half-open behind him before settling again, uselessly tense.

Pit’s eyes opened slowly.

For a moment, they were unfocused.

Then they found Dark Pit.

There it was again.

That awful, simple recognition.

Pit looked at him like Dark Pit had been expected to still be there.

Dark Pit’s stomach twisted.

Pit did not smile this time.

Maybe he was too tired. Maybe he remembered enough of what Dark Pit had said. Maybe he had seen the distance between their hands, even through sleep, and understood something he had not been told.

Or maybe he understood nothing.

Dark Pit could not decide which possibility frightened him more.

“Morning,” Pit said.

His voice was rough with sleep.

Dark Pit looked toward the trees.

“It’s barely morning.”

“Still counts.”

Dark Pit did not answer.

The silence stretched.

Pit pushed himself slowly upright. His wings rustled against the stone, white feathers catching the first weak light. The movement made Dark Pit flinch before he could stop himself.

Pit noticed.

Of course he noticed.

But he did not ask.

He only looked down at his wings, then back at Dark Pit.

“I’m okay,” he said.

Dark Pit’s jaw locked.

The words were meant to reassure him.

They did not.

They sounded like a promise Pit could not keep.

They sounded like a lie that had not happened yet.

“Don’t say that,” Dark Pit muttered.

Pit blinked. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Pit studied him.

Dark Pit wished he would stop.

He wished Pit would look away, get up, call Palutena, do anything except keep searching Dark Pit’s face with his own.

Same eyes.

Different expression.

Pit’s were always open.

Dark Pit’s had learned to narrow first.

Pit’s face softened.

Dark Pit felt the warmth return, immediate and humiliating.

He turned away before it could become anything he had to name.

“We should go,” he said.

Pit was quiet behind him.

“Together?”

The question was so plain that it made Dark Pit’s throat close.

He wanted to say no.

No was easy. No was familiar. No would put the space back where it belonged. No would prove he could still choose something without Pit’s life hanging in the balance.

But the word would not come.

Because Pit had almost died.

Because Dark Pit had felt him die.

Because the world outside the clearing was waiting to take another piece from both of them.

Because some part of Dark Pit wanted to hear Pit’s footsteps beside him.

Because perhaps every reason was tainted.

Perhaps none of them were.

He did not turn around.

“Do whatever you want,” he said.

Pit was quiet for one long moment.

Then Dark Pit heard him stand.

Feathers shifted.

Boots scraped against stone.

Pit came closer—not close enough to touch, never close enough to touch. He stopped at Dark Pit’s side with a careful space between their shoulders.

Dark Pit could feel the warmth of him anyway.

He stared ahead.

Beyond the trees, the path disappeared into morning fog. Somewhere beyond that were ruined temples, battles, gods, and the rest of a world that had no patience for a crisis without a weapon to point at it.

Pit breathed beside him.

Dark Pit listened.

The sound entered him before he could stop it.

He did not know whether it was fear.

He did not know whether it was love.

He did not know whether there was a difference anymore.

They started walking again.

Neither of them reached for the other.