Chapter Text
It starts simple: Phainon is smiling less.
Mydei isn’t too concerned at first — the Black Tide has been encroaching on Okhema more and more these days, and he knows it weighs on the mind of the Deliverer heavily. He just drags him out for a spar more often, knowing the exertion will put him right at some point.
…But it doesn’t.
They’re both drenched in sweat, covered in dust from the training ground sticking to them, and Mydei keeps waiting for Phainon to stop breathing hard and straighten up, grinning that sun-like smile at him, but it doesn’t happen. He frowns.
He reaches out, concerned, and puts his hand on Phainon’s shoulder. When Phainon starts, he feels the full-body flinch.
Mydei lets his hand fall, now outright staring at Phainon. Phainon stares back, that familiar gaze still so blue, but also so tired. The bags under his eyes speak volumes.
In the end, neither of them says anything. It was the tension, surely. If Aglaea is allowed days when she jumps at shadows, then Phainon is too.
He just needs time.
They go to dinner.
It is lively as always. Trianne is stealing food off Castorice’s plate, who doesn’t notice because she has her nose in a book. What Trianne doesn’t notice in turn is that Cipher is stealing from her plate, until she turns back and nearly all her fruit is gone. “Ciphy!”
Aglaea chuckles. “What comes around goes around, Teacher.” She, too, reaches across the table and plucks a grape off Trianne’s plate.
“Agy! That’s not fair!” Trianne turns to her compatriots with a pout and starts whispering. Three little redheads bowed towards each other. Mydei can’t hear what they’re saying, but he can hear Trinnon’s scandalized “Trianne!” just fine.
And there goes Tribbie, “…I think it’d be fun.”
Whatever mischief they’re plotting is bound to come around at some point, Mydei thinks to himself, already chuckling at the thought. Thoughtlessly, he slides an arm around Phainon’s waist, as he has done a thousand times during dinners just like these.
Phainon freezes instead of melting against him. There is none of the comfort associated with his movement, always so soft and sweet between them after a long, hard day. Concern bubbles up even stronger within Mydei’s chest, but when he asks, “Are you alright?” Phainon nods. All his muscles are still locked stiffly in place.
And then, muscle by muscle, he can feel Phainon choose to relax against him. Mydei pulls him closer and relaxes too.
Phainon takes him by the hand and leads him to his room after dinner. Mydei follows, a little bemused. Phainon is so quiet today. The absence of his chatter almost echoes through the halls they pass, their footsteps too loud.
Mydei watches him as they walk. His back is so familiar, but when he opens his door and turns to Mydei and his smile doesn’t really reach his eyes — that isn’t familiar at all. Mydei’s breath catches in his throat.
Still, he follows where Phainon goes. In this case, to bed.
When Phainon touches him, a hand slowly trailing down the side of Mydei’s chest, Mydei lets him and relaxes against him. With a small sigh, he closes his eyes, and Phainon pushes him down against the mattress, diving into a kiss so ferocious Mydei wonders for a moment if Phainon is attempting to devour him.
He likes it like that, though, even as something is niggling at him in the back of his mind. He lets it go, losing himself to the warm touch bestowed upon him.
(He tries to flip them over once, but Phainon reacts so badly that Mydei silently lets himself be pushed back into their previous position. Phainon’s just tired , he tells himself, just jumping at shadows Mydei can’t see.)
Later, when he’s staring at the cracks in the ceiling, feeling sated yet unsettled, it comes back to him. The calluses. Phainon’s hand didn’t quite have the right calluses.
His skin crawls.
Suddenly, he feels dirty in a way he never has before.
Something is off, but Mydei watches. He didn’t get where he is today — his people safe, even when Kremnos Castrum isn’t anymore, the city his by right even if he had to kill his father for it — by acting first and thinking later. Not for important things, that is.
And Phainon is very important.
And it’s good he’s held off to watch, because they’re called out that day, and Phainon was already exhausted enough without Mydei asking one too many questions. But Mydei needn’t have worried — when he catches a glimpse of Phainon through the battlefield, he is hacking away like a man possessed, his technique more precise than it has ever been before. Mydei can only be glad for it.
And then Castorice gets stabbed and Mydei is too busy trying to fend off their adversaries, curse up a storm all the while. Castorice can’t get a doctor’s help, at least not physically, and when he escorts her to Hyacine after, once the battle is done, he’s already dreading having to watch her bandage her bloody wounds herself.
Phainon… Phainon doesn’t follow, and when Mydei returns, he just stands there, in front of the infamery, staring at the door.
There is nothing in his expression.
And Mydei knows, deep inside, that something is very wrong.
This time, it is Mydei who takes Phainon by the hand and walks towards his room at a brisk pace. He chooses Phainon’s room intentionally — whatever is going on, he needs Phainon to be at ease. And right now, he’s jumping at every shadow along the way. His own room is better than Mydei’s — he hopes the familiar surroundings will help.
He opens the door and is faced with darkness. He makes a face, parking Phainon on one of the chairs before opening the curtains. The light of Okhema’s eternal dawn spills across the floor. It catches on a golden glint, right next to the carpet, and with growing horror, Mydei realizes what that shade of pyrite is. A blood stain.
He kneels in front of Phainon, who is looking at him warily. “Did you get hurt?”
Phainon frowns. “You know better than to think I’d let anyone get to me in battle.”
Ha, as if anyone is invulnerable in battle. But that is not the important thing right now. Mydei takes a shuddering breath. “Phainon — did you harm yourself ?”
Phainon’s eyes widen. “What? I—” He cuts himself off. A flash of realization passes his face, but it’s unreadable. It’s as if he has been hurting himself, but didn’t even realize he was doing it.
Mydei stares at him, utterly lost. “…You’ve been acting so strange lately. I thought something was going on. I — so many things were off , Deliverer.”
Phainon’s face twists into anguish. “Why do you have to be like this?”
Mydei cups his cheek, yearning to press Phainon’s face into his neck and just hold him, but something is happening here, something important, something he has to listen to, to understand. “Like what?”
“So kind, when I know what Okhemans consider kindness doesn’t always come easily to you. So sweet, when you wouldn’t be at all if— if you knew.”
Mydei snorts. “If you think self-harm is something I haven’t seen before—”
“The blood is mine,” Phainon interrupts him. “But it is not of this body.”
Mydei blinks. It’s utter nonsense, coming out of Phainon’s mouth right now. “What are you talking about?”
“I am Phainon,” says the love of his life, smiling gently at him now. Quietly, sadly, in a way that doesn’t suit him at all. Melancholic is not a word Mydei ever thought to associate with him, and it throws him off. “Just millions of lives removed from the first time I fell in love with you. I.. wanted to remember what it was like. That’s why I did it.”
This has to be some kind of psychotic break. But Phainon looks at him, entirely serious, and the question falls out of Mydei’s mouth. “…Did what?” There is dread in his bones as he asks.
“Killed him. Your Phainon, I mean. The sun bled, and then we became one.”
It takes everything in Mydei not to flinch back. It can’t be true. It can’t be, and Phainon needs him now. His eyes are bloodshot, the bags beneath them so deep and dark, so clearly unwell he might as well have been screaming it at them.
Phainon seems to think he has to reassure him about this murder that can’t have taken place in the first place, because people do not murder themselves. “I told you. I am him, so there’s no need for concern. He’s still here. Somewhere inside of me. We always become one upon death.”
He sounds like Anaxagoras, raving about devouring gods along with Coreflames. About becoming gods themselves.
Phainon looks away. “You must think me a monster, now.”
Mydei, hand still on Phainon’s cheek, curls his fingers around his jaw and turns Phainon’s face back to him. “Never. I just don’t understand. So explain, Deliverer. Where did all of this come from?”
Phainon closes his eyes, swallows thickly, and then, ever so slowly, opens them again. A golden glow comes with it. That blue-sky gaze is gone, and in its place are a thousand fireflies, lighting up one by one, until his irises are as golden as their blood.
And Mydei can hear, suddenly. Cries of the past — roars from his very own chest, filled with fury. Derisive laughter amid battle. That creak of bone as it straightens when he rises from the dead once again — and behind all of it, the voices of others. Aglaea, speaking of golden baths. Castorice, wishing for a last embrace. A thousand voices for Tribios — old and young and sweet and furious. Anaxagoras, ever calculating, even as he dies. Ciphera, Hyacine, their last curses and blessings alike.
And not just that. Oronyx, moaning in distress. Cerces’ chuckles abruptly cut off. Titans upon Titans upon Titans—
The sounds of millions of Coreflames as they are taken from their holders.
Only the very, very last moments of those lives, and still, it overwhelms Mydei. The sheer vitriol, the fear, the fiery determination and the ice-cold condemnation.
There is so little love to combat it all.
The violence of it fills his ears, his eyes, his lungs.
He breathes out carefully, letting it fade as Phainon blinks and his gaze is blue again.
…Phainon’s raving sure doesn’t seem like raving anymore. Mydei looks at him again, analyzing him with this new information in mind, but all he can see is Phainon: hurt by ages Mydei has not lived and does not know, holding himself stiffly as if bracing for a blow he is so sure will come.
What a fool, as always. If there is anyone, anyone at all, who would understand the necessity of death to reach a goal sometimes, even at the cost of precious life, it would be Mydeimos. Mydeimos, the Undying. Mydeimos, ruler of a people forever slaughtering and being slaughtered for their creed. Mydei, who even if he hadn’t understood, would still have believed the Deliverer would always mean well, even with a thousand lifetimes between them. He has more faith in him than that.
People change, it’s true. Despair twists and defaces, but despair is a circumstance, not a characteristic.
He pulls Phainon towards him, and hears his breath hitch as he ever so gently puts their foreheads together, eyes closed. “HKS. Do you think it’s that easy to get rid of me? You’ll have to do better.”
And Phainon laughs wetly, a little disbelievingly, but he melts against Mydei as he hasn’t done for days now, and clutches at his arms like he never wants to let go again.
And he thinks of Phainon saying, I wanted to remember what it was like, to remember what it was like to be loved, and his heart breaks.
He sweeps Phainon up — no mean feat, even for him, given the Deliverer weighs a ton in all that armor — and sits in the chair himself, the two of them occupying the same space as if that somehow might fuse them together — never to be parted again. The armor between them is uncomfortable — metal against naked skin — but it doesn’t matter.
It hurts, this feeling. It hurts so badly, but it is so worth it, because Phainon has to know. Mydei needs him to understand, bone-deep, that he is loved.
“We have this life,” he says, kissing Phainon’s forehead and whispering into his hair. “We have this life, for however long that lasts.”
One life of love, of understanding, against that tide of despair and hate.
And if tears are trailing down his neck, fallen from the face hidden against it, then nobody needs to know at all.
And when the day comes, it goes like this:
“You know I cannot let this end without a fight,” Mydei says, as the sky above them falls apart into red ruin.
Khaslana — Phainon — smiles bittersweetly. “Yes, that would be utterly against your nature.”
And then they have a glorious Kremnos Festival, like the one where Eurypon fell for Gorgo because they were evenly matched, where there is love in bloodlust and affection in sadness and regret, even in determination.
All that to say: in this lifetime, when Khaslana thrusts his blade through Mydei's back, it feels like an embrace.