Archive of Our Own

It starts with a few extra mishaps here and there. 

Axel comes back from a fight more battered than usual. There’s a few too many Corruption Beasts milling around the hollow tree. Their battles take a little longer, chaos straying a little closer to home. Their recent supply ship never arrived. 

Something has been wrong, but the sight of Hakka, mask pressed tight against his face, comforts him as much as it unnerves him. Comforts him in the way that every moment with him is easy. Leave him uneasy in the way that he always feels when faced with this version of Hakka, the bloodthirsty one, the vicious one, the one whose eyes he cannot fully read.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the monster starts and the man ends. He loves both in a way, in the way that the normal Hakka flows into him as easy as breathing, in the way the bloodthirsty Hakka matches him hit for hit. He scares him with his restrained capacity to kill.

Hakka smiled, but it rendered his face unfairly cold and doll-like, a little inhuman, but it could have easily been a trick of the light.

There are moments too, moments like these where Hakka feels strange in front of him, moments where he turns away from him as if unknowing. It must be that unknown part of him, the corruption that courses in his veins, that part fights for control. His spears are sheathed and his arm looks… fine though, simply rattled by the bouquet of feelings forced on the lone survivor from a rough battle. The bodies, other adventurers, other beasts, all strewn around his feet. 

“I did my best,” he mutters softly, blood smeared across his cheek.

And Flayon trusts him. Inexplicably. Even when he really shouldn’t.

Sleep comes easy that night, worn down with days of battle and cradled by someone foreign draped in Hakka’s comforting form. It comes easy and leaves him heavy, soft and sleep-muddled, blanketed by the trust baked into his very soul.

Back then he’d been hopeful, naively so. He didn’t want to believe it, ferried off to a dream of a world where the effects of the Records Corruption would never touch them.

It is not Hakka who resides in his body and not Hakka who kills him in this moment of weakness.

In this life, Flayon drifts off and he never wakes up.

The very first time I remember you, you are blonde and you don’t love me back.

Flayon is jolted awake, head filled with thoughts that are not his own. The corpses and blood hazy like a distant future, the chaos speckled and sepia like an old photograph. His childhood is very confusing, more so than before he’d argue, brain packed to the gills with millions of memories that are not his own.

He is not a normal child, weighed down by a lifetime of memories, but it also makes him stronger. It makes the burdens easier to bear. He is the only one that remembers, it seems, but it also makes him feel grateful. The weight of memories is his burden to bear alone.

He does things a little differently in this lifetime. Not enough to cause a real difference, still turning to piloting, still wandering the streets of Elysium. Just enough to test the waters. He does not allow himself to grow attached to things that will not last. His body is weak and small, still a child at heart, but his brain is fast, faster than anyone has any right to know, too fast, overwhelmingly fast, a breakneck blitz. Flayon almost flinches at the familiarity of it all.

When he leaves home, he does not cry. He resolves himself instead, seeks out the fledgling guild of an idyllic adventurer even faster than before. When he finally did meet them, his guildmates, smiling and shining, he was a year younger than his lifetime before. Flayon smiled, slightly dimmer, slightly more jaded, and basked in the soothing balm of returning home. 

-

The day comes, as it did before, where Bettel organises their expedition to Xenokuni and Flayon cannot contain his excitement. It spills out of him in waves, in misplaced manuals, in forgotten meals, in the irrepressible hammering of his heart. Xenokuni means Hakka and Shinri. Xenokuni means their family is finally complete. 

He meets Hakka, as expected, and the pain hits differently this time, fully prepared for him to stab him when they find him. It feels like coming home again in a twisted sort of way, butterflies swarming at the sound of Hakka’s battle cry when he rushes forward. Everything works out exactly like it should.

It is only when Bettel has shot him, when they’re inelegantly shoving his unconscious form into a pillow case, that he realises that something is wrong. 

Hakka’s hair is more blonde than inky purple.

He’s still the exorcist, the crow, every bit the fighter he ever was. He still agrees to fight by their side. He still takes to Shinri like a dad, takes to Bettel like a long-lost brother. Nothing else seemed different, so perhaps it was just a glitch, a cosmetic difference, a reskin to the bird he knew before. 

Even if something was different, Flayon would be different in response, would research the Records Corruption more fiercely, would never let Hakka succumb to the beast trapped inside him. He could change things before they got worse and they’d get their happy ending: growing old and grey together with the best family he could ever ask for. He’d salvage what was stolen from them in their last lifetime together.

-

Life is cruel though, cruel and random, and everything does not turn out how it should. They grow stronger, always tied together by a spirit for adventure. The corruption continues to eat at Hakka’s spirit, and the Corruption Beasts keep attacking, and Elysium still suffers, despite all his attempts to avoid it. Nothing is working quite like it should.

In fact, Hakka himself feels slightly different this time. It’s not just the hair, not just the bright flash of his teeth as he goes off alone for the umpteenth time. He does not seem to remember, but he is still different. A little more solitary. A little rougher around the edges.

It’s a cool summer night and the sky above them is a peach and plum kind of sunset, bathing them in its rosy glow. It dyes Hakka’s hair to an almost familiar shade, if only for a moment. Then the lights around them begin to flicker to life against the hazy dusk like a swarm of fireflies, like candles in a chandelier. When he turns to look at Hakka, the picture of innocence, perched on the steps to the guild hall, he can barely stand to meet his gaze.

He is still so incredibly breathtaking.

It was around then, last time in his memories, in a moment just like this after this very same mission when he drew him close and–

Flayon leans up onto the tips of his toes and kisses him, featherlight and curious. 

Hakka’s eyes flash open immediately as he pushes him away, faster than Flayon can even begin to pull himself away. Even without words, it’s easy to hear what he means to say and what he leaves unsaid.

Ah, so it’s like that, he realises with a grimace. It’s fitting somehow that this is the cost of living another life. It’s fitting as punishment for assuming everything would turn out fine.

-

"I'm sorry," Hakka warbles around his words a couple days later, heartbroken and hesitant because apologising is usually a good thing, right? "I wasn’t fair to you. I never realised you were in–"

Flayon can tell by the sound of his voice alone that he’s been crying even though he refuses to meet his gaze. As he continues speaking, Hakka clutches one of Flayon’s hands in his own because he’s devastated, because he’s resigned to this new paradigm formed between them. Hakka’s crying and rubbing his thumb back and forth over the back of his hand as if to soothe him, as if to convey the sheer physicality of his emotions that bleed into his fingers. This time, Hakka loves him, but he is not in love with him, and it is just like him to try to apologise for that in spite of it all. 

There are some things about him that refuse to change.

"Don't." Flayon answers sternly and tugs his hand away. Hakka is finally looking up at him now, the ghost of a frown settling on his mouth. The moonlight reflects off his flaxen hair and his eyes are so murky that he could probably drown in them if he tried hard enough. It feels foreign in a lot of ways.

"Don't," he repeats softer this time, closing his eyes with a sigh. "Don't say it out loud. It’s okay."

The darkness feels purple around them. He thinks of his Hakka and his midnight hair and his eyes like sunbursts. He misses it a little, which is weird because there’s nothing to even miss, not in this lifetime, not in this body. In this life, they aren’t meant to be.

With Hakka or not though, Tempus is still his forever home.

A couple months later, he takes on a solo expedition. A necessity, he reasons, because it’s the safest for him to go with the protection of the R-TRUS behind his back. Because Hakka’s Records Corruption is getting worse even though he likes to pretend it isn't. Because Altare needs to stay here to lead and to soothe and to keep things running smoothly. Because he needs to find a solution to the corruption no matter what. Because this life will not be a waste.

When his time comes again, at the hands of more Corruption Beasts than one person could ever handle, his only regret is that he couldn’t come back to hold them all in his arms one last time.

The next time you are brunette, and you do.

Flayon’s third life is a lot less confusing. He realises what was going on a lot faster this time, armed with double the experience. He is prepared for it all, down to the day, time, and place.

He made sure to excel even more in this lifetime, days and months and years spent simply amassing knowledge because he refused to fail again. He does not cry when he leaves home. He does not cry when he leaves his life behind. He does not cry when people commend him, when they call him a genius as if they could ever know anything about him.

He does not love his old life, his life before adventure, but he accepts it as a part of himself too. And he cries, just once, for the last time, hugging his sister before taking to the skies.

Flayon drags things out this time, doubling back and waiting the proper length for things. He tries piloting different vehicles to cure his wandering thoughts while he waits for the right moment to tick past. The mundane parts move faster with the extra years beneath his belt.

And finally he joins Tempus, right on time, because maybe he interfered too much in his last life and that’s why things changed. He lets things play out the same as before, eagerly joining Bettel on his quest to Xenokuni. 

He needs to see Hakka, the real testament of what has been different, so he rushes into his family estate and engages with him as fast as possible and the motions are all exactly the same. And when he finally does, he feels his heart stutter for just a moment.

Hakka stabs him. Bettel shoots Hakka. Flayon pilots them home.

He feels conflicted as he does it, unfairly so perhaps. Hakka’s hair is browner than purple in this universe, soft like a freshly brewed cup of coffee. It was beautiful and he was never a huge judge of appearances, so that wasn't the problem. It was more about the meaning of it all. It was another neon sign markedly pointing out that even when he tries to keep things the same, Hakka can still be different. He's stubborn like that.

Flayon has never been able to drink coffee without feeling sick. It feels like a bad sign.

He’s not the blonde Hakka though, which gives him hope. Maybe there was still room to make things end differently when he’s tried so hard to keep everything the same up until now. Maybe this Hakka, who is not quite his own, could still grow to love him nonetheless.

Altare expands the guild.

They get stronger.

Hakka is infected equally by his curse and an unyielding spirit for adventure.

The world gets harder to bear. 

The hollow tree stands in the distance, everpresent.

Flayon was more observant now, more discerning with two lives behind him, and it’s easier to tell when Hakka struggles. It was never that bad in the beginning, never bad enough that he had to interfere, but proof nonetheless that the Records Corruption was stronger than he thought. Proof that he needed to figure something out.

He relived the events from his past like clockwork, letting all the puzzle pieces fall into place one by one.

And then the night came again, something soupier this time, dusk more mauve than pink, and it comforted him. The sheer purple of it all.

“Do you regret it sometimes?” Flayon questions, tentative. “Surviving your childhood,” he clarifies, because in their lives together there has always been something to regret.

“Not really,” Hakka answers, pensive and fleeting like he’s moments away from taking off. 

“Even with the corruption and everything?”

“Ah,” Hakka hums cheerily. “But life needs a little spice, doesn’t it? Besides, what would you do without me? Who else is going to one-up all your jokes?”

Flayon pushes against his shoulder without any real force through a wheeze of a laugh. His fingers reach up to gingerly cup Hakka’s cheek and his nerves pulse errantly beneath his skin. Hakka giggles a little too, jolting in surprise as he edges even closer, but he smiles against his lips as he closes the distance.

He loves me, Flayon thinks, letting years of worries slip free.

He wants to cry out, to sing it to the stars above. This life will work out fine.

-

Except it doesn’t. His third life does not work out just fine, and it was his mistake perhaps for assuming otherwise. Karmic retribution for flying too close to the sun, perhaps.

It catches them both off guard this time. 

Rather than a big battle, than a moment of weakness, it is a comparatively ordinary thing that gets them. That’s precisely why it happens, probably, because Flayon has always prepared for the big, uncertain future from the second he was reborn. 

It’s frustratingly simple, a normal patrol around Elysium, one that never caused any problems before. He’s relatively unarmed because he's complacent and impatient, eager to return home hands entwined. He hears it before he can see it, the howling of beasts in the woods and the telltale clash of metal. Flayon runs as fast as he can, and it is the sight of it that knocks the breath out of his lungs faster than any amount of running. 

Hakka is standing alone, surrounded by a pack of beasts, one spear lodged in a nearby tree. He moves instinctively, punching and kicking and stabbing, when Flayon yells out towards him. He gathers all their attention, soaking up hit after hit with his shields as he tries to work his way over to Hakka. 

One of them claws through him, catching him from behind once he finally lowers his guard enough to offer a hand to Hakka. It hurts, but it does not kill him, just renders him breathless enough to stagger to the ground. Hakka grits his teeth and kills it swiftly, arm like a meteor blazing through the sky, but there are more and more of them approaching, drawn by the smell of spilt blood. 

Flayon jumps and intercepts one aiming to shatter Hakka’s wings and the taste of success stains his tongue sweetly. There is a limit to how much he can handle though, even with all the extra training. 

He coughs up fresh blood and the trees are spinning around him in fanciful pirouettes. The last thing he sees through blurry, tear-stained eyes, is the hazy smoke gathered around Hakka’s form, the whirlwind of energy as he gives himself up to the corruption to desperately try to save them both. It’s a shame, he thinks, that he still couldn’t save him from this fate.

Just like that, Flayon’s third life ended, smoked in the vestige of Hakka’s corruption. 

He wasn’t sure if it would be better if Hakka died or not, didn’t have the luxury of knowing, but the sentimental part of him wished he could somehow find a way to live happily forever.

After a while I give up trying to guess if the colour of your hair means anything. 

When he goes through it all again, fresh for a fourth time, Hakka’s hair is a silky, powdery pink, sweet like sakura petals. He stops trying to piece together meaning in it all, if there’s some secret code in the colour of his eyes, or the colour of his hair, or the speed of his heart whenever he sees him again for the very first time. In some lives, Hakka loves him back. In others, he doesn’t. Sometimes he looks heartbreakingly similar to versions before, but they’re never exactly the same. There’s no pattern, no way to tell how things would happen until they did, every possible pattern broken as quickly as they coalesce. 

Hakka was always his greatest friend and his biggest treasure. He would cherish every life they had together, no matter what. 

That part stayed constant.

because even if you don’t exist, I am always in love with you.

Flayon’s twenty-seventh life passes by pretty uneventfully. The beginning parts are a haze, blurring together in a thick fog as he gets through the parts where he’s too young to make a difference, too far from home. It starts becoming a routine. 

Grow up. Learn a little more. Become a pilot. Take to the skies. Return home,

His early life was always hell, something coloured by a swarm of noise and thoughts and powerlessness and the frustrating inability to do anything at all. The parts after Tempus were good though, tumultuous but good. And sometimes they lasted longer than he expected. 

Worryingly, it seemed like things were still changing faster than he could respond back to. His lifetimes were diverging from his comfortable, known patterns even when he didn’t change much of anything. Sometimes new minor things had rippling consequences, but avoiding them had their own set of opposite but equal reactions. There was a hesitance lingering behind his actions now, an apprehension that one of these days he’d irrevocably screw things up beyond repair.

Especially this time, things just felt off somehow. 

He took it all in stride though, chasing adventure with Bettel and the others, and when he’s flying through the air he can almost forget the anxiety permanently curled up in his chest.

It hits him with the force of a rocket shooting through the stratosphere when the day comes, when he’s off with Bettel in Xenokuni, and they’re both already gearing up to turn back as soon as Shinri joins them. 

Bettel is smiling, satisfied after accomplishing his goals and surveying the land, and he wants to be happy too, pasting a mirrored smile on his own face because he really is proud of them, he is . Bettel never wanted to lead them, claimed he wasn't cut from the cloth of leadership, but he always did a hell of a job with this expedition. But that can’t be right, it can’t be over yet, because there’s something, someone , important that they’ve left behind and they both seem disturbingly unconcerned about it. 

This lifetime diverged in a major way, he realised, and Flayon’s heart sank as he realised that this life would be an incomplete one.

Where is Hakka?

His smile slips when he sneaks off, when he checks the records in the R-TRUS and realises that in this life, Hakka’s family of exorcists never had a son, so there was never anyone else to take back with them.

Everyone seems happy when they return, basking in the glow of another successful addition to their family, and it is such a bittersweet moment because they will never know how much better it could be.

-

It is not the loneliness that is hard for him to bear. If anything, it is the grief of knowledge that steeps in his bones. He knows what it feels like to wake up to a warm bed and even warmer arms, to love and be loved with every fibre of his soul. It is always there in the way he goes out and feels the breeze kiss his neck, gentle and sweet, and almost hears his voice ringing in his ears.

He’s taken to dialing Hakka’s old communicator number to vent out his feelings. There is no Hakka in this universe, as his brain never fails to remind him, so no one will ever pick up on the other end. The familiarity of it brings him comfort though, tapping out messages for someone who will never be able to see them.

> I think I just decided to do this whole life thing on hard mode, because of course I love you. It just always seemed too easy? Loving you comes easy like breathing and nothing has ever safely come easy for me. I can’t trust easy things! if something is easy, it usually means you’re being conned, but it’s not funny anymore. none of this is funny. I just want to love you. is that too much to ask?

> what are you doing somewhere without me, hakka?

> today would have been your birthday. happy birthday.

> maybe because you’re not here I should just focus on winning. like. not glory. not love. this life will be about winning, and clearing missions, and finding a way to salvage things next time so I can face you with a smile. I will find a way to win.

> I saw a cat today and it reminded me of you. 

> everything reminds me of you. 

It spills out of him shamefully, this great and terrible crutch that he leans on when the weight of this life gets harder and heavier. Flayon fights a losing battle against his deepest compulsions. He misses Hakka terribly.

> I wonder if you’d be proud of me out there.

> it's lonelier because no one can begin to understand, because I don’t have the words to even begin to explain.

> sometimes I look at the stars and imagine you’re up there somewhere and you haven’t responded because it’s just taking too long to receive anything and this is all just some crazy dream. I want to wake up already.

> I like to take walks and go on long drives to clear my mind. but then I see all these silhouettes and none of them feel right because none of them are you and it all feels so incredibly unfair.

> foughght a really goooddd battle today. you would have liked it. sometimes when they laugh I can hear yours joining in the chorus like my own private symphony and it fucking burns

> why’d you have to go?

> what kind of vegetables do you like best? I want to start growing things to make up for every life I’ve ever taken like… repentance, maybe, but when I think about you for too long I shut down and it’s hard to focus and I refuse to forget you so… here I am. talking to a ghost.

> they say that you grow up and become a man when you become the thing you swear to destroy. would you forgive me? am I redeemable?

And, as always.

> I hate you.

> ignore the last one. I just miss you so much sometimes. every time. It might kill me someday, crushed under the weight of my feelings.

> I’m pretty sure I will never stop loving you.

The number you have dialled is not currently available. The number you have dialled is not currently available. The number you have dialled–

Flayon continues pouring his heart into the chasm separating them in absentia.

-

It still smells like strawberries inside the R-TRUS, he thinks bitterly, because he’s always loved them just as much as Hakka did. He does not do it for him, but sometimes it feels like everything around here is for him. Just another reminder of home.

Flayon doesn’t know what to do for the rest of this life, so he doesn’t do much of anything. The others are sweet and strong and battered by the world and do not deserve another failure to deal with. He loves them more than anything else.

Flayon waits patiently, unerringly. 

Because where others were the type to pick through their food, indulging in their favourites right away without a second thought, Flayon was the type to hold back, to save the best for last. He liked to take his time, to savour the feeling of spice on the edges of your mouth that stays long after you’ve finished eating. The kind of taste that lingers. The kind that makes you chase something that you know will never last. 

It grows duller over time. 

When a chance to explore the Records Corruption comes up for himself, he takes it, accepts it gingerly with both hands. 

Flayon gives in willingly because this is a perfect chance to learn, because he’s not sure what else to do.

He’s always had a high spice tolerance.

His twenty-seventh life ends mercifully, even though he is frightfully alone.

I remember most fondly those lifetimes where we get to grow up together,

When his twenty-eighth lifetime begins, he immediately knows something is wrong. Things are changing at a faster and faster rate, it seems, or perhaps the universe around him is rearranging its pieces before he can ever reach checkmate.

He is not born to the family he knows, to the home that he always has to leave. He is not born in the skies, fresh and flailing in a pilot’s cockpit. No, in this lifetime he wakes up and he is met with Shinri’s face, younger but still so very kind. 

It’s a blessing perhaps, to gain a real brother even though they’ve always considered each other family. 

Growing up with Shinri, however, means growing up in Xenokuni. It means fighting and training with him, means one day he’ll have to wander with him too. It means trading his time with the guild for time with Shinri, which is valuable in all its strangeness.

Flayon wasn’t quite sure how to react to it, trading cockpits and wings for weapons and sprinting. To always having someone to rely on.  But he was used to changes, even if this was a wild one, so Flayon adjusted to it as necessary.

He snuck out at night, walked down the river to a familiar clearing where he knew Hakka would be training. Even as a child, before the expectations of greatness were strapped tightly on his back, before his aspirations grew so large and worldly, Hakka would train his mind and body to be ready for the heavy future ahead. They’d talked about it before, in one of his other lifetimes, the way that childhood has always been a fleeting feeling and all the little things they did to escape it.

Flayon found him easily, caught up in exactly the kind of place he described. A clearing in the forest near the estate. Somewhere secluded. Somewhere where no one can hear him scream. 

He found him resting, just sitting there beneath a tree, and took a moment to just take in the sight. This Hakka, younger than he’s ever known him, exists in a liminal space. He’s still strong, but softer, less guarded. It shows up strongest in his eyes, eyes that are clear like a summer sky, and he wants to protect it. His fingers itched to touch him as if to prove that he was real.

“Banzoin Hakka,” he calls out, voice ringing out between them.

“Who are you?” Hakka asks warily, readying his spell tags. “What do you want?”

Flayon smiles and shows him his hands, clearly unarmed. Hakka’s voice is so cute like this, always so cute when he tries to sound intimidating. 

“My name is Flayon,” he offers.

“Just Flayon? Flay-on, two syllables like turn on, like rhymes with your mom?” Hakka tries his best to goad him into revealing more with the wave of his hand.

“That’s right,” he responds cheerily, approaching even closer.

Machina X Flayon is his name as much as it is his chosen one. But in this life, in a life where Shinri is his brother bound by blood on top of love, it feels ungrateful to throw that kindness away. It feels unfair to simply take it as his own though, something he hasn’t earned and does not quite deserve, so just Flayon is fine for now. It is enough for him.

“Let’s train together next time, okay?” Flayon promises.

He laughs like a sparkler and revels in the way Hakka’s eyes widen as he sneaks up behind him while he says it. Though Hakka’s trained for all his life, Flayon has many more lives behind him and many years of experience getting beneath his skin.

“If you get caught, you’ll be punished,” Hakka warns him, firmly not unkind. 

“Goodnight, bird!” Flayon shouts back, laughing while he sprints through the wind.

He’s smart enough to avoid the guards and any wandering eyes. This would be his secret to bear alone, another secret for the pile.

-

True to his word, always so true about the parts he could show, Flayon returned night after night. He never revealed more than he had to, not about himself nor his family, his life outside of the night. Here he can be the Flayon that grows with Hakka, his sole companion.

He’s still so warm, even now, warm like the summer sun. 

“Say, Hakka, if you had a chance would you become a robot? It would be cool, but what if the government experiments on you? I’m just a little guy so I don’t think I could survive that.”

Would his humour be different as a child? Would there come a day that he asks and he asks, but Hakka doesn’t want to respond?

Hakka hummed and parried his strike with his left hand, unsure. “You always have so many questions. I think someone would find some way to experiment on me anyway if they really wanted to. I don’t like mechanics though so maybe not,” he responds, readying his spear.

“Hakka, do you like working so hard like this everyday?” Flayon twirls around and sweeps a leg beneath his feet. Hakka watches intently and jumps over it.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Hakka responds, honesty weaved throughout his voice. “Everyone is relying on me to be strong and I'm pretty sure if I took a long enough break I'd go crazy.”

“I guess so,” he replies with a shrug. “But without all of that, what would you like to do?”

Hakka reaches out and punches him, so he grabs his outstretched arm and pulls it towards him to open his chest up enough to kick him. Jab cross.

What does this Hakka, free of worries, free of corruption so far, want more than anything? What does he want before he grows up and realises that everything needs to break before it can begin to heal?

“Sing, I guess. Fight some dudes. Save the world. Normal kid things like that.”

“Let’s take on the world then,” Flayon promises, lips strained around a smile.

Flayon sighs as he brushes the dust off his clothes. He leaned down and rinsed his hands in the flowing water. The dirt flows easily, running off with the speed of a hummingbird’s wings. The blood on his hands, so many lives lost along the way, stubbornly persists. It is something he's gotten used to. After all, he is not made for this innocent world no matter how much he wishes he was. 

when you share your secrets and sorrows and hiding places with me.

“Hakka, why do you always train here?”

Hakka’s face is screwed tight into a look of idle concentration. He lunges forward, thrusting his spear, then returns back. Runs through his reps like a soldier. Switches hands. Then practising again with a variety of weapons, with knives and daggers and swords because you never know what you have to fight with, but he always returns to the spear.

“It's easy, so why not?” he questions back, walking through his half steps backwards and forwards.

“That’s not what I meant. I mean, you could train somewhere a lot nicer than this if you wanted to.”

Hakka leaps up and twirls through the air above him. 

“It’s quiet,” is what he starts with. “No one can hear me if something goes wrong. No one has to know what I’m doing here. Life is hard sometimes, but being here in the deep of the night makes it easier to forget that. It’s easier when no one has to see and no one gets the chance to worry.”

Flayon can understand that, honestly. The feeling of screaming into the void because it’s the easiest way to let out your feelings. The feeling of avoiding others because no one can charitably share your pain.

“But I’m here,” Flayon professes, light as a feather.

“Yeah,” Hakka agrees, glass-eyed and effervescent. “You’re here.”

Flayon wants to say more, but the confession dies on his lips. He hopes it’ll be just like this for a very long time. More than anything else, Hakka deserves to live a happy life for as long as possible.

Flayon counts down the days until Bettel will come to bring them all back home.

-

“I thought you’d like this!” Flayon shouts, proudly presenting his newfound discovery.

“Flay, that’s a fucking rock.”

“Mmm, yeah. But it reminded me of you.”

It wasn’t just any rock. It was tender, dreamy purple, a little crystal of a thing, something that refracted the light into all its beautiful constituent colours. It reminded him of Hakka, the way that he took in the world and reflected the best parts of it, the way his thoughts showed on his face in the gentlest of ways. Flayon was sure that he could lose himself in all Hakka’s many colours.

It’s not just a rock, but a promise. A message. I am here. I will not leave you. We’ll figure things out together.

There was a smattering of red on his face, maybe a blush, maybe a remnant from the winter wind.

“You’re so silly,” Hakka laments through a smile. His eyes are sparkly and bright and innocent, so young and carefree. It’s so unfair, staring at his face like he has countless times before knowing that it cannot last.

Flayon laughs soundlessly and beams even brighter when he comes back the next night to see it wrapped up, secured as a charm for his spear’s strap. It’s a desperate wish for protection.

-

Their love is brief, but vast and all encompassing and heart wrenching in all the ways in which a love so brief can be so inexplicably colossal. 

There’s a scrap of a note he keeps in his pocket, a letter of sorts. 

if this smears, sorry, it’s hard to find a pen in the dark. I had to do this now before everything begins to completely fall apart. I think that I love you and I want you to be happy and that is all that really matters. Maybe my words will bleed off in the river water. Maybe you won’t ever be able to know. Maybe things will never change. So thanks. That’s all. Just… thank you. For all of it.

Tonight he is tired, he is so incredibly tired and Hakka is warm beside him and he lets himself sleep, if only for a couple minutes.

I love how you play along with my bad ideas,

He’s never allowed to meet Hakka’s family, never allows himself to act like he knows him beyond these midnight meetings, but Flayon can tell that he gets his laugh from his mother. It’s sweet, honestly, the kind of morsel he wants to cherish for as long as possible.

Through Hakka’s voice, he can always hear echoes of his own, and Flayon revels in the thought of building things up for him. If he cannot stop the corruption from spreading, then the least he can do is make this life as lovely as it can be for as long as possible. 

Flayon squats down, one hand bracing his weight on the riverbank as he draws out a plan. 

Hakka speaks a lot more now, confidence and closeness fuelling his thoughts. He talks more and smiles more, smiles as he tells stories about the fishmongers and the teachers and the other children that he hears about around the village, the ones that he catches a glimpse of before he’s escorted back inside. 

For Hakka, who is confined to his future as an exorcist, this is always a moment of escape, a chance to relish in growing up like a child. For Flayon, who feels sun-scorched simply existing beside him, this is always an opportunity, a chance to stay by his side. 

Flayon teaches him how to draw, or Hakka pantomimes his favourite recipes to cook, or they simply play games with rules only they bother to keep track of. They race to see who is faster. They stand on their tiptoes and insist that they’re growing taller, faster, stronger than each other. They imitate bird calls, and cat meows, and compete to see who can come up with the most ridiculous possible thing for what fish must sound like when nobody's listening because it makes his heart smile to hear Hakka burst into uncontrollable peals of laughter.

It’s easy to sit beside the river and imagine that this is the whole world. There are no other lives. There are no other expectations. There is nothing looming in the future and nothing chasing them from the past. There is only this moment, Hakka’s hand warm in his lap as he anchors him firmly here. 

Sometimes he sits and imagines that they are the only people in the world. Sometimes he thinks that the world only turns because they are here to see it. 

before you grow up and realize they are bad ideas.

It turns out that is his mistake, his complacence and his faith that everything would be fine until they finally got to Elysium.

He wakes up, Hakka’s jacket draped softly over his chest, startled because he is completely alone and the sun has already begun to poke its stubborn head through the horizon. It shouldn’t be like this, clothed in light somewhere that’s saved exclusively for the stars.

Flayon has always been a light sleeper, but Hakka’s presence is the heaviest kind of blanket.

“I know that I’m a lost cause. I know that you know that too, no matter what you may say, but you still try so hard to protect me like this.” Flayon sighs, running his fingers gently over the cloth, but no one is there to hear it. “So fucking stubborn.”

He neatly folds Hakka’s jacket, setting it down on the rocks before running off. He’ll definitely come back for it, even if Flayon cannot.

Maybe, despite all his failed attempts at stopping Hakka from the same, the very least he can do in this rare chance is to intercept Shinri instead. To try to interject before the influence of corruption gets to him too. Because Shinri has never been anything close to a failure, no matter what anyone claims. 

The exam is simple, but cruel. 

Prove your worth by slaying a Corruption Beast, just one. The lucky ones pass without much pain. The luckier ones die painlessly. The strongest escape physically unscathed, but forever altered. They are always cloaked in glory, but there are no winners in war.

Today is Shinri’s day and he knows from the stories exactly how he will fail. 

Flayon runs, runs with the weight of countless lives on his back, because today was the worst possible day to oversleep. The dampness from the morning dew clings to his hair as he gets to the testing grounds and he leaps up, uncaring of the crowd around him. This is the moment, Shinri’s back turned away as he secures his bow once again, that the beast will strike. 

He will gladly die before letting his family get hurt again.

Flayon leaps, arm outstretched and sword in hand to block it. His motions are slightly clumsy but efficient enough, more used to lasers and shields than something so close range. It is enough to knock back the beast, to give Shinri the precious time he needs to recover. It is a terrible miscalculation though, too much additional pressure on Shinri’s back to keep him safe.

Unfortunately, for all his training, this Flayon is still practically a child in a child’s body, still growing into a form that can effectively use all the knowledge forced fleetingly into it. Small tears threaten to spill out of Hakka’s eyes in the audience, eyes wide behind him, wide like chasms, wide like all the distance he could never cross, asking desperately why he is there. Hakka parts his lips but seems to hesitate, unsure how to act, unsure whether to break decorum, unsure whether to even hold out his hand towards him.

That’s right. Because in this world, in the world where they aren’t supposed to meet yet, Hakka is a stranger to this man and his reckless brother, to these people who he knows nothing about that are ready to throw their lives away for this exam. Because he is Banzoin Hakka and he is not allowed to think about heroics yet. 

Please come here still, Flayon prays wordlessly. Bettel, you have to come here and take them away so they can live through all the adventures we never could. 

“I’m sorry.” The words break free without warning, barely a whisper, something easily lost in the uproar of the crowd. 

He swallows again and again to force down the everpresent lump in his throat. It burns and burns and it never truly leaves.

Flayon mouths out the things that he cannot possibly say, body trampled under the feet of the monsters around him. 

Lights out.

(And in our times together I have many bad ideas.)

Not all his lives are tragedies. Some are frightfully normal, the kinds where he dies on a mission, or from an injury or illness, the kinds that are unremarkable and beautiful for it. 

There are also the silly ones, the ones that he regrets if only because they could have easily been longer. It is the unfortunate weight of possibility that colours these lives, the thought that they could have been so much more. 

Like this one: in a relatively unchanged universe, Hakka takes the R-TRUS to the car wash every other week. They talked about it before, a time where he would be able to fly it solo, and they worked on getting to that point together because it was fun. They dream of all kinds of things, of cafes and bakers and playing pianos in jazz clubs. They buy steaming cans of coffee from vending machines, not because they like them, but because it makes everything feel more normal.

He writes a song about swimming circles through the air.

It happens like this: They think it would be fun to create a circus for Bettel’s birthday and plan a whole ridiculous long-winded scheme just to make it happen, something destined to succeed because it’s just too crazy to fail. They make Axel the lion tamer, Altare the ringmaster, that kind of thing. 

Hakka is on trapeze because he was born to fly. Flayon is ready to catch him because he is his partner. 

They are practising, just playing in the skies because Flayon’s a pilot with the luxury of travel. They’re laughing and flying and zooming through the clouds and Hakka takes a misstep and suddenly he is falling and falling and falling and falling, faster and faster, and Flayon darts out to catch him, because he is his partner and he cannot let him fall.

He is soaring, the wind whipping through his hair, and Hakka is getting closer and closer until he clasps their hands together and stares into his eyes and loves him so purely and deeply.

He dies on impact, cushioning his fall.

When we meet as adults you’re always much more discerning. I don’t blame you.

It’s truly, absolutely, completely unfair. In this life, everything almost feels just right, like things are finally settling back to normal, like their paths are finally easing into a rhythm of sorts. 

He is young, physically fresh-faced, the youngest pilot in all of Elysium. He graduates with flying colours, a genius who can tackle any vehicle he meets. They’ll never know his secret, the fact that he’s already trained for aeons to do this.

Flayon is more qualified than ever, and he dashes off to the guild hall to hand in his application only to feel the floor drop beneath him. His smile falls and he struggles to plaster it back on. His resume flies away freely in the wind, hands grown slack beside him. It’s unthinkable really, because what once was the pub, the guild hall, is now just a boarded up building.

No.

This can’t be right.

Because what did he ever do to deserve this, to deserve losing the rest of Tempus along the way? If not him, then why should they have to suffer for his sins?

Flayon spends a few months on it, poring through books and old papers and any record he can find. It takes him a while until he hears anything. Too long. In a world with no Tempus, it’s hard to find any information about Vesper or Magni or any of them because there are no grand expeditions to latch onto, no chances to galavant into the public eye. The world is tilted off its axis and no one seems to care.

He finds it one day, crisp, a cold little blurb of a thing. 

Expedition unsuccessful. Five students from Elysium Academy were killed after an unfortunate incident with a dragon. Their bodies remain unidentified. News of this great tragedy comes just days before the graduation of our most recent class. If anyone has any details, feel free to report to XXX.

It makes sense in a gut-wrenching way that there is Tempus if there is no Regis Altare to blaze the path forwards for them. He wants to destroy something, wants to kick some heads in or smash some vases or just do something, anything , because how dare the universe kill him off so unceremoniously. Altare is a hero, the kind of person that drew them all together, the bright kind of soul that commands attention. He didn’t deserve that. None of them do.

Okay, so no Tempus. Fine. At least his circumstances have given him an evergrowing capacity for making plans just to rewrite every detail along the way. 

It rains after he finds out. It rains for practically a month straight, thunder harsh like a whip. It’s fitting though, evidence that maybe the skies will mourn him when no one else knows to. It’s fitting. He sits in the R-TRUS and waxes poetic of a family lost in the wind, wrapped up tight in a mountain of blankets. Flayon tries to sleep through the whole month, to shut out the nightmare that haunts his every waking moment. It’s all so hard to bear, the loss of everything all at once. 

His cockpit is water-logged, fuzzy and foaming with the sopping weight of tears he refuses to shed. Flayon forces his chest to take in everything even when the air is still too thick and painful to breathe and every part of him has been rubbed raw with anguish. 

He falls asleep and dreams of faraway summers, of growing up with Hakka and Shinri by his side and the river and the innocence that dotted those lives. The image of Hakka splashing him, small hands scooping water upwards in troves. The thought of 8 men trading stories around a long, long table.  It smells like summer in his memories and he wants to go back he wants to go back he wants to go back he wants to go back.

-

He picks himself up eventually, more out of necessity than anything else. It’s more fuel for the fire, honestly, another reason why he has to make the most of this life. 

Flayon takes the journey to Xenokuni alone, finding Shinri has already moved on to another unknown place because he took too long, because he is a wanderer like no other. So his feet carry him dutifully to the only other place he can go, the closest place he has left, to Hakka’s family’s estate. 

“Not interested,” he hears a voice hiss behind him, footsteps crunching in the snow beneath them.

He turns and sees Hakka’s face and feels achingly delicate, cracking at the edges like glass that hasn’t been annealed, all pressure built up and waiting to absolutely fucking shatter. He fears he may just completely break apart, could dissolve so totally that not even Hakka would be able to piece him back together.

It’s the brightest sight he’s ever had the pleasure of seeing.

“Yeah?” Flayon raises a hand and taunts him.

He hunches down and grounds his feet, curls his shoulders in and bows his head between them for a second, face burning red-hot and crumbling. 

Hakka scoffs at him, readying his spears and lowering his mask. It’s still his red mask, so red, the kind of red that leaves a permanent mark. Hakka’s wandering hands find purchase, talons swiping gashes into his arm, and the pain of it all makes him feel blessedly alive.

-

Hakka always grimaces after he hurts him. It’s a sign of the beast inside him, he claims, the part that revels in lashing out at anyone who will take it. 

If Flayon’s healing wounds had felt like excitement, a rush and a half, a shining beacon that he’s still human despite all of this, he thinks that to Hakka they must feel like an inescapable regret, something ever present that ravages over and over. It took him barely a week to recover from Hakka’s furious onslaught. His eyes are always the same, underlined by the same tightly wrapped thoughts that this is his unfortunate duty to bear. Flayon’s never found a way to stop that part from happening.

He stares at the familiar lines of Hakka’s back as he makes his retreat and wonders how long it takes for someone to recover from a lifetime of being exactly the person everyone expected you to be, completely hating it all the while.

Next week, he comes and asks again. Implores him to adventure with him. Fights him gladly. A little scrape in the scheme of the universe. 

-

In a moment of weakness, he tells Hakka about the others in a faraway sense, cloaked in just enough obfuscation to feel distant and unknowable. 

“I had these friends once,” Flayon starts blearily. 

It stings, acid fresh on wounds that never quite got the chance to scab over. He cannot paint an accurate picture of all their little idiosyncrasies, but he can share the bits that linger so strongly in his heart. Magni’s support. Axel’s energy. Bettel’s kindness.

“They were so brave and strong. My brothers in arms, really. Smart and wicked and wild. We loved each other so much, you know. And our leader–” he pauses and looks up to blink the beginning of tears out his eyes. “Our leader was the type of person to write ‘anonymous’ messages just to cheer us up. Good morale was key to a good mission and all that. He was the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

Hakka opened his mouth then closed it but he did not speak, could not even begin to find the words.

The moonlight renders him shiny and silver. 

“I’m sorry,” he finally offers, voice muffled by the sounds of the night around them.

“Oh Hakka,” Flayon murmured. “You have nothing to apologise for.”

“I think I would have loved them too if I knew them, if they’re even half as great as you say they are,” he sympathises, pensive in the silence he’s created.

The words hit him with a fresh pang of sorrow, sharp and steady. He tastes the blood lingering in his mouth. If only Hakka knew how true that really was.

Yet, always, you forgive me. 

The sun comes up and he thinks about him. Always.

He feels old, older than any time before, but it's hard to really tell for sure. Flayon’s lost track of his years. It’s like flying over the open ocean. There's nothing to ground you, no landmarks to provide perspective. He only has what he sees now, what little sliver of the universe shines through and makes it to his waiting eyes.

Hakka’s eyes crinkle and his shoulders shake slightly as they keep talking, the closest thing to a laugh he can manage to produce. Each intake of breath enkindles the fondest feelings in his chest.

“Oh, honey,” Hakka croons softly.

Flayon could tell from the tone of his voice, the way it wrapped around him so tenderly, that Hakka would have reached for him had it been another life. He would have taken him into his arms and squeezed as tight as he possibly could. Flayon’s spine is like water and he aches to melt into his embrace, but this Hakka, the one who’s been impossibly weathered by all the things they could not save him from, can only channel love through a trying smile and a light touch that’s ruffling through his hair before pulling away.  

They still long for adventure and for this moment, it feels like enough.

As if you understand what’s going on, and you’re making up for all the lifetimes in which one of us doesn’t exist,

“I like you,” Hakka confesses one night, blurry and bleary in the encroaching dawn.

His eyes are startlingly sincere. Twin moons mirroring the utmost devotion. Smooth enough to skate on. It knocks the breath out of his chest for a moment, caught staring at the stifling softness of it all. Sometimes he forgets that Hakka’s eyes are so unbearably blue, a sleep-worn, yew berry blue. 

Even if he wanted to, there’s no way to deflect the way his gaze so totally and completely captivates him, fierce as a foundry.

“You know nothing about me,” Flayon replies, absentmindedly grasping strands of Hakka’s hair and twisting them into braids. They’ll unfurl in the morning, knocked around in his sleep. 

“I’d like to, though, if you’d let me.”

Something deep inside him is singing, or maybe it’s the birds or the sound of the stars giving way to the day ahead. Hakka is still talking, but all he can hear is the song that is playing and playing and stare at his lips, so delicate and faint, and try to somehow make all the disjoint pieces fit neatly together.

“–and sometimes I see you in my dreams, small and young and still so haunted by the world. I mean sometimes there are other things, dreams of magic and knights and long, long trains that never seem to go anywhere, but then there’s you. I think I’d find a way to love you all the same no matter what.” 

He looks like he could keep going, rambling deep into the sunrise, but Hakka stops, gentle and grieving, and leaves the ball in his court.

I’ve seen you die hundreds of times, he imagines in response. Eviscerated. Entombed. Effervescent. There are limits to how much anyone can ever really know him.

“Help me with the garden tomorrow,” Flayon answers instead, removing his hands from their perch in Hakka’s hair to settle on the ground and deposit his head firmly in his lap. 

“Sure,” Hakka agrees, easy and smooth. “I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with it though,” he continues, angling for a reaction that he’s very happy to give back.

“See, you know nothing about me!” Flayon scoffs. It’s all show, all deflection, and they both know it. “It makes me feel better, I guess,” he hums, curling inwards to face him. 

The world is ending and Hakka still wants to save it. 

The grass is rough beneath his palms, verdant yet slowly bleaching in the sun. It reminds him of life in a way. Flayon rips some free from the ground and tosses it up like confetti, musing as it spirals to the ground. The breeze carries some of it far off enough that it’s out of sight. Gone, probably. Too far to tell.

“You deserve a better world than this,” Hakka quietly responds after a while, head tilted stubbornly up towards the horizon.

It’s the most romantic thing he’s ever heard.

This life is a dreamy one, all cotton candy clouds and cookie cutter journeying. Nothing happens. Nobody comes. Nobody goes. Simple and easy.

and the ones where we just, barely, never meet.

Then there are others.

A distress call. A rescue mission on the outskirts of Elysium. It is standard procedure, a standard part of training, his final mission before he graduates. These are the best kinds of missions, the kind that make him believe he's still capable of good. They make him feel like a hero, even though he’s not sure he deserves it.

If, one morning, someone told him that his friends, his family, his lover, his world, his dreams, his sky died from a bombing, a threat, napalm, missiles, whip crack, sword strike, search and destroy, outer wilds, utter massacre, no escape, he would have no choice but to adapt, to grow, sublimate, become a tree that sprawls across the plane of the universe, something strong enough that they could rest in his leaves and find a way back home through his branches.

At first, he mistakes the body as a piece of trash, a remnant of carnage floating in the water, something shapeless and wholly unrecognisable. It bobs a little, twisted slightly out of shape. Then he sees the blood, the metallic sheen clinging to the surface. He sees the blood and the twisted limbs and the hair plastered unnaturally to his face and even as he approaches, it remains unmoving.

Fuck.

Distantly he realises, pulling it out the water, that it fits in his arms like lock and key. Even now, after all this time, they are still forced apart by a distance that takes years to travel. He looks down, half expecting to see a matching wound in his chest, a gaping hole, a bloodied mess. Instead, there is nothing, nothing but his bloodstained jacket and Hakka’s body turned cold and cruel in his embrace, and it burns just as badly.

Why is he here? It’s too early for him to be here, to leave Xenokuni, and he’s never been caught off guard this bad so how could this happen?

If you repeat a name enough times, does the body retain their identity, or are they merely reduced to a thing, another object, something limp and heavy in your arms, pinkish saliva trickling from their mouth?

Banzoin Hakka, beloved, gone too soon.

Flayon throws his heart in the river to live with Hakka’s corpse. He stands there, grim satisfaction clawing up at his throat, as he imagines it sinking down deeper and deeper until it lands home. He watches his reflection distorting in the river’s surface, watches the way the water refracts his face into a shattered visage, and it feels fitting.

Oh, Hakka, he mourns. It’s you and all the things I did to avoid saying goodbye and all the things you did because you refused to let me go.

He has not felt this way since that one, so long ago, where they guided each other so blindly through a life without the others.

It is curtain call and there is no one else waiting in the rafters.

He does not like to remember the rest of this life, but sometimes it haunts him when his mind runs out of horrors to create. A new surprise.

I hate those. I prefer the ones in which you kill me.

Corruption Beasts are gnarly creatures, snarling and ruthless reductions of things. The scourge of the land. They’re getting stronger too, it seems, edging closer and closer to the hollow tree with every passing day. Flayon can tell there’s something strengthening them, whatever is doing the same to the creature inside of Hakka. Years of experience have helped him spot the signs of its growing influence on him. The way he turns colder, the way he relishes in the indiscriminate act of killing.

He weaves left, tagging one with a bomb as Hakka darts around them, errantly jabbing at any that approach. It explodes, sending off shrapnel into the trees around them. With a shattering sound, its leg gave way temporarily slowing it, but the monster shifted its weight gearing to jump towards him again. 

Flayon smiled coldly and readied to attack once again, tightening his grasp on his energy packs. He can hear the crack of Bettel’s rapier and Shinri’s arrows zinging behind him. Charing forward on battle-worn feet, he lets loose a cry and strikes.

The beast leaped towards him, all fangs and fur and pure rage trapped in an onslaught of claws. Flayon moves instinctively, instincts honed to the sharpest steel, dodging enough where it grazed his shoulder rather than his face. Close enough to spill blood, but purely cosmetic. 

Hakka sprang up before him, stabbing cleanly through its throat. 

“You good, Flay?” Hakka kicks at another one, ducking down as Shinri shoots it through the eye.

“Doing fine,” he responds, readying his shields around them.

“Got it!” Hakka shouts, darting off to weaken the rest. Flayon followed the sound of his voice and aimed with his phasers, looking to finish them off. 

Then it gets worse. He turns, running off to support Hakka from long range, when the Corruption Beast from before gets up and swipes clean through his chest, shields already sent far off in Hakka’s direction. It pierced through his torso, twisting savagely before drawing out and readying another volley. 

Bettel rushes in, decapitating it before it gets the chance, but he can tell from the panicked look on his face that it’s bad. He doesn’t say anything though, a silent mercy, just leads him off somewhere safer while they finish things off. 

Flayon offers an apology with his eyes, begging him to forgive him. Bettel’s too nice for his own good.

That’s the real way they get you. Corruption. If Flayon were lucky, he’d die here, but he can already feel it, the phantom voices buzzing in his ears. They want his body. They want his soul. They want to take over. They need him. They want him. They’ll kill for him. They want his power. They’ll give him power. They’ll give him everything he wants. They–

“Machi? Flay? You good?”

Hakka’s voice comes in and out like a salve on his feverish skin. Warm hands draped across his forehead. Sweetness peppered in bursts of pain.

He smiled as he watched the beasts around them fall, adrenaline pushing his heart into overdrive. There’s nothing better than kicking some heads into the ground. Violence is the strongest drug and the cruellest mistress. Flayon’s chest ached, throbbing as he coughed up a fresh wave of blood.

He sees visions, so many visions swirling around him, so many versions of Hakka. Illusions of happiness taunt him, but Flayon would not let them win.

“Perfectly fine, darling. Barely a scratch,” he echoes, intimating at his chest with a flip of the wrist.

“Dumbass,” Hakka cries, wiping the blood from his lips. “You’ve lost so much blood that you’ve started saying these ridiculous things.”

Flayon’s laugh fractures into pieces around him.

“Kill me,” he begs, crimson hand clutching Hakka’s with all the strength he can possibly muster. “Kill me while I’m still human.”

Hakka holds him close before driving his spear straight into his heart. One blow. Painless. Painless enough. 

“I’ll become a necromancer or some shit like that and you’ll regret all the times you made fun of me because you’re never getting rid of me. We’re going to meet again, okay?” he demands, voice quivering in the fuzzy light between them.

Flayon does not answer because he didn’t want to lie. He didn’t want to tell the truth either though, so he just sat there, sat and listened to the sounds of the carnage until his vision went dark, blood in his throat capturing all his feelings of love like the thickest webs and the sweetest honey.

But when all’s said and done, I’d rather surrender to you in other ways.

Corruption always sends her sweetest angel, so it’s no surprise to him when Hakka shows up in the inky depths of his heart. Memories, dreams of the past, nightmares, desires, fabrications, anything was fair game. 

Urging lips meet his, a hungry, devouring sort of kiss like Hakka wants to eat him alive, disarming grin playing games on his lips. He’s not laughing, but Flayon can practically hear it resonating around them. A bark of a laugh.

It tastes sweet on his tongue. Yet then again, he's always heard that poison always tastes particularly sweet, heard it about rat poison, heard it about antifreeze, heard it about apple cider vinegar traps for catching fruit flies. The feeling tastes sweet, but this too could easily be poison, something lying in wait to stake its claim on his bones.

It’s always Hakka.

“Didn’t you miss me, Flayflay?” he calls, voice sharp like a siren’s song.

“Don’t you love me too? I love you so, so much,” he taunts, saccharine sweet, hands fisted tenderly in his hair.

“Let’s go home, baby,” he hums, fingers teasing along the hem of his jacket, talons drawing shivers down his spine.

He’s going to hate himself for all of this, starting from the way he grabs Hakka’s collar, sucking the poison from its source.

He gives in for a while, pulled deeper by temptation. Flayon gives in because he is so weary and worn, because it’s the only thing he can think to do, because the heart is a lonely hunter and he is so tired of constantly being trained to kill.

-

It’s Hakka, a chequered apron tied around his waist as they giggle and flounder around, throwing chalky candy hearts around in mock professions of love. 

Marry me. My angel. I love you.

They shatter into pieces as they fall to the ground, but Flayon feels strangely unbothered as he crushes them beneath his feet. They’re standing behind a café counter and there is nothing else in the world, just him and Hakka and the sweetness that never washes from his lips.

His face feels warm as their shoulders knock together, brushing against each other with a resounding crack.

-

He’s up before Hakka today, startled awake by some wispy remnant of a dream. It’s a rare occasion for him so Flayon just lies there for a while, simply watching his chest rise and fall and counting the breaths. Simply having him there, so solid and sturdy, comforts him more than he can ever put into words.

When it’s clear that he won’t be able to fall back asleep, he shifts out from his spot in the blankets and pads over to the kitchen. 

The curtains are drawn and the fridge is empty.

Drawn back by the sudden chill, he slips back into bed, snuggling closer to Hakka’s back, chin digging into his shoulder. Hakka still shows no signs of stirring.

-

Hakka laughs, all breathy and sweet, as he twirls Flayon around. A masquerade, they said, but Hakka’s so obvious, red mask and white suit and his shiny, shiny shoes. The thought that they must be matching, that they look good together, two parts of a set with matching masks and gloved hands clasped resolutely hand in hand, makes him feel giddy inside. The song slows, and so do they, and his hand edges a little higher to covet the back of Hakka’s neck. Touching, always touching.

The music shifts and they fall into the ecossaise, eyes resolutely glued to each other through the chiming of the bells.

-

They never quite get the details right. Hakka’s tone will be off, or his eyes, or the way his face crinkles when he buries his nose in his hair and smells the blood that he can never quite wash away. He’s not a dancer at heart. It’s a nice fantasy to indulge in from time to time though. 

The thing that the demons infecting him will never understand is that he knows Hakka better than anyone else. Better than humanly possible. Even a disguise, a daydream drawn so perfectly out of the culmination of his memories, isn’t enough to trick him. He's lived through it all, both stood together and forced apart in equal measure.

“Kill me,” he pleads, voice echoing off into the distance below. “Kill me while I’m still human.”

“Don't be silly, angel. I would never do that.” A semblance of Hakka’s voice rings out beside him in splintered waves. The tone is all wrong though, too much weight and not enough duty. Not heavy enough on the r’s.

They don't understand that mercy is the greatest form of love.

Flayon’s sure that Hakka, the real one, can hear him wherever he is, ears always attuned to their special wavelength. He will make things right. The pain that follows is a shallow blessing. 

Their next reunion will be a proper one.

Even though each time, I know I’ll see you again, I always wonder

There are days when Flayon’s mind is violently pulled towards Hakka, regardless of whether they’re together or not. It could be the smell of the earth, coarse and heady beneath his feet, or in half of a song, something wordless and soundless that plays on repeat in the vestige of a dream. 

Today it's the blush pinks of the cherry blossoms. There’s something grounding in them, proof of years and years of hard grown life. He stared at them through the window, eyes wandering whenever his focus slips. It seems like they’re blooming faster this year, already beginning to fall in the breeze.

He feels it deeply and constantly, the kind of love that keeps him tied to the ground. Every life blooms like the last, a flurry of feelings all mangled up and hard to truly untangle. Look at the flowers, he wants to say. That’s how I feel about you. 

How fast, Flayon wonders, is he going to fall this time?

“You need to stop doing this,” Altare tells him gently, hand like a harmony.

“Doing what?” Flayon asks, fiddling with his fork on the edge of his plate. 

Today it’s Hainanese chicken rice, one of his favourites. An old comfort is more accurate, perhaps, because even the blade of favouritism dulls its edge after so many cuts.

“Going somewhere I can’t follow,” Altare says, ruffling his hair all fond and free. “Always deep in that head of yours.”

“I just–” his voice cuts in, then he rubs his finger over his forehead to smooth out his tone. “I can’t help it,” he grumbles, more to himself than anything.

Flayon looks at the trees outside and is bitterly reminded of all the leaves and petals and fragments of feelings pressed into dusty books that’ll never be opened. He thinks and thinks and thinks until the words get stuck in his lungs, caught between the edges of his teeth.

That’s the thing about life. He’s always leaving.

is this the last time?

Pain and hard work will wear you down until nothing can rattle you anymore. Walking in the dark, drifting through abandoned lots to sit in the silence. Haunted houses. Ghosts, but the real kind. Spirits. Corruption. The deep, deep, ocean and its sheer endlessness. His first solo showcase. His first kill. His first loss. His first death. He’s grown incredibly tolerant of it all.

The only thing that continues to scare him is people, humans and their unending capacity for the palest love and the brightest hatred. He winces a little, pain doubling down whenever they fight. It’s never anything serious, maybe a forgotten call or a misplaced jacket, but there’s always the errant thought that this time, Hakka could walk out and he’d never come back. He could die and Hakka would only be left with memories of his sulking face, his artificial focus, all those moments spent clinging to all that pettiness. 

When he was happy, energy burst out of him like an overflowing tap, a constant explosion, as if his body could not even dare to contain it. His hands shook and he would literally bounce in place, whooping and hollering and looking for the nearest person to share it with. When he was sad, no one ever had to know.

Flayon sighs and gingerly takes Hakka’s face into his hands, dotting kisses on his cheeks, his forehead, his hair, his hands, lips butterfly-soft and searching.

“What was that for?” Hakka murmurs, sleepy and stirring.

“For loving me,” Flayon replies, as if it explains it all.

It’s a little unfair, he realises, to cling to Hakka so much sometimes. He tries to avoid it, tries to let him live his own life, but sometimes the fear wrings his heart in a vice grip so tight that it’s like he can hardly breathe. The fear that he could squander their final days together without even knowing it.

It’s a little unfair, he realises, because for Hakka this is always the first and last time and he should not be wasting it spending so much time thinking about the future.

It manifests in the little things. Hands lingering and meeting more often than was necessary. Second glances at his retreating form. Words always on the verge of springing out. Sitting with him when doing separate tasks just to feel his steady weight beside him.

If this is his last chance, then he wouldn’t change a thing.

Life is hard. It’s hard and tiring and you’re never done because there’s always another quest to carry, another life to save, another dream to dash, but companionship is the balm that soothes all aches.

It’s a blessing too though. He gets thousands of chances, millions of moments and hopes and wishes impossibly coalescing just to give him this opportunity to meander back and spend them all here, relishing in the warmth beneath his wandering fingers. 

Is that really you?

Everyday was a new adventure. Hakka dragged him off, incessant hands tugging him off to a park with promises of picnics and peaches and yakisoba pan to watch the leaves fall with him. It was a special treat, he reasoned, because he’s never gotten to see what autumn looks like and he wants them to do it together. 

Every day he wakes up and explores the world anew. The park had a winding trail of acupuncture rocks, or so they heard, so they compete to see who can run on them for longer, barefoot and wild. They run and they run until they become one with the wind itself.

They squabble over food, stealing bites and stubbornly pushing each other aside to pay for any and all of it. They made up silly competitions: who can jump the furthest, who can find the reddest leaves, who can get hit by a falling acorn first without shaking them down to do it. Joy like an inferno blazes deep in his chest.

Suddenly Hakka’s reaches out, arms outstretched in front of them. His talons glimmer in the light. Flayon is on the verge of speaking in response, a joke about zombies perhaps, but then Hakka leans back on his heels. He rocks back and forth and leans back like he’s flying, like he’s ready to defy the wind and skies and he stubbornly closes his eyes as he begins to fall.

Flayon bolts behind him when he realises, hands fumbling as they try in vain to reach for his shoulders. They both tumble to the ground, stirring up a pile of leaves around them. Hakka is laughing, joy bubbling out of him without a care in the world as he feels Flayon squished solidly beneath him. 

“What the fuck, Hakka? What were you thinking?” Flayon whines. He’s more surprised than anything, shock still licking at his nerves.

“Trust fall,” Hakka chirps, pulling at the crumbling leaves to reveal their skeletons. If he had any other reasons or displeasure at his failed attempt to grab him, then he certainly doesn't show it.

“There was no one there to catch you,” he grumbles, picking leaves out of their hair.

“Trust fall,” Hakka repeats again, offering his hand with a megawatt grin.

-

It’s a little shameful when he thinks about just how much everything reminds him of Hakka. 

He has a short fuse sometimes. It’s a flaw he's well aware of. It's gotten better with age, shaped tenuously less like something so hair-trigger, something so testy that he’d push someone around whenever they get on his nerves, but he still has his moments. Sometimes he acts a bit too fast and thinks a bit too slow. Outpaces himself without realising.

Sometimes he stares at the sun, heedless of all warnings of health and safety and UV rays because if anything kills him it damn well won’t be the sun. He stares at it and he sees Hakka there, brighter and dimmer and constant. Perennial. Beautiful.

Sometimes he stares at the monsters they fight, the Corruption Beasts, and it tugs on his brain a little, recalling the moments where he nearly succumbed to it. He thinks about Hakka and the monsters that dwell beneath the surface. Maybe they’re all people just like him, people like Hakka, people unwilling to let go of something marketed sweetly as love. It is merely circumstance that paints him as the hero.

Sometimes he looks at the world and wonders whether he’s just a messed up refraction of infinitely many parts of it as if this is all one long dream that he’ll never wake up from.

Flayon sits primly on the ledge of his cockpit and thinks about everyone who hadn’t made it back to him, the ones who fought tooth and nail but couldn’t make it home. He thinks about Magni and Bettel and Hakka and the telltale crack of metal against bone. He thinks about the hearth in the guild hall, the folded photos tucked hastily into his wallet, the words carefully measured that he never got to pour.

He thinks about what it might have been like to die with them. 

A soldier’s burial.

And what if you’re perfectly happy without me?

This lifetime is a rare chance. All of the variables and chance and time and space lining up into the perfect storm, a world without corruption. 

Flayon grows like a weed, guided by the unwanted wealth of generations of thoughts. When he has a moment to spare, he checks on Hakka, the tallest, strongest sunflower around. In a world without violence, Hakka always turns to music. He’s drawn to it in all lives, all arrangements of the fabric of time, but the peaceful worlds are the ones where he can devote himself fully to the beat of the drums. That's just the kind of person he is.

“I want to create the kind of music that makes your heart shake,” Hakka says with a smile, recording coming out a little tinny through his speakers. It’s that customer service smile he pastes on his face whenever he needs to appear especially polite. The sight of it aches a little, so Flayon closes his eyes with a sigh and continues listening.

Hakka sings a lot of songs about love and illusions that make you wake up in a chill, spine taut as a bowstring. Sometimes they’re pretty little treats dissolving into air like little sugary coloured stars, and other times they’re dipped in gold, gilded and glassy like the saddest things he’s ever heard. During moments of weakness, he imagines he’s singing just for him, crazy as that would be when they’ve never even met. Flayon shamelessly buys all his albums but leaves them all tightly bound in plastic, keeps them as an unplayed memento of sorts for the brightest star around.

The thing about stars is that they’re supposed to be enjoyed from afar.

It reminds him of the shoes he keeps in his closet, kept pristine and shiny. He sees them every morning as he gets ready, lying there on the floor the same as always. He sees them but he does not dare put them on, always caught opening and closing the door.

He thinks about it a lot too, meeting Hakka like this in this world without chains. But then he sees him so glistening and glowing under the spotlights and he wonders if it’s really worth it. This Hakka already has infinitely more than any before. The world is his song and Flayon is a beat too small to be a part of it.

Flayon almost thought about buying floor seats too, didn’t even realise he was saving for them until the moment already passed. It’s better this way though, less tempting, more physical. He settles in on the right side, stage left, close enough to the exits where he can make an escape at any time necessary.

Someone, one of his band members for this set he belatedly realises, drapes themselves languidly over Hakka's shoulders and flashes him a winning smile and Flayon's heart lurches in his chest. They share a laugh, something lost in the crowd, something that’ll make it online as the cutest little snippet of brilliant superstar Banzoin Hakka’s life. It's all so heartbreakingly familiar, displayed as a show for hundreds of people who will never know Hakka as well as he does. Or maybe not, maybe they do, maybe at some point he's simply become another face in the crowd, heart straining against its cage as he melts into his seat.

He looks up on stage, separated by the infinite red tide, and thinks about how easy it would be to jump up there. He could unfurl his wings and fly just to run up and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him. Flayon thinks about how angelic Hakka stands, burnished bright by the spotlights above them, and how he loves him so desperately that it may very well kill him. The reality is not that simple though. There is the security, for one, part of a long list of reasons why people like him are not quite built for people like Hakka, not yet, maybe not ever. Still the desire sparks anew every single time, fresh as the frost, and his legs twitch to move. 

His head is filled with thoughts that are too dangerous to finish and Flayon watches his feet carry him reluctantly out of his chair, out of the hall, out of the stadium, out of Hakka's burgeoning life before he can do something so foolish. Before his heart’s refrain can begin and taunt him all the while.

Flayon hastily shoves a note beneath his seat, taking one last chance to watch the stage flicker, bright like half a constellation.

Ah, but I don’t blame you; I’ll never burn as brilliantly as you. 

A letter to Hakka from an admirer, a comet, a falling star.

Today I’d like to write about something else, but it seems like I can’t. It doesn’t really bother me, but I think this’ll be my only chance so sometimes I wish it could be something better. It’s snowing while I write this. When you go to sleep and wake up again, I’ll come down from the sky too.

I see you so clearly whenever I hear your voice, the movements of your body, your hands so delicate and strong. It’s almost like meeting you. I’ve made my heart colder, harder, stronger, but still it persists. Your face is like a map and all roads home lead back to you. Your voice is the glowing hearth of your soul. You are so sun-born that it brings me to my knees. I hope you know that you deserve every moment of this life.

It fascinates me sometimes how much my body can contain the ever growing magnitude of all these feelings trapped deep inside my chest. I don’t expect you to find this. Even if you find this, I don’t expect a response. I will not be listening for it, so don’t even try. You've always been so good to me. I want you to be happy even when it looks like this. Maybe especially so.

So be happy.

Sometimes I look at you and see blueprints for someone that has an uncertain future. So here is my heart, not that you had to ask for it, a trophy that you’ve always owned. I will always feel this as best as I can.

Este es un puerto.

Aquí te amo.

It’s signed with a drawing of a battery instead of a name.

-

Hakka looks out on the crowd, adrenaline like oil burning deep in his lungs. It feels unreal, moments crystallising in front of him as if life is all one big crazy simulation. Everything is so bright that he can barely see his hands in front of his face and his entire body feels electric. The bass vibrates through the floor and he can feel it humming through his bones.

The end of a concert feels like a blur. He’s filled with so much love and happiness and energy that it spills out of him in an endless wave. Hakka shoves one hand in his pocket, bringing the microphone to his mouth as the final notes ring out around them.

“I'll make the whole universe feel like it’s yours, okay?” He shouts. “Just wait for me. Final song, baby!”

It’s a message for him, for the man that lives on the outskirts of his mind, his unknown inspiration. The crowd cheers around him but it falls on deaf ears, Flayon long having ushered himself out of the stadium and into the relative safety of the R-TRUS.

Next time, he decides, because Flayon is perfectly happy with things as they are now.

This life is a performance and he is more than happy to give it his all.

It’s only fair that I should be the one to chase you across ten, twenty-five, a hundred lifetimes 

The seawater is cool against the warm sand. 

Hakka kicks off his shoes and runs down to the shore, kicking up sand with hoots and hollers and laughing so sweetly and candidly that Flayon can't help but run off to join him. It’s warm, golden and soft beneath them, and when he looks back he can see the intersecting lines of their footsteps. 

“If I die, which I will, I don’t want to spend my last days lamenting the end,” Hakka confesses, kicking up seawater in an arc behind them. His arm is buried in the sand and it washes the beach in a lilac glow.

There is no cure from corruption, as they've slowly discovered.

“I would have liked you as a lifelong friend,” Flayon says, voice small and secretive.

“In another life then,” Hakka calls, searching for his hands in the dark. He presses a can to his cheek, tracing words into his palms and drinking in his presence.

“In another life,” Flayon agrees, simple and secure.

They stayed out late at night, lying in the sand until the mosquitoes picked over them. It's the deepest kind of healing.

Sometimes it feels like every life is a continuation of the others, another blip on a forever growing line of succession. When he resurfaces, he’s going to paint this moment, long brushstrokes and watery patches, a landscape sewn on misaligned scraps of paper. There's only so much energy contained in every moment, only so much we can fit in the lonely vessel of life, so he resolves himself to only spend it on the things that are worth it.

He’ll close his eyes and wake up in a new body, still him, still full of words and feelings he’ll never quite harvest, still so incredibly alive.

until I find the one where you’ll return to me.

Their life together begins like it always does.

“I’m Machina X Flayon, pilot of guild Tempus!” Flayon shouts, extending his hand towards the man in front of him.

“Banzoin Hakka, the coolest and cutest exorcist of all of Xenokuni,” Hakka responds, buoyant and beaming.

Every time it’s fresh like the first, two magnets locking together in a flash. 

“I get the feeling we'll be together for a very, very long time,” Hakka calls out. His voice is a never-ending symphony.

Flayon grabs his hand and they take to the skies.