She did not speak.
She had recognized, with the quiet precision of someone who knew him well enough to read the shape of a conversation before it arrived, what this was. Or something close to what it was. She wasn't entirely certain she was almost never entirely certain with him, which was one of the things that was both maddening and, if she was honest with herself in the specific privacy of her own skull, compelling about him. He was the only person she knew who could consistently surprise her.
She said nothing. She waited. She would give him this, at least.
But she wanted to hear it.
Selfishly, perhaps. She wanted him to take all the time he needed, to say whatever he needed to say in whatever order he chose. She would not push. She would not interrupt.She would not make this about her needs or her curiosity.
This was his moment.
And if she was being honest, brutally, quietly honest she felt she had earned the right to listen. She had waited years for him to speak like this. She had carried the weight of his silences long enough. So yes, she would let him talk. She would let him do this his way.
"I saw her first at the Academy," he said, eyes drifting toward the porthole. "Way before any of this started. I was standing near the entrance, trying to look like I belonged there, and she was already there. Same detached expression she still wears sometimes. She didn't even glance at me. Probably didn't know I existed."
He gave a small, dry smile.
"I was nobody," he said. "Just another Sleeper, well from the Outskirts. Nothing special, really. Well… except for the divine Aspect, I guess. Which is surprisingly not so very rare."
He gave a small, self-deprecating laugh.
"And I was too busy scanning every single person like they were about to enslave me at any moment. Thanks to my Flaw, of course."
His mouth curved, almost amused.
"Mysterious. Inhuman. And kind of monstrous. That's how I saw her back then at the academy."
Nephis looked at the shifting sea light on the floor.
Mysterious. Inhuman. Monstrous.
She had been called those words many times before. But they sounded different coming from him. The same syllables, the same meaning on paper yet they carried a different weight when Sunny said them. When he spoke them, they weren't insults or judgments. They were observations. Honest, unfiltered, almost gentle.
There was something strangely intimate about hearing someone describe you as monstrous without malice, without performance. As if the word had changed shape between his mouth and her ears. As if the perception of the person saying it could completely alter its meaning.
She turned the thought over carefully, not letting any of it show on her face.
He had seen her that way once.
And now he was sitting here, years later, telling her about it.And he was sitting here telling her about it now, which meant the word had changed shape somewhere along the way right? She wondered, quietly and selfishly, how he would describe her now.
"She was already incredibly strong," he said, almost reluctantly. "Even back then, before I really understood what that meant. The way she carried herself… It wasn't arrogance. It was quieter. Like she had already decided she was going to win, and that was that."
He fell silent for a second, then continued.
"And then came the Solstice."
He picked up his cup, turning it slowly in his hands.
"She found me. Or I found her. We found each other, I guess. She was with someone else too. Then we actually talked for the first time." He tilted his head. "She was… strange to talk to. And I've met plenty of people who are weird for bad reasons. This was different."
He searched for the words, frowning slightly.
"She seemed… inexperienced to say the least. Conversation, smiling, those little exchanges everyone else does without thinking. She's given me a fright multiple times doing them. Like she'd learned all the rules from a book, but had never actually played the game. To say it clearly she was bad at it."
Something moved through Nephis's chest.
She did not let it onto her face.
He was not wrong. She had known, even at the time, that certain things did not come naturally to her, the social graces, the easy warmth, the language of ordinary human connection that people around her seemed to speak without learning. She had spent a great deal of her life aware of this gap and considerably less time feeling anything particular about it, because feeling things about gaps you cannot close was not a productive use of attention.
She felt something about it now.
He said it without cruelty. Without even the mild edge of someone delivering an accurate criticism. He said it the way you described a fact you had observed carefully and stored accurately, and somehow that was more affecting than gentleness would have been.
But… Given him a fright?
She had thought she had done a decent job back then. Yes, she knew she wasn't naturally warm or effortless in conversation, but she had made an effort. She had been careful. Controlled. And yet the idea that she had frightened him multiple times stung more than she expected.
It wasn't anger, exactly. It was closer to irritation. Yes, a quiet, prickling annoyance.
Nephis kept her expression perfectly neutral, but inside, that small sting refused to fade.
"It was weird," he said, almost to himself. "Coming from someone who moved through a battle like she was born in the middle of one… and yet she still looked graceful while cutting down nightmare creatures left and right."
He looked away again.
"The first thing she actually said to me," he continued, "was that I was a pervert. Which I maintain —"
"—was an accurate assessment." Nephis said.
The deflection was automatic.
She did it before she even fully decided to, creating a small, familiar argument to give her face something neutral to do while her chest continued its private storm. She wanted footing. A weapon. Something she could wield if the ground beneath her started to shift too much.
After all, she knew the power her words had over him.
Not because of authority or the Bond, but because his words had always carried weight within her, more weight than she had ever wanted to admit. And now she knew it went both ways. Her words touched him. They landed. They stayed.
Just as his touched her.
That was why she refused to simply let herself be seen like this. She didn't want to be defenseless. Not when she knew exactly how deeply they could affect each other.
So she reached for the familiar comfort of resistance, even if it was only a small, quiet deflection.
"— was unfair," he continued, with the dignity of a man who has accepted that this argument is unwinnable and intends to keep having it anyway, "and which I maintain with great dignity. And then only a few days after, she decided to teach me her family's sword art."
He let it land.
Nephis looked at the wall.
She was very carefully not looking at him.
She remembered the decision. She had made it quickly, the way she made most decisions not impulsively, but with a certainty that arrived faster than the deliberation that should have preceded it. She had looked at him and thought: he needs this. He needs proper technique, something, something versatile. And the most compatible thing she had was the art of her family, which she had spent her entire childhood learning in a hall that smelled of candle smoke and old wood, under the watchful instruction of people who had made her do it again, and again, and again until the forms were less like learned movements and more like breathing.
She had not thought it significant, at the time. She had thought: this is the obvious thing to do.
He was describing it as though it were extraordinary.
So she wanted to see what he had to say.
"I want you to actually consider that," he said, looking somewhere past her shoulder. "A family sword art. Something passed down for generations, kept secret, protected… sacred, probably. The kind of knowledge people have killed over rather than let it fall into the wrong hands."
He turned his palm up in pure bafflement.
"And she just… offered it. To me. After knowing me for a few days. While already convinced I was a pervert. And a potential assassin at that perhaps?" He let out a short, dry laugh. "I only wanted to learn how to hold a sword without looking like an idiot. Instead she handed me the secret legacy art of her noble bloodline."
Sunny had taken her family's art and made it his own.
He had woven a part of her into himself deeply, irreversibly. The forms, the discipline, the precision… they lived in him now. A piece of her legacy breathed through his blade every time he fought.
And that thought, selfish as it was, felt deeply satisfying.
She didn't say any of it out loud.
The sea shifted quietly beneath them.
"At first I didn't even realize what it was," he continued, quieter. "Swordsmanship is swordsmanship, right? So I didn't think much of it. Then it hit me, way after this, it was her family's art. A real legacy thing." He exhaled through his nose. "I told myself it had to be transactional. That nobody gives away something that valuable for free. I spent days, weeks, months, waiting for the other shoe to drop, trying to figure out what the price was going to be."
He shook his head slowly.
"I was wrong. She had simply decided. And when she decides something…" He paused, searching for the words. "She goes all in. Completely. No halfway. That's one of the things about her that's both impressive and I want to stress this occasionally terrifying. The collateral damage can be pretty significant."
She had known he was cautious. She had known he was distrustful by nature.
But hearing him admit it so plainly that he had spent days, weeks, even months waiting for the other shoe to drop, constantly searching for some hidden price behind her gift made something warm and unexpectedly soft bloom in her chest.
A quiet, helpless little smile tugged at the corner of her lips.
Of course he had. She had too. She too doubted him at first, yes. She had watched him carefully, measuring every movement, every word. But those doubts had faded faster than she expected. And now, hearing him speak about it years later, she felt a strange, quiet satisfaction bloom in her chest.
Back then Sunny had been so suspicious, so strangely intense. Always watching, always analyzing, treating every kindness like it might hide a trap. His reactions had been… peculiar, to say the least. Not that she was any better. And yet here he was, years later, confessing that the moment she had offered him her family's sword art without hesitation, his first instinct had been to brace himself for betrayal.
He was quiet for a moment, then added almost reluctantly:
"After that we fought. About something stupid, probably. Both of us are too stubborn. It got bad enough that I decided to stop speaking to her altogether." His voice lowered. "I was furious. The kind that keeps you awake at three in the morning feeling completely justified."
She remembered that "fight" clearly. The moment he had spat "Fuck you, Neph" before turning his back on her. At the time, she had been convinced he was a liar, that most of the things between them had been false, that he had only ever pretended to care. The anger had burned hot and vicious inside her too… but beneath it, there had also been a quiet, humiliating ache. She had wanted him to come back. Quickly. She wouldn't have apologized easily, perhaps not at all, but she had desperately wanted him to reconcile anyway because she trusted him regardless.
He looked down at his cup.
"But even then… I never let anyone talk shit about her behind her back. Not once. I even killed someone for it." He gave a small, crooked smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Even when I was angry enough that I probably agreed with what they were saying… I still didn't agree."
He looked at his hands.
She looked at the porthole.
She was not going to examine why the sentence: I even killed someone for it, had struck her so hard, somewhere deep below her sternum. She already knew the reason.
Just as she knew that she, too, had reacted strongly sometimes too strongly whenever someone spoke ill of Sunny behind his back. She had silenced more than one person with a single cold look or a few cutting words. She had defended him fiercely, even when she was furious with him, even when part of her wanted to agree with the criticism.
She had never admitted how protective she felt toward him.
"We reconciled," he said. "More or less."
He gave a small, tired shrug.
"And then, of course, we immediately got into another fight. A much bloodier and more annoying one. Which says a lot about us, I guess. Probably nothing good."
He paused, then added with a small shrug:
"We're not… simple people. Together."
Together, she noticed. Not as a team. Not in proximity. Together, as though the word had always meant something specific when it applied to them specifically. To him.
He breathed.
"And then she disappeared," he continued, quieter. "I resented that. A lot." He exhaled through his nose. "I told myself I'd moved on. Put it all in a nice little box, and close the lid. The anger, the… whatever that other feeling was. I didn't have a clean name for it, and the one I did have felt like too much."
He looked down at his hands.
"I told myself I'd stopped thinking about her." A beat. "I wanted to be stronger than her. So I was stupidly competitive back then. Every time I trained, every time I pushed myself, part of it was because I didn't want to fall behind her. I hated the idea that she was always one step ahead. But.. "
"But I thought about her every single day. Whether she was sleeping. Whether she was eating. Whether she was still winning." His jaw tightened slightly. "I knew she was winning. I never doubted that. I just…"
He glanced toward the porthole, voice dropping.
"I wanted to see it myself."
Sunny, who had spent years making himself into something that didn't require outside things to function. He had missed her. He had missed her daily, with the specific persistence of someone who can't stop pressing a bruise.
She thought: so he did think about me.
She thought this and said nothing and looked at the porthole, again.
"Then she came back," he said. "And moved straight into my home. And let's just say my reaction wasn't exactly my finest moment."
He paused, looking vaguely embarrassed.
"I spent a stupid amount of time refusing to admit I was just… glad she was alive and actually here.
He continued, voice flatter:
"She took my clothes. Ate my food. And apparently burned my projector—"
He stopped abruptly.
"My projector." he repeated, with a completely different weight.
Nephis murmured, very quietly, "You're so childish… I already apologized."
Sunny looked at her for a second, then shook his head.
"That's not the point I was trying to make." He exhaled slowly. "The point is… she has this talent for making herself present. Not just physically there. She fills the space in a way that makes everything else feel… less real. Less solid. Like she has her own gravity and the whole room rearranges itself around her."
He gave a small, helpless shrug.
"Maybe it's just me who gets infected by it. I'm way too conscious of her, of everything about her. But I resented it. A lot. I was way too aware of her. All the time. So I thought about it for a while… and I came to certain conclusions."
I'm way too conscious of her. The words arrived and she let them arrive and did not flinch and did not show the internal shape of what they did. She was conscious of him too. She had spent years being more conscious of him than she had clean language for.
He was quiet.
"Then she made another decision," he said. The lightness was gone from his voice now.
Something quieter and more careful took its place. "One I didn't agree with. Again."
He paused, staring at the cup in his hands.
"She said something to me before that. I think it was supposed to be reassuring. That she had a plan. That she was in control. That I didn't need to worry."
His jaw tightened slightly.
"Then she told me that whatever I wanted, whatever I chose… it wouldn't matter. Because the decision was hers. Because she could just impose her will on the situation and there was nothing I could do about it."
He let out a slow breath.
"Or that I couldn't escape fate. Something like that. I hated it."
Nephis had gone very still.
She remembered the conversation. She remembered, with the precision of someone who did not misplace significant memories, exactly what she had said, and the intention behind it, and the gap between the two. She had heard them, now, through the distance of his voice recounting them, and understood with a clarity that arrived slowly and settled completely that she had failed to translate the intention into the words, she did realize it back then too, that her words had landed somewhere else entirely.
The feeling this produced was not guilt, exactly. It was something more specific, the particular discomfort of being the most careful type of wrong. The kind where your intentions were good and the damage happened anyway.
"I know," he said carefully. "She probably meant it differently. I'm fairly sure she was trying to reassure me or perhaps say something else I don't want to name for her. I understand that now."
He stopped for a second.
"But in the moment? The words were the words. And they landed like shit."
He let out a short breath.
"So I pulled away. Needed distance. You can't think straight when you're too close to something like that."
Silence.
She did not say I know. She did not say I'm sorry. She let the sentence exist in the room as what it was an honest accounting, a thing he had needed to say, a thing she needed to hear and she received it without deflection.
"After that I… took a vacation, I guess. Went somewhere cold. Not the best place, honestly. But apparently freezing your ass off is supposed to be good for clearing your head. Turns out it didn't help at all. I just ran into a whole new set of problems. Still… I don't regret it. I got a few good things out of it."
A small, dry smile tugged at his lips.
"And then there was another vacation but this time at a beach?"
The quality of the silence changed.
Something in her that had been held tightly released by a single degree. She recognized the shift in the return of his voice to something lighter, something that moved forward rather than back. She had been bracing, she realized. She had been sitting in the chair with her hands around her cup and her spine at attention and bracing for the next thing. The beach was not the next thing. The beach was the moment before the thing. She knew it, from the way he said it.
"Not exactly a beach vacation," he said dryly. "Wouldn't recommend it. Brutal humidity, constant murder attempts from the local wildlife, logistics were a disaster."
He paused, then muttered:
"Turns out I'm shit at choosing vacation spots."
She wondered, despite herself, what it would be like to go somewhere with Sunny, not on some monstrous turtle shell where everything wanted them dead. Not in freezing wastelands or nightmare-infested ruins. Somewhere safe. Somewhere that didn't try to kill them every five minutes. The image was so absurdly peaceful that it almost made her smile.
He paused, then admitted more quietly:
"But we were there for almost a month."
The words seemed to taste strange coming out of his mouth. He shifted slightly, uncomfortable.
"I didn't know what to do with that. With things being good just because we were stuck in the same place. I kept waiting for the twist. The big revelation. Some disaster that would prove I'd been right to stay suspicious."
He stared at the ceiling for a moment.
"It never happened. We ate terrible food, trained until we were both too exhausted to be difficult with each other, talked about everything and nothing, watched the water… and it was just…"
He stopped.
The sentence ended without finding its word.
And then Nephis turned to look at him.
He was looking at her.
Not sideways. Not with the easy deflection of a man who has decided to make a point at a safe angle. Directly, with the careful, exhausted openness of someone who has used up all of their available distance and found, at the bottom of it, simply the truth.
Her breath did something she would not name.
"After everything," he said quietly, "in one of the loops… I finally stopped lying to myself."
He met her eyes.
"I love you."
A beat.
"That incomprehensible, over-the-top girl who taught me her family sword art when I was a nobody, vanished for two years, and then came back to burn my projector, and took over my entire life… that's you."
He gave a small, crooked smile.
"I think you knew. But I wanted to say it out loud anyway."
The cabin was very quiet.
She had not moved. She couldn't, quite. Her expression had traveled through several things in the last few minutes, annoyance arriving first, surprise, then recognition, then something deeper and more private underneath that trembled at the surface without quite breaking through and had emerged into something that was not composure but was trying to look like it. Pieces, reassembling.
And beneath that, something far more dangerous: a slow, trembling warmth that threatened to crack the careful mask she had worn for years.
She felt her heartbeat loud in her ears.
She had heard him describe her for the last several minutes the good things and the maddening things with equal specificity, the way she talked and the way she fought and the way she decided things and the particular quality of her presence that he had spent years resenting and apparently could not stop noticing.
And still… he loved her.
The realization was almost too much. She tried to open her mouth, desperate to say something, anything, before the moment slipped away.
But Sunny looked away from her.
Not dismissively. Gently, almost. Because his gaze moved to a point in the air a few degrees to the right of her shoulder, and his expression changed, sharpened and settled simultaneously and she recognized it, with a lurch in her chest that was not quite fear and not quite understanding but lived between the two.
"See? I told you, you bastard." he said.
To nothing.
To no one she could see.