Archive of Our Own

After everything, Rin had the foolish hope that perhaps death would be kinder to her.

But when had things ever been truly in her favor? From her life in Tikany, to her grueling education in Sinegard, to being thrust into three wars and winning each one by the skin of her teeth, Rin knew she’d been fated to fight tooth and nail for every good thing in her life.

That didn’t make things any easier.

She awakes on the shores of Speer, to the sound of crashing waves, Kitay stirring beside her. Her hand creeps to her chest, pressing her palm flat against where her heart is supposed to be beating. It comes away silent. Then she feels warm fingers curling around the hand she’d lost a year ago, and is hit with the realization that Nezha had succeeded. Fang Runin and Chen Kitay are dead; that could be the only explanation for the lack of Hesperian soldiers descending upon her to pry open her body for her secrets, the sudden appearance of her right hand, and the silence of the Phoenix in her head.

She’s— they’re— free.

A surge of relief tinged with melancholy floods Rin. She’d never wanted to die, and yet death seems like the only way to attain peace; both for herself and Kitay, and for Nikan.

Her eyes fly open to find a fiery orange sky above her, and Kitay sitting up, grains of sand stuck to his clothes and hair, but his gaze is trained on something else. His hand squeezes hers, hard, and Rin stiffens when Kitay moves slowly in front of her, as if to shield her. The look on his face is unreadable, but his eyes are sharp, his jaw working stiffly. Rin strains her ears, hearing faint footsteps padding across the beach, growing louder and louder with every step.

Rin bolts up, and something in her stomach plummets when she sees exactly who is walking toward them. Blood roars in her ears, and every instinct in her body is screaming at her to run, but all Rin can do is have her wide eyes trail his movement, that confident, purposeful gait heading straight for her.

Kitay moves in front of her, arms spread wide, and Rin feels a distant flood of affection for him trying to protect her after everything, but it’s overshadowed by the long-forgotten war of fear and awe she’d thought she’d buried when she destroyed his weapon and molded her own.

Altan Trengsin stops right in front of them. He regards them with an expressionless face and a stiff nod, but his eyes—a deep, earthy brown, not blazing scarlet—betray a myriad of emotions that Rin could not hope to make out.

He stares past Kitay, meeting her look with a steady gaze of his own, and holds out a hand to help them up.

“It’s been a while, Rin.”

~*~

She runs. 

Rin calls herself every berating name in the book in her head: coward, weak, stupid , but she bats his proffered hand away, grabs Kitay by the wrist, and sprints as far away from Altan as their feet can carry.

“Rin?” Kitay asks, keeping up with her with surprising ease, and she feels his concerned stare prickling at the back of her head, but she can’t bring herself to look at him. The tears she’d forced herself to swallow when she was alive are now threatening to pour out, the heaviness of shame, guilt, resentment and oh, treacherous affection in her chest suffocating her.

Her legs sprint faster, her ears trying to detect any sign of Altan pursuing them.

“Rin, he’s not following us. You can stop now.” Kitay says breathlessly, tugging at her hand gently. She shakes her head frantically, not wanting to slow down, the need to put distance between her and Altan so great, but Kitay holds her in place, forcing her to a stop. Rin’s knees give out, and she barely manages to catch herself with her hands as she tumbles onto the sand in an inelegant heap. Kitay kneels down next to her and pulls her into an embrace. She buries her head into his chest, fists clenching tightly against the fabric of his shirt. She feels her whole body break into tremors, but Kitay holds her steady.

“I won’t let him hurt you,” Kitay murmurs, planting a kiss on the top of her head. “Not anymore.”

She shakes her head, her tears wetting his clothes. 

Rin hadn’t expected to face Altan again. 

She had had her fair share of hauntings, but his ghost, his rage, the space he’d left behind to fill, was the worst of it all. They shared a particular, exquisite pain; the weight of the dying embers of an extinct nation, desperate for it not to burn out. Hunted down until the very end, leaving the burden of fixing their mess to somebody else. She could not blame Altan for the choices he made, not when she made the exact same ones further down the road, a familiar path forged by the cycles before them. 

But looking at him hurt. 

Without the Phoenix whispering its desires in her ear, Rin’s mind is an onslaught of her memories of Altan, a constant reminder of how many ways she’d failed the people she loved. Images of the Cike—Ramsa, Baji, Suni—who died before their time for her, because of her; Jiang, who had tried so hard to protect her if only she hadn’t been so fucking stubborn; Kesegi, who she abandoned for dead in the hands of the Republic, a sacrifice she thought was worth making because she’d been blinded by her thirst for revenge; Venka, one of her most trusted allies, her friend, gone in the blink of an eye, the last words she’d heard an accusation of treason.

Kitay, whom she loved the most, whom she promised to protect against every force that could hurt or corrupt him—she almost broke him on this very same beach.

And all she could remember was hearing the Phoenix… and Altan’s voice, goading her to finish the job. To keep pushing. To raze the whole world to the ground for wronging them.

Altan had destroyed everything he held dear through his carefully-honed fury. Rin would know—she had been on the receiving end of it many times.

She had learned to wield it like a weapon just like he did, too.

Rin wanted to be like him, once.

She supposes she got her wish, in the end.

~*~

They discover they can go anywhere, understand any language, see anyone, in this plane of existence. 

It distracts Rin, for the time being. 

She’d never travelled outside of Tikany during peace times, kept on a tight leash by Auntie Fang and saddled with the task of raising Kesegi, and when war came, the only thing running through her head while traversing through the different provinces was how to bend them to her whims.

Now, the world seems so vast. Filled with different cultures, languages, stories and knowledge they never would have learned otherwise—things that would have been so helpful in rebuilding Nikan, but that seems to be the tragedy of death: regret in what could never be, what you can’t change.

Kitay absorbs it all like a sponge—he’d always wanted to be a scholar, and now he has an eternity ahead of him to fulfill that dream. Rin listens to him attentively as he gushes about the most mundane discoveries like gas-powered vehicles and civilizations of past and present, tucked in a small corner of a library in a foreign country, invisible to everyone but her. His eyes glisten with the enthusiasm of a child gifted a brand-new toy, and bittersweet affection curls in Rin’s chest at the sight. 

What would he have become without the war? Would he have been left untainted, cultivating his ingenious mind to create, cure and innovate instead of maneuvering the best ways to slaughter any of those who questioned her? Would he have changed the world with his ideas, his unquenchable thirst for answers?

Who would she have been?

Rin shuts down that train of thought before it wades into dangerous territory. 

Eventually, however, they always find their way home to Nikan. Kitay thinks their spirits must be drawn to it; they had, after all, been raised and died for the very same place, their homeland weaved into the very fabric of who they are.

Rin, ever the cynic, has the notion that it's simply because their consciences would never free them of their crimes against Nikan.

Still, she finds herself standing in the ruins of the places she’d once loathed and cherished in equal amounts.

Sinegard dredges up memories of blood-red poppy flowers in a thriving garden, of a man with stark white hair and a vacant look in his eyes, a sharp mind hidden just beneath the surface. Golyn Niis haunts her with the ghost of a porcelain skinned princess with a vulgar tongue and a deadly aim. Tikany reminds her of a too-skinny boy clinging to her legs, begging her not to leave him with his cruel mother.

Arlong… she tries to stay away, but she couldn’t. Arlong greets her with bright blue eyes that were once a lovely shade of almond, broken, as the boy who owns them is strapped to a table and injected with concoction after concoction. Rin never stays for too long, unable to stomach it. It was easier to ignore the guilt when she didn’t see him, burying it with layers of righteous hatred that he got what he deserved.

They all did, didn’t they?

She isn’t naïve enough to believe that there is anyone left who mourns her. If the Hesperians had their way, she would be completely eradicated from Nikan’s history, but even if she weren’t, she would simply be another character of a folktale, an enigma to those who hear her story. A goddess, a monster, a legend whispered among parents to scare their children from playing outside by nightfall. What would be her moniker?

Instead, Rin mourns the living.

She mourns Nikan’s slowly eroding culture when she sees temples demolished and churches erected in their place, she mourns the Nikara who will never live to see true divinity and unknowingly put their faith in the false Maker, she mourns every shred of dignity that Nikan had being squashed from bowing to Hesperia time and again.

She mourns the world moving forward while she can only watch as everything she tried to build falls apart.

Despite that, Rin makes her way through Nikan routinely—her own personal, private penance.

The only place she refuses to go back to is Speer. The island is still desolate, void of any lingering presence, its beaches littered with her people’s skeletons, but bereft of their spirits. She doesn’t know where they went, and she doesn’t try to think about it too long. How bleak it must be for her and Altan to be the last remnants of the Speerlies, even in death.

Kitay only brings it up once, three months after.

“He seemed like he was waiting for you,” he says.

“I thought you were keen on protecting me from him.”

“That was because I didn’t know what he was capable of, then,” Kitay sighs, thumbing through the pages of an engineering textbook in an old Nikara library. “I know what our limits are now.”

“I don’t want to see him. I have nothing to say to him.”

Kitay gives her a sad look, shutting the book.

“You can’t run away from this for eternity, Rin, and you know it.”

“I can try,” she says, for the sake of being stubborn, but Rin knows he’s right; he always is, and if she’d only listened to him then they would both still be alive. 

“ Rin. ”

“What could he possibly want from me?”

“You two were the last remaining Speerlies. He was your commander, your friend… your family. Is that not enough of a reason to want to see you?”

“I don’t want to do that. If he’s looking for absolution, he’s not getting it. I will not be the one to clear his conscience. Not after everything.” Rin grits out, temper starting to flare.

Kitay goes quiet.

“I never said anything about absolution.”

Rin doesn’t reply.

“You know what I think?” Kitay asks. “I think you aren’t scared of Altan because he hurt you. I think you’re scared because you finally understand him after you’ve feared and hated him for so long. And there’s a tiny part of you that blames him for the things that happened to you because he died.”

She has nothing to say to that. He watches her carefully, features softening as he takes in the conflict evident on her face.

“I’m not ready.” Rin’s voice comes out soft, barely above a whisper. “I don’t…”

“I know. But maybe Altan has the answers you’re looking for.”

Rin nods numbly.

“I’m not asking you to do it now. I’m just telling you to consider it.” Kitay pulls her into his arms. “Frankly, I wouldn’t even let you near him if I didn’t think this was your only option. But I don’t like seeing you in pain, Rin. I never have.”

He gives her one final squeeze before turning back to his book.

Kitay never mentions it again.

~*~

Rin stands on the shore of Speer exactly a year after she’d died.

Time had trudged on sluggishly.

Rin didn’t realize how far she’d fallen off the edge until the one who pushed her was gone. Her head had gone completely silent, the voice of the Phoenix becoming only a memory. Sanity, however, only left her reeling from everything with a clearer mind and a heavier heart.

In the past year, she and Kitay had explored almost every corner of the world, but most importantly, they found themselves reunited with people they thought they’d lost for good. They simply needed to know where to look.

Kitay had given his family a good, long hug. They gave Rin a wary side-eye, but she found herself on the receiving end of their gratitude for protecting him the way she did during their wars. Rin gives Kitay a look, and he replies with a subtle shake of the head.

So, they didn’t know everything. About the truth about shamans, about the soul bond, about how things ended on Speer. Perhaps they never bothered to find out.

It’s better that way. No one could ever truly understand the choices they both made if they hadn’t lived through it themselves, and she’d rather Kitay have a family that did not cast judgment on him.

They found Venka, too, sitting on the same roof they had drunk themselves silly before Nezha stabbed her in the back. After a well-deserved smack in the head for daring to accuse her of being a spy, Rin and Kitay were engulfed in the most aggressive hug, littered with a litany of curses Venka had picked up in her long, long free time.

They searched for traces of Jiang. She hadn’t expected to find him, but Rin had still broken down into tears in the middle of his wilted garden when they found it empty.

Kesegi was a lost cause. Neither Rin nor Kitay had found where he’d been held, or whether or not he’d been spared when the Republic realized he was a worthless bargaining chip.

Rin didn’t try to find the Cike. She hadn’t earned it, not until she talked to Altan. It only felt fitting that when they’re ready, their two former Commanders who had led them astray found them and offered their apologies together.

Which led her here, and now. 

Kitay and Venka had offered to come with her, but she knows she has to confront this the same way she and Altan had always done things. Alone, together, just the two of them.

Altan sits with his feet in the water, eyes closed. His fingers skim the edges of the waves, drawing patterns in the sand that get washed away the next second.

Rin takes slow, tentative steps, sand crunching softly under her feet. She stops a few paces away from him, unsure of what to do next.

Without opening his eyes, Altan greets her.

“It took you long enough, Rin.”

~*~

They sit there in silence for what seems like hours. It isn’t peaceful or content, like the kind of quiet she and Kitay would settle into when he’d find new books he’d want to study, but it isn’t tense or hostile. It just… simply is.

“Why haven’t you left?” Rin finally breaks. 

“There’s no other place for me to go.” 

“You—”

Altan shakes his head. 

“Whatever it is you’re going to say, you’re wrong. I don’t belong anywhere but here. You don’t remember anything about Speer, but I do. I remember what it was like—how beautiful everything was—before they ripped it away from me. From us.”

His tone is scathing, but it isn’t directed at her. Instead, Altan glares at the ocean, as if his hatred could travel over it and reach the farthest corner of Nikan. After all this time, his anger is still alive and burning, though now it’s softer around the edges, resigned. Without the Phoenix, it’s his only companion.

How lonely it must have been for him.

“How…” Altan asks unsurely, like he isn’t quite certain how to act like a friend rather than a superior. She supposes she can’t blame him. “How have you been?”

“Don’t strain yourself with the pleasantries, Altan. It doesn’t suit you.”

Altan grimaces.

“You’ve grown into quite the bitch.”

“I know. And you were a jackass, so I suppose we’re even.”

They’re dancing around what needs to be said, Rin knows. She thought she had erased the ability to fear, or at least locked it away in the deepest recesses of her mind to rot, but she had the inkling that once she crossed that bridge, there was no turning back. The door would be wide open, and she wouldn't know how to close it down again.

Or if she'd even want to.

Rin doesn’t know if she can handle that, right now. She’d spent so long listening to his voice in her head, admiring him, hating him, worshipping him. Trying to do right by him, thinking that that was what he’d want.

She sees so much of her in him. Both the hardened general, the human weapon, and the scared, lonely girl trying to carve a place out in the world so she’s not forgotten.

Maybe Altan has the answers you’re looking for.

“Go on. Ask it. I know you want to.”

She obliges.

“Was it you?” Rin asks, and her voice wavers. She can't feign strength, and she doesn't try to. None of that matters now, not when all she can see is a reflection of herself and her worst mistakes in him. She needed an answer.

She needed to know if he had a deliberate hand in her ruination, whether he dared to haunt her after what he’d done to her.

Altan finally turns, gives her a sad look, and shakes his head.

“No.”

A sob wrenches itself out of Rin's lips, her hands flying to the faded patch of Altan's handprint on her chest. It was gone, now, but she felt as if the burning had only gotten ten times stronger with the heat of the answer she’d gotten. Rin digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. She wouldn’t cry in front of him.

“Then all that time, your voice… what was that?”

“The Phoenix. It’s good at getting you to do what it wants you to. I thought we could control it, somehow. But the moment you let it in, it sees all of you. And it uses your worst fears against you. I think I lost sight of the fact that it was a god with no reservations once I had a taste of what it could give me.”

 In the dying light of the sunset, Altan’s face is cast in an orange glow, the gleam reflected on the ocean making specks of light dance on his face. He looks so young—forced to make decisions whose weight should never have been put on his shoulders. 

In another world, they would have grown up together. He would have been a brother, a guiding hand, a shoulder to lean on.

But now all Rin sees is a boy, just like the poor shopgirl that she was in Tikany, who lost his way as he desperately tried to escape the fate that was written for him.

“I’ve never left Speer except to see how you were faring.”

“What were you thinking when you saw me... make the choices I did?”

Altan smiles, rueful, a sad thing.

“I saw myself. And that was the worst part of it—knowing exactly how you felt, wanting to push you off that path and save you, and not being able to do anything about it.”

He takes an unsteady breath, as if steeling himself for his next words.

“There's nothing I wanted more than to see you succeed. I failed. I hoped that you wouldn't. But not at the price it cost you. You were my family, Rin. I loved you, too.” 

At those words, Rin breaks her own resolve and lets her tears fall.

All this time. All that anger, that resentment, that blind worship, it was all for nothing.

What does she do with the remnants of them now? 

“I was a monster, wasn’t I?”

“You were. But so was I. When the world treated us like monsters our whole lives, how could we have been anything but?”

“I did more horrible things than you ever could have done.”

“I would have done the same if I was given the chance.” Altan falters, then asks, “Do you regret it?”

Rin closes her eyes, heaving a heavy, shuddering breath, not because she isn’t sure, but because, after everything, she’s afraid of truly, truly confronting the answer. It was easy when she thought that she had no other options, when she thought that she did what she needed to do.

It was another thing entirely to admit that she wanted to, and that she’d do it a hundred times over.

“No.”

“Me neither.”

Rin cries. It feels like the entire time she’s been here, she hasn’t stopped. She’s pathetic, but what else is there to do? She couldn’t hurt anyone now, even if she wanted to, and she has an eternity of atonement to face, anyway.

Altan doesn’t try to comfort her. It would feel hollow if he tried. But there’s a new understanding that’s passed between them. 

“I heard Chaghan’s voice, a lot of the time,” he tells her quietly, an offer of vulnerability in exchange for hers. “That’s why when he left when we went to the Chuluu Korikh, it felt like the ultimate betrayal. I didn’t understand why he was trying to stop me when he’d been the one goading me this entire time.”

“I think you already know who I heard.” Rin says dully.

“I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”

“But you did, anyway.”

“It’s one of the very few things I’ve come to regret.”

Rin nods in acknowledgement. It isn’t forgiveness. He didn’t deserve it. If she were a better person, perhaps she would have been capable of it, but she isn’t. Not now, maybe not ever.

She knows Altan would understand; that he might be one of the only people who would.

Altan turns his eyes back to the ocean and watches the sun disappear beneath the horizon. Rin rises to her feet.

“Come back sometime,” he says, not looking at her, but she detects a hint of pleading in his voice. She knows loneliness intimately, and something in her chest clenches.

“I will. There’s still a lot I need to know from you.”

As she leaves, Rin thinks she hears the soft hiss of a relieved sigh from behind her.

~*~

Rin visits once every few months. 

In the months before her next visit, she finally manages to find the Cike. The Night Castle should have been obvious in hindsight, but Rin thinks she’d simply been too scared to confront them had she been correct.

She’d found them dealing out a deck of cards on a rickety wooden table, Baji threatening to disembowel Ramsa if he tries to cheat again.

They’d all paused when she walked in, taking her countenance in with wide eyes and slack jaws. In that heartbeat, Rin wonders whether they would reject her completely, hurl insults, and blame her for their early demise.

She wonders whether she would be able to handle that, regardless of the fact that she deserves it.

Then Ramsa jumps her, sending her toppling over to the ground.

“ Fucking finally! Do you know how long we waited for you to find us?” Ramsa demands, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her. “It’s been a year since you’ve kicked the bucket, Rin!”

“I’m—” Rin tries to reply, her throat closing up. “I don’t—”

“It’s okay,” Suni interjects gently. “We understand.”

“But it’s my fau—”

“ No. Enough of this sappy shit. Don’t worry about it.” Baji waves off, getting up and prying Ramsa off of Rin. “We get it. We had to die sometime, though I suppose I wish I could have had a more dignified death. Something like getting laid down on a bed of roses and being sent off into the sea surrounded by gold treasures like one of those Western kings. Those fuckers are the worst, but they knew how to die in style. That would have been nice.”

“I don’t think they actually did that in the West.”

“Semantics.”

Baji offers a hand to help her up. It’s warm in hers.

“It’s good to see you again, Commander,” he grins, holding up the deck of cards. “Do you know how to shuffle? That little shithead has been skimming off the top and I want to play fair for once.”

And suddenly, Rin felt the guilt weighing on her shoulders for their deaths dissolve little by little.

She makes sure to come by often. Ramsa wouldn’t have anything less.

Before Rin knows it, she finds herself trudging through the familiar path on the beach of her homeland.

She never takes anyone else with her—there’s a fragile intimacy she’d formed with Altan, a tentative bond that was as unique and unexplainable as her bond with Kitay’s. They were one and the same in the things that mattered, and Rin would think herself selfish, but she’s found a certain solace in knowing she isn’t alone in her monstrosity.

She sits beside Altan, who seemed to be waiting for her.

“Don’t you want to see them? The Cike?” she turns to him after a while. “They were asking about you. Ramsa, especially. You were like a big brother to him.”

“I don’t have the right. I abandoned them.”

“They don’t hate you, you know.”

“That doesn’t matter. Your foster brother probably doesn’t hate you, but I know you feel like you don’t deserve to see him, either.”

Rin gapes at him indignantly. Altan shrugs.

“Fuck you.”

“Low blow?” He raises a nonchalant, questioning brow, but Rin isn’t having it.

“Don’t fucking turn this around on me. We’re talking about you. The Cike—”

“Drop this, Rin.”

“—just wants to talk, if you would just stop being—”

“I said, enough.”

“—such a fucking coward—”

“ Be fucking quiet!”

Altan’s eyes flicker with barely suppressed rage, but Rin stands her ground, though a tiny part of her wants to run away and shield herself from an incoming blow. She isn’t sure he’d do it, but she braces herself anyway.

Instead, he snarls at her.

“Leave. And don’t fucking come back.”

~*~

She comes back. 

Rin offers no apology, and she refuses to run away from him. They’re on equal footing now, and despite everything, Speer was home to her in a way Nikan never was, though she’d never seen it in its full glory. She had just as much of a right to it as he does, memories or not.

Altan doesn’t drive her away. Rin knows not to ask why. Altan had his reasons, just as she has hers. 

Rin keeps coming back. In fact, she comes back more frequently than she did before.

Sometimes, they sit in complete, companionable silence, neither of them feeling the need to break the delicate tranquility.

Other times, they talk. 

About mundane things. Altan asks about how things have changed in the world, in Nikan. Rin tries her best to explain things to him, but there’s a certain heaviness laced in her words when she describes how Hesperia is so close to occupying Nikan. Altan thinks that watching the world transform without them is the punishment for their crimes. 

About intimate things. How Speer had thrived before the Mugenese slaughter. How Altan had gotten recruited into the Cike. How Rin had lost her hand. What Sister Petra had done to her. What Dr. Shiro had done to him. They took turns exposing their old wounds, dug their nails in them, and watched them bleed.

They don’t mince words, nor offer false comfort. It would seem insulting, more than anything.

Then, few and far-in-between are their fights. One of them would broach a topic that the other refuses to talk about. That’s when Rin learned just how explosive and cutting and scorching their words could be. Altan spits out accusations that his sacrifice for Rin is worthless. Rin lashes back, calling Altan a dog that knows nothing except how to follow orders. They always end the same way—with one of them screaming at the other that they never want to see their face again, and storming off.

But Rin always comes back, and Altan always welcomes her the only way he knows how; in complete silence. But he never sends her away.

They both suppose that’s enough.

~*~

They lay side-by-side on the sand, under the stars, a year and three quarters after she’d first woken up dead on Speer. 

Rin, Kitay, and Venka had gone back to Arlong that day. 

Rin hadn’t wanted to see Nezha. She did, anyway.

He still looked as beautiful as ever, even from afar. But there’s no mistaking how Hesperia had taken that enchanting boy from Sinegard and drained the life out of him little by little. There he lay, still as a corpse, his eyes trailing the container of the syringe held by his tormentor—this time, filled to the brim with something that could only be described as liquid fire in a glass. 

He barely flinched when the needle pierces his skin. She doubts he even registers it nowadays.

Rin bit her lip so hard it would have bled if she were alive.

Fight back, you piece of shit. Don’t just lay there and take this shit. Take that scalpel and jab it into her neck, you stupid, cowardly fucker— 

“This is inhumane,” Kitay murmured, disgusted, turning away.

It was almost too much for Rin to bear.

Rin showed up that same day, long after the sun had set, with two full bottles of sorghum wine for them to drink. Altan doesn’t question it, only pops one open with a practiced ease.

“Have you seen Chaghan?” she asks, sitting up, though she suspects she already knows the answer. She was breaching new territory with this. In all of their talks, they had always skirted around Chaghan and Nezha. But today, she’s reckless. Today, she wants to hear what Altan had to say. Wants to know he feels the exact same way she does.

Altan stills, giving her an expressionless look. 

“What made you ask?”

“Just curious. He was looking for you, you know. He even tried to use me for it, once,” she spits, a little bitterly.

His eyes darken for a split second, pushing himself up, and Rin fights the instinct to flinch. He wouldn't hurt her now, she knows—he'd said so himself, he would have done so before—but her fear, just like her rage, is not so easily forgotten now that she remembers what it felt like.

“I haven't.”

“Why not?” she dares to ask.

Altan gives her a long look.

“The same reason you can’t seem to look at Nezha.”

This time, Rin does flinch.

“That's different.”

“Is it? We both forced their hands with a burden they could never carry. We destroyed them. The dam. The Hesperians.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Chaghan was tasked to kill me in my sleep if I became volatile. Nezha was the same, only he managed to finish the job.”

“You loved Chaghan. You would have never killed him.”

“Don't pretend that you were capable of killing Nezha, Rin. The only one you're lying to is yourself.”

Rin bristles at that. “You don’t fucking know anything about me.”

“I know that you took the easy way out. Just like I did. Broke what I needed to and let somebody else clean up the mess for me.” Altan takes another sloppy swig of wine, the liquid spilling out of his mouth onto his clothes.

“Don’t waste good alcohol, you asshole, give me that—” she steals the bottle from him and downs three big gulps, searing her throat. “What does it matter? He got what he wanted.”

“Don’t play the fucking saint here, Rin. Yin Nezha got everything that was coming to him, but you know that what you left him was not what he wanted. You did this for yourself.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“You could have stayed alive.”

“And get cut open on an operating table by the Gray Company while they fuck over Nikan regardless?”

“I didn’t say it was a good choice.”

“You’re absolutely fucking useless, you know that?”

Altan snorts, the barest trace of a suppressed laugh. That’s how Rin knows he’s drunk out of his mind—in all of her visits, he’d never once laughed before. “I made a pretty good human bonfire when I was alive.”

“So did I.”

“Cheers to that. Our ancestors are rolling in their graves.”

They clink the bottles together.

“I hate that he loved me. Why was he so fucking stupid to love me? He should’ve just killed me when he had the chance.”

And that was the truth. Nezha had touted around his love for her like it was cause for forgiveness of everything he’d ever done to her. But it wasn’t, it never had been. Rin had learned that the people who loved you often inflicted the worst kind of violence on you, then had the audacity to claim they did it for your sake, and lord it over your heads after the fact. She loathes Nezha for pretending to have her interests at heart; that was a bigger betrayal than stabbing her in the back that night on the sampan.

“Fuck if I know. Why did we do anything that we did when we were alive? None of it made any logical sense. Emotions are a curse, and the god we called on had a fuck ton of experience exploiting them.”

“He wouldn’t have gotten hurt if he hadn’t dragged me into his father’s war in the first place. If he hadn’t gotten attached, maybe it would have been easier to get rid of me. What a fucking moron.”

“The price of loving fire is the risk of getting burned,” Altan replies. “The people who loved you knew that, yet they loved you still.”

Rin stares at the waves crashing against the sand. 

“How do you deal with the guilt?”

Altan shakes his head, his gaze far away.

“You don’t.”

~*~

Three years have passed since her and Kitay’s death.

In that timespan, she’d managed to coax Altan into facing the Cike, though he still remained adamant in not leaving Speer. Rin ignores the burning in her eyes when Ramsa had greeted Altan the same way he did her—a tight embrace that Altan clearly didn’t expect, sending both of them tumbling onto the sand. She would deny that the way Altan’s eyes had softened when he regained his bearings and hugged Ramsa back made her throat close up.

Fuck, she’s going soft, isn’t she? Kitay would never let her live this down.    

Baji had simply remarked that he’s glad to have another player to help him trounce Ramsa, because Rin had an atrocious poker face. Suni smiled at him, silently thanking him for his kindness toward him when he was alive.

With their combined efforts, they managed to get Altan to step off Speer, even temporarily, to see the world. Somehow, they find Qara near the Ketreyid mountains—waiting for her brother—along the way. It takes a while for Altan to even look her in the eye, but he manages eventually.

For a while, all was well.

Then it happens.

Chaghan meets them first.

Rin knows Altan felt it the moment he'd passed, too, wandered too far from the plane of the living, searching for answers for questions Altan had never known he had.

Rin sees the square set of Altan's shoulders, the alertness that had been drilled into him in Sinegard seeping through the cracks. In his eyes, so out-of-place, is fear, enticement, and exhilaration. 

He looks like the fighter he'd always been destined to be.

He looks like a soldier preparing to draw the first blood.

Though, Rin supposes, meeting the love of your life after you'd left them without even a goodbye is its own kind of warfare.

Conversely, however, Rin finds that he also looks like a teenage boy, anxiously anticipating the arrival of his crush on his first day of class. 

“I thought it would have gotten easier,” Altan mutters, watching a figure walking from a distance. “It didn't.”

“You can’t turn back now.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“Don’t be a fucking coward, Altan.”

“Like you wouldn’t be exactly like this when your little Prince croaks.”

“Can you stop bringing him up every single—”

“Are you going to bicker like children the entire time?” Qara sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I know we all died young, but some of us have some sense to not act like toddlers.”

“He started it—”

“I did no such fucking thing—”

Altan’s voice peters off when a familiar scrawny boy with hair and eyes as pale as snow stops a few feet in front of them.

Altan’s eyes twinkle in a way that Rin had never seen before as he drinks Chaghan in.

“Chaghan,” he manages to say, voice hushed.

“Altan.”

Chaghan nods at Rin in acknowledgement, but keeps his gaze trained on Altan.

“I think we should speak,” Chaghan finally continues, a silent dismissal. Rin takes Altan’s hand and it gives it one final reassuring squeeze before she and Qara take their leave.

From the corner of her eye, she sees Altan and Chaghan settle on the sand next to each other. She might be imagining it, but she thinks she sees the smallest hint of a nervous smile on Altan’s lips.

Rin has never been hopeful when she was alive, but in this moment, she has an inkling that things will turn out all right.

~*~

She deeply regrets encouraging any of this.

“You’re disgusting, do you know that? The two of you.” Rin says, eyeing Altan and Chaghan’s proximity disdainfully. Qara hums in agreement, but her gaze is full of amusement. Rin supposes she’s never seen her brother and Altan act so revoltingly sweet before—frankly, Rin doesn’t know how she stomachs either of them.

If she ever acted like that, she’d ask Kitay to euthanize her, the fact that she’s dead notwithstanding.

“We’re just sitting next to each other. Besides, I’m not the one who ogled the Royal Prick of Arlong after he offered me a few sickly-sweet words, Rin.”

“You deserved to die,” Rin shoots back, though her words held no bite, not like it used to.

“That I did. But so did you.”

Rin rolls her eyes before standing up.

“I’m leaving. Qara, are you sure you want to watch this?”

“Envy has never been a good look on you, Rin.”

“I’ve never pegged you as a child, Chaghan.”

He shrugs. “Traversing through the spiritual realm adds decades to your age. I was only twenty-six.”

“It’s a miracle you survived that long without anyone murdering you, honestly. You’re insufferable.”

“She’s just jealous because the person she fell in love with stuck a knife through her chest.” Altan drones, making Rin raise a rude gesture at his face.

“Assholes, the both of you. You deserve each other.”

Rin stalks off, but the contentment that makes a home in her chest doesn’t disappear, even after she leaves the island to find Kitay and Venka.

~*~

When Nezha dies, Altan gives Rin's shoulder a tight squeeze.

It had been a long time coming. His body, once beautiful and invincible to the point of divinity, had been bruised, beaten and broken by the Hesperians. After an experiment gone too far, The Young Marshal, the Dragon Prince of Arlong had succumbed to his fragile condition and passed.

Rin knew she would never be ready to face Nezha.

She regretted nothing she had ever done, would do it all over again if she had to—he'd been one of the hands that had honed her into a weapon, shaped her into a monster, and she would never forgive him for that. And like him, she’d laid waste on everything he’d ever cared for, murdered his remaining family in cold blood, and subjected him to one of the worst fates imaginable when she’d thrust his blade into her heart.

She despised him. He should have despised her.

And yet, she loved him just as much as she hated him. She hated him because he’d made her love him. At the end of the day, they were both fucking idiots that became each other’s devastation.

And that's what she simply cannot—refuses to—confront. And she knows when she sees his face again, that stupid, beautiful face, she would break.

“He’ll probably look for you.” Altan says matter-of-factly.

“I hope he doesn’t.”

“Coward.”

She’s terrified. Nezha is the only thing left she had to face: her greatest mistake, her enemy, her love. The last shred of her horrific, twisted, legendary past that she has to confront.

But Altan, like he'd once did, forged the path. All Rin has to do now is follow. The proof is in the way he smiles, unburdened, his hand laced between the fingers of the person he would have fallen in love with in life if he had simply learned how to.

Altan Trengsin has never looked more at peace.

With that knowledge, Rin finds a morsel of courage.

Rin rises to her feet, and Altan gives her an encouraging nod, just as Chaghan lies his head on his shoulder. The Cike make faces at her teasingly, Venka mimes throwing up, and Kitay smiles.

Rin had never known what having a real family felt like when she was alive.

She wonders if it came anything close to what this feels like right now.

“Knock him dead before I do it for you,” Altan calls out.

“He’s already dead, jackass.”

“The point still stands.”

Rin lets out a laugh.

Finally, she turns to the slowly approaching figure, with a face she'd been watching from afar for years, and takes a deep breath just as he stops in front of her, disbelief, reverence, and sheer awe painting his visage.

Rin raises an eyebrow at him, the side of her lip lifting into a smirk.

“It took you long enough, Nezha.”