He says, deadpan, with no provocation. He’s simply staring up at the ceiling of the dark, dark room through overgrown bangs, train of thought clipping through the tracks and swerving down detours until it finally arrives at that conclusion.

Latula turns over, groggy. “Wh-?? Babe, no,” she coos, still a little tipsy from earlier on in the night. She spites herself for it under her breath. His moments of clarity are so rare, and here your drunk ass is going to waste it. Wasssste it. Haha. What a funny noise, ssss….

“Are you sad still?”

“‘bout what, babezz? Nothin’ to, to be saaaadabout!”

He closes his eyes. So she is, then. In these rare moments,  he sees through the thin veneer he’d painted of her before the game had even started; she has always been oh-so clever, and wise and thereby simply must know more than he, and she is too good and pure to ever lie to him. To ever lie, he trusts her more than he trusts himself, incarnation of justice, the anchor that keeps the world going 'round.

He can’t remember those nights, anymore. Only that the principle he’d chosen to live by (she is everything you can never be and more) didn’t start after the incident. Only that she is important.

Only that she is more important than him. Isn’t that how they got here?

“’s that why you drink so much?”

The words aren’t quite as clean and clear as he’d intended, but then again,  they never are, anymore. This is a good night. He does not feel so indeterminately, inexpressibly angry, nor so numbed to emotion he can hardly sense the passage of time at all. He is confused,  but he can always cling to his anchor.

An anchor that hasn’t been taking care of herself, that hasn’t been letting herself leave his side long enough to socialize, that’s come to regard him with venom on her tongue where she does not think he can hear.

He does not blame her. He’s sick of him, too.

He does not need a caretaker. He should not need someone to take care of him, of course not, he is Mituna fucking Captor, eternally nine-sweeps like the rest of them, most powerful psion in the Beforan Empire by the age of six sweeps and her insistence on making this work between them is breaking her. She’s falling apart, and he’s so certain it’s because he cannot pull himself together, and in this coveted moment of self-awareness where it doesn’t take dizzying twists and turns to come to the conclusion, where he doesn’t feel like he’s drowning under the pressure of the atmosphere so that he can still say that he knows what he should do. What he should have done millennia ago.

Type her, messy as it may be, with poor hand-eye coordination, a note.

[I think I love you. If you don’t love me anymore,  that’s okay.  We can stop. I don’t blame you. Please don’t lie to both of us anymore.]

He tucks her in as best he can with shaking hands, and walks away.

He doesn’t know where,  or how long for,  or what he’s hoping to see or accomplish, but he walks down the stairs and out of their collective hive in his pajamas, letting the artificial sun sting the surface of his skin. It hurts. It hurts, and he wants to scream.

Good, says the part of his mind that simply knew this was the only way. They’ll all be better off without him. She will be better off without him.

It doesn’t matter what happens now.  His lover, his best friend, is freed of her eternal burden. She never even has to see his face again. It’ll be wonderful, for her, finding friends and never dealing with an outburst, or a breakdown, or a seizure, or some other kind of interference to a casual afterlife. She won’t have to be overwhelmed every step of the way.  She won’t see him as a chore instead of her matesprit, giving and taking in equal measure. All he’s done is take, take, take from her, since he’s been back.  Now he’ll try to take some of the misery.

It shouldn’t be hard.  He’s already gotten lost, finding a nice spot in the damp grass and undergrowth to lay down and stay still for as long as he can stand.

It’s better this way.

It’s because you love her.

If you really didn’t care, you would stay and watch her drown in herself.

You need to simplify. You know this wont make sense later, when you wake up, or when the dull ache in your head arbitrarily decides to sharpen to a point. You won’t understand like you do now. You will be scared, and lost, and alone, and you will not be able to piece back together all of the reasons why.

Because you love her.

Love Latula.

Love.

Everything you’ve ever done has been for love, so you’ve been told. You worked to make your powers as strong as they could be for love. You worked them so hard they burned out of your body, for love. You clung to your last breath and refused to let go until you saw your love. Love-love-love-love, with you, so she has told you. It seemed so possible, before, your heart full of emotions that go wide and deep and frightening when you turn to get a good look at them.  Your joy mutates into ugly cackling, your disappointment to a flood of tears that physically refuses to stop for half an hour after you’d decided to move on. Your frustration, with your emotions, your teammates, yourself, is like a reset button. You get so worked up, a powder keg, pressure boiling to the top of your throat and boring upwards through your skull and then. 

Then you don’t know.  You never remember exactly what you say or do, at that point. It scares you most of all.

Well, it scares you second-most, next to the knowledge that this, no, this isn’t for love. This is because you hate yourself. You are doing this because you hate being so invisible when you have something to say and such a sideshow when you’re struggling, be it to articulate or to emote appropriately or, hell, just to be. You hate the way they look at you. You hate that you can’t do anything about it.

You hate the sad look in her eye when she looks at you. You hate the pity. You hate the despair. You hate that she tells you and herself that it’s okay, and she’ll love you anyway. Always love you anyway.

Is it selfish, that you can’t take it anymore?

You can’t stop being as you are. You have tried, and it’s beyond you. You are no longer in control of yourself, not even enough to pretend you don’t need help nobody that’s left can possibly proficiently give you, and it only starts to frustrate you again.

You also know that,  being everyone is dead already,  you can’t exactly take yourself put of the picture any better than by running haphazardly into the woods in someone else’s dream. 

Love. You are full of so much love, that’s why you stay put.

You’re listening for instructions.

Someone better than you, smarter than you, someone with a brain that makes all the right neural connections.

Nevermind that they’ll never come.

Now all you have to do is wait for time to end.