>>5239426[To have a home again…with you]
Ozmas’ eyes soften, at your words. Her hand finds yours, and when your fingers entwine you sense there’s something healed, between you both. You move to leave, but Ozmas remains in place, struggling with words she can barely start to form.
[It’s okay…whatever you need to say, I want to hear it] You assure her, and that’s all you need to say for the dam to break.
You finally talk.
About Almath. About the future. About everything that had been building since the Crucible came, and even before.
Her anxieties, and your fears.
Her hopes, and your dreams.
…Dreams.
It’s a wonderful dream…one you’ve had every second of every minute of every hour that you’ve spent trapped in this charred prison of a body. The world around you violently shifts, and Ozmas is still looking at you, waiting on an answer that you’ve haven’t voiced yet. You feel the fear, the distrust roiling in your chest—Charon’s chest—that fuels the words they uttered so very long ago.
Words that inform your present, still.
You feel yourself say, regretting every syllable, helpless to change the past.
You see something inside Ozmas break, like a dam failing to contain a flood.
{We should keep moving} She says, numbly, your hand and hers falling to your sides. You move to the rift, and the arm’s reach between you may as well be the distance between the stars. Six words that doomed your species and yourself to oblivion. Six words that continued the cycle, that brought carnage and sorrow to another planet.
To good people.
This…
…this is all your-
“Peace.” You say. Not as Reyva or Charon, but as you. As yourself, sitting next to the somber Hexane in the waking world, hand in hand. Charon’s leaning over with their other hand on their face, hiding their eyes as they speak aloud.
“I wish I was as strong as you are, my friend…” The Hexane intones. “…but I’m not. Not then, and not now.”
“Charon…”
“I wish I’d had the strength to say what you would have said. To do as you would have done.” Charon says, finally looking to you with their eye-lights waning, almost sputtering out completely as they continue. “I am sorry, Shu. I…”
Charon sits upright, squaring the shoulders of their blackened, skeletal form. “I must continue. There’s still more I can show you about the Cord. When you are ready to go back in, we-“
Charon falters, and you wonder just how long your friend has had this yoke bearing down in them. The visions you’ve seen of the Cord, they’re information and explanation, both.
A plea for forgiveness.
>>”…You did your best, Charon. You have nothing to apologize for.”
>>”You’re forgiven, Charon. For whatever you think you’ve done? You’re forgiven.”
>>Write-in
AND
>>Go back in to Charon’s memories.
>>You’ve seen enough, for now.
>>Write-In
YOU ARE IN CONTROL 