"You know smoking's bad for you, right?"

Romeo licks his lips absentmindedly, looking down at the cigarette in his hand. A thin, curling trail of translucent white smoke wends its way a few inches up before dissipating in the wind. "Tastes disgusting, too."

Jesse lets out a huff of laughter, plopping down next to him and almost bouncing. "Maybe you shouldn't smoke, then."

The former Admin shrugs, touching the thin stick to his lips and inhaling deeply, before tugging it away and releasing the smoke in a cloud that emits from his mouth all at once, dissolving quickly in the wind. "Probably."

They roll their eyes at him, fingers twitching as if they're thinking about shooting their hand out and snatching it out of his grip, but they just keep their arms around their knees in a hug. "So, stop smoking."

"Nah."

Romeo likes the way Jesse's mouth curves up at the ends as they chuckle, turning their head away and staring out over Beacontown. "So. How's being human suiting you?"

"It's… different than what I've become used to," he says, honestly. "Sometimes I forget to breathe or eat or even drink water."

Because he does forget to do that; he doesn't inhale until his lungs start screaming at him, berating him, beating him around the head with a newspaper until he inhales and starts air circulating through his system until he forgets to inhale again, he'll go for several days without eating, or at least he did before Stella whacked him on the shoulder, shoved some burnt food in his face, and started supervising his food intake like a hawk, and he'd once gone for three days without drinking water before Radar had taken him aside and started coaching him on how to drink water periodically so that he didn't die of dehydration.

Jesse gives a sheepish laugh and rubs their head, regarding him almost sympathetically. "Wow, uh, hope that you fix that soon. You'll get used to it quick."

"Sure hope so," the former Admin mutters, making Jesse chuckle again. Their laugh is light and lilting, like the thin trail of smoke emitting from the almost stick-like thing in his fingers.

When they finally stop laughing, they glance at him, green eyes reflecting in the moonlight. "How's Xara?"

He pauses, eyes gravitating to the cigarette in his fingers, ash dripping off of the end as it slowly burns down.

"She wants to kill me."

"Doesn't everyone?" Jesse replies, drily, and Romeo can't help but snort at that statement, because damn it's true. He's gotten nervous about walking around without people in dark areas because he's afraid he's going to get jumped. Heck, he tailed Radar for two months before Radar started getting a little jumpy and asking him to not do that.

At least Petra doesn't seem to hate him as much anymore. And Lukas seems… at least normal around him.

But Xara, well, he can understand her hating him.

He did kill her best friend (and his, too, because Fred was just as much his best friend as he was hers), lock her in a prison underground (to rot, to waste away, to go insane with insomnia), he bedrocked over the world that they'd created (their world, THEIR creation, something that they had all made together, and he just built over it all, built a whole new world over the ruins of the old one as if it hadn't mattered, as if he hadn't cared)…

"Hey, I never asked you this," he said, glancing at Jesse out of the corner of his eye.

They turn to look at him quizzically, green eyes blinking owlishly as they wait for his query.

"Why did you save me?"

"How do you mean?" Jesse's response is quick, but not clear. Their eyes show the confusion at the question.

"Back in the Terminal Zone. You could've left me there. But you didn't." Romeo looks back out over Beacontown, lamps lighting up the whole place periodically, golden light and light from Sea Lanterns washing the whole city in a clashing but beautiful glow.

He lets his eyes drift over the prismarine that's still there from when he smashed through Jesse's city like he was a toddler playing with cars and blocks.

The building floating above the Order Hall, decorated with green trees and flowers wreathed beautifully around the whole thing, but something that didn't belong.

Something that stuck out like a sore thumb.

The stage area that everyone had left there because it was beautifully built and it was fun to have little productions up there, it was fun to play on it, and there'd been a few very well-done performances staged on it already.

"I hurt you. I locked you underground. I stole your city and broke it beyond repair, beyond a point of no return. I tried to kill you."

"In all honesty, it's hard to take someone trying to kill you personally when half of the people you meet try to do it," Jesse says lazily, shooting him a cheeky grin.

He concedes the point with a roll of his eyes, before glancing at Jesse again. "But… I didn't deserve your mercy. I didn't deserve you being nice to me. I certainly didn't deserve you helping me when everything around us was breaking apart."

When he was an Admin (was, was, the word slips off of his tongue so easily now), it might've been a struggle to admit it. But now, the admission slides out of his mouth like water off of silk.

"So…"

Jesse lets out a small laugh, hugging their knees even more tightly. "Yeah, you're not the first to give me that sort of 'why did you do it'. And I probably have every right to hate you."

"There's no 'probably' about it. You definitely have every right to hate me," Romeo replies, touching the cigarette to his mouth and taking another inhale of the foul-tasting smoke.

"Okay, I definitely have every right to hate you, then," Jesse replies, giving him a playful face at the interruption. "And I definitely have every right to hate Aiden. I have every right to hate Cassie Rose, to hate Mevia, and Hadrian, and the Warden, and heck, I probably have every right to be mean to Stella, too."

Jesse's playful smile becomes more serious, more even and measured and calm compared to their usual cheeky grin. "But I also have every right to hate Ivor. Soren, Gabriel, Ellegaard, Magnus. I have every right to hate Harper, for making PAMA. I have every right to hate Em, maybe even Nell. Heck, at this point, I have every right to hate all of my friends, if I really wanted to. And if I went around hating people based on if I had the right to hate them, I'd be a very lonely person."

"But you don't have to care about them."

He's not joking around anymore.

He's looking at Jesse, the cigarette dangling from his fingers loosely, eyes fixed on the petite hero with a seriousness that he doesn't usually have present on his face nowadays.

"You have every right to hate them, and yet not only do you not hate them, you actually care about them. I've seen the letters you exchanged with them. I've seen how you treat the people you have every right to hate."

Jesse gives a light shrug. "Well… of course I care about them. It's not my place to decide whether to condemn people or not."

"But Jesse, you are aware of what they did to you, right? You're aware of what I did to you, right? I put your town in eternal winter as leverage so that you'd be my friend. And then when we didn't agree, I locked you in a prison buried in bedrock, fully intending to just let you rot there," Romeo puts special emphasis on the word 'rot'.

Jesse considers Romeo's words, touching their lips as they think.

Finally, they lower their hand and gives him a wry smile. "Romeo, I'm going to share a secret with you that I used to help Lukas write more believable stories. It's something Aiden taught me, before we even got along."

The former Admin blinks. "I… alright?"

"The villains of any story? They don't think of themselves as the villains. They think of themselves as the hero. The story that the heroes think is theirs? It's their story. And in their story, the hero is the villain."

Jesse's smile widens a little. "Yeah, they're doing bad things. But they're doing it for a cause that they think is worthy to do it for."

Jesse shrugs. "When you consider that, it's hard to hate people. They're doing something because they really think that what they're doing it for is right. Not to mention, sometimes the heroes act more messed up than the villains. There isn't any black and white, 'good and evil' like you see in stories. There are shades of gray in everything, and when everything is gray, then it's hard to make out what I'm supposed to feel towards it."

Romeo stares at Jesse for a moment. All he can think of to say is, "Are you sure Lukas should be the author of the group?"

Jesse laughs at that, the serious mood lightening a bit at that. "Probably. I'm more of the pep-talker, if anything."

The former Admin looks back at the cigarette in his hands. It's getting rather short.

Finally, he says quietly, "But I still don't understand why you saved me."

"What's so confusing about it?"

Romeo hesitates, glancing at Jesse as they lean their cheek on their hand. He doesn't want to mention the elephant in the room.

But he finally does.

"Because you died instead of me."

Jesse's faint smile fades to a blank expression.

"You're not actually… here." Romeo rubs his hand down his face with a low sigh. "If anything, you're a figment of my imagination. I don't even know why I'm bothering to ask you anything."

"You've got my personality down pat, considering I'm a part of your imagination."

Romeo snorts at Jesse's comment, hand still covering his eyes. He doesn't want to look at Jesse. "I still don't know why you bothered to save me."


He can still remember it. Radar had brought the giant Enderman. And it had distracted that glitching prismarine colossus from killing them, screeching and roaring intermingling so loudly that the ground was echoing.

But at the last second, the ground had disappeared in a spray of sparks beneath his feet, he could still feel panic welling up in him in a desperate bubble, arms smacking into stone floor with a large amount of force and making his elbows ache.

A hand tightening on his forearm, hauling him up before the ground he was desperately clawing, clinging onto with all of his will, could vanish beneath him. Jesse hauling him along. "Romeo, come on!"

The lava already starting to destroy the portal, creeping down over it as gravity inevitably tugged it down.

Jesse was going to make it through.

He wouldn't.

That thought barely crossing his mind before he suddenly felt Jesse's grip on his arm change, squeezing so hard he could feel it bruising.

A yank and then a shove.

Stumbling forward towards the portal, twisting over his shoulder, eyes widening.

Jesse's hands falling to their sides from the shove, skidding to a halt already, green eyes set resolutely.

The feeling of falling through a curtain, swirls of iridescent white curling around his arms, his chest, running itself through his hair.

And then Jesse disappearing from sight as lava blocked them from view and the portal tugged him into that space, that weird world between a portal and the other location it leads to.

And then flying out backwards, back slamming into hard ground with enough force to wonder if something had broken, but he doesn't even have time to claw air back into his lungs because he feels as if someone has shoved a pillow over his mouth, doesn't have time to scream that they have to go back even though he knows full damn well that Jesse isn't going to be able to come through.

And then watching the portal close in on itself before vanishing in a spray of purple sparks.

Erasing any hope that Jesse might've been able to slip through.


"You… I don't even know what happened, if you got deleted or erased from existence or if you're even still alive, but you're sure as hell not here," Romeo says at last, making a vague gesture. "You could've just let me die in there. Heck, Jesse, I deserved it."

Jesse sits there for a moment.

And then they give him a small smile.

"You know, for someone who thinks he's talking to a figment of his imagination, you sure like asking answers to questions that you couldn't possibly know the answers to."

He doesn't know how he's supposed to respond to that.

"Here, I'll impart two last little bits of Jesse wisdom advice on you," Jesse says, wiggling their eyebrows at him and making him huff out some laughter.

"The first bit is this: sure, maybe you deserved it, but who has the right to decide that? Certainly not me. I'm not going to look down on someone unless I'm helping them up. I know your name, and what you've done. But I don't know your story, or what you've been through. If I don't know that, then I don't have the right to judge their fate."

Romeo considers the statement for a moment. He feels like this is directed at himself; since he used to do just that.

He still does that.

But he considers the statement anyway.

"The second bit of advice, or wisdom or whatever this is supposed to be," Jesse says, a bit dramatically, enough to make Romeo chuckle, "is this."

They lean forward, so close that if they were real, Romeo could reach out and boop their nose. A secretive smile is on their face.

"Who said I wasn't actually here?"

They're gone in the next blink, but he can still hear their voice whispering in their ear.

"You know, it's kinda funny, Romeo."

"The Terminal Zone might not have been able to hold together without an Admin's power…"

"But it sure has a lot of power of its own."

"See you soon."


A/N: Yes, I know I have been AWOL for, like, another month. Honestly, I'm experiencing a block on HCM and am considering dropping the fic altogether because of how much time it takes up, and I'm also debating if I need to drop a few more fics.

However, I have been active on Tumblr, and started writing oneshot fics there based on headcanons and whatnot, so here we are.

Hope y'all enjoy these. xD

x.X. A.L. X.x