EPILOGUE

Part One
N.D. 1-2

I

"This is the last one, then we're done. Perhaps," Libertus added, dropping to the ground. He was keeping his arms slightly away from his hips, as if he didn't want to touch anything with the same hands he had touched the remains with. Miles found it out of place. They had handled all kinds of fresh human remains in the war and thereafter, and those were now nothing but dry bones.

"Well, I'm not an archaeologist, but unless there was someone naked around, I think we have separated them all," he replied.

"I don't think they're called archaeologists, those who deal with recent bones," Elea intervened to point out, as she'd always done. She was sitting on the edge of the subway platform, disheveled and sweaty, but apparently quiet as if she had just unloaded a truck and not exhumed human bodies. She threw her head back to drink from her plastic bottle.

Nobody spoke anymore for a few minutes. The subway tunnel was silent as a tomb - and it was exactly that. Miles could only hear Elea's swallowing while emptying the bottle, and their breaths still a little heavy with fatigue. The three of them looked at the four groups of bodies, a short distance one from the other – a row of blankets and sheets that extended visibly, neatly arranged on the quay. They had recognized the Kingsglaives, the Crownsguards and the City Guards by their still-intact uniforms – it was absurd that fabrics lived longer than human flesh. Civilians without identification papers, on the other hand, would have remained largely nameless.

"One hundred and seventy-six," Libertus summarized. "Thought we would find more corpses."

"There weren't many people at the Citadel on the day of the signing," Elea recalled. "We were in charge of the security and we decided that in agreement with the Crownsguard, do you remember? We had closed everything to those who were not strictly essential for the signing, partly to avoid accidents with the Lucians contrary to the treaty, partly to better monitor the area without civilians on our ass. The Crownsguards were mostly in town. There were almost only City Guards to support us. The Council, of course. A few people in the Chancellery. Anyway, some of them managed to escape, I suppose."

"We'll find others of these pits, I bet, later on," Miles mused. "These here are just the corpses they found inside the Citadel."

Among those bodies there were no members of the Council, nor the King. The Council and the King had already been found in the Ceremonies Hall. Someone – Izunia, they had supposed, or perhaps the Imperials left in the city – had enjoyed putting them back in their seats, the King in the center, the others lined up in the counters as if during a session. The rest of the bodies had been thrown into the subway tunnels, however, and it must have been the Imperial officers with the help of the magiteks. Out of sight, out of nose. It had been ten years since Miles no longer thought of the Imperials as the enemy – he had lived shoulder to shoulder with some of them and actually he had married one – but in that month, since they had started to fix what they had done to Insomnia, he honestly found it hard. Rowena had grasped it, and although he had begged her to stay in Lucis with him – not that she had anyone waiting for her in Niflheim, but most of the other refugees had returned or were about to – they were having quite a rough time those days. Miles was almost frightened; little more than a month after the start of the New Dawn, and they were already forgetting what they had been through together?

"Well, we're done here anyway," he said, shaking those thoughts off. Physical activity had helped him up to that moment, and he couldn't wait to throw himself back into it. "Let's start loading them on the trucks."

"All together?" Elea asked, tilting her head towards the nine corpses of the Kingsglaives.

Miles nodded. "All together," he confirmed.

"What the heck, we'll do it, but not now. Let me catch my breath," Libertus gasped. "Dunno 'bout you, but I'm burned out."

Nobody answered him. Miles himself was feeling pretty tired, actually, and just from pulling up and wrapping some fucking bones in a blanket. It had only taken them a few hours. Once, it would have been a walk in the park.

They all knew that their fatigue was not due to the injuries suffered in the battle against the Omega, not only that. But as long as they didn't talk about it out loud, it wasn't a problem.

Sighing, Miles sat back down. Nobody is chasing us, he reminded himself. It could have taken a day like ten. He would never get used to not being in a hurry, he realized. He had had to learn to do things quickly as a child, and had continued to do it all his life. As a kid, his father was always there to teach him a lesson, then it would be an instructor at the Training Facility pursuing him, later, in the war, an enemy looming, or, in the case of Longwythe, ten thousand things to do. There were still, actually, ten thousand things to do, but now it was different. These are the first flashes of the New Dawn.

He pulled out of his pocket the nine tags taken from the skeletons in Glaive uniforms. The chains had twisted together, and some, ruined by time, had broken. He began to untangle them. Two belonged to his old teammates of Squad 4. Norton Chad and Marius Gaunt. He would give Marius' one to Luc, provided he accepted it. The kid hadn't taken it well when they had told him the truth, but oh, how can you take the news that your father was not a war hero but a traitor to his country? A traitor who probably betrayed his country to secure your future?

He would keep Chad's tag for the moment - he didn't think anyone would come to claim it - and tossed Amber Nesrin's to Elea, who grabbed it on the fly. He would give Aron Kitz's to Luka. They still hadn't found Titus Drautos' and Nyx's remains, nor their comrades' in the airship.

"What am I supposed to do with this, a small memorial on my nightstand?" Elea asked. "He killed his, our, comrades," she reminded him, hinting with her head again at the nine bodies.

"Do whatever the fuck you want with it," Libertus replied. "We had to recognize the Glaives, and we recognized them. We are the closest relatives of those scumbags."

Miles looked at Marius' tag. He had raised his son, supported his father. After ten years, he still couldn't think of Marius Gaunt as a scumbag. Or rather, he had been a scumbag, even before he betrayed, but since the episode in Cador when they had helped their teammate Charis to kill Emil Nardus – the pederast of Squad 1, for the Six, how the fuck could they admit and keep such people in the Glaives? Cor Leonis would never have allowed it – and then to make the corpse disappear, he realized Marius wasn't just a scumbag, but a kid who grew up too fast who couldn't live with what he saw every day; no worse than others, indeed, better than many.

"And the other four?" Elea asked him. "If we have to arrange small memorials on our nightstands, those indeed deserve a separate space, with our comrades killed in the airship."

The other four were Legato Harsh, Sarah Helias, Caesar Dominicus, Samuel Farrell. Sam had been in his squad for the previous few months when Squad 6 had been disbanded because Silia was in Insomnia to have the prosthesis implanted; there were four of them left, so few that they could not operate. Sam was a fucking blabberer, but when he shut up, he was good. Miles liked Sarah very much, however. They had been together several times. He had never asked Silia if she knew. A lot of water under the bridge. "I'll keep these ones for Silia," he replied.

Again, silence fell between them, and again, Miles realized what was within that silence. Elea did not believe she would return. Libertus did not believe she would return in time.

"Where is she now?" Libertus asked.

"Before leaving she told me she was going to Hammerhead for a week to say hello to everyone, to support those who are confused and don't know what to do, and to fix a few things. Also, to rest a little longer away from the mess in Insomnia, I suppose. Iris heard from her later. They were heading to the Meldacio HQ, but not straight. I don't know where they are now."

Elea frowned. "She could have waited another month. And giving us a hand in the meantime. Maybe she'd even manage to convince her husband not to run away from his responsibilities."

Miles couldn't say that Gladio was his best friend, but he knew him better than Libertus and Elea did. Longwythe was not far from Hammerhead and they had gone out together on a Sworn Swords' mission several times, not to mention the time Miles had spent in Hammerhead, when he still had no outpost on his back. The Gladio he had seen in Insomnia in the early days of the New Dawn was not the same Gladio he had known previously. He was a scabbard with no sword inside. "No use talking about it," he cut her short.

"Oh well, given the way that bitch treated us when we went to Orior in 756, I do talk about it," she retorted sourly.

"It's not the same. Let's not fool ourselves. In 756 we were still at war, even if we thought we were done." Even after giving his ass for ten years, Miles was still deeply ashamed of it. After the fall of Insomnia, he had run away like a rabbit, just as Silia had accused them of doing. He had gotten out of the way, as he had said at the time, waiting to understand how the wind was blowing; then the wind had become a hurricane and they found themselves facing an apocalypse without having lifted a finger in recent months to prevent it. "I'm not saying there are no things to do now, but everything has changed."

"I'm going back to Galahd," Libertus announced out of the blue.

Miles and Elea raised their heads at the same time to look at him.

"Yeah, well, not right away," he said. "I'll give the Marshal a hand here for a while longer; two months, three, but now they need leaders, diplomats and low-laborers, not fighters, right? This job here," he pointed to the bodies, "someone else can do it. In fact, I've stayed, how do they say, pro forma? I've been on the front line for a long time, and I didn't feel like walking away overnight. But I feel no longer necessary, not here. Maybe Gladio thought the same," he ventured to say.

Miles shook his head. "Gladio was born in Insomnia. His father was General Clarus Amicitia and he was the Shield of the True King. Now that Insomnia is rebuilding, he's expected to do more than move corpses, right? That's not the point."

"And what's the point, then?" Elea asked.

"He collapsed," he had to admit. "He's a human being, after all. But he is still Gladio Amicitia. He faced an Astral, and defeated the Blademaster, and you don't simply pass the Trial of Gilgamesh by just the strength of your arms. I'm sure he'll come to his senses again. But now, even if he had stayed here, he wouldn't have been able to handle all of this, and I think Silia knew that too, if instead of smashing his face and kicking his ass she went with him. Give him time. Nobody is chasing us, right? As for Silia..."

"As for Silia?"

Miles smiled. "She simply can't escape responsibility. She just took another, different one. Pulling her husband back together. Having done that, she will return to Insomnia to take others, if only to remove some of them from the Immortal's back."

"Shit, still after ten years, that man scares me," confessed Libertus. "He's not human. He has the organizational capacity of a computer. Not to mention the fact that he's in better shape than us at fifty-five, even after his deadly wound."

The shadow of the Covenant at Angelgard loomed over them again. Whatever Libertus said, the Immortal was getting old, but they, although twenty years younger than he was, would age faster. Miles had removed almost everything about that morning, but he still remembered the pain, a pain different from all the pain he had experienced up to that point that had nothing to do with the human body. Every now and then, out of the blue, a flash of the visions of that day would explode in his head. Another past, another future, another world. Fortunately, he would forget them shortly after. But the exhaustion did never go away. It was as if they were in constant debt for mana. As if they were paying in instalments for something huge they had borrowed.

Suddenly, the roar of an engine echoed in the tunnel. Miles' arm snapped to his belt, looking for the hilt of a sword he no longer carried with him. In Insomnia there were no enemies, so he had stopped going around armed, but the habit died hard.

"Who could that be?" Libertus asked.

Elea got up. "Maybe the Marshal sent someone to help us out. Thank the Six. I'm already exhausted, and we're only halfway through the job."

The roar of the engine approached and amplified. It wasn't another truck, but a motorcycle. Odd. The tunnel was still dark – he didn't think they would get the subway up and running again for an entire generation, there were too few people for it to do any good, but maybe he was wrong and they would reactivate it to move large loads from one side of the city to another – and when he saw the motorcycle's headlights he couldn't make out who was on board.

The bike parked next to one of the three trucks they were supposed to load. There were two passengers, he noticed, and they were wearing full-face helmets. When the driver took his off, Miles gasped. "Luc, what the hell are you doing here?"

The man behind Lucius took off his helmet as well. It was Luka. "Just a coincidence, man. I was giving driving lessons to your lad and we thought about doing it in the tunnels of the old subway."

Unlike Luka, Lucius didn't have the face of someone who wanted to joke. "Why didn't you tell me what you were going to do today?" he addressed him without greeting or answering him.

Miles crossed his arms across his chest. "Why, did you want to accompany me to empty mass graves? What the fuck? We've got sunshine again, Luc. Go for a walk, get a tan. Find some other kid, whoever, Talcott Hester, and play a ball game." Talcott was seventeen and a Sworn Sword, Miles remembered too late – fuck, where did the time go? – so he was too old and too experienced for ball games.

Lucius eyed him indignantly. "I'm almost fourteen," he reminded him. "I can help!"

"You're thirteen," Miles nodded, "and now you can really be thirteen, Luc. Not like us, when we were thirteen." He suddenly felt old, even more tired, and sad. "Get back up. If you want to lend a hand, there are so many ways to do it other than exhuming corpses."

Luc wasn't listening. He looked at the tags Miles still held in his hand. "You found him?"

Miles pursed his lips without answering. Maybe it was too late with Luc, he thought. He had raised him and trained as if the Long Night would never end, to make him a Sworn Sword, which the boy had wanted to be since he'd still had snot on his nose. He was strong, quick, and smart. Mature. Knowing about his father had made him even more mature; Miles could see it in his shrewd eyes. It was too late to give him back a real childhood.

He handed him Marius' tag. "He's the second from the left of that group of nine. But there isn't much to see. In case you don't just want to see, lad, I warn you that if you touch something, I'll break your jaw. They are human remains, now, to whoever they once belonged to, and must be respected, not as the Imperials did."

Lucius' pale cheeks – they were all pale by now, Miles had only noticed when they started to burn continuously in the sunlight – turned red as he took the tag, trying to touch it as little as possible as if it were dirty. "I don't want to do anything. Just looking. I'm not going to do anything to the body. Who do you think I am?"

If you don't care, why are you here? Why did you take the tag? he was about to ask him, but probably Lucius hadn't an answer for that. He was thirteen. There was what remained of his father, whom he had hardly known when he was too young to remember. A traitor to his country, but he still was his father, and he would have his blood forever. Miles decided to leave him alone and left him free to go look at the remains as he addressed Luka. No one else spoke.

"And you, what are you doing here?" he asked his comrade in a less cordial tone. "You should be in the hospital. What do you have to do with Luc?"

"I can walk," Luka replied, as if it were an answer. And it was also a lie, more or less, because he had crutches. "I met the Marshal at the hospital. He had a follow-up visit. He told me you were going to start recovering the bodies today. I thought I'd come and have a look in the afternoon, since I can't help you that much. However, it wasn't me who told your lad. He was there and he heard us talk."

Luc had been running errands for a month and a half. He had been sprinting from one side of Insomnia to the other all day, even though Miles had told him many times that it was not necessary. He collected information for Gregor and Meteor Publishing, snooped around, relayed messages, and brought something to someone. Often, he was in the hospital, which they were getting operational again; no surprise then.

Miles handed Kitz's tag to Luka. He frowned as he read the serial number. "Oh, Aron. A real scumbag. Even before. Yeah, he was with Gaunt and the others when Silia went to the Shrine, right? It serves him right. Who knows who did it."

"It doesn't matter anymore," Libertus said uncomfortably. Miles kept forgetting that he too had been one of those scumbags, even though, to be fair, they had gone over to the side of the Imperials, while Libertus wanted to keep fighting them.

He turned to look at Luc. He had pulled back the sheet covering Marius' remains and was staring at them in silence. When he realized he was being watched, he said, "There are only bones."

"And what did you think you would find after ten years?" Elea asked him.

"Dunno. I saw old photos of him as a kid, at Gregor's house," he replied. "It was, like, seeing myself. He really looked like me. And Gregor had also kept newspapers with photos of him as a Kingsglaive. They are small, grainy photos, like those of the Meteor during the Long Night, it's difficult to take clear photos of people fighting, right? I was hoping to..."

He did not complete the sentence.

"What you should do in these cases?" he asked after a while, his voice trembling as he lowered the blanket over the remains. "Gregor didn't know what to do with the photos and the newspapers. If he should throw them away. Burn them. But he was his son after all, wasn't he? Even if he did what he did. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know if I wanted to keep them. This too," he continued, showing the tag, "what should I do with it? What's the point?"

Miles felt his chest stir. He reached him, put his arm around the kid's shoulders – Luc would become taller than him – and buried a hand in his short curly hair. Luc had shaved it, two months ago, the night they had told him everything, as if he wanted to erase one of the ways in which he most resembled his father. It had grown back, of course, curlier than before. But the nature is not genetic. Only minimally, perhaps. "I don't know what to say either, Luc," he told him, more softly. "Just this: never forget that you're not your father. Don't be ashamed of who you are, because Marius Gaunt was Marius Gaunt, and you are Lucius. More my son than his."

Luc looked down abruptly. He didn't answer.

"We all loved people who got involved in the betrayal," he continued. "All of us, for example, loved Titus Drautos, the Captain who arranged all of this. We would have given our lives for him. And even though now we all say we hate him, none of us can forget what he gave us. If you hate your father, Luc, no one can blame you. And no one can blame you if a part of you is grateful to him for doing it for your sake. You'll have to live with all this, I'm afraid. Being an adult means learning to live with things that we can't agree." He let him go. "For what it's worth, I think you should keep that tag. If we find it, and I'm sure we'll find it, you can have his sword too. After cleaning it of Silia Hartwood's blood," he added to tone it down. Elea, Libertus and Luka laughed.

"There's worse, lad," Elea said roughly, "than living with the idea that your father was a traitor. You won't believe me, but that's it. And I'm afraid we are the least suitable people to comfort you. We need that bitch Hartwood. She always had good motivational speeches for everyone. After all, I think we wanted her for Captain just for that."

This time, Miles laughed too. He cracked his knuckles. "Since you're here, Luc, and you're in better shape than us, get to work and help us load the truck with those bodies. Treat them properly. Civilians too. People have mourned their deaths. And you," he said to Luka, "don't think you can stand there doing shit while we work. We didn't have tags, but we numbered all the blankets. There you'll find pen and paper. As we load the envelopes in the trucks, mark the names we tell you with the corresponding number. Let's get our asses up, guys."

"What the fuck, what's the rush?" Elea protested. "Nobody is chasing us, right?"

"No," he confirmed. "I just want to go home to my daughter and especially to my wife as soon as possible, take a bath and have a fu..." he stopped just in time, noticing Luc's gaze. "…a fucking dinner. Have you not been hungrier than usual for two months now?"

II

"Hey, Iggy! You there?"

Ignis had heard him arrive before he even opened the restaurant door and announced himself. In addition to identifying the people he knew by their stride, eleven years of blindness had taught him that walking reveals a lot about an individual's personality. Prompto's was a noisy shaff shaff, regardless of the type of shoes he wore. He had made shaff shaff even on his wedding day, wearing ceremonial lace-ups.

Ignis put away the knife, carefully washed his hands, and joined Prompto in the hall. He knew perfectly where every chair, every table, every obstacle was, and everything was always perfectly in its place. He couldn't hear Cindy. "Hi, Prompto. I'm here. When did you come back? How is Cid doing?"

A mild sigh. "Not great. He's starting to... how to say... we told him 'bout the anniversary and he asked Cindy if she meant Regis' birthday. Then he returned to normality. But lapses like that happen to him more and more often."

"He's eighty-eight, Prompto," he replied patiently, pushing aside a chair from table 7 and sitting down. "Can I get you something? A drink, perhaps?"

"No, thanks, gotta go back to Cindy's workshop. Who knows what they've done in our absence. I just dropped to say hello and…" A long pause. "I wanted to ask you something. D'you like this story? The commemoration?"

"No," he replied truthfully. "Cor isn't enthusiastic about it either. But people need those rites, and we cannot exempt to attend as well."

"I see." A wet sound. "I can't believe it's been nearly a year already."

"Indeed, it passed quickly, didn't it? We have been so busy it seems like yesterday."

"D'you think Gladio will return, at least on this occasion?"

Ignis couldn't answer that question point blank. He checked that the napkins and silver cutlery on the linen tablecloth were perfectly aligned. They were. "I really don't know, Prompto."

"We haven't heard from them for a while."

"Because it has been quite a while since they left Lucis, and Niflheim is still not properly connected."

"That idiot..." Prompto was scratching his head. "After all these months, I still can't figure out if it's Silia who dragged him away, or if he's the one who dragged Silia away."

Ignis straightened the wine glass. It was slightly misaligned. He had long ago quelled the throb of dull anger he felt towards Gladio for leaving, and towards Silia for supporting and encouraging him in his choice, but somewhere it still rasped like a monster locked in the attic. It had been a blow to the three of them, Noctis' death, and even though Ignis hadn't told Gladio plainly to his face that he was shirking his responsibilities, as the Marshal had, he had thought so. He had wondered if Gladio really had the right to feel more overwhelmed than them. Than him, who in some way, already in Altissia, wearing the Ring, had known it, even if the memories had faded soon after. "There is little point in talking about it, Prompto. When they get tired of playing the wild rovers, they will come back."

"D'you know what pisses me the most?"

"What?"

"That when Cindy finally agreed to marry me, he wasn't there. He wasn't at my wedding. Who cares if he wasn't there to rebuild the Citadel, to bury the corpses? He was supposed to be my best man, along with you. He was supposed to be here at your restaurant opening. And when Nyx was born. It was not in the ugly times that I would have wanted him here, but in the happy ones."

Ignis smiled. By now he knew that chant by heart. "Well, if he takes a few more months, he will miss his nephew's birth as well."

"Well it suits him."

A van parked on the street near the restaurant, and Ignis turned towards the entrance. A car door slammed with bad grace. A hatch was opened. The sound of something being pulled down, the rustle of a plastic bag. The hatch was closed.

Ignis got up, worried, hoping not to hear what he indeed heard: a click-click of heels on the asphalt and then on the pavement, weighed down by something. Again the rustle of plasticky rubbing on the sidewalk. He hurried to the exit.

The restaurant door opened. Too late. An acrid, metallic smell of blood reached him. "Hello, Bright Eyes!" chirped Aranea, careless about Prompto's presence. "Fresh Behemoth meat for your pantry!"

Ignis was glad he couldn't see the mess on the restaurant's immaculate floor. "Aranea," he said, trying to keep the tone of his voice calm. "I think I have told you a million times to use the rear entrance, like all suppliers. Am I wrong?"

"I'm not a supplier," she pointed out. She approached him. She had come back from a hunt, had dragged the carcass of a shattered Behemoth into the restaurant, yet instead of sweat she smelled of Sylle flowers. She kissed him on his lips, again careless about Prompto. "Anyway, it's closed. Anyway, even if there were customers, they would see that the smoked Behemoth fillet from the Chez Scientia restaurant is real Behemoth, and it's very fresh."

"And seeing it smashed to pieces on the floor they would certainly never order it again."

"I would order it."

Ignis gave up arguing. It was two hours before opening, and there was plenty of time to clean up. "Would you mind taking it to the cold room, at least? Or do you want to use its head as a centerpiece?"

"That wouldn't be a bad idea. It would add some character to this swanky place. Hello, chick. How's old Cid doing, down in Hammerhead?"

"Aranea, I told you to stop..."

"Even if you have sprouted wattles, you're always a chick, until you get a man's haircut." Aranea loaded the carcass onto her back again. Ignis clearly heard the dripping of the dead beast's blood on the floor and shivered with disgust. "I'll put it in the ice-house, and then I'm going home to take a shower and sleep. If I don't see you home by midnight, Bright Eyes, I'll come and pick you up here at the restaurant. On my back, like this Behemoth."

Ignis sighed, exhausted. Trying to reason with her was a wasted effort. Aranea disappeared for days or weeks like a stray cat, not always deigning to warn of her exit, but at some point, he'd always find her at home – on the bed, precisely – and after the third broken window from entry he had seen fit to give her a copy of the keys. He could not, nor did he want, to ask for more, even if they shared a child.

"Oh, I almost forgot," Aranea said again. "In Lestallum I met four people from Niflheim. I talked to them. When I asked if by any chance they had seen a tattooed beast and a tiny woman, they immediately knew who I was talking about. Up until three weeks ago they were in Colddale, an abandoned lakeside village southeast of Gralea. Now the lake is no longer frozen, and it seems that these two shady figures have settled there for a couple of months. They are on their own, they say, they fish, they hunt, they take long walks in the woods, every now and then they show up in the inhabited centers to exchange meat and hides for alcohol. What a life of hardship and deprivation, huh? While we're staying here to work."

"That asshole!" Prompto cried.

In fact, Ignis would have pointed out if the news, instead of reassuring him, hadn't irritated him, now that the rebuilding process had started getting traction, none of them really worked. The restaurant gave him a lot to do, of course, but it was the culmination of a lifelong dream; Prompto and Cindy owned a workshop, but it wasn't a real job. As for Aranea, she wandered here and there around Lucis continuing to carry out hunting missions, sometimes taking Nyx with her, others leaving the child in his charge without giving any news. None of them lacked anything, anyway; it would take some time to restore an economy based on real money.

Actually, the only one who was breaking through with work was Cor Leonis, as he had broken through with work in every moment of his life since he was thirteen. The Insomnian members of EHSO, returned to the City, had restored a New Council (no more a King's, of course) and had forced him to join – not that he would allow himself to refuse. They had also named him Supreme Commander, an honorary title since Insomnia no longer had an army, even though Cor planned to train a few dozen young men, volunteers to form a small permanent army, just in case. There was no one to fight against at the time, but Ignis shared Cor's belief that even if all the new nations were at peace and would be at peace for a long time, things would change sooner or later, and there are notions that must be handed down so as not to find themselves, five or six generations later, fighting with slings and sticks against nuclear bombs.

"I was telling Prompto that earlier," he retorted, pushing back that irritation. "Sooner or later they will get tired of wandering and will come back. They won't be able to stay away from this for too long."

"This, what?"

Ignis made a vague gesture all around. "All these things to do. Silia, above all. You know Silia."

He heard an amused, or perhaps exasperated, snort from Aranea. "If you say so, Bright Eyes... now, care to tell me where my son is?"

Ignis sighed. "With Iris at her house."

"Is she practicing?"

"I too tried to leave him with Cindy for a while, hoping she would be convinced, but nothing to do," Prompto sighed too.

"Were you hoping Nyx would convert Cindy to the joys of motherhood?" Aranea laughed. "Wrong child. He's a little savage."

"And whose fault is that?" Ignis asked, argumentative.

"And whose do you want it to be? Nobody's. He's nine fucking months old."

"Maybe if you didn't take him hunting, he'd be a less neurotic child."

"Stop, stop," Prompto interrupted them. "I'm not going to stand here and listen to your couple quarrels. I already have mine own. However, I only dropped for a short greeting. We're coming for dinner one of these nights, Iggy. Bye, Aranea."

Feeling tired, Ignis took off his glasses, looked for the cloth to clean them in his pocket, and started rubbing the lenses. Suddenly, he was seized by the irrepressible desire to close the restaurant and go home. Now that Aranea was in town, maybe they could spend some time together, the two of them and Nyx, pretending to be a normal family. Just for a few days, before Aranea was attacked by one of her usual itches and decided to go somewhere else to do something else. Who knows if sooner or later he would find some peace. Who knows if she would have given it to him.

"I heard about this commemoration shit," she said as Prompto pulled the restaurant door closed behind him. Ignis heard her take a chair and sit down.

"Will you attend?"

"Does it matter?" she asked with a clear streak of sarcasm. "I wasn't there, at the last battle. I was in Lestallum throwing up in a bucket."

Ignis knew what a setback it had been for her. Before leaving for Insomnia, he had done something he was not proud of: he had not called her. He would have wanted to tell her goodbye, of course, and tell her to take care in case he didn't make it, but he feared she would rush to Insomnia, endangering herself, endangering their son. With a little luck, Aranea would have known what was happening when it would be too late to arrive on time. He had been sure that, if he had survived, that gesture would have pushed her away forever. And instead, the next day, as he lay on a bed in the Insomnia hospital, devastated by Noctis' death and his own wounds, he had seen her appear in his room. She had called him an asshole, a selfish chauvinist, and then she had joined him on the bed, and had been closer to him than ever in those horrid first days of the New Dawn, while everything around him was screaming to be rebuilt but he could only think of destruction. It certainly could not be said that Aranea was a predictable woman.

He sat down beside her and slid an arm around her hips. "Of course it matters. Many people did not participate in the last battle. Not even Gladio, Prompto and I, and not even the Glaives, actually, participated in the last battle. We only covered the King's back, what little we were allowed to do." He sighed. "We didn't participate in the last battle, but we fought the most important of all. The one that lasted ten years, and that served to keep alive a humanity that could enjoy the light that Noctis brought back. So..." He leaned over to kiss her neck, behind the ear, "of course it matters. You did more than many others."

He heard her snort. "Bright Eyes, don't do this if you don't want me to slam you to the floor."

Ignis smiled. "The restaurant is closed," he pointed out, and then kissed her. "Welcome back, Aranea."

III

Gladio closed his eyes, and for a moment he saw the room around them as it must have been eleven years ago; the peeling and damp-stained walls returned to ivory, the cloths on the tables and the padding of the armchairs became taut, bright and clean, the furniture returned shiny, the carpet intact - the suite of a luxury hotel. Even he, who came from a noble family, would have felt almost uncomfortable sleeping in it. His father, on the other hand, had always been of a very frugal nature and had not liked displays of wealth.

He felt the claws of that daemon he called anxiety lazily scrape at an imaginary door. It just scraped. Gladio did not open. He focused on the sound of the waves and smiled.

It'll be all right, he told himself, and it would be even better.

He opened them again. Silia, lying naked next to him on the huge bed, moved. She wasn't sleeping, but she too had her eyes closed. Even after more than a year, Gladio could not get used to all the time they had never had; time to talk, time to make love, time to be silent together, time to think.

He stroked her hand and went up along her right arm, no less sturdy than it had always been. Silia was keen to keep herself fit and insisted that they sparred at least a couple of hours every day, wherever they were. At first Gladio did it only to please her; he considered it useless now, because there were no more opponents his match and, in any case, he no longer meant to fight except to put a Behemoth's leg on the table. In the early months after the New Dawn, he had indulged her listlessly, to help her recover after the damage caused by the Omega, just as they used to do in Insomnia when they were young. Then he had gone back to spend himself more and more, body and soul, into it. Silia continued to train with patience and constancy, although her physical collapse was increasingly evident to both of them. She got tired early, and slept a lot – she, who once seemed not to need the same amount of sleep as mere mortals. They never talked about it, but he knew that a clock ticked over his wife's head, and that it was ticking faster than the others', and not a day went by when Gladio did not wonder when the price to pay for the Covenant would be required.

He gently kissed her ear, stroking the curve of her jaw, then her shoulder. Silia sighed but did not open her eyes.

"Silia?" he whispered.

"Mh?" she replied.

"I want to go back."

For a moment, she didn't react, and Gladio thought she was actually sleeping. But then his wife smiled, without opening her eyes. "Good," she replied simply, hoarsely, also in a whisper. "Then let's go back."

In the past few months, Silia had never pressured him to return, nor had he ever had to ask or explain anything. Their youthful harmony of the times in Insomnia, tempered by ten years side by side at Hammerhead, not always easy, especially in recent times, had now turned into a complete mutual understanding. When Gladio had told Cor he would not remain at Insomnia, in those hellish days after the last battle – Silia very weak after being between life and death, Cor Leonis beside himself, him, Prompto and Ignis wounded and mangled by Noctis' death – she, grey as a rag, had declared casually that she would not mind traveling.

He and Cor, who had been on the verge of jumping on each other's necks – again – had turned towards her at the same time. Gladio hadn't discussed it with her before – his decision had slipped away from his tongue with exasperation as Cor already started talking about the rebuilding of Insomnia – and he couldn't believe she had made up her mind on the spot.

Cor was no less surprised than he was. Drained or not, Silia could have lent a hand in a million ways and, Gladio was sure, she would have preferred to stay by Cor's side to rebuild Insomnia, a decision he would sadly accept. Yet, although Gladio had always put Noctis before her and at that moment also his personal pain, Silia had chosen to follow him.

Cor had opened and closed his mouth twice. He had tried to convince him not to leave, calling him a coward and irresponsible, but Silia's unexpected decision to leave as well without even trying to dissuade him had evidently shaken the Marshal so deeply as to extinguish every fighting streak in him. Do as you like, he had concluded, through gritted teeth. He had struggled to get up, as if carrying a big burden on his back, and left the room, and they didn't see him for quite a few days. Gladio had believed he had caused a rift between them that he would hardly be able to smooth out, and that he had caused an even greater rift between the Marshal and Silia; but two weeks after, as soon as they both had recovered enough to travel, at the time they were going to leave Insomnia, they had found the Marshal in front of them. Silia was not surprised at all, from which Gladio had deduced that they must have talked without him. The Marshal had even returned to him the Genji Blade, which Gladio had left in front of his door, feeling he no longer had the right to wield it. The fact that I don't approve doesn't mean that I don't understand, the Marshal had said to him, his hands on his shoulders. Take care of you, boy. I'm still proud of you.

Suddenly, Gladio felt the taste of anger in his mouth, as a clear and irritating understanding ran through him. He swallowed. He didn't have to get upset.

"The both of you knew that, right?"

"What?"

"That it would end like this."

She snorted. "I'm flattered by the subtlety you attribute to me."

He patted her ass, sitting on the bed. "Silia, fuck you, you always end up turning me inside out like a sock! That's why you followed me in the first place!"

She finally opened her eyes and sat up, serious. "Gladio, don't piss me off. Don't talk as if some kind of conspiracy has been enacted. We've always done what you felt like doing. I've never manipulated you. I never forced you. Indeed, if you allow me, in the last year I have indulged you even when I would have liked to kick your fuckin' ass."

She made him feel like shit. Silia had always been there for him, to probe his mood, to support him, to help him breathe, to hug him when he'd wake up in the middle of the night in the throes of nightmares risking to smash her face, to bring him back to reality during the first, terrible months when he suffered from episodes of depersonalization. Gladio had served as a pillar for someone else all his life, and now that he was broken, she was the one who had assumed this role towards him, leaving behind what she really wanted to do. Before the final battle, Silia had told Noctis that he had been her Sworn Shield for ten years, but now their positions had reversed.

"I'm sorry," he said heartily, hearing the daemon knock on the imaginary door again. It hadn't happened often to him lately, getting paranoid, but at first he had experienced such sudden mood swings that he was still amazed at where Silia had found the patience not to send him to fuck.

"Don't worry, Beast," she replied, reaching out a hand to stroke his hair. "Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome. I've been there too. Let's hope there's still some shrink around."

She'd always tell him that when he was losing his temper. She'd remind him how bitch she had been with him in Insomnia. He'd remind her that she hadn't gotten much better over the years. Instead of taking offense, she'd kiss him, and they would often end up having sex where they were. Niflheim was almost deserted, even though someone had decided to return, and they hardly had to worry about being seen or heard by anyone. The first few months, Gladio had gone from extreme sexual apathy to a fury that he hadn't experienced even in the early days in Hammerhead and that, when it abandoned him, left him distraught and drained. Silia had always indulged him even in that, careful to bring him back when he lost his head. Even that side, now, was much better, and the sex they had was once again a game, not a desperate outburst.

"Are you sure you're ready?"

"I am," he replied, nodding to reiterate the point. "We've been away too long."

"True."

"They'll be very angry with us."

"They'll be furious. We haven't sent any news for months. Although I bet they heard about us from someone. You don't exactly go unnoticed, Gladio. And I bet Roth talked with Cor and said to him we're here in Gralea."

"We'll try to be forgiven."

"I don't know how we can."

Silia's voice was amused, not worried, and Gladio heard the knock on the imaginary door stop. He greedily kissed her neck, her shoulder. "Let's go back," he repeated.

"What made you change your mind?"

He laid her on her back, spreading her legs with his knee. "Gralea. They're working on it, you've seen it, they do their best. Even the children. Yet it will take at least fifty years for it to work again, you heard Safay Roth. And he refused our help. He said that rebuilding Niflheim is the task of the Niflheimians and that, even if it takes five hundred years, they will put the country back on its feet and make sure not to repeat the same mistakes. No more Emperors."

Silia hissed as he entered her. Gladio had no doubt that throughout that year she had felt as he had felt when Roth, whose prosthesis had already forfeited in Hammerhead, had proudly declared that he would rebuild his homeland.

"Let's go back," he repeated, leaning on his elbows and kissing her forehead, "and let's do what is needed. Protect. Rebuild. Watch. As we have always done."