Cuyler sat on the edge of the cart, his feet dangling down towards the earth. I studied the snowy slope around us and found the men nowhere. Cuyler must have sent them away, though I had not passed anyone on my way out.

"Stunning, isn't it?" Cuyler asked as I came up behind him.

His head was cast up to the sky and I followed his gaze. The Northern sky glowed blue and green, as if it were a symphony and the colors were the music drifting into the world.

I did not bother to confirm it for him as I watched the sky shift and change above me. "Back home the stars are always surrounded by nothing but darkness. I don't understand how things like that can change so much depending on where you are standing,"

"We all have our own theories about that, depending on who you ask." I tore my eyes away to look at him, as he gazed up into the clouds. "I like to think it's our reward for living here, so far away from any warmth."

"Men like you? I doubt you ever go to bed with cold sheets."

He chuckled a bit, his breath turning the air before him into fog, "Little golden heir isn't so little anymore." Cuyler finally glanced at me, "Do you remember when we first met?"

By the look in his eye I knew we remembered two different days.

For the first time I recall meeting him was after my first battle in the Southern War. I had long been killing men before I stepped foot outside the city walls, but I will never forget the chaos of that first battle. Or the stench.

I remember staring at myself in the reflection of the river just out of sight of our camp. I remember running my finger down the side of my own face, so drenched in blood I could not see my own flesh beneath it. I remember thinking of stripping myself of my clothes and walking into the river, allowing the current to take me far away from the path laid before me. I remember feeling like a child playing pretend, suddenly thrust into the real thing.

Cuyler had appeared through the trees as if on a phantom wind, no rustling of leaves or breaking twigs to be heard. He'd had the hand of a beautiful redhead folded in his grip and a lightheartedness to his face. The way he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw me could still play vividly in my mind to this very day.

But what I remembered most of all, was when he didn't even pause before he sent that pretty redhead back to the camp, and sat beside me on that river bank. As if he could see what I needed so much in that moment was not to be alone.

I had watched him ever since.

But this was not what I saw in Cuyler's eyes as he waited for me to answer and so I said, "I meet a great many handsome men, I will need you to remind me,"

His eyes sparkled under the moon, "I had hoped meeting the most handsome man of all would stick in your memory. Worry not, I will forgive you for your lapse, you were only a little tot back then, of course."

My grin turned a but down at the corners.

"I was likely eighteen at the time, so you must have only been about ten. I was there to steal your older brother away from his public responsibilities and had stumbled into your training quarters, hoping to find him there. Instead, I found you,"

I pulled at the strings of my memories, and found frayed edges.

Cuyler's eyes were back on the sky, his attention seeming to glaze as he spoke, "I thought you were a young boy at first, you were stiff as a board and covered in all types of bruises, and had a wooden sword tucked into your belt. And your hair was cut so short, just here," He touched his neck just below his ear. "It was when I asked if you'd seen Klaten and you turned your eyes to me that I realized you were the bastard born Klaten had written such spiteful letters about. It was the color, he'd-"

He rubbed now at his neck, a frustrated sigh escaping, "You asked me who I was and what business I had with the heir. I said I was an heir myself though far less important and had travelled very far to meet with him. You looked me up and down and told me where to find him. Now I could have just left then, could have gone and found your brother and had the drunken night I had planned to have all along but something made me pause."

His eyes found mine again, "I looked back at you, covered head to toe in bruises and thought of my own little brothers. I thought of watching them receive those marks, thought of how it would feel to look at their faces from the day they are born knowing I'd either have to kill them or be killed by them..." Cuyler swallowed down the emotion that had crept it's way into his voice. "Yet I had known Klaten my entire life, and I'd read the animosity in his letters. I asked you then if Klaten had been the one to hurt you."

Suddenly, he slammed his fist down into the wood of the cart. "I left the city that same day, left it with one less friend than I'd had when I arrived. And even now, all these years later, there are times I look at you and hear the words you told me when you were just a little girl covered in bruises instead of scars, They all hurt me."

I swallowed, "That was a long time ago, Cuyler. I don't even remember receiving those wounds."

"That's good, I'm glad you don't. But I remember them." He watched the colors shift in the sky and mumbled again, "I remember them."

The snow crunched beneath my boots as I stepped closer to him. I set my hand on his shoulder and said, "It was never your job to protect me. Not then, and not now."

He nodded, "When I met you again in the war… I could see you were no longer that little girl who flinched at the sound of her brother's name. I could tell something had changed in you."

I removed my hand from his shoulder as I sat beside him, "Bashing said brothers head in with a rock could have something to do with that."

Cuyler did not balc at my bluntness. Instead he leaned forward to look me in the eye, "I know it is not my duty to save you and yet I feel I have failed in this since I first set eyes on you. I feel inclined to try one final time before leaving the matter of saving in your own capable hands." He glanced behind me, "There is a waterfall about a 15 minute walk from here. The fall is steep and the current unwavering." I shook my head slowly, not following. "I offer you a story, one I will tell every day for the rest of my days. The Golden Heir wished to take a walk, I took her to the falls to watch the northern lights, one moment she was steady on her feet and then the snow shifted and she went over the ledge." My eyes grew wide, "We searched for her body for 18 straight days and found not a trace."

"Cuyler-"

"In this story, there will be a mourner in the north, a memorial in the east and silence in the west. And most important of all, a girl free of them all."

It was not a story he offered me but a life. A winding road that leads to wherever I choose. I consider it for the length of a second, consider it with every last shred of my selfishness.

And when I looked inside myself for a reason to stay on this cart, in this city, as this person, it was not the faces of Sam or Ichigo or Bonnie that made me pause. It was the face of my father and the words he had spoken to Axys all those weeks ago. Heirs are easily and pleasantly made.

Clark would not mourn me, he would waste no time in creating a replacement. A child he could mold as easily as he had molded me, yet this time he would correct his mistakes. He would not allow my half sibling the luxury of growing before the pain started. I'd had thirteen years with Sora, the kindest of men I'd ever met. I'd had eighteen years with Sam, who had always known how to keep me from crumbling to dust. Broken as I was, who would I have been without them?

I would have swallowed the world and still hungered for more.

My choices in life had never seemed my own, but I had been blind. There is always a choice; I'd just been choosing wrong, I would not now.

"A beautiful story it would have been, but I'm afraid it is not one that suits me." I feel his eyes searching me, but I never look away from the sky. "My story will have a far more extravagant end, and I plan to see it through."

His breath fogged the air before us, and I looked to him, his shoulders slumped, "And so you shall."

"Our lives were never meant to be easy, Cuyler. We are the conductors of our own broken fragments, we carry them always. And if I walked off into that forest, they would only follow me."

The look that passed between us was built of lightning. Striking and burning. "I will see more of a reflection of myself in you than any other for as long as I live."

I smiled then, bright as the sky itself, "Beasts, Cuyler, you and I."

He did not return my smile, "They will tear it from you, and I will be forced to watch."

I patted his cheek with my numb fingers, "I want nothing of the pity you hold in your eyes. Cast it out, so that I will never see it again." My finger smoothed away the snow from his stubbled cheek. I did not bother to tell him, did not try to make him understand, that while I had once thought him my equal in strength, I now saw the truth.

We were both shadows of our past selves, and we found solace in one another's darkness, and while we could never cure each other, there was no harm in being comforted in the dark.