He lost. Pixy lost. He's floating, falling, drowning. He's on fire, trailing smoke, unable to breathe. Desperately trying to stabilize enough to slow his rapid descent. He failed. Alarms are blaring, and he needs to eject. He can't. (He won't. Better to die with pride than live with the defeat.) It's too late now, the sky is too far away.
Darkness has settled in when he finally comes back to. He's still strapped into the cockpit of the Morgan. Maybe if he doesn't open his eyes, he can pretend that it was all a bad dream, but the ache all down his right side says otherwise. It hurts, but it's not an unfamiliar pain. He's been in plenty of fist fights before, and while he usually won, he usually got his ass kicked in the process. All he needs to do is to keep moving and he'll be fine. Just keep moving. (Sprained wrist, fractured leg, several bruised ribs, and a long gash on the side of his head that he never even noticed. The people that rescue him say that it's nothing short of a miracle that he survived. A miracle better used on someone else.)
Snow covers the cracked window. None of the instruments are working, and he's covered in broken glass from all the screens. All he can do is brush it off and start getting out. Everything is fuzzy, but he's done this so many times it's second nature. Panic floods his system when he can't get the window open, but it just as quickly dissipates when a heavier shove is able to lift it up.
He drops onto the ground below, and another shock of pain runs up his body. It's cold, the kind of frigid that stings his skin and freezes the air in his lungs. Snow blankets everything in sight, reflecting just enough light to make his surroundings out. He crashed in a small clearing, surrounded by dense forest. A lone figure stands across from him, making neither a move nor sound, sending him fumbling for the gun he keeps on him in case he crashes behind enemy lines. (No one is coming to rescue him. Whoever finds him is going to drag him to prison, if not kill him outright.) The safety is flipped off and aimed by the time his head clears enough to recognize her.
Cipher doesn't even blink at the sight of the gun, much less flinch at the idea of throwing her life away. (He's jealous. Detachment is a necessity in this business, and she is practically the embodiment of snow.) Time slows to a crawl as they stare each other down. (Belkan. Pixy's Belkan, not Ustian, like all his papers say. Life is easier without people knowing that fact.) His hands are shaking, from holding on too long, from the strain on his wrist, from the unwillingness to shoot. (She's the only person on base who knows, and the complete lack of judgement lifts a long-settled weight in his chest.) Like always, she wins, and he lowers the gun and holsters it.
(Love and hate are supposed to be opposites, but they're mixing and churning in his stomach. He can't love her. She kills without hesitation or remorse, a soldier complicit in the slaughter of others. Just another cog in the machine, letting the cycle continue without end. He hates her, for all that, for being strong enough to do something about it, for not choosing to stop it. He wants - he needs to kill her. He's the only one that can. But he can't hate her either. She's Cipher, his Buddy, who focused all her energy into making sure those flying with her were safe, who refused to fire on civilians, who was probably the first person he's trusted in years. Just another victim of circumstance, trapped in a war she has no stakes in. They're more similar than either of them ever admit. Different background, same story. Similarities that draw them together, and force vulnerability out of them.)
(Maybe he wanted to fall. Maybe he trusted her with the future. Maybe he's just a fool who can't even save himself.)
Cipher simply regards him, though he can never tell if she notices his inner turmoil. Another half a second passes, before she turns and walks straight into the woods. The choice in front of him is clear, either follow her or don't. If he does, he'll be chasing after someone who hates him and probably never wants to see him again. She probably has no idea where she's going and he fully knows she has more pride than sense when she's angry. If he doesn't, he'll also be blindly walking around the forest in the dark. Maybe he should just do the honorable thing and go back to sleep and let the snow consume him. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. He hasn't made a good decision in a while; what's one more?
Pixy breathes in, taking in as much of the frozen air as his messed up ribs will allow, and tries to clear his head. His choice is obvious, and he takes the plunge after her. She doesn't even bother to acknowledge him.
Silence holds the entire forest in a stranglehold. Footsteps crunching through snow is the only reassurance that he hasn't completely lost his sense of hearing. Cipher is walking steadily ahead of him, but she's as silent as she ever is. (As silent as she was after Operation Choker One, just accepting that they were nothing but pawns.) All of his senses are on edge. Even in the dead of night, even with the snow, there should be some kind of sound, but there's nothing. There hasn't been any signs of life. Outside of the quiet figure he's trudging after, he's alone.
(He's completely alone. He betrayed Lucan by goading Cipher into the fight. He betrayed Cipher over Waldriech. Cipher betrayed him over Hoffnung. There wasn't anybody else he could trust anymore. Was there anyone he could trust in the first place?)
(Uncle Jonas wouldn't be able to take him in. Said that they couldn't afford another mouth to feed, especially one that wasn't old enough to work. The senior officer makes no attempt to soften his words, even as the junior officer quietly reminds him that Larry is a child. Larry himself barely pays attention, still waiting for his parents to appear from the still smoking remains of the village. It's not until the small memorial over the mass grave that he realizes that they won't.)
He's always hated silence. With nothing to focus on, his thoughts get too loud, until they drown everything else out. Instead he's forced to think about the twinge in his chest with every breath he takes and the ache in his wrist and the shock of pain every time he takes a step and the numbness in his toes and oh, he's going to die here, isn't he? He's going to die in the middle of nowhere and it's all going to be for nothing. Borders will still divide people, wars will still rage on. How many more will die in the name of some land grab disguised as some beautiful ideal?
End it. Break the cycle. That's what he wanted to do. Reset it all to zero, so there would be nothing to fight over. Many, many (too many) people would die, but infinitely more would be saved. (It wasn't a heroic act, and the Solo Wing Pixy would forever be named a villain, but it was for the greater good, right? The catalyst would be horrific but permanent, better than allowing another Hoffnung or Vorfreude or however many cities had been caught in the middle, right?)
(Cipher disagrees with him. Said that conflict was part of human nature and that people would always fight. He thinks it's a depressing worldview, but when she wakes up sobbing and terrified after being forced to relive her parents' murder, he understands. They are so different from each other, yet they are so similar. A ring can stretch into the infinite, but it is still a ring. It will end where it starts.)
He needs to think about something else, so he thinks about that last battle.
Victory had simultaneously been within his grasp, and so far away he would never be able to reach it. He should have had the advantage, but he knew better. The Morgan was a beast of a plane, but Cipher was a beast of her own. She had faced impossible odds before. (They had faced impossible odds before. Maybe in another world they could still be together. Probably not.) It had been less of a battle than a dance, twisting and turning around each other, firing with near perfect timing and just missing enough to move onto the next steps. Beautiful and destructive and tragic, moving ever closer to one of their deaths. Fighting against her had been nothing and everything like alongside her.
(They tried to tango once, back before everything had fallen apart. Cipher knew from one of the many 'flashy, useless' classes she had to take, Pixy had learned while on a job in Sapin. Neither of them had done so in several years. It was clumsy and offbeat and they had to correct each other every other step, but it had been fun. Eventually, they both gave up and just swayed to the music, enjoying each other's presence.)
She fought with the same cold, calculated, style she always had, but none of the caution. (None of her strict moral code, but perhaps she had deemed him unworthy of such mercy.) Eventually, she figured out his weakness and flipped to face him straight on in a move that was almost stupidly bold, even without the fate of the world hanging in the balance. An evenly matched duel between two knights, with fate determining the winner. That moment was probably the only moment he could have defeated her, except maybe the first blow, when he fired before he even had a clear visual, but her escort had taken the hit and went down.
(PJ, he realizes much later, trapped in bed with nothing but a broken leg and his thoughts. Of course PJ would be the one to follow Cipher straight into a suicide mission. Of course he would jump right in front of the blast like that. That was his ideal: to protect those he cared about, and Pixy damn well knew the kid thought of her like an older sister. He also knew that PJ's ideals would get him killed.)
(He was right, but PJ had died and succeeded, while he failed and lived. So where did that leave him, aside from the twisted husk of a man who could only desperately cling to survival?)
The snowstorm is starting to die down, and his visibility is getting slightly better. The forest is getting less dense, so he can worry less about tripping on a root and just letting the snow consume him. Whether the thinning out was because he was actually nearing the end or just wishful thinking, he doesn't know. Cipher continues ever forward, so he keeps following her, never quite able to catch up. Did she know where they were, or was she just moving because it was the only thing she could do?
(Both his mother and the matron of the orphanage warn him of the fae folk. His mother had warned him of beautiful people in the woods that would lead him away, never to be seen again. The matron does it out of spite, telling him that they would be back to collect the changeling they replaced the real Larry Foulke with. He retaliates by dropping her clothes in the well. Years pass before either of them even kind of respect each other, but she's the first to express her pride when he graduates top of his class. He wonders how angry she would be if she saw him now.)
Suddenly the treeline breaks, and he can finally see. They've reached some kind of field, maybe a farm, but there isn't any kind of civilization in sight. Only more trees across from him, and a sharply rising cliff face to his right. They must have crashed somewhere in the mountains. Towns were out here, but they were few and far between. It could be days before anyone would find them. (He's not going to last that long. He's not sure he's going to make it past sunrise.) Cipher doesn't seem bothered. She's on his left, staring down a cliff, out into the storm. He can finally catch up, curious as to what caught her attention.
At first he can't see anything but shadows, but as the storm slowly comes to an end, he realizes that's not it at all. It's ash. Rubble stretches on for thousands of feet in almost a perfect circle, before burned trees and ruined buildings finally begin to rise. He knows where he is now. The world changed here, turning everything on its head, and definitively ending the war. (It had been different when he had been flying freely above, safe from the immediate consequences.) This was one of the Seven Pillars.
There was a town there once. There were people there, once. Innocent people, who had only been involved because somebody behind a desk decided they should. He wondered if they even knew. Probably not. Nobody had predicted that the Belkan government would dare turn nuclear weapons against their own people. He had never heard of any evacuations, only that 12,000 lives had been wiped out in the blink of an eye. (Wasn't the V2 going to be so much worse, though?)
He can't move anymore. He's just too tired (from the cold, from his injuries, from the fighting. He has been fighting with everything he had for almost his entire life, and now there is simply nothing more to give. If to survive was to fight, then surely to reach peace one had to die. That was the point, wasn't it? To attain world peace through world annihilation?) All he can do is watch the storm continue to die down in complete silence, revealing more and more the depth of the destruction.
She stands in front of him now, in front of the crater, in front of the burned out prelude to what he was about to do. She stretches her arms out (as if to hold him, as she did when she tried to comfort him after Hoffnung, as she did when he brushed her off) and the sky bleeds from black to purple. Finally, the sun peaks over the horizon, bathing the world in the first light of a new year. It hits her, (her, Aurorette, the dawn) and her silhouette sets aglow, but it's too bright. If he looks at her, he'll go blind. The sunrise catches her just right, and it turns her hair into a halo.
Ah, Pixy understands now.
This is not his Cipher. His Cipher is a demon, an instrument of war, an omen of death. (His Cipher is a monster. Just as he is.) This thing is nothing more than a spectre, a figment of his imagination. (Maybe an angel, taking on the form of his beloved to show him, to make him understand the weight of his sins before dragging him down to hell.)
The ghost reaches out to him, but unconsciousness reaches him first. The last thing he remembers is the cold, impassive look in her eyes before he collapses into the snow. (It's fine. He did the right thing, right?)
(Right?)