A/N: Ugh. People. I swear to God, you guys. People. They just, they always want things from you.

On the bright side, it's currently blizzarding! About time, too. And yes. I realize my updates are fucking abysmal. But I figure, this way you can...reread...the other chapters to remember what's happening? Also...I'm a bad person?

...go away.

No one saves us but ourselves.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
- David Brin

At twenty-one years of age, Marluxia Amaranthe (of two rather loopy parents with unfortunately unique name ideas) had become a graduate student. Though a far cry from those select few in the ecology department who exhibited a remarkable and undying devotion to their profession, he was appreciably determined in everything he did. And what he did, he did efficiently – he could loop as many unsuspecting undergrads as he needed for his dirty work, punching in numbers, grinding up samples for the mass spectrometer, and so on – not to mention the possibly illegal and definitely immoral relationship he had with the head of the science department. He was the sort of ruthless leader rarely seen in fields of science, and it was a wonder he hadn't been drawn to law or politics or medicine.

Marluxia was nothing short of manipulative, and when placed in an environment full of clueless and naive students of science, indifferent and removed from love and betrayal, he thrived like an invasive species.

And when placed in an environment full of angry and clueless people, leaderless and frightened of chaotic anarchy, he thrived even more.

After having built up his reputation thus far, Marluxia found little cause to reinforce it. Threats proved effective more often than not, and he always made sure to surround himself with the few competent people who might prove a threat to him. Marluxia was manipulative, and he was a fantastic actor when need be, and he wielded those around him like so many tools.

The escape of two men (two children, really), then, proved absolutely unacceptable. The escape of his right-hand man and would-be lover even less so. With two shows of brutal insubordination so close to each other, Marluxia Amaranthe had little choice but to pursue both parties himself. With Larxene holed up in his study dispensing written orders, few would ever learn of his absence.

"When anything happens the first thing all of you do is fail to behave like human beings! Stop!"
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Oh my god. What a fucking baby. I can't be-lieve you, Hayner. Such a lamer. You crybaby.

It was missing and Hayner felt that acutely. Seifer, two feet away, crammed at the other end of the bed, had his back to him. Hadn't said a word all night. The bed was comfortable as hell, being as it had blankets and a couple of pillows and wasn't the grass by a river at the onset of winter, and it seemed like a waste to be lying on it and watching someone else sleep. He wanted to prove to Seifer that he was perfectly fine. But with a life like Hayner's, you learned to live with suspended feelings, and the lack of resolution. No time for – what was it? – closure.

This place was a goddamn farm house. Maybe not literally (and he wouldn't know, never having been to a goddamn farm house), but it could sure as fuck pass as one. The walls were wood, bare and untreated, grey with age. The floors, too, where they didn't hide under unraveling carpets. There weren't any pictures on the walls – there was a map pinned up near the bedside table, yellowed and rough, labeled with thin chicken scratch – but that was all. There was a whole wall of books. They didn't have shelves to sit on and gather dust, but stood tall in neat columns with their spines facing out. Proud in their height and their orderliness, no stack was too tall to keep any books from being accessed, but there was still something – sad, about it.

All these proud books and no shelf to hold them up.

When he was a kid, Hayner lived on a pretty busy street, with cars that growled and sped down the road all night long. He would watch as their headlights illuminated his window, made a square of light that got dragged and stretched over the walls until it disappeared with the sound. It was sort of nice, after a while, if you got used to it. Sort of calming.

And now all he had was the still light and the still books and the still man.

The moonlight was pretty, though. It traced a faint, inoffensive white light over the gold letters on the book spines, and the muscles in Seifer's arms. It made him feel sick and tickled in his stomach.

I've never hated you. Not once.

Perhaps the indoors was a signal for Hayner and Seifer that dawn didn't have to be a wake-up call, because this day also found them asleep for the sunrise.

A knock on the door, brisk and to the point. "Boys? Are you awake?"

He didn't wait for an answer, just poked his head into the room, his long curtain of hair frazzled and his glasses perched on the tip of his nose. "Hello?"

Vexen saw both lumps in the bed, each curled up on opposite ends, buried in the blankets. The right lump shifted and groaned, drew the covers up a little further to block out incoming sunlight. "Oh dear," he quipped. "Seems I forgot what it's like to work with people this young." He tutted, swinging the door open and fiddling with the ties around the curtains to open them some more. "Your poor internal clocks have probably been ravaged beyond belief, last ten years being what they were."

Here Vexen paused, and leveled the lumps with a clean look. "Must've been quite young, I suppose. Ten or so. Blessing in disguise, in some respects, isn't it? You're more prepared than anyone for this new world. No more clinging to the old one. Jump in any time, sir, I know you're awake."

"You can't possibly fucking know that," came the muffled response.

"I do now though, don't I?"

Hayner shoved the covers down from in front of his face to glare at the man. With his hair mussed and his cheeks lined with the imprints of the covers, he didn't make the most searing impression.

"You think you're funny, huh."

"Well, I amuse me. Usually I'm the only one that matters." He grinned and took off his glasses, cleaning them with the corner of his disgustingly civilized button-up shirt. "Now, there should be some spare clothing in the attic, and once you've had a bath and changed we'll eat breakfast."

Hayner kept quiet, kept his eyes on this funny old mother hen. The man was talking crazy. You didn't plan what was going to happen in your day; it was out of your control.

Spare clothing? Baths? Breakfast?

Delusional geezer.

He couldn't kill the hope, though, burning bright and yellow, a tiny rock in his gut which spun and spun and spun.

"Come on. Out we go, my good man." Vexen leaned over and grabbed the edge of the cover, shaking it and (perhaps not accidentally) lightly smacking Hayner in the nose with the backlash. "Up up up. The days are getting shorter and I've got hardly any time to get to know you before the sun sets."

"Get to know us?" It was "us," not "me". Always us. Slowly pulling himself upright, Hayner supported himself on his hand and winced as he stretched out a cramp in his leg. The frigid air tickled his skin, cooled his damp sweat, prickled. "Why?" Seifer had to be awake by now, listening intently, making judgments like he did.

"Yes. After all, I'm letting you live with me. I think I deserve to understand the boys under my roof." His smirk did funny things to that little stone hope in Hayner's belly, getting called 'boys' and 'letting you live with me' like they could actually be useful, like they could actually have a reason for staying here. No Rich Men, no scary gang leaders, no – people.

Him and Seifer and a crazy old man.

Like a fairytale.

A delusional child for a delusional geezer, he thought to himself. How fitting.

Vexen must have had a teenage son or nephew or something, because he sure knew how to get them awake, and how to leave right after that. Hayner nudged Seifer with the base of his palm, over the covers, crouching behind him. "Hey. You're awake, right?"

"Yeah." Duh, Hayner.

"What do you think?"

"Told you before, didn't I?" Seifer rolled over onto his back, shirt crooked and clavicles exposed. "He's nuts. We may as well take advantage of it. I mean, hell, it's not like we have anywhere else to go."

Hayner drew his knees up, hands at his ankles, staring at the wall of books. "I guess so. Do you think we'll – " but he wasn't sure what to ask.

"We'll what? Stay? Not forever. We'll probably manage to fuck it up gloriously like always."

Hayner didn't have anything to say to that. He just tightened his arm around his knees and stared harder at the books, at their golden letters flashing in the sunlight.

"Hayner? Y'okay, man? Don't go nuts on me."

"I'm fine, Seifer." He shot him a glare and rolled off the other side of the bed, feet hitting the floor with a jarringly crisp thump. Seifer was such a fucking pessimist. He went around telling you how wrong you were about everything for having hope, and making fun of you for not being as cynical as he was. Hayner was allowed to have hope. 'Just fuck it up gloriously like always' his ass.

What got Hayner about Seifer was how he just couldn't let things be, sometimes. He couldn't sit down and say, "Whelp, here I am." He had to qualify it somehow, and let the world know that he didn't believe this could make him happy either. Any situation needed the Seifer Almasy Stamp of Disapproval before he could acknowledge it.

Without waiting for him to roll out of the bed and make a retort, Hayner pulled on his boots and left the room, taking the time for once to really look at where they were. The second floor of the house, at the end of a hallway which hooked to the side and led to the stairs. Small rugs like stepping stones of comfort dotted the aging wooden floor. Here a Persian rug, red and gold and finery, there a welcome mat or a bath towel coming apart at the seams. The little facsimiles of suburban houses were fascinating to him. There were places where pictures had obviously hung, rectangles of paler wood where dust and dirt hadn't been able to penetrate. Many of these had a rough drawing of a tree or a leaf rubbing pinned up instead, like Vexen had taken down pictures of a family he never knew and tried to compensate for the empty spaces.

But Hayner was seeking the attic, and the chain hanging from the ceiling seemed promising. A yank opened the hatch; another yank on a rope brought down the ladder. Dust, pent up and swirling, rushed out of the hatch in a great exhalation, and Hayner coughed violently when it swallowed his head.

"Gross gross gross," he muttered, taking a breath of fresh air and holding it while he scuttled up the ladder.

His house didn't have an attic. The very top floor had walls that tapered a little as the roof slanted inwards, but then it just sort of stopped. So he'd never actually been inside someone's attic before, didn't know what to expect – but if he had expected anything, it would've been like this. Boxes of things, labeled with irrelevance, overflowing. Clearly when the family had started putting things up here there had been a semblance of order, an underlying organization which had deteriorated into throwing things on the floor.

He tromped through the piles of crap, a box of child's toys, some old photographs, outdated books and encyclopedias, three violins lined up in velvet cases. There were some articles of clothing here and there, patchily distributed, but never consistent or in enough quantity to sort through until he got to the very back.

There was a little moth-proof cupboard from which hung jackets and coats, and two whole boxes of men's clothing, haphazardly stuffed in. Hayner went for the coats first, of course. They would last you longest. And they had layers, so once they started to fall apart you could dissect them and turn them into something else.

He knew he was a pretty small guy, relatively speaking, so Hayner went for the smaller end of garments first. A leather trench coat, worn but not beaten, hugged his shoulders and was actually a little loose around the middle. Sleeves reached halfway down his forearms, though. Either Hayner had freakishly long arms or a freakishly skinny torso – and his diet being what it was, it wasn't hard to figure out which. Best to get something that would allow a little room for fattening up. God knew he needed it.

Next he tried on a big woolen coat, whose furring lining dwarfed his face, and next a bomber jacket that reached past his fingertips. He sighed, casting it off into the reject pile, and set his fists on his hips to survey the remaining options. It wouldn't be so bad, getting something that didn't fit quite right – it was standard, really, but still – with this many options, it seemed like there had to be something a little better.

"Start without me, didja?" Seifer must have just popped his head up the ladder; he sounded far enough away.

"Just trying to motivate your lazy ass. You seemed mighty comfortable in that bed." Hayner smirked privately and grabbed a black coat, long and small.

"Did I now?" the familiar clomp of boots that didn't fit quite right.

"Yup. Hogged the covers all night."

"Aw. Was baby cold?" He laughed, and Hayner laughed with him, even if it was a little forced. This coat fit pretty damn well, even if he didn't quite understand the mechanics of it. The ends of each sleeve had two golden buttons which didn't seem to serve any purpose besides decoration, and instead of a hood a constricting woolen neck led into a little black capelet that hung over his shoulders. He tried to lift it up to raise it over his head, but it had a clasp to keep it attached to the back of the coat. Well. It would keep his neck warm, at least.

"Nice," Seifer gestured to the coat and picked up the discarded woolen coat. It fit him perfectly, of course. "Did he say just coats?"

"No. He just said 'spare clothing'. I guess we can take anything."

He hitched the oversized hood over his head and frowned. "Is it supposed to be this big?"

"Probably," Hayner said. "Maybe it's a fashion statement." He took a quick sniff of his own coat. "From the 1940s."

"Whatever. I guess it'll keep the snow out."

"Yeah."

"You look like a supervillain, by the way," Seifer told him, perhaps as retribution for implying he had a fashion sense.

"I do not." The forthcoming self-conscious twirl didn't really help his dignity.

"Do. You've got a cape and when you button that thing all the way up it's like an evil cloak. I bet you just found somebody's Halloween costume." Seifer smirked and clapped him on the back before turning to rifle through the rest of the coats for something that might suit him better.

"Sure, but if I'm a villain, you're Cruella Deville."

"What? No! At least being a generic villain can potentially be dignified."

Hayner just laughed and sat down with his new coat to look through the rest of the clothing. "It's probably fine. Besides, if you keep it you can have extra fur from the lining for other things." He pulled out an old button-up shirt.

"I guess." Seifer sat down next to him, knocking the hood back. "Anything good here?"

"Just started looking."

There was an awful lot of clothing there, and most of it just made Hayner kind of sad. Like the little girl dresses, the tight teenage sweaters, hoodies. They found a real old military uniform, and knit cardigans with wooden buttons and holes in the yarn.

When they descended again, each boy with his very own set of sixty year old clothing, Vexen was coming out of the room they'd slept in. He had a thick sheaf of papers under one arm. "I hope you found something suitable?"

Hayner stared at him for a moment, mind whirring, revisiting the role of the unwelcome intruder he was only yesterday. He glanced down at the clothing in his hand. Some cotton shirts, two pairs of pants with the legs rolled up and the belts cinched tight, a wooly scarf and as many moth-eaten socks as he could find. A filthy thief, said his mind. He never said you could have any of this. Filthy thief taking advantage of an old man.

"We did okay," Seifer spoke for him, unsettlingly polite. "Thanks for letting us get clothing. We appreciate it."

Even Vexen seemed put off by the gentle treatment. "Yes, well," he muttered, looking at them strangely. "It's no skin off my back, either way."

"What's that mean?" Hayner blurted. Teachers like it when they can teach you things.

"What does what mean? Skin off my back?"

"Yeah."

Vexen pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows. "It just means it's no inconvenience. Maybe I should have given you books, too," he laughed.

Hayner thought back to those books stacked up in the room, their gold letters shimmering in faded moonlight. Oh, he'd like to sit down and have a good look through those books, to read about a world of problems that weren't his own.

"Dunno about that," said Seifer. "I haven't read anything longer than a billboard for like two years."

"Ah," said Vexen. "No problem, that. No problem at all. You'll have to do a lot of reading regardless."

A moment of tense silence.

"Why?"

"I am – unfortunately – an intellectual." He really did sound truly apologetic. "And you are – equally unfortunately, I suppose – under my employ when you live here. I have a good deal of things with writing on them. They need wrangling."

Do you know, it was the funniest thing how Vexen talked like their staying here was a given. Hayner kept waiting for the ice to crack, and for him to stop and kick them out for being terrible people. But it hadn't happened yet. Man was he a little messed up inside.

"If you two are all set with that, the bathroom's the first door on your right downstairs. If you don't mind, I'd rather not waste energy on more than one hot bath. I assume you two are comfortable with that?"

And why not? They'd seen worse of each other.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
- Gertrude Stein

They didn't talk while the bath filled up with hot water; the revelation of naked bodies was hardly a new thing. Hayner was used to it – Seifer was, for some reason, the only person he saw as a body wearing clothes. He didn't immediately come with them, but he wore them. Everyone else was attached to their clothes, no nakedness underneath. It would have been so speculative compared to what he knew for sure, on Seifer.

Seifer, who slid his pants off and put his hands on his back, stretching and blinking hard. He took a long time taking off his socks. His feet were tender: blisters crouched on his little toes and the bottoms of his heels. Seifer's eyes were the same color blue no matter what he wore, even when it was nothing. They never changed with the weather or the clothing.

Hayner leveled this old body with dull eyes. Bony hands with swelled knuckles, a sunburned back slightly peeling, hips red and chafed from ill-fitting pants, those thin shadow lines that traced from the tops of pelvis down to his penis. He didn't look at Seifer's face, though.

His eyes were always drawn to a twisted knot of scar tissue just beneath his ribcage. Seifer wouldn't tell him where it came from. So all Hayner knew was what he could see of it, though it was now commonplace – he knew it was ugly, and rigid, and that Seifer had no feeling there if you touched it.

When he was little Hayner had read a book about an elf who saved someone from a fire, and got a big burn all down one side of his face. He had a big silver scar there for the rest of his life, but the person he'd saved still loved him, and Hayner now realized that it was stupid allegory about inner beauty. But as a kid all he'd remembered was thinking about that big silver scar. He had thought it would have to be beautiful, like a swathe of metallic paint – or why else call it silver?

He realized, now, that silver could be tarnished and ugly and shine with a malice, and a story nobody wanted to hear.

Hayner sat down on the edge of the tub, yellowing ceramic, and touched his fingertips to the water. Sss! He pulled his hand back up immediately, watching his fingers turn red from the heat. Too hot. Or maybe it had been so long that any heat was too hot. He kept his eyes on the water, on the curling puffs of steam that rose from it, the rushing sound from the waterfall at the front.

Seifer sat down next to him, hunched over, hands dangling between his knees, eyes on his hands.

And then he leaned to the side a little.

He leaned to the side and put his head on Hayner's shoulder.

Damp dirty skin and hot puffy breaths and soft blond hair a buzzing underneath the skin, blood or emotions or both, and all of it made Hayner sick to his stomach with excitement. Mine.

"We knew, didn't we," said Seifer. He stared at a decorative scallop sitting next to the soap dispenser on the sink. "We knew that this would happen someday."

Hayner knew he wasn't talking about the house. Or Vexen. Or Marluxia or the dead man with his shining bones stained with marrow, or the knife or Zexion or Eyepatch or the key or the death or the partnering up. Something in the weight of his words betrayed it. They were too heavy to deal with anything so insignificant.

"We knew this would come."

For the life of him, what could he say. Excuses and technicalities.

"I'm sorry."

"You were ten."

"I know."

Seifer inhaled slowly, stood up, turned off the faucet with a quick twist, and stepped into the tub. He sank down slowly, carefully, and kept his knees drawn up so that half of the space remained empty. Hayner joined him. They sandwiched their legs so they would have room to stretch, though Hayner suspected they were both unduly careful about getting too close.

The shoulder Seifer had leaned on felt heavier now, and that weight was still there, and this distracted Hayner while his body reddened in the intense heat. It was too warm, of course, almost painfully warm, but this only meant it would take longer to cool down. And it was wonderful anyways. Hayner wondered where the heat came from. Then again, Vexen seemed to be quite resourceful in that area – the plants, the tea, the water, and all those diagrams and books and things – he must have had an invention for everything.

Hayner realized with a start that he was breathing quite hard, the heat or the closeness getting to him, and he scrunched up his toes and tried not to look at Seifer.

He tried not to think about what he'd said.

We knew this would someday happen.

His world's downfall was just like everything else they had done. Much waiting, then the build up, the eager prediction of the climax, the words of glory and philosophy and proof that they would go out in a glorious orgasmic show of colors and explosions, speeding speeding speeding up until they fell over the cliff nobody had been looking for. A small, brown, and unremarkable denouement.

He was glad, in a way. Was that wrong? Was something wrong with him? Now that he thought about it, it was over with, it had happened without anyone spurring it, a natural occurrence. He wondered if they'd waited, even hoped for this to happen. The same way you hoped that a dog you took from a shelter, one you picked out for its dead eyes and hopeless demeanor to give it a home, the same way you hoped to God that dog would die before you had to put him down.

Some days he wanted to curl in on himself and hide under a bush.

"Damn. You know, some days I think about how fucked over we got for all this."

"Huh?" Hayner hadn't even heard what he'd said.

"So apparently, nostalgia is this word for remembering old things better than they actually were. Like you can have nostalgia for your childhood usually, because everything seemed so awesome then, even though when you actually were a kid none of it seemed awesome. It just seems awesome by comparison now when you can't have it. So the way I see it," Seifer grimaced, and grabbed a lumpy yellow bar of soap that Vexen must have made himself. "The way I see it, we got just enough of normal life to get all this awesome nostalgia about it, and then the world fucking ended. So we have all these memories about places and things that don't even exist anymore. But little kids, they don't even remember it, they have nostalgia about this world, so it's okay for them. And grown-ups had already finished with nostalgia shit and were sick of the real world, so when everything got fucked up it wasn't nearly so bad for them."

He dipped the soap in the water and trailed it up over his chest, his arms, his back, leaving little bubbly white streaks all along it. He tossed the bar to Hayner, who did the same, and tried his best to get it all over his hands, too.

"So?" he asked. His voice was quiet, and gentle, and he hadn't meant it to come out that way. Seifer looked at him. Right in the eyes, he looked at him, and he was naked on the other side of the tub but he seemed so far away. "I know that," Hayner said. "What do you want me to do about it?"

That was all.

He was choking, his tongue was swollen, and they didn't speak.

Sometimes, Hayner felt like these huge things happened between them, and he didn't understand them at all. Like Seifer was saying something and Hayner wasn't even listening.

He leaned his head back, slid forward a little, not caring that his calf was brushing against Seifer's ass. Seifer did the same, closing his eyes and leaning back.

"Jesus," he whispered. "Why've we always gotta do this?"

Hayner didn't say anything back.

He wanted to touch Seifer, in that moment. Not the way they always touched – accidentally. They'd had awkward brushes before, plenty of them; touching was not uncommon. But he wanted to touch Seifer on purpose, have Seifer know it and do it back, for them to turn to each other in a crisis instead of being back to back. He wanted to be real partners. Not like this. Not like this, please. He wanted nothing more in that moment than a do-over, if not for the whole world, then for them.

It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill.
- Wilbur Wright

He'd been so distracted the whole time, Hayner hadn't even bothered to enjoy the hot bath beyond a few fleeting moments.

"Boys!" Vexen called – curious how infrequently he used their names – and Hayner rushed to put on his new clothing before going to see what the old man wanted. Funny how early forties was old to him.

When they had gathered themselves in front of him, the wise professor lecturing to his class of two uninterested students, Vexen smiled and told them they looked much improved from their haggard appearance yesterday.

"I'd like to show you something," he said. "I'm afraid I haven't got any dark, dramatic secrets to keep from you. Just the opposite. Follow me."

He led them outside, past the cleared grass and the makeshift grave, into the woods in the opposite direction from the river, over a fallen tree and a patch of very muddy ground with a board laid over it, and so on and so forth for twenty silent minutes punctuated by heavy breathing.

They came to a large boulder, eventually (not the first of the journey), where Vexen stopped. He led them around it, made a note of its interesting origins. "Almost always, when you see a big rock or something way out here far away from a quarry, it's because glaciers passed through a few thousand years ago. As they go, glaciers pluck rocks off of the surfaces they scrape, and as the rocks slip down again they eventually get deposited hundreds of miles from where they came."

That wasn't the point. The point was behind the boulder, a clearing with little in the way of grass and much in the way of moss and very small pebbles and a little sunlight. It was absolutely full of shit.

Vexen looked very proud.

Rotting planks of wood, piles of metal, torn cloth and paper, boxes full of toys or plastic bags. There was a great deal of cloth, really – and wood – and the metal – less of the other things.

"Um," said Seifer, which about summed up Hayner's feelings on the matter.

"Ah," Vexen said. "Right. Piles of junk. Not exactly encouraging. Perhaps this will help."

He handed them a sheaf of papers. Yellow, crinkled, ripped along a few edges. Hayner took some of them, let Seifer hold on to the rest, and flipped through them. They didn't make any sense. Oh, he could see what they were, individually: calculations for volume or surface area, some more complicated symbols that he figured he would have learned in middle or high school, little technical drawings or boxes with arrows. Notes on materials, "lift," "drag," "thrust," and so on. It wasn't until he got to the picture that he began to understand.

"It's a boat," he said simply. He flipped to the next page. "A boat with a balloon on it."

It was beautiful, the drawing. Like a Hood blimp, a big football-shaped balloon with tethers and ties and bolts keeping it attached to a tiny wooden hull, every plank lovingly drawn down to the graining of the wood, and several attachments that he supposed were crude flaps for steering. And yet somehow old-fashioned, when flying was a luxury, when there were no planes, like it belonged with a bunch of hot air balloons. It was flight. Modestly romanticized and, Hayner's mind reminded him cruelly, silly and impossible, but still flight. And he understood: Vexen wanted to build a machine.

It made sense. All the little devices around the house, pipes and engines. Hayner supposed it was more out of boredom than necessity.

God but it looked pretty in the drawing. Such sure, dark lines of ink, like Vexen had known just what he meant when he sat down to plan it, and like it had come out just right. It didn't remind him of before the disaster. It would be a creation of its own. A new thing made out of dust and remnants and hope, bright and shiny.

"A dirigible, if we're being technical," Vexen corrected him. "But you're more or less right – I haven't got the means or the wherewithal to make a plane, but lighter-than-air flight isn't beyond me."

"Why?"

"Well, it's much easier to fuel lighter-than-air flight, and while it is much slower, with proper planning and weight distribution – "

"Why do it at all?" Seifer finished Hayner's question for him.

"Ah." Vexen paused, pursed his lips, and began to toy with one of the buttons on his trench coat. "I had thought that was obvious." He stooped to pick up a scrap of cloth which was barely large enough to cover his hand, and he went to sit on the large boulder. He half stood, with his legs on the ground and his backside leaning against the rock, and he frowned at them. "I had hoped – but no, I suppose not."

"Humor me, old man," said Seifer.

"If you were to die," said Vexen, "Right now, if you were to die knowing everything you know and you could begin your life again from birth with all this knowledge – would you change anything?"

There might have been a glance there, from Seifer to an oblivious Hayner, searing and brief. "Yeah. A lot."

"Precisely."

Hayner, who had been flipping through the papers again and hoping he wouldn't be responsible for understanding them, looked up at Vexen. "What's that mean?"

"It means that the slate has been wiped clean but we still have all our memories. If we don't act now – " he gestured to the surrounding junk " – then we'll have another four hundred years of Dark Ages, completely devoid of technological development. The key is to set up avenues of communication. Once we assess our situation, we can start acting."

Seifer inched closer to his partner, and their shoulders brushed, and Hayner felt like throwing up again. "You're serious."

Vexen gave them a funny look again, like he'd explained this about a million times and they still didn't understand. Like he couldn't fathom anyone on Earth not having his hopes and aspirations. That anyone as young as Seifer and Hayner could be so defeated. "Yes," he said. "I am serious. And I can assure you with all the gravitas of a man twice your age – for what it's worth - that I am not the only one in the world who thinks like this. Surely you've encountered organizations, groups attempting to drag themselves out of the primordial ooze?"

Glinting green eyes and too-perfect muscles, smooth lips cracking a cruel grin and that one damning phrase, "Hn. You'll do."

"Not in a good way."

He just laughed at that, low and hoarse in a good way, and said, "How about this: I would like to build a boat with wings, purely because I want to fly. Does that satisfy your curiosity?"

"It makes more sense to me," said Hayner.

"Then you'll help me?"

Images tickled his conscious mind, a cheesy movie montage with a triumphant orchestral score. Building something from scratch, knowing just how it worked, how to fix it if something went wrong. A beautiful wooden hull with broad curves and a figurehead at the front, something beautiful and new. Not a mermaid, no, something more fitting than that – a dragon, a winged horse, something. And the balloon would be beautiful in its own way, with lots of patches, heavy with history in someone's baby blanket, a scarf, a sweater, a swathe of cloth patterned in paisley or plaid but all delicious and different and theirs. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted it. It was like he'd been offered the chance to build his ultimate fantasy treehouse.

"I'll help," he said, never more sure of anything, and glanced at Seifer. "I'd love to. But I can't speak for him."

Seifer crossed his arms and looked away. "Yeah," he said, "You can."

That night Hayner had a dream, long and involved, and all he could remember was open-mouthed kissing with one of the girls from Marluxia's green room. She made a noise and he touched her between her legs and he woke up crying. He got as close to Seifer as he could without touching and inhaled his maleness. But he couldn't get back to sleep.

A/N: What? What. Nobody made you read this. I can have blimps if I want. It's sci-fi. I can do whatever I feel like. It has to be SOMETHING.

YOU KNOW WHAT MAYBE I'M JUST UNDER A LOT OF STRESS OKAY

AT LEAST SAIX ISN'T A CAT THIS TIME

Review please? Or not if you don't feel like it. I dunno. Maybe I'm just been insecure or something.