A/N: Sorry for being so late with this! With the way I update, you'd never know this fic has been finished for a couple of weeks now. *sigh* It booted out my original campnano idea and decided to be it instead. :D So it's all done, at 20 chapters, and hopefully I'll remember/internet will behave and I can post at least once a week.

Enjoy!

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a chaotic heart
Chapter 4

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She finds him again, and it's a big city and lots of people and not even another bar and he's got no idea how she's pulled off the near impossible, but she has. She has and it's her hand on his shoulder and her voice in his ears and why can he only recognise one of them and not the other? It's not fair. He knows she's gripped him like this before but her touch, her grip – they're still unfamiliar. But her voice is another matter. He knows it. Thirteen long days, hearing nothing else. And that feeling from the bathroom in the bar stirs in him again but it's quickly doused by relief.

He fights her a bit and then follows meekly, because she is the Saviour and he really does want to be saved. Never mind the cackling voice from not too long ago that points out how she's failed – no, that's not true, is it? He does mind. Very much. But she has failed, and he's got a mixing pot of emotions to feel about that, and not all are his own. He wants to throw it in her face. He's torn between hiding behind her and hiding from her and in some twisted balance with it all, he's tagging along like her coat-tails and it's supposed to feel nostalgic…except it's not.

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She glances behind her to make sure Hope is following. It's nostalgic: in Vile Peaks when he'd chased after and he'd checked on him only because he was a constant annoyance to her, breaking her surveillance – and then Odin had almost cleaved the boy in two and thrown it in her face that she did in fact care about him when she leapt to his rescue.

Now it's a new world and they barely know each other, but over a thousand years' memories can't just be washed aside and she still cares. And Hope feels something too because he follows. She doesn't know what he's thinking though and that unnerves her.

He ran from her last time and now he follows without even a restraining hand. Even when she stops at a fast food stand and orders a boxed meal each. She doesn't bother asking what he'll like. It only occurs to her afterwards that it'd have been more polite but the food is as much of a distraction as it is a necessity, and anything off the street stands is bound to put a bit of fat on him. She's judging off his wrists, of course. She can't see much of his frame with the hoodie he's adorned.

'Here.' She thrusts the box at him and unwraps the burger in her own, looking around. Not an area she frequents, but there's a rather large park nearby. Better than eating on the street. Better than accosting themselves in a café or restaurant and having Hope cause a scene like the one in the bathroom –

She winces and cuts off that thought. She's practically asking for a scene, but what else is there to do? Pretend she didn't see what she saw? Pretend she's not terrified on some deeper down level, and worried for several layers on top? Though she is pretending. She knows she's pretending, even if they haven't had a proper conversation yet. She's pretending by searching him out. Pretending there's no Bhunivelze lurking in the shadows because no way in hell has she just brought the dead god of light some lunch.

She's taken a few steps in the direction before she realises Hope's shadow has slipped away from her. She turns back, and he's staring at his box – or through it. His eyes are glazed. 'Hope?' she asks.

He blinks at her voice but doesn't answer her.

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The box itself is insignificant, but the food is warm and his hands have been cold for far too long. He can count the years, if he really wants to. He doesn't, and in any case it's not a fair count because he's discarding his new life, when he'd steal his father's coffee just to burn his fingers on the mug or when he'd iron holes into all his gloves because they wouldn't retain the heat. Or when he'd gotten too close to the heater and had to walk around up to three weeks later with hands well-padded in aloe vera and gauze. He gave up on gloves some time after that and his hands have felt even more foreign since.

Now they're temporarily warm again and he marvels at how a cheap meal from a street vendor can accomplish it. But he lingers too long. Lightning vanishes into the indescript crowd, and then returns with a look of concern on her face and it's so wrong – not wrong, he corrects himself. Right; it's right. It's the blank slates and flat notes from the both of them in the last thirteen days that were wrong.

'It's just a cheap meal.' And Lightning sounds oddly uncomfortable. He stares at her. She stares at him. 'Nothing to get sappy over.' She throws it in almost as an afterthought, and then he lifts a hand to his twitching lips and understands what she means.

He is smiling. Over a cheap boxed lunch brought by the Saviour – by Lightning. He laughs at himself, and his laugh sounds foreign to his own ears, but she doesn't start this time. Instead, she takes his now freed hand and leads him down the street, and he follows on autopilot, wandering when a disgruntled God will make themselves known again but enjoying the foggy solace in the interim and marvelling at how simply he's attained it. He hasn't managed that since the flood of memories at fourteen.

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Hope is laughing. Again, except it's a different laugh this time. Not the laugh from the Ark, when he'd conceived that plan with the fireworks and she still doesn't know why Hope – or Bhunivelze – chose such a garish plan to nudge her towards. In any case, she fails to see what's so amusing about a burger, small serve of chips and a canned drink but it lifts her heart so she's not too concerned. It's different to the low, echoing laughter of Bhunivelze. It's a laugh that she's heard before and yet it's almost foreign – and why not? The last time she's heard Hope – the real Hope, or at least the Hope that is definitely real – laugh is back when they'd travelled together as l'Cie.

She's not so sentimental that she'll let that thought slip from her lips, so she just nudges him along. He doesn't resist her grip this time. Just follows amiably, and a part of her entertains the thought of the he in the bar being an apparition like in his man-made Ark and this the real soul. But even that is a complex answer: the balance of the innocent fourteen year old swept up in the Purge, the Pulse l'Cie, the adult who became a researcher than humanity's hope, the ancient destroyed by despair, the remodelled form that became Bhunivelze's puppet and now, the reborn teen with who knows what going through his mind. And the middle of the street isn't the best place to ask.

A park isn't much better, but there are small pockets of personal space: knots of children playing on the equipment, knots of people of all ages having picnics, and the occasional solo person or couple looking for a place to settle down. She takes one of the empty park seats, more designed for parents to watch their children playing on the swings but the parents have already appropriate a bench of their own and the two of them need a place to sit down.

She sits, and pulls Hope down to sit with her as well, then finishes the burger. He wraps his now freed hand around the edge of the box again but doesn't open any packets. Doesn't start eating. Isn't this the kid who would beg for breaks – meal, toilet, general – way back when? But she knows things have changed. A lot of things. I can't keep thinking like this.

'Hope,' she begins, then unwraps her chips and puts three in her mouth because she's not entirely sure what to say next. She never has been, especially with no monsters on the horizon or no big governing bodies or Gods to take down. She decides to go with one of the common grounds she's currently aware of. Discard the other world for the time being. Discard what she knows, and doesn't know. 'You're too young to be working in a bar.' And she doesn't mean to sound scolding but she does so anyway.

He laughs again, and this time it's a mix between the two and it makes her shudder in a way that Bhunivelze's pure chuckle doesn't manage. 'I'm immortal,' he says, and the box tumbles from his grip and scatters – as well as the contents can scatter, still wrapped as they are – and he'd holding his hands out in front of him, elbows locked and sleeves riding up, before she can even formulate a feasible response. Something along the lines of the last five hundred years of the new world: how people ceased to grow old or be born, but anything from sickness to ravaging monsters to an angry god could kill them.

There aren't so much ravaging monsters as people who've forgotten how much they should be grateful for, but the sentiment's still there. That, and people age in this new world: they're born, they grow, they age and, sooner or later, they die. There's no immortality there but what Hope means is something else.

And what he's showing her this time is not the palm that grasped their other friends, but the white scars that crawled into his sleeves from his wrists. And more scars wrapped around his wrists as well: newer…or more frequent. They're still dark. Scabbed. Healing. She's surprised they are healing, considering the circumstances she's found him in. She's surprised they're not infected. The most shocking, though, is that they're there to begin with.

Hope's parents hadn't mentioned this. And she'd never imagined it herself.

'Hope…'

He looks at her. Grey eyes, hiding behind contacts: hiding their true colour, and their depth masked with an extra layer of wrapping paper. 'Is it you or Bhunivelze?' he asks. 'Who won't let me die?'

And suddenly, the greasy food she's eaten crawls up her throat and floods her mouth and dribbles down her chin until there's just too much and she coughs and it splatters on her box and lap, and she can't quite work out what it is, exactly, that's toppled her.