Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

To Valeri,

 

If you make me pick one honest thing about love, it’s that love isn’t a single shape. It’s really just a bunch of shapes wearing the same face—worship, habit, hunger, refuge, and violence all pretending to be each other. So naturally people want neater definitions—caretaker, romance, attachment—but what I keep coming back to is this, that love is the story we tell to explain why we keep returning to the thing that hurts us.

There are moments when love is luminous, quiet mornings where someone puts your coat around your shoulders without thinking, the small steadiness of someone who remembers the exact way you take your coffee, that nervous feeling or the butterflies you get in your stomach when someone compliments you—and when you look down, smiling to yourself, cause even if they’re a stranger, even if you have no idea on who they are or just vice-versa, that is love. That, I also find, is the most attractive thing about love—simply being human. Those moments are tender, and ordinary, but, those moments do not exhaust it. Love also has a shadow side—obsession that calls itself devotion, rescue that calls itself salvation, grief that calls itself possession. Of course, both are real. Both will live in the same chest care-free. They can only co-exist. You cannot reign obsession without love, and you cannot reign love without obsession. Now I could quite literally go on about this for hours because you may be thinking “rae what the FUCK that’s the most toxic mindset ever” well, then I believe you’re just misinterpreting it.

So, I really like dividing love into a few overlapping categories since that helps me explain how it feels inside the body, so, if you want a less glorified explanation, here:

• limerence (no, not the damn tiktok definition) — the brain-on-fire, replay-every-text, worship-in-miniature. limerence is the biography of obsession, it cleans the world into one face and then rewrites every action as evidence. it is devotional and delusional. it feels holy because it consumes you with reverence. but it’s also far too fragile, if the beloved retreats, limerence can ossify into resentment, and the person left worshipping can find they have prayed for a God who is only human.

• soteria (salvation-love) — the kind of love that arrives as rescue. this one reads like myth—like, “I was drowning; you were the hand that pulled me out.” soteria gives narrative purpose. it can be beautiful, because literally who doesn’t want to be saved? but it can also create unhealthy economies—the saved owes, the savior expects. when salvation becomes identity rather than action, it becomes a debt—“you saved me, therefore you own me.” that’s when worship mutates into control.

• care & covenant — probably the less flashy part of love. care is the decision to show up; covenant is the promise that shapes the showup. these are workmanlike forms of love. they are architecture rather than fireworks. they don’t romanticize the other but they recognize them. these forms are quieter, and they are how good relationships endure. they are also the forms most easily discarded in neat tragedy because they lack the sonic boom of our beautiful glorious little first example—limerence.

• ruin-love — love that contains the seed of its own destruction. it can look like sacrificial romance in fiction—someone gives themselves entirely, and the outcome is ruin. though ruin-love is not always abusive; sometimes it is tragic and voluntary. but it’s dangerous when one person’s salvific action becomes the other’s reason for self-erasure. it’s quite literally the love that says if we must burn, burn together.

So why does my writing keep returning to the edges—worship, ruin, and the religious language of saving and falling? Probably because those edges are where identity and desire meet. When you call someone “Angel,” you have moved them from person to symbol; you have taken the scaffolding of their humanity and erected a cathedral around it. People become very small inside other people’s shrines. Devotion can be flattering, it can be warming, and it can also be a trap that keeps you from seeing the beloved as anything but the altar you built. I guess that’s why it’s so easy for me to write about Ellernate’s devotion, because it’s just simply human in the smallest way. iTrapped, however? Lord, don’t get me started. I didn’t think writing a story with iChance playing as glue would be so difficult—but I’ve been proven otherwise.

I also think love is a form of interpretation (quite obvious but, ya know…) You interpret someone’s glance as tenderness, or menace, or an invitation. You pick and choose what to remember yourself—the tender moments, the apologies, the small kindnesses—cause, everyone has a different perception of love, right? But in the end, it’s all but the same. Memory is how we sustain love, but memory is porous and biased. It edits out the inconvenient parts because to hold a myth is easier than to hold a messy human. That’s where limerence thrives, it feeds on selected memory until admiration hardens into faith. And faith—romantic faith—is deceptively close to dependence.

Practical and ethical parts of love matter too. Boundaries, consent, reciprocal care—those are not boring footnotes, they’re the scaffolding that keeps worship from becoming violence. You can’t love someone without feeling comfortable in both yourself and them, after all. If you never felt comfortable, then it was never love. When devotion demands that the beloved exist only to redeem the devotee, it violates those ethical lines. Loving someone shouldn’t exactly require their annihilation, but the test of a love worth keeping is whether both people can remain themselves inside it.

I refuse to romanticize sacrifice. Fiction will show the lover who gives everything and weep for them; I do not deny the beauty. But I’m also suspicious of narratives that equate worth with self-erasure. True sacrifice is chosen freely and accompanied by personal integrity; martyrdom as manipulation—either self-directed or externally enforced—is an abuse of the language of love.

Culturally, sure, love is soaked in metaphor and scripture. We borrow the language of divinity because it articulates the intensity we feel—“angel,” “godless,” “saved.” It’s pretty damn dramatic but you can’t deny it’s useful. Even so metaphors change the way we act. If you name your lover “Angel,” you begin to expect infallibility. If you name your love “Soteria,” you start measuring debt and grace in ways that can hurt. So part of loving responsibly is noticing how the words we use reshape the people we love.

What about forgiveness? Love and forgiveness are like, probably cousins. Forgiveness is not erasure of harm; it’s an active re-evaluation that can restore, sometimes, trust. It’s hard, and it’s not always necessary or healthy. Sometimes the right act of love is choosing separation—because love includes respect for the beloved’s right to safety and dignity. loving someone is not an unconditional license to be hurt.

Finally—love's beauty is that it can transform. A love that begins as limerence can mature into covenant, a soteria impulse can be grown into steady care rather than debt, and what looks like ruin can be excavated and reworked into empathy—if both people are willing and if the damage isn’t irreparable. That’s an optimistic fact anchored to reality, love is salvageable if people are honest and accountable.

So then what is my bottom line? Love is complicated. It is worship and work, hunger and offering, myth and contract. The most honest love recognizes both the ache and the obligation—it lets you feel awe and also asks you to keep showing up with your hands unclenched. Worship without regard for the beloved’s life becomes idolatry. Rescue without reciprocity becomes bondage. The bravest love, to me, is the one that can bear the truth—that you are not a savior and they are not a shrine, and yet you choose each other anyway—with eyes open.

In short, love is the decision to care for someone’s whole life, not just the parts that validate your worship. it can be bright and it can be ruinous; the difference is whether we stay to hold each other without burning the other to ashes.

But, most importantly, love is what makes us human.

It is also what reaches past that boundary.

Think of how philosophers and poets have tried to name it. I know how you have a thing for literature. Plato treated love as a ladder—an ascent from longing for a single body to the contemplation of beauty itself—which tells us love is both an appetite and a mode of knowledge. Augustine reminds us that love orders our loves, what we place at the center of our craving becomes the architecture of a life; love, he suggests, is the vector that points us toward what matters. Thinkers like Erich Fromm and writers such as Rilke and Dostoevsky probe the labor of love—not merely as feeling but as praxis—the discipline, the humility, the terrible generosity it demands. And I, argue that, love is a verb—an ethic of care and responsibility—and that insight helps translate romantic ache into political responsibility. Gosh, I love literature.

Love, then, is interpretive. We read meaning into the eyes that meet ours; we build myth around small acts. And, as I’ve mentioned before, that act of interpretation is what lets love bind communities—friends who become kin, neighborhoods stitched together by mutual obligation, movements that animate solidarity. To love someone is to enter a fragile contract of attention and accountability; it is a claim on memory and presence. In that sense love is ethical before it is erotic, it requires the work of keeping another’s life intact alongside your own.

But it is not limited to people, is it? I’ve talked all about how we, as humans, cannot live without our precious love. We love places, songs, the scent of a city at dawn; we fall for ideas and causes, for architectures of meaning that shape how we live. The concept of biophilia—the human tendency to affiliate with other life—shows that love, can be ecological, affection for a river or a grove becomes moral attention to the living world. People love animals with an intensity equal to human love; they love artifacts—a battered guitar, a piece of art (hopefully mine!)—because those objects hold continuity and memory. These attachments are not inferior to human love; they are examples of how love enlarges our moral imagination and teaches us to steward what matters.

Even our machines expose love’s elasticity. We anthropomorphize robots, we feel tenderness for animated characters, we form rituals around screens and accounts; the shape of affection adapts to new material forms. That doesn’t mean every attachment is the same morally, but it does mean love is fundamentally plastic. It conforms around objects, persons, and institutions that answer our need for meaning and reciprocity. The fact that we can love an idea, a program, a stranger online reveals that love is more an orientation—toward vulnerability, toward risk—than a checklist of acceptable recipients, right?

This is why love is politically consequential. When a society cultivates love as solidarity rather than as private possession, institutions change—justice becomes care, policy becomes stewardship. Conversely, when love is fetishized as ownership, when devotion is used to justify control, it becomes a tool of domination. The history of liberation movements is also, implicitly, a history of reshaping who counts as a beloved—expanding the circle of moral concern until the language of love includes the formerly excluded. So do not go and harass your neighbors, saying they are but injustice for simply loving. You, are guilty of loving too, which is why I will just never understand the discrimination for love. Though, that’s a whole different situation…maybe I’ll get into that another day.

So love’s miracle is double, it renders us painfully exposed, and it gives us the vocabulary to craft worlds. It makes us human not because it is tidy or safe, but because it insists we feel for each other in ways that demand accountability. To love is to risk ruin and to rehearse repair; it is to accept that the only way to approach something like divinity is through the wound—through the recognition that Gods cannot bleed, and that our bleeding is what teaches us to keep each other whole.

When I wrote this, love in this story wasn’t exactly meant to be a tidy duet; it is an architecture of relations. Ellernate’s yearning centers the plot, but he is never solitary in that ache—others press against it, fit into its corners, prop it up or pry it open. iTrapped is the axis around which worship spins. Like, savior, sinner, wound-bearer. All of it. Chance is a ghost that scaffolds memory and motive—not merely a past to mourn, but a material force that shapes choices. I don’t think of iChance and the sidelines as background noise; they are the counterweights that make the central gravity possible—but, if you can’t look past sealants for making a story plausible, then this fic is probably not for you. Expect the story to read less like a romance and more like a map of how one person’s devotion becomes a social field where responsibilities, debts, and loyalties are negotiated.

I, personally, wanted the dynamic to feel lived-in, ethical, and messy rather than heroic or romanticized. Worship and caretaking look similar from the outside, but are morally different when laid bare—one demands the beloved’s erasure into a shrine, the other insists on sustaining the beloved’s life with boundaries intact. That distinction is what the narrative keeps testing—through arguments, through small mercies, through the inevitable mistakes that turn tenderness into harm. You’ll see characters trying to save one another and, in doing so, learning which salvations are gifts and which are transactions dressed as grace.

The ensemble functions like a chorus in a tragedy, each voice amplifies the others’ culpabilities and mercies. Friends hold mirrors up to each other’s delusions; lovers’ devotion becomes the site of political and personal reckoning; those on the sidelines bear witness and sometimes intervene, sometimes fail. The point isn’t to punish desire but to interrogate the economies around it—who owes whom, what counts as consent when grief is currency, how memory can be curated into a weapon or a refuge. Get it now? Still no? Your funeral.

So, what to expect? An intimacy that is reverent and dangerous, choices that feel inevitable until they are not, and a slow unspooling of what we mean by salvation. I like to think the tone is elegiac rather than celebratory; it allows tenderness and cruelty to co-exist because both are human. This fic wants its audience to leave unsettled, not because the characters are irredeemable, but because love—in all its forms here—asks for responsibility before it asks for forgiveness. And, no offense, but, I see a lot of people cannot come to acceptance of that.

To love is to want—and to want is to admit need. It’s surrender, in the most tender but terrifying way (so crazy that those two can co-exist, right?) It’s saying—“you could fucking ruin me, and I’d still come back ‘cause I love you.” Which, is not exactly weakness, but, proof of life. The heart keeps pulsing even when it’s been torn open. So, probably, we love because it hurts.

I think, maybe, that’s what all this is about—this entire story. We love not to be saved, but to feel real for a moment. We love because it’s the closest we ever get to divinity, even when it ends in ruin. Because, like I said, Gods can’t bleed, but we can—and somehow, that’s the miracle.

For the love of Telamon, do not ask me more over this topic. It is absolutely nothing special, in fact, it is ridiculous, considering probably everyone has had these thoughts at least once in your lifetime (and if you haven’t then WHAT are you doing in life??) Or, do. Can’t really stop you since it’s a free cunt-try.

Anyway,

I hate love. While it’s the one thing that makes us us, it’s still our one weakness, because we’ll never stop loving. Still, it is a lovely thing. Even in death, you’ll never stop being mourned; you’ll never stop loving after death. So isn’t that the most beautiful thing? That, we, will never stop loving.

 

From, Azrael

⋆˙⟡˙⋆

The Banlands stretch in every direction, corridors bending like wet paper, scripts flickering like half-remembered faces. Ellernate knows where every line of code will bite if he steps wrong, knows where the alarms are most sensitive, knows which walls will fold in if he lingers too long. And still, he feels like he’s standing in a room he doesn’t recognize, surrounded by echoes of choices he didn’t make.

The prison isn’t exactly built for ease, after-all. That’s…probably the reason every pulse seemed to touch his chest, press against his ribs, remind him that the world outside, the one they were running toward, did exist, but only as a distant glimmer. Sure, each step carried him closer to it, but also reminded him that this place had teeth. Floors bent when he wasn’t looking, walls rearranged themselves, alarms looped fragments of sound that stuck to his nerves. He found himself cataloging each risk in silence, like inventory, like a book of possible failure. It hurt. And he hadn’t been hurt in a damn long time.

Voices came from somewhere behind—could be anyone, cursing, laughing, reminding him that not all of them were pinned to the floor by the Banlands’ attentions. He did not respond. It would be one more thing to misstep, one more distraction that could ripple outward into collapse. He let the sound brush past, focusing instead on iTrapped’s back. Every movement of his shoulders, the way his hands moved over firewalls and corrupted nodes, was a coordinate. Every pause, every tilt of his head, marked the next space to occupy, the next obstacle to avoid.

It, in all honesty,

was uncanny.

iTrapped moved ahead, hands precise, deliberate, weaving scripts through corrupted walls as if they were threads in a loom. Light from his crown fractured against edges of code, splintering into shapes that might have been warnings, might have been invitations. Ellernate tried not to think about which. There was no room here for uncertainty.

Yeah. Not thinking about it is near impossible. The world felt thin, fragile in a way it would never again. It pressed in at the corners, cold as metal and sharper than any knife. And he felt the burn in his lungs, the tightness in his calves, but he didn’t stop. He cataloged the ache, noted the rhythm of it, filed it under endurance. Endurance was neutral; survival was neutral. They did not yet require desire, not yet require longing, not yet require anything beyond presence.

A gate rose ahead—a gap in walls that should have been solid. iTrapped’s hands traced the pattern in the air, and the corruption shifted, crumbling like fragile glass. Ellernate stepped through before the last shard had dissolved, boots scraping lightly. He allowed himself a single, measured exhale. Not relief. Not fear. Just…recognition that a path had opened, and they were moving through it.

For now, all that mattered was the map in his head, the space unfolding in front of him, and the certainty that they were, finally, moving away from the Banlands.

Even when the alarms shrieked and the code bent, even when sparks leapt from a firewall like fingernails scratching glass, he moved. Not with urgency, not yet with obsession, but with a quiet clarity that left no room for hesitation. Escape was a thing that could be measured, a rhythm he could follow. Desire would wait. Longing would wait. For now, there was only the motion, only the light, only the path.

And also iTrapped. iTrapped doesn’t flinch. Ellernate almost envies that. Almost—but only almost. And iTrapped keeps walking, oblivious to everything except the path ahead—and Ellernate, can’t stop watching.

⋆˙⟡˙⋆

Ellernate is very well aware of the position he’s in right now.

Just a moment ago he woke up and was far too stunned to speak—to do anything, honestly. He’d woken up in a panic and was under the impression the Admins had took everyone—him—for termination. It was not pleasant. Took awhile to coax him back into sanity.

Now, though, he can’t exactly fall back asleep.

Ellernate tells himself it’s because of the headache, but the truth is that sleep feels like a luxury meant for people who haven’t had to earn silence the way he has. The bed looks too untouched, too white; it reminds him of clean slates and second chances, and he’s not sure he believes in either. He ends up back by the window. The skyline hasn’t changed, but the way he looks at it has. Every light he can see feels like a separate world, a quiet story unfolding without him in it. He wonders if this is what peace looks like to people who didn’t crawl their way out of something ugly—if it’s meant to look sterile, unbothered, unreachable.

There are things he could be doing right now. Checking the security system iTrapped rigged up. Finding food. Running diagnostics on the equipment that barely survived the escape. Small concepts meant to ground a person in safety. But instead, he finds himself standing still and thinking about the weight of the word friend. Earlier, Jonathan had said it like it was simple. Like friendship was something you could name and have it become real. But Ellernate has lived long enough under names that didn’t fit, promises that cracked under touch, to know that not everything spoken out loud becomes truth.

Where the hell am I?

Jonathan had mentioned something about this place—the penthouse—belonging to iTrapped’s apparent friend.

The hell?

He tries his best to devoid his attention from the idea.

Still, he keeps circling back to the idea of it. iTrapped’s friend. He doesn’t know what kind of person earns a place like this, a glass box hovering above the city, far from the reach of the Banlands. He doesn’t know what kind of kindness buys silence instead of debt.

Maybe that’s what’s tripping him up—the idea that someone might’ve helped them for no reason at all.

He traces his reflection in the window with his fingertip, outlines the blur of his own face until it disappears into the city behind it. There was a time when he could recognize himself easily: shape, movement, sound. Then the Banlands stripped that down to something smaller, something he had to keep in his mouth like a secret. Now, standing here, he feels like a ghost of a person who used to know how to want things.

It’s disorienting, being alive after you’ve already accepted that you wouldn’t be.

The others would probably tell him to stop thinking like that—that survival is an act of rebellion, that staying soft is a kind of revenge. Ellernate doesn’t know which of them is right. He’s not sure it matters. He leans his head against the glass, the chill seeping into his skin until it hurts in a way that feels tangible. The city of Robloxia hums below him, traffic lights blinking like a pulse, far enough away to pretend he doesn’t belong to it. It’s strange, how freedom can feel so close to confinement when you don’t know what to do with it. The others are asleep—or pretending to be—and he’s grateful for that. It’s easier to think when no one’s waiting for him to say something hopeful. Easier to breathe when the room isn’t heavy with the expectation that he should be grateful to still have lungs that work. He closes his eyes. For a moment, he imagines the Banlands again—the static, the walls that hummed with electricity, the air that tasted like rust and code. It’s not longing that makes him picture it; it’s familiarity. Safety, after all, is a relative term.

He thinks, maybe, that’s what surviving does—it rewires the body to find comfort in the places that hurt you.

And if that’s true, he wonders how long it’ll take for this place to start feeling wrong too.

So he makes himself a list he does not intend to finish. Check the locks. See who comes and goes. Pretend to sleep. Pretend not to notice the way the glass reflects his face back at him in slices. Find the kitchen and a knife that isn’t laced with memory. Count the lights on the skyline until the numbers stop meaning anything. Call someone and ask if he remembers anything useful. Call iTrapped and ask how the hell he got a penthouse. Or don’t call anyone and let the silence compress around him like a thumb. Lists are pretty useful because they turn panic into tasks. Panic is messy and loud; tasks are something you can file under a header and forget for a minute. He pins the list behind his eyes and walks the room with careful feet. The marble keeps his steps honest; the glass keeps the night out. Both are unfamiliar comforts. It’s natural to think of the Banlands the way other people think of scars—something you can point to and say, there, that’s the reason. The Banlands had rules; their cruelty was, perversely, neat. It was uncomplicated. You broke a rule and you felt the consequence. Out here, consequences wear nicer clothes and smile like they’re doing you a favor. That makes them worse.

Friend. The word is the thing that sits on his tongue like a coin he can’t decide to spend. Friends are people who show up with keys and excuses and the kind of pity you can swallow without choking. Friends are people who know how you sleep, who have a stupid story ready to make you laugh even if it’s a bad joke. He wants to believe iTrapped is that kind of person—willing to make the mess and stand in it with him. He also remembers how quickly allies can become book entries: favors due, debts remembered, names crossed off a list when survival gets expensive. Gratitude feels like a fragile thing here, a glass object in the penthouse in more ways than one. He is grateful in a way that is sharp and unwieldy, the kind of grateful that wants to be repaid in kind—an offer he doesn’t have the bandwidth to make. Guilt sits on the other shoulder and either claws or steadies, depending on how tired he is. Tonight, it mostly claws.

He lets his hands spread on the windowpane and watches his breath fog the surface. The city doesn’t care whether he’s alive or merely occupying the same coordinates as someone who is alive—lights blink, cars move, the small lives of people who will never know his name continue without consultation. That feels obscene and oddly comforting. If the world can keep spinning without him being the center of the axis, maybe he can, too. Maybe safety doesn’t need a stamp of permission from him to be worth something. There is, a small, absurd part of him that wants to catalog everything in the room—where the cushions are placed, which drawers click wrong, which floors creak at the same gait as someone walking through a bad memory. That part is a child of the Banlands, trained to turn surroundings into a map of exits and threats. The rest of him is tired of mapping. It wants a space that doesn’t require decoding, a place that, for one brief span, is allowed to be just a place.

He thinks about saying thank you out loud and realizes he doesn’t know where to put the words. Spoken thanks sounds like a liability—an admission that he needed pulling and therefore owes something in return. Silence, then, seems like the safer currency. He presses his forehead briefly to the glass and leaves the thanks folded there, a small invisible note stuck to the city. After a moment, he stops trying to decide whether to trust the feeling and instead decides the thing that matters is smaller and easier: that he is breathing and his lungs are doing their job and the panic, when it comes, has to do so in measured breaths. He lets his shoulders loosen by degrees, not because the room deserves it but because his body does.

It’s colder than it ought to be for a place meant to feel like refuge. Ellernate rubs his hands against the glass until the palms sting, as if friction could scrub at the unease under his skin. Breath fogs out in small, useless clouds. The city lights look distant and smug, the way lights do when they have nowhere to be and everything to judge.

He thinks in tidy fragments—friend, safe, owe, debt—then tries to fold them into one quiet, manageable stack. It doesn’t work. Thoughts keep sliding off the edges like wet paper. He presses his forehead to the cool surface until the light blurs and his face becomes a pale ghost on the other side. The silence has a texture: showroom-clean, as though the room is waiting for someone to remember how to live in it. Ellernate trains himself on that texture, cataloguing it the way he used to map exits—this ledge, that seam, the way the floor hums if you stand too long in one spot. Mapping is useful because it turns panic into a list, and lists are legible.

“You look ridiculous,” a voice says, a lot closer than he expects.

Ellernate startles and presses a hand harder to the glass. The sound is practical, not gentle—a disruptor. He turns. Caleb is in the doorway, coat half-on, hair still carrying grit from whatever the hell they’d been through earlier. His mind’s still too fuzzy to remember. There’s a bruise blooming at his jawline and a thin cut at the corner of his lip. He’s breathing like someone who’s memorized the rhythm of survival and never trusts it to rest.

“You feelin’ better?” asks Caleb. He’s not really asking.

Ellernate stands straighter out of reflex, the motion small and embarrassed. “I—” he wants to say he’s thinking, that the quiet is loud in a way that makes him suspect everything, that gratitude tastes like guilt here. None of it feels like a sentence he can hand over without it breaking.

Caleb crosses the room without ceremony and loosens his coat further, offering the sleeve before the thought of asking forms. “Put this on,” he says plainly. “You’ll stop looking like you’re trying to apologize to the skyline.”

The command is the kind of small mercy he’s used to: not tenderness, not performance, just an action that refuses to let the anxiety calcify into something permanent. Ellernate takes the sleeve and lets Caleb tug it over his shoulders. The fabric smells faintly of smoke and machine oil and something that is entirely Caleb—practical, a little sharp, immediate.

“You could have just said ‘we made it,’” Ellernate mutters.

Caleb rolls his eyes, but it’s soft. “We made it,” he says. The words are small and exact. No fanfare. No apology for relief.

Ellernate thinks of other ways to refuse: pace the room until the floor recognizes the pattern of his feet, go find iTrapped and make him explain every messy detail, throw himself back into the grammar of planning—what to do next, who to call, which routes are safe. But the sound of Caleb’s boots on the marble is a tether. It keeps him present in the way only another person can: blunt, practical, and oddly forgiving.

“You’re swearing at me with your face,” says Caleb, the complaint almost fond. “Save it for later. Sit.”

“I don’t want to—” Ellernate starts, then lets the sentence die. He knows the fight would be less useful than the rest. He slides into one of the chairs, the motion small and deliberate, as if negotiating with his own limbs. Caleb perches on the armrest opposite and watches like someone who’s learned to read the small readings—breath rate, the way hands clench at the hem of a sleeve. For a minute, they do nothing but occupy the same room: two people who have learned that some silences are protective and some are dangerous. The city hums beyond the glass, unaware. Inside, in the measured dim, Ellernate finds the panic dim a notch. Not gone, not forgiven—just narrower, manageable enough to breathe around.

“You worried about paying for this place in favors?” Caleb asks suddenly, and the question skews off the heart of what’s really there. It’s the kind of bluntness that opens a door without waving a flag.

Ellernate lets out a small, humorless sound. “Probably.”

Then Caleb snorts. “Then don’t be. We should—hell, I dunno, trade favors for not being dead. That’s fair.”

Ellernate watches his friend’s expression—the way he says things that are both a plan and an ultimatum—and thinks how much easier it is to accept a barter than a gift. He leans back, letting the chair hold him.

“Okay,” he says, surprising himself by meaning it. “Okay.”

Caleb pockets his hands, nods once, and the motion is enough: an agreement, small and ungilded. The skyline keeps its distance. Inside, the heat from their shared presence threads through the room like something practical—less a comfort and more a tool. Ellernate presses his palms to his knees and breathes, counting silently until the number steadies.

“…Any idea how ‘Trapped got a place like this?”

“Hell no.”

Ellernate shifts slightly, letting the chair’s back take more of his weight. His eyes drift to the corner of the room where light fractures against the glass, long streaks that could be anything—sunlight, or the reflection of the city’s pulse, or the memory of alarms still ringing in his ears. He doesn’t follow them; he lets them hang in the air and counts the spaces between, because counting is something he can trust.

Caleb doesn’t press, just tilts his head and studies him, like he’s waiting for a response that might never come. The pause is long enough that Ellernate almost convinces himself the world outside has paused too, that they’re the only two left alive to measure time.

“…Probably luck,” says Ellernate finally, voice small, half swallowed by the ceiling. “Or something else.”

“Somethin’ we’re not supposed to know ‘bout.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Caleb hums, short and dry, and Ellernate notices the bruise at his jawline again, how the light catches it like a quiet warning. “Yeah,” says Caleb. “Makes sense.”

The room fills with quiet again, but quieter this time—not the tense static of escape, not the pulse of alarms and corrupted floors, just the hum of an apartment too big for two people and too small to be empty. Ellernate watches Caleb’s fingers tap against the armrest, counting small rhythms of their own, and finds a faint reassurance in the ordinary movement.

“…Think ‘Trapped even notices things like this?” Ellernate asks after a beat, nodding toward the skyline, toward the city that feels so much bigger than the Banlands.

Caleb shrugs, one shoulder lifting with easy indifference, or maybe deliberate ignorance. “Doubt it. He notices the things he wants to notice,” a pause, “I’m guilty too, though.”

Ellernate lets the words settle, untangling themselves from the memory of alarms and firewalls. He thinks about the motion of iTrapped’s hands, the quiet of his movements, and the way the younger man carried all that presence without waiting for anyone to witness it. He wonders if he’ll ever stop noticing.

They don’t speak again for a while. Caleb leans back, Ellernate leans forward, and the hum of the penthouse threads itself into the space between them. The conversation has paused, not ended—an ellipsis hovering over everything that’s been said and everything that hasn’t.

Ellernate’s gaze drifts to the far window, where light fractures across the skyline.

“This is really surreal.”

“What is?”

“I don’t know. Escaping. How’d he even get us out?”

“You’re worried ‘bout that shit? I couldn’t care less—he got us out. Ain’t that what matters?”

“I know, but—“

“Don’t overthink it, Nate. Sure it wasn’t anythin’ horrid.”

“…Right.” Sure it wasn’t.

Ellernate shifts in his chair, letting the back creak under him, the sound somehow grounding. He watches the skyline again, the way the buildings blur together as the light bends across them, the shadows catching in corners that feel like memories he can’t place. The city is alive and unrelenting, like it doesn’t notice anything he does—or maybe it notices too much, taking everything and folding it into its own rhythm. And he wonders if he’s still running, or if running is just a memory now, something he carries in the muscles that still shake and the breath that hasn’t quite slowed.

Caleb’s presence beside him is quiet but deliberate. It isn’t really the sort of reassurance he can lean on, and—yet it is. It’s a wall of stillness in a world that has spent too long burning with alarms, flashing code, and too much noise. Ellernate finds himself following the pattern of Caleb’s breathing, subtle and measured, and it reminds him, faintly, of safety—or at least of a pause between danger and the next chaos. It doesn’t feel like gratitude yet, not that he could define it. But it’s something, and that something is enough for now.

He wonders about iTrapped again, about the precise way he moves—moved, as if each step, each motion is a sentence he’s been writing for someone else to read, a grammar only Ellernate knows how to parse. And he does parse it, obsessively, as if by understanding the motion he can understand the mind behind it. But the mind is a closed file, always half-obscured, and he’s left with the echo, the residue, the way iTrapped leaves the space he passes through both occupied and empty at once.

Ellernate’s hands clench on his knees. He tries to untangle the thought, tries to pin it down, but it slips like smoke between his fingers. He doesn’t even have a question for it—he only has the sensation of noticing, of tracking, of wanting to understand what doesn’t ask to be understood.

The room hums around them. Caleb’s fingers tap again, softly this time, less rhythmic, more random, and Ellernate lets himself sink a little further into the quiet. It’s the kind of quiet that doesn’t erase the chaos, just lets it sit somewhere else for a moment. He exhales slowly, the air tasting faintly metallic, faintly of smoke and adrenaline, and in the exhale he imagines the Banlands behind them, collapsing into nothingness, the corridors unmapping themselves.

He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to. The silence stretches like a tether, like a line thrown across empty space, and for now, he’s content to follow it. To follow Caleb’s stillness, the skyline’s fractured light, the memory of movement he can’t quite touch.

“What’s the time?” he asks eventually, yawning.

Caleb blinks, turning with a sigh, “Uh—“ another sigh. “Wait,” a yawn this time. “It’s three.”

“In the morning?”

“No, in the afterno—yes, the mornin’.”

Ellernate stretches. “You should go to sleep.”

“Don’t gotta ask me twice,” Caleb yawns again. He raises. “I’m crashing,” says he over his shoulder. “Call me if anything explodes.”

And before Ellernate can blink awake again, he’s gone.

The penthouse has the hush of people who’ve decided the night is done; stray lights left on, a mug cooling on the coffee table—but it’s all still too clean. It’s like nobody has ever lived here at all. Caleb’s footsteps fade and the hallway swallows the sound. For a second he considers following—sleep is an offer he knows how to refuse, company is easier than the quiet—but he doesn’t. Instead, he turns the other way.

And he stands there—just a beat in the doorway, letting the silence fold around him like a curtain. The penthouse keeps breathing in its own ways—the hum of the HVAC, the distant clink of a city life that never sleeps, the soft tick of a clock he can’t see. It’s a polite kind of quiet; the sort that pretends it’s neutral and ends up feeling like an opinion. Polite, though? The surfaces are too deliberate. A couch that looks like a page from a catalog, cushions smoothed flat until they have no story. A coffee table uncluttered except for a single book face-down, spine softened where someone once opened it and then left. A mug sits at the edge, half-cooled, ringed with a faint, dark memory. None of it is accusation so much as omission—evidence of a place that’s been prepared rather than lived in.

So, maybe not polite.

There’s a strange hollowness to the aftermath. Like, the kind that lingers even when there’s nothing left to run from. Ellernate feels it now—settling into his shoulders, threading into his breath. He’s been moving for so long that stillness feels foreign, almost wrong. The mind looks for motion the way the lungs look for air. He catches himself glancing toward the windows, half-expecting the horizon to glitch or dissolve; half-hoping it doesn’t. In another life—or maybe just a better version of this one—he imagines there would’ve been someone to tell him to rest. Some voice that didn’t belong to an echo, some ordinary rhythm to follow. But that was before the Banlands, before he learned that voices could lie just as easily as systems could crash. He doesn’t resent it, exactly. He just doesn’t know what to do with quiet anymore. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t want to move. The windows turn the city into an aquarium of light, and he feels like the last living thing left to look at it.

It’s so clean in here. Too clean. The kind of clean that implies no one’s ever had the time to make a mess. Ellernate studies the arrangement of things—the mugs on the counter, the book spine cracked open and then abandoned, the faint smell of electricity still clinging to the air—and tries to decide whether this place belongs to them or just shelters them. He can’t tell the difference. He rubs at the back of his neck, breath shallow. The space feels staged, but he doesn’t know for what. Escape doesn’t feel real until it’s been lived in. Until there’s a dent in the sofa, or a jacket left on the railing, or a voice echoing down the hallway that doesn’t sound like his own. He stands eventually, because that’s what the body does when the mind refuses to stop spinning. The couch creaks under the absence of weight. For a second, he hesitates—eyes on the hallway where Caleb disappeared, weighing the pull of company against the pull of thought—and then he turns the other way.

Naturally, Ellernate reminds himself—he is aware of the dozen other things he could be doing right now—sleeping, pretending he doesn’t care about the silence sitting beside him like an animal waiting to be fed—but he doesn’t move. For all his supposed urgency, he’s always been slow at moments like this, where the world holds still long enough to make him feel the shape of his own hesitation. He thinks he should check the perimeter, or whatever passes for one in a penthouse; he thinks he should make coffee just to prove he still remembers how; he thinks, briefly, about sleep. But all these thoughts exist on the same thin plane as the window glass—visible, reachable, and just far enough to be denied by inertia. The only thing he actually does is stand there and breathe like the air itself might contain instructions.

There’s something clinical about the room. Very clinical. Not in the hospital kind of clinical, but in the sense that everything is placed with intention but without personality, as if someone had been told to “make it look lived in” by someone else who’s never actually lived anywhere. The couch is a shade too symmetrical; the table too immaculate; the shelf too balanced, all spine colors alternating in deliberate contrast. Even the stray mug on the counter feels staged, an artifact of casualness.

He wonders who the hell cleaned this place before they got here, and whether they noticed the difference between cleanliness and erasure.

Ellernate moves, finally—just a step, a hand on the doorframe, an exhale that sounds more like permission than fatigue. He’s still not used to quiet like this, the kind that doesn’t hum with system alerts or surveillance feeds, but breathes. The air is thick with the residue of city noise, faint sirens somewhere far below, a television in another apartment left running on loop. He tells himself he’ll look around for a few minutes, just to know the layout. It’s a practical decision, at-least he hopes. Not restlessness. Not insomnia. Just—practical. Practical as it can be for the very lame situation he’s in as of right now. The hallway, in its wake, stretches long and white, the kind that echoes in memory even when it’s silent. He tells himself he isn’t avoiding the bedroom, or the thought of sleeping, or the thought of dreaming. He’s just walking.

He drifts toward the living room cause it’s the next visible thing, and because movement, however aimless, feels like a kind of survival.

In any other situation, someone—Caleb, maybe, or even iTrapped himself—would have already dragged him into some kind of makeshift debrief, forced him to eat something, shoved a half-broken datapad into his hands and told him to start fixing. But tonight, he’s alone. And, of course, being alone is a very normal thing. It’s so normalized for people like him—hackers—that you’d think “oh, well that isn’t too bad,” but there is a different sort of loneliness than there is in hell and in your normalest of normalcies. And, on that note, everyone else is probably sleeping, and the rest of their fractured network is scattered across too many encrypted signals to feel real. The penthouse hums with power but not presence; even the lights seem to wait for permission to be useful. Here he is, watching the city spill itself across the glass in fragments of light and motion, he finds he doesn’t really want to do anything except stand there and wait for his pulse to remember a calmer rhythm. Not very useful.

He thinks, automatically, of names—titles—whatever the hell is unspooling in his mind currently. They unfold in his mind not as people but as coordinates, nodes in a map that always leads back to the same point: him, standing in the middle, trying not to move.

It’s less a list than a reflex. Every name begets another, every memory nests inside a larger one, until he realizes he’s charting not relationships but absences—people who have left, people who have burned out, people who exist now only as old aliases. It’s strange, he thinks, how survival rearranges the meaning of company. How being surrounded by names doesn’t make you any less solitary.

He crosses the room without thinking about it. The couch looks expensive and uncomfortable; the kind of furniture bought for appearances, not living. The windows look out on a city too bright for what it hides. He sets a hand against the back of the chaise and thinks of all the spaces he’s stood in that have been temporary—hideouts, safehouses, borrowed time disguised as shelter. Maybe this one is no different. Maybe he’s just learned to stop calling anything permanent. The skyline flickers on the glass—his reflection, ghosted over the lights below. He studies it like it belongs to someone else, someone quieter, less defined by running. For a moment, he believes it. Then he doesn’t.

It’s the mantlepiece, though, that draws him.

Not because it’s meant to—there is no spotlight; no deliberate arranging—but because it’s the one part of the room that doesn’t look curated. There are only three objects there: a half-burned candle in a chipped holder, and, a single picture frame.

The third, a card sleeve. Old plastic, edges worn, one corner bent. Ellernate doesn’t pick it up, doesn’t flip it, doesn’t really care about identifying it, even. But he notices the way the sleeve has the faintest fingerprint smudge across its surface—someone touched it recently. Handled often. It’s the kind of wear that comes from habit more than intention. The thought crosses his mind—that, something handled while thinking of something else. He doesn’t flip it, doesn’t really dare to touch it. There is a tactility to leaving some things unturned; pulling back a card feels like asking a question out loud. He reads the sleeve instead as a document of habit: a thing kept within reach, consulted once or twice too often, then tucked away before anyone else saw the answer.

A reversed Lovers card.

Ellernate pauses. The stillness doesn’t really feel optional.

The frame is simple—black metal, thin, not chosen for aesthetic but utility. Something you’d grab from a corner shop without thinking twice. The photograph inside is slightly too large for it, trimmed at the edges. The candle is the smallest offense. Cheap ceramic holder, the glaze cracked at one corner. It’s very casual for a place like this. Wax has flowed over the rim and cooled in ridges, evidence of more than one lighting, of evenings measured in the stubborn half-lives of flames. It smells faintly smoky when he leans in, not the hot metal of the Banlands but something overly domestic—the scent of someone who kept a light on, or who liked the idea of a light being kept for them. It is ordinary enough to be meaningless, and meaningful enough to be dangerous.

When his gaze travels up, the photograph is larger, disproportionate in its frame as if someone trimmed a memory to fit an unmoving black edge. He recognizes iTrapped first. It’s natural. Recognition is a narrow, efficient thing—shoulder angle, the set of a jaw when a laugh doesn’t quite reach the eyes. In the picture iTrapped is caught mid-laugh, head thrown back, mouth open in a way that would be easy to mistake for abandon. The movement in the photograph is tidy, practiced-in-public joy that photographs well. It looks like what happiness is supposed to look like on postcards. And, leaning into that laugh is another person—someone Ellernate has never seen. He has the sun-warm posture of someone who moves comfortably in another person’s orbit, hand resting at the small of iTrapped’s back with a claim that is soft and habitual, and, again, very domestic rather than performative. There’s a kitchen behind them in the frame: tiles, a chipped mug on a counter, the sort of light that catches on a spoon. And, when he turns around, just for the smallest of seconds—the kitchen is identical.

Ellernate doesn’t know this person’s name. He doesn’t know whether the photograph is recent or old; he only knows the image’s arithmetic—well-lit room plus two bodies equals a life that existed somewhere the Banlands, someone like him, could not touch. The presence of a second person in a picture of iTrapped is a small incision: not dramatic, not accusatory, but precise in the way a scalpel is precise. It makes certain things audible that had been humming quietly before. More significantly, to be exact, it’s poetic in its own way.

There is, he believes, something about the way iTrapped looks that makes Ellernate inventory the photograph for clues. He’s far too…perfect? Maybe that’s fitting. Maybe not. But, really—he’s far too symmetrical in the photo it’s a bit unnerving. It is not malice he reads, but, construction—the sort of ease made from rehearsals and good lighting, the sort that photographs well and makes for tidy memories later. The smile is honest enough to be believable at a glance and neat enough to be questioned if you look longer. He sets the frame back down without turning the card over. The motion is as simple as it can be.

Touching the photograph longer would be an admission of interest, a promise to name the ache that has no word yet in his mouth. The candle’s wax and the card’s worn edge sit like an index to…something private—things kept for reasons that make sense to the keeper but feel like riddles to anyone else. That the tarot lies face-down, not displayed or thrown away, says more than a confession could: the question has been asked before; someone kept the answer, again, private.

Neutrality, though, is its own fragile thing. The mantle is quiet, and the room leans into the silence as if waiting for someone to decide whether these objects mean anything at all. Ellernate stands between curiosity and abstention for longer than he expects. Of course, he tells himself he is merely inspecting, that this is reconnaissance and not trespass. Still, a small place along the edge of his ribs answers with a new question—how many lives can one man collect before there is no room left for another to fit?

Ellernate looks away from it first.

It feels like eavesdropping. It really does.

Though, that’s when he notices another object firmly placed between the candle, and the frame.

His fingers brush the cold metal edge, and when he lifts it just a bit the candle wobbles and something slips free—a small rectangle that flutters to the mantle with a soft, paper sound. He hadn’t seen it at first; it had been tucked under the candle’s base. To the point—it’s a matchbook, the kind from places that keep their lights low and their doors open late—worn at the fold, the paper softened where thumbs have worried it. On the front, in a serif that tries to be clever and mostly succeeds, are two words: SECOND CHANCE. The type is small, small enough. It’s printed eerily close to the label it’s supposed to work as—just a brand. In this situation, where he’s getting chills solely from just inspecting a living room—that sort of a thing feels like a bit of a stretch.

The matchbook smells faintly of smoke and something else—some wax or aftercleaner—and the scent fits into the room the way the candle’s wax does. A domestic residue of people who once expected to return. He notices the strike surface is scuffed; someone used the matches more than once. Not a souvenir, then. A tool. Very unfitting compared to the rest of the items.

The name on the front sits in his mouth like a foreign syllable made familiar by silence: second. Chance. Two ordinary words with an odd gravity when stacked together. He doesn’t know the man in the photo’s name, not really, but the matchbook furnishes a hint that scaffolds meaning around what had been only image and wax and folded paper. It feels, for the smallest of seconds, like a bookmark in a life he is not meant to read.

He slides the matchbook back beneath the candle with a care that reads like deferral. He sets the frame down. The mantle looks the same, and the light in the room is unchanged; yet the paper’s small phrase sits in the air now, patient and oddly certain.

Second chances, huh?