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Chapter Text

The first time Melinöe met Moros, she was seven and suspicious of him.

He stood beside Zagreus and Thanatos in the courtyard, half a head taller than the others, his silver hair tied loosely at his back, his posture too straight for someone his age. She thought he looked like the kind of boy who wouldn’t know how to play tag.

Zagreus had dragged her along, insisting she needed “friends her age.” That was an exaggeration—Thanatos was closer, quiet and serious; and Moros, older, already watching the world as if he understood too much of it.

They played together anyway. Or rather, the others played, while Melinöe and Moros sat near the edge of the garden, pretending not to watch.
He had offered her half his sandwich without saying anything, and she had taken it without saying thank you. That became their rhythm.

Years went by like that. Summers blurred into winters, laughter into awkward silences. Zagreus and Thanatos remained inseparable, dragging their siblings into every scheme and half-baked adventure imaginable.

Melinöe grew into a quiet, careful teenager—sharp-eyed, unflinching. She liked rules because they made sense, unlike people.
Moros became quieter still, a shadow of certainty. He tutored Thanatos and, occasionally, Melinöe too, when Zagreus begged him to help her with mathematics.

Their study sessions were long and still. She would frown at the equations, then glance up to find him watching her with a calm that irritated her. He never lost patience.

“You’re thinking too hard,” he’d say softly.

“That’s the point of thinking,” she’d reply, equally soft.

No one could tell if they liked each other or not. Perhaps neither of them knew, either.

When Zagreus and Thanatos left for university, the group fractured in the quietest way. Melinöe didn’t go to see them off. She said she didn’t like crowds.
Moros had gone with them. He’d already been accepted into a philosophy program—he was always meant to leave.

He said goodbye at the gate, his voice polite, as always.

“Take care of yourself, Princess.”

She didn’t answer, only nodded, clutching the hem of her saffron sleeve until her knuckles turned white.

For the first time, she realized he wasn’t someone she would always see.

They didn’t speak again for years. Messages went unanswered, birthdays forgotten, visits postponed.
She told herself it didn’t matter—that people drift apart all the time.

But sometimes, in the middle of her long nights spent studying under harsh fluorescent light, she would remember his voice: low, certain, inevitable.
And Moros, sitting in his dim apartment grading essays, sometimes found himself pausing when he saw the faint golden hue of saffron in the street, and wondered why it reminded him of something he’d lost without noticing.

They met again when she entered university.

He was the Philosophy professor that taught the class which she took for extra credit, and she—sitting in the back row, braid falling over one shoulder—was pretending not to notice.
He almost didn’t recognize her at first. She looked composed, older, with eyes that saw too much.
When she looked up and met his gaze, for a heartbeat, it was like nothing had changed at all.

But they were different now—two strangers sharing an old, familiar silence.

Chapter Text

It had been years since he last saw her, and yet the moment he stepped into that lecture hall, Moros knew.

He recognized her before he even saw her face — by the tilt of her head, the way her shoulders angled slightly inward when she was deep in thought. She sat near the back, as she always did, half-hidden by a row of taller students. Her hair was shorter now, wheat-colored, tied loosely with an elastic that was about to give up. Her eyes — mismatched, red and green — were fixed on her notebook.

He had taught philosophy for a few years now. Faces came and went, blurring into one another. But hers pulled something old and familiar from the quiet corners of memory.

He didn’t say her name. Not at first.

“Good morning, everyone,” he began, tone even. “This course concerns itself not with what is, but what must be. Welcome to Introduction to Moral Philosophy.”

His voice echoed, soft and steady. The students murmured in response — some eager, some half asleep. She didn’t look up.
He told himself that was a good thing. 

The lecture went as they always did — measured, deliberate, organized. He paced in front of the whiteboard, marker in hand, diagramming thought experiments and contradictions, watching faces flicker between comprehension and confusion.

And then — her hand rose.

He hadn’t expected that.

“Yes?”

Her voice was soft, but it carried.

“You said morality depends on intent,” she said. “But intent can’t be quantified. How can something immeasurable form a foundation for judgment?”

It wasn’t the question of a sophomore. It was the kind of question that came from someone who thought.
The kind of question he used to ask when he still believed every answer mattered.

For a moment, he forgot the script. The class waited.

“Because intent,” he said slowly, “reveals not what a person does, but who they are when no one’s watching.”

Her gaze held his — steady, unflinching.

“Then perhaps morality isn’t about people at all,” she murmured, almost to herself. “It’s about inevitability.”

Something twisted in his chest at that word — his own word, the one he used too often, the one she must have remembered.

He wanted to say something more, but the moment passed. She turned back to her notes, and the world resumed its rhythm.

After class, students trickled out one by one. He stayed behind to erase the board, the sound of dry ink squeaking in the silence.

She was still there.
Gathering her books. Calm, unhurried.

He thought she might come to speak to him — maybe even smile the way she used to when Zagreus dragged them into something absurd. But she only nodded once, polite and distant.

“Professor Moros,” she said. “Thank you for the lecture.”

Professor.
He hated the formality of it, how it carved a line between them that hadn’t been there before.

“You’re welcome,” he managed. “It’s good to see… students thinking that deeply.”

Students. Another line.

She gave a small, knowing smile — or maybe he imagined it.

“You always said thinking is the least people can do.”

Then she was gone.

He stood there for a long moment, hand still on the board, eyes fixed on the empty seat she’d left behind.

For the first time in a long while, Moros felt the sharp edge of something he couldn’t name — not quite regret, not quite longing.

Only inevitability.

Chapter Text

It began as habit — the kind of harmless observation a teacher makes when he recognizes a diligent student.

At least, that’s what Moros told himself.

Melinöe always arrived early.

Five minutes before the lecture began, never later, never earlier. She sat near the back, third row from the wall, where the sunlight couldn’t quite reach. Her notebook was always open, a pen neatly aligned at its edge. She never scrolled on her phone, never whispered to anyone. Just waited. Still. Composed.

It wasn’t unusual. Just… consistent.
And consistency, to Moros, was comforting.

He began to notice small things.
How her hair, loose from its braid, caught the light like faded gold.
How she tapped her pen twice when thinking, never three.
How her eyes — that impossible pair of red and green — seemed to flicker brighter when she disagreed but was too polite to interrupt.

He shouldn’t have noticed that much.
He knew better.

When he spoke, she listened. Not idly — intently.
Her gaze followed every word, as if she were trying to trace the thought itself rather than the sound.

Sometimes, when he looked up from the whiteboard, he caught her already looking.
She didn’t look away quickly, the way most did.
She just… blinked once.
And that, somehow, was worse.

He’d lose his place for a fraction of a second, enough for his students to notice.
Thanatos had once teased him for being too serious, too detached.
He would have liked to argue now, but even he could hear how hollow it would sound.

Weeks passed like that.
His lectures, her silence.
The invisible thread that stretched between them, too thin to name, too strong to ignore.

He graded her assignment one evening and found himself pausing over the final question — “Is truth ever kind?”
Her essay was sharp, precise, but threaded with something quietly mournful. She ended with:

"If truth is inevitable, then kindness must be a choice. Perhaps that’s why most people prefer lies.”

He read it twice. Then a third time.
He didn’t know whether he wanted to praise her or ask if she was all right.

He gave her full marks and didn’t write a single comment.

There was one afternoon — late, the sky outside fading to violet — when she came to his office with a question about the reading.
He wasn’t sure why the sight of her standing there felt like both a surprise and an inevitability.

“You’re early,” he said.

“Or late,” she replied. “Depends on where we start counting.”

She said it so matter-of-factly that he almost smiled.
Almost.

They spoke — about Kierkegaard, about ethics, about the contradictions of reason.
Nothing personal. Nothing dangerous.
But the longer she stayed, the smaller his office seemed to get.

When she left, she thanked him with that quiet nod again.
He watched her go, then looked down at the half-finished cup of tea on his desk and realized he hadn’t touched it since she arrived.

Later, when he walked home under the city lights, he saw her again across the street — leaving the library, earbuds in, scarf trailing behind her.
She didn’t see him.

And yet, something in him wanted to believe she knew he was there.

He shook the thought away.
He had a life built on control, on distance, on reason.
He couldn’t afford to think of her as anything but a student.

But as he stood at the corner, waiting for the light to change, he caught his reflection in the window beside him — a tired man with silver hair, watching the world like it might slip through his fingers if he blinked.

He wondered when observation had become obsession.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t love.

That was the first thing Moros told himself.
He told himself that every morning — when he set down his papers, when he stepped into the lecture hall, when he saw her sitting in her usual place with that same stillness that both steadied and unmade him.

He hald told himself that long ago.

He admired her. That was all. Admiration was safe. Rational. Contained.

Admiration did not make his hands shake when she raised hers to ask a question.

Admiration did not make his pulse stutter when her gaze met his and lingered a second too long.

Admiration did not mean he noticed when she switched from black ink to blue halfway through the semester, or when her braid came loose near the end of class, and he wanted — absurdly, irrationally — to reach out and fix it.

No. This was not love.
It was… observation. Intellectual appreciation.
The kind of fascination any teacher might have for brilliance, for potential.

He repeated the word “admiration” until it lost its meaning.

Melinöe, for her part, said nothing.
She always said nothing.

But he began to suspect she noticed.

The way his eyes followed her sometimes, too long.

The way his tone softened when she spoke — imperceptibly, but she was too perceptive not to hear it.

She never confronted him. Never teased.
That would have been easier.

Instead, she met his gaze with that quiet, unreadable calm, and it felt like she could see the thoughts he worked so hard to bury.
That was the cruelty of her silence — it gave him no ground to defend, no denial to hold.

One afternoon, she lingered after class again. The others had left.
Her notebook stayed open, her pen poised but unmoving.

“Professor Moros,” she said softly. “You’re distracted lately.”

His throat went dry.

“Am I?”

“Yes.” Her tone was gentle, not accusatory. “You stare at the wall when you think no one’s looking.”

He exhaled, slow and deliberate, as if he could control what his body betrayed.

“It’s part of the profession,” he said at last. “Too much thinking. Not enough sleeping.”

A ghost of a smile crossed her face — the kind that wasn’t quite happy, more knowing than kind.

“You used to be better at lying.”

That disarmed him. Completely.

“I don’t lie,” he murmured.

“You rationalize,” she corrected. “It’s worse.”

There was no malice in her words — just fact.
And in her eyes, that quiet knowing again.

She gathered her things, stood, and bowed her head in polite farewell.

“Good afternoon, Professor.”

The sound of the door closing after her echoed like finality.

Moros sat at his desk long after she left, staring at the spot she’d occupied.

He should have been angry — or at least embarrassed. But instead, he felt something heavier.
It wasn’t the shame of being seen. It was the weight of being understood.

And for a man who’d spent his entire life avoiding vulnerability, that was far more dangerous than love.

Chapter Text

He began to draw lines.

Thin, invisible ones. The kind that didn’t show, but could be felt.

It started small — an extra space between them when she lingered after class. Shorter answers. Less eye contact. No more small nods of acknowledgement when she walked in.

He told himself it was necessary. Professional. Logical.

A teacher’s duty to remain objective.

They were never close to begin with, so it shouldn’t have mattered.
But distance, once deliberate, became impossible not to notice.

Melinöe noticed. Of course she did.

She didn’t confront him, not directly. She was too self-contained for that.

But one day after class, when the others were gone, she looked at him for a long moment — that quiet, level gaze that always seemed to know more than it should.

“You don’t have to pretend I don’t exist,” she said.

Her voice was calm, polite, even. But there was something underneath — not anger, not sadness, just… fatigue.
As if she had seen this before, a hundred times in a hundred different ways, and already accepted the outcome.

He froze, chalk still in hand.

“That isn’t what I’m doing.”

“Then what are you doing?”

He had no answer.

He had built his entire life on words — teaching them, dissecting them, mastering them — and yet in that moment, silence was all he had.

She tilted her head slightly, as though studying a puzzle whose solution didn’t matter anymore.

“It’s fine,” she said at last, soft as the space between breaths. “It was inevitable.”

Then she packed her things, as quietly as always, and left him standing there — the marker slipping from his hand, the sound sharp in the empty room.

For the next few days, he kept to the lines he had drawn.

He taught, he spoke, he avoided her eyes.

It should have felt safer. It didn’t.

It felt hollow.

And then came Prometheus.

He transferred in mid-semester — older than the other students, perhaps in his final year. A Philosophy minor, though he hardly needed to be. He spoke with confidence that bordered on arrogance, his tone smooth, deliberate, the kind of composure Moros recognized too well.

When he answered, the class listened. When he smiled, it felt rehearsed — polite in a way that was more performance than courtesy.

And Melinöe… Melinöe spoke to him.
Easily.

Moros watched from the front of the room as they exchanged quiet words before lecture began, their tones low, steady, almost conspiratorial.
She smiled — small, polite, the kind of smile she never gave him.

It shouldn’t have mattered.
It didn’t matter.
And yet, his pen broke in his hand halfway through the lecture.

That night, he walked home under the dull glow of the streetlights, rain starting to fall in soft, uncertain drops.

He thought of Melinöe’s words — “It was inevitable.”

He had spent his entire life mastering inevitability. But this one, he realized, was of his own making.

Chapter Text

Prometheus had a way of speaking that made everything sound like a challenge.

Not an open one — not the kind you could acknowledge and address — but the kind hidden beneath layers of civility, like a blade slipped under the tablecloth.

He was clever. Too clever.
Every word deliberate, every pause calculated.

When he spoke, the room leaned toward him without realizing it.

Moros recognized the type. He’d been that type once.

The first time Prometheus challenged him, it was phrased as a question:

“Professor, if we define inevitability as the culmination of all possible outcomes, doesn’t that make free will an illusion we tell ourselves for comfort?”

Polite. Thoughtful. Dangerous.

Moros replied with equal composure, tracing the line of logic calmly — perhaps too calmly. He’d learned that silence could be sharper than words when wielded properly.

“An illusion is still real to the one who believes in it,” he said. “The question is whether comfort invalidates truth.”

The class murmured. Prometheus smiled.

A stalemate. For now.

But the real duel began weeks later.

Prometheus had a habit of drawing Melinöe into his discussions. Subtly. Strategically.

He’d turn to her mid-argument with a polite, almost deferential tone:

“Wouldn’t you agree, Melinöe?”

And she would pause — because she always paused — before answering with careful logic that often supported his point, not Moros’s.

It wasn’t betrayal. She was simply being fair.

He knew that.
And yet, each time, it stung more than he’d ever admit.

Once, however, she surprised them both.

“I think you’re missing the professor’s point,” she said quietly. “It’s not about control. It’s about acceptance.”

Prometheus tilted his head.

“Acceptance of what?”

“Of limits.”

Her gaze flicked to Moros for a brief second — unspoken understanding passing between them like a thread drawn tight — before she turned back to Prometheus.

“Even truth bends under the weight of human limits.”

The class went silent.

Prometheus smiled — not in defeat, but in recognition.

And Moros, for the first time, felt something sharp twist in his chest that had nothing to do with pride.

After class, Prometheus lingered as Melinöe packed her things.

They spoke in low tones — too low for Moros to make out. Prometheus laughed once, soft and charming. She didn’t laugh back, but her lips curved faintly, polite as always.

When they finally left, the air felt heavier.

Moros sat alone at his desk, staring at the faint marker ink on his fingertips, realizing how absurd it was to feel jealousy over something that didn’t exist.

But he couldn’t help it.

Prometheus was everything he wasn’t — confident, outspoken, fearless.

And Melinöe… she had always gravitated toward brilliance, even when it burned.

He told himself it was natural. Inevitable.

But when he saw her later that week, standing in the hallway with Prometheus, her posture relaxed and her expression almost warm, something uncharacteristic flickered in him — something dangerously close to resentment.

He turned away before either of them could notice.

That night, Moros couldn’t sleep.

He sat at his desk, papers forgotten, tea untouched, the city outside washed in amber light.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted anymore — her attention, her distance, or simply an end to the uncertainty.

But one thing he knew for certain:
Whatever this was, it was no longer admiration.
And perhaps, he had always known, he just did what he did best.

Lying.

Chapter Text

It was supposed to be an ordinary evening.

Zagreus had texted him that morning — “Dinner tonight. All of us. No excuses.”
He even sent a smiley face. That, Moros knew, was a threat.

He’d tried to decline at first. Work, papers, grading — any excuse would have sufficed. But Zagreus was relentless, and Thanatos had already agreed, which meant resistance was futile.

And so, here he was — at the long, crowded table of Zagreus’s shared apartment with Melinöe, surrounded by warmth and laughter and the ghost of a time when things were simpler.

When he and Melinöe were only names that happened to coexist in the same conversations.

Zagreus was in full host mode, gesturing wildly as he told stories. Thanatos rolled his eyes but smiled despite himself.

Melinöe sat quietly across from Moros, head slightly tilted, her expression faintly amused — the same distant, knowing calm she always carried like armor.

She looked different now.

Older, maybe. Sharper around the edges.

But there were still traces of the little girl he remembered — the one who used to sit by the lake and draw shapes in the dirt while Zagreus tried to drag everyone into some grand adventure.

The one who sat next to him in a comfortable silence and looked at him like he held the solution to every puzzle in the world.

He hadn’t thought about that in years.
He wished he hadn’t thought about it now.
He tried not to think about it anymore.

Zagreus was retelling a story about their teenage years — something about an ill-fated fishing trip that ended in near disaster. Everyone laughed. Even Melinöe smiled.

And Moros, against his will, remembered —
Her, sitting at the dock with her knees pulled close to her chest, the setting sun painting her hair gold. She had looked up at him then, eyes mismatched and bright, and said, almost absently,

“You always look like you’re thinking about something sad.”

He’d wanted to say no, I’m thinking about you, but he didn’t. He never did.

Back then, it was easier to pretend he didn’t notice how she lingered near him without reason.

Easier to believe her small acts of attention — offering him tea, remembering his favorite books — were just her being kind.

Easier to tell himself that she didn’t mean it the way he feared she might.

Now, across the table, she looked at him again.
It wasn’t the same look.

There was distance now — polite, detached, a quiet respect that came from someone who had once cared too much and learned better.
And maybe, he thought, that was inevitable.

He’d drawn the lines himself, after all.

Zagreus said something about “how funny it is that we’ve all grown up,” and laughter filled the room again.

Moros smiled when he was supposed to.
But his eyes lingered on Melinöe, and for a fleeting moment, he wondered if she remembered those days the same way he did.

Probably not.

When she met his gaze, it was steady — unflinching, unreadable.

And in that look, Moros saw the inevitability he’d spent his entire life teaching others about:
the quiet tragedy of something that was never meant to begin, ending all the same.

He left before dessert, blaming work again.
Melinöe didn’t stop him.
She just nodded once, her voice soft but distant.

“Good night, Professor.”

And the door closed on everything unsaid.

Chapter Text

Prometheus and Melinöe fell into rhythm easily — too easily, perhaps.

He saw it first in class: the unhurried way their conversations formed, the way her answers found his questions before he even finished asking them. They spoke the same language — precision, restraint, intellect — except where Prometheus’s voice was steady and sure, Melinöe’s was soft and deliberate, like she was weighing the world before giving it words.

And Moros… Moros stood there at the front of the lecture hall, explaining theories of moral reasoning while his thoughts wandered in directions they shouldn’t.

He didn’t want to care.

He told himself that every morning before stepping into the classroom.

He failed every time.

When Prometheus began meeting Melinöe outside of class, it was entirely appropriate.

A research project — her own proposal, something about ethical paradoxes in decision theory. Prometheus had taken an interest, offered feedback, even suggested a joint paper submission.

Nothing improper.
Nothing worth noticing.
And yet, Moros noticed everything.

He noticed when she started arriving later to his lectures — always on time, never early anymore.

He noticed when she looked tired, and when her hair was still damp from rain that morning.

He noticed that she no longer looked at him at all.

It shouldn’t have mattered. But it did.

He found out about their meetings by accident — or maybe because Zagreus mentioned it over coffee, far too casually.

“Apparently she’s been seeing Prometheus after hours. Something academic. He’s helping her publish.”

Something in Moros’s chest pulled taut.

He didn’t say anything, but Zagreus must have seen something in his expression because he added,

“You okay?”

“Of course.”

“Right,” Zagreus said, unconvinced. “You look like you just swallowed a nail.”

Moros smiled thinly. “It’s just work.”

But it wasn’t.

When Melinöe came to return a stack of graded essays later that week, she seemed… lighter.

She placed them neatly on his desk, her voice low but calm.

“Thank you for your notes, Professor. They were helpful.”

He nodded, fighting to keep his tone even.

“I’m glad.” That was supposed to end the conversation, but the words that followed slipped out before he could stop them. “You’ve been busy lately.”

She looked up at him — a flicker of something unreadable passing through her expression.

“Yes. Prometheus thinks I should expand my research.”

He hated how his pulse reacted to that name.

“He’s… ambitious,” he said carefully. “Be cautious. He often confuses conviction for truth.”

Her lips curved slightly, not a smile — more like an acknowledgement.

“And you don’t?”

He froze.

The air between them thickened — silence pressing down like a weight neither could lift.

“You don’t have to pretend not to care,” she said quietly. “But you also don’t get to act like you do.”

Her tone wasn’t angry. It was steady, certain — too certain, the way truth always was when spoken by someone who’d already made peace with it.

“You don’t have that right, Professor.”

The title cut more sharply than she intended, or maybe exactly as she intended.

She turned to leave, her movements deliberate, graceful — and final.

Moros didn’t stop her.
He just stood there, hands still, breath uneven, realizing that inevitability wasn’t always about what was meant to happen — sometimes it was about what you’d already ruined.

Chapter Text

Philosophers, by definition, did not quarrel.

They debated.
They reasoned.
They dissected.

And yet, Moros couldn’t shake the feeling that Prometheus had come to his office that afternoon not to debate, but to draw blood.

The discussion began politely enough — as they always did.

Prometheus leaned against the edge of Moros’s desk, posture casual, smile faint.

“I was hoping to get your thoughts on Melinöe’s paper. She’s developing the section on moral consequence — fascinating premise, really.”

Moros didn’t look up from the essay he was grading.

“She’s talented.”

“Exceptionally,” Prometheus said. “It’s rare to see someone so young grasp complexity with such clarity. You’ve guided her well.”

It was a compliment. On the surface.

Beneath it, Moros could hear the faintest edge — like a string pulled too tight.

He set his pen down.

“Her work speaks for itself.”

“Of course.” Prometheus’s tone softened — almost warm. “But guidance matters. You must take pride in her progress.”

Moros finally looked up.

“I take pride in all my students.”

Prometheus’s eyes glinted with amusement.

“Naturally.”

Later that week, Prometheus requested to present his research. A project.
Topic: “The Ethics of Attachment and Objectivity in Human Reason.”

Moros knew exactly what that meant, and yet he agreed.

He wasn’t sure why — pride, maybe. Or inevitability.

The seminar began with fifty students in the room, Melinöe sitting near the center, notebook open, her expression calm and unreadable.

Prometheus spoke first, smooth as ever.

“Our capacity for reason often falters in the presence of emotion,” he began. “Even philosophers — especially philosophers — mistake detachment for virtue.”

Moros folded his hands, his tone even, “Detachment is not virtue. It’s discipline.”

Prometheus smiled, “And discipline without empathy is cruelty.”

It was nothing, a passing remark, but every word landed like deliberate provocation.

The class shifted — eyes darting between them.

And there, right in the middle, Melinöe’s gaze flickered between both men, her pen hovering mid-sentence.

“What do you think, Melinöe?” Prometheus asked lightly.

She startled slightly — just slightly — before replying,

“I think… it depends what you’re trying to protect.”

“And what would that be?” Moros asked, before realizing how sharp he sounded.

“Yourself,” she said simply.

The silence that followed was heavy, awkward, unbearable.

Prometheus smiled again — that infuriating, knowing smile.

“Wise words. See, Professor? You’ve taught her well.”

Moros didn’t respond.

After class, he found them standing outside, speaking in low tones.

Prometheus gestured animatedly, Melinöe listening with that quiet attentiveness that had always undone Moros more than he’d admit.

She was smiling faintly — not bright, but genuine.

When she caught Moros’s gaze from across the hallway, her smile faded.

He inclined his head politely, walked past without a word, and didn’t stop until he reached the empty stairwell.

There, for the first time in years, Moros pressed a hand to his chest and felt something heavy and human beneath the surface of inevitability.

Something like jealousy.

Prometheus wasn’t his enemy.

Not really.

But he was a reminder — that someone else could reach her, understand her, match her, in ways Moros never allowed himself to try.

He’d drawn the line.
He just hadn’t realized he’d trapped himself behind it.

Chapter Text

That night, Melinöe dreamt.

Maybe it was because of the seminar — too sharp, too revealing — or maybe it was because she had been holding her breath for too long.

Whatever the reason, her mind wandered backward, into softer years — back when summers felt endless and grief hadn’t yet learned her name.

In the dream, the air was warm and golden.

She was twelve, maybe thirteen.

Moros was older — already in high school, already the kind of calm that unnerved everyone else.

They used to gather in Moros's house’s yard after sunset, where the air smelled faintly of rain and burnt sugar from the nearby bakery. Zagreus and Thanatos would argue about something trivial — rules of a game, or who cheated first — while Melinöe sat under the old fig tree with her notebook.

Moros would sit beside her, not speaking, just reading.

He was always reading.

She’d liked that about him.

He never filled silence with noise.

“Moros,” she said once, looking up from her notebook.

“Yes?”

“Do you ever think about the future?”

He turned a page. “Constantly.”

“No, I mean…” She hesitated, pressing the pencil against her lip. “Do you ever think about what you want in it?”

He looked at her then — really looked — his expression unreadable.

“That’s a dangerous question.”

“Why?”

“Because wanting is where suffering begins.”

She frowned. “That’s not an answer.”

He smiled faintly, eyes soft. “It’s the only one I have.”

She didn’t understand him then — not really.
But she’d thought, in the naive certainty of youth, that maybe she could learn. That maybe, if she stayed close enough, she could understand him someday.

And so she’d said, without thinking,

“Then maybe I’ll learn to want for you.”

He went still.

The world around them felt suddenly too quiet — the kind of silence that made her regret speaking at all.

“Melinöe,” he said finally, gently, like one would speak to someone about to step too close to a cliff. “Don’t.”

She had smiled — small, embarrassed — and turned away.

“It was just a thought.”

But she’d felt it then — the distance.
Thin as air, invisible, but unmistakable.

He hadn’t come to sit under the fig tree after that.

Then she felt herself trying to call out to him, to tell him she hadn’t meant it the way it sounded — that she hadn’t even known what it meant.

That please...

But dreams are cruel things.
They only play back what already happened.

She saw him again, a little older this time, walking ahead while she followed, smaller, quieter, her steps too hesitant to close the gap.

Every time she tried, the distance only stretched further — until she couldn’t see his face anymore.

Melinöe woke before dawn.

Her eyes stung, though she wasn’t crying.

Outside, the city was still — that brief hour before light and noise return.

She sat up, pressing a hand to her chest, and whispered the same thing she’d told herself every time he drifted away.

“It’s alright. It was never meant to exist.”

But her voice cracked on the last word.

Chapter Text

For three days, Melinöe was like a ghost. She was there, but barely.

She arrived to lecture two minutes after it began and left one minute before it ended. She sat in the third row, not the second. She submitted her reflections online, turned off notifications, and walked a different path across the quad, the one lined with ginkgo trees that shed quiet, papery leaves she could pretend to be interested in. When Moros asked the room, “Counterexample?”, she kept her gaze on the margin of her notebook and let someone else answer. When he looked past the rows, she looked at the clock.

It worked, in the way cauterizing works.

Prometheus noticed by noon on the second day. Of course he did. He lived in the spaces other people ignored—the after-questions, the pauses that revealed more than the answers. In seminars, he watched her fingers still on her pen when Moros spoke. After class, he watched her take the long route out, shoulders squared, face blank.

On the third afternoon, he intercepted her in the lab corridor as the exhaust hoods hummed and the fluorescents hummed louder.

“Walk with me,” he said.

It wasn’t really a question. She followed anyway, because refusing would look like running and she refused to run.

They stepped out into the winter light. The sky was a pale, patient blue. Students crossed and recrossed the brick paths in loose diagonals, bundled and busy. Prometheus handed her a coffee he hadn’t asked if she wanted.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I am efficient,” she replied.

“That is not the same thing.” A pause. “Has Professor Moros—”

She stopped. “Don’t.”

“—hurt you?” Prometheus finished softly.

Melinöe stared at him, surprised, and then not surprised at all. He had always moved directly to the axis of a thing.

“No,” she said. The word lodged, then slid free. “He just stopped looking at me.”

Prometheus’s gaze did not flinch. “Ah.”

That was all. Not pity. Not triumph. Just comprehension, neat as a knot pulled tight.

They walked again. The coffee warmed her hand; it didn’t reach her chest.

“Why does it matter?” she asked finally. “Whether he looks or not? He is my professor. I am his student. The line is very clear.”

“Lines,” Prometheus said, “are often clearest to the people who draw them.”

“And to those who are told to obey them,” she said, almost lightly. “I am good at obedience.”

He smiled at that—small, rueful. “No, you’re good at discipline. Too good.” He let the quiet stretch a moment. “Would you like me to speak with him?”

“No.” Too fast. She softened it. “No, thank you.”

“Because you don’t want to make it a spectacle?” he asked, but it wasn't so much a question as a statement.

“Because it isn’t anything,” she said, and the lie was so elegant it felt almost true. “He did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. There is nothing to fix.”

Prometheus studied her a moment the way some people study proofs: searching for the single step you can’t justify. He did not find it, because she offered him none.

“Then allow me a less efficient question,” he said. “What will you do with the part of you that still wants him to look?”

She exhaled. A white thread of breath unraveled in the air and vanished.

“I will put it somewhere it cannot ruin anything,” she said. “The freezer, perhaps.”

Prometheus laughed, quick and bright. “Spoken like a chemist.” Then, more gently: “Even frozen things expand, given time.”

She didn’t answer. He didn’t press.

They circled back toward the humanities building, its windows reflecting thin sunlight. Through the glass she could see, absurdly, her own seminar room—rows of chairs, the old whiteboard that refused to erase clean. The door was ajar. Moros stood alone at the front, sleeves rolled, writing something on the board in his precise hand. He paused, as if listening for a sound no one else could hear.

“Do you hate him?” Prometheus asked.

Melinöe’s mouth moved around a shape that never became a word. “No,” she said at last. “I am learning how not to depend on the answer to a question I never asked.”

Prometheus regarded her with that quiet approval he reserved for particularly sharp definitions. “That,” he said, “is a curriculum I can endorse.”

They stopped just shy of the door. Inside, Moros set the marker down, then picked it up again, then set it down for good. He turned toward the rows—toward the third seat in the third row like he was about to say something to no one. His gaze slid past the glass and did not see them.

Prometheus angled himself so his reflection cut across the pane. “You know,” he said, quietly, kindly, “You already have my number. Text or call, whichever, whenever. If you’d like a different room to think in.”

“Are you getting sentimental?” she asked, a hint of jest in her voice, and Prometheus looked pleased with himself.

“It’s a door,” he said. “You choose whether to open it.”

She looked through the glass, at the man at the front of the room who had taught her to love precision and then became imprecise when it mattered. She did not reach for the handle.

“I have a lab in ten minutes,” she said.

“Of course.” Prometheus stepped back. “Be efficient.”

He left her there, which she appreciated. He was kind in the way that never announced itself.

Melinöe stood a moment longer until the air felt less like a glass pressed to her ribs. Then she went the other way—down the stairs, past the vending machines, out into the brittle bright. She found a bench and sat, hands tucked in her sleeves, watching the wind redraw the ginkgo leaves in skittering patterns across the path.

He just stopped looking at me, she had said.

The worst part was how cleanly the sentence fit inside her. No edges to catch on, nothing to bleed against. A fact you could catalogue and shelve. She could live with facts.

She took out her phone, typed a message, deleted it. Typed another, deleted that one too. Efficiency, she reminded herself, is not the same as endurance.

When the bell tolled the hour, she stood. She did not look back at the windows. She did not look for him.

Across campus, in a room one floor up, Moros pressed thumb and forefinger to his brow and told himself that distance, too, is a discipline.

Both were correct. Neither felt better.

Chapter Text

Moros scheduled the colloquium on a Friday evening precisely because no one sane would come. That was the control. Whoever appeared in the lecture hall would be there by choice, not inertia.

At 17:59, the room was a scatter of graduate students, two auditors from economics, a lost mathematician, and—inevitably—Melinöe. Third row, center. Hair pulled into a quick knot. Notes aligned square to the desk. She had never once arrived late to anything he ran; he wished she was.

At 18:01, Prometheus took the seat beside her.

Moros felt the shift like a draught that no window could explain. Prometheus didn’t look at him, at first. He bent toward Melinöe with some comment—low, companionable—and she listened with that small frown she wore when she was calibrating rather than resisting. Steady rhythm. Reliable constant.

Moros uncapped his marker.

“Tonight,” he said, “we’ll consider how a theory behaves when we remove the variables that comfort it.”

On the board: DETERMINISM / CHOICE. Underneath, a ladder of claims he had taught so often he could draw it in the dark. He moved through them with his usual restraint—text, counterexample, refinement—watching the room’s attention tilt and correct. He did not look at the third row until the first Q&A, and even then it was to call on a student in the back with an overconfident voice and a talent for objections that wilted at the second question.

Prometheus didn’t wait his turn.

“Professor,” he said mildly, as Moros erased. “If a system defines its boundaries and then measures coherence within them, how does it avoid praising itself for its own fence?”

There it was: probing dressed as neutrality. Moros replaced the cap. “By testing consequences at the edges.”

“And when the edge is a person?” Prometheus asked. He did not glance at Melinöe when he said it, which was how Moros knew the question was for her anyway.

“We don’t test people,” Moros said. “We test claims about them.”

“Ah. Then let’s claim,” Prometheus replied, lazy as a cat in a sunbeam, always sounding too confident, too self-assured, too knowing. “That an instructor’s selected distance counts as a neutral condition rather than an intervention. Show me the math.”

A rustle—interest sharpening. Moros kept his tone even. “Distance avoids contamination.”

“Or produces it,” Prometheus said. “Absence can bias as surely as presence.”

Melinöe didn’t move. Her gaze stayed on the board as if the answers lived there and not in the air.

“Next question,” Moros said.

The hour lengthened. Prometheus asked sparsely but with precision, nudging premises, reframing Moros’s examples as if to see how they held under another light. Moros answered with an economy that would have looked like calm from the hallway. Inside, he could feel the small shifts of balance—how the room’s regard redistributed with each exchange, how Melinöe’s pen paused and resumed not at his sentences but at Prometheus’s pivots. He wasn’t sure whether he was measuring anything or simply pressing a thumb against a bruise.

When the colloquium ended, the usual clatter of zippers and chairs rose and fell. Students drifted to the aisle in polite eddies. Prometheus stayed seated, speaking quietly to Melinöe. Moros organized his notes into stacks that did not need organizing. He should leave. He did not.

Melinöe stood. She thanked him the same way she always had—voice soft, exact, as if gratitude were a language with strict grammar. Prometheus said nothing to Moros, only offered a wave that was almost a bow, and then he and Melinöe began toward the door together, matched without trying.

“Miss Melinöe,” Moros said.

They stopped. Prometheus glanced at her; at the smallest tilt of her head, then he walked on. The door clicked shut. The hall felt instantly larger.

“Are you all right?” Moros asked.

It was a poor question. He knew it when he heard it leave his mouth—too blunt for her, too late for him. But he had already sent it into the air, and he was a great believer in consequence.

Melinöe considered. She did not fidget, did not shield. “I am keeping up,” she said. “The reading was clear.”

“I meant—” He stopped. He had meant none of the safe things. “I meant… in general.”

“Generalities are imprecise,” she said, not unkindly.

He tried again. “Seminar has been—”

“Lively,” she supplied.

“Yes.” He swallowed. “And if any of that has made your work more difficult—”

“It has made it more… rigorous,” she said, and the pause gave the word an edge. “I do not mind rigor.”

He nodded, and felt that he was being granted an alibi he hadn’t earned.

“Thank you for the colloquium,” she added. “The framework on interference was useful.”

“Good,” he said, and heard the thinness.

She looked at him then—not through him, not past him, but at him in the way he remembered from years ago: direct, steady, as if she was measuring not his argument but his temperament. He managed not to look away.

“Professor,” she said softly, “you don’t have to ask me that question again.”

He knew which one she meant. He also knew that if he let the moment pass, it would set like plaster.

“Nevertheless,” he said, “I will ask if I want to know.”

A faint, almost imperceptible wince crossed her features—there and gone, like light in a window. “Then I will answer if I want to tell you.”

Silence. It wasn’t unfriendly. It was just the truthful kind.

She inclined her head. “Good night.”

He should have said her name. He didn’t. “Good night.”

The door closed behind her with a seal that felt hermetic. Moros sat on the edge of the desk and stared at the half-erased ladder of claims. He thought of control variables—how you choose them so the experiment won’t lie to you, how easily the choosing becomes a lie of its own.

Distance avoids contamination.

Or produces it.

He had designed a boundary, drew it clean, taught himself the dignity of keeping it. Now he wasn’t sure how to cross back without contaminating everything he’d used as proof of care.

In the hallway, cut by the thin pane of the door’s window, he saw the bottom of a saffron skirt, the edge of a dark coat. Two figures paused, then moved off together—steady rhythm, corridor light flickering them in and out like frames from a film.

Moros capped the marker. He placed it precisely parallel to the tray’s edge. He did not follow.

Later, he wrote an email to the colloquium listserv attaching the slides. He typed and deleted one more message—the one with no addressee and no subject line, the one that began, Are you—

He closed the laptop.

If this was a curriculum, he understood the next unit’s title: Consequence.

Chapter Text

Rain arrived the way deadlines did—without drama, just inevitability. By the time Moros stepped out of the faculty building, the courtyard had turned to a single, shallow mirror. Students hurried across it like thoughts he couldn’t keep.

Melinöe stood beneath the eave, hair pinned up, saffron skirt darkening at the hem where a stray drip pressed its luck. She hadn’t noticed him. Or she had, and elected not to show it.

He opened the umbrella before he could rehearse a justification. “Miss Melinöe,” he said, voice even. “Shall we walk?”

She looked at the rain, then at the strip of dry concrete between them. “Only if you keep your side.”

He tilted the canopy, an exact bisecting line. “Of course.”

They stepped out together. The umbrella skimmed the rain into quiet arcs, a moving room with soft walls. Moros adjusted the angle a fraction so the wind wouldn’t catch her shoulder. It was nothing; it felt like everything.

They said the easy things first. The seminar’s next file. A lab’s scheduling conflict. The rumor that the café near the west gate had changed suppliers and ruined the espresso.

“They swear it will improve,” he offered.

“They always swear that,” she said.

Their pace settled. Sidewalk lights stretched into the puddles, tearing themselves long and thin. The umbrella made a small, faithful circle of sound around them—rain reframed into pattern. Boundary, he thought, and hated himself for the metaphor.

At the crosswalk the signal refused to change. They stood with their toes on the white line, and he was suddenly aware of how very small the shelter was, how easily his sleeve could brush hers if he breathed wrong. He kept his hands at his sides.

“You’ll want the south gate,” he said, too quietly.

“I know the way,” she replied, not unkindly.

He nodded. He knew she did. He knew she had known it for years, long before he began pretending his distance was benevolence. Memory, treacherous, found him anyway: a bench twelve winters ago, a girl in a too-big coat pointing at constellations she was only half certain of, trusting he’d supply the names. The tilt of her face then—open, bright, like there was a universe in the answer and he might give it.

Now, he saw the same face with the light subtracted. Not empty—never that. Just guarded. As if she had filed something sharp down to a manageable shape and learned to carry it without bleeding.

“Professor?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re pushing the umbrella toward me again.”

He corrected the angle by a hair. “Apologies.”

“It keeps happening.”

“Wind,” he said, and heard the lie wear his voice like a borrowed coat.

A scooter hissed past, throwing up a wet fan that almost reached their shoes. She didn’t flinch. She never had. He envied that steadiness and feared it in equal measure.

“Thank you for the seminar,” she said after a block. 

He waited.

“It was useful,” she added, and the pause did what it always did—turned neutral words into an instrument. “For deciding what not to measure.”

He felt the point slide in without force, clean and exact. “You mean me.”

“I mean variables that pretend to be constant,” she said. “It simplifies the math.”

They walked under a sycamore; rain shook loose in a small, sudden curtain. He pivoted the canopy in time; the drops caught the fabric and ran harmlessly off. He wanted to say I never meant harm. He wanted to say You looked at me like I was allowed to exist. He wanted to say so much. He said none of it.

At the south gate, the awning extended far enough that he could close the umbrella without baptizing them both. The rain boomed, larger without the silk between.

“Thank you,” she said. Her eyes held him for a measured second. Not searching. Confirming.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

She adjusted her bag on her shoulder. “Prometheus asked if I’d consider choosing the same elective with him next term.”

The gate’s sensor light ticked on as if consulted. Moros kept his breath even. “Will you?”

“I told him I’ll decide later.” A beat. “I tend to choose the path that costs me less.”

He nodded once, a concession and a sentence. “Sensible.”

“Rational,” she corrected. Then, after a heartbeat that felt dangerously like grace, “I hope your umbrella survives the season.”

“It’s sturdy,” he said. “It was a gift.”

“From whom?”

“Zagreus,” he lied gently, because the truth—your brother, years ago, after a storm I failed to prepare for—would tell her too much about when he started counting the weather.

Melinöe’s mouth tilted, not quite a smile. “Then it’s used to chaos.”

The gate unlocked with a soft click. She stepped backward into the rain’s reach, already dampening at the shoulders, already becoming her own boundary again.

“Good night, Professor.”

He almost said her name. He swallowed it the way he had learned to swallow every salvaged thing. “Good night.”

She turned and went, rain stitching itself between them with professional efficiency. The world resumed its ordinary scale. Moros stood beneath the awning a moment longer, the closed umbrella a weight in his hand, the ghost of a small room settling around his ribs.

He had set the boundary. He had enforced it. And now, walking back alone, he understood the most difficult part of any experiment wasn’t designing the distance.

It was living with what the distance measured.

Chapter Text

Zagreus picked the loudest restaurant within walking distance of campus—tin ceilings, clatter, laughing undergrads, a jukebox that only knew one volume. “Neutral ground,” he declared, grinning like chaos in human form. “No thesis talk, no grading, no trauma dumps. We eat. We hydrate. We behave.”

Moros arrived early. He always did. He sat where he could see the door—habit, not strategy—and folded his hands like he was trying to keep them from reaching backward in time. Thanatos appeared next, scowling like a man being punished for existing. Zagreus came in loud and radiant, dragging half the noise of the restaurant in with him.

Then Melinöe arrived—hair loosely braided, saffron sweater bright against the gray light outside. She slid into the chair beside Zagreus and said, almost as an afterthought, “By the way, I invited a friend.”

Zagreus blinked. “You did?”

“Yes.”

Before he could ask, the door swung open again.

Prometheus entered with the quiet confidence of someone who had already charmed the entire building. “I hope I’m not late,” he said pleasantly. “Melinöe mentioned dinner. I couldn’t refuse.”

Zagreus blinked again, slower this time. “Oh. You’re that Prometheus.”

Prometheus smiled. “I suppose I am.” He shook hands around the table—firm with Zagreus, courteous with Thanatos—then stopped in front of Moros. “Ah,” he said, amused. “So this is why you always look at her like a fragment of your past.”

The words were gentle, but they landed like a spark in dry grass. Zagreus coughed—too loud—to break the tension. “Right! Introductions. Prometheus, this is Moros. Melinöe and he go way back. Childhood thing. He used to be the terrifyingly calm older kid who knew everything.”

“I was thirteen,” Moros said evenly.

“And terrifyingly calm,” Zagreus confirmed.

Laughter followed. The tension softened—but not completely.

Dinner started well enough. The conversation was harmless, light, the kind that made time sound forgiving. Thanatos even cracked half a smile. Prometheus fit in easily, talking with his hands, eloquent in that dangerous way men are when they know exactly how much space they occupy.

“So,” Prometheus said eventually, “Melinöe and I are working on a research proposal together. She makes the entire process—what was it you said?—ah, bearable.”

Moros didn’t flinch, but something cold and sharp slipped between his ribs. He didn’t know why it bothered him, only that it did.

“She said that?” Zagreus said, mock-surprised. “That’s high praise. She barely tolerates me.”

“I said tolerable, not bearable,” Melinöe corrected quietly.

Prometheus chuckled. “You always correct me. It’s very grounding.”

The table laughed again. Moros didn’t.

Jokes blurred into memories. Zagreus told stories about childhood chaos—the time Melinöe built a makeshift chemistry lab out of the kitchen, how Moros tried to explain cause and effect while Zagreus nearly set the curtains on fire. It was warm. It was familiar. It was safe. Until it wasn’t.

Moros spoke before he thought. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with him lately.”

Silence. Prometheus arched a brow, mild and knowing. Melinöe turned toward him, expression unreadable.

“We work together,” she said evenly.

“It wasn’t criticism,” Moros replied, too quickly, too sharply. “Just an observation.”

Her tone didn’t change. “You’re very good at those.”

And there it was—that distant, frostbitten tone that wasn’t anger, just absence. The quiet removal of warmth. The one that left him standing in a space she’d already decided not to inhabit anymore.

Zagreus, bless his chaotic soul, clapped his hands. “Okay! Garlic bread. The one constant of civilization.”

“Thrilling,” Thanatos said.

Prometheus smiled. “I like this dynamic.”

“I don’t,” Moros said under his breath.

Zagreus didn’t seem to hear—or pretended not to. “Anyway, Melinöe and Moros used to practically live in each other’s pockets growing up. We were, actually. Thanatos was my shadow! Inseparable! That’s why I invited everyone tonight. Thought we could all reconnect like normal functioning people.”

Melinöe’s fork paused midair. “Normal,” she repeated softly. “That’s ambitious.”

Prometheus’s grin widened. “Ambition makes life bearable, doesn’t it?”

Moros didn’t answer.

When dinner finally ended, Zagreus lingered to argue over the bill. Prometheus shook hands all around, told Melinöe to text him about the next meeting, and left with that faint, infuriating smile.

Moros waited by the door. Melinöe brushed past him like air.

“Melinöe,” he said quietly.

She stopped but didn’t look at him.

“I reacted poorly.”

“No,” she said softly. “You reacted predictably.”

And then she was gone—stepping out into the wet night, the streetlights bending around her like she was made of something the world couldn’t quite touch.

Thanatos came up beside him, hands in his pockets, silent for a long while. Then:

“You can’t keep standing at the edge of your own story,” he said.

Moros turned to him, frowning. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Thanatos said, meeting his eyes with that clinical calm only he could manage, “you either walk in… or you watch someone else write the ending for you.”

He left Moros there—under the dim restaurant sign, rain whispering against glass, a quiet stillness where laughter used to be.

And for the first time, Moros wasn’t sure which choice frightened him more.