Illia found him in the heavens, sitting where he usually sat, in the particular stretch of pale endless light that served as the closest thing to a fixed location his existence required. She dropped down beside him without ceremony, brush still in hand, a fresh streak of paint along one knuckle that she had apparently not bothered to clean before coming to find him.
ILA: You've been quiet.
BLK: I've been thinking.
ILA: That's usually when you're quiet. I've learned to read the difference between thinking-quiet and brooding-quiet. This feels like the second one.
He did not answer immediately, and Illia, who had never once in their long acquaintance allowed silence to sit unchallenged for longer than she found tolerable, continued without waiting for him to fill the gap.
ILA: I checked on Astra today. She's painting again. Properly, I mean, not just the cliff stuff we did together. Found her own thing again.
BLK: I saw.
ILA: Of course you did. You see everything.
She said it without bitterness, just observation, the particular ease of someone long accustomed to the specific shape of what he was and what he did, and Blook felt the words land with more weight than she had likely intended them to carry.
BLK: I do see everything.
ILA: That's not a complaint, if that's what you're hearing. It's useful. You're the only one who actually knows what's happening to everyone at once.
BLK: It doesn't feel useful from where I'm sitting.
Illia turned to look at him properly then, setting her brush down across her knee, the particular attention she gave to things she had decided mattered more than her usual cheerful deflection suggested.
ILA: Alright. Talk to me, then. What's actually going on.
He considered, for a long moment, whether to answer honestly, and found that the considering itself had already answered the question, the particular exhaustion of someone who had been carrying something silently for far too long to keep doing so convincingly.
BLK: I watched all five of them today. Astra. Lisa. Alexander. Noel. Ivy. Each of them found their way through something I didn't think they'd survive intact, and each of them came out the other side different. Changed. Whole in some new configuration that wasn't available to them before.
ILA: That's good, isn't it?
BLK: It is. It's wonderful. I'm glad for all of it.
ILA: But.
BLK: But I've watched thousands of people go through exactly that, across more years than I can properly measure, and I have never once gotten to do it myself.
Illia was quiet for a moment, processing this with more seriousness than her usual demeanor typically allowed for.
ILA: Do what, exactly?
BLK: Grieve. Properly. The way they did. Hold something terrible and let it transform into something survivable. I don't transform anything. I just keep it. Every loss I've ever witnessed sits in me exactly as fresh as the day it happened, because I never get the ending that lets grief become something else.
ILA: Because you can't die.
BLK: Because I can't die.
ILA: Have you ever tried to.
The question arrived plainly, without dramatics, the particular directness Illia brought to most things she actually cared about beneath the cheerful exterior, and Blook found himself sitting with it longer than the simplicity of its phrasing suggested it should require.
BLK: No.
ILA: Why not?
BLK: I don't know.
ILA: That's not an answer.
BLK: It's the only one I have.
She studied him for a long moment, her expression shifting through several things Blook recognized but could not immediately name, settling finally on something quieter and more careful than her usual register.
ILA: You've had countless chances. Countless centuries, by the sound of it. You could have asked someone, found some way, ended this whenever you wanted to. And you never did. Why not?
Blook turned the question over the way he had turned over the unfinished thought since the graveyard, since the morning after, finding it harder to evade now that someone else had finally given it a voice outside his own circling internal repetition.
BLK: I think some part of me believed that if I stopped watching, everyone would be alone with their grief. That the watching itself was a kind of company, even if no one knew I was offering it. I think I told myself that mattered enough to justify staying exactly as I was.
ILA: Does it matter? The watching?
BLK: I don't know anymore. I used to believe it did.
ILA: And now?
BLK: Now I think I might have been telling myself that so I wouldn't have to ask the harder question.
ILA: Which is?
He looked at her, this woman who had spent centuries painting things into and out of existence with a brush that answered to nothing but her own will, who had once been part of a generation of knights alongside Nilah, who had agreed without hesitation when he asked her to go sit outside a grieving woman's door for two weeks straight, and found, somewhere in the particular safety of her direct unflinching attention, the words he had been avoiding since the morning after the graveyard.
BLK: Whether I actually want to keep existing like this. Or whether I've simply been too afraid to find out what happens if I don't.
The heavens held their pale endless quiet around them, no wind, no weather, nothing but the particular stillness of a place built for permanence, and Illia sat with him in it for a long while without speaking, the question now fully spoken aloud between them, no longer something Blook could pretend he had not yet finished thinking.
ILA: For what it's worth. I don't think wanting an ending makes you selfish. Even if the ending means forgetting all of us.
BLK: I know.
ILA: But I also don't think you have to decide today.
BLK: No.
ILA: Just. Don't disappear without telling me first. When you do decide.
He looked at her, and something in his chest, old and heavy and finally beginning to shift after far too long held perfectly still, eased slightly at the particular plain affection in the request.
BLK: I won't.
She picked her brush back up, the moment settling into something gentler now, the particular ease that came after a hard thing had finally been said aloud and survived the saying.
ILA: Good. Now come watch me paint something. I'm working on a mountain again and I want an audience that isn't a confused village three states over.
BLK: You already painted a mountain. You told Astra about it.
ILA: I'm painting a different one. Keep up.
He almost smiled. It had been a long while since anything had nearly managed that.