noli’s hands hovered blindly over 007n7’s face. he wasn’t moving. his beloved was unmoving. how could have he let this happen? how careless must he have been? his hands shook, overrun with tremors uncountable & trembles of the dozen. tears slid down his face, down his cheeks, falling onto the chest of 007n7’s shirt, staining it with damp spots. if 007n7 had been alive, he would’ve been wiping away those tears by now, yet there was no more breath left in the poor man to do so. he had a bullet lodged deep in his cranium, blood spilling out onto the floorboards in a circular pattern like some sick display of art. noli couldn’t even bear to take a single glance towards 007n7’s mortifying, bleak expression now.

noli’s hands flew up to his void-crown, yanking the thing out of its continuous hovering position in the air & throwing it onto the ground with an almighty crash. the thing made a massive dent in the floorboards, yet the crown itself was untouched. noli slammed his face into his palms in frustration, desperately wracking his brain for a response to this situation, for a way to get 007n7 back to him. … get 007n7 back. noli’s hands slowly lifted out of his palms, tear-stained mask edges now glimmering with something other than anguish. noli was a god, wasn’t he? he’d only come down to earth to pretend to be human for the fun of it, yet had fallen in love with a mortal in doing so. & now that that mortal was dead, noli could do something about it, no? since he was an all-powerful god?

he stood up. he cradled 007n7’s limp corpse in his arms, hands clutching at the areas where they would’ve been when they used to hold one another at night. noli held 007n7’s limp, bleeding head against his shoulder, eyes squeezing shut beneath his mask as he channeled that everlasting energy within him to actually preform something significant for once.

everything went white after that.

then… when noli could finally open his eyes once more, he was standing 007n7. way before the latter’s change & his transition into a hack-free lifestyle, which meant that noli could still have time to fix it all before 007n7 inevitably ended up dead again. noli was back in his old body as well, no more corrupted mask, no more void-crown displaying his dietical level of authority. he was just his past self once again, just noli in a purple hoodie & jeans. he’d kept himself this way so as to not make 007n7 suspect noli of being anything other than human.

007n7 was standing in front of a table, tending to a small red child—c00lkidd. the very child that had taken his 007n7 away from him in the first place. after c00lkidd went missing, 007n7 had been so overcome with grief & guilt that he’d caused his own shortcomings. even before that, c00lkidd had prompted 007n7 to leave noli, to abandon noli, because noli kept on wanting 007n7 to return to hacking whilst the latter refused for the sake of c00lkidd. noli nearly choked on the sight in front of him. he couldn’t help himself; the next moment he found himself already stumbling blindly towards 007n7 & threw his arms around 007n7’s torso from behind, clutching onto the man with an obvious amount of desperation. he didn’t speak. just hid his face in 007n7’s back as if he were physically attempting to conceal himself from something.