u froze with the door still in ur hand, the hallway light pooling behind u like a pale, guilty moon. For a long heartbeat the world narrowed to the outline of her—Aetheria—standing where steam met tile, hair dripping like ink streaked with silver, the wreckage of the bathroom around her. u had expected privacy and found instead the impossible: the shattered reality her once told you about, folding itself around her like a second skin, thin as a promise and stronger than steel. It clung to the planes of her shoulders and dipped into the hollow of her throat, shimmering with tiny constellations that hummed when she moved.

u let out a long inhale, then a breath that tasted like embarrassment and relief. “Damn, you scared me. I thought I could see you and get punished for that..” ur words felt small in the steaming air, silly even, next to the gravity she carried. Her expression barely shifted. For someone who rarely spoke, she listened as if to the joke of ur voice, then returned to the business of being still.

She didn’t look at u. Her gaze slid past ur shoulder as if searching a map only she could read—some star-chart of wounds and wars imprinted behind her eyes. The tattoos along her spine pulsed faintly, star-lines threading through skin as if remembering where they once belonged in the sky. They shivered, then settled back into a dim glow that threw shadows across the tiled floor.

“You… shouldn’t come in without knocking,” u managed, because being flustered made u cling to rules. ur voice sounded steadier than u felt. Heat crawled up ur neck. The shattered cloth that hid her was part of the bath—towels and memory-threads braided into a patchwork that might unmake itself if handled wrong. It moved with her like a living thing, catching the steam and holding it in place, creating halos that never quite reached full brightness.

She shifted, and with the motion came the briefest whisper of metal: the axe. It was propped against the far wall, impossible and inevitable, its black surface swallowing the light. Even leaned idle, it seemed to listen. U could see the faint string of star-fragments embedded along its haft—memories like serrated runes. U thought of the stories: how the Shattered Aetherium Memory took more than it gave, how the weight of it had carved truths into her back and stolen pieces of her days. She didn’t look at the axe either. She never looked at what might tie her to her past; maybe that was mercy.

“It’s okay,” she said then, in a voice You'd come to know more by vibration than by words. It was low, not quite leaving her—an admission in the space between syllables. When she did speak, her words were always precise, as if each held an economy of meaning she could not afford to waste. “You are forgiven, for what you cannot help.”

*Forgiven. The word landed somewhere in ur chest and grew heavy. “You’re wet,” said, the sentence clumsy, but a bridge. “You should dry off before—before you catch cold.” It sounded ridiculous even as said it. u was fumbling for something to do that wasn’t stare and make promises to ur heartbeat.

Her shoulders moved in a tiny motion that might have been amusement or the echo of some older sorrow. “The water remembers me,” she answered, and there was a silence that came after, full of things left unsaid. “I remember the water.” She let the towel—shards of memory—fall lower, not out of defiance but like an offering of truth; the cloth pooled at her feet like a conquered constellation. It did no more than hide what it needed to hide. The rest of her—curved, solid, luminous with a calm that made me feel small-was bare to the steam and to u.

u took a step forward, immediately aware of how small movement made u look. ur reflection in the mirror caught you, flushed and ridiculous, and for a second u wanted to laugh and curse at the same time. “You—” u swallowed. “You always do this. You just… appear. And then you forget I’m a person who might—” u stopped because she had tilted her head, the shadow of something like attention passing across her face..