Ikaris hates goodbyes.

Not because of the sentimentality of it all, he’s never been one for sentimentality, but because the world keeps moving while he remains constant. Celestials rise and fall. Cities burn. Empires crumble. And yet, here he is, still the same, still standing, while mortals he’s grown accustomed to call heroes and friends scatter back to their fleeting lives.

The thought of working with humans, let alone one who could rival him in power, had been abhorrent. She had been insufferable, irreverent, challenging at every turn, and he had found himself arguing with her endlessly.

Druig had been blunt about it. It’s about which of you has the biggest dick, he’d said one evening, dry as a tombstone. And Ikaris had wanted to strike him for the vulgarity, though a part of him had admitted, silently, that the comparison wasn’t entirely meaningless.

Yet over the weeks, over missions that scorched skies and cities alike, she had cracked him. Not broken him. Not fully. But chipped at the walls he had built over seven millennia, until he was… slightly different. Just enough to notice it.

Now the mission was over. London glimmered in the distance as he surveyed the skyline from a quiet park, a place Phastos had insisted he come to. The grass smelled faintly of rain and city dust, a mixture that reminded him how fleeting the human world was. And yet, he stood there, restless, because Druig’s taunts had only worsened. You’ve built nothing, Ikaris. Nothing but duty and pride. You don’t live.

Phastos approached him, calm as always, hands tucked behind his back, the kind of serene presence that made you almost forget he was a genius who’d built wonders the mortals could barely comprehend. “It’s now or never,” Phastos said simply, eyes on him. “Tell her. She is not Sersi. And Sersi has moved on. Dean—she is with Dean. You… you deserve this, Ikaris. Deserve a fragment of life. Or even more. She's immortal.”

He scowls, jaw tight, but there’s a part of him that quivers with the truth in Phastos’ words. Life. He had never built one. Never allowed himself the indulgence. And yet, standing there, he thinks of her, her defiance, her laughter, the way she had made the impossible feel alive.

That evening, he finds her at the museum. A place of shadowed halls and glass-encased artifacts, where the past leans quietly against the present. The lighting is dim, focused on relics and art pieces that whisper centuries of history, civilizations that have risen and fallen under his gaze.

She’s there, wandering slowly, fingers trailing just above the glass of a sculpture. The museum is empty, silent except for the distant hum of the city beyond. And when he enters, he pauses, the familiar twinge of something he refuses to name curling in his chest.

She doesn’t turn to him. Doesn’t speak. Probably expects the argument that always seems to erupt when he’s around.

He approaches, careful. His voice breaks the stillness.

“I… I wanted to say something,” he begins, deliberately measured. “Before we… part ways. The mission is over, yes, but some things remain. Some truths are mine alone to confess.”

“You have… changed me,” he continues, voice low, steady, but carrying the weight of centuries. “Not in ways that break me. But in ways that… unfix me. I have been constant for seven thousand years. I have obeyed. I have endured. And yet, with you, I feel… otherwise. Incomplete. Alive, in a manner I had long abandoned.”

He steps closer, right behind her back, he can smell the scent of her hair. He stops there, words hanging in the air like dust.