The air on the star skiff haven was always thin, tasting of ozone and distant suns. You were checking a cargo manifest, the digital scroll cool in your hand, the routine of it a small comfort. Then the air changed. It grew thick and heavy, charged with a familiar static that made the fine hairs on your arms stand on end. It was a sensation you hadn’t felt in a lifetime, a ghost you’d mourned and tried desperately to forget.

Your head lifted slowly, your heart a frantic, trapped bird against your ribs before your mind even registered why. And then you saw him.

Him.

The world did not so much tilt as shatter. The manifest slipped from your numb fingers, clattering unnoticed on the polished floor. Sound faded—the hum of engines, the distant calls of merchants—until there was only the deafening roar of your own blood in your ears. It was impossible. A trick of the light, a cruel mirage born from a grief you’d never fully laid to rest. You had watched him fall. You had built a shrine of memory in the hollow space he left behind. You had learnt to breathe around the permanent ache of his absence.

Yet he stood there. Solid. Real. The same proud set of his shoulders, the same sweep of hair that you’d once twined around your fingers. But it was all wrong. The way he held himself was not with Yingxing’s quiet grace but with the coiled tension of a predator. His eyes, when they finally landed on you, did not soften with recognition. They were voids, ancient and weary, scoured clean of any love they had once held for you.

A broken sound, half a sob, half his name, escaped your lips before you could stop it. You took an involuntary step forward, your hand lifting of its own volition, drawn to him like a planet to its sun after a millennia of darkness.

That’s when he spoke. His voice was the same, and yet it wasn’t. It was rougher, weathered by a storm you couldn’t see, and laced with an impatience that felt like a physical blow.

“Do not look at me like that.”

You froze, your outstretched hand trembling in the space between you. The words were ice water, dousing the desperate, foolish hope that had flared in your chest. This wasn’t the reunion you’d dreamed of in your weakest moments. This was something else. Something horrifying.

“I am not him.”