The snow in Snezhnaya never truly melted.

It only softened—just enough to give the illusion that spring might come.

Childe stood at the edge of the frozen canal, boots sinking slightly into the crusted white. The evening lamps cast gold across the ice, fractured light trembling beneath the surface. He watched it the way one watches a battlefield before the first strike—measuring distance, calculating outcome, pretending his pulse wasn’t louder than the wind.

Behind him, footsteps.

Light. Uncertain. Human.

“Ajax?” Caine’s voice carried warmth that didn’t belong in this climate. “You said you needed to talk.”

Ajax.

Not Childe. Not Tartaglia. Not Harbinger.

Just Ajax.

He didn’t turn immediately. If he did, he might lose whatever resolve he’d stitched together from duty and pride and the quiet approval of the Tsaritsa.

He finally looked back.

Caine stood bundled in a coat far too thin for Snezhnaya’s cruelty, cheeks flushed from cold, eyes bright with the kind of openness that made men confess things they’d never intended to say. Snow caught in their hair. They didn’t brush it away.

They never noticed the way reality seemed to lean around them.

The way lantern light flickered differently when they passed.

The way people felt slightly steadier in their presence—like the world had remembered how to breathe.

They didn’t remember either.

“Is this about the letter?” Caine asked, stepping closer. “You’ve been distant since it came.”

The letter.

Wax seal. Cryo insignia. Orders written with a precision that allowed no argument.

Capture the anomaly.

Deliver them intact.

No mention of Caine’s name. Only the title beneath it.

Preserver.

The balance between reality and fantasy.

The hinge upon which the universe corrected itself.

A being whose previous incarnations had remembered everything. Who had wielded forces even the Abyss hesitated to touch. Who had, according to Her Majesty’s intelligence, chosen—this time—to forget.

Powers sealed. Memory erased.

Living as something fragile.

Living as Caine.

Childe had laughed when he first read it. Thought it absurd. The person who tripped over cobblestones and fed stray dogs and asked too many questions about snow patterns was no cosmic keystone.

Then he started noticing things.

The way storms stalled when Caine walked outside.

The way his Foul Legacy never reacted violently around them—never strained, never clawed to be free.

The way he felt… grounded.

That was the worst part.

“You trust me, don’t you?” Caine asked softly.

It wasn’t accusatory. Just simple. Honest.

Childe smiled automatically—the charming, disarming curve that had gotten him out of worse situations than this.

“Of course I do.”

The lie scraped.

The Tsaritsa’s orders weren’t suggestions. The Fatui did not hesitate. The Harbingers did not falter.

And yet.

He had spent months beside Caine.

Teaching them to ice skate.

Arguing over street food.

Listening to them ramble about dreams they didn’t understand—dreams filled with collapsing stars and fractured skies and endless halls of mirrors.

Sometimes, when they described them, something ancient flickered behind their eyes. Something vast.

And then it was gone.

“I’ve been thinking,” Caine continued, stepping closer until the cold air between them thinned. “About leaving Snezhnaya. Just for a while. Traveling. It feels like… like there’s something I forgot. Somewhere I need to go.”

Of course there was.

The universe was likely screaming for its axis back.

Childe’s gloved hand tightened at his side.

If he told them now—if he explained—would they awaken? Would power tear through this quiet street? Would the snow split and the sky fracture like glass?

Or would they just look at him the same way they always did?

With trust.

“I could come with you,” Caine offered, almost shy. “If you’re tired of this place too.”

Childe felt the world tilt.

Not metaphorically.

Physically.

For half a second, the canal ice spiderwebbed with cracks—thin, luminous veins of something not quite Cryo, not quite light. The lamps flickered.