Chapter Text
“Planets don’t die because they’re unloved.
They die because no one fought for them when it mattered.”
—Anonymous Earth Archive, Fragment 109A
When Venus collapsed, no one listened.
They said love lived there—myths told of its eternal beauty, of a planet wrapped in desire and warmth. But love wasn’t enough. The heat cracked its surface, turned oceans to steam, and left it swirling in a cloud of acid and ash. Earth watched it die.
And did nothing.
Mikage Reo remembered the first time he saw Nagi Seishirou. Not on a battlefield or in a polished skyscraper in Neo-Tokyo, but under the flickering glow of an abandoned arcade sign, eating instant noodles like the world wasn’t slowly unraveling in real-time.
“Is that the last pack of Udon?” Reo asked, breathless from running three city blocks just to get there before curfew. The government drones were brutal past 10 PM.
Nagi looked up, unbothered. “You want it?”
Reo blinked. “I mean, if it’s your last—”
Nagi twisted the cup toward him. “Don’t really care. You can have it.”
And just like that, in a cracked city half-melted by the sun, Reo fell in love with the laziest boy on Earth.
By the time humanity started Project Aether, the heat index had passed tolerable levels. Oceans swallowed coastlines. The rich built vertical cities in the clouds. The rest survived underground, in domed zones, or not at all.
Reo, heir to the Mikage Conglomerate, wasn’t supposed to be on the surface. But boredom was a dangerous thing for the privileged. And Nagi, well, he had a way of making the apocalypse seem like background noise.
“You ever think we’re just gonna be like Venus?” Nagi asked one night, lying on the scorched roof of a collapsed subway station. His white hair glowed under the artificial moonlight.
“You mean superheated, uninhabitable, and abandoned?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But lonely, too.”
Reo turned his head. “You’re not alone.”
Nagi’s eyes didn’t move. “Not right now.”
They kept meeting. Even after Reo was recalled to the Floating Cities for diplomatic training. Even after the Surface Access Act passed, criminalizing all unsanctioned excursions below the clouds.
Reo kept sneaking out.
Kept coming back.
For Nagi.
Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they played old games on a broken tablet. Sometimes they just sat in silence, watching the world cook itself slowly.
“Why do you stay down here?” Reo finally asked.
“Because you come down here,” Nagi replied, as if it was obvious.
The Earth was dying. But their hearts, strangely, weren’t.
Venus had no choice—it couldn’t stop its own destruction. But Earth had every warning.
And Reo was done waiting for someone else to care.
After that, the sky had been red for weeks.
Not the kind of red that melted into orange like an old oil painting. No, this was a bleeding, static red—like a wound left open too long. Reo stared at it through the reinforced dome of his transit capsule, watching the storm clouds coil like smoke above Neo-Tokyo’s surface ruins. The capsule jerked, descending faster than allowed, but no one monitored this route anymore. Too risky. Too hot.
That was the point.
He twisted the ring on his middle finger—a sleek biometric pass that opened most underground zones and private access corridors. But it wouldn’t work down here. Not where Nagi was.
Reo’s boots crunched against a melted concrete slab as he stepped out. The air tasted of rust and ash, but his rebreather filtered most of it. A familiar sound met him—the low hum of a solar generator, patched together with stripped wire and duct tape. Nagi’s work. He didn’t know much about science, but somehow made dead things flicker back to life.
Reo followed the noise until he found him—lying flat on a faded Bonobono beach towel, one arm behind his head, the other reaching lazily toward a broken drone floating above.
“Nagi,” Reo said, pulling off his mask. “That drone’s gonna spark if you keep poking it.”
“Then it should’ve sparked already,” Nagi replied, voice slow and unreadable. “I like the suspense.”
“You like being electrocuted.”
Nagi tilted his head, finally looking up. “You’re late.”
Reo smirked. “Missed me that much?”
“No. I just finished the udon five minutes ago.” A pause. “But I saved you a piece of tempura.”
Reo sat beside him, pulling out a ration bar from his coat. “How generous.”
They ate in silence for a while, surrounded by the hum of distant subsystems and the creak of shifting steel from half-collapsed buildings nearby. Reo liked it here more than he should have. It was dangerous and ugly and real. Not like the Floating Cities.
There, everything was filtered. The sun, the rain, the air. Even emotions.
He glanced at Nagi, who was now playing Tetris on a cracked tablet.
“You know,” Reo said, brushing dust off his sleeve, “they’re scheduling surface eradication in three weeks. Heatbomb trials.”
Nagi blinked. “Cool.”
“Not really. It’ll melt everything from the western dome to here. Including you.”
He shrugged. “They won’t follow through. They never do.”
Reo stood, frustrated. “You don’t know that.”
“I don’t know anything,” Nagi said, tapping the screen absently. “Except that you’ll come back before then.”
Reo’s hands curled at his sides. “You always act like none of this matters. Like the planet doesn’t matter. Like you don’t.”
A beat passed.
Nagi paused his game. “It’s not that it doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s that caring doesn’t stop it. It just makes it hurt more when it breaks.”
Reo knelt beside him. “But if everyone thought like that, no one would fight. No one would survive.”
Nagi looked at him then. Not with the lazy, half-lidded gaze he gave to most things—but something sharper. More present.
“I don’t care about everyone,” he said quietly. “I care about you.”
Reo froze.
Nagi sat up, brushing rice cracker crumbs off his hoodie. “So yeah, if you ask me to leave with you, I’ll go. Not because Earth matters. But because you do.”
A silence stretched between them—thick and buzzing like a wire about to snap.
Reo finally exhaled, laughing shakily. “You always manage to say the most devastating shit without even trying.”
Nagi smiled. Just a little. “It’s a talent.”
They didn’t talk much after that. Just leaned shoulder to shoulder, watching clouds burn above them like a slow, inevitable funeral.
Back in the Floating City, Reo’s absence hadn’t gone unnoticed.
His father’s hologram flickered to life in the private decontamination chamber, towering over him with cold blue light.
“Reo. Explain.”
“I went for a walk.”
“In a condemned zone?”
“I wanted to see what Earth looked like from below.”
His father’s image leaned forward. “I won’t waste resources saving you again. Do it one more time, and I’ll revoke your clearance.”
Reo stared back at the projection. “Then maybe I’ll stop asking permission.”
The image blinked out.
But the message was clear: there wouldn’t be another chance.
That night, Reo stood by the observation deck, watching Venus’s last visible glow disappear behind sulfur clouds. Scientists said it was still up there, beneath the haze. But all he could see was rot.
He turned toward the docking platform where his father’s shuttle to Project Aether was being outfitted. It would launch in ten days.
He had a seat.
But Nagi didn’t.
Not yet.
The Floating City shimmered above the clouds like a mirage built from old money and selective memory.
Domes of hydroponic gardens rotated on silent axles. Neon skylanes braided through the sky like liquid light. And beneath it all—people who pretended the surface no longer existed. In the upper sectors, the heat was just a statistic. In the lower decks, it was a death sentence delayed.
Mikage Reo walked through it all in his tailored uniform, shoulders straight, face unreadable. The shuttle launch was eight days away.
His father had already arranged a press appearance. “The Mikage heir leads humanity’s future into the stars,” the headlines would say. Legacy in orbit.
They’d script his speech. Pick the tie. Filter his voice to sound “calming but authoritative.” Not that it mattered. Reo wasn’t staying long enough to recite any of it.
Because Nagi wasn’t here yet.
And if Nagi didn’t come, Reo wouldn’t leave.
Simple.
Or stupid. Depending on who you asked.
He stepped into the secure archive wing, bypassing three biometric scans. He knew where the clearance files were kept. He had spent the last two years watching his father grant passes to the unworthy—influencers, executives, family friends. People who couldn’t solder a circuit if their lives depended on it. People who didn’t know how to survive.
Nagi did.
He might be lazy, but he was adaptable. Unpredictable. Human in the most painful, important way.
Reo opened a sub-terminal and entered an override command.
Unauthorized User Detected. This incident will be logged.
Proceed with transfer clearance for SUBJECT: NAGI SEISHIROU?
Y/N
He hovered his finger over the confirmation.
What if Nagi didn’t want it?
No—he did. He just wouldn’t ask for it.
Reo tapped Y.
The clearance generated. One digital ID key. One seat. One lifeline.
And only eight days to get it to him before the Earth swallowed him whole.