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A tarnished grey starship circles around the jutting rock formation that has served as Phainon's refuge for the past months, and to Phainon's increasing puzzlement, refuses to land. He's beginning to think that this may be some sort of prank, when the starship turns to him at last, and slows to a hover a good distance above the ground.
Phainon sees Boothill wave at him from the cockpit, and waves back after a beat.
"Did you get a new ship?" Phainon yells.
"Heck yeah I did! She's a beauty, ain't she? Picked ‘er up off my last bounty. Fella didn’t need it no more on account of being shot kapoot," Boothill hollers back over the ship's comms.
"Uh-huh. And are you going to stay up there and keep shouting at me, or are you coming down to talk?"
Boothill scratches his chin. "Nah," he says, casual in a way that sets Phainon on guard. "Just here to drop off a package from the Trailblazers."
Caelus hadn't told Phainon anything about a drop-off. Phainon squints up at him. "What package?"
"Well, I ain't too sure how to put it," Boothill says. "So I'll just drop him right on down, nice and easy like."
"Him," Phainon repeats, bewildered, before a door on the side of the starship clanks open and someone plummets out of it, golden and beautiful and Phainon would recognize that shape and form anywhere in any part of the universe.
Mydei lands without a stumble, and from across the distance between them he pins Phainon with his sun-streaked stare. Phainon stares back at him wordlessly. He thinks he should say something, but all he can do is look, and drink him in after all this time apart. He wonders if Mydei is doing the same; he's surprised that Mydei can bear to look at him at all.
He barely hears Boothill leave. It's only when the drone of the starship engines have died away that Phainon manages to find his voice.
"You're wearing a shirt," he says.
Mydei lifts an eyebrow at him. "Well spotted, Deliverer," he says, and Phainon hasn't heard his voice in months, not since the last and final recurrence where the Traiblazers and all the Chrysos Heirs had gathered to put Irontomb and Phainon to rest, only for Phainon to come out of the mess as Nanook's newest emanator.
"Why are you here?" Phainon asks.
"You're here," Mydei says.
Phainon draws in a shaky breath. He thinks that the mechanics of breathing might be starting to slip him by.
"Go back," he says. "Please."
"A Kremnoan does not retreat," Mydei says. "You know this well."
"This isn't something you need to retreat from, this is—you have to go back."
Mydei takes a step towards him, then another, and Phainon takes a step back in turn, unthinking. He watches Mydei cast his eyes around them at the uneven ground and sparse shrubbery, and at the faraway cliffs with their cold shadows. Phainon's camp sits under an overhang of rock, flanked by a bunch of stone cairns that has stood witness to his night terrors and silent wakefulness for many days. A pool of brackish water collects between the rocks.
"Why here?" Mydei asks.
Phainon looks away. "There's a hot spring some ways south from here. It's very scenic."
"Only you, Deliverer," Mydei says, amused, "would find a way to indulge in baths on a rock this desolate."
"It’s not that bad a place to live in," Phainon mutters. "If you hate it that much, then go back."
He hears Mydei exhale, and by the sound of it Phainon can tell that he's come closer.
"It is exactly that miserable," Mydei says. "By what means do you sustain yourself? What do you eat?"
"My body stopped needing food a while ago," Phainon says.
"The body might not need it, but the mind and the soul do. I see that you have neglected all three."
Phainon turns back to look at him, taking in the slant of his eyes and the arch of his cheekbones and the stubborn set of his mouth, and that frown between his brows that Phainon knows from long experience means that Mydei is displeased about something and determined to remedy it. To be looked at with such gentle reproach again is difficult for Phainon to withstand. He feels the distance between them like a yawning chasm.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Phainon tells him.
“Tell me why that is so,” Mydei says.
The miserable, ravenous beast in Phainon's chest threatens to break loose. He swallows.
“You know why.”
Mydei observes him for a moment, then moves around Phainon to inspect the campsite, putting a safe distance between them. He's dressed for space travel and missing half his regalia, Phainon notices vaguely, but that doesn't detract from his brilliance at all.
"It's not meant to be a permanent dwelling," Phainon says to Mydei's back. "I'll find somewhere else once I'm ready to leave."
"Will you not return to Amphoreus?" Mydei asks without turning.
Phainon bites his lip. "I can't," he says.
Mydei pauses his inspection of the campsite. He glances back at Phainon with those unerring eyes of his, and Phainon despairs a little, because it had been hard enough leaving the first time, and to have Mydei right here in front of him now is agony.
"Come back with me," he says. "Amphoreus awaits your return."
"No."
"Deliverer—"
"I can't," Phainon says again.
"Where will you go, then?" Mydei demands, losing his composure for the first time since his descent. "Will you continue to hide away on barren worlds until you become barren yourself? Is that your intention? To torment yourself?"
"Torment myself," Phainon echoes. The corner of his mouth twists up, though he doesn't feel like smiling. "That's a new way of putting it. Perhaps you're right."
Mydei falls silent, as if there's something Phainon said that has left him at a loss. Phainon turns away.
"It doesn't have to be so," Mydei says, behind him. "Return with me, Deliverer. The Era Nova awaits you. You above all others deserve a place in it."
Phainon thinks: this isn't something he can endure.
"If you won't leave, then I will," he says. "Don't follow me."
He steps past the boundary of the campsite and crosses into the vast landscape beyond. The coreflames in his body eagerly leap for freedom, let loose at last from restraint, and he feels himself change with it, cracks spreading through his flesh and wings unfolding out of his back, ready to carry him away. But there's a hand on his shoulder that prevents him from taking off, and Phainon stops short when Mydei says, furiously, "Don't you dare run from me, haikas."
"Let go," Phainon says.
But Mydei doesn't. He drags Phainon back around and there's a glint in his eyes that usually heralds a long, physical bout of some kind, which is why Phainon isn't surprised when Mydei punches him across the face.
Something inside Phainon twists alive in answer to Mydei's challenge. Blood sings in his ears. He turns with the momentum of Mydei's blow, summons Dawnmaker, and lunges forward swinging.
***
They fight for an hour, then two, and then Phainon loses track of time altogether.
By unspoken agreement, neither of them uses their powers. Right at the start of the fight, Phainon cuts the flow of energy from the coreflames and locks it down tight, and Mydei doesn't bring any of his divine might to bear. Instead they tear into each other with a savage, physical ferocity that would have cracked the training grounds back in Okhema and earned them a scolding from Aglaea, if they were there.
It's a bit like falling into step after a long period of separation, Phainon thinks dimly in some far-away part of his mind. At first, the gulf of time between them had felt unbridgeable, but as they match each other strike for strike, that distance narrows, and with each step they take across the uneven ground they come closer to finding their balance. The body remembers, the mind follows, and Phainon realizes after a while that Mydei has been anticipating his attacks as readily as Phainon anticipates his. When Phainon brings Dawnmaker up to catch Mydei's clawed hand aimed at his throat, he knows what comes next: Mydei's knee rising to slam into his stomach that he avoids with a shift back, and then Mydei prowling after him to maintain their close quarters.
Running through him is a feverish joy in knowing they still fit together. That feeling buoys him for a while, until Mydei overreaches a little, and Phainon is ready to seize the chance to get past his guard and get behind him as he'd done so many recurrences before, but a full-body tremor rip through him at the thought of letting Dawnmaker get anywhere near Mydei's back, near that weak spot that Phainon had ran through millions of times, and instead of following through Phainon retreats.
Mydei doesn't hesitate to pursue. Phainon parries and retreats further, again and again, until he's on the defensive. It's an inexorable process, Mydei hounding him from every angle with ruthless persistence, not giving Phainon any room to breathe. Phainon knows that his moment of hesitation earlier has marked his defeat.
The end finally comes when Mydei wrests Dawnmaker from his hands and throws it out of reach, where it skids across the ground before coming to a halt several meters away. Phainon throws himself after it, but Mydei is quicker. He slams into Phainon and they go sprawling over the rocks, wrestling and scrabbling for control like wild animals. Phainon manages to get on top with his arm on Mydei's neck at one point, but it's a fleeting victory; Mydei hooks a leg over Phainon's and rolls them over, and before Phainon can react Mydei has seized his wrists and pinned them above his head with one hand.
"Yield," Mydei pants.
"I'm not done yet," Phainon grits out, and thrashes as violently as he can. He bucks up and almost unseats Mydei from his position, but Mydei clamps his thighs down hard on Phainon's hips and rides out the motion. Phainon tests the strength of Mydei's grip for another few seconds, and then freezes when Mydei closes his free hand around Phainon's throat.
"Yield," Mydei demands again.
Phainon drops his head back onto the ground. "Fine," he says. "You win."
When Mydei releases him, Phainon covers his face with his hands. It takes a long moment for his pulse to settle, and when he finds it within himself to lower his hands, he sees Mydei staring down at him, bloodied and beautiful and knowing. Phainon's heart twists.
"That was a pitiful showing," Mydei says.
"Well, it's all you're going to get," Phainon says flatly. "Satisfied yet?"
"Never, when it comes to you."
Phainon glares back up at him, a knot tightening in his stomach. He thinks about shoving Mydei away, and just getting up and leaving, but Mydei is warm on top of him, and Phainon is a weak, weak man. Strength of will is not something Phainon has ever thought he lacked, but Mydei has always managed to strip him of it without trying.
"What will it take to get you to leave?" Phainon asks helplessly.
Mydei regards him for a moment. Then he says, "You know what I want."
Phainon shudders and turns his face away. "I can't give you that. I can't give you anything."
"A Kremnoan never yields a claim," Mydei says, fiercer now. "And you are mine, Phainon of Aedes Elysiae, as I am yours. Has your addled mind forgotten this? Do you think I will be content to leave now that I finally have you here before me?"
"Forget about me," Phainon says, a desperate bid for mercy. "Just go home."
"You are my home," Mydei says, brutally final, and then he takes Phainon's face in his hands, and for a terrifying instant Phainon thinks Mydei will kiss him, but Mydei only squashes Phainon's cheeks, hard enough to make Phainon squawk, before he lets go and rolls off entirely to lie beside Phainon on the dusty ground.
Phainon blinks up at the sky. He had spent three long months on this rock making a home in his grief, leaving only to handle commissions, or to take his rage out on Nanook's antimatter legion. He'd thought it would be best to never see his friends and home and all of Amphoreus again, given what he had done to them, and given what he had become. And then Mydei had to come along and undo all of Phainon's work in a single day, which is just typical of him, and now Phainon is left with all these tumultuous feelings that have decided to riot together all at the same time.
He feels Mydei's gauntlet close around his wrist.
"Set aside your doubts," Mydei says. "Do not let your thoughts consume you. It will not have you. I will not let it.” And then, quieter: "Come back to Amphoreus with me, Deliverer. You are greatly missed."
"I can't," Phainon says.
"You can," Mydei insists.
"Thirty-three million cycles," Phainon says, tremulous. "And I struck you down in every one of them. I killed Castorice and Hyacine and—I've probably killed every living soul on Amphoreus at least once, at some point. I can't go home."
Mydei exhales shakily, and grips Phainon's wrist tighter. Phainon thinks that it might bruise tomorrow.
"Cease this foolishness," Mydei says. "You couldn't spare us anymore than you could let Irontomb be completed."
Phainon laughs raggedly. "Yes, I did what I had to do. Every time when presented with the choice, I chose to keep the cycles going, and I'd do it all over again, given the need. That doesn't absolve me of anything. Life isn't so easily weighed."
"And so you choose to cower in this pitiful corner of the galaxy," Mydei says. "Is this penance, Deliverer? Do you hide out of a misplaced desire for atonement? Or do you do so out of fear?"
"What if it's both?" Phainon says sharply. "What is it to you, anyhow? The dawn of Era Nova has begun. The time for deliverance is done, and my part in it as well. Let it rest, Mydeimos."
"I forgive you," Mydei says.
Phainon nearly bites through his lip. He says, very small, "You shouldn't."
"Do not presume to tell me what I should and should not do," Mydei says, gently. "If it is absolution you seek, I shall give it, even though there is nothing to absolve. But clearly you believe otherwise. Thus, until the day comes when you can accept the truth of these words, I shall tell you as many times as you need to hear it: I forgive you."
Phainon stares into the whirl of nebulas splashed across the darkness above, suddenly glad that they aren’t facing each other. The cool press of Mydei's fingers against his pulse point feels as though it might scorch him clean through. His body remembers that grip too well, the gentleness of it at odds with the warrior's strength of those arms. He wants, very badly, to pull that hand to his mouth and kiss it, but he doesn't dare to encroach on what he no longer has the right to claim.
"You may tire of repeating yourself long before I reach that day," he says, trying for levity and only sounding wretched.
"Or you may tire of your stubbornness before I tire of my patience."
"I don't know if I can," Phainon admits. "That day may never come at all."
He hears the scrape of armour on stone, and then Mydei is leaning over him, blocking out the great void overhead. Phainon meets his eyes with difficulty; once, he'd have been able to do so without reservation, but time has piled between them now, and Phainon is both the architect and executioner, each recurrence and death a stone in the wall. Yet the way Mydei looks at him hasn't changed.
"Then I shall gladly wait for the rest of this life and all the next ones after," Mydei says.
"We only have the one, now,” Phainon says.
Mydei ducks his head closer. His tangled braid falls over his shoulder to brush Phainon's cheek.
"Then we must not squander it. Come home with me. Fig Stew and Beagle Coconut both miss you terribly."
"Do they?"
"Perhaps all the other Chimeras as well," Mydei says. "And only all of Okhema. Even Krateros has asked after you."
Phainon smiles despite himself. "Krateros? Surely you jest. Has the west wind changed course at last?"
"I do not jest," Mydei says gravely. "That word does not exist in the Kremnoan language."
A laugh shudders through Phainon like a death-rattle. "Mydeimos, I—" He swallows hard, suddenly close to tears, because he has missed this: Mydei near him, with him, that tempestuous back and forth of words exchanged. But he can't have it back. Not as he is now. "I'm not myself anymore. I've become—I am not well. It will be difficult, and hard, and surely there are better things for the prince of Castrum Kremnos to do than trouble himself over the likes of me."
"Again, you presume to tell me what I can or cannot do," Mydei returns. "And it won't be as difficult as you imagine. You are an easy man to love."
Phainon stares up at him. Words dry up in his throat. There's a heat rising under his skin that has very little to do with the billions of coreflames trapped in his body.
"Saying that outright is cheating," he manages.
Mydei doesn't smile, but the corners of his eyes crease slightly. "So it's fair when you say it, but not when I do? I warned you many times about your hypocrisy, Deliverer, and still you've not improved."
"Stop calling me that," Phainon says weakly. "I'm not the Deliverer anymore."
"Was it not you who endured thirty-three million cycles of agony until the heroes from beyond the skies could bring the Flame-Chase to an end?" Mydei returns.
Phainon digs his fingers into the soil. "And in every one of those cycles, I killed you. As well as countless others."
Mydei exhales harshly, and gathers both of Phainon's wrists and slams them down on either side of his head, fully braced over Phainon to glare down at him, breathtaking in his fury. He's close enough that Phainon can see his lashes tremble minutely.
"What you did, you stubborn haikas," Mydei grits out, "was hold the line for billions of years. You fought for us, for the whole damned universe, for longer than anyone should ever have been asked to fight. Your long vigil is ended. You have earned your rest, and I refuse to stand by and watch you throw it away. Come back to Amphoreus with me. Come home."
Phainon swallows around the hot lump in his throat. "I cannot go with you."
"You can."
"I wish I could," Phainon whispers. "But I can't. It's time to let me go."
"Never," Mydei swears. "Explain to me why you believe you should suffer here alone. Help me understand. What keeps you here?"
Phainon feels pried open.
He says, "Mydei, I am afraid."
"I know," Mydei says, after a pause. His hold has slackened. His thumb rubs over the inner flesh of Phainon's left wrist. "Tell me why."
Tell me of your fears, Deliverer, Mydei had said, several hundred thousand recurrences ago. Tell me so that I may carry them with you, just as you have carried me.
This isn’t quite the same as that. But it is close enough to feel like a kiss laid on the crown of his head and a punch to the gut, all at once.
“Mydeimos," Phainon says. His vision has blurred, but he hasn't cried since the final recurrence ended; he doesn't see why he should start now. "Mydeimos, I'm not the same man who fought by your side in the Flame-Chase. I haven't been him for a long time. You know this."
"Are you not still yourself?" Mydei demands. "You've changed. So have I. But at our cores we remain who we were, even if we've built new layers over the old. I would recognize you in a hundred different forms, in a hundred different lives. Tell me, Deliverer," and abruptly Mydei seizes Phainon by the jaw, turning his face to meet the furious gold-spun light of Mydei's eyes, "are you not still the same man who faced me in battle for ten days and nights to a draw? Who would compete with me in everything, for no greater reason than to share in the delight of victory, the sting of defeat? The same unrelenting man who would search the sea of souls for my mother's ring, after hearing me speak of it only once?"
"I don’t know, maybe I—I might not be," Phainon begins, and chokes on a sob. It hurts, somewhere behind his cracked sternum, where all the grief and rage and shame, pain both old and new that he refuses to examine too closely, have come to nest. I am not this person anymore, he wants to say, but even as the words take shape in his mouth he knows them to be untrue.
He is still that man, has always been that man, who wants nothing more than to live up to the impossible ideal of himself that the world needs him to be; a man who takes satisfaction in every small laugh coaxed out of Castorice and every beaming smile from the Tribios; a man who, in nearly every recurrence, had wondered if Mydei's hair would feel as soft as it looked.
But he can't erase the billion years of despair between him and the first Khaslana. Irontomb, the recurrences, Nanook—they have all shaped him into something terrible; destruction is what he has become, now. Perhaps Lycurgus was right; it was always all he was made for.
Eventually Phainon gathers enough of himself to say, "Chartonus was the one who found your mother's ring.”
"And I have thanked him for his service," Mydei says. "But it was you who thought to search for it."
Phainon tries to look away, but Mydei will not let him; the pressure of his grip increases fractionally. His other hand rises to settle around Phainon's nape, thumb sweeping over the rune of destruction branded into his skin.
"Mydei, please," Phainon says. His voice cracks on the second word. "See reason."
"I see with more clarity than your obstinate mind ever will," Mydei says. "I knew you, Phainon of Aedes Elysiae, and I know you still."
"Do you?" Phainon says. "Sometimes I dream of—of killing everyone again. And when I wake, I forget myself; I think I'm still there, back in the recurrences, and that they never ended. I dream of your death, often." His eyes slip shut as he says this, because he cannot bear to look at Mydei's face as he speaks of it. "I'm afraid that if I return to Amphoreus with you, I may lose myself and return to being that black-robed figure. This fear wakes me night after night, and follows me into my waking hours. How can I dare to go home as I am now?"
"Do you want to kill me?" Mydei says calmly.
Phainon jerks against Mydei's grip, startled into looking at him again. The coreflames surge past his control for a moment; there is a sudden wash of light over the shadowed planes of Mydei's face, before Phainon wrestles them back into order.
"Titans, no," he chokes out. "Never again. I would sooner die myself."
"Do you wish to slaughter all of Amphoreus, then?"
"I get the point you're trying to make," Phainon says wearily. "But it's not that simple." He lets the coreflames flare up beneath his skin for emphasis, not enough for the full transformation to take over, but enough to flood light into the space between them from the cracks formed on his flesh. "Lycurgus told me I was made for destruction, and he was right. Look at me now, Mydei. I am destruction."
The temperature of his body has risen to such a degree that it must be intolerable for mortal flesh, but Mydei, Demigod of Strife that he is, doesn't flinch away. Phainon expects this of him. What he doesn't expect is for Mydei to shift the grip on Phainon's jaw into a cradle, and lean in until their foreheads press together.
"I fought with you, and fought against you, for thirty-three million lifetimes," Mydei says. "I know you as you have known me. You are capable of great destruction, as I am, but that is not all you are."
Phainon holds very still as Mydei's thumb presses gently against the seam of Phainon's lips, and Phainon feels it as a ravenous creature clawing at his heart. His own fingers betray his want; they find the spaces between Mydei's armoured ones and fit into them.
"Nikador’s tenacity. Endless fortitude. Devotion." Mydei smooths back Phainon's unkempt hair, then sweeps his knuckles down along the curve of Phainon's ear. "Kindness, often to a fault. Even when others are not."
“That’s enough,” Phainon says, raggedly.
"You are loved," Mydei continues relentlessly, "by many. And by me. I love you still, in this moment, and I will love you for as long as I live."
Phainon squeezes his eyes shut against a fresh welling of heat, and feels the weight of the universe in the dark. He doesn’t dare to speak.
"Look at me, Deliverer," Mydei says. His thumb sweeps over Phainon's cheek. "Phainon, look at me," and at the call of his name, Phainon pries his eyes open, and stares at Mydei through a veil of tears, and sees gold, gold, gold.
“I’m looking,” Phainon says, thinly.
"You did kill me. Thirty-three million times and more." Mydei is smiling faintly, that wry curl of his mouth which, in several lifetimes before, Phainon had longed to press his lips against, and only dared to do so in a bare handful of them. "You faced me in glorious battle, time and again, and each loss you dealt me was more splendid than the last. I would entrust you with my weakness and my death a billion times more, as many times as it would take for you bring us victory."
“I don’t have a billion more times left in me,” Phainon whispers. “I’m not sure if I have even one."
Mydei presses his mouth gently to Phainon's brow. "One is enough," he says. "One is all we need. I would give you my weakness again, if you would have it. One last time."
"Mydei," Phainon says, shaking, "what if I lose sight of myself? What if I become him?"
"Then I will fight you until you find your way back," Mydei says, a heavy vow to make for anyone, let alone for Phainon, "as many times as it takes. Eternally. Just as you fought for us all."
Heat spills out of Phainon's eyes. He stares at Mydei silently, and he can't go on, he doesn't know what to say, and Mydei grips Phainon's nape tighter, tips his head back, and kisses him.
Phainon gasps into his mouth and surges up to kiss him back, clutching desperately at Mydei's back to pull him closer, dizzy and unmoored and weeping openly, letting Mydei in, letting him taste the salt of Phainon's grief: here's his sorrow and guilt and heart; here's everything he is and has become. Take it, he thinks. Take it all from me. Take me with you. Take me away.
The coreflames in him are in a frenzy, wilder than they've ever been, and Phainon is probably scalding to the touch, but Mydei doesn't seem to care; he slides a hand into Phainon’s hair to tug his head back, exposing the length of Phainon's neck to the night, then leans down to press kisses along the line of Phainon's jaw, down to the hollow of his throat and over the too-fast thud of his pulse and that wretched mark of the sun, before coming back up to find Phainon's lips again.
Phainon sobs out a curse. He drags his hands over the familiar planes of Mydei's back, angling closer into that warmth, as if he could pour himself into Mydei's skin. At some point a leg finds its way between Phainon's thighs, and an arm slides under his waist, bringing him in until they're chest to chest, with Mydei's heavy weight bearing down on him. But Phainon feels lighter than he has in a long time, possibly ever.
And then Mydei starts moving against him, rocking Phainon against the ground like they've done so many times before in the dubious privacy of Okhema's training grounds, and it’s been too long since they last did this, and it feels too good, too much.
"I can't," Phainon gasps out, utterly overcome, "Mydei, I need—" and Mydei grits out, "Anything, I’ll give you everything," and then his gauntlets are on the ground, and his hands are everywhere: slipping beneath the hem of Phainon's threadbare shirt to trace the tender flesh along his ribs, and further down to squeeze Phainon's thigh, pulling it up to hook over Mydei's waist. Phainon chokes on a moan and grabs a fistful of Mydei's hair, pulling him down so he can scrape his teeth against the curve of Mydei's throat, gratified by the way Mydei jerks against him, cursing in Kremnoan. His cock is achingly hard in his trousers, trapped against Mydei's hip as he ruts against Phainon with mindless urgency, each thrust like a blow, and Phainon wants more, he wants—he wants—
"Come back with me," Mydei says, fingers digging into the flesh of Phainon's thigh, "Come home, Phainon, Khaslana," and then he speaks the word for equal in Kremnoan that Phainon would commit to memory in every recurrence where he was fortunate enough to know it, and Phainon shudders apart under Mydei.
He goes slack afterwards, pressing his face into Mydei's shoulder to ground himself as his heart settles and body cools to tolerable temperatures. Mydei doesn't last long after that, muffling a groan into Phainon's hair before falling heavily atop him. He rouses himself enough to take his weight off Phainon, shifting them onto their sides so they lie facing each other, and takes Phainon's hand to press a kiss against his knuckles.
"Well?" Mydei says, after the second kiss.
"Well," Phainon says thoughtlessly. "Hm."
Mydei huffs out a laugh. "Is that really all it takes to render the mighty Deliverer speechless? We've done more taxing deeds in the past, you and I."
"Oh, shut up," Phainon says.
Mydei laughs again, that beautiful rich sound, pressing his smile against the heel of Phainon's palm. Phainon stares at him helplessly, heart as full as his lungs are empty, and drags Mydei into a proper kiss.
When they break apart again, Mydei's hand remains curled around Phainon's neck.
He says, "Let me take you home, Phainon of Aedes Elysiae."
"All right, Mydeimos," Phainon says at last, smiling through tears. "Take me home."