（ sasuke comes to sit by him, and cy — unbidden — lifts an arm and reaches to touch his knee. it's soft, and deft. there and gone. ）

A celestial blade can kill a god. But making it requires the sacrifice of a world and all its peoples, and it can only be used once. It starts to disintegrate on contact with our blood. You gotta make it count.

（ even in his darkest moments, when he has been nothing but a maelstrom of grief howling into the fucking dirt, he hasn't considered it. he can't. maybe if one day he feels himself becoming more and more like that monster, he'd do it in a last act of mercy. but until that day comes — it's not even on the table for him. ）

Iantha? （ he laughs, a bleakly incredulous sound. ） Yeah, she knew, the bitch. She had the audacity to apologize to me afterwards.

（ she found him not long after he buried tak. he hadn't known who she was, at first, that memory one of many that had been burned away, but he remembers the way his entire being reacted to her, with a sort of primal, bone-deep fear he's not sure has ever really been carved out of him. she found him, and she looked at him with those eyes like constellations, and she said, I'm sorry, Auhle. It had to be like this. ）