Two years approached like a deadline Yu hadn't set.
She noticed it first in small ways. The way spring arrived and she automatically started planning the garden expansions for the growing season. The way she'd started thinking "next winter" instead of "if I'm still here." The way Hei had settled into her lap one evening and Yu had thought, without thinking: my cat.
Not "the cat."
My cat.
Like ownership. Like permanence. Like this was her life instead of a temporary stopping point.
The realization should have been comforting.
Instead, it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.
Month eighteen. The first crack.
Yu was in the kitchen, cooking beside Cicero in the comfortable rhythm they'd developed. He was preparing fish, she was handling vegetables, and they moved around each other like dancers who'd practiced the steps so many times they'd become instinct.
"Hand me the ginger?" Cicero asked.
Yu reached for it without looking, knowing exactly where it would be because she'd organized the kitchen and she knew her own system.
The movement was automatic.
Thoughtless.
Domestic.
Her hand froze halfway to the ginger root.
"Yu?"
She looked around the kitchen. At the organizational system she'd implemented. At the ingredients she'd started buying on her own initiative. At the pot that was hers—Cicero had given it to her last month, saying she needed her own equipment if she was going to keep "improving his recipes."
At the life she'd built here without noticing.
"I'm fine," she said, grabbing the ginger.
But she wasn't fine.
She was terrified.
Month nineteen. The fear started talking.
You've been here almost two years.
The thought came while Yu was reorganizing the library for the third time. Not because it needed reorganizing—her system was perfect—but because organizing helped her think.
Two years in one place.
That's longer than you've stayed anywhere around someone since—
Since when? She couldn't even remember. Centuries ago, maybe. Before she'd learned that staying meant burning.
You've gotten comfortable.
She had. That was the problem. She'd gotten so comfortable that she'd stopped watching the horizon. Stopped planning escape routes. Stopped maintaining the careful distance that kept her safe.
You've stopped being careful.
Yu's hands stilled on the books.
She'd stopped being careful.
When had that happened?
When had she started trusting that tomorrow would look like today? That next week would exist? That this place, this person, this cat, this life would still be here?
When had she started hoping?
The book she was holding slipped from her fingers and hit the floor with a sound like breaking.
Month twenty. The cracks widened.
"You're quiet today," Cicero observed over breakfast.
"I'm always quiet."
"You're quieter than usual, then." His eyes studied her with that uncomfortable perception. "Something wrong?"
Everything, Yu wanted to say. Everything is wrong because nothing is wrong and that's terrifying.
"I'm fine," she said instead.
"You've said that four times this week. I'm starting to think it's not true."
"It's true."
"Yu—"
"I said I'm fine!" The words came out sharper than intended.
Cicero leaned back, hands raised in a placating gesture. "Alright. Fine. But if you want to talk about whatever's bothering you, I'm here."
That was the problem, wasn't it?
He was here.
Would keep being here.
Had promised to keep being here.
And Yu had started believing him.
Mistake, the voice in her head whispered. Dangerous mistake. Believing in permanence. In safety. In home.
Nothing is permanent.
Nothing is safe.
Home burns.
Month twenty-one. The guilt started.
Yu found herself watching Cicero more carefully. Cataloging small details like she was preparing for his absence.
The way he hummed while cooking. The way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. The way he moved through the pagoda like he belonged there—because he did belong there, it was his, he'd built it.
For her.
He'd said he'd built it for her.
And she'd stayed.
Had accepted his hospitality, his kindness, his patience with her terrible social skills and her hostile deflections and her constant need for reassurance she pretended not to need.
Had taken and taken and taken for two years.
What had she given back?
A reorganized library? Some improved gardens? Arguments about cooking techniques?
It wasn't enough.
It was never going to be enough.
You're a burden, the voice whispered. Difficult. Prickly. Angry. How long before he realizes keeping you here isn't worth the effort?
Hei meowed from her lap, sensing the tension.
Yu stroked her mechanically, mind spiraling.
How long before he gets tired of you?
Month twenty-two. The distance grew.
Yu started pulling back.
Not obviously. Not dramatically. Just... small withdrawals.
She stopped showing up for breakfast. Said she wasn't hungry, needed to work in the gardens early, had too much to do.
She stopped asking Cicero questions about his day. Stopped sharing observations about books she'd read. Stopped arguing about his cooking techniques.
She stopped touching him casually—the brush of hands while cooking, the companionable shoulder bumps while gardening, all the small physical contacts that had become natural.
She was preparing.
For what, she didn't know.
But something was coming. Something had to be coming. This couldn't last. Nothing this good ever lasted.
Better to pull back now.
Better to protect herself.
Better to be alone and safe than connected and vulnerable.
Month twenty-three. Cicero pushed back.
"Alright, enough."
Yu looked up from the herbs she was transplanting. Cicero stood at the garden entrance, arms crossed, expression serious.
"Enough what?"
"This. Whatever you're doing. The pulling away, the avoiding me, the—" He gestured sharply. "The walls. You're rebuilding them and I want to know why."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yu." His voice was flat. Done with her deflections. "You haven't eaten a meal with me in three weeks. You've moved your reading spot from the library to your room. You flinch when I get too close. So either tell me what I did wrong or tell me what's actually going on."
"You didn't do anything wrong."
"Then what is it?"
Yu's hands clenched in the soil. "It's been almost two years."
"I know."
"Two years in one place."
"I know that too."
"Don't you think—" She stopped. Started again. "Don't you think that's enough?"
Silence.
When she looked up, Cicero's expression had gone very still.
"Enough," he repeated slowly. "You think two years is enough."
"I just mean—I've been here a long time. Longer than I planned. Longer than I should have. Maybe it's time to—"
"To what? Leave?" His voice was too calm. The kind of calm that meant he was angry and controlling it. "Is that what you're preparing for? Is that why you've been pulling away?"
"I'm not pulling away."
"You absolutely are. And I want to know why." He moved into the garden, and Yu had to force herself not to back up. "What changed, Yu? What happened that made you suddenly decide two years is 'enough'?"
"Nothing changed! That's the problem!" The words burst out before she could stop them. "Nothing's changed and nothing's gone wrong and it's been two years of—of comfort and safety and home and I—"
She cut herself off.
"And you what?"
"I'm waiting for it to end!" Yu's voice cracked. "I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the disaster, for the moment when this all falls apart because it has to fall apart because nothing this good lasts!"
"So you're going to leave first."
"I—" Yu's breath hitched. "I don't know. Maybe. I can't—I can't keep waiting for it to end. Can't keep existing in this—this perfect bubble knowing it's going to pop. I'm losing my mind waiting for the catastrophe."
Cicero stared at her.
"There is no catastrophe," he said finally.
"There's always a catastrophe."
"Not here." He crouched down beside her, heedless of the dirt. "Yu, listen to me. I know your history. I know every place you've stayed has ended in fire. But this place is different. I'm different. This—" He gestured at the pagoda, the gardens, everything. "This is permanent. Real. Safe. The catastrophe you're waiting for isn't coming."
"You can't know that."
"I can. Because I'm the one who built this place. I'm the one who made it this way. And I'm telling you—you're safe here."
Yu wanted to believe him.
Gods, she wanted to believe him so badly it hurt.
But two thousand years of experience said otherwise.
"I need time," she said quietly. "I need to—to think. To figure out—"
"How to run away more effectively?" Cicero's voice had an edge now. "No."
Yu's head snapped up. "What?"
"I said no." He stood. "You want to leave? Fine. Leave. But you don't get to pretend it's because you need time to think. You don't get to tell yourself you're being practical or protecting yourself or whatever lie you're using to justify it."
"It's not a lie—"
"It absolutely is. You're terrified. I get it. But you don't get to disguise terror as wisdom." His eyes were hard. "So if you're going to run, at least be honest about why."
Yu stood too, hands clenched. "You don't understand—"
"I understand perfectly. You're afraid that if you let yourself be happy, the universe will punish you for it. So you're punishing yourself first."
The words hit like a slap.
"That's not—"
"Yes it is." He moved closer, and there was something almost desperate in his eyes now. "Yu, I have done everything I can to make you feel safe. To prove this is real. To show you that you can have this. And you're still looking for reasons to run. So tell me—what would it take? What do I have to do to convince you to stay?"
"I don't know!"
"Then figure it out!" His voice rose. "Because I can't keep doing this. Can't keep watching you build walls and pull away every time we get close to actual happiness. Can't keep—"
He stopped.
Took a breath.
"I can't keep fighting your fear for you," he said quietly. "At some point, you have to decide to fight it yourself."
Silence stretched between them.
"I don't know how," Yu whispered.
"Then learn." Cicero's voice gentled. "Or leave. Those are your options. But you don't get to stay and keep one foot out the door. That's not fair to either of us."
Yu's throat tightened.
"I'm not trying to hurt you."
"I know." He reached up, cupped her face gently. "But you are anyway. And I'm asking you to stop. To make a choice. To actually choose this instead of just tolerating it until you panic."
"What if I can't?"
"Then I need to know that. So I can stop hoping."
The words gutted her.
Stop hoping.
He'd been hoping. For her. For this. For them.
And she'd been pulling away, building walls, preparing to run.
You're destroying this, she realized with horror. Not the universe. Not fate. Not catastrophe. You.
"I don't want to leave," she said, voice barely audible.
"Then don't."
"But I don't know how to stay without being terrified."
"So be terrified." Cicero's thumb brushed her cheek. "Be terrified and stay anyway. That's called bravery, Yu. Not the absence of fear. The presence of it and the choice to keep going."
Yu's vision blurred.
"What if I mess up again? What if I panic and—"
"Then we'll deal with it. Together." His other hand came up, framing her face. "But you have to actually try. Have to stop looking for exits and start looking for reasons to stay."
"I have reasons," Yu said, tears falling now. "So many reasons. The gardens and the library and Hei and you and—"
"Then hold onto those." Cicero pulled her into a hug, and she let him, let herself cling to him like a lifeline. "Hold onto them when the fear comes. Remind yourself why you're here. And if that's not enough, come find me and I'll remind you."
Yu buried her face in his shoulder and cried.
For the terror.
For the hope.
For two years of building something beautiful and almost destroying it herself.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
"I know."
"I'm going to be terrible at this."
"Probably." She could hear the smile in his voice. "But terrible and trying is better than perfect and running."
They stood in the garden, holding each other, and Yu made a choice.
Not to stop being afraid—that was impossible.
But to try.
To fight the fear instead of surrendering to it.
To stay.
After the crisis in year two—after Cicero had called her out on self-sabotaging and she'd chosen to stay, to try, to fight her fear—things changed.
Not dramatically.
Not all at once.
But slowly, steadily, the distance between them became something else entirely.
Year three. Autumn.
They were preparing dinner together—this had become routine, their movements synchronized after years of sharing the space—when Cicero said something that made Yu laugh.
Actually laugh.
Not a bitter sound or a sarcastic huff, but genuine amusement.
She stopped mid-chop, surprised at herself.
"What?" Cicero asked, noticing her pause.
"I—" Yu looked at him. "I laughed."
"You did. It was nice. You should do it more often."
"I don't laugh."
"You just did."
"That was—that was an anomaly."
"Sure it was." But he was smiling. "You know what I think?"
"I don't care what you think."
"I think you're happy. And it scares you."
Yu's hands stilled on the knife.
Was she happy?
The question should have been simple. But Yu had spent so long defining herself by absence—not safe, not settled, not home—that presence felt foreign.
But looking around the kitchen, at the meal they were making together, at Hei curled in her usual sunny spot, at Cicero smiling at her like her happiness mattered to him...
"Maybe," she admitted quietly. "Maybe I am."
"Good." Cicero's hand covered hers briefly. "You deserve to be."
And the terrifying thing was, Yu was starting to believe him.
Year three. Winter.
Cicero produced the board one evening without ceremony.
Wooden. Old-looking, though Yu had learned by now that Cicero's sense of age was unreliable. Sixty-four squares in alternating dark and light, with small carved pieces arranged in precise rows at either end.
"What's this?" Yu asked.
"Chess." He set it on the low table between them — the one in the main room where they spent most evenings. "Have you played?"
"I've played Xiangqi."
"Similar principles. Different rules." He began arranging the pieces with practiced ease, each one clicking into place with quiet finality. "I'll teach you."
Yu examined the board with the same intensity she brought to everything — focused, analytical, already looking for patterns. The pieces were different from Xiangqi's. More varied. Fewer but more mobile.
"This looks simpler," she said.
Cicero's smile was the particular kind that meant she was about to be wrong about something. "Let's find out."
It was not simpler.
Or rather — it was simpler to understand and infinitely harder to master. Yu grasped the rules within minutes. Understood the basic movement of each piece within the first game.
Lost that game in eleven moves.
"That's not—" Yu stared at the board. At her king, cornered and helpless, surrounded by Cicero's pieces like they'd been there the whole time. "How did you do that?"
"Patience, mostly." Cicero leaned back, stretching. "You're playing aggressively. Every move is an attack. That's your instinct — strike first, strike hard, end it quickly."
"What's wrong with that?"
"Nothing, in a fight. In chess?" He gestured at the board. "It leaves your back open."
Yu's jaw tightened. "Again."
They played again.
Yu lost in fourteen moves.
"Again."
Fifteen moves.
"Again."
Twelve moves. Worse than before.
Yu's hands had gone flat on the table, pressing down hard enough to whiten her knuckles. Cicero watched her with an expression of calm amusement that she wanted to throw the board at.
"You're thinking three moves ahead," he said. "I'm thinking six. You need to slow down."
"I don't slow down."
"I've noticed." He tilted his head. "That's why you keep losing."
Yu looked at him. At the board. At the pattern of her failures laid out in carved wood.
Then she began studying.
It became a thing.
Not just the playing — the preparation. Yu attacked chess the way she attacked everything that had bested her: with obsessive, relentless focus. She replayed their games in her head during the day. Analyzed the positions where she'd lost. Developed counters, abandoned them, developed new ones.
She reorganized her thinking the way she reorganized rooms — methodically, ruthlessly, until the system was perfect.
It took three weeks before she lasted past move twenty.
"Better," Cicero said, studying the board after Yu had finally managed to take his bishop.
"I took your bishop."
"You did."
"That's the first piece I've taken from you."
"It is."
Yu looked at him expectantly. Something in her chest wanted him to say well done or impressive or anything that acknowledged the three weeks of work that had gone into a single captured piece.
"Same time tomorrow?" Cicero asked instead, already clearing the board.
Yu exhaled through her nose.
"Same time tomorrow," she agreed.
She didn't beat him for another six months.
But when she did — a quiet afternoon in early spring, Cicero's king cornered with no escape — the silence that fell was so complete that Hei lifted her head from her nap to check if something was wrong.
Yu stared at the board.
Cicero stared at the board.
Then Cicero started laughing.
Not the polite, controlled laugh he used on visitors. A real one — surprised and delighted and genuine, the kind that crinkled the corners of his eyes.
"Finally," he said. "I was wondering when you'd get there."
"You knew I would?"
"Of course." He started clearing the board, still smiling. "You don't lose at things, Yu. You just haven't won yet."
Yu looked at the board one last time. At the position of her pieces — careful, patient, strategic. Nothing like how she played three months ago.
She'd slowed down.
She hadn't even noticed she'd done it.
"Again?" she asked.
Cicero's smile turned sharp. "Again."
Year five. Winter.
The first snow fell on a morning when Yu was in the garden, bundled in one of the robes Cicero had made her plus a warm cloak he'd added last winter.
She was supposed to be checking the cold-hardy herbs. Instead, she was watching snowflakes fall and thinking about how this was her fifth winter here.
Fifth.
Five years in one place.
The longest she'd stayed anywhere around someone since... she couldn't even remember.
"Admiring the view?"
Yu turned. Cicero stood in the doorway, holding two cups of something that steamed in the cold air.
"Just thinking," Yu said.
"Dangerous activity." He came to stand beside her, offering one cup. Hot chocolate, she discovered. He'd learned to make it last year after she'd mentioned missing it from centuries ago.
They stood in comfortable silence, watching the snow fall.
"Five years," Yu said eventually.
"I know."
"That's a long time."
"Is it?" Cicero glanced at her. "Seems short to me."
"Short?"
"Compared to how long I'm hoping you'll stay." His tone was light, but there was truth underneath. "Five years is just the beginning, Yu."
Something in her chest tightened.
"You really mean that," she said. Not a question.
"I really mean that."
Yu took a sip of chocolate to hide the way her throat had tightened.
"You're ridiculous," she muttered.
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true."
"And yet, you're still here."
"Unfortunately."
But she moved closer as she said it, let their shoulders touch, and felt him lean back slightly in response.
Comfortable.
Easy.
Home.
Year six. Spring.
"Yu?"
"Mm?"
They were in the library. Yu was reading, Cicero was supposedly organizing something but mostly just watching her. He did that sometimes—just watched her like she was doing something interesting instead of sitting still with a book.
"What are you thinking about?"
Yu looked up. "The text I'm reading. Why?"
"You've been on the same page for ten minutes."
Had she? Yu looked down at the book and realized he was right.
"Just distracted," she said.
"By what?"
By the fact that this was year six. By the fact that she'd stopped flinching when he got close. By the fact that his presence had become as natural as breathing. By the fact that somewhere along the way, "one more day" had become "all my days" and she hadn't even noticed the shift.
"Nothing important," Yu said.
Cicero moved to sit beside her. Close. Deliberately close.
"Liar," he said softly.
Yu's breath caught.
They were very close now. Had been getting closer for years, in ways both literal and metaphorical. Walls coming down. Distance shrinking. Careful touches becoming casual ones becoming something that felt like...
Like...
"Cicero," Yu said quietly.
"Yes?"
"What are we doing?"
He knew what she meant. She could see it in his eyes.
"What do you want to be doing?" he asked.
Yu's heart hammered. "I don't know. This is—I've never—"
"I know." His hand found hers. "So we'll figure it out together. If you want to."
Did she want to?
The answer should have been complicated. Should have required analysis, planning, careful consideration of all possible outcomes.
Instead, it was simple.
"Yes," Yu whispered. "I want to."
Cicero's smile was slow and warm and everything.
"Good," he said.
And when he kissed her—careful, gentle, giving her every opportunity to pull away—Yu leaned in instead.
Chose closeness instead of distance.
Chose hope instead of fear.
Chose him.
Year six. Summer.
Cicero appeared in the main room carrying something Yu had never seen before.
Small. Rectangular. Smooth black surface that caught the light in a way that felt wrong — too uniform, too perfect. No seams, no texture, just a single flat plane of dark material.
"What is that?" Yu asked from the couch, where she'd been reading.
"Entertainment." Cicero set it on the table and tapped the surface. The air above it shimmered, and suddenly a rectangle of light hung in mid-air — bright, vivid, impossibly clear. Images moved across it. People. Places. Colors that seemed to bleed off the edges.
Yu blinked.
"Where did you get this?"
"From where I come from." He said it casually. The way you'd say from the kitchen or from the garden. "It's a viewing device. Shows stories. Games. All sorts of things."
Yu examined the floating display with the same careful attention she gave new plants — curious but not trusting. "Stories."
"Interactive ones, even." Cicero pulled up something with a flick of his finger — a grid of images, each one labeled with small text. "See these? These are games. You control a character. Fight things."
Yu's eyes sharpened.
It was a small change. Barely visible. But Cicero caught it — the way her gaze focused, the slight lean forward, the flicker of genuine interest she usually kept locked down.
"Want to try?" he asked.
Yu set down her book.
The game was called something in a language Yu didn't recognize. It didn't matter. The moment she picked up the controller — another piece of future technology, slim and light in her hands — the logic of it was immediately, viscerally clear.
Button here does this. Button there does that. Move left, attack right, dodge forward.
Combat. Translated into something small and precise and controlled.
Yu's fingers found the rhythm in thirty seconds.
She selected a character — a woman with a long blade, fast movements, brutal efficiency. The screen flickered. An opponent appeared. The match began.
Yu won in fourteen seconds.
Cicero blinked.
"That was... fast."
Yu didn't look at him. Was already waiting for the next match to load, fingers resting on the controller with the patience of someone who'd wielded actual weapons for two millennia.
The next opponent appeared.
Yu won in eleven seconds.
"Yu."
"Mm."
"Are you enjoying this?"
She didn't answer immediately. Was mid-combo — a chain of inputs so fast her fingers were a blur, each one landing with mechanical precision. The opponent's health bar drained like water from a broken vessel.
Match over.
Yu set down the controller. Looked at Cicero.
Her expression was perfectly neutral. But something in her eyes — something small and sharp and deeply, quietly satisfied — told him everything.
"Again," she said.
Over the next week, Yu played every fighting game on the device.
Every single one.
She won them all.
Not easily — some took her longer than others, required learning new rhythms, new patterns. But she learned them fast, absorbed them the way she absorbed everything, and once she understood the logic of a game she dismantled it with the same ruthless efficiency she brought to reorganizing libraries.
Cicero watched from the couch, controller in hand, losing match after match after match with an expression of absolute delight.
"You're not even trying to win," Yu accused after her twentieth consecutive victory.
"I'm trying," Cicero said mildly. "You're just better."
"Obviously."
"Obviously." He grinned. "It's like watching someone use a cannon to crack open a walnut."
Yu considered this. "Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation. A very impressed observation."
Yu's mouth twitched. Almost a smile. She picked up the controller again.
"One more," she said.
They both knew it would be more than one more.
The games became a fixture of their evenings. Not always fighting games — Cicero introduced other types, strategy games and puzzle games and things with no combat at all. Yu was good at all of them. But the fighting games remained her favorite, and when she played them there was something in her posture that changed. Something looser. More fluid.
Like she was remembering something her body already knew.
Cicero never asked about it.
He didn't need to.
Year eight. Summer.
Yu woke to sunlight and warmth and Cicero's arm around her waist.
This had become routine over the past two years. Sleeping in the same bed, waking tangled together, starting each day with quiet conversation and comfortable silence.
She'd stopped questioning it around year seven.
Stopped analyzing what it meant that she'd let someone this close. That she'd allowed herself to be vulnerable. That she'd built a life with another person instead of alone.
Now she just... existed in it.
Let herself have it.
"You're thinking too loudly," Cicero mumbled against her shoulder.
"I'm not thinking."
"Liar. I can hear the gears turning."
Yu smiled despite herself. "Maybe I'm thinking good things."
"Are you?"
She was thinking about eight years. About how this place had become home in ways she'd never expected. About how Cicero had become... everything. Companion, friend, partner, lover. All of it and more.
About how Hei was curled at their feet, purring in her sleep.
About how the gardens were thriving and the library was perfect and the pagoda felt like an extension of herself.
About how she'd stopped counting days until leaving and started counting memories worth keeping.
"Yes," Yu said quietly. "I'm thinking good things."
Cicero pulled her closer. "Good. You deserve good things."
And finally—finally—Yu believed him.
Year Eight. Autumn.
It started because Cicero was bored.
Or said he was bored. Yu had learned, by year seven, to be suspicious of Cicero's boredom. It usually meant he was planning something that would entertain him at her expense.
"I want to show you something," he said one evening, producing the viewing device from somewhere. He'd taken to hiding it in various places around the pagoda — a game Yu pretended to find annoying and actually found charming.
"Show me, then."
"It's a movie." He settled beside her on the couch — their couch, the one they shared most evenings now, shoulders touching, Hei wedged between them like a small furry chaperone. "From my time."
"What's it about?"
Cicero's smile was too innocent. "Vampires."
Yu went very still.
"Vampires," she repeated.
"Yes."
"You want to show me a movie about vampires."
"I thought you might find it interesting." His tone was perfectly neutral. Perfectly, transparently, deliberately neutral.
"Put it on," Yu said, voice flat.
The movie was terrible.
Not in a subtle way. Not in a way that required analysis or critical thinking to identify. It was terrible in the way that made the air feel slightly insulted — dramatic music over nothing, actors delivering lines like they'd learned them phonetically, a vampire who glittered.
Glittered.
Yu watched in silence for approximately four minutes.
Then: "That's not how fangs work."
Cicero said nothing. Sipped his tea.
"Vampires don't have fangs like that. Those are decorative. Actual fangs are—" Yu stopped. Caught herself. Cleared her throat. "From what I understand. From research."
"Of course," Cicero murmured.
On screen, the vampire dramatically revealed his True Form, which was mostly sparkle and bad lighting.
"That's not a True Form," Yu said. "A True Form is—" She stopped again. Her jaw worked. "That is deeply inaccurate."
"Is it?"
"It's an insult."
"To whom?"
Yu turned to glare at him. He met her gaze with perfect innocence.
"To anyone with basic knowledge of the subject," Yu said carefully.
"Naturally."
On screen, the vampire declared his eternal love for a woman he'd known for two weeks.
"Oh, no," Yu said.
By the end of the movie, Yu had catalogued seventeen factual inaccuracies, four logical impossibilities, and one scene that made her physically flinch.
"The sunlight thing," she said, as the credits rolled. "That's — completely fabricated."
"Is it?"
"Completely." Yu crossed her arms. "They made that up. Whoever wrote this made that up specifically to—" She stopped. Drew a breath. "It's wrong."
"Noted." Cicero was watching her with barely concealed amusement. "Want to see another one?"
"Absolutely not."
He was already scrolling through options. "This one's about an ancient Chinese warrior who—"
"Fine," Yu said. "Fine."
The second movie was a wuxia drama.
Yu recognized the setting within seconds — the costumes, the landscape, the particular kind of magical energy the special effects were trying and failing to replicate.
"This is—" Yu's brow furrowed. "This is supposed to be the Zhou Dynasty."
"Is it?"
"The costumes are wrong. Those are Shang Dynasty sleeves on a Zhou Dynasty robe." She leaned forward, squinting at the screen. "And that building. That's not—that architecture didn't exist yet. That's at least three centuries too late."
Cicero nodded thoughtfully. "Good eye."
On screen, a legendary warrior fought a dragon with choreography so obviously staged it was almost impressive.
Yu's expression went through several stages.
First: confusion.
Then: recognition.
Then: something that could charitably be described as offense and less charitably be described as existential horror.
"I know that dragon," Yu said.
Cicero's eyebrows rose.
"Not personally," Yu added quickly. "But the legend. I know the legend. It happened a few centuries ago. And it was nothing like this." She gestured at the screen, where the warrior was delivering a speech about destiny while the dragon looked bored. "He didn't give a speech. He was terrified. He almost died. And the dragon—" She caught herself. "The legend says the dragon was much more dangerous than this."
"The legend," Cicero repeated.
"Yes." Yu's arms were crossed tight. "The legend."
"Of course."
On screen, the legendary warrior fell in love with a princess in what was clearly meant to be a moving romantic moment but came across as two people who had never met trying to remember each other's names.
"They didn't fall in love," Yu said flatly.
"They didn't?"
"No. He thought she was annoying. She thought he was a fool. They argued for three years before anyone even suggested—" Yu stopped.
The silence stretched.
Cicero looked at her.
Yu looked at the screen.
Hei, wedged between them, yawned enormously and went back to sleep.
"The legend is inaccurate," Yu said, after a long pause. "Obviously."
"Obviously," Cicero agreed, and his voice was so gentle that Yu almost looked at him.
Almost.
Movie nights became weekly.
Cicero developed a talent for selection — always something that would provoke a reaction, always something Yu would feel deeply, personally wronged by. Bad vampire movies. Terrible wuxia adaptations. One film about an "ancient Chinese sorceress" that was so historically confused Yu actually had to leave the room for five minutes.
She came back with tea and watched the rest with an expression of such concentrated fury that Hei moved to the far end of the couch.
"That woman," Yu said, when it ended, "was not a sorceress. She was a diplomat. She prevented three wars. And this—" She gestured at the screen. "—this makes her look like a villain because she was clever."
"Mm," said Cicero.
"It's offensive."
"It is."
"I want to find whoever wrote this and—"
"And what?"
Yu's mouth opened. Closed. She looked at her hands, at the tea, at Hei pretending to be asleep.
"And explain to them," she finished, with great dignity, "that history is more complicated than they think."
"That's very measured of you."
"I'm a very measured person."
"You threw a pillow at the screen twenty minutes ago."
"That was a reasonable response."
Cicero laughed — really laughed, the way that made the room feel warmer — and Yu pretended she didn't like the sound of it.
She didn't fool either of them.
Year ten.
It started so gradually that Yu almost didn't notice.
Hei sleeping more. Not unusual—cats slept most of the day anyway.
Hei being less interested in chasing the leaves that blew through the garden. She was getting older, after all. More dignified. That made sense.
Hei's fur not quite as glossy. Hei moving a little slower. Hei's face getting gray around the muzzle.
Small things.
Ignorable things.
Until one morning in year ten, when Yu woke to find Hei still sleeping and realized with horrible clarity that her cat was old.
Not just older.
Old.
"How long do cats live?" Yu asked Cicero that evening.
They were in the kitchen—always the kitchen, their space for difficult conversations disguised as meal preparation.
"Depends on the cat. Ten to fifteen years, usually. Sometimes longer with good care."
Ten to fifteen years.
Hei was more than ten.
Yu's hands stilled on the vegetables she'd been cutting.
"Yu?" Cicero's voice was careful. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. Just curious."
But it wasn't nothing.
It was everything.
Over the next months, Yu watched.
Watched Hei sleep longer. Watched her hesitate before jumping up to her favorite spots. Watched her move with the careful deliberation of a body that didn't quite work the way it used to.
Watched her age.
And with each small change, something in Yu's chest grew tighter.
She's dying, the voice whispered. Slowly. Inevitably. And you can't stop it.
Yu had known this intellectually. Had known cats didn't live forever. Had known that Hei's lifespan was finite.
But knowing something intellectually and watching it happen were very different things.
It started the way mornings always started.
Hei's weight at the foot of the bed. Cicero's warmth beside her. Pale light through the window, soft and unhurried.
Yu opened her eyes.
Everything was fine.
Hei's fur was gray around the muzzle.
Yu noticed it one morning while the cat was eating. A dusting of silver where black used to be, creeping outward from her nose like frost on glass. Not a lot. Barely visible in certain light.
But Yu had spent ten years learning to read this cat. She knew exactly what Hei looked like. Had memorized the precise shade of black in her fur, the exact shape of the white patch on her chest, the specific way her tail curved when she was content.
The gray was new.
Yu touched it with one finger, gentle. Hei purred, oblivious.
It's nothing, Yu told herself. Just age. Cats get gray. It's normal.
She went about her day.
The gray spread.
Not fast. Not dramatically. Just... steadily. Like tide coming in. Yu watched it happen over weeks, over months, in the way Hei moved through the pagoda with less urgency than before. The way she chose warmer spots to nap. The way she stayed curled up longer in the mornings before stretching and yawning and padding off to find breakfast.
She was still Hei. Still demanding. Still purring when Yu scratched behind her ears. Still occasionally knocking things off tables for no discernible reason.
But slower.
Quieter.
Smaller, somehow, though Yu knew that was impossible. Cats didn't shrink. They just... became less present. Took up less space in the world.
One evening, Yu was reading in the library. Hei was in her lap — their usual arrangement — but the cat hadn't shifted position in hours. Usually she moved, stretched, adjusted. Now she just lay there, breathing, warm and heavy and still.
Yu set down her book and looked at her.
Hei opened one eye. A sliver of gold, clouded slightly at the edge with something that might have been age or might have been something else.
She blinked at Yu.
Then closed her eyes again.
And something in the quality of that blink — the slowness of it, the finality — made Yu's chest go tight in a way she couldn't quite name.
The morning came without warning.
No dramatic decline. No suffering. Hei had been fine yesterday — ate her breakfast, napped in the garden, let Yu pet her in the evening. Normal. Routine.
Yu woke to the absence.
Not absence of warmth — Hei was still there, still curled at the foot of the bed in her usual spot. But the absence of presence. Of the tiny vibrations that came with a living thing breathing. The subtle shifts of weight. The warmth that was different from blanket-warmth, animal-warm, alive-warm.
Yu reached out before she fully understood why.
Touched fur that was still soft but already cooling.
No heartbeat beneath her fingers.
No breath against her palm.
Hei was gone.
Not in a way that left room for argument or denial. Gone the way a candle goes out — one moment the flame was there, and then it wasn't, and the wax was just wax.
Yu sat in the gray morning light and looked at the small black body with its silver muzzle and its white chest patch and its closed eyes, and she did not cry.
She did not move.
She did not breathe for a while.
She just sat there, and the silence in the room was so complete, so absolute, that it felt like the pagoda itself had stopped breathing with her.
Time passed after that.
How much, Yu couldn't have said precisely. Days, weeks, the turning of seasons — it blurred, the way grief made everything blur. The world continued. The gardens still bloomed because Cicero tended them. The library still held its books because nothing had damaged them. The pagoda stood, as it always had, patient and permanent.
But the spot at the foot of the bed stayed empty.
And Yu found herself reaching for weight that wasn't there, in the middle of the night, her hand closing on nothing.
The first gray hair appeared on Cicero's temple in autumn.
Yu saw it when he turned his head in the kitchen light — a single silver thread among the dark, catching the sun like a filament of spider silk. So small. So easily missed.
She stared at it for a long time.
He noticed her staring. "What?"
"Nothing." Her voice came out strange. She cleared her throat. "Nothing."
But she'd seen it.
And she couldn't unsee it.
It was slow.
Gods, it was so slow.
Not cruel — cruelty implied intent. This was just... time. Doing what time did. What it had always done, to everything, everywhere, without malice or mercy or any awareness of the lives it was wearing down.
Another gray hair. Then another. Then a handful. Then a streak, visible now even in dim light, threading through the dark like veins of quartz in stone.
Cicero didn't seem to notice. Or if he did, he didn't mention it.
But Yu noticed.
Noticed the way he sometimes held his back a little longer before straightening. The way his hands — those hands she knew so well, that had measured her for clothes and held her face and coaxed tea from impossible leaves — sometimes trembled, barely, when he reached for something.
Small things.
The kind of things you could pretend were nothing.
Yu was done pretending.
She watched him with a desperate, hungry attention, cataloguing every change, every shift, every minute sign that the man she loved was becoming something she couldn't keep.
And he smiled at her like he didn't know. Like he couldn't feel it happening.
The lines appeared around his eyes first.
Fine, at the edges. The kind of lines that came from years of smiling — and Cicero had smiled so much, for so long, that the creases had earned their permanence.
Then around his mouth. Then at his forehead, faint furrows that deepened when he frowned or laughed or concentrated.
His hair went gray faster after that. Not all at once, but steadily — like watching snow accumulate. Weeks of tiny additions until one morning Yu looked at him and saw someone who was aging, undeniably, irreversibly aging, and the word hit her like a physical blow.
Aging.
Like a human.
Like a mortal.
Like something with an end.
"You're quiet today," Cicero said.
They were in the garden. Spring again — Yu had lost count of how many springs she'd seen here. The cherry tree was blooming, petals drifting down in that lazy, beautiful way that had once made her feel hopeful.
Now they just looked like things falling.
"I'm fine," Yu said.
"You always say that."
"Because it's always true."
"It's not, though." He sat beside her on the bench — their bench, the one he'd built in year three — and his movements were slower than they used to be. More deliberate. The easy grace she'd loved in him had been replaced by something more careful, more considered.
Old. He was getting old.
"I'm watching you die," Yu said.
She hadn't meant to say it out loud.
The words hung in the air between them, raw and jagged and impossible to take back.
Cicero was quiet for a long time.
"Yu—"
"Don't." Her hands clenched on her knees. "Don't tell me it's fine. Don't tell me everything ends. Don't—" Her voice cracked. "Don't say anything that sounds like acceptance."
"I wasn't going to."
"What were you going to say?"
He turned to look at her, and his face — his beautiful, lined, aging face — held something she couldn't read.
But he didn't answer.
And the cherry blossoms kept falling, and Yu kept watching him, and the silence between them felt like a door closing.
The forgetting started small.
A name misremembered. A date wrong by a year. Yu chalked it up to distraction at first — Cicero had always been scattered about certain things, brilliant and absent-minded in equal measure.
But then it got worse.
He forgot where he'd put the tea. Not once — repeatedly. The same tea he'd been preparing every morning for a decade, kept in the same cabinet Yu had organized years ago.
He forgot the name of a book they'd read together. A book they'd discussed for hours, argued about, laughed over. Gone, like it had never existed.
He forgot — briefly, for just a flash of a moment — which room was Yu's.
That one broke something.
He'd caught himself, immediately. Covered it with a joke, a smile, a redirect. But Yu had seen it. Had seen the confusion in his eyes, the way his gaze had passed over her like she was a stranger, and the ground had tilted beneath her feet.
"Cicero."
"Mm?"
"Do you know who I am?"
He looked at her — really looked — and his face softened with such tender recognition that it was almost worse than the forgetting.
"Of course I know who you are," he said. "You're the most important person in my world."
But the way he said it — too careful, too deliberate, like he was reminding himself — told Yu everything.
He died on a winter night.
In his sleep, like Hei had. Quietly. Without drama or suffering.
Yu woke to the absence again — that same terrible hollowness she remembered from before, amplified a thousandfold. Not the absence of a cat's small warmth but the absence of him. Of the person who had seen her and stayed. Who had waited for her. Who had built a home for her out of nothing but magic and patience and an inexplicable, infuriating belief that she deserved good things.
Gone.
The bed was enormous without him.
The pagoda began to decay within the first year.
Not visibly at first — just a wrongness in the air, a heaviness that hadn't been there before. The light that had always filled the rooms from everywhere and nowhere grew dimmer. Warmer days cooled. Gardens that had bloomed in impossible combinations began to separate, species retreating to their natural habitats, the impossible harmony dissolving into something ordinary.
Then the books started crumbling.
Not all at once. A page here. A binding there. Yu would reach for a text she'd organized herself, years ago, and find the spine disintegrating in her hands, centuries of careful preservation undone in months.
She tried to save them. Gathered the ones that were still intact, moved them to rooms that seemed more stable, wrapped them in cloth, kept them dry.
It didn't matter.
The pagoda was dying.
She could feel it — the same way she'd felt Gaia's presence when she first arrived, that thread of connection thrumming through the walls. It was weakening. Fraying. Like a rope worn thin by years of bearing too much weight.
He maintained this, Yu realized one evening, standing in the kitchen where she'd learned to cook properly, watching a crack spread slowly across the ceiling. He's been maintaining this the entire time. And now he's gone and it's falling apart.
The realization settled into her like cold water.
She was alone in a place that was dying.
Yu left the pagoda eventually.
Not by choice — the structure finally collapsed on a gray afternoon, walls folding inward like a body giving up. Yu stood in the ruins and watched ten years of home reduced to rubble, and felt nothing.
She had stopped feeling things somewhere around the third year of silence.
The world outside was still there.
Of course it was. The world didn't care about one woman's loss. Civilizations rose and fell in the time it took Yu to walk from one end of the continent to the other. Empires she'd never heard of flourished and crumbled. Cities appeared where forests had been and forests reclaimed cities that had been abandoned.
Yu watched it all from a distance.
Not metaphorically. Actually, literally, from hilltops and mountaintops and the edges of things, watching humanity do what humanity did — build and destroy, love and fight, live their brief, furious, brilliant lives and die and be replaced by more of the same.
She didn't interact.
Didn't try to hide or pretend or fit in. What was the point?
There was nothing to fit into. No one to pretend for. No cat waiting at home, no garden to tend, no insufferable man to argue with about spice ratios and soil composition.
Just Yu. Walking. Watching. Existing in the spaces between other people's stories.
The way she had before.
The way she always would.
The earth changed slowly, then all at once.
The sky turned the wrong color first — a haze of amber that hadn't been there before, thickening over years into something opaque. The rivers ran warmer. The ice at the poles shrank and shrank until there was nothing left to shrink.
The forests went first. Then the grasslands. Then the oceans — not disappearing, but becoming something unrecognizable, too hot, too acid, too hostile for the life that had thrived in them for millennia.
Yu watched it happen.
Watched the last civilization fail to adapt. Watched the last cities empty. Watched the last humans scatter and dwindle and eventually — quietly, without ceremony — stop.
And she was still there.
Still breathing.
Still existing in a world that had become a husk of itself, a scorched and empty thing spinning through the void with nothing left on it but dust and silence and one woman who had outlived everything.
The silence was the worst part.
Not the heat. Not the dead landscape. Not the empty sky where birds used to fly.
The silence.
The absolute, crushing, suffocating absence of sound. Of life. Of anything at all except the wind moving across barren ground and Yu's own breathing and the distant, indifferent turning of the earth.
She sat on a rock — or what had once been a rock, now fused into something glassy and strange by the heat — and she looked at the horizon where nothing grew and nothing moved and nothing would ever move again.
And she waited.
For what, she didn't know.
There was nothing left to wait for.
Yu woke up screaming.
Not a clean scream — not the sharp cry of someone startled from sleep. A ragged, broken sound torn from somewhere deep in her chest, the kind of sound that came from lungs that had forgotten how to breathe for a moment and were desperately trying to remember.
She was drenched. Sweat soaked through her clothes, through the sheets, slicking her hair to her face and her hands to the fabric she was gripping with white-knuckled force.
The room was dark.
The pagoda was dark.
Yu's vision swam, refusing to resolve, the dream still layered over reality like a second skin she couldn't shed. She could still feel it — the heat, the silence, the terrible weight of being the last thing alive — pressing down on her chest like a stone.
Where—
A sound.
Small. Quiet. A vibration more than a noise.
Purring.
Yu's head snapped toward it.
Hei was at the foot of the bed. Curled in her usual spot. Black fur gleaming in the faint light from the window. White patch on her chest, pristine. Tail curled around her nose.
Alive.
Breathing.
There.
Yu stared at her for a long time, unable to process it. Unable to reconcile the cat in front of her with the cold, still body she'd touched in the dream. Her hands were shaking. Her whole body was shaking. She pressed her palms flat against the mattress and tried to make them stop and couldn't.
Then she looked beside her.
Cicero was there.
Asleep. Dark hair, no gray. Smooth skin, no lines. His face relaxed in sleep, younger than it had any right to look, and he was breathing, steady and slow and alive, and the dream was wrong, had been wrong, all of it wrong—
A sob hit her before she could stop it.
Not a single cry but a wave — her whole body curling forward around it, arms wrapping around her knees, face pressed into fabric, and then another one, and another, each one ripping something loose that she'd been holding together for years and years and years.
She couldn't breathe.
Couldn't see.
Could only shake, and gasp, and cry in a way she hadn't cried since the garden with the cherry blossoms, since before she'd learned to be brave, since the part of her that was still — underneath everything — terrified of being alone.
Hei stirred, mewling in confusion. Padded up Yu's leg and pressed against her side, purring louder, the way cats did when they sensed distress.
Yu pressed her face into warm, living fur and held on.
Cicero woke to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them. Dawn was just beginning — gray light seeping through the window, turning everything soft and colorless.
She was still.
Too still.
"Yu?" His voice was rough with sleep. He sat up, reached for her shoulder. "Hey. What's wrong?"
She flinched.
Not away from him. Toward him — a sharp, involuntary movement, like his touch had broken something open. She turned her head and looked at him, and the expression on her face—
Cicero had seen Yu angry. Hostile. Defensive. Scared. Vulnerable, even, in the moments she let him close enough to see it.
He had never seen her look like this.
Like she was seeing him for the first time. Like she was checking, desperately, frantically, that he was real.
"Yu." Quieter now. Careful. "Talk to me."
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"I dreamed—" Her voice was raw, scraped clean of everything. "I dreamed that you died."
Cicero went very still.
"Not fast. Not—" She swallowed hard. "Not like anything happened to you. You just... got old. And then you forgot who I was. And then you died. And Hei—" Her breath hitched. "Hei died first. And the pagoda fell apart. And the whole world—" She pressed her hands over her face. "The whole world died. And I was still there. Still alive. Watching all of it turn to dust and I couldn't—I couldn't do anything—"
Her voice broke.
Not into tears — she'd cried herself empty already. Into something worse. Something quiet and exhausted and ancient.
"I couldn't stop it," she whispered. "I couldn't stop any of it."
Cicero didn't say anything for a long time.
He didn't move to comfort her immediately. Didn't reach for her or pull her close or offer reassurance. Just sat there, in the gray morning light, and let the silence hold what she'd said.
Then he moved. Slowly. Deliberately. Sat beside her on the edge of the bed, close enough that their shoulders touched, and stayed there.
"Yu."
"Don't." Her voice was paper-thin. "Don't tell me it was just a dream. Don't tell me—"
"I wasn't going to." He turned to face her. His expression was serious in a way she almost never saw — stripped of the playfulness, the teasing, the knowing smile. Just Cicero. Honest and quiet and carrying something heavy. "I was going to tell you something true."
Yu looked at him.
"I'm not going to die."
The words landed in the silence between them like a stone dropped into still water.
"What?"
"I'm not going to die, Yu." His voice was steady. Certain. The same voice he used when he told her things he needed her to believe. "Not from age. Not from time. Not from any of the things you saw in that dream."
"That's—" She shook her head. "Everyone dies. Even—you said you weren't human, but that doesn't mean—"
"It does, actually." He reached out, took her hand. His fingers were warm. Alive. Solid. "I'm not going to age. I'm not going to forget you. I'm not going to leave this pagoda in a pile of rubble for you to find."
She stared at him.
"The pagoda," she said slowly. "You maintain it."
"Yes."
"You've been maintaining it this whole time. Every garden, every room, every—"
"Yes."
"And if you stopped—"
"It's a texture added to the world. Gaia would intervene or it would decay. Eventually." He didn't look away. "But I'm not going to stop. Because I'm not going anywhere."
Yu's breath shuddered out of her.
"How?" The word came out cracked. "How can you promise that? How can anyone—"
"Because I know what I am." Cicero's thumb traced slow circles on the back of her hand. "I know my limits. And mortality isn't one of them. Not in the way you experienced it in the dream. Not in any way that matters."
"You're not human."
"No."
"You never were."
"No."
Yu looked at their joined hands. At Hei, now curled between them, purring with magnificent indifference to the weight of the conversation happening above her head. At the pagoda around them — solid, warm, alive with the quiet magic that had kept it standing for a decade.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked. Not angry. Just tired. Tired and raw and desperately, achingly relieved.
"Because I was afraid you'd run." Cicero's smile was small and sad. "You spent two thousand years running from things that scared you. And the truth about what I am — what I can do, what I am — is a lot. Even for someone who's already accepted the impossible."
"I wouldn't have run."
"Maybe." His eyes were gentle. "Maybe not. But I wasn't willing to risk it. Not when I'd just gotten you to stay."
Yu's throat tightened.
She looked at him — really looked, the way she had that first morning in the garden when she'd realized her hands had stopped shaking around him — and saw the same face she'd been falling in love with for ten years.
No gray. No lines. No forgetting.
Just Cicero.
Hers.
"Promise me," she said. Her voice was barely a whisper. "Promise me you're not lying."
"I promise."
"Promise me the dream was wrong."
"The dream was wrong."
"Promise me—"
"Yu." He shifted, turned her toward him, and his hands on her face were the same hands that had measured her for clothes a lifetime ago, steady and warm and impossibly gentle. "I promise. I'm here. I'm staying. You are not going to be alone."
She nodded. Couldn't speak.
Cicero pulled her close — not a dramatic gesture, not a rescue. Just arms around her, chin resting on top of her head, warmth against warmth in the gray morning light.
And Yu pressed her face into his shoulder and breathed.
In.
Out.
The pagoda hummed around them, patient and alive.
Hei purred.
And the dream — the endless, suffocating, claustrophobic dream — finally, slowly, loosened its grip.
The day after the nightmare was quiet.
Not the heavy quiet of grief or tension. Something lighter. Something like the silence after a storm — the air washed clean, everything sharp and vivid, the world looking slightly more real than it had before.
Yu spent most of it in the garden.
Not working. Just sitting. On the ground, back against the cherry tree, legs stretched out in front of her. Hei in her lap. The sun warm on her face.
The pagoda hummed around her — that constant, low vibration she'd lived with for ten years without quite noticing it. She noticed it now. Paid attention to it the way you paid attention to a heartbeat you'd been ignoring.
He maintains this, she thought. All of it. Every day. For ten years.
The realization settled into her without shock. It was too late for shock. Shock had burned itself out sometime during the night, between the tears and the dawn.
What remained was something quieter.
Something that felt like understanding.
Cicero found her there in the late afternoon. Didn't say anything at first — just sat beside her, shoulder to shoulder, and watched the light move through the garden.
Hei mewled in greeting, then resettled.
They stayed like that for a while. The silence between them had always been comfortable. Years of practice had made it a language of its own.
"I should tell you more," Cicero said eventually. Quietly. Not pushing — just... offering.
"Yes," Yu said. "You should."
Another pause.
"Not today," Cicero said. "Tomorrow. If that's okay."
Yu looked at him — at his face, unchanged, unhurried, patient as always — and nodded.
"Tomorrow," she agreed.
Tomorrow came gently.
They were in the kitchen — always the kitchen, for important conversations — and Cicero explained.
Not everything. Not in a rush. In the way he did most things: carefully, with attention to what Yu could take in, pausing when she needed to pause.
He told her about where he came from. Not just when — the future, yes, she already knew that — but what. What he was. What he could do. The scope of it was larger than she'd imagined, but he didn't dwell on the enormity. Just laid it out, plainly, like facts on a shelf.
He told her about the pagoda.
"I built it for you," he said. Simple as that.
Yu's hands stilled on her tea.
"Before you arrived. Before you even knew this place existed." He turned the cup in his hands, studying the tea like it held answers. "I knew you would need somewhere. Somewhere safe. Somewhere no one could find you, and where the world couldn't touch you, and where you could—" He paused. "Heal. That's the word. Heal."
"You knew I was coming."
"I knew you would end up here. Eventually." His expression shifted — something complicated underneath. "The details of how I knew that are... a longer conversation. But yes. I knew."
Yu sat with that for a long time.
A pagoda built for her. A decade of maintenance. A pocket dimension shaped around her needs before she'd even walked through the door.
"That's a lot," she said finally.
"It is."
"You're a lot."
"Also accurate."
Yu almost smiled. Almost.
"The pagoda can't stay like this forever," Cicero said, later that evening. They were on the bench in the garden — their bench — and the light was fading into the particular amber that meant evening was coming.
"Why not?"
"Because it was never meant to be permanent. It was meant to be a cocoon." He gestured at the garden, the pagoda, the impossible sky above them. "You needed time. Space. Somewhere to remember how to be alive instead of just surviving. You've done that."
Yu looked around at the place that had been her world for ten years. At the gardens she'd shaped. The library she'd organized. The kitchen where she'd learned to cook properly. The bench where she'd been kissed for the first time. The bedroom where she'd slept without nightmares for years.
"So what happens now?" she asked.
"Now you take it with you."
Cicero produced the pendant the next morning.
Her pendant. One of the only memories in physical form she's had with her since forever. She found the jade little after being born in this world. She found it in a cave. To her at the time, it seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world. Later, she would carve it and make it into a pendant. However, the wear and tear had done its thing on one of her most precious memories.
It seemed Cicero fixed it and put a silver chain on it. She couldn't be more happy.
Now he held it out to her, and it pulsed with light.
Not bright. Not dramatic. Just a quiet, steady glow — the same quality of light that filled the pagoda's rooms. Warm. Alive. Familiar.
"This," Cicero said, "can hold a version of the pagoda. The full space — it'll seem smaller. Quieter. But it'll still feel like home."
Yu took it carefully. The moment her fingers closed around it, warmth flooded up her arm — not heat, exactly. Recognition. Like touching something that had always been hers.
"The garden?" she asked.
"A version of it. Enough to grow things. Enough to sit in."
"The library?"
"Compressed. But all there. Every book."
Yu turned the pendant in her hands. Studied it. Then looked up at the pagoda — the real one, surrounding them, vast and ancient and impossible.
"When?" she asked.
"Whenever you're ready."
Yu spent three days saying goodbye.
Not ceremonially. Not with tears or speeches or any of the grand gestures she would have scorned. She just... moved through the space. Slowly. Deliberately.
Touched the walls of the library where the wood was worn smooth by years of her hands passing over it. Walked through the garden in the early morning, when the light hit the cherry tree just right. Sat in the kitchen one last time, in the spot where she always sat, and let the silence fill her up.
Hei followed her everywhere, as if sensing something was changing. The cat wound between her ankles, meowed when Yu sat too long in one place, demanded to be held with a persistence that was almost aggressive.
On the third evening, Yu stood in the center of the main room and looked around.
Ten years.
Ten years in one place. The longest she'd lived anywhere around someone since before she could remember. The place where she'd learned to laugh again. Where she'd learned to trust. Where she'd learned — slowly, painfully, with a great deal of resistance — to let someone close.
"Okay," she said, to no one in particular.
Or to the pagoda.
Or to herself.
Okay.
The compression was beautiful.
Yu hadn't known what to expect — something violent, maybe. Something that felt like loss. Instead, it was gentle.
Cicero stood in the center of the garden, one hand raised, and the pagoda folded. Not collapsing — folding. Like paper being creased with infinite care. The walls drew inward, the gardens condensed, the light gathered itself into a single point of warmth that traveled — through the air, through the magic, through something Yu couldn't see — and settled into the pendant hanging from Cicero's fingers.
The pagoda was gone.
The space where it had been was just... space. Empty. Ordinary.
But the pendant glowed, and when Yu reached for it, she could feel the garden inside. The library. The kitchen. The bench.
All of it. Smaller. But there.
Yu closed her hand around it and held on.
"Ready?" Cicero asked.
They were standing in the empty space where the pagoda had been — just the two of them and Hei, who was curled in Yu's arms with the magnificent indifference of a cat who had survived dimensional relocations before and fully intended to survive this one too.
Cicero held out his hand. Not to take hers — to open something.
The air in front of them split.
Not violently. Not with drama or thunder or tearing light. It simply... parted. Like a curtain being drawn aside. On the other side: snow. White, blinding, impossibly cold-looking snow. A landscape of ice and wind and a massive, brutalist structure rising from the Antarctic wilderness like something that had no business existing at the edge of the world.
Yu looked at it for a long time.
Then she looked at Cicero — at his face, unchanged and unhurried, at his hand still extended, at the small knowing smile that said he'd wait as long as she needed.
Then she looked down at the pendant in her other hand. Warm. Humming. Home.
"Ready?" Cicero asked again.
Yu adjusted Hei in her arms. The cat opened one eye, assessed the situation, and went back to sleep.
"Ready," Yu said.
She stepped through.