lloyd does not realize that this is perhaps his worst fear. not until he witnesses the chaos. people are celebrating, mourning, and discussing the fall of hive city. the scientists are awol. it is all going to shit, yet people are laughing, crying, exercising powers they haven’t felt in years.
he feels numb. he wonders where zelos is. where his father is. martel, mithos - everyone. the city falls apart around him, as it has a few times now. sectors destroyed on a whim or by accident. every time, he had run to help.
but people are disappearing. they are going home.
‘i don’t want to go home.’
it sickens him to think such a thing when all he had ever wanted was the right the wrongs the mere existence of this city embodied.
people should be going home.
but what of their connections? their friendships? their jobs, their homes, their lives? all that they had built up here, from near-nothing. it is crumbling and they are going home.
lloyd wants to see aselia again. he has a job to do there, one which hive city had reinvigorated his determination to complete. but home … home …
the smoke, wherever it comes from, stings his eyes. that is what he wishes to believe, but ever-emotive, ever-honest lloyd irving cries. he stands and he cries, curses himself silently for not doing anything. for just watching. this was beyond even him, which he loathed to admit, but there was still time. time to find zelos.
yet he stands. and he cries.
nothing gold can stay, and all good things come to an end.
he was stupid to think this would be any different.
he should be happy. he should be ecstatic, to go back to a world he did truly love despite all its faults. there were things that needed to be done, a church to salvage, he had made a promise to the king... all this time, he’d been running from that. here in this city. it hadn’t been his choice, of course, but he had secretly relished the chance to live a life away from the chaos of aselia. away from the wreckage cruxis had made. he’d gotten too comfortable here. and now he had to pay the price of being foolish.
the idea of going home, of seeing meltokio again...puts a pit in his stomach large enough to fall into.
and matters are not helped any when he catches sight of lloyd.
he’s crying. he feels something like a pang -- an honest to god sharp gripping on his heart, and his mind is saying that it’s not right to see lloyd irving cry when he should be smiling.
“hey.” it’s soft, just loud enough to get the other swordsman’s attention. he smiles in that way he always does when trying to pretend things aren’t as serious as they really are. “you hear the good news?”