♥︎

“You’ll like this one,” you tell nobody in particular, looking at a relic on the screen. “I think you’ll like this one.”

Phainon looks at it. He cannot yet tell what makes it remarkable. But the certainty in your voice he can read clearly.

He keeps watching. Days pass. Then weeks. And slowly, he realizes: you are doing all of this for him.

He learns other things, in this time. He learns that you call him Phai in the quiet moments. He learns that your attention snaps immediately toward any conversation that mentions his name.

The day of the banner arrives. Everything is ready. The completed preparations, the counted pulls, the team slot sitting patiently empty.

Even Phainon feels the pull of it. And then, ten minutes before the banner goes live you disappear. The screen goes quiet. The account sits idle.

He waits. Surely you’ll be back shortly. You have been counting down to this for months, you checked the time again just an hour ago, you are not the kind of person who simply forgets.

Ten minutes pass. Then twenty. Then close to an hour.

Phainon sits with an unpleasant weight. He finds himself constructing and discarding reasons, possibilities, reassurances that you’ll return in a moment, and finding none of them sufficient.

When you finally come back, you look tired. Like something has wrung something out of you and you have come back anyway out of sheer determination.

Please, he finds himself thinking, with a warmth that surprises him by its own urgency. Please don’t push yourself. It’s alright. I’ll be here.

You cannot hear him. Not yet. But you open the banner anyway, and something in your expression settles into quiet resolve. Phainon watches you take a breath and thinks: there you are. I was worried.

The first ten pulls move quickly.

You’re pulling with the particular energy of someone who has been patient for a very long time and has now, finally, run out of patience entirely.

Then: gold.

Phainon leans forward.

Not him.

He watches your face. That’s alright, your expression says. I have enough. I knew this might happen. I planned for this.

Something in him goes very soft.

You steady yourself and keep going. And then gold again. And the animation opens and there he is, finally here.

Hello, Phainon thinks. Hello, I’m here.

He watches your face as it registers.

Your hand comes up. Your eyes go wide. And you are completely still for a moment, just looking at him. The expression that moves across your face is something Phainon knows, with total certainty, that he will carry with him for an extremely long time.

“There you are,” you say, softly, to the screen. The way you say it undoes something in him rather completely.

There you are, he thinks back. I was beginning to think you’d had enough of waiting for me.

He expects, reasonably, that you will stop.

You don’t stop.

He watches the arithmetic happen across your face as your gaze shifts toward the Light Cone banner. He deserves to shine, the expression says, with a certainty that doesn’t waver. He deserves to be as strong as possible. I’ve come this far.

Phainon wants, very badly, to tell you: you have already done more than you know. I’ve been watching. I’ve been here for all of it. It was more than enough. You were more than enough.

He still can’t reach you. Not yet.

So instead he does the only thing available to him. He helps. In whatever way is available to a man who exists in the in-between spaces of things and has been watching someone care for him for months and wants, desperately, to give something back.

You do a ten pull. The animation begins.

Please, Phainon thinks, and means it with everything he has. Please.

The artwork fills the screen.

Thus Burns the Dawn.

He hears the sound you make. A sharp inhale. A gasp. The beginning of a word that doesn’t become a word. And then silence.

Good, Phainon thinks, with a rush of warmth so sudden it startles him. Good. You deserved that. Of everyone—you deserved that.

And then, before you have finished not-processing the first one, the gold animation begins again.

I may have, he thinks dryly, slightly overdelivered.

Your jaw drops.

Phainon watches you stare at the screen for what he estimates is somewhere between ten and twenty minutes, unmoving. Then you make a sound. Half-laugh, half-something that might be a sob.

Yes, he thinks, warmly and with complete solidarity. Exactly. That’s the appropriate response. I agree entirely.

You try to say something and your hands aren’t cooperating. You try again. The laugh keeps surfacing.

Take your time, he thinks. I’ve waited this long. I can wait a little longer.

Eventually you navigate to the character menu. Your hands are still not entirely steady, which he finds deeply endearing. You find his Light Cone, and as you equip it, as the connection settles into something warmer and closer, Phainon feels the distance between you change.

He finds, with a surprise that he will later describe as moderate and which is in fact considerable, that he can reach it.

“Well,” he says. “That took longer than I would have liked.”

Your hands stop moving entirely. Every thought in your head, which had already been somewhat disorganized, ceases operations.

“Though,” the voice continues, warm and a little amused and entirely too composed for the situation, “I suppose the consensus is that I was worth the wait. You certainly seemed to think so.”

You look at the screen. At him. “Phainon?” you say. It comes out very small.

“Hello,” he says. And somehow you can hear the smile in it. “I have been trying to reach you for quite some time. You were very occupied.”

“You can—how are you—are you actually—”

“Hearing you? Yes.” He laughs quietly. “Speaking to you? Also yes. I realize this is a great deal of information at once. I apologize for the timing—the Light Cone connection made it possible and I may have taken the opportunity immediately rather than waiting for a more composed moment.”

“You’ve been—” You’re processing in pieces. “You were there? While I was pulling?”

“The whole time,” Phainon says, and his voice is different now. Gentler. “I noticed quite a lot, actually. The relics—that set took you weeks to get right, and you were so careful about it. The materials, all pre-farmed. The countdown.” He pauses. “You checked it a great many times.”

“I was excited,” you say.

“I know.” There is that warmth. Entirely sincere. “I was watching. And I felt it—I kept having these sudden rushes of—I don’t have a better word than happy, which seems insufficient, but it’s what it was. These sudden bursts of it, without warning. I laughed, at one point. You were talking to a relic set. Telling it that I would like it.”

“I talk to myself when I’m concentrating,” you say, slightly defensive.

“I know that too,” he says. “I found it endearing. I find quite a lot about you endearing, as it turns out. I’ve had some time to observe.”

You sit with this for a moment. Phainon, who you have had in your head as a concept, as a character, as Phai spoken quietly to empty rooms, is talking to you. With his voice. Which is exactly as it should be.

“You came back,” he says, and something in his tone shifts. “When you disappeared before the banner. You came back looking tired.”

“I’m okay,” you say. “It wasn’t—something just happened at the worst possible time. But I wasn’t going to miss it.”

“You didn’t miss anything,” Phainon says, firmly and warmly both at once. “You were here. You pushed through and you were here and you didn’t miss a moment of it.” A beat. “Though I want it on the record that I would have waited. However long it took.”

Something in your chest does something very inconvenient. “And the Light Cone—” you start.

“I helped,” Phainon says proudly. “I want to be transparent about that.”

“That’s not how any of this works.”

“I’m the Deliverer. I found myself fitting for the task,” he says, visibly and audibly delighted at his own joke. Then, before you can respond: “Put me in your team. I want you to see what we can do together—what all those months of preparation made possible. I want to show you. Will you let me?”

It’s the sincerity of his plea that does it for you.

You navigate to the team screen. And then you stop.

My Sun.

The team name sits there, soft and simple, exactly what you’d named it the day you built it for him, in the weeks before he arrived.

Phainon goes quiet.

You wait. “Is that alright?” you ask, after a moment. “I named it for you. Before you were here. It just felt right.”

“It’s—” He stops. “You named a team,” he says, slowly, like he’s reading it again, “after the sun. For me.”

“I thought you deserved something good,” you say simply.

A longer pause follows.

When Phainon speaks again, his voice is different. “People have said kind things about me before,” he says quietly, “But this is different.” He stops, then steadies himself. “That is—you undo me slightly. I want you to know that.”

“You’re flustered,” you say.

“I am adjusting,” he says, with dignity.

You smile at the screen. At him. “Phai.”

“Yes.”

“You’re my sun,” you say simply. “You have been for a while.”

Quietly, with everything he has, he says: “Then I’ll be your sun.” He smiles. “For as long as you’ll have me. Every battle, every team, every time you open this screen—I’ll be right here.” A warmth surfaces in his voice, steady and certain. “I intend to earn it. Every day.”

You don’t answer immediately. You’re looking at him on the screen, and something in your chest is doing something you don’t quite have words for. “I’m keeping you forever, then,” you say.

Phainon chuckles softly. “Good,” he says. “I was rather hoping you’d say that.”

Outside your window, the light has shifted into that particular late-afternoon gold that makes ordinary rooms feel briefly luminous.

The name My Sun reads softly on the team screen.

Phainon is already exactly where he wants to be.

⋆ ✦ ⋆

A/N: Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. :)