romeo

Sure, Sorey came back after his last breath. Sure, he remembers Mikleo. Sure, he's still the kind, pure, lovable nerd. But it's not enough.

Mikleo mourns for someone named Sorey, despite Sorey standing right beside him. But he isn't. He's just ever so slightly and yet simultaneously so entirely off. It's not the new gradient of his hair. It's not because Sorey has less memories of the others, or of their journey. The Sorey from that journey was one that was only around for a few months, so it should be fine, right? If he's more like the Sorey from before they left Elysia. That's who Mikleo spent his childhood with, grew up beside. But there's nothing that Mikleo can even pinpoint beyond a memory or two that slipped through the cracks. Somehow, it just isn't him.

And it hurts Mikleo to look at him. Like looking at something so nearly a person. It hurts to have that knee-jerk, negative reaction, 'he's fake,' having to remove himself for a while because he's so close to screaming, demanding he stop pretending to be someone he isn't.

Maybe he's right, but maybe he's wrong. Maybe Sorey the seraph really isn't anything like Sorey the human. Maybe Sorey the seraph is a Sorey built of Mikleo himself, and then it feels like his own fault that his most dear came back wrong. But he's had so many years without Sorey to know what it's like to be made of so many peoples' influences—enough years to forget that once upon a time, he was built of almost nothing but Sorey, too. Maybe Sorey the seraph isn't so different after all.

He realizes that he wouldn't know anymore anyway. It's been so long. Even with the long life he lived for himself, his focus on Sorey had been so perfectly centered to never realize that the finer details had worn away from his own memories. If asked to picture Sorey's face a year ago, he wouldn't have been able to beyond the broad strokes, hazy as a dream filtered through muddy waters. Maybe Sorey the seraph and Sorey the human are the same in all the ways that matter, and Mikleo's own idea of him has mutated with how many years he's had to polish and rub away layer after layer until even traveling back in time wouldn't have given him the 'right' person back.

Neither of them can really know at this point.

But of course it hurts Sorey, too. He had no frame of reference for how people changed with time—never had to say goodbye to someone for long enough to see a stark before and after. He hadn't even thought that the Mikleo he would wake up to might be someone he doesn't know. He might have expected him to look different, but centuries of time and people and learning and shifting of cultures has refined Mikleo into someone almost wholly new.

Mikleo doesn't laugh at the kinds of things he laughed at before. Mikleo has seen nations rise and fall, and is tired and has harsh opinions about many of them that Sorey only hopes he'd agree enough with if he had the same insight as someone who'd lived it first-hand. Things they used to argue about, Mikleo now knows all of the objectively true answers to, and the world has changed so much and there's so much to catch up on that Sorey feels more like he's 8 with the way Mikleo answers his questions or observations, even if he's patient.

Sorey wonders, if he'd been able to continue his life beside Mikleo, would they have kept pace with each-other, or would one have eventually out-grown the other? Would Mikleo have become a different person than he is now? (And would it be for better, or for worse?) Would he have grown to be someone as difficult to recognize as Mikleo is to him now? (And would he even notice this far down the line?) Would he think of his 17-year-old self as a naive and foolish child as Mikleo seems to view his own teenaged self? He supposes it's not an unreasonable view to have, but as he sees himself as just reaching 18 at this point, hearing Mikleo speak of his own words and thoughts back then (a lot of which he must have forgotten they'd shared) as if they were invalid stings in a way that feels like an attack on Sorey himself.

There's a divide between them that seems impossible now, across which mutually echoes a lamenting 'where did you go?' and desperate 'I'm right here.'

The years may never catch up, but the difference between 10 and 20 is gapingly large, while 50 and 60 is near nothing. If millennia pass, and Sorey becomes someone new, too, would this gap between them similarly get any smaller?