Summer, a flood of gold through the arches. The clipboard in Phosphophyllite’s arms an unwanted but increasingly familiar weight. On either side of them the corridor stretches empty and silent, everyone else too far out along their patrol routes to be seen as even a glint in the sunlight, or ensconced somewhere within the depths of the school. The air is still, but the grass in the courtyard stirs, incremental, as though an unfelt breeze is ruffling over it.

“Oh, are you here as well?”

Phosphophyllite whirls around. A bright gold-flecked shock of cropped blue hair, one eye noticeably more luminous than the other, with an odd shellacked lustre. The gem’s standing barely an arm’s length from their right shoulder. Had they been there all along? Phosphophyllite frowns, trying to place the features, but the memory rears up just short of slotting into place. They’ve never forgotten an entire gem before.

“Sorry,” Phosphophyllite says, gesturing at the glossy agate-shell bands spiralling down their legs. “These are all new—I’ve lost a lot of inclusions lately, so I don’t really, um, remember who you are?”

“That’s alright,” the gem says, a small smile playing at their lips. “It’ll come back to you.” Their hands come up to frame their face, fingers fluttering on either side of their chin. “This isn’t mine, anyway, I’m just borrowing it from a friend! There’s a lot you’re forgetting these days, isn’t there?”

“Can’t remember what I’m forgetting,” Phosphophyllite mutters.

The smile flickers, widens, and—it isn’t alien, in this light. There’s something deeply unsettling about catching their smile crawl across a stranger’s face. The shape of it tugging at Phosphophyllite’s own mouth in recognition, and then the weight in Phosphophyllite’s arms isn’t paper at all, it’s a braided mess of gold and platinum splaying out from their shoulders. For a moment Phosphophyllite falters, can’t reconcile the too-smooth crystal structure of the alloy with the rest of their body, metal pooling useless and heavy in overlapping tendrils around their feet, and they’ve been here before, helpless, hopeless Phos good for nothing but watching, wide-eyed and rooted in place, too slow, too late. Then the molecules shift, slipping together, and they wrest the alloy back into some semblance of limbs.

“It’s winter,” the gem says, and it is, the lake outside glassed over with ice, white all the way to the tremulous horizon. “Don’t you have a duty to tend to?”

“I—oh,” Phosphophyllite says. There’s a weight at their hip, and when they put their hand there, their fingers brush against the hilt of a sawtoothed blade. Its heft familiar, imperfect, built for the grip of a broader palm. “But I thought—”

“The last thing they entrusted to us and you can’t even—”

Their arms surge out in a vicious rush of gold, snapping firm around Phosphophyllite. Strangely warm where it presses their arms flush to their sides, gold binding to gold, caging them in. They’d done this to Cairngorm, too, hadn’t they, that blind violent upswell of terror seeing only the pale sheen of their hair in the light, bright as a memory, as the winter sun. Grasping for something no longer within reach. Cairngorm’s voice floats lazily to the surface of Phosphophyllite’s memory: when you’re hurting—

The gem steps closer, the gold shifting as they move. Their lips close enough to brush against Phosphyllite’s cheek, just touching the corner of Phosphophyllite’s mouth, and like the stirring of a breeze Phosphophyllite feels the thinnest of cracks spiderwebbing out from the point of contact. “Every partner we have, we ruin,” they muse. “Don’t you ever wonder why?”

Phosphophyllite’s eyes snap open. “Then Cairngorm—”

“No,” they say. The gold drips to the ground in thick rivulets, falls away. They pull back. A softer set to their mouth, now. “Not yet.”