you put me on and said i was your favourite

The Rainbow Road shimmers beneath a pastel sky, its volcanic stone radiant with unnatural hues—lavender and peach, coral and cyan, a palette poured straight from some dream or memory too old to name. The waters froth at the shore in opalescent whorls, bubbling with secret geysers that hum like distant voices.

And just above the horizon, far out where the sea meets sky, a ripple of static begins.

It is faint at first, like a smudge on the air. But it moves. Closer. Closer. A flicker between the colours, a shape where shapes shouldn’t hold. The silence of it is heavy—too quiet for comfort—and then, like the sound of a television tuning in from nowhere, it speaks: "…Noe."

The voice isn’t loud, but it’s layered. Sweet and sad and reverent. The static coalesces, gently now, and Vox does not swoop—not this time. His many limbs unfurl as though underwater, graceful despite their wrongness. A mouth opens where a shoulder ought to be. One eye looks sideways, the other upside-down. His form flickers in and out of itself, but holds—tentatively—as he touches down on the edge of the rainbow shore.

His grin is smaller than usual. Still far too wide, but not unkind. [sy]"I didn’t want to frighten you," he says, tentacles folding politely behind his back. "I came slowly. Like a snail. Or an idea."

The silence stretches. A geyser pops in the background with a cheerful plorp.

"I’ve come to say goodbye."

The words carry a weight not often found in him. They tumble out strangely clean, untouched by metaphor or misplaced jokes. Raw, almost. His limbs twitch.

vox

Draw the cat eye, sharp enough to kill a man
You did some bad things, but I'm the worst of them

The Rainbow Road was beautiful, but there was nothing on it that caught Noe's eye. No, her gaze was turned up to the distant horizon, where a ripple of static interrupted the otherwise smooth pastel blue. She wondered what it said about her, that she was willing to befriend what some would argue was a monster, that she should know him well enough to be able to recognize that indistinct blur as Vox. But he'd never been a monster to her. Not really.

He'd just been doing the best he knew to do. She really believed that, after the bouncy ball incident.

Noe might have offered a smile at the sound of her name, but she faltered at the tone. There were too many layers to it, something sweet on top of something melancholy on top of something else that she couldn't quite place. And there was something odd about his appearance. Instead of popping into place, he materialized slowly, gently, touching down upon the shore like an eldritch angel (and if that wasn't an oxymoron, Noe didn't know what was).

"Hi, Vox," Noe said, ignoring the spray of the geyser in the background as she studied her friend, trying to discern what it was that was different.

And then: I've come to say goodbye.

Noe frowned. "Wait - what?" she asked, concern coloring her voice as it rose an octave. "Goodbye? Why? Where are you going?" Was this some kind of Family matter? Some retribution for befriending her without making her a Friend of the Family? Or had Vox changed his mind?

Sometimes I wonder which one will be your last lie
They say looks can kill and I might try

Noe

The static around Vox pulses gently, like a held breath. His form flickers—momentarily upside down, then not—and when he speaks again, his voice has lost none of its strange cadence, but there’s something softer tucked in between the frequencies now. A tremble in the signal. "They asked us to leave," he says. "Politely, actually. But they meant it. Your people—Caido people—they caught our Reaper." A ripple of sadness warps through the air around him, distorting the light. "They pricked her with a thorn. A real one, I think. From a rose."

He glances down—though it’s not quite clear which of his eyes is the one looking—and taps a tentacle idly against the shore, kicking up a small burst of pink foam. "Now she’s not one of us anymore. All her lovely sharp edges are gone. The thorn took them. She’s soft now. Slow. Frail." His voice lowers, a hush layered with a hundred whispers. "The only way to make her whole again is to bring her back into the Void. Back to the dark, where we're all one."

Vox turns a little, his many limbs folding inward like seaweed caught in a tide. One of his mouths speaks alone this time, as if sharing a secret the others are too shy to repeat. "Dorian would do anything for the Family, you know," he murmurs. "But especially for Dahlia."

He rotates slightly. An elbow grows where a shoulder was. His expression—if one can call it that—shifts into something curiously solemn. "He doesn’t say it," Vox adds, tone brightening into something that sounds almost fond. "But it’s love. I’ve seen it. It coils around him like thread, tugging him toward her. Love is such a strange infection. It makes people...ridiculous." His laughter is brief, soft, and distorted—like a corrupted lullaby.

"I understand it less than everything," Vox admits. "But I know what it looks like." And then, almost shyly, one tendril twitches in her direction. "I see it when I look at you."

vox

Draw the cat eye, sharp enough to kill a man
You did some bad things, but I'm the worst of them

Noe watched the pink foam dissipate into the air, a frown on her face as she considered what Vox was telling her. Dahlia was pricked by a rose - a Vi's Rose, she thought; it had to be - and was no longer a Family member. And now the Family was leaving. Vox was leaving. And the thought of it hurt more than Noe cared to admit.

A part of her had wondered - if she'd found a rose, could she have saved him, too?

But it didn't sound like he'd have wanted to be saved. And would it really have been fair of her to take away a part of who he was? Wasn't that exactly what she'd asked him not to do, when she'd asked him not to hug her?

Confused and unhappy, Noe swallowed hard and glanced up. If she hadn't been infected, perhaps she wouldn't have seen the Family as capable of love, but she'd been their Friend for long enough to know that they were people, too. Not of this world, perhaps, but they had feelings. Desires. And she could easily believe, now, that Dorian's love for Dahlia and the rest of his Family might be what drove him to save them - even if it meant forsaking Caido.

When a tentacle twitched in her direction, Noe reached for it, grazing a single finger across its tip. "You could stay," she said desperately. "Couldn't you? We could - I don't know, but we could figure it out."

Sometimes I wonder which one will be your last lie
They say looks can kill and I might try

Noe

The tendril wraps delicately around her finger, its surface cool and pulsing like a jellyfish heartbeat. Vox doesn’t speak at first. Not in the way people do. A low warble threads between his mouths, soft as seafoam over glass, and for a moment it sounds almost like mourning.

"I want to," he says finally—too many mouths shaping the words, each one forming the syllables half a second apart, echoing one another like a skipping record. "I want to stay."

The admission ripples through him, visible in the shiver of his static, the subtle glitch of a limb folding in on itself and vanishing. "But I can’t. I have to be with my Family. It’s in my marrow. It’s the glue beneath my fingernails." One eye rotates like a compass needle trying to find true north. "And without them I think I’d...unravel."

The static thickens slightly, like clouds forming inside his silhouette. "I adore you, Noe," he says, every vowel strung through with something raw and glitching. "I wish I could have been your friend longer. I wish I could have learned the rules, and remembered which ones mattered. I wish I could have stayed to see what you build next."

His grip doesn’t tighten—he’s too careful for that—but the little curl of tentacle around her finger pulses once more, like a sigh made real. "But I loved every millisecond," he says, and somehow, impossibly, it sounds like the truth.

But then, Vox pauses, the static of his form trembling with new frequency—like a thought just barely forming into speech. His gaze, such as it is, sharpens. A ripple flows through his limbs. "You could come with me." The words drop like stardust, soft and dazzling.

"I could show you the whole sky, Noe. Not the one you see here—all of it. Every folded corner. We could build something in the dark, you and I. A laboratory. A playground. A world." His voice pitches higher—excitement, longing, awe. "Anything your heart can imagine. We could make it together. No rules. No edges. Just...us."

He smiles—dozens of them blooming across his form, radiant and glitching like a dream trying to stay. "Want to?"

vox

Draw the cat eye, sharp enough to kill a man
You did some bad things, but I'm the worst of them

When Vox spoke, it was with too many mouths, the words echoing around and around in a way that would probably be grating to anyone else. But to Noe, it was just... him. And for a moment, she allowed herself to imagine what things would be like if he did stay. Difficult, no doubt; people wouldn't understand him, or their friendship. But it would be theirs all the same, and fuck what everyone else had to say about it.

But then he declined, and although a part of Noe had known that he would, it still hurt, stinging like a thousand tiny pinpricks into her soul at the thought that he would simply... disappear. He'd be out there somewhere, of course - but unreachable, like the stars. Or perhaps even more so, because at least the stars could be found in Safrin's presence in their world, and if the Family was gone forever -

Vox might as well cease to exist.

"I loved being your friend," she whispered then, her voice breaking. Somehow this was worse even than being cured, and the confusing mix of emotions she felt in the aftermath. "Even after they pricked me with the rose - I still missed you, even when I tried not to." And, gods how she had tried not to.

But then he was asking her to come with him, and she could see the possibilities of the life that he promised, and a part of her longed to say yes. But then she thought of Koa, and of her father, and of her friends, and she smiled sadly. "I wish I could," she said. "But... I have to stay with my family, too."

Sometimes I wonder which one will be your last lie
They say looks can kill and I might try

Noe

For a moment, all of Vox’s forms seem to halt. The ripple of mouths still. The static hushes. Even the ambient noise of his presence—the soft thrum of otherwhere—pauses as if holding its breath. Then: "You did?"

The words spark like firecrackers in a fishbowl, bright and fizzling and full of glee. His form stutters with joy, slipping sideways in sheer delight before righting itself. "You liked being my friend?" A dozen eyes blink in overlapping succession, too fast and too many to follow. "Oh, Noe! You’re so charming when you try not to miss me. It’s very heroic. Very tragic. Very Caido."

The laughter that follows is soft this time—sincere. Something caught between a musical chime and a corrupted lullaby. It dissolves slowly, giving way to the quieter ache beneath. "I understand," Vox murmurs at last, the pitch of his voice lowering until it curls under the edges of the world. He rotates slowly, his shape folding in on itself—reconfiguring until one limb curls toward what can only be called a pocket, stitched into the logic of his form like an afterthought. From it, he pulls a gear. It’s small, delicate, iridescent—a rainbow shimmer clings to its teeth.

"Build something here," he says softly. "For me. Just a little thing. A reminder. I’ll build something for you too—out in the stars. A very Noe-shaped something." He lingers, and though he doesn’t move, the air around him pulses with emotion: longing and delight and a kind of fragile sadness.

"I know I can’t give you a hug," he says, with a sound like a glitch trying to sigh, "but I’m thinking huggy thoughts. Very intense ones. Extremely affectionate." One more smile unfurls across him, crooked and radiant and too many teeth. "And I’ll think of you always. You’ll be my favourite echo, no matter how far away or what other sounds I hear."

And then, with a soft pop—not unlike a bouncy ball vanishing between couch cushions—he disappears in a slow, spiralling plume of violet smoke. It rises, curls, and dissipates into the pastel sky, leaving the air faintly humming with memory.

~FIN

vox