the monsters turned out to be just trees

hope keeps us breathing, just to kill us in the end

Had Loren articulated some of his tangential thoughts, perhaps the alchemist might have answered more satisfactorily. He and Ronin weren't together at the moment, for various reasons. Love wasn't always successful, after all. Love couldn't prevent death, couldn't triumph over gods. He might too, have said that love doesn't make you clever enough to stop making mistakes, that it doesn't simply give you a path to follow. "I am not sure I know what it is, but I know what it makes me do. That you do not really know what it is, until you have felt it." Have you ever been in love, Loren? But no, that was the question Remi still couldn't ask.

Goosebumps raced up Remi's side as he shuddered out a breath, squeezing his eyes closed and sending yet more droplets down his cheeks. "You have all of your memories, Loren." The alchemist replied in a cracked whisper. "I do not. I owe Ludo a favour to be used at any time it likes. It could one day well ask for my memories again just for its own amusement." Remi shivered as Loren's hand ghosted over his skin, his muscles clenching at the not-contact.

Looking over at Loren, Remi tried to find in his Launceleyn-blue stare something. Anything. Anything that was real and wasn't as ephemeral as everything else seemed to be. Something that would persist through the summoner's mood swings and fits of self-pity. A lodestone when Loren's eyes turned dull and flat and dead. "You have to promise me then. If I ever lose my memories...promise you will remind me of this. Of what I did. " Remi's lips could hardly form the words much as they trembled, and locked deep within his shattered sea-green stare was a seed of doubt and worry. That if the day ever came, Loren would think he was doing Remi a favour by keeping his darkest secrets hidden. "Promise me."