the ivory tower is coming down

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

"Don't." Remi growled in a voice reminiscent of gravel underfoot. His anger wasn't directed at the Star so much as the situation, and he'd be damned if Safrin was the one to tear he and Ronin apart. That was for them to do if it ever came to that.

But then again...it was impossible to think they weren't to blame here.

You're sure she's yours? The words were flat, Remi's accent hardly giving them any colour at all. The alchemist's eyes stared unseeing down at the sand, at the way their feet pressed it up in delicate mounds. How easy it would be to walk into the sea and never come out. To vanish into the sky and carve out some part of a new land with the hope that there wouldn't be a portal there, that they might finally outrun their pasts.

The worst part of it was, the part that cut bitterly to the quick, was that if Remi asked it of Ronin, he was quite sure his partner would say yes. Abandon her. Who cares. Let's defy the gods and run away, for however long we can. Ronin, gods love him, would probably agree in a heartbeat. Perhaps that was the cruellest part of all of this: whatever goodness had been carved out by Aoife's death was not enough.