he's not vanished from your world, simply gone

"So you were together, with Alvis?"

Rex's crude questions were a trademark he'd picked up from Nia. Yes, it was more to-the-point-ness than anything actually rude, but there was still something...imprecise about it. Not vague. Just imprecise. And Alvis was- had always been quite precise.

"Not like Homs, humans, might have been. Not like Blades either."

And Alvis, beautiful Alvis, had been neither.

"We didn't..." Shulk touched his lips with the cold fingers of his right hand. "We didn't kiss, for instance. Holding hands was more or less Alvis's limit. And it was very rare."

Rex frowned, arms crossed over a chest far too broad. "You never struck me as the tactile type anyway. More cerebral, 's the word."

"And who could be more cerebral than Alvis? If Mythra and Malos were people of deep feeling, Alvis was one of deep thought. That was how he existed."

Nothing could make more sense than that, to Shulk. He'd often thought, as privately as possible, that he just...wanted inside Alvis's brain, or whatever it was he (had) had that was able to function in a similar fashion. There must have been so much in there.

So much...

"He existed by being with you."

"By being with anyone. By being acknowledged, recognized. By giving shapes to wishes."

He was my Monado. And then again, he wasn't.

"Any regrets?"

Another blunt question.

"I wish..."

That when I held that vermilion core, on the beach, I'd known he wasn't there? That I'd held it to me, tried to slip my fingers past, into and beyond the novae traces of his soul, no matter what I knew or thought?

I don't know Alvis - I'm not together with him - by anything but his presence.

"I wish I felt big enough to understand it. All of this terrible reality, so far beyond what we think of as people. But that fear, lurking within the quiet horribleness of it all...he's still with me, in that. And so it's alright."

"You're sure?"

"The future is unclear. But the past is over. So we'll just...walk on."