thank god i'm only watching the game, controlling it

"This isn't LIFE!" she wants to scream at him, wants to watch his head rip around with that dreadful horn spiking its proud, proud, damned too proud way through the air. His hair still flows, but he never puts it up anymore. Like he needs its gravity pinning him down, because he's made his Mi- M into a weightless, ineffectual piece at his side that will never, ever leave. Because time does not exist, for them. Of course.

Oh, screams. Physical things. She needs them, she finds. Just to see him react. Just to see him change. But that's the issue. He won't. She knows it.

She knows he'll just dripe back at her, "What, then, is the problem? If you don't have to live it. If you're already dead." And smile, in that off, uncanny way that means he's hollow and disturbed - and he knows this! - but because he has her he won't quibble. He loves his victorious emptiness, doesn't he?

Or...no. No, he wouldn't say that. Because that would mean that he admitted...

You were already wearing this armor when I saw you, he tells her. You, too, had chosen this way. Maybe you had doubted yourself before I arrived, but then you must have seen that Z would put everything to rights for us. As we belong.

The part of her that's still Mio gives another stilted, stifled cry at that. No, she didn't, she never would have! Because that would mean that she admitted...

But time does not exist for them. So she can't know what she thought then. It would have been the same as now.

The same as now? So then she knows it. So she does know what was in her...past...

The furious red X slashing his armor, so as to match the Y that almost seems to figure on hers, has always burnt most brightly into her eyes. The effect of Moebius status is none such that she can escape the rage that sits with him even now, never parting its flow just as she is never parting, never parted.

Never and always.

It was his choice to envision her that way. She knows it, because she has decided it. But it doesn't matter. This is N's now, and he brings with it M's mutation.

So is it better to be the staunchless set piece, or the killer taking violent charge?

Z does both.