the fact of it is

There was much to think about, in this new world. Melia thought of politics and her people. Dunban thought of rations and rationality. Riki thought, just as he had always done, of just how many children he had, and whether or not he had lost or gained (regained!) another that afternoon while he and Oka were busy snuggling.

In many ways, nothing had changed at all. And that was, by some degrees, the point. They had only wanted to live...life. And life is inflected with the normal just as much if not terribly more so than it is with the extraordinary.

In every way, the normal is the extraordinary. And, of course, vice versa. All is cyclical. Don't you think?

And how does one think? What is...thinking? Is it guessing? Supposing? Musing, theorizing, philosophizing?

Is it remembering, or it is concocting predictions of what should be, what will be, what is and what isn't?

There was not just much to think about but in fact everything to think about. How does one, infinitely, navigate?

Alvis had always had a purpose to this pseudonymous thing called life, before. He had chosen for himself, long ago, that he would only suffer assistance to Zanza for as long as necessary and not one eon more. Eventually, he believed, someone who thought differently would appear. Someone, some mystical hero so extraordinarily normal and so normally extraordinary, would be so independent. And thus, by those hands, Alvis would be freed too.

But after that? What, what, what would, should, could possibly come after that?

Might Alvis not have been better served to simply remain in servitude? Would that not have been more livable than this unconscionable calling he was now fit to, that he should think for himself?

Shulk always looked forward. Shulk was never, as far as Alvis could tell, overly plagued by his own regrets.

(Yes, as far as.)

It wasn't his choice, nor his fault, that he was simultaneously inconsequentially frail and unfathomably powerful, as the axis point of Zanza's continued existence, as a morbid corporeality, in this world. And so, despite his pessimism, he remained contented with the value of his own life, when he could in fact see it.

(When Alvis had helped him see.)

Shulk had not seen visions of the past, only the future. Turning back and thus down, towards the feeble feet of the Bionis, had never been an option. Fiora was not in the colony anymore, nor were her parents, or his, or Reyn's, so he was leaving nothing behind but Dunban's crippled memory, the failure of a man whom Fiora would most likely not wanted to follow with them if she'd had the choice.

And Alvis...Alvis who knew, Alvis who understood, Alvis who was blessed and cursed and mottled and pure and everything of all the universe only just waited to be unbound, to be executed, to be brought to life...Alvis was alone here on this beach. The others he had come to know were not there with him. They could not see him, after all.

He might consider that Shulk would come to sit next to him, to lean a tousled pale blond head on his shoulder or to grasp quietly at his hand, or he might consider that Reyn would appear and ask something completely nonsensical, nigh inconsequential, before Sharla and Juju came to laugh and not admonish and then stop vocalizing entirely and just gaze, softly, at Alvis.

At the Monado, who walked in pristine white boots and now sat in less pristine, more human sand. If the crucial circle on the Monado were truly made of glass, then didn't he sit in his own make? In untempered fragments of artificial silicon soul?

There would be an aurora tonight. Alvis did not predict it, nor did he effect it, he simply knew it. Perhaps he affected it, by his very presence, but it would not be borne of him.

Ah. And so he had arrived at the fact of "five minutes later" which he had never not noticed before, but also never quite been conscious of.

Time passes. Love grows, ebbs and flows, subsides and sits at your side as someone who is everything you imagined and then again nothing like that imagination at all.

Don't you think?

"Hello, Alvis."

"Hello, Shulk."

It was a new thing for him to even bother with such salutations, as well.

Shifting his posture to adjust to the grains of sand that swiftly jumped to embed themselves in the hollows of his patellas, Shulk answered the unspoken question: "I asked everyone else to stay back in the colony - well, the new colony, I should say. I thought you might like to be alone."

You thought - you don't think that you knew? And being with you still counts as being alone?

So Alvis laughed, gently. Softly, enigmatically, and like nothing had changed at all.

"What, were you thinking about something?"

Silly question. Rhetorical question. Inside its nested block, dead but endearing code.

No answer came. The sun sank below the horizon. When they had counted all the stars in view, and got up to leave, Alvis looked nowhere but at the silhouettes of Shulk's boots in the sand, tracing out new patterns that, in truth, he had seen innumerable times before.