We left the Gate.

  “Dude, I can handle this all myself. Six deep isn't even a challenge for these guns!”

  We found Damien and his gate guards waiting for us.

  “Chef’s rules, dandelion; you gotta at least clear your dessert plate.”

  We killed all thirteen of them.

  “Come to bed. You need sleep.”

  We discovered the Nexus let us access a fast travel map of uncleared Dungeons when in proximity of Gates.

  “I drew this for you, Lee.”

  We purchased the Deity Commentary, and it held little important information.

  “Surely, we will resurrect them with our wish. I have faith in us.”

  We buried them in the backyard.

  “I’ll miss you all. Until we meet again.”

  Three days had passed at base.

  Axel hadn't cried.

  That's what brought me back fully, plucked me out of the fog of grief I was mired in. It was like a spark of clarity as I stared at his face across from me at their funeral.

  My concern for Axel was something I could tether myself to.

  Even when we tamped down the dirt above their graves, the blond didn’t shed a tear. Was he keeping his emotions in check out of consideration for me?

  He hadn't gone back home to Charleville as often as I had, but he did visit his parents when the opportunity arose. I knew he loved them. It was impossible not to.

  Auntie Li and Uncle Seb were… had been the kind of people you wanted to grow up to be. Even in my late twenties, they were my image of what successful and truly good people were like. It’s why before all of this that Axel’s behaviour never made sense to me. The two of them had raised him, after all. But the Axel now—I could see them much clearer in him.

  That said, Axel had always liked my parents more than his own. Isn’t that always the case?

  I loved mine. I did. Yet when I needed the feel of home, I found myself seeking the Masson household more often than not and utterly avoiding Axel’s room once we’d had our fallout. They’d been a bike ride away, after all.

  The reason was simple.

  My reaction to Chrissie’s death and the gaping hole of Axel’s friendship had been to withdraw all forms of aspiration, until eventually I lost an understanding of what counted as things I wanted or desired. My parents on the other hand… Mum had thrown herself into work, my father into hobbies, and when that didn’t occupy them, both of them became overly invested in shaping and moulding my life insomuch as they could.

  It couldn’t have been easy. My lack of direction would’ve been hard to navigate around, to channel into something else. But I guess it’d worked well enough to make me a functional adult.

  Looking back now, given how things had gone, the person I’d been before the Event made far too much sense. I’d been doing what I thought I had to. What my parents had led me toward, what society screened as the example of success. The question of what I wanted wasn’t something I’d ever asked nor would I have known the answer to it.

  In fact, me wanting to stop living with Axel had been the closest I’d ever gotten. And that hadn't really even been true.

  After high school, I’d moved out of home to pursue tertiary education as soon as it was financially viable. Not only was it the done thing for kids in our town not intending to take on family business, it was an unspoken expectation from my parents. Even then, their overbearing interest in the mundanities of my life followed me down to Brisbane.

  Every call with mum and dad started with a “Have you applied for a raise yet?” or “What happened to that girl you met in uni?” or “Do you still spend time with Axel?”

  It was almost funny that the answers hadn’t changed, even now.

  No. Which girl? I guess.

  But I’d have done anything to hear them ask those pointless questions again.

  My singular solace was that maybe I could.

  Their deaths had hit me hard, like a brick wall slammed into me, leaving me reeling and unable to function. I’d barely been conscious the past three days. I loved my parents and Axel’s, and Axel had loved mine and his too. There was no way he’d be unaffected.

  Yet, he operated as if nothing was amiss. In my stead, he'd taken on the de facto leadership position, though Jye and Tam did decry and bemoan this. I could vaguely recall them being very vocally disagreeable to his charge back in Bia’s Dungeon.

  As much as it concerned me, I was glad Axel had been permanently glued to my side. Looking back through the haze, the others had shown their care for me in their own way, but it was Axel's hand that had guided me from waking to sleeping each day.

  Without him, I'm not sure I would've found myself again so easily. Or ever. The sadness was a strangling darkness, weighing me down, and only his presence had pierced the veil.

  He'd taken care of me. I was certain he'd bathed me. I couldn't remember it, not clearly. Everything between discovering the “pertinent information” and blinking into existence at the sight of Axel's dry eyes during the burial was a Gaussian blur of fragmented memories and unplaceable exchanges.

  Of the first night back at base, all I could recall was the soft of a shower sponge between the blades of my shoulders and warm water trickling down me. I remembered a tenderness on my brow, and sheets, silky, tucking me in, and the scent of frangipani pressed into my back and wrapped about me.

  I was sure all of this had been Axel.

  Part of me wondered if I was a terrible person. He had to be suffering too, and I'd just let him take care of me.

  It occurred to me that I wasn’t familiar with how he dealt with loss. After Chrissie, our relationship severed beyond what I’d thought repairable, I’d not been close enough to him to witness what he’d done to grieve my sister. At the very least, I knew he’d wept before her funeral procession, his eyes red, and then when he’d dropped that Warhead into her grave, his face had been scrunched in sorrow, nose snotty with tears.

  So why hadn’t he cried this time?

  Sure, it’d been close to two decades ago, but the Axel now was more similar to Axel then than the Axel in between. He was much more honest with his emotions these days. It was beyond impossible to believe Axel wasn’t heartbroken about the loss of his and my parents.

  Was he suppressing the pain?

  Had he buried it because I was relying on him?

  Did he need some time alone to process?

  Everyone grieved differently.

  I resolved to get to the bottom of it, most of all because when I focused on Axel I wasn’t thinking about how I might never hear my parents’ voices again.

  Carefully, I slipped from Axel’s sleeping arms and out of bed, ensuring not to disturb him. As I crept away, I cast one last glance at the blond’s resting face, letting the sight soothe me, then walked out of the room.

  The rest of the day after saying my goodbyes had been rough. Well, every day had been.

  They don’t tell you that the emotional pain is physical. I’d forgotten how much it drained you, sapped you of strength. It wasn’t just an ache in your chest. It was full body exhaustion, anchoring you down, making focusing difficult, small tasks impossible. The world reminded you cruelly of their absences. Not only that, but it messed up your biorhythms, bodily functions, mental cognition. But worse of all, grief toed an exceptionally close line to frustration and self-loathing.

  I hated how weak I felt, how I hadn’t been able to save them.

  I couldn’t recall it all, but I’d spent most of the time back at base ferried between bed and lounge, half-carried half-walked by Axel, a hand in mine and another on my shoulder to guide me.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  So, despite my weariness, I didn’t want to sleep anymore.

  I was tired of being tired.

  Wandering downstairs for the first time on my own, I was hoping to lend a hand. Be useful in some way. Whatever chores I’d normally be doing had been shared by the rest of the party, but a restlessness had grown inside me. It was part guilt over having the others take care of me and part wanting to distract myself.

  My parents were dead.

  It was an immutable fact.

  The only thing to do was go forward.

  “I’ll be! Look who decided to grace us with his presence, poppit.”

  Tam was in the kitchen preparing dinner, Wren assisting her. The ten-year-old caught my eye as she peeled an onion and beamed at me through her tears. I had no idea where the two of them had managed to scrounge up more of the versatile vegetable. We’d been fresh out at the last supply check before Dungeon 11, having cooked the rest of them into the meals we’d made for our journey. Had they made a supply run while I’d been out of commission?

  I watched for a moment, Tam finely cutting the onions as Wren passed them over, letting the normality of the sight sink into me, before joining them on the other side of the benchtop. Leaning against the breakfast bar, I studied what Tam had already prepped and set aside. There was quite clearly a pile of mordexi meat, in all its purple glory, already chopped up. Beside that was a bevy of other prepared ingredients.

  “Curry?” I asked.

  “Family recipe with a twist,” she replied with a grin, dipping her head at the meat.

  I hoped she would be modest with the spice level. Even ignoring the mordexi, my stomach wasn't feeling particularly charitable these past few days. I’d kept nothing down but chocolate mousse and that was given sparingly. My body was still so currently haywire that no functions other than sleeping and eating what I could had returned to me.

  “From your side or your wife’s?”

  For a second, her expression steeled, guard up, but gradually that eased. I blinked in surprise. She was making a marked choice to try and not raise her hackles at my every attempt to know her. It was a strangely pleasant feeling. Was this my reward for trusting her? For believing in the good inside her? Either way, I wouldn’t be bringing up this change just yet. I was worried I would spook her like a horse.

  “It was her pa’s.” Her smile sharpened. “It ain’t gourmet, but it's good for the soul.”

  “Can I help?”

  Tam’s mouth opened to reply, and it looked like the beginnings of a firm no, but Wren interrupted, pushing the last halved onion to me.

  “You can take over, Lee. I can’t see anymore!”

  The onions’ defensive mechanism had worked overtime, and the girl was practically bawling her eyes out, her nose running. Though an odd void sucked the joy from everything lately, I found myself suppressing a laugh. Blinking rapidly to clear away the tears, she lifted her hands to her face but froze just before contact, concentration on her brow.

  Makris had intervened, no doubt.

  Slowly, she lowered her hands and then went to the sink to wash them thoroughly. Using her clean hands, she splashed a little water over her face, rinsing the tears away before patting her skin dry with a hand towel. When she was done, Tam gave her a different task, fetching spices.

  Watching this all in silence, I fought a frown.

  Maybe the man in her head really was looking out for her…

  I plucked at the thin skin of the onion, digging the nail of my pointy finger under its first layer. My right hand still felt stiff. The scarring was no longer as raised but remained very noticeable, a rigid line down the center of my palm. It would take quite some time to fade completely, unlike my other injuries.

  It was hard to imagine Makris's real intentions with Wren. My own past told me it couldn’t be good. That tearing the memories from a kid was tantamount to child abuse. And yet, seeing that he clearly cared enough to stop her from harming herself with a little onion juice in the eyes told a completely different story.

  It didn’t make me comfortable with the idea of her not even being aware of the memories she’d lost. Just further worried about what they could be.

  With the telepathy skill, maybe Makris and I could come to some sort of understanding. But I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation at all. Especially since I didn’t want Wren to be present, so I could lay into the ghost in her head.

  When I finished peeling the onion halves, I pushed the vegetable toward Tam.

  She jutted her jaw in acknowledgement.

  The clattering of the kitchen as she and Wren continued cooking was oddly calming.

  “Oh, dude! You’re up and about,” came Jye’s voice from down the hallway at the door to the basement.

  Their eyes were glazed red, a loose expression on their freckled face. As they closed the distance, the unmistakable dankness of smoked pot wafted over to me.

  I didn’t blame them at all. Finding the dead bodies of friends’ parents wasn’t something that became an in-joke. It was fucked up. Not to mention, there was Bia’s sponsorship which didn’t look like it ended well, along with Jye’s background of masked hurt… If the redhead felt the need to unwind in such a way, who was I to judge?

  Instead, I attempted a smile and patted the stool next to me in invitation.

  Jye sat down, their movements a little too fluid, and sniffed the air like a dog. Actually, it more reminded me of Bear in the Big Blue House. During Jye's and my brief exchange, Tam had begun to fry off the curry paste in some oil, the fragrant spices of ginger, lemongrass, and chilli filling the air. My stomach growled, my appetite awakened. Maybe a little bit of heat wouldn’t be too bad.

  “Damn, Tam, I hope you’re making, like, a triple batch,” Jye said, rubbing their hands together. “I’m gonna be eating my weight in this.”

  Tam eyed the giant for a moment, genuinely assessing them from head to toe, then directed Wren to measure out double the amount of rice she was pouring into Lusi’s rice cooker. It was probably a smarter move than trying to increase all the other ingredients now that she was already cooking the dish. I had no doubt that when she served it up, Jye’s bowl would receive an obscene amount of the carb.

  Into the silence that followed, I asked, “Where’s Gigi?”

  “I think xe is in the back shed,” Wren said from the sink, turning her head away from her rinsing of the rice to meet my gaze. “Xe said that it would be a good place to practice if xe made some modifications.”

  I leaned back in my stool.

  I'd been mired in grief, and the world had moved on.

  Did these people really need me at all?

  I’d been absent from the team for the past few days, in mind if not in body, and everything had been running absolutely smoothly. Rather, it all seemed better than it’d ever been under my watch. And I hadn’t done anything.

  I’d thought that the others were all incredibly special, each of them talented in different ways, but that what I had to offer was useful to them. A way to help them remain normal in a world where it was anything but, to protect them from themselves. However, in reality, it looked like I’d deluded myself into believing that when I contributed nothing to the party. I was party leader in name only.

  As I sat there, I couldn’t help but feel like deadweight.

  They didn’t need me.

  In fact, it was painfully obvious with our latest discovery that it was really only me who needed them.

  “Lee?!”

  The scramble of feet clattered down the stairs, Axel’s bleary eyes wide in panic as he appeared down the hall. His blond hair was mussed, clothes in a disarray, as he all but stormed over to us, each step like a crack of thunder.

  He was next to me in an instant, his voice raw and shaking as he said, “You can’t disappear like that!”

  I froze upon seeing his expression. I’d been expecting annoyance from not stirring him to let him know what I was doing, especially since we’d been attached at the hip. But this reaction, this wasn’t even anger. I stared, my mind unable to comprehend what I was seeing.

  Was he… Were those…

  “You, once— I thought you’d—” He didn’t finish the sentence and instead swept his arms around me, pressing himself against me.

  Axel’s skin was clammy, his breath like that of a small bird, quick and rapid palpitations of his chest. Able to finally move, my shock passed, dim understanding forming in my head, I folded about him, subconsciously running a hand along his back in comfort. Even through his shirt, I could feel the feverish sweat on his skin.

  His body trembled in my embrace, and he squeezed me tightly, uncomfortably so, pushing his face to my neck, like it was some safe haven. My other hand curled up to his head, fingers threading through his hair. I couldn’t help but compare how this was the exact reverse of when Axel had slipped away from me.

  The others, who’d been staring, looked away, and in silence, they faded from the kitchen, Tam switching off the stove before following Wren upstairs to the bedrooms. Jye retreated to the basement, not even glancing back once. I made a note to thank them for their patience in the future.

  Axel’s tears pooled in the crook of my neck, dampening the collar of my pajama shirt. This was entirely different from his unhinged disappearances. This was just Axel dealing with loss.

  Well, I’d been right.

  I was a terrible person.

  And I was an idiot.

  It wasn’t anything of a secret about why he hadn’t cried until now.

  The reason was obvious.

  Just as he’d kept me waking each morning, I’d unknowingly been propping him up too, a crutch he’d been leaning on, just invisibly.

  I hadn’t thought my presence so important to him.

  But when he’d woken alone for the first time, his parents dead, and with no comfort, nothing…

  I couldn’t fathom the feeling.

  Fuck.

  I was always messing up when it came to Axel.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my mouth dry, throat constricting. “I didn’t think.”

  His sobs continued, but in between stolen breaths, he managed out, “You- can’t- leave- me- again.” He swallowed back some of the tears. “Promise me.”

  “I won’t, Axel, I won’t.” I would’ve promised him the world if it stopped his crying, each of his shaky inhales like a dull throb of pain in my chest. “I’m sorry.”

  I repeated those words again and again until they lost meaning and then long after that.

  Time passed. I wasn’t sure how much. But Axel's sobs had finally silenced.

  He slowly lifted his head from my shoulder to meet my gaze.

  His eyes were bloodshot and swollen, the creases of my shirt had left matching impressions along his cheek, his skin was a mottled mix of pale and flushed, and his nose was runny, the hair of his brows running in all different directions. Even his blond hair had kinked unnaturally, the bangs crinkled from the heat and moisture.

  It was a pathetic sight. The worst I’d ever seen of him.

  My next thought was inappropriate for the moment. It didn’t make sense to think because our parents were dead, and my mind was still heavy with memories of what would’ve been. But this thought was the only thing that took over, and for that I was grateful too. It relieved me of them.

  Staring at Axel, I could only think that Axel was beautiful, no matter what expression he made, and I was grateful to see each one. He was here and alive, and he’d stopped crying. He’d been so distant, so worried about image, during our adulthoods that other than his recent insane breakdowns, I don’t think he’d shown this face to anyone else. That he trusted me to reveal this emotion, in contrast to how we’d once been, that I could rely on him as I had, and that he relied on me like this too…

  I lifted my head to lay my lips along his brow, echoing the same gesture he’d bestowed on me just the other day, trying to convey my feelings, my gratitude, my appreciation, for everything he was to me. I wouldn’t be alive without him, and, in that moment, perhaps because their loss was still so fresh and where they should’ve been was a gaping hole, I allowed myself to recognise that I wouldn’t want to be.

  His eyes widened as I pulled back, then his mussed brows furrowed, a displeasure rippling over his features.

  “You choose now to kiss me? Of all fucking times?”

  A snort of laughter escaped me.

  “Your forehead is oily,” I remarked, the feeling lingering on my lips.

  He growled, his voice still hoarse, “And you’re lucky I love you.”

  I was.

  The party had curry rather late the day that Axel and I buried our parents.

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