promptfic: o14, rain

[sword_logic]

The rain falls, bitter and acidic, cutting through the sinking acrid air that hangs heavy over the Wall. Saint helps the last Hunter to his feet and sends him stumbling back towards the City with a nudge of Light, his Ghost blinking slowly at him in gratitude. Smoke and steam slink across the ground together, the rain coaxing the latter out, pushing the former away.

“Strange, how victory and survival can be so similar a thing,” Saint muses.

“Not strange at all,” Osiris replies. The rain can’t seem to decide whether it should fall through the Echo or sublimate against him, thin ribbons of steam blooming into being across his shoulders with no rhyme or reason, no pattern other than endless entropy.

Saint can feel torn fiber across his chest and down his biceps, warning flares across his thighs, and he finally lets the slab of cement fall, mud bursting in a wave across his greaves, joining blood and scorched Ether. Osiris’s shimmering form is pristine, his eyes distant and piercing all at once.

“You can survive without victory.” The Echo is warm as sunlight, beating through the heavy clouds, the low-slung smoke, this rain that seems more punishment than blessing. “You can be victorious without survival. That we have done both today is a testament to everything we can achieve.”

“On this, we agree.” Touching him is like trying to catch a sunbeam, but Saint, fool that he is, does it anyways. “I will see you in the City?”

“I wager you’ll see me in many places,” Osiris responds, and rain weaves another shimmering ribbon of steam through the Echo, wavering and subtle like the amusement in his voice.

“Home,” Saint rephrases.

He feels the press of a hand on his chest, against the struts of his ribcage, and a wash of heat bursts against his helm as the Echo dissolves.

“Stubborn man,” he mutters to no one in particular, but Gepetto hums quietly, and the smoking Wall, the City skyline is a siren song he can resist no longer.