"I've made a right mess of things since you've been gone," she said to him with only the slightest smirk to showcase her sardonic amusement.

"I made a right mess of things before I left," he replied with his own wry smile, and she imagined that she saw a great chasm of sadness within those famed icy eyes. Once, there had been nothing within him - indeed, nothing within either of them - other than that singular desire to be great. And they had done it, too, had done it so well that it had been difficult to imagine the fall of their reign - but she had done it, had brought him down with her, had begun the trek down that long, dark, lonely road that had led them to their own individual demises; for though they had risen together, they had fallen apart.

Would she change things, if she could? Could she truthfully say that she regretted their failures?

She had come too far now to lie.

"I changed a long time ago," he told her then, and she nodded almost imperceptibly, for hadn't she known? Hadn't she seen it in his eyes, that he had become something, someone else? And hadn't she accepted it, or ignored it, or moved on either way, as though it didn't matter? But she had known, and wasn't that the important part? She had seen the difference, that evening in the he Edge, or she had thought that she had seen something, and she had watched him wither away after the invasion, until one day, he simply wasn't there anymore - and she had regretted it, regretted what they had become, what she had done to them, because, after all, it had been all her fault for leaving in the first place, hadn't it? And then he was back, and he was different, and she was different, but neither one of them would acknowledge it, and then they were pretending, falling into old habits with that old sense of relief because it had been so very easy back then, and why couldn't it be easy again?

It was all a lie, a great lie that they had bought into because it was far harder to expose themselves to each other, to their followers, to their own minds. And yet, here they were, fallen from grace and wallowing in the darkness, together again and yet so much farther apart than they had been before. Or were they? Were they so far apart, or were they, even now, drawing closer and closer together, on the path to collide and right the shifting gravity of their oh-so-fragile worlds?

She wondered again who she had become. She wondered again who he had become.

She wondered what they were now.

"I'm sorry," he said. "For everything."

"I'm not," she replied, and for a moment, watching him with something like defiance in a suddenly intent gaze, she imagined that she understood

"Talk talk talk."

[ooc | @[Mauja] Sorry for the wait!]