Gulls sang overhead, their cries soft and plaintive. Stay. Stay. Stay. Cera turned his eyes to the sky, to the shadows they cast with their angelic wings. "What is there left to stay for?" he whispered out to them. And still they continued their mournful cries, sweeping their wings against the water as if to stir his grave, keep him from his essential ending. He watched them with bland, tasteless eyes. Shallow. Like wilted leaves and frozen spring buds on old oak trees.

They had no notion of what they asked of him.

Ilaria sat perched in the curved joint of his wing, silent. She could not keep him from the demise he so sought. It was beyond her, no matter how intrinsically their souls were tied. This was a problem she could not fix, a heart she could not mend with words of sympathy and hope. To die meant to kill, for they would both perish beneath the weight of his passing. Perhaps that was the only thing keeping him tied to the realm of the living at that moment, to know that her light would be extinguished alongside his own. Was it solely love for another that kept him alive? Was it for her sake that he bothered to draw air into his lungs?

Hadn't he suffered enough?

A singular twitch of his ear was all that belied and heralded the approach of the primitive stag. He knew not who it was, for even Ilaria did not bother to turn her little fuzzy head. They were guardians of stone on the shores of the desert, peering out into a vast expanse that would not deign to share its answers to their endless, searching questions. Ilaria had been at Cera's side since the first horror of his life, since d'Artagnan had ripped his chest in two and left him to die, to bleed, to wilt. Extinguished. There was nothing he had been through, had experienced, that she had not felt in turn. His pain was hers.

Cera.

Gaucho's voice rolled over him, warm and reassuring. Gaucho had become the center of Cera's world a long time ago. He was not so fleeting or fanciful as the stars or the moon, nor as seasonal and temperamental as the seasons in their constant metamorphosis. No. Gaucho was bedrock, was stone and quarry and hammer all in one. He was the sturdy block beneath his feet, eternal. Unwavering. And so Cera had allowed himself reliance, because it had seemed Gaucho was the only one who could never hope to betray him. Because Gaucho was not a star, burning bright and dying out, nor a leaf that withered, colored, and died. Cera had thought he'd finally made the right choice in whom to trust with the shredded remains of his soul and his loyalty. His heart.

"Would you kill me, Gaucho, if I asked you to?" It was smooth and succinct, as calm as the oasis on a winter's night. It did not betray the screaming loss inside him, the truth behind the words. Finally he turned his head, slow and deliberate, and pinned Gaucho's eyes beneath the weight of his loss and despair. He wrote novels in that look, a past he wished to erase forever but had to live with nonetheless.

"I have lost my father. I have lost my sister and my nephew. I...I lost my brother. I have nothing but this sand, this herd, and my ties to you." And what did any of that mean, when the Earth God had found him wanting? "Did I fail you, Gaucho?" And the trust he placed in the brute in that moment could not be detailed by the gods themselves. He would cast aside the judgment of an immortal for the sake of one mortal man, would leap into the ashes and be born anew if Gaucho so much as whispered that Cera had not failed in at least that one, solitary thing. "Were the Gods that I served so faithfully right? Did I achieve nothing?" And though his eyes desired to shed their tears, he could not seem to muster them. He was already a wasteland inside. There was nothing pure left to call upon to cleanse himself any longer.

@[Gaucho]

Somewhere lost in the labyrinth of the painted cherub's mind, there was an awareness that Gaucho would do for him whatever Cera truly begged of him, were it a personal affair. It was why he had asked it of the dun and nobody else. All the others would weep, cry that he needed to stay, that he was loved and worthy, that they needed him. Slanderous lies that Cera would never believe. They had gotten on past all the other deaths in their lives, after all. What more would he be but another tally on a forgotten page? No, they wanted him to remain so that they could extract further use from him. Their love was cloaked and riddled with pockmarks of greed. Selfishness. Gaucho could release him from that pain, Cera had known it beneath the grief and the despair where his mind still thought in logical patterns.

And though the hesitancy in the Wildfire's words was apparent, there was still a promise. A certainty. I shall. And yet preceding those words was a blasphemous lie, and from the apathy he had drowned in, came a sudden surge of righteous fury. "You cannot simply find the lost soul of a dead body," he spat, a harmless grazing blow that was directed more at the world than at Gaucho's words. A frustrated raging against a world that had never cared for him in the first place. "They are gone forever. No takebacks." Hardened eyes glared down at the horizon across the sea, wishing he had the power to rend apart the world and spiritual realm, take Hototo back and never let him leave again. It should have been Cera. "It should have been me," he whispered, crinkles of pain forming around his eyes, a subtle sort of grief.

"Would you abandon Rhoa, Ivezho, Sohalia, Zenobia, for the whim of a God? Would rhojosor mean nothing to you?" It was one of the few words Cera had picked up from the warrior, the one he seemed to value above all else. Cera's tiny chest heaved with a sudden crest of emotion, and he had to look away from the open, honest face of his Sultan. "My father did. How can I forgive that, when he feels no regret? He does not see," he choked out. Beneath all the anger Cera felt for his father abandoning him, betraying him and their family, there was a broken heart drowned in too much love for the painted stag. He loved Midas so fully, so completely, even after all his father had done to him, put him through. All without thinking about talking with Cera, asking how he felt, caring whether he objected to it or not.

Through the pain of remembering that selfless, persevering love for an absent father, a beacon of light shone through. Words that heaved him from his sorrow forcefully, and yet with reasons only of love. A burden that had seemed to splinter and crush all of Cera's bones was thrust up and away. He hadn't failed him. It felt like he could finally breathe, and for a moment he feared he'd simply burst into tears and embarrass Gaucho forever. Instead, he took in a deep, staggering breath and turned moist verdant irises towards the warrior standing guard at his side. "Thank you," he whispered, trying to express how much Gaucho had taken off his shoulders with those two meager words.

A soft laugh and a shake of his head followed. "Ilaria was chosen for me, because I asked the Earth God for her. She was only in danger because I asked it." Ilaria cried mournfully in objection from his shoulder, but he carefully untangled his mind from hers, not wanting to hear her plaintive cries. Cera knew the truth, and so did Ilaria. She was merely objecting to his guilt. "The Throat would gain another Forger. My place would be filled. The Throat would be exactly the same," he murmured quietly, something like an apology writ into the lines of his features. Sorry for showing Gaucho how miserable and useless Cera was. Sorry for destroying the little pedestal Cera didn't belong on.

"I'm not like you, Gaucho. I am replaceable. Forgettable." As evident by Midas leaving him without a single glance backward. At the lonely, broken boy he left behind. A shattered project left for Gaucho to pick up and try to put together. But Gaucho had. And so when he begged Cera to stay, when he gave voice to those soft cries resounding in Cera's head, the painted boy yielded.

"I will stay," he whispered. For you was left unsaid. "But I don't know what use I will be of to you anymore." A broken automaton could only do so much before the rest of its pieces wore away into nothing.

@[Gaucho]

Though the land was vast between he and his father, Cera felt as if the distance between their hearts and minds was ever larger. He fell to silence beneath the weight of Gaucho's words, wondering if the dun worshiped Midas too much to see Cera's side of the story. Midas had already written him off, after all. The man would have nothing to do with him anymore. A failed prodigy, something Cera had striven to never become. It seemed all he'd done was ruin what little good he'd garnered in the world. But even with the possibility of Gaucho siding with his father, the painted boy simply had to try.

"He cannot understand why I'm so angry," was the first whisper that passed his lips, tinged in the emotion he spoke so quietly of. A deep, burning pain that ached raw and open like an endless chasm in his voice. "He refuses to think that he is wrong. If I can see, somewhat, why he did what he did...why can he not do the same for me? How can I forgive him when he thinks it was okay to do such an unforgivable thing?" A contradictory statement, but Cera would overcome that boundary if Midas ever showed him that there was a point in being inclined towards it.

"But Ranjiri and Ryuu...perhaps I can fix that." If that was his only reason for remaining, aside from the stallion at his side, then perhaps that was enough. If only for their sake, Cera would linger in the mortal world until he reconciled with what little family still held the possibility of love for him in their hearts.

Gaucho's firmly stated words pulled him from those musings, and he turned quiet green eyes to the fiery stag that shed his light upon Cera like the lantern that would lead him out of this darkness. The words were so simplistic, something he'd already heard Gaucho say before, and yet they reached down deep into his chest and placed themselves upon his heart. Each word warmed him from the inside, until Cera felt something like relief, if not healing, in the wake of it. "Yes," he whispered, strained and nearly deliriously happy, fearing he would burst into hysterical laughter with the surety of Gaucho's words. "That's why I stayed," he croaked, tears he'd already cried attempting to shed themselves once more. Even when Midas had left, even when it meant he, too, had to give up the only family he'd ever known, Cera had stayed. And Gaucho...he understood.

A lit wing reached to touch his shoulder, a kiss of feathers that was so brief but so welcome that Cera leaned into the mere ghost of it. His tiny laugh was watery and sounded strained through the clutch of his tight throat. "But you have done more in far less time here," Cera pointed out. What had the Prince achieved? Nothing, not really. "Everyone knows your name, knew it even before you were Sultan. How many know me as anything more than Midas' son?" It hurt to know that they came to him only because they knew his title, only returned to his side when they required something. They valued him because he was capable of giving them what they wanted, and nothing more. Nobody cared for the soul that housed the magic of the Sun. At least...nobody but Gaucho it seemed.

@[Gaucho]