Wings

29: Please Don't Let Me Go

NPOV

Track: Remember To Remember Me, Isak Danielson

There is no good way to measure time in the vast expanses of nothingness, so the amount of time that passed as I was pulled through a string of light through the cosmos is unable to be determined by a matter of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, or seconds. What I can, however, use to tell how much time passed is by keeping track of the following:

In the distance, approximately three hundred thousand meteoroids, comets, and asteroids fell within a ten-light-year radius, tens of thousands of which were in the last few seconds in the Kuiper Belt.

1.116 x 10^40 reactions happened in my core, switching hydrogen to helium and spreading heat and light outward, producing 4.8 x 10^28 watts of energy, in human terms.

I traveled just enough in the cosmos that Vega appeared to move nearly two degrees in the sky.

Two supernovas exploded around the cosmos within a one-million-lightyear radius.

My celestial self spun a little over eleven degrees.

I received no prayers.

In the time that these things could happen, I shot through the cosmos at speeds deemed impossibly by humanity; however, I am not bound by the laws of humanity's astronomers, and light is a wave which exists everywhere in the universe; I am everywhere all at once, and now I am simply being pulled toward Earth in a more distinct stream than usual.

And when I finally fall to earth, atoms streaming through the sky in two interlaced arcs, I find myself tangible and cool and thinking and—

And running out of air.

Pieces of me seize, and then oxygen fills two organs in my chest, and the transformation is complete; I continue gasping for breath, my heart stuttering as it starts up again, nerves sparking and blood beginning to flow.

And as the nerves spark, my back burns. It's not the same kind of burning as the hydrogen and helium that had been at my core some time ago, but it is burning nonetheless. The oxygen brings some relief to my lungs, and slowly but surely I regain a level of consciousness that simply hadn't existed for me some moments ago.

"My son," says a voice that I think I recognize. "I have questions for you."

"Nico," gasps a voice that I know I recognize, and then I find myself being pulled into warm arms. "Oh my God, I can't believe you're here—"

The golden boy, Will Solace. I'm with him again? That doesn't make any sense; I was just a star, wasn't I? How could I be back on Earth? Did he somehow get the punishment reversed, or is this just a temporary reprieve? I don't want to go back into the skies—just the thought of returning to that melancholy loneliness makes my stomach lurch, and I wince at the sensation.

"Will," I whisper into his shoulder, "what happened? I thought..."

"You sacrificed yourself by kissing me," he reminds me, "but I made God—or, Hades?—bring you back."

Immediately, I lurch out of his arms—because oh, Hades, the actual real-life Hades is here, what the fuck—and fall to my knees in the sand, twisting to face the god again. I lean forward, touching my forehead nearly into the sand in a bow. I say, "Hades, my Lord, it is an honor to be in your presence."

"Your friend doesn't seem to think so," Hades says bitterly. "He had quite the selection of words for me."

I tense, shooting a look at Will that I hope gets my message across: What the hell did you call the king of the cosmos?! Then I quickly resume my bow and try to do damage control: "He didn't mean it, my Lord. He doesn't understand your existence; he is only human."