#mod lina's oldest hoyoverse muse everyone give it up for tuna

[voidrifter]

application.

In her dream, it’s him again. 

“Why are you doing this?”

It’s the same question again.

“...”

It’s the same answer.

The Herrscher of Finality plants her hands on her hips. It’s just them here, perhaps the first indication that this is all a dream. A pocket in reality, a moment in the heat of battle, frozen and utterly still. One Kaslana to another, the past to the future.

Sometimes she asks the question over and over until her throat burns and her hands tremble, sometimes she tells him about her day. About who called or how long she trained or about how lonely it is on the moon, and how she wonders if he would understand that. Probably. She doesn’t know much about him, except for that he was like her once.

Suddenly she isn’t the Herrscher of Finality anymore, she’s just Kiana. The cuff of her jacket between her thumb and forefinger– a nervous habit– and her eyes at the ground between them.

“I don’t think I’m gonna end up like you did.” He doesn’t answer because he can’t, she knows that. This is a dream and he’s dead anyway. “The world always mattered to me before anything– people, y’know?”

She’s happy, in the end. They all are, where it matters anyway. Or she thinks, at least. There’s no reason not to be– all they fought to save has been realized, their war is as over as a war ever can be.

“Was it hard, being by yourself?”

Again, there is no answer. Kiana’s weight shifts, right to left, eyes snaking shyly up to the silhouette that makes his profile. 

“It’s hard for me, but I was never really by myself before. Even when I felt like I was, when Mei left and stuff, I wasn’t really. There was Fu Hua, and always Bronya and Seele, and…”

Sirin. Her heart aches somewhere distant. This body of hers was always made to be shared, empty without a second heart to beat inside of it. She hadn’t liked the Herrscher of Void, no, and that absence is for the better.

But for the better, Kiana has learned, doesn’t always feel good. Sirin was gone for the better, Kevin was gone for the better.

“You were good once, right? Mei tells me stories sometimes, Fu Hua too.” 

It’s never fair, what all the bad in the world can do to the good. “Sometimes I wonder, though. I guess everybody does, huh? Maybe it’s just the moon getting to me. So I can kind of see why you would…” Well, no she can’t, but maybe a little bit. Kiana shakes her head, ponytail swaying with the motion. Even if it’s hard sometimes, or she misses people all the time, she still wouldn’t change it. Not a single thing, no matter what. 

“Guess that makes me tougher than you, doesn’t it, uncle?” She doesn’t know why she’s teasing him– he doesn’t care, he isn’t real. Even if he was, he still wouldn’t. This isn’t the Kevin her friends tell stories about, it’s a Hero so lost to his own war that he has forgotten why it even started. 

“We both know how this fight ends, anyway.” But she doesn’t think that makes her tougher. “I can’t say this in front of my friends, they’ll just argue with me, so you best keep it a secret.”

Not like he could tell anyone if he wanted to, anyway.

“I don’t really think I’m all that strong, honestly. Sure, I guess if you’re asking physically…” But even then, so are Mei and Bronya and Fu Hu and- “I act all confident, y’know? I mean, I am,” a laugh, sheepish, “but I know I’m not all that, either. I wouldn’t be half of what I am without my friends.”

She’s looking at the sky now, wondering where about that endless sea of stars her friends are now as she sleeps. She hopes that they’re happy, that they’re safe. That they miss her at least a little.

“I know I’ll always be remembered for this,” for you, “but I think I wouldn’t care if I was remembered at all. Those kinds of things just don’t mean that much to me in the end, y’know? As long as the people I love never forget me I- hey! Where’d you go?”

The sound of an alarm cuts clean through the night sky, startles her straight to sitting up in bed. A mess of sheets, made worse as she fumbles for her phone to turn the damn thing off. A notification flashes in the alarm’s absence, a single line.

M: miss you!

Yeah, she’ll never be like him.