Solving for x

On The Night When Finna Came Back (“The Night When Finna Came Back”, also variably referred to as: The Moment When Everything Changed, How the Gang Got Back Together Again, The Beginning of the End of the End Which Seemed Like It Would Never End, and, That One Time. At no point have any of these titles been literally documented, but they have floated like bits of vague detritus through the minds of those who lived it. Not everything is recorded by the Gods. Some important historical events only exist inside of your head.) On The Night When Finna Came Back , it’s fair to say that Dmitrii overreacted. The proffered bed was appropriate (even though it wasn’t his house), as was the change of clothes, but the three-course dinner at well-past-midnight was a little much. Eating that late was a bad idea, for one thing. He, Finna, and the now-sober Miruku were fully experiencing the consequences of his decisions as they sat there around the kitchen table at five in the morning, unable to sleep but certainly not awake.

It’s Finna who broke the silence, then. It occurs to Dmitrii that this is out-of-character, but then again a lot of things have felt out-of-character since he’d averted the end of Musea’s causal existence.

Despite literally seeing the future of his friends fighting and growing distant, there was something tonally incomprehensible about its happening in real life. Some part of himself, it seemed, had remembered that glimpse forward as an exaggeration. At first, he’d put it aside as a “future problem,” and shortly after that, stopped worrying about it entirely. Now, watching it really happen was like some nightmare made real. And like a nightmare, he couldn’t accept it as something that was really happening. “But Finna’s going to come back,” he’d thought to himself, “so none of this really matters.” That was how he’d justified all the dissociating, at least.

Anyway, Finna said this:

“I apologize for the late hour. My decision to come back was a very… sudden one.”

He’s still wearing that magic starfaring cloak, and the look of it sitting around him warps time, making it seem as if everything’s happening all over again. His android face hasn’t aged. Other than a number of scuff marks and a new dullness in his eyes, Finna is a vision of the past.

“Had you changed your mind?” Miruku asks quietly.

“What? No. I always intended to return. Eventually. But there were things I needed to… There were matters of personal import that needed addressing.”

“You needed some time to yourself,” Dmitrii remarks from the sink.

“Yes, I suppose you could put it that way,” he says. Dmitrii can feel Finna’s eyes on his back, tracing the curves. Maybe not the second part. But a man can dream.

A silence settles over the kitchen, and while it isn’t necessarily an uncomfortable one, it’s a far cry from a team effort. While making and eating dinner, all three of them had carefully worked together to avoid actually discussing anything serious. It was one of those unspoken rules that everyone agreed to through eye contact. It would be Finna to break that agreement, clumsily and without warning. Maybe it wasn’t out-of-character after all.

“So then…” Finna says finally.

Dmitrii spins around from the kitchen counter to face the two of them at the table. “What you missed?” he says briskly. “Sclera’s ‘short trip’ to space has been going on for over a year now, no one’s heard from Julakogari or Raadaesh in months, Dravidia keeps getting between Past and Future Miruku and literally clawed for his troubles, Kenori will only talk to people who Past Miruku likes, and our Miruku here had a total mental breakdown earlier this evening. Her… uh, seventeenth, if I’m keeping count.”

Miruku huffs a hard breath at that.

“Anything you want to add?” he asks her.

“Astra ended the kirin plague,” she says, with a developed wryness that Dmitrii is still getting used to. “You know, that little thing.”

“Yes, the one positive,” Dmitrii says, even as he speaks struggling to place the sudden vitriol that’s entered his voice. “Forgive me for forgetting the one good thing that’s happened in six years. Must have slipped my mind or something.”

“I should… explain myself,” Finna says.

“No,” Dmitrii says, just as Miruku says, “Okay.”

They look sharply at each other—one of those rare quick motions from Miruku, her usual body language horribly stalled and trepidatious. On one of Miruku’s more lucid days, Sclera asked her why she still acted like that; hadn’t she only been so slow and halting because of the Time Table’s influence? She thought a while and said: Yes, but my brain doesn’t know that. For some reason, Dmitrii thinks about that sentence a lot.

They look at each other. Miruku lifts her eyebrows a little. Dmitrii narrows his. Then he feels suddenly unnerved, and he looks at Finna instead. “You said it was personal time, so let’s keep it personal,” he says.

Finna hesitates. Miruku closes the gap: “If you want to share, I want to hear it. It might be important.”

“Important?” Finna asks.

“Important to… bringing us together,” she says, lowering her gaze.

“It’s five in the morning, Miruku,” Dmitrii says, as gently as he can. “That’s not going to happen tonight.”

“You’re angry with me,” Finna says.

Dmitrii looks at him in surprise. Finna’s gaze doesn’t flinch when Dmitrii meets it. He has his eyes narrowed, leaning forward a little, his good hand poised on the table. Dmitrii realizes he’s angry as Finna says it; the sharp realization estranges him from his own emotions, like the curtain—or the starfaring cloak—was pulled away too suddenly. “No,” he says, too quickly, and then adds, also too quickly, “It’s just been a long time.”

“I wouldn’t have left,” he says levelly, “if I didn’t feel I had to.”

“What for?” Dmitrii says.

Finna presses his lips together, a little hum escaping him as he tenses. “Do you… actually want me to answer?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t care.”

They keep staring at each other, Finna evidently unable to produce a response to that. Dmitrii is now uncomfortably aware of Miruku’s presence. She looks between the two of them like a silent sentry, observing everything.

Finally, Finna lowers his gaze. He chooses to press on. Definitely out-of-character.

“At first I had truly only intended to get some time for myself,” he begins, his voice dropping into that low intonation with which he threatened Dmitrii’s entire understanding of the world, “but it quickly became clear that I do not really know what ‘time to myself’ means. I found myself at the bottom of the rift, that they are calling the Worldwound, with a collection of other first explorers. I couldn’t stop myself from observing the aftermath (Literally, after-math. Finna calculated the most probable location and point in the time stream from which he could enact his revenge; he ran the numbers for the outcomes of each and every spell he cast, a heuristic balancing-of-the-equation taking place each time he stepped through time. He held all the numbers that made up this universe and let them spill through his palms, sifting through the detritus for the one number he needed to change the world. It is only in the absence of his math that there can be an “after.” ). Not much of a vacation, you’ll agree.

“I wanted to make sure the leftover magic was not harmful. There are strange things down there. The primal magic has dispersed into the rock and imbued it with the anomalous. The weave between worlds is weak there—things filter in from other planes, or things filter out, or things are transformed to halfway states between one plane and another. It is stable, at least, but I would not call it safe. I thought I would stay there to investigate and make sure no unwitting explorers were hurt. But it wasn’t long before that Craze person showed up, and people listened to her far better than me.” He shrugs. “I left.”

“That took six years?” Dmitrii says.

“No. Then I returned to space. I went to the Planepotentiary, to Mvuapiki, to the Vacuum, and close to beyond. I helped Fenton sort some affairs of galactic law, and left my influence on Mvuapiki’s battlefields. Though I don’t think Juulakogari noticed. I needed to…” His bright yellow eyes search the floor before flicking up at Dmitrii. “I don’t expect this to make sense to you.”

Dmitrii nods regardless, for the time being quieted by Finna’s intensity.

“I needed to… live the history I had read about,” he murmurs. “I studied your time period in preparation for coming here. Mvuapiki’s civil war, the kirin plague… that was history to me. But now I am living here, in this time. I needed to… experience it in real time. As it is. To make it real.”

He lowers his gaze again. “These are some of the reasons I was gone, at least.”

“I missed you,” Miruku says, before Dmitrii can.

Finna’s head snaps up to regard her. “Well… yes, you must understand… one of my other reasons for being gone so long has to do with just that. I’m sure you realize, with all of the… difficult experiences in our collective history, I was dealing with some leftover feelings of… let’s say, resentment. I would not have been able to entertain all of you in a… kind way, and so I did not bother trying. But I am… better, now.”

“So what you’re saying is,” Miruku says, tilting her head in a playful way that is at once so alarmingly like Past Miruku, “you couldn’t miss us at first because you were mad at us. But you do miss us now.”

“Yes,” he says, for a moment uncharacteristically shy. The emotion ebbs nakedly on his face, to such a degree that Dmitrii feels dizzy. He forgot how expressive this android was. How totally incapable of producing a poker face. A family of bats roost around Dmitrii’s heart, dark wings fluttering against the ventricles like ticklish fingers on his back.

“I think I understand you,” Dmitrii says, surprised by the now-subdued tone of his own voice. “You had a little war to fight. You couldn’t just… carry on living. You had to earn it. It had to be a saga, a rite of passage, or otherwise you would never feel like you really belonged. A war against the rift, a war against time, and a war against yourself. Am I right?”

“Yes,” he says, still spectacularly shy. Dmitrii’s subconscious goes wild, trying to think of different ways to keep that look on his face forever.

Early morning creates a vivid diaspora of faint light as it spreads uncertainly across east-facing surfaces. It is spotty and inconsistent, chopped up further by the cloud barrier and the presence of so many tree branches lingering over windows. Dawn is deceptive, when it begins. The first patches of light look more like patches of shadow, the faint sun striking the darkness so sharply that it seems to resemble darkness unto itself. But as the light lifts—as the sun lifts, brighter, brighter—the shadows morph through peerless shades of gray, gaining light and color and organic fracture as they go.

Miruku lies upside down in her bed, with her legs running the wall, and the dawn gathers in her face and invents new shades of gray. Finna organizes them in the thick silence. Milky gray, variable gray, lip-of-black-hole gray, fine-dust-of-sugar gray, Miruku gray. Miruku gray is by far the most interesting. It compliments all sorts of colors.

“Dmitrii’s just upset because you haven’t said you love him, I think,” Miruku says abruptly. They have been perfectly quiet for 37 minutes and twelve seconds. Finna might have thought Miruku had fallen asleep, if not for the careful way in which he’d been studying her face.

“I told him I am not very good at these things,” Finna says.

“When?”

“Before we left the Akashic Record.”

“That was a while ago, Finna. He probably forgot what you meant.”

Finna thinks for a moment. Neither flinches at the other’s gaze, not like they used to. “Am I the one… in the wrong?”

Miruku also thinks for a moment. Her eyes mount the ceiling and then trek down the other side. Briefly the light hits her irises and she discovers apocalyptic gray.

“I think we’re all in the wrong,” she says finally.

“About my love life?”

Miruku laughs. “No. Well, maybe. But I meant in general. These days, I think being certain about anything is just… stupid.”

Finna nods. “I am sorry I left you to deal with the aftermath alone.”

Miruku doesn’t respond immediately. “You know what’s hard?” she says. “Being myself. Cause they don’t really… know me. I mean, they do, but they know me in pieces. Sometimes literally. And there’s little bits of who I am that none of them have seen before, because they didn’t know me before I… before we did what we did. At the table earlier, all I wanted to do was just yell at you two to kiss each other already. But I think I would have scared the shit out of Dmitrii if I did.”

She regards him upside-down. “It’s not like that with you. You’re like a stranger, except we share personal stuff, so I can act however I want around you. I like that.”

Finna spent most of the formative years of his life locked in near-isolation aboard a spaceship where his primary contact was a racist psychiatrist. He is used to making detailed observations about other people in his head, to protect himself from the psychological profiles of strangers. Now, for reasons he can only grasp at, he decides to voice one of those observations. “You’re avoiding my apology,” he says. “Instead of acknowledging it directly, you intimated something personal about a related subject, and then turned it into a compliment directed at myself. Now I am discouraged from bringing it up again, because I feel morally obliged to acknowledge the personal information you just shared. What’s more, by ending with the compliment, it seems as if the subject organically turned on me, and I, by way of humility, feel pressured to let it happen.” He pauses. “Possibly you do this because you are genuinely angry at my leaving, and thus don’t want to accept the apology. Or—and I think this is more likely—discussing the contents of my apology means admitting that you have suffered more, and you are reluctant to do so when you have already taken up the better part of the evening with a nervous breakdown.”

They stare at each other, both quite expressionless.

“It’s a good trick,” Finna says. “But it isn’t helping either of us get better.”

Miruku doesn’t move immediately. When she does, it’s at a deliberate pace, carefully turning over on the bed, hopping up to her knees, and sitting back on them. “How did you know?” she says.

“I do it myself,” he responds levelly. “All the time.”

And Miruku smiles. It’s a slow smile, and it just gets wider and wider, until it’s a grin. It breaks her face up into enclaves never-before-seen, and for a moment it almost seems as if there’s a fifth Miruku abound. Then the sun rises for real, and the bedroom windows flash briefly white, and Finna discovers his new favorite: smile gray.

Dmitrii is in the living room, tuning his violin. It is six-forty in the morning. Given the circumstances, Finna can only assume this is normal behavior.

He’s in the hallway, leaning against the wall just around the corner, trying to figure out how to approach Dmitrii. He very quietly and deliberately lets his carefully-constructed personality fall away for a moment. For just a moment, he wants to see himself not as a wounded, impossible hermit wandering alone in a place he doesn’t belong, but as what he actually is: a scared, confused man. A man who doesn’t know what love is and has a terrible feeling he’s about to find out.

But Finna doesn’t know how to approach him. Should he… flirt? He doesn’t know how to flirt, or what it even is, really. From what he’s observed, it’s the same thing as banter among friends, just slightly more aggressive. Some instinct tells him this description isn’t wholly accurate. Forget it, then. What if, instead of talking to him, he performed some gesture for Dmitrii instead? Making breakfast, or wearing revealing leather, or enchanting a favorite possession? This will take longer. And what if the gesture is misinterpreted as an expression of guilt? No. He thinks to himself: I shall walk up to Dmitrii and ask him if he wants to sleep with me. No, this looks vulnerable. I shall walk up to Dmitrii and forcibly take his hand and we will go to his bed immediately.

It occurs to Finna, as if from a great distance, that Dmitrii may not actually want to sleep with him. Perhaps what Dmitrii is actually interested in is what Finna had always regarded as the unattainable: finding love (also known as: solving for x.). The love he had with his family on Petalis wasn’t something he found, it was something he had—something eternal. Not finding love, then, but rediscovering it.

He allows himself, just for a moment, personality down and thoughts exposed, to dream. A grand dream of that which had been promised to him, falsely, crudely, and flippantly, since the destruction of his planet: the dream that he might one day experience the love he had for his family with other people. Is it really possible? Not just that he could feel that way again, but that he could feel that way with aliens from another time?

With one alien in particular?

Dmitrii turns the corner with his violin resting loosely on his shoulder. He nearly collides with Finna, who rears in an almost dire effort at avoiding physical contact. His exposed face is a messy display of tangled emotions, barely discernible to Finna let alone anyone observing him. The look he ends up with is vaguely akin to a cat with its paw in the goldfish bowl.

There’s a pause.

“Going to bed?” Dmitrii asks, friendly.

Finna panics. He hasn’t panicked in over 20 years, and most of the previous occasions took place in a windowless psychiatrist’s room, so it doesn’t go over well. Tears bite at his eyes, and he turns around suddenly to hide this, before realizing how strange this looks and completing the rotation to face Dmitrii again, expression just barely sorted. He grabs Dmitrii’s arm and starts to say Yes, and you’re coming with, but loses the nerve halfway through, and instead it comes out as “Yes, and you’re… with violin,” as if he was saying with child, a strange Musean phrase that he’s not totally sure on the meaning of. He assumes it’s just a slang way of removing the extra words, and he probably sounds very well-adjusted for using it. This maverick touchdown resembles enough of a success for Finna to avoid having a personality crisis on the spot.

Dmitrii laughs. If he’s noticed something’s up, it doesn’t show. “I am. I could serenade you to sleep.”

“You’re not going to sleep?” Finna asks.

Dmitrii shrugs. “I don’t have anyone to cuddle with.”

Finna thinks about this. Wouldn’t it be difficult to cuddle while playing the violin? He has managed, with an almost breathless lack of effort, to completely miss Dmitrii’s flirting. All he can make sense of is a vague instinct that there’s a certain way to respond to this, but he hasn’t read the room well enough to figure out what it is. The room he’s in is dragon-lengths away from Dmitrii. For some reason all he can think about is his ex, a Lashuntan tattooist in future Casio, the only ex he’s ever had.

“Hey,” Dmitrii says, sparing him. “What’s going on in there, the Industrial Revolution?”

“What?”

“You’re thinking hard enough to blow smoke,” he says dryly. “Look, just…” Dmitrii sighs. “Don’t overthink. Don’t think at all. This isn’t a math equation, you don’t have to… to… solve it. Just be here, okay? You’re here now, and everything’s going to be okay. Everything is okay.”

There’s a long silence between them. Dmitrii picks up the conversation again, in the same motion with which he picks up Finna’s hand. “You’re still holding my arm,” he observes.

“I am,” Finna says.

“Why?”

“It was a product,” Finna says slowly, “of not thinking.”

Dmitrii lifts Finna’s hand the rest of the way and kisses it, gently. Finna is immediately furious that he didn’t do this himself, but he doesn’t have much time process it. He’s too distracted by how smile gray looks on Dmitrii’s face.