Disclaimer:
I don't own anything!

Author's Note: This was inspired very much by Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, a book that I cannot recommend enough. It is a sci-fi YA series of which I am just now starting the 2nd one, that is told entirely through the AI's POV, emails, chats, official statements, ads. It's a masterpiece of visual design and has an incredibly haunting, chilling writing quality.

So, this one-shot is a coda to my other story, The Definition of Strength, but it's not necessary to read that first. This is another exploration of character for these two that I felt fit my mindset after reading Illuminae.

Stories are where memories go when they're forgotten.
-The Twelfth Doctor

"What do you know of astronomy?" Mithos asks from his favorite spot by the window.

Genis looks at his ghost. Mithos is more transparent today than usual; Genis can hardly pick him out of the moonlight. "I'm not a specialist or anything. I know our solar system, constellations, major landmarks. General knowledge, I suppose. Why?"

"So you know little of astrophysics?"

"I don't know about Tethe'alla, but in Sylvarant, learning any physics at all besides gravity, basic laws, things like that—it's kind of a miracle."

Mithos hums in acknowledgment. Usually, Genis is rather good at predicting Mithos' trains of thought, even if they often come out of the blue. He's only gotten better at it over the years. There are still times—like this one—that Mithos manages to surprise him, and leave Genis fumbling to figure out where the conversation is going.

"Do you know the speed of light?"

"299,792,458 meters per second," Genis rattles off. "Why the sudden science quiz?"

A faint smile is hardly discernable on Mithos' lips. "Top of the class," he murmurs. "Even going that fast, the stars are so far away that, by the time their light reaches us, the star itself is very likely dead."

Genis sets the last dish on the rack to dry, wiping his hands on a towel. He's been neglecting his dishes for a few days and they had begun to pile up. "Is this your scientific way of saying that there's no point in wishing on a star?"

Mithos throws back his head and laughs, his form becoming a little more solid. He grins at Genis, beautiful. Eternally fourteen. Eternally four thousand and fourteen. "Not quite, but I hadn't considered that angle."

"So what were you thinking?" Genis grabs a blanket to wrap around himself when he sits in his favorite armchair, tucking his socked feet beneath him.

"The universe is so incredibly, unfathomably large." Mithos looks away, out to the stars. Genis wonders if, after so much time on Derris-Kharlan, Mithos is more accustomed to space than being on a green planet. "The universe doesn't care about you. Or me. Anyone. It doesn't owe us anything. All of our experiences, the lives we live…the universe doesn't care about them. It was here long before we were born and will be here long after. We are hardly an iota of importance."

Genis curls a little tighter on himself beneath the blanket. Lloyd would argue, he thinks. Would say that everyone is important. But Mithos' words ring with a terrible truth.

"….You think that it doesn't matter what we do—good or bad-because in the grand scheme of things, we don't affect anything?"

"Quite the opposite." Mithos turns, slipping into the windowsill for a moment before managing to sit on it again. He doesn't control what he can and cannot pass through, which only provides entertainment for Genis. "I found a way for physical immortality. We can argue semantics and morals about the differences between living and surviving until we—well, you're blue in the face, but on a physical, medical level, I achieved immortality."

"Right…" That is the true terror of Mithos Yggdrasill. A prodigy beyond even Genis' intelligence, with ambition and courage to rattle the stars, and the ferocious love that had split a world apart. All at only fourteen.

"But physical immortality—that's nothing. True immortality, I don't know if I've achieved it."

"I don't follow."

"What's the definition of immortality, Genis?"

It's irritating to be treated like a schoolchild with all these questions, but Genis finds his patience because Mithos is leading up to something. "To live forever."

"That's the proper definition. But I disagree."

"Of course you do," Genis laughs. The sound has a bitter edge to it. "I don't think you''ll be satisfied until you've upset every tradition and worldview."

Mithos ignores the interruption. "True immortality is achieved by never being forgotten, the legacy you leave. True death—I believe—is achieved only when no more stories are spoken of you, when no one remembers your name or achievements.

"The only way anyone—including the universe—cares about you is if you do something that is worthy of remembrance."

Genis' smile fades. His twenty-fourth birthday is next month. He's felt old since he was twelve, since he'd dealt the killing blow on the boy he loved, the same boy had destroyed and rebuilt a world for love of his sister. Mithos will always be older than him, but never before has Genis looked at him and thought, he is only a child. A child who knows the size of the universe and doesn't want to be alone and forgotten in it. He'd built a world system to do it. Had created a religion around his sister, a benevolent goddess. She wouldn't be remembered in any other way except the way Mithos had always known her. His own story had been changed until all that remains is the Hero. The martyr.

"Do you think you're going to be forgotten?" Genis asks quietly.

"I'd like to think not. But I have seen too many empires rise and fall, too many people building monuments in their quest for immortality—monuments that your sister now studies as ruins—to think that I've achieved it."

"You're wrong, Mithos."

Mithos looks up, and in his eyes, there is no hint of madness, but the yawning gap of four thousand years of experience. The vulnerable child gone as quickly as it had come. "Why do you say that?"

"The history books are largely devoted to what you've done. They had to be rewritten entirely after the truth came out." Raine herself had written more than a few of those books. "Scholars are debating on how our planet moves in space now that Derris-Kharlan's gravity isn't there. The cultural ramifications of all that you did. The political, the social. Everything. There is no aspect of our lives that remains unaffected by Cruxis."

"Our plane is a speck of dust in the eye of the universe."

"True," Genis concedes, the blanket slipping to his waist as he sits up. "And the history books may forget you eventually. Maybe one day, all that you've done will be relegated to a section of a chapter.

"But I think all legends go through that. The stories of the constellations—the woman loved by Efreet whose name is written in the stars so he cannot forget her. The fastest woman alive blessed by the Sylph, running as fast as the wind. The hero with a sword of lightning—those people all likely existed. Those people are always remembered, even if we don't know their names."

Mithos' smirk is crooked; his face is too young to pull it off, but Genis can imagine it on the man he would be, a handsomely rakish expression. "You think I'm going to be a legend?"

Genis rolls his eyes, slipping out of his blanket cocoon to put on a pot of tea. "Not that you need the ego boost, but yes."

Mithos laughs softly, moving to stand near the counter. Mithos is tall, for fourteen, but Genis at twenty-three stands head and shoulders above him. They stay in comfortable silence for a while—even though it is the beginning of winter, Genis is too accustomed to the chill that Mithos puts off for it to affect him much.

It is as the water comes to a boil, and Genis pulls out a mug that Mithos speaks again. "…It's not myself I'm concerned about. Well, not as much."

"Who? Martel?"

Mithos shakes his head. "I'm pretty sure that, of all of us, Martel will be the one whose memory lives on the most." A moment of hesitation. "The War killed so many."

Genis doesn't dare answer. Mithos rarely speaks directly of the Kharlan War—the only real war, in Mithos' mind.

"There weren't graves for them all. No time to dig them, no space for them. We burned them. There are no markers left for those that died, no one who can or will speak of them. Of their lives and loved ones."

Genis wonders if Mithos has ever spoken of the War to anyone, including Kratos and Yuan. If any of them ever spoke about it. He pours the water from the kettle, dipping his teabag. "But you remember them."

"Yuan and I are the only ones left. Who knows what will happen to Kratos."

"Martel said she's made up of the memories. They live on in her."

Genis half-expects Mithos to snap that the new Spirit of the Tree is not Martel, but he doesn't. Today is not the day for that argument, it seems. "She has many of their souls, yes. But I do not believe she has memories retained of those before the Great Tree's death." Mithos cautiously leans against the wall, making sure he's not about to go through it. He won't look at Genis now, eyes on his hands. "You think I did a lot of damage? There has been no event in all of collected history that has that kind of death toll. In twenty-two years, the War killed over a billion people. That we know of. And of those billion people, how many names have survived?"

"Four," Genis replies quietly.

"Because we made it that way. But I still remember every name of every soldier I fought with. Every person we burned. All the promises we made to the dying, we have kept. There are a thousand things I can say about Yuan and Kratos—good and bad—but I know they remember the names too."

"Do you remember their stories?" Genis asks, staring at his tea, the fresh mint smell a balm to his nose. Mithos likes to make faces at Genis' taste in teas. "You've dictated to me before, and I told you I would write down what you wanted me to say. I can write their stories, have them for the world to read and know, even if they have no connections to those people anymore."

"Do you think Yuan wouldn't notice?"

"They deserve to be remembered. Even if they're not published until later, they will be written down. One more person will know their stories, and that's one more chance for immortality. Someone needs to tell them. Needs to remember what they died for."

Mithos finally looks up, and Genis cannot pretend to fathom what is running through his eight-thousand-mile-a-minute mind. "…You are an extraordinary man, Genis Sage."

Genis snorts, taking a cautious sip of his tea. Still too hot. "Is that a yes?"

"I will consider it."