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Content warning: while this solo doesn't contain particularly graphic violence, the threat of torture is present.
This thing with Tyndareus was...nice. Okay, yeah, sure, Pyrrhus didn't love that he hadn't been able to get Tyndareus to a royal and bring him home, but their little energy-draining scheme was going pretty well, and the longer he got to know the new Tyndareus, the more Pyrrhus liked him.
It was still a little bit of a tangle, the whole....feelings thing, where sometimes Pyrrhus wasn't sure if he loved this Tyndareus or the one he'd lost gotten killed lost (like he'd just disappeared one day, like Pyrrhus hadn't held his body in his arms, like those feelings weren't constantly bubbling under the surface when he interacted with this Tyndareus, a tide of grief that he had fought so, so hard to escape.)
(The tide never stopped. It was always lapping at his heels, threatening to pull him under, darker and more dangerous even than Thalassa's freezing oceans.)
(But he still had his head above water. He was still fighting. He was even looking forward to things. Everything wasn't hopeless bullshit. He hadn't survived this long to give up now, when things were actually getting better.)
The point was, the more time he spent with Tyndareus, the more he felt like good things were actually happening. For all of them, even if Thalassa was...not doing the best. Maybe they just needed to find that stupid Knight he'd always been talking about wanting to shut up, but that would mean searching the whole damn city, assuming he was even still around or Awakened yet or whatever else might be going on with one random Knight who happened to have a connection to Pyrrhus's best friend--
That was a project for another time. Things for Imnolu had gotten better when he found his professor, now a Moon Knight. Things for Pyrrhus felt better now that he'd found Tyndareus again. And the most important thing was that the three of them were alive, to keep figuring this s**t out.
And, listen. Pyrrhuis was only so acquainted with Earth romantic traditions, but there was something just a little heart-pounding about meeting a handsome man under blooming flowers, to do something that required a whole lot of touching and sitting together, and just....yeah, okay, maybe he liked this new Tyndareus like he'd like the old one. It wasn't the same; this was a different person, and he had to keep reminding himself of that. But honestly? That almost felt like a new reason to be optimistic.
It was a new person. Maybe he would remember things after he purified and started getting memories back, maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he liked Pyrrhus too, maybe he didn't. Weirdly, Pyrrhus found that he almost didn't care. If he got another chance, that was all well and good, but he'd gotten lucky once, with one Tyndareus, and if it didn't happen again, that was...it was actually kind of okay.
It would be enough to make sure that Tyndareus got out of the Negaverse and got to make his own choices, make his own life, as a whole new person. Pyrrhus wasn't normally in the saving people business unless there was money to be made or favors to be earned, but this...he could do a little heroism for free if it meant helping this particular person.
He honestly felt...light. Happy. A little giggly and floaty, weirdly enough, which was not normally how he got, but...
He'd been like that before, in the early days of courting Bernard, when they'd just been partners in crime, before things spilled over into a much more fun and mutually beneficial partnership. He'd been silly and fluttery and crushy in a way that he didn't really normally associate with himself, but Bernard had brought those things out in him. Apparently, the new Tyndareus could bring those things out in him too.
It felt good, to be thinking positively. To have an outlook on life that wasn't just...grimly pushing forward because he couldn't give up now after everything he'd been through. Sunk cost fallacy as a reason for living. Everything wasn't fixed, no--Tyndareus was still Chaos and Pyrrhus the asteroid was still infected with it--but maybe...maybe things were going to be okay.
Pyrrhus really did feel good about the whole thing. Good enough that he wasn't paying attention to anything around him, which he normally would have recognized as stupid. But he was in the isolated corner of the park where he normally met with Tyndareus; they were both careful, it was safe, he could let his guard down a little.
There was a sharp pain in his back, into his chest.
"Take a nap, alien freak."
Pyrrhus only had a moment to realize his starseed was being pulled out from behind before he blacked out.
