Dearest Fitz,

I love you. I love you. I love you.

It's so much easier to say that now that I know it's true.

...

Fitz decides not to register for the match.

His matchmaking packet waits, filled out in its entirety, and he feels stupid whenever he looks at it. Come on, Fitz, he thinks, scanning his entries. Ideal sense of humor: sarcastic, with goofy characteristics and a passion for practical jokes? You couldn't possibly have been more obvious. He's almost certain he was thinking of Sophie when he did it, but now he wonders how he ever deluded himself into believing that.

Maybe, he hopes, both of Alden Vacker's children choosing not to register will influence public opinion. Maybe they'll start thinking about why.

He doesn't want to get his head too far up in some fantasy.

But since Sophie, Dex, Linh, Keefe, and Tam have all decided not to register too... maybe the combination of the Vacker kids, the youngest regents ever, the girl who saved Atlantis, the boy who took down Lady Gisela, and the boy who brought a new way of bending shadow to the Lost Cities all taking a stand...

Alden has been hinting at a more permanent solution. In other words, he wants him to be a Councillor.

But lately, the world has been looking more to Sophie for an answer. The Vackers have faded with the death of Alvar—not that anyone knows what really happened to him. They've simply become... irrelevant.

In any case, it doesn't matter what happened to the Neverseen. The world, Tam has pointed out on multiple occasions, is still fucked. But, he tends to add, it might still be up to us to save it.

...

This letter, you can read. You looked through the notebook already (the gold one, the one filled with you) and you've basically lived in my head for the past year, so this is the last secret.

The last secret: I know you don't remember that I told you this (it was rather distracting when we kissed a few seconds later) but I did write a goodbye letter to you, before the one for Sophie.

It's maybe still sitting in Candleshade, in my trash can, ripped to shreds.

I told too much of the truth in it, and that's why I didn't leave it for you. Of course, I do remember it (I remember everything) but I won't be sharing it. I don't think you need any reminders of what it was like.

Because, holy hell, things have changed, haven't they?

For instance, we're happy. (or... well, as happy as we can possibly be)

...

"You killed him, didn't you," Biana says softly, a confession, a secret laid bare. So she's known for a while. So she's only just found the nerve to confirm it.

Fitz lays with his head in her lap and thinks about how the last time he'd lain like this, hit with the melder and shaking with pain. It came in tsunamis then, and it comes in waves now.

"Yes," he says. Even if the official story was that a mixture of the stress of getting his memories back and his injuries at the troll hive had killed him quickly, everyone close to him either knows or suspects that Fitz was the one to finally end it.

"How did you do it?"

He looks up at her, matching her hesitant gaze above him. "Dagger. In the throat."

Biana lets out a shuddering breath, squeezing her eyes shut and scrubbing at them with her hands. "God," she says quietly.

"I guess you were right," he says, letting a bitter smile grace his lips. "We are all just a bunch of fuckups."

She doesn't deny it. But she twists her fingers through his hair and says, "Sophie kissed me yesterday."

He blinks up at her, but she's not looking at him anymore. She stares off into space with stormy eyes, oceans and jagged rocks blocking the path to whatever she's feeling.

"Did you kiss her back?"

She smiles slightly. "Yes."

"Then what's wrong?"

"Nothing. I just—I want her to know she has it right this time." Biana meets his eyes again and suddenly there are tears there. He doesn't know why. It could be anything. There is so much there to cry for. "I've made so many mistakes. I don't want her to think she's one of them."

"As the second-best expert on mistakes in your life," he says, and reaches to flick her cheek. She bats his hand away and scrunches up her face. "I don't think you have anything to worry about, Bee."

She smiles, for real this time, a grin that splits her face in half. "You haven't called me that in ages."

"Sorry about that," he says. "I've been a little distracted."

"Ah." she complains, pretending to swoon onto his stomach, summoning an oof. "No time for me any longer... I have become irrelevant."

"No!" he calls, pulling her hair until she shrieks with exaggerated fury. "I could never forget you... my dearest sister..."

She sits up and pokes him in the stomach so hard he yelps and sits up as well, pinching her arm. "Come on, Bee, I called you my favorite sister."

"That's a given, Fizzy! I expect a million handmade desserts by tomorrow to prove it." Biana nods to assert her statement, and he pulls her hair again.

...

But this is supposed to be a love letter. Allow me to express how irrevocably you have restructured the way my mind works, the way it redirects attention to your lips, your hair, the acne on your face and the bump in your nose and the way your laugh feels when you let yourself fold in half with the weight of it on your shoulders—much better than that chip you were carrying before—and the way your spine feels under my fingertips when I press down enough to feel the bumps.

(see, I can be romantic! riddle me this: which is better, this awesome and eloquently composed letter, or a boring-ass pen?)

The thing is, I'm not able to forget anything. I remember all the fights and the shouting and the cruelty, even—we both were cruel, and petty, and maybe a little ruthless with each other back then, and now too—and I remember the laughter and the games and the promises we made.

Ones like I'm going to marry you someday. And the promise you made in return: no, you're not. You said that's not true, like I have ever in my life cared about honesty or right and wrong.

...

Sophie gives them a bulletin board left over from her human home that the Council brought to Eternalia. Fitz helps Keefe hang it up in the main sitting room at Candleshade, right over the fireplace.

They'd encased Gisela's last note in never-melting ice specialized by Juline and Kesler's efforts. It would never fade, never yellow, never age, and neither would she.

Neither, Forkle had pointed out when they told him about it, would she be able to turn back. They still don't know how long Keefe's commands can last—or if there is a limit. Or, in this case, whether there is anything left of a person in her. Perhaps she is simply a concept, a voice, an endless whisper.

(YOU ARE MY LEGACY)

And he can't hear a thing.

Gisela's words go up onto the bulletin board, pinned by the same starstone pin she'd keyed to Keefe's blood when he was eleven. It's a reminder that he won't see often since no one lives in that house anymore. It will crumble into ruins around her.

They stand in that house and Keefe looks at the note and Fitz looks at him.

"I haven't ever—" Keefe starts, and then pauses and stuffs his shaking hands in his pockets. "I haven't ever been good at saying goodbye."

Fitz knows this better than anyone. But he isn't talking to him.

"And it's much easier to say it when you don't mean it. I ran away and didn't say goodbye because I didn't think I'd be coming back. I'm saying goodbye to you and I don't know if I'm telling the truth."

(He isn't telling the truth. Fitz knows this like he knows his own name. Keefe has a disease where he can't let things go. He will return over the years, pacing these halls and running his hands along the wall to see how much dust he can collect on his fingertips. They will come away filthy, and he will wipe them on his father's office chair. He is made of beginnings, not endings.)

"What am I saying?" Keefe mutters, and takes a few steps back. "God, you don't care about lying. Bye, Mom."

...

Maybe we are one big shade of gray. But you know what?

In a black and white world, you'd still be golden. Sorry for bringing that up, darling. I know you hate being the Golden Boy. But I think you can't help it.

I also think you've been gilded, not golden. You're lead covered in gold paint, and you know what that makes me? Coal that can never turn to diamonds no matter how much pressure you add. An oyster without a pearl, if you prefer that metaphor instead.

Yeah. You know me. I know you.

What else is there to say?

I love you, I love you, I love you.

That's what else.

I know you and I love you all the more for it.

Let me put it into other words: for a long time, gold was my favorite color. Do you get it now? I'm saying that I stared into the sun until I went blind because looking at you happy without me hurt worse than fire. I'm saying that I wake up spitting butterflies because there are too many in my stomach. I'm saying my blood, maybe my being (whatever the hell that is) is made of you and your smile.

You confound me. That's a new word, isn't it? Confound, perplex, confuse, humiliate, terrify, intrigue. They're not usually synonyms. Let's change the definitions, huh?

...

Fitz lays on the bed and thinks of being made of stone.

It's part of the reason he avoids looking in mirrors these days: whenever he meets his own eyes, they glaze over in a practiced marble. His jaw sharpens as he clenches it, his hair solidifying, skin graying. Part of who he is leeches away when he sees himself, who is he and who he appears to be broken down the middle in a rigid line.

He looks more like his brother every day.

He tries to avoid it: letting his curls grow out instead of gelling them back or cutting them off, allowing his smile to go crooked and sloppy, even asking Biana to teach him about eyeliner to remind him his eyes are darker teal, not a pale blue.

Fitz twirls his finger around Keefe's hair. It's getting even longer these days, and he often ties the upper half of it up. His brown roots are showing through again, which means another Keefe-Biana bonding day shut up in the bathroom with the nasty smell of bleach filling up her bedroom.

"Hey," Keefe says.

Fitz smiles. "Hey."

Keefe's lips turn up in a familiar smirk.

"What?" he asks.

He sits up, and Fitz immediately misses the warmth of his head on his chest. Keefe pulls a slightly crumpled paper from his pocket. "I have something for you to read."

...

I think we're afraid of being abandoned. I guess I'm at least a little to blame for that.

But, see, there's a lesson found in running away. I don't know if I learned it yet, but I think you're teaching me the art of coming back.

With you, I want to stay. That's what this letter is about.

Thank you.

Love,

Keefe