"Please Fix Me"
Arc 2: Chapter 10
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POV: "???"
The cold air of the New Year's early morning carried the promise of a future Luna could no longer face with hope, only with the lacerating pain of the present. Her words, once spoken, hung between them like a heavy veil.
"Empty… I'm sorry. For everything. For not being stronger. For not being able to break the chains."
He lifted his head with effort. There was no hatred, no resentment in his eyes. There was something more devastating: acceptance. The calm understanding that some walls, even the most unjust, were simply insurmountable. With a hand that barely trembled, he took the slate and wrote three words:
"It's all right."
It was his most beautiful and most painful lie.
"Thank you, Empty," Luna cried, her face bathed in tears that were an agonizing relief and total devastation. I will never deserve you, the thought pierced her like a blade. Even hurting him, even with these words being the last he hears from me… please, live in me. Become part of who I am.
Luka appeared at the corridor door, his face a mixture of concern and urgency.
"Luna. The Council needs a final word. And… Raphadun is being questioned."
She closed her eyes for a second, pulling the queen's mask over her shattered face. With one last look at Empty—a look that tried to memorize every detail, every curve of the mask, every shadow in his eyes—she turned.
"Fencer," she called, her voice regaining a thread of authority. Flávio was passed out in a corner, snoring. "Please, take Empty home. Carefully."
Fencer nodded, his face serious. Raphadun, pale and hungover from drunkenness and guilt, helped carry Flávio's heavy body. Empty, in his chair, he taken back to the simple house, straight to the room that had become his final sanctuary.
"Stay well, bro," Fencer said at the door, his voice unusually stripped of cynicism, only laden with respectful sadness. He closed the door softly.
Alone, Empty remained motionless. The distant noise of the streets—"Happy New Year" shouts, laughter, music—came through the window like waves from an ocean of life from which he was being pulled away. It was the sound of the world he had helped save, celebrating without him.
He did not move for a time that could have been minutes or hours. Until, when the last sound of movement inside the house ceased and heavy breathing of sleep took over, something inside him ignited. It was not a strength. It was will. The last, pure, uncontaminated one.
He moved to his chair. With monumental, silent effort, he left the room and slid down the dark corridor.
Fencer, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of cold tea, saw the silhouette pass by the front window. He saw Empty, a fragile and determined figure, maneuvering his chair outward, into the darkness. His fingers tightened around the cup. He only watched, and did not interfere.
Meanwhile, in Luna's luxurious room, the hot bath water could not wash away the guilt nor warm the cold in her chest. A whirlwind of memories invaded her, each one a knife:
Empty rising from the ruins to face the Pursuer, a beacon of protective darkness.
Empty emanating pure light to save the dog, the most beautiful and incomprehensible gesture she had ever witnessed.
Empty watching her with that gaze that was both childish and ancient, full of a mystery that would now never be unraveled.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
He was an enigma who would die in a month, according to the doctors. But he was more than an enigma. He was a feeling. A presence that filled the empty spaces the crown and duty created. She submerged, staring at the marble ceiling, her mind a labyrinth of sadness without exit. How to move forward in a world that rejected the purest thing she had known?
She emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a robe. Luka was there, sitting on the edge of the bed. He was not relaxed. His purple eyes had a flush, an unusual intensity.
"Empty…" he began, voice contained. "Would he… be capable of doing something? Something dangerous? After asking Raphadun to take him to the Stones?"
Luna let out a light laugh, almost a sad sigh.
"Look, don't worry about that. He only thinks of others, never himself. Why do you ask?"
"I saw him. In the room. His eyes on the Restoration Stone." Luka chose his words carefully, like one handling broken glass. "You know what those stones did in History, Luna. The obsession they generate. The sick desire to find 'God,' to rewrite reality… That was what caused the ancient wars for power."
"But it doesn't make sense with him," Luna protested, her voice a thread of strength. "He is… special. Different."
Luka studied her face for a long moment. He saw the lie, saw the pain, saw the conflict. And, perhaps out of pity, perhaps out of exhaustion, he accepted.
"I understand," he said, rising. "I'll leave. Let you rest. Stay well, Luna."
He turned to go. And it was then that she broke.
"Luka."
He stopped.
"I am…" her voice failed. "Out of options. I need… I need your help."
He turned. He had never heard her ask that. He had never seen her so vulnerable, so far from the queen. His face softened, and he simply nodded, yielding.
While echoes of parties still danced in the wind, Empty reached the cliff where they had watched the fireworks. He was not there to relive the moment. He was there to create a new one.
With movements that were no longer trembling, but deliberate and final, he began to undo himself. The straps of the arm armor were loosened. The metal tube fell to the ground with a dry sound. Then the breastplate buckles. Plate by plate, the carapace that had protected him from the world, that had defined him as "The Empty Man" to others, dismantled around him, an empty steel shell.
Luka and Luna, at the top of the tower, intertwined in an act that was duty, consolation, and escape. Luka kissed her, and she responded, seeking in physical heat an anesthetic for the pain of the soul. He led her to the bed, and their bodies moved in an ancient rhythm, a desperate attempt to connect through the physical, to fill the void that the truth about Empty had opened.
With the armor removed, Empty was exposed. The night wind, once an annoyance, was now a whip of ice needles against his necrotic, translucent skin, clinging to overly visible bones. His body was a map of ruins. And then, with hands that now seemed skeletal bird claws, he opened them.
In the center of his right palm, pulsing with a soft and deep green light, was the Stone of the Future. The secret he had carried from the beginning. The primordial order: "Protect her. Never show it to anyone."
Raphadun, with a knot of guilt and worry in his stomach, went to Empty's room. The door was ajar. The room, empty. Only the thick diary rested on the desk, open.
Invading a privacy he had always respected, Raphadun picked up the book. He flipped through pages of smiling faces, sketches of plants, of Luna, of all of them. Until he reached the last page.
And there, there were no drawings. There was only one sentence.
When read, Raphadun's heart stopped. A choked scream escaped his throat. He turned and ran. The diary fell from his hands, pages scattering across the floor like petals of a funeral.
On the cliff, Empty held the stone. Memories flooded him, not as pain, but as raw material:
The first curse, defeated, its human form smiling as it dissolved.
The face of every soul he had freed, a gallery of silent gratitude.
Luna and Raphadun, trusting, beside him in the Infernal Zone.
Flávio, laughing. Fencer, observing.
The illuminated shadow rose. The "It's all right."
In a final act of pure will, Empty pressed the Stone of the Future against his own chest, where an agonizing spark still flickered.
The stone reacted. Not as an inert object, but as a seed finding the soil it was made for. It liquefied into a nectar of living green light, coiling around his arm, flowing through his dark veins, flooding his torso, enveloping his entire body in a pulsing mantle of primordial energy. The pain was excruciating, the universe being rewritten inside his flesh, but it was a pain he embraced.
In the kingdom, life celebrated:
Luna and Luka moved in physical synchronicity, a sigh escaping his lips.
"Please, a good life," he murmured, the ritual phrase of New Year's Eve.
Luna, for an instant, broke the sadness. She looked into his eyes and, with a voice trying to believe, replied:
"Please, a good life."
Fencer slept restlessly. Flávio snored. Bruce toasted with Ver?nica, his calculating eyes. Aldert laughed with his numerous offspring. Amanda hugged Juliet, smiling with her mage family. Millions embraced, promising a better tomorrow.
And there on the cliff, something immutable happened.
Raphadun arrived, breathless, the scream trapped in his chest. He saw Empty, enveloped in green light, the energy growing in a silent and overwhelming crescendo. The diary, carried by the wind of accumulating energy, flew from his hands, pages opening to the final sentence:
"PLEASE, FIX ME."
Empty felt his arrival. Amid the whirlwind of light and pain, he turned his head. His eyes met Raphadun's. And there, for one last and eternal instant, he smiled.
Then, with a final sigh, Empty channeled everything—every memory, every pain, every fragment of love, every spark of his essence—into the core of the Stone of the Future.
"EMPTY!" Raphadun shouted, as if his entire voice burst from his body.
Empty looked back. And in one last gaze, before he could regret, he let go.
He went out.
And everything exploded.
Arc 2: Empty's Life
End.