Eric and Ruby wandered out onto the streets, the sun climbing high and warm over the rooftops of Paris, gilding the pavement in that soft, golden light the city seemed to specialize in. Ruby had both hands wrapped snugly around Eric's right arm, leaning into him slightly as they walked, in no particular hurry to decide where they were actually headed.
"Yeah, I remember when that bitch fell down the stairs," Ruby said suddenly, grinning at the memory. "God, that was so satisfying to watch. Back in school, I mean. She'd been awful to literally everyone for like two years straight, and then boom, gravity finally got her."
Eric laughed, genuinely, the sound easy and unguarded. "I didn't know my own wife had this many stories from her school days stockpiled somewhere."
"You'd know more of them if you actually sat down and talked to me sometimes." She puffed her cheeks slightly, turning her face away in mock offense. "Also, I only bring these out when I'm in a generous mood. So, consider yourself lucky."
"I do sit and talk with you."
"You sit and worry about me. That's different."
"Is it?"
"Completely different categories, Eric."
"Fine. Educate me, then. What's the criteria for a proper conversation, in your professional opinion?"
Ruby considered this with far more seriousness than the question deserved. "Stories. Gossip. Preferably about someone getting what they deserved. Bonus points if it happened at least five years ago so I can tell it without feeling guilty."
"That's a very specific rubric."
"I contain multitudes."
He laughed again, and she smiled up at him, clearly pleased with herself, tightening her grip on his arm slightly as they continued down the footpath, the two of them wrapped up entirely in their own small, easy world while the city moved busily around them, no one sparing them more than a passing glance. Neither of them minded that. Eric especially preferred it that way, invisible in the crowd, unremarkable, exactly how he liked to move through most places.
Eventually their idle chatter tapered into a comfortable quiet, the kind that didn't need filling. Eric glanced around as they walked, taking in their surroundings properly now. They'd wandered close to the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, the massive park sprawling out ahead of them, and judging by the number of couples strolling the same paths, hand in hand, sharing pastries, arguing playfully over park benches, this was clearly the neighborhood's unofficial romance district.
"You want to walk through the park a bit?" Eric asked. "Or are you already planning to drag me somewhere expensive?"
Ruby gave him a sideways look, considering. "Depends. Are we in a 'treat myself' mood today, or a 'save it for emergencies' mood?"
"Whichever mood makes you happiest."
"Dangerous answer." She narrowed her eyes at him, only half joking. "You say that like you don't remember the incident with the shoes."
"I remember the incident with the shoes."
"Then you know exactly what kind of chaos you're inviting by giving me an open-ended budget."
Ruby wasn't extravagant by nature. Most days she counted every euro carefully, being genuinely stressed over small purchases, the kind of woman who reused containers and complained about grocery prices with real feeling. But every so often, when the mood struck her, or the savings looked comfortable enough, something in her shifted entirely, and she'd walk into a shop and simply decide, with total confidence, that today was the day she deserved something nice.
Eric found himself wondering, not for the first time, what she'd do if she actually knew the full scope of what he had sitting quietly in reserve. Not just the liquid cash he kept for ordinary expenses, but the Aura stones too, each one worth more than most people saw in years. He hadn't told her about them and probably never would.
He let the thought pass and glanced around instead, more out of habit than intention, and something in what he saw made his easy mood falter slightly.
Pregnant women. Everywhere.
Not obviously, not in any way an ordinary passerby would notice; most of them hadn't started showing yet, nothing visible to the naked eye at all. No untrained observer, not even a doctor without proper equipment, could have told just by looking.
But Eric wasn't looking with ordinary eyes.
When he activates his Abyssal Eyes, a change occurs in them: both eyes start glowing with pink Aura and four arrows pointing downward—two on each side of his black pupil.
After this change occurs, he is able to see the soul of any person, and any change in their emotions shows a different color in his eyes.
His eyes read emotion like color. Red for anger, blue for sadness, yellow for joy, green for trust, purple for fear, aqua for surprise, brown for disgust, orange for anticipation, pink for love, black for something powerful and tangled, white for calm. The darker the shade, the stronger it burned.
He could spot damage too: black and red flecks scattered through a person's body wherever something had gone wrong inside them, the way he'd once caught the raw, inflamed mass sitting in Claude's chest without any trouble at all. Anything Lysi Nova or below, his eyes could read clean.
And souls. If a woman carried a second, smaller soul tucked inside her own, that told him everything he needed to know without a single test or scan.
None of it connected to his pathway. It never had. If ability followed pathway the way logic suggested it should, he'd have needed to belong to the Afterlife Pathway to see any of this at all. He didn't. The eyes simply were what they were, entirely their own thing, answering to nothing.
He'd avoided using them much since arriving in Paris. They drank Aura fast, and worse, they drew eyes, glowing and strange enough to mark him instantly to anyone paying attention. There was also the quieter fear underneath both of those, that he might see something out there he had no framework to understand, and no way to unsee.
That fear mattered less now. Truth kept his face and his eyes locked in this borrowed shape regardless of what he activated underneath it, and if he stumbled onto something truly beyond him, the Supernova bound inside the Imperator's Cross could pull him back from the edge, the same way it had pulled Uriel back once already.
Which brought Max to mind. That flame still sitting coiled somewhere inside him, dark and patient. Nobody talked about it. Not because they'd forgotten. Because there was nothing useful to be done about something none of them could comprehend, and Max wasn't in immediate danger sitting still. If it ever came due, the Cross would answer that call too.
Eric intended to deal with it properly himself, once Hypernova was actually his.
He hadn't even been able to see the thing the first time he'd looked, before all of this. Too high, too well hidden. In hindsight, maybe that had been a mercy. Seeing it clearly back then might have cost him more than he could have paid.
His gaze drifted across the street now, catching soul after soul carrying that same small, second flicker inside them. So many.
Beside him, Ruby broke the silence with a grin. "Remember when Max and Zoe got caught doing it that first time?"
Eric coughed. Shameless today, apparently.
"I remember," he said. "Behind the camp. If not for you, they'd have gotten away with it completely."
"I know! I blew their whole cover wide open." She looked delighted about it even now. "I teased Zoe about it for days. Every single embarrassing detail. It was so satisfying."
"Until she cried."
"Until she cried, yeah. Worth it while it lasted, though."
Eric let his gaze settle on Ruby's soul. Pink and bright yellow, warm colors bleeding into each other, with faint traces of orange threading through. The black and blue that used to sit heavy in her had thinned to nothing.
Good choice, bringing her out today, he thought. She was his anchor, the fixed point he needed to hold steady through the method of control at his current rank, and days like this made that anchoring easier than anything else could.
They walked for an hour, took the metro the rest of the way, and finally reached the district they'd been aiming for. Couples filled the streets, laughter drifting between shopfronts, and Eric let his Abyssal Eyes fade back into stillness. No need for them here.
"Before the park, food," Ruby announced, closing her eyes and tugging at his arm with an exaggerated, pitiful expression. "I'm starving."
He laughed at the performance and let her lead him to a small restaurant with tables set outside.
She was in a talkative mood, peppering their waitress with questions about local specialties, trading jokes about age and beauty, the two of them getting along so easily that by the time the food arrived, Ruby was already asking for recipes, telling the waitress, with a wink at Eric, that she loved cooking for her husband.
Eric smiled, a little awkward, a little charmed. He didn't need his eyes to know her soul had gone entirely pink right now.
When the waitress hesitated over the recipe request, Ruby simply pulled out forty euros and handed it over with the smug satisfaction of someone who'd just won an argument nobody else knew they were having. The waitress's eyes lit up, and a few minutes later she returned with everything written down.
Ruby practically glowed, hugging the woman before looping her arm back through Eric's, grinning the whole walk to the park.
The park itself opened up wide and green in front of them, alive with the low hum of people talking, children laughing, someone's dog barking somewhere in the distance. Ruby found a quiet patch of grass beneath a tree and declared it perfect, spinning once with her arms out before dropping down to spread a blanket across the ground.
Eric watched her, something quiet and heavy settling behind his eyes even as his mouth curved into a smile. He pushed the feeling down and joined her, slipping off his shoes and his watch, letting the cool air touch his skin properly for the first time all day.
Ruby patted her lap, grinning.
He lowered his head onto it without a word, and her fingers found his hair almost immediately, slow and idle.
"Do you remember when we first met?" she asked.
"Of course." He didn't have to think about it. "I got hurt during training and ended up in the infirmary. You were there. I remember thinking you were the cutest thing I'd ever seen." He reached up, brushing his knuckles gently against her cheek. "Still think that, for what it's worth."
She flushed, catching his hand with her own. "You were so cold back then. I genuinely couldn't stand you at first."
"And yet."
"And yet." She rolled her eyes, smiling despite herself. "Everyone thought you were sneaking in to see me on purpose."
"I was sneaking in to see you on purpose."
She flicked his forehead lightly. "I knew it!"
"Guilty as charged."
"Still not as bad as Max and Zoe, though."
"God, no. They started within a week of meeting. I had no idea Zoe had that in her until it happened."
"Given how they still are now, I don't know why we were surprised." Ruby's fingers kept moving through his hair, unhurried. "I've known Zoe since we were four, you know. Same as you and Max. I remember finding that out, how wild it was that we'd both ended up with best friends who were best friends with each other. Same school. Same class. Even the same jobs, eventually." She smiled, eyes drifting somewhere distant and fond. "I think it was fate, honestly. Meeting the two of you." Her voice softened. "Makes me wonder when we'll finally have kids of our own."
Her eyes had been closed through most of it, but on the last line, one cracked open just slightly, watching him.
Something in Eric's chest clenched hard.
How do I explain this to her, he thought, the warmth of the moment curdling instantly into something colder. That there's a two-hundred-year-old thing wearing a baby's face who could end his own life in an instant and pour himself into our child instead, and that giving birth to him would kill her.
No version of that conversation didn't end badly. No way to soften it, no way to even begin.
He coughed instead, heat rising in his own cheeks now, and turned his gaze up toward the branches overhead. "Let's not talk about that right now."
Ruby laughed, delighted at how flustered he sounded.
Truth's passive ability is doing a lot of heavy lifting right now, he thought grimly, letting the embarrassment sit on his face like a mask, grateful for once that it was easy to hide behind something.
After a while longer, after more idle talk and a few stolen kisses, Ruby finally sat up, rubbing feeling back into her numb thighs, her stomach already growling again.
"Good thing," she said, reaching for her bag, "I packed snacks."
She pulled out a pair of sandwiches wrapped neatly in plastic, handing two over to Eric and keeping two for herself. Soft white bread, a thin spread of butter and cream, strawberries tucked between the layers. They ate quickly, tucking the empty wrappers back into her bag once they'd finished, neither of them the type to leave a mess behind.
"So," Ruby said, brushing a few crumbs from her lap, "any more plans for today?"
Eric reached into his pocket and pulled out two tickets, holding them out to her without a word.
She snatched them, scanning the print, and her whole face lit up. "Oh, my god. Return of the Maniac. I've wanted to see this forever; I actually cancelled my own plans to go because I felt bad spending the money on—"
She trailed off mid-sentence, the excitement souring slightly into guilt.
Eric reached over and smoothed a hand over her hair. "Money's meant to be spent. Come on, we're cutting it close; I picked a theater nearby on purpose."
Ruby beamed, throwing her arms around him and pressing quick, scattered kisses against his cheek before they packed up the blanket and headed for the theater.
The air conditioning hit them like a wall the moment they stepped inside, a sharp, welcome contrast to the heat outside, and Ruby actually shivered a little as they grabbed a tub of popcorn and found their seats.
The film itself was genuinely well made. Solid action, a plot with more depth than most of its genre bothered with, characters written with more care than expected. But the real draw, the reason it had blown up the way it had, was the love story woven through all of it. An ambitious leader, willing to sacrifice anything for the world he wanted to build, constantly undone by the one person he couldn't bring himself to either convince or kill. Over and over, he tried both. Over and over, he failed. Until, finally, the story forced him to choose: his dream or her.
He chose the dream.
The final scene, him holding her as she died, screaming into the wreckage of everything he'd sacrificed her for, hit exactly as hard as it was meant to. Even Eric found himself genuinely moved by it. Around them, half the theater was crying outright, Ruby included, her eyes red and glassy by the time the credits rolled.
She didn't stop talking about it the entire walk out.
"That was SO good."
"The leader and his wife, God, their whole dynamic, it was just beautiful."
"And the ending, when he's holding her and screaming, I actually sobbed, Eric, like actually sobbed—"
She paused just long enough to glance sideways at him, mock-serious. "Good thing my husband would never leave me like that."
Eric laughed, and they grabbed a late lunch as the afternoon slid toward evening, the sun beginning its slow descent by the time they finished eating.
He led her afterward toward the Seine, timing it just right, the sky above the water already softening into color, gold bleeding into rose. They walked along the riverbank in comfortable silence, Ruby's gaze drifting to the water, watching the sunset scatter and ripple across its surface.
Something in her expression had gone distant, thoughtful, somewhere far off from the easy chatter of a few minutes ago.
"What are you thinking about?" Eric asked.
"I've been thinking about a lot of things," she said, voice soft, unhurried, matching the slow ripple of the water beside them. She turned her head, the last red light of the sun catching the side of her face. "A lot of questions. Would you answer some of them for me, Eric?"
He nodded, something steady and certain settling into his expression.
They found a bench along the water and sat together, Ruby's right hand closing around his left, tight, almost like she was afraid something might pull her away if she loosened her grip. She dug into her bag and pulled out a small handful of fish bait, tossing it into the Seine, and a small cluster of fish immediately surfaced, jostling each other over the scraps.
She watched them for a moment, then let her gaze drift back to the sunset.
"I've been thinking about a lot these past few days. You. Me. Max and Zoe. Just... everything." She exhaled slowly. "I have some things I want cleared up. Would you let me ask?"
She shifted closer, resting her head lightly against his shoulder, eyes closing.
"Have you ever felt like I've been holding you back?" Her voice stayed quiet, careful. "I feel like there's something you wanted for your life, once, and you gave it up somewhere along the way. You're here with me, physically, but half the time your mind's somewhere else entirely."
"You hold me back a little," Eric said, honestly. "I did have a goal once, but it doesn't matter anymore, though. It has nothing to do with what we've built now." He paused. "The thinking, that's just me worrying about our future. Money. Stability. You know how I am about that."
Her eyes fluttered slightly at the answer, something in her expression flickering, though she let it go without pushing further.
A long silence stretched between them before she spoke again.
"I know you've been keeping things from me." Her voice was steadier now, though quieter too. "A lot of things. Ever since we got here, everything's felt strange, and I don't understand why you won't tell me. Is it because you don't trust me?" She lifted her head slightly, meeting his eyes. "Because I trust you. Completely. With everything I have."
A small, wet smile broke across her face, tears already gathering.
"So I'll keep trusting you. I'll wait, as long as it takes, until you're ready to tell me everything. I just need you to promise me one thing." Her fingers tightened around his hand. "Just promise you'll never leave me."
The tears spilled over as she said it, her eyes locked on his, raw and open in a way she rarely let herself be.
Eric felt something twist quietly in his chest. He understood most of what she was asking, even the parts she hadn't said outright. He had his reasons for the silence, reasons he still believed were sound.
He'd never had trouble lying before. Between Truth's passive pull, his own practiced composure, and the sheer depth of her trust in him, a lie here would have cost him nothing at all.
And yet something in him resisted anyway, some quiet, stubborn discomfort settling low in his stomach that he couldn't fully explain away.
He looked her directly in the eyes and let his voice carry every ounce of warmth he actually felt. "I promise. I will never leave you."
Ruby broke down properly then, a sob tearing loose as she threw herself against him. Eric caught her easily, wrapping his arms around her, one hand smoothing gently over her hair as her shoulders shook. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, murmuring soft, meaningless comfort against her hair while she cried it out.
"You could've at least," she managed between sobs, pulling back just enough to fist both hands into his collar, still crying, "lied about the holding-you-back part!"
"...What?"
She wiped roughly at her wet cheeks, laughing through the tears now, something bright breaking through the emotion. Before he could ask anything else, she surged up and kissed him, hard enough that he actually rocked back slightly, one hand instinctively rising to steady her, though he made no real effort to pull away.
"Wait." He managed to get the word out between kisses. "Ruby, wait, I wasn't finished, I actually meant—"
"Too late," she said against his mouth, grinning. "Kissing you now. Explain later."
He laughed, giving up the argument entirely, and let her have the moment.
They stayed there a while longer, the sun finally slipping fully behind the skyline, the Seine catching the last traces of gold before settling into blue. Ruby eventually pulled back, resting her forehead against his, both of them a little breathless, a little pink around the edges.
"Hey," she said, quieter now, some of the earlier heaviness returning, though gentler this time. "Can I tell you something? Something I've been thinking about for a while, actually."
"Always."
"I've been thinking about maybe... going for it. Actually training properly. Becoming a real chef, not just, you know, cooking for you and calling it a hobby." She glanced at him, a little uncertain despite everything. "There's a program here in Paris, actually a good one. I looked into it a few weeks ago and never said anything because I wasn't sure if it was stupid, or if we could afford it, or—"
"Do it."
She blinked. "You didn't even let me finish the pros and cons list I made in my head."
"I don't need to hear it." He reached up, brushing a strand of hair back from her face. "If it's something you actually want, I'll support it. However it looks. Money, time, whatever you need."
Something shifted in her expression, soft and grateful, and she leaned into his palm slightly. "You mean that?"
"Completely."
"Even if I burn our kitchen down a few times learning knife skills?"
"Especially then. Gives me something to tease you about for the next decade."
She laughed, shoving lightly at his chest, though she didn't pull away.
They sat there a while longer as the last light faded fully from the sky, her hand still resting in his, the city settling into its evening hum around them, neither of them in any hurry to be the one who finally suggested heading home.