xp_logs | Kylun, late night

Kylun has been delaying the final confirmation of his blood test results. Tonight he makes his decision.

"Why do we burn incense?" a much younger Kylun had asked, his nose wrinkling. Zz'ria had smiled, as he often did, and answered, as he always did.

"Because of the many pathways of memory, scent is among the easiest to travel."

The exact formula of incense they had used at the monastery had taken Kylun a certain amount of effort to acquire, but he had done so, and its scent curled around him as he sat alone in his room, breathing evenly, waiting for the path to open.

He tilted his head slightly, nostrils flaring. A nuance was off, subtly jarring him away from this most private ritual. It was not the incense, but something else, something--ah. Kylun stood up smoothly and opened his window a bare crack, allowing a chill breath of wind, the faint tang of snow, to mingle with the pungent incense.

Kylun settled himself again, and this time, as his eyes drifted closed, the scent carried him back to the monastery, to the sparse quarters that had been his since his very first night there.

But he had not been alone there, in the last years of the monastery's life. How many times had she come up behind him when he was sitting just like this, how many times had she broken his deepest meditations with a breath? He would never find his center when he was so easily distracted, she had always teased. And how she had always blushed when he told her that he had no need, that his center had come looking for him.

Sa'tneen. Dead now, like the others. But tonight, walking scent's path into his memory, he could almost hear her footfall behind him, feel her bright smile in the air, sense her fingertips a whisper away from his skin.

There is nothing half so heartbreaking as the raising of a ghost.

"I need you," he murmured, the words barely reaching his own ears, too soft to break the spell. "Your wisdom and your heart, love, and your courage when mine fails, oh, I need you now.

"Our home, and you, were all I ever wanted, all I ever needed, but you always reached for something more. What little Zz'ria could tell me of . . . the people I thought were my parents, he told me at your urging. It was enough for me to avenge them, but you always hoped I would remember them. And now that you are gone . . .

"My parents are alive. Well--I am being hasty. One test yet remains, the last proof that these people, these strangers, are my blood parents. And yet . . . while that proof remains unfulfilled, I can pretend not to know. While this last seal remains unbroken, I can imagine that my life as I know it is the life I should have had. That I was not robbed of who I should have been.

"I do not know this Colin McKay, this boy I might have been. But I know that he never would have met you. He would never have been whole. I do not know if I can face these people, if I can stand before them, when my heart tells me that no matter how happy my earliest years might have been, I am glad I was taken from them, that if I could choose between the two lives I might have had, their heartbreak is a price I would pay again and again and a thousand times, because that price brought me to you. What kind of answer is that to their hope?"

Kylun bowed his head, shoulders slumping, and waited for the storm of his emotions to subside.

"Tell me what to do, love. Where is the right path in this? I can live without certainty. You loved the man I am, and that has always been enough for me. Must I take this last step, if it leads to still more pain for two people I would not willingly harm? Can I not remain Kylun, and leave Colin McKay to vanish in the past?"

He waited for a moment, half-expecting to hear Sa'tneen's answer. None came. Ghosts do not speak to the living.

With a small sigh, he opened his eyes, breaking the spell. Propped against the incense burner, the sealed envelope of the blood test results stared back at him, the hospital logo in the corner winking balefully.

He reached for it, weighed it in his hand. The matches he had used to light the incense were within reach; he could end this now, walk away and live the life he knew.

But he did not need to hear Sa'tneen's answer to know what it would have been; he had not even needed to ask, except that he missed her. With a quiet sob that was half a prayer, he slit the envelope open.