Whenever he thinks the best times have run out, they all come back as a jolt, as if the best is yet to come.

Rodi Isandro's been dragging his willpower to hell and back. The call to action is getting more intense with each passing day, yet he buries these impulses back where they came from: his primitive cephalopod nature.

But tonight, the itching is far too consuming to keep ignoring it. Leaving his best bartender in charge, Rodi sneaks out from behind the stick and brings his phone up. He suddenly finds himself on the crowded street, next to the smokers from the nearby club and a curiously empty sky. He hasn't thought what would follow.

As Rodi keeps his phone to his ear, he's pacing and chewing at the chain of his thin necklace. The longer the tone rings into the speaker, the less this is worth spending their voices on. His voice can conceal apprehension, but it can't ever conceal his eagerness. This is him being needy, disgustingly needy, for no better reason.

He wishes Olive Anthos would talk by himself, say exactly what he wants, needs, for how long, where, when… After all, such simple wishes have been their modus operandi since forever.

But all they've been able to talk about, ever since climbing that Spire, is how little they understand of this world, how their trust is preyed by this uncertainty. They can't know what is their volition anymore, and what is their Alternan-laced DNA speaking in everything they’ve built together: their apartment in Heliko Building, their mixology spanning Inkadia's menus, their relationship. These have been dropped, one by one, in favour of an enlightened life.

And it fucking sucks.

It’s said that too much knowledge drives one to madness. For Rodi, it seems to drive to futility.

At the Spire's final floor, all the data gathered through ruthless challenges had cracked a cryptographic key that revealed their past lives. Millennia-old logs were decrypted from the dense, disjointed O.R.C.A. databases, then screened in technicolour on the recreated Liquid Sky Display. It was supposed to be an epiphany, but Rodi was left with just who he always was: born to chase after another’s special mix of chemicals, instead of the elusive sun.

He wouldn't have even tried getting past his condition in the first place, and especially now if it's encoded in his soul. Olive happens to be sharing the same drop of desires that their cephalopod progenitors gobbled up during humanity’s self-extinction. Back then, their driving forces were simpler: eat and diversify your genes, but these complicated mammals added themselves to the mix.

Our wiser Olive Anthos has decided to start anew; from his own volition, this time. He is being reborn in faraway cities and spiritual retreats, learning to let go of whatever the Liquid Crystals in his ink would say, forgiving and reconnecting with the long-dead human who imbued it in the first place. Rodi Isandro, on the other hand, knows this is a losing game, and knows that would make him unpopular with his fiancé's new crowd.

So he stayed back in Inkopolis, letting Olive wander some more. Rodi is learning to make peace with his yearning, giving into the Liquid Crystals' whispering. He even likes blaming them for all the funny things happening in his head.

He jumps some logical steps while mentally drafting his phone call's script, and goes straight to picturing the impatient, steamy, self-indulgent make-out session he'd inflict on Olive when he gets him back, tease how quickly he loses that wisdom when a tongue lands on his lips.

...He snaps out of it with a stuttered hi, babe, when Olive picks up on the other end.

Olive listens to Inkopolis’ distant hubbub for a moment, until figuring exactly why Rodi is calling.

"Buy me tickets and I’ll come,” Anthos needs it as much as Isandro does.

He might've finally learned that impulse is made of both volition and predestination, spark and tinder, to give in so naturally. Rodi didn't need a divine spark to know that.

The moon fills up as they count the days to the flight.

Their reunions, no matter if physical, virtual or imaginary, are always celebrated with a grand kiss, but their lips are pressed too hard together to unfurl naturally. It's as if they need to compensate for all that distance they keep putting between themselves, by smashing the split atom back together.

Only after they've remembered how their presences felt, they can check how they look. Olive grows a new speckle in his mask whenever the sun hits him. Rodi's smile lines deepen with each visit.

"...Drinks?" Olive suggests. The bar's still his comfort zone, as much as he hates admitting it.