The moment the words left Gulf's lips, Steve's face twisted, every tendon standing out like steel wire under skin.
"You bastard," he snarled, voice shredded raw. "You murdered my father… and now you're trying to rip away the only person I have left in this world?"
Tears welled, hot and useless, but he refused to let them fall. The air reeked of ozone, old blood, and the metallic tang of coming death. Something inside him broke with an almost audible crack.
Steve vanished.
Assassination boots screamed alive. Asphalt exploded under each step, showering the night with razor-sharp gravel. He became a red-black comet, dagger already whistling for Gulf's heart.
Gulf didn't move. He tilted his head, that slow, pitying smile. "Son of Noah… still crawling. Guarding that broken little stray, Jack?" His laugh was soft, intimate, cruel. "Look how far the bloodline has fallen."
Steve's vision flooded crimson.
He let the dagger spin wide, slammed the plasma cannon off his back, and held the trigger until the barrel glowed white-hot. Bolts howled out, superheated air shrieking, turning falling rain into glass needles that shattered against the ground.
Gulf lifted one lazy hand.
Star Crest bloomed on his forearm, a living nebula of violet-white. The plasma storm hit it and died, swallowed with a hollow pop that left only the stench of scorched metal.
"Pathetic," Gulf murmured.
Then the sky cracked open.
A second sun ignited above his open palm, no bigger than a clenched fist, bright enough to bleach the world grey. Heat slammed outward in a solid wall; paint blistered off rusted cars, skin tightened painfully across Steve's cheeks.
Behind Gulf, Jack hung from the iron post. Blood dripped from his ear in slow, deliberate drops, pat-pat-pat onto the concrete. His left eye was swollen shut, purple-black. The cheap cotton shirt they'd bought together five years ago clung to him, heavy with blood and rain.
Gulf's voice dropped to something almost tender. "It really is sad. You'll both die here, side by side."
Time turned to syrup.
Steve's shaking fingers found the cracked Lightning Crest over his heart. White-blue fire answered, searing straight through muscle and bone. He screamed, refusal, every memory of his father's last breath, every promise to Jack, poured into the sigil like molten iron.
"NOT HIM. NOT TODAY!"
The Lightning Phoenix tore free, wings of raw voltage spanning the street, feathers crackling like live wires in water. It shrieked, a sound that rattled teeth and burst capillaries, and flung itself at the miniature star.
Jack watched through the one eye he had left. Tears cut clean paths through the grime. He jerked against the chains hard enough that a single iron link snapped with a metallic ping and clattered to the ground. He tried to scream Steve's name; only a wet bubble of crimson came.
Light against light.
For one impossible heartbeat, the phoenix held.
Then the supernova pulsed.
The bird shattered into a million glass-bright shards. Sparks rained down, hissing where they kissed blood and rainwater.
Steve hit the ground on his knees. Broken glass drove into his shins. Skin on both arms had split and curled back like burnt parchment; the raw meat beneath glistened wetly. The stench of his own cooked flesh filled his nose, thick and nauseating.
He couldn't feel his hands.
But he could still see Jack breathing, barely.
Gulf stepped closer, boots grinding glass to glittering dust. The tiny sun hovered above his palm, humming, patient.
"Still clinging to hope?" he asked, almost curious.
Steve crawled. One inch. Two. Glass carved his palms open; fresh crimson smeared hot across the concrete. Pain was proof he was still here.
Jack lifted his head. Their eyes locked.
Everything was in that look: stolen apples, shared cigarettes behind the school wall, the night they swore on blood and stars that neither would ever walk alone.
Jack's ruined lips shaped one word. No sound, just breath and desperation.
Don't.
Steve smiled through split lips, tasting copper and smoke.
"Sorry, brother," he rasped. "Can't keep that promise."
He forced himself upright. Legs shook like they'd shatter. The world shrank to three things: Gulf, the sun, Jack.
One step. Another. Each footfall left a wet, red print.
Gulf's brows rose. A single bead of blood, his own, slid from his hairline where a stray spark had kissed skin. The first crack in the god.
Steve's charred fingers closed around the fallen dagger. The hilt seared what was left of his flesh. He didn't raise it.
He pressed the broken tip against his own sternum, right over the dead Crest.
Gulf's eyes widened a fraction. "What are you—"
Steve drove the blade in.
Just deep enough to kiss the heart.
Thick, almost-black blood gushed over the cracked sigil.
The Lightning Crest detonated awake.
White fire erupted from the wound, no phoenix this time, something feral and screaming, born from a heart that refused to quit. Electricity clawed over his skin like acid. His hair flash-burned away in a puff of acrid smoke. His eyes bled pure, blinding light.
He looked straight at Gulf and spoke with a voice that smoked and cracked.
"You want my hope?" One step. Blood hissed on the ground. "Choke on it."
The lightning didn't fly.
It lunged, a living, rabid thing made of every second Steve had ever kept Jack breathing.
Gulf's Star Crest flared in genuine panic. A hairline fracture spider-webbed across the nebula. The miniature sun wavered, heat rippling the air like a scream.
Gulf took two full steps back, heel scraping concrete.
Jack's raw scream tore the night in half, something inside him ripping wide open.
Steve kept walking forward, dagger buried in his chest, lightning pouring from the wound like he was bleeding daylight.
Ten metres.
Eight.
Six.
From the shattered rooftop across the plaza, Elisa and Aurora watched the impossible unfold.
Elisa's hands were clamped so hard over her mouth her nails drew blood. She had known Jack since they were six, two barefoot kids chasing each other through the market with stolen peaches. She had braided his hair the night before his exile trial, crying into his shoulder while he pretended to be brave. Now she watched him break chains with nothing but tears and light, and sprint toward a stranger who was literally burning himself alive to save him. A broken, disbelieving sob tore out of her. "Jack… you found someone who loves you like we did," she whispered, voice splintering. "And you're still trying to carry the whole damn world on your back…"
Beside her, Aurora (the girl who once shared a single blanket with Jack on the night Jack was dragged away in chains) had let her sniper rifle slide forgotten to the concrete. Her scarred knuckles were white on the ledge. One tear cut a clean line through the dust on her cheek. "That idiot," she breathed, voice shaking with something between pride and agony. "He always said if someone needed him more, he'd burn himself down for them. And now he finally found someone willing to burn first."
Jack's scream still rang in the night, raw and animal, as he watched the stranger (Steve) stagger forward, dagger buried in his own chest, lightning pouring from the wound like daylight bleeding from a dying god. Steve's smile, broken yet defiant, cracked Jack's heart wide open.
Tears flooded Jack's eyes, hot, blinding, unstoppable. Guilt and love and terror crashed together in his chest. He didn't even know this boy's last name, yet Steve was dying for him, no, with him.
Then warmth bloomed at his throat.
The pendant (his mother's last gift, the only thing the exile guards hadn't taken) ignited. Soft, impossible light spilled through the chains, warm as the summer mornings he'd lost forever. The air shimmered, and she appeared: the Light Spirit, wings of fractured starlight, eyes like dawn over a ruined world.
"Oh… wonderful," she whispered. "You've crossed the threshold. A heart that refuses to let a stranger become family… that is where true light is born."
Jack's voice cracked. "Can I save him? Please, I can't lose him too!"
The spirit's glow softened with infinite tenderness. "Then give me everything. Contract with me, and become the light he's already decided you are."
Jack didn't hesitate. "Take it. Take all of it."
Their hands met in a flare of gold. Chains dissolved into golden sparks.
He moved.
Light Escape.
He became a comet of pure dawn, crossing the plaza in a heartbeat, skidding to Steve's side just as his knees buckled. Jack caught him, arms wrapping around charred, trembling shoulders.
Steve sagged against him, breath wet and ragged, but his eyes still burned.
Jack pressed their foreheads together, tears falling onto Steve's bloodied face. "I don't even know you," Jack choked out, laughing and sobbing at once, "but you just burned your life for me. So let me burn mine back."
Steve's cracked lips curved into that reckless, beautiful grin. A weak, bloody laugh escaped him. "Took you long enough, stranger."
They laughed together (two broken boys laughing in the face of death), and in that laugh was the beginning of something eternal.
Gulf recovered, rage and disbelief twisting his face. He thrust both hands forward. The miniature sun exploded into a devouring void. "STAR CRUSHER!"
But Steve and Jack stood back-to-back, shoulder-to-shoulder, exactly where they belonged.
Lightning and Light braided into one living spear taller than the skyline, humming with something bigger than power.
Gulf's golden eyes widened in genuine, bone-deep shock. "…Impossible," he whispered, voice trembling. "That resonance… in minutes?"
A fracture spider-webbed across his Star Crest. The void stuttered.
Because this wasn't power. This was Jack choosing, in the space of one heartbeat, to make a stranger his brother forever.
Steve and Jack took one perfectly synchronised step forward.
"Brothers' Requiem," they said together, voices raw, steady, eternal.
The spear launched.
Elisa and Aurora shielded their eyes as the plaza turned into a second sunrise.
Gulf's scream of pure terror was swallowed whole by the light.