[Gelateria Dondoli, San Gimignano, Italy, 28th September 2010, 9:00 PM Local Time]

The inside of Gelateria Dondoli was warm and bright, the smell of fresh cream and pistachio hanging in the air alongside the low hum of Italian conversation.

The pale stone walls and the amber glow of the pendant lights gave the small shop the particular warmth of a place that had been exactly what it was for a very long time and was entirely unbothered about it.

Ethan and Didi stood at the counter, hands hooked together, working through a large cone of gelato that had been the subject of active negotiation since the moment they ordered it. The rules were simple: whoever finished their half first won, and the winner had their way with the loser for the rest of the evening.

The loser had agreed to these terms fully aware that they were not terms so much as a promise they were looking forward to keeping.

Their lips had touched at least seven times over the ice cream, which neither of them had commented on, both choosing instead to simply enjoy the contact and keep eating.

The cone was empty inside of thirty seconds.

Ethan pulled back and licked a trace of hazelnut gelato from the corner of Didi’s lips with deliberate care, then straightened and met her eyes with the full satisfaction of a man who had just won something he was going to enjoy.

"I win," he said, and licked his own lip where the flavor lingered.

Didi’s smile was quiet and warm. "Congratulations on defeating Death."

"I already won when I had your heart," he said easily. "This was just dessert."

She shook her head. "You are dangerously smooth, Dr. Carter." She glanced at the empty cone.

"And your Adaptive Evolution is absolutely cheating. You only won because your adaptation kicked in."

"That’s not cheating... that’s the difference between you and me. You fight with what you have. I become what I need."

She laughed, and he loved the sound of it, and they walked out of the shop together into the cool Tuscan evening.

They had spent the first part of the evening in Paris, walking along the Seine in the blue hour after sunset, the lights of the city coming on one by one across the water, before Ethan had opened a portal and brought them to San Gimignano for gelato.

Now they found themselves in a quiet lane off the main piazza, the medieval towers of the old city rising around them in the dark, the stone underfoot worn smooth by centuries of feet.

They stopped near a low stone wall that overlooked the valley below, the rolling darkness of the Tuscan hills stretching out under a sky thick with stars. The lights of distant farmhouses dotted the black like scattered sparks.

Ethan already reached out with his telepathy in a wide, gentle sweep, found the handful of people nearby, and nudged them all toward the idea that the lane behind them was more interesting tonight. They drifted away without knowing why, and the overlook became theirs.

Didi looked out at the valley and was quiet for a moment. Then she asked, "What was your life like? Before all of this. Before the reincarnation."

She already knew the outline. She was Death of the Endless, and she could read the age of a soul the way most people read a face.

She had known from the beginning that his soul was older than his body, that his memories were intact, that his powers had come later.

From what Ethan had told her, the one who called himself the ROB—which, in her opinion, was a ridiculous name, though who was she to judge when she went by "Didi"?

Anyway, moving on.

Ethan had told her about the power... the life he gained after his transmigration.

But she did not know the life before the life. The one he had been living before the watch changed hands.

Ethan was quiet for a moment. He looked out at the valley and let the question settle.

He knew he had broken the unspoken code of transmigrators and reincarnators by telling Didi the truth.

But she was a cosmic being—someone who could tell at a glance that his soul was far older than his body.

Besides, he loved and trusted her enough to share the secret he had once sworn never to reveal to anyone.

And, in a way, it felt good. To finally say it out loud. To tell his girlfriend—and have her barely react, because compared to everything she had witnessed across her existence, this was just another strange story.

"Normal," he said finally. "In every sense of the word."

He exhaled. "I was Twenty-six years old with a desk job. Paid exactly enough to keep the electricity on and the fridge from being completely empty. Apartment that wasn’t cramped but wasn’t comfortable. The kind of place you live in rather than come home to."

He paused. "Wake up, get ready, and head to work, putting in eight hours that aren’t terrible but never truly meaningful. Then travel back home, eat something without really tasting it, and lose myself in anime or fanfiction until my eyes can no longer stay open. Finally, go to bed... only to repeat it all over again."

Didi listened without speaking. Her hand was still in his.

"My father, mother and elder sister, who got married young and seemed genuinely happy about it, which I could never figure out but respected."

He smiled faintly. "They were good people. We were close, in the way families are close when they don’t need to talk about being close."

"And people? Got any friends?" Didi asked, a quiet note of amusement already in her voice.

"Friends, huh," Ethan repeated, and said nothing else for a second. "I was an introvert—not very outgoing back then, but I had a few close friends who genuinely liked and cared about me. I kept my circle small because it made it easier to talk and share my problems with my buddies, and they shared their own troubles with me as well."

He smiled, as if recalling those moments, "And before you ask, I didn’t have a girlfriend. In fact, I barely had any contact with girls at all."

He glanced at her sideways. "I could barely look at a woman I found attractive without calculating seventeen ways the conversation could go wrong before I opened my mouth."

Didi laughed. It was an honest laugh, warm and bright, and she pressed her other hand over her mouth briefly to contain it. "I am sorry," she said, composing herself. "I am trying to reconcile that with the man who currently has two wives, and three girlfriends."

"I adapted and evolved," Ethan said, straight-faced.

She shook her head, still smiling.

Ethan continued, "And after that, I died—and you already know the rest of the story, how ROB tricked me." He glanced upward. "That’s the part I’ll never fully let him live down. He handed me a cup, said it was something worth drinking before moving on... and by the time I realized what I’d swallowed, I was already here."

He tilted his head slightly. "I was angry about it for a while. Those first few months were... a lot."

"And then?"

"And then I met Anna." The word came out simply. Without performance. "She walked into my life and that was it. I stopped being angry about the circumstances and started caring about what I was building. About who I was building it with."

He is still looking at the stars. "After her came Jean. Then Diana. Then you. Then Susan."

A long beat later... "I have a family now. Not one I was born into but one I made. And I would set the universe on fire before I let anything touch them."

He turned to look at Didi, and there was nothing complicated in his expression but certainty.

"That is why I will do whatever it takes," he said. "To make you all happy. All of you. I am not going to let any of you regret choosing me. That is not a possibility I am willing to entertain."

He paused, then added more quietly, "And if I ever meet ROB again... I’ll thank him. Because eventually, I came to love the life he gave me. Back then, I was afraid of life—but now, I welcome an infinite one with open hands."

Didi smiled and watched him in silence for a moment, her gaze softer than before, as if she could see every version of him layered beneath the present.

Then she stepped a little closer and said, "You’ve changed more than you realize."

Her voice was calm, but there was warmth in it now.

"Most people, when they’re forced into something like that, hold on to the anger... or break under it. But you didn’t. You grew past it."

She tilted her head slightly, studying him. "And the fact that you can stand there and say you’d thank him... not out of helpless acceptance, but because you’ve truly embraced what you’ve become..."

A faint smile touched her lips. "That’s not something ordinary, Ethan. That’s strength beyond anything physical."

"I suppose I can thank ROB again for giving me the Fountain of Youth—and for forcing me to adapt to everything that came with it."

Didi smiled, her eyes soft. "Even without it, I’m sure you would’ve been just as amazing as you are now."

He chuckled. "I’m not so sure about that."

He turned and pulled her into a gentle embrace, pressing her against his chest. Carefully, he tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear and said, "Without my powers... I doubt I would’ve even caught your attention in your universe. We probably wouldn’t have fallen for each other."

She let out a quiet laugh, resting comfortably against him. "That’s a possibility..."

Then she looked up at him with a hint of mischief and warmth in her gaze.

"But I think you’re underestimating yourself. Power might have brought you into my world..." she said softly, placing a hand over his heart, "but this is what made me stay."

He chuckled and she hugged him even closer and tilted her face up, and he met her.

The kiss was slow and unhurried, the kind that existed entirely in the present tense, with the Tuscan stars overhead and the valley dark and quiet below them.

Then suddenly Ethan broke it. His head turned sharply, like something had hooked the edge of his awareness and pulled it sideways. His expression went flat in the span of a breath.

Didi looked at him. "What happened?"

She could not tell from the outside. Her powers were restrained here, her Omni-sense dormant, and she had no way to read whatever thread he had just found.

Ethan’s eyes were changing. The blue of his irises deepened, shifting toward something luminous, and the temperature did not drop so much as the warmth simply left, the comfortable evening air going neutral in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.

Around the world, in the upper atmosphere, something stirred. Pressure systems that had been stationary for days began to rotate. The stratosphere moved.

"Someone is acting very brave," Ethan said. His voice was completely level, which made it worse. "It’s time to put some pests to rest."