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Yuni's life was one giant mess of contradictions.
She recalled a life she had never lived.
She grieved a man she had never met.
She regretted breaking a promise she had never made.
She had memories that were created before she ever got the opportunity to make her own, memories that sparkled and glowed and ached so fiercely that sometimes she found herself blinking away tears that weren't hers to shed.
Sandalphon grieved the same man as her, yet she could not bring herself to share in his pain. His was deep and white hot, the grief of someone who had longed and loved for centuries before losing it all just before finally holding it in his hands.
Lyria often stroked tender fingers over a feather Yuni recognised with a violent, razor sharp longing but had never seen in person before. Each speck of color, each shimmer of dawn and twilight in brilliant white, was as familiar to her as her own hand and yet she had never seen the wings they belonged to before.
The Four Primarchs spoke of greatness and perfection under which Yuni knew lay self-flagellation and bone deep loneliness because she had seen it with eyes not her own.
Yuni was a shadow of him, an unintended recreation tinged with a sadness that muted his sunlight colors to her wintery ones. She saw it every time she looked in the mirror over her dresser on the Grandcypher.
She saw it in the slope of her nose, the unruly strand of her hair that never lay flat, in the shape of her eyes and tilt of her head.
Yuni was created to look like a man she had never met, a man she knew despite not knowing him, a man she grieved but hadn't loved.
She was a contradiction born to fulfill a promise made between two people who had no one but each other for less time than they needed and deserved.
That promise had been fulfilled now. And yet she lingered.
Lingered to struggle with emotions and memories and obligations and promises that were not her own and could never return to the one they belonged to because Cosmos held them herself.
Yuni didn't complain.
Yuni didn't know how.
This was who she had always been.
Even if her grief and pain had no where to go, she didn't complain.
She settled into the life she was given, found friends to make her own memories with, all the time holding the relationship she never formed in a careful, unsure hand.
Unable to let go.
Unable to examine it closer.
There was no one to examine it with. Cosmos had lived it and grieved it herself.
There was no one to examine it with.
Until there was.
Because as well as she loved the man she never knew, there was one primarch - Supreme Primarch - who loved him in a way that made the skies buckle.
Made the Omnipotent pause to witness.
Made life and death flinch long enough to release a soul that should be gone.
And suddenly Yuni knew the man she never knew, because one day Lucifer was dead and the next he was there and smiling the smile she knew her lips could form as well.
Smiling at her.
And she smiled back.
Now she knew the man she never knew.
And the man she never knew wanted to know her too.