A forgotten birthday can hurt more than any erasure.
It's past midnight when Elara slips out of the Cell's medical alcove, a battered box of matches and a lopsided cake balanced in her arms. The cake is nothing fancy—scavenged ration bars, instant frosting, a crude portrait of Swan drawn in cocoa powder—but in the cool silence of the Underground, it might as well be a diamond.
She checks her device: today's date winks in the dark. She is the only one who remembers.
Kaito keeps sharp watch at the tunnel's mouth; Echo tunes the sensors for stray Specters. The rest of the Cell works quietly, stringing together a memory they hope Swan will believe in—a birthday that might never have actually happened.
Swan is led into the makeshift celebration blindfolded, hand in Elara's. He's stiff at first, wary—he hasn't expected individual kindness in years, hasn't had time to mark personal milestones. The world's been war for so long.
But when Elara tugs off the scarf, the candles throw dancing shadows across the old concrete, and he has to blink hard in the uneven, gentle light.
"Happy birthday, Ghost," Maya grins, placing a hand-made paper crown on his head, glittered with bits of anti-glitch foil. "You're not supposed to age, technically. But we figured a legend can bend a rule."
Laughter echoes through the Underground corridors—soft, uncertain at first, but real. River holds out a gift: a battered notebook to capture "the memories you might forget, but we'll keep for you." Echo's present is a glitch-art portrait, Swan's edges blurring hero and friend, ghost and leader.
Swan looks at the cake, its surface trembling under too many candles, and tries to remember what birthdays used to feel like. A mother's smile? A father's joke? The taste of chocolate instead of ration bars?
It's gone. But the warmth in Elara's smile—a little too bright, a little too sad—draws back the dark. For one fragile hour, Swan is surrounded by laughter. The Cell sings an off-key song; Maya misremembers the lyrics; bits of the past are stitched desperately into the present.
Elara hands him a wrapped package: inside, a crudely folded mask. "For the days when you'd rather not be a ghost at all," she explains. "For you, not for Nyx. For the boy who's still here underneath."
He blows out the candles. Wishes nothing, or maybe just for more moments like this—moments that remind him being remembered matters more than being legendary.
As he cuts the cake, someone snaps a picture. It comes out washed, grainy, smudged. "Perfect," Echo insists, hanging it among other holy relics on the Cell's wall.
When Swan looks at the collection—drawings, gifts, that blurry photo—he realizes the cruel math of being a legend: the more the world remembers Nyx, the harder it gets for anyone to truly remember Swan. Every new survivor, every new devotion, further erases the specifics of "him."
But not tonight. Tonight, Elara remembers. The Cell remembers. Laughter ricochets across stone corridors. For a little while, memory beats legend. For a little while, the ghost is simply a boy who is loved.
[END OF CHAPTER]