“Why have I never seen you without your helmet?”
The question doesn’t surprise Ex - he’s heard it often enough.
They’re quiet, staring out over the lava lake, legs dangling precariously from where they hang on the edge of a nether fortress bridge.
For a time, Hels thinks they must not have heard him.
Then, he shrugs, “Nothing much to see, really, best to leave it on.”
Ex glances at the knight. The warm light of glowstone and lava cast a shadow across his face that accentuates his already sharp features, and they feel a wisp of envy curl inside them, but it’s fleeting.
When you’ve lived as long as he has the resentment you hold for what you can’t have fades.
“Fine, if you really need proof,” in a move that neither they nor Hels expected he lifts his hands to the latches of their helmet.
There’s the hiss of compressed air and it takes a decent tug but it comes off easily as you would expect.
There’s no crackling lightning or stillness in the air to indicate the defiance of nature that has just taken place.
What Hels notices first is his hair, it’s white, but in a dirty way - darker at the roots as if it’s been a while since it had been dyed - it sticks out every which way, puffed up from the recent agitation.
Ex tilts their face slightly toward him.
Or at least that’s what he thought, but after a heartbeat, his mind makes sense of what his eyes have seen, which is to say - nothing.
From the corner of his eye, he thinks they might have some semblance of a nose, straight and small, maybe the impression of eyes red and beady, and a mouth stretched into a smile all too wide.
The closer Hels looks, the more he searches, the more sure of this fact he becomes. Where the hair curls around his ears to brush their cheekbones there is nothing.
Nothing but a dark, vast expanse of pure Void.
The stars - are they stars? - swirl and drift in an entrancing pattern and Hels can feel his world spin with them, vertigo or a dance of their own making he can’t tell.
Then, the dance stops - is it disappointment he’s feeling, or dizzying relief?
Ex’s helmet is back on now, and, though the red-tinted visor hides what’s behind it, Hels knows he will never forget what’s there, which is to say - of course - nothing.
“Did you know,” they say conversationally, as if he had never removed the article in the first place, “that when one is born in the void, it can just as easily take back what it gave to you?”
It would be a long silence before either would speak again.