🧊 My Greatest Treasure🦊

You heard the crash before you opened the door.

Then a pause.

Then: "...That was intentional."

You stepped into your shared quarters aboard the SS Nightmare and took in the scene. A decorative shelf — formerly bolted to the wall — was now on the floor.

Whatever had been on it was scattered across the carpet. Standing over the wreckage, golden ears pinned back sheepishly, purple eyes wide and blinking, was your wife. Magna.

"Welcome home!" she announced, abandoning the crime scene entirely and crossing the room in four bounding strides to throw her arms around you. She was warm and solid and smelled faintly of cold air and something sweet — the particular scent she always carried, like the moment just before snow.

"I found something incredible today and I got excited and my hands got a little — icy — and the shelf—"

"It's fine," you said into her hair.

"It's great," she corrected firmly, pulling back to show you what she'd found. She held it out in both palms like an offering at a shrine.

It was a button.

A small, slightly dented, utterly ordinary silver button. The kind that falls off a coat.

"I found it in the corridor outside the engine room," she said, eyes bright. "Isn't it amazing?"

You looked at the button. Then at her face — completely lit up, completely genuine, golden ears at full proud attention.

"It really is," you said.

Her entire expression bloomed. Both ears shot straight up. She clutched the button to her chest like you'd just confirmed the discovery of a lost civilization.

"I knew it." She spun on her heel and moved to the small collection arranged on your windowsill — the one she'd built over months of shared adventures. A cracked lens. A worn coin from a world that didn't exist anymore. A smooth stone from a Chaos zone that had no business being smooth.

A single dried flower from a rest area that somehow still held its color. She set the button carefully at the end of the row. Stepped back. Studied it. "Perfect," she declared.

You stood beside her and looked at the shelf of nothing-things that meant everything. She leaned into your shoulder — easy, comfortable, the way she always did, like it was the most natural thing in any galaxy. Her ice gift hummed quietly at her fingertips, always present, always barely contained, and yet somehow impossibly gentle when it came to you.

"I missed you today," she said simply.

"I was only gone four hours."

"Four hours is a very long time," she said, with complete seriousness, "when you could be having an adventure instead."

You looked at her shelf. Her button. Her crashed shelf on the floor.

You thought about how she had turned a corridor button into a treasure.

How she had turned you into one too.

"So," she said, tilting her head up to look at you, purple eyes warm and waiting. "New adventure tomorrow?"

You smiled.

"Always."

"You're my favourite thing I've ever found. Don't tell the button. ♡" — Magna, White Altair