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Call it curiosity. Call it selfishness.

But whatever Envy does, he’d best not call it sentimentality.

***

Sorrow

Over the decades, she learns from Echo that beings experience three types of suffering. There’s the suffering of oneself. There’s the suffering of strangers.

There’s the suffering of a peer.

A few years shy of fifty, Wonder is caught breaking celestial law. According to the Fate Court, she’s been making clandestine trips to the mortal world, in order to communicate with a human boy. Since it’s impossible for mortals to see or hear their kind, the goddess has been writing letters to him instead.

From what the naysayers report, and from what little their classmates know, it wasn’t a rousing success. All it did was terrify the mortal into madness and land him in an asylum.

As for Wonder? Right now, she’s screaming. She’s screaming so hard and so brittle, it shatters Sorrow’s bones. Because their class is responsible for each other, they’ve been tasked with the gruesome chore of executing Wonder’s punishment.

Within a rotunda of immortal spectators, they’ve tied Wonder to a chair. Her hands have committed the misdeed, so they’re the focus of retribution. While Anger, and Love, and Sorrow keep Wonder strapped down, Envy slashes her palms with a blade. Ribbons of red form the shapes of starbursts. Her howls jump from one end of the space to the other, as if trying to pound their way out of here.

Each of her cries slices a rift into Sorrow’s womb. She hates this. She hates this so fucking much. And she hates that she’s a coward who’s not stopping it.

That’s Love’s job. The goddess can’t take it anymore and flings herself in front of Wonder, shouting for the horror to stop.

“Stop!” she bellows.

Envy reels back to avoid lashing Love by mistake. The intermission is a welcome relief. Privately, Sorrow exhales.

Love throws a tantrum, kicking and screeching as Anger abandons his post and drags her out of the room. Being the class leader, it’s clear why he takes action. If he does nothing, the outburst will get them all into trouble, not just one.

Besides, since Love is such a precious and rare commodity to their rulers, keeping her in one piece is paramount. It’s likely that Love will serve a period of solitary confinement for this disruption, rather than physical torture. But she hadn’t cared about that, and good for her.

Shame on the rest of them.

Sorrow bites her tongue until it leaks blood. So this is what it’s like to feel guilt without having to ask Guilt. This is what it’s like to witness someone else’s pain, to have it slide between the cracks of one’s conscience.

This is what it’s like to be powerless, unable to help.

As Wonder whimpers from the chair, Sorrow yearns to stroke the female’s waterfall of blonde curls. So she does. Covertly, she does this, her fingers combing lightly through the roots, brushing her friend’s scalp.

The goddess relaxes with each pass of Sorrow’s digits. And this is what it’s like to comfort someone without the magic of an arrow.

Sorrow feels her eyes shimmering, about to spill. Sucking it up, she peeks at the assembly, checking to make sure no one notices.

Her gaze stumbles across a pair of attentive, hazel eyes. Envy watches her, watches what she’s doing. He may have seen her on the brink of tears as well.

Maybe he understands. Maybe he does, because yes, the twinges she’d seen from him while he cut into Wonder hadn’t been from exertion, but from remorse.

He hates this as much as she does.

That night, Sorrow sits on the floor of her home, with her back braced against the foot of her bed. It doesn’t seem fair that Wonder should be so utterly wrecked—her mangled hands, her broken soul, her grief over a mortal—and that the Goddess of Sorrow should walk away without a hair out of place.

Sorrow snatches a razor from the floor next to her, and she presses the blade into the underside of her arm.

***

Envy

He’s not sure why he goes looking for her. She won’t want to talk to him, and he’s also not sure why the notion causes him to flinch.