Okay, last one… most likely. I just realized that the original oneshot had a lot of weird loose ends. There's probably still weird loose ends, of course, and maybe I just made a few more, but at least they're a little tighter.

This one's a biiit less lighthearted, though. Especially at the beginning. But I think it gets better.

"Kyon? Kyon!?" Haruhi called out into the grayness.

It was gray in the city, all gray, like the rest of the world had taken on the skyscrapers' and sidewalks' dull colors. She hated it, but she had all the time in the world to change it.

"Haruhi?"

She whipped around in a flurry of blue and brown. Before she could even speak, his hand was clasped around hers. It was cold and clammy and sweaty and he was shaking really badly.

"I shouldn't have told you," he moaned. "I'm sorry, Haruhi."

"Sorry?" Haruhi laughed hard. She almost had to brush the tears away. "Why would you be sorry? Look! I can do anything now, Kyon!"

To prove her point, she waved her free hand. An apple popped into existence. Well, a gray apple, but that didn't stop Haruhi from throwing it across the empty street.

"And you think that'll make you happy?" he hissed.

"Of cou—"

"Tell me one thing you have left to do. Tell me one goal you can work for, now that you can do anything. Tell me one thing that's still worth fighting for."

Haruhi opened her mouth to respond confidently. It stayed there, suspended in midair when she realized that nothing could come out.

What could she do? Hang-gliding? She'd conjure a pair of wings for herself in one second. Deep-sea diving? She'd dive down to the Marianas Trench in two. Exploring alien planets? She'd explore the entire universe in three.

"I don't know why, but I still seem unaffected," Kyon grumbled, looking all around. "Now what…" He looked down at Haruhi. "Do you think you could… err, Haruhi?"

She could see anything. Do anything.

Know… everything.

Haruhi's eyes widened. She could do anything. Kyon had said it himself, in his moment of weakness after the most terrible day—how had she known that? Oh, because she could know everything—in his life. He'd wanted it all to end.

But why? Why did she have these powers and not—oh, no—now she knew. She knew it all. She was a god. A god. A real god. Everything she had ever wished for, everything she had ever thought about and everything everything everything had always been in the palm of her hand and she never ever even knew it and—

In an instant, Brigade leader, Haruhi Suzumiya, one of two gods of the universe broke. She crumbled like little powdery pieces of stardust, which spilled out into the dark matter of space and fanned out into the nothingness. Everything meant nothing. She knew it now.

She forced it all out of her mind, but it was only temporary. The memory of the truth was now embedded into her mind (forever knowledge, inescapable, waiting). The knowledge would come seeping back quickly. It'd been held at bay for too long. But she had the will to hold it back a little longer.

"K-kyon," she choked out.

He could see her breaking, she knew. It was all in her eyes, she heard him think. She looked weak, fragile, she could see from his eyes.

In a split-second she had made her decision. She clutched his (cold, clammy, sweaty, shaking) hand harder than he could ever. She shot the knowledge up his arm and into his soul. And just like that, he knew like she did.

But Kyon was strong too. He forced his half of the knowledge (returning with a vengeance) away from the time being and met her gaze with his own eyes (which were just a little less broken than hers).

"I'm so sorry," he said in a sigh.

Haruhi broke their stare. The gray skyscraper-sidewalk-city world was gone now. Both the gods were aware of their existence. They no longer needed Earth as a sense of security.

"I don't want it," she murmured. "I want to keep living like this."

"I admit, it was fun." Kyon chuckled. "While it lasted, of course."

"Can't we just go back right now?" Haruhi said. She knew that she sounded close to a whine, but that just made Kyon chuckle.

"Where's all that knowledge and god-power-stuff going to go if we keep pushing it away?" he pointed out.

"We could give it to someone else?" she suggested hopefully.

"Force it on someone else?" Kyon restated.

She scowled. "Don't we deserve a little leeway?"

"Isn't that a little selfish?" he shot back. "It was our power to begin with. It wouldn't be fair to force our responsibility on someone else."

Haruhi huffed. "You're no fun."

"I'm just enjoying whatever remaining humanity I have before we have to go back to, well, not being human."

They stood there, hand-in-hand, watching over their emptiness. Accepting their fates. Accepting the nothing.

Until suddenly, Haruhi had an idea.

(She couldn't believe that it didn't come to her before!)

"Kyon! Kyon, let's make a block!" she nearly screamed.

"Eh?"

(Briskly, she explained her plan. She wove her words carefully in the most mind-bogglingly praising way. However, he was not fooled.)

"What makes you think this 'block' will even work?" Kyon said skeptically. "Once we're completely omniscient again, won't we remember making it in the first place?"

Haruhi grinned wickedly. "Well, didn't it work before?"

Kyon was stricken. So that was why. That was why they'd never had the idea to trap their knowledge and abilities and instead become human. It was because they had placed a block on themselves before—a block that would remain in effect until they could execute that idea once again.

Ugh, and he thought time-travel was confusing.

Haruhi looked up at him hopefully.

("…it's not like I can do this without you.")

At once, on reflex, Kyon heaved a great big sigh. How was he supposed to say no to that?

"We may be gods, but I guess we can't stop some things," he said. "If we could place this block, then maybe… I don't know. We could have a break, I guess.

Haruhi pumped her free fist enthusiastically. "Alright! Oh—but you have to be the actual block."

"Why me?" he complained. In a low voice, he added, "Why is it always me?"

"I heard that, Kyon! Penalty, minus five hundred points!"

They both chuckled.

"Well, I still had my powers, didn't I?" she reasoned. "I just didn't know about them. You did, but in the end only you could tell me that I did and really convince me. You're the literal key to it all."

"I guess that makes sense."

(They stood there absentmindedly for a few moments.)

"Haruhi," he said slowly, "do you really want to do this?"

"Of course! Who wants to be a boring old immortal thing, just sitting around and doing nothing?" she said fiercely.

"I mean… here, look at it this way. Making this block means that we'll probably end up in this same predicament. We'll end up repeating the same thing—the same lives. Heck, no one knows how many times we've had this conversation before."

She shook her head, to his surprise. "I don't think we'd be dumb enough to do that. No, it'd be really boring to do the same thing over and over again! I think everything was different last time, and everything's going to be different again."

His eyes softened. "That's what you think?"

She smiled playfully. "Yeah! I bet this next time, I'll talk to you first when we first meet!"

"I bet I'll still be born first," he said on a whim.

"I bet you'll die first!" she shot back.

He shook his head. "Now that's just depressing."

"And I bet I'll do this and that and… hmmm…"

"I guess it won't really matter when we die anyways, though," he rambled on. "What would even happen if one of us died before the other? Would the other one just break down the world? Was it even possible for us to die?"

"Oh, and I bet I'll figure out how to get rid of all this boring power and knowledge first," Haruhi mumbled on.

Kyon stopped his rant and frowned. "You really think we could do that?"

"I bet we can do anything." She looked away from him, towards the nothingness, but her hand tightened around his once more. "Don't you think, Kyon?"

"I don't know. I guess we have all in the time in the world to find out," he replied.

(If energy beings could smile, they both did.)

(Bored, she stared down at Earth as a white pinpoint in the sky…

…

"…we're going to have to plan a lot if we want to do this. What will our human names be? What genders? What will we look like? What will be our histories? Will we even remember that we're gods?"

"Of course not! That's be against the whole point," she replied. "But… well, I just wanted to jump into all this, you know? Just pick a persona and get into it!"

He snorted. "Always one to just rush into things."

"Always one to over think things," she shot back. "But, you're agreeing on this, right?"

"Does it matter?" he asked rhetorically.)

Of course. We might be able to do anything, but we can only do it together. Isn't that right?

Isn't that right, K—