Once upon a time (birthing) - Gleam/Spark/any

[Giver]

It's in the eyes; I can tell, you will always be danger
We had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?

If she could have remained unnoticed by him and alone in her anguish, it would have been a mercy. But she doesn’t – she can’t. She smells too much like something he knows he needs, he bends towards her because she does not want to possess in chains but grow entwined the way ivy does. Alight’s face twists in antipathy for shadows that stretch out behind him and he turns to follow her gaze, his gut clenching viciously as his mind feeds on unfaithfulness and sips on woe. He is all the more angry for Spark’s appearance – angry at Alight, for having brought this profane chaos to these shores; for the wedge he had let her drive between them – green and insidious; 

Anger at Spark’s searching heart, that it could not have slept out the rest of the night in ignorance.

His mouth moves dumbly, desperately trying to piece together the puzzle – missing so many pieces himself – so that he can explain it all to her in a way that would be enough. Explain how a dream can become reality in mutant monstrosity; explain to her how Alight is dangerous, not just broody or lurking and acidic. But ugly, now, in her confusion and her mania; that somehow the depths to which her mind had sunk had birthed something corrupt and twisted—

Somehow all her aching and imploring had breathed life into a painted-up mimic.
Somehow it had worked.

Somehow.

How?

“Wait. Spark… wait, I can… it isn’t what it looks like.” In any other situation he’d hope – maybe even arrogantly expect –  she would believe him. One hopes the bonds woven are strong enough to carry through to gentler shores, but this is a kind of unearthly storm. He breaths, heavy and frenzied, turning his eyes back to the babes – he can feel that they are deathly tired, shivering under Alight’s great wings despite the heat wafting from them; they are confused, sensing things they cannot understand. This feels like a hopeless situation. Like beaching on a deserted island rather than by an oasis – if Spark turned her back on him now, he couldn’t possibly blame her.

He’d rile against it. He wouldn’t give up, not without trying.
“I thought.. It was you…” he beseeches, fully aware of how strange it sounds.
Of how he should have known.

“Tell her what you did,” he demands, hard and cold and quiet, his bright eyes now boring into what conscience Alight might have left, tatters and rags. He takes another step, this one more commanding, towards Alight and the children, who she seems to grip tighter and tighter with her wings (now, unthinkingly pressing those flames dangerously close to both of their bellies – if it weren’t for their immunity to the heat, they’d catch and burn). “Tell her what you did Alight! How did you do it!”

---

(Gloam shrinks back, further behind mother’s inferno;
In front of him he feels righteous anger – so pure even he, a baby, understands its baseness.
Beside him, he feels something slimy and queer – terribly off putting; one day he will find out the sensation is like touching a tangle of worms with his lips; one day he’ll understand how vulgar it is – but the obscurity of Alight’s emotions make them safer to him. He leans towards her to find stability but finally his knees give out, dropping him on the sand.)

---

“What? Tell her what Giver?” she whispers, turning her wide, mean eyes to Spark, glowering. She does not feel Gloam lay down. It isn’t about them anymore; it is about the hard, smarting aggression in Giver’s voice, the way he advances on her with such ire on his lips… those lips. Those lips.

(Those lips.
She had touched them.
Had he not touched her with them?
Are they not hers?

They are hers.)

“What is there to say?” she speaks in contrived bewilder, countering his own emotional, raised voice, her wings pull up, spitting a thousand hot sparks into the air, exposing Gleam and Gloam, “what needs to be explained?’ (The filly blinks, with the same miniature constellations as he; Gloam is the same silvery buckskin.) She smiles, and it is a victorious and callous gesture.

“Does anything need to be explained, Spark?” she asks, calmly, hugging her wings back in around the twins.

“Don’t fight me, Giver. Please. Look at them.”

He continues to close in on them, slowly, the end goal a hazy thing – lashing out at Alight? Sending them all to the deeps of the black, calm waters at their back. He watches the boy collapse and his gut twists.

They are his. He knows this.
It is an alien, uncomfortable feeling. But they are, and their weakness – which he knows as clearly as if it were his own, tasting the bitterness all the way to his cortex – disturbs him. Her carelessness with them incenses him! “I don’t know how you did it, I don’t know why… what were you thinking would happen?” she wasn’t thinking, he knows. Because she is crazy. He cannot point to the exact moment it happened. It had been a slow progress, or else it has always been there.

Alight takes a step back, water licking her ankle, pulling the girl along with her, leaving the boy in a tiny heap on the damp beach. “Giver. Stay back,” her voice is shaky and warning, she snaps the heated air with her wing – that is a warning, too.

He clenches his jaw, something possessing him – something primal and something novel – “Go back, Alight. Go back to wherever you have been hiding.” If he ever sees her again, he thinks, it will be too soon. This severance feels swift and final, but in front of him it dawns on her slowly. Painfully. Her mimic smile fades and it is replaced by unclothed disappointment. Horror.

She knows – that does not mean she will ever accept it.

“They are still yours, Giver. You firsts,” she calls the last word, pointing it towards Spark like a whip’s tail, “that will never change.” (It had been beautiful. It had not been right, of course, because if she could have had her way, she would have come to him as she is – flamed and golden – and he would have had her.) She stumbled back, pulling Gleam along, back into the sea, fumbling at her other side, feeling for the boy that is not there anymore.

Panic takes her. She reaches for him, crumpled over. “Gloam, get up. Come here baby.”

It's in the eyes; I can tell you will always be danger