It's in the eyes; I can tell, you will always be danger
We had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?
Things die all the time.
Stars die beautiful, long evolutions.
They feast on their nuclear cores until the weight of that glut destroys them.
They become giants ‒ hot, red behemoths ‒ turbulent and bright. In this senescent period, they get a second life as gods. Then, they burst. Slayed into a whirl of biting gas and hectic debris ‒ orange, teal, purple. They become pretty, fossilized things, like so many jewels hung across endless, beautiful astrophysical chains.
( Chains.)
“Gloam,” he calls to him, through the heave of darkness that holds secure all the things Giver understands best (like stars and short, ugly atrophies), and he comes. He was, once, like a torchbug in the night, flitting and flickering; now, he is more like a meteorite, loosed from his gravitational course. He is jarring and dangerous, though he chooses to keep his wings tucked up against his invulnerable ribs.
Gloam chooses, smoldering.
He is moody. But he is always moody. He grunts in response, like he did when he was a boy and the way his mind tastes is as bitter and wordless ‒ stymied, nervous, scared. These shores remind him, perhaps, of lost things. Of unpleasant but needed things. “We will find…” Giver begins, watching the boy-turned-man consume oxygen around his body and spit out sparks into the darkness.
He grunts and marches on, sparking and flitting and woosh-ing, into the heavy night. “...Right,” Giver sighs, shaking his head and turning back to the cluster of watery constellations, seething away in miniature around his luminous skin.
Something's die well-earned, indignant deaths.
Nobody had cried when Pangea ate its own grim core. Except, perhaps, Giver and Gloam.
It's in the eyes; I can tell you will always be danger
Dark.
Always dark.
But never starless, even if there are no stars to be seen in the night sky.
(She sees them imprinted behind her eyelids, constellations that are brilliant and numerous - too numerous to recall, but there all the same, patterned against the gray matter of her inelegant brain.)
That is why she hugs close the raw exposed shoulder of the volcano, close enough to a split in the rock that coughs steam and bright sparks of ash and magma. Her own brilliance is enough to keep the dark at bay and to shame the stars if they’d laid eyes on her now. She is swathed in pure flame, bright and burning. There is nothing recognizable about her now except those infinitely black eyes and her small thin shape. All else was flame, simple and writhing.
It should not have surprised her the way it did when the wind blew his scent to her off the sea. Or that with it, came the scent of the son that should have been her own but would never be despite how she told Giver as much. The flame that she had become grew brighter, burning white-hot as her anger lent strength and heat to it. She should not have been so angry with him but she was, and she could not help it - the anger had to go somewhere, and it had, after sickening her. It burnt her skin up, made her whole and strong. Made her clean and untouchable.
She smelled him - them, and debated going to where they marched through the night, luminous and bright, stars and fire, and all kinds of things that she could not name. Spark only looked after them, tracked them far enough along until they were more than shadows and snippets of talk that reached her flicking fire-ears. Still, she stayed. Uncertain. Angered. Lost. For she loved him still and his absence had been a huge ache in her heart until the fire came and burnt up even that.
(but she still loved him!)
Long last, she came forth. Burning and bright, a conflagration of a horse and not the Spark that he’d have known or recognized. She said nothing as she joined them in their march.
ooc: you're back! <3333333333333333333333
It's in the eyes; I can tell, you will always be danger
We had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?
He is always happy to see her.
But happiness isn’t always perfect. Sometimes, after the bonfire of that night, it felt safer and gentler to spy her from a distance—all earth, breath and wild—where he didn't have to suffer the dregs of her mind; where he could not feel her aspect weave itself into him, pressing into all the places his guilt had rooted. Where he did not have to suffer the shame of his own inadequate peace-making. It felt safer and gentler to leave, marching across the ragged and unwashed countryside in search, though it brought him no happiness to do so. Gloam had begged him to, needy for the separated skin of his sister (and, perhaps, his mother, though he did not say so)—and how was he to deny the boy that? How was he to deny himself that?
He could not be sure what would be worse, to find the girl had spit loose from that blazed hag, or to find them together.
He could not be sure what would be better—to not have to see Alight, or to have her close enough to earn his pelt a few more burn scars from her wings, just enough to snuff them out with finality. He had braved them once before, in a frenzy of stars and fire, after which he had emerged with the boy trembling behind him, yelping and groaning in anguish and she ( woosh-ing and cursing their heads, all) had the girl, tucked under a flaming wing, yanking her back into the dark, starred ocean, threatening to drown her if he took another step.
It didn’t matter. Because they had not found the girl, nor the fire-hag. They had found Pangea, razed to nothing—a stitch of earth where once there had been grim canyons and caves. Gone, and no sharp, puberty-toned calling of ‘sister!’ from Gloam, nor begrudging, hard yells of ‘Alight’ from Giver, had stirred them, stars and fire, from the waste.
Gone. Giver let it settle in his belly with some sad gladness; Gloam had been devastated.
“Spark,” he says, softly and cautiously, as she joins him. Gloam, still keeping space between them, follows her flaming body with some curiosity before snapping back to the front. Marching on. “Spark...” he repeats dumbly, his gold-brown eyes watering from the heat, unsure of where to look as her body shifts and snaps brightly. He doesn't say he is sorry, though perhaps he should have (perhaps she waits for it—that flamed goddess, like an offering for her mercy), because it feels too obvious. And he is a stupid, stupid man. “We didn’t find… anything…” he trails off at the end, wincing as he considers the idea that she might not care. That it might not be why she came.
That she might want to hear something else entirely free of their shades.
“Does it hurt?” he sighs, finally, braving the heat to stay near her, knowing the best thing he could do is take a step aside and save his smoking whiskers. He finds her eyes, black and red, rimmed in fire, and he means not just for her—for her own once smoothed, patched skin—but for him, as well. He is keenly aware of the smooth, hairless creeks of grey skin on his sides and neck, how their branding had seared and bubbled before he could find healing.
Stars and fire.
It's in the eyes; I can tell you will always be danger
If Spark had known that neither of them had found the girl or the nag that had come between them and birthed both Gloam and Gleam, she might have understood how Gloam felt to be sundered from his twin. His devastation could easily have been hers’ a thousand times over and had been, once or twice on the occasions that Spear and she had been separated by decisions and fates that called them apart from one another. But never had they been forced apart by oceans of threat and continents of hate. No, never that.
She bends an ear to her name said softly and cautiously from his lips. He repeats it and she still gives him nothing but her flaming quiet and hot quick steps as she keeps pace with them. She rolls a red right eye to the colt that trails her then surges to the front of them as Giver tells of how they found nothing. Spark thought she ought to have felt something at that - whether it was gladness or sorrow, to know that the sister had not been found, nor her hag of a mother that dragged her back from them, all of them. Still, she says nothing. What is there to say?
“No,” she answers him at last.
No, she lies with lips of flame that spark and spit as the shame of it disappears inside her. Her heart swallows it up; like it has everything else that the fire couldn’t touch, like her love for him. Though sometimes she thinks the fire did burn that up, burn it white-hot and clean until her heart was just a heart again that beat stupid and meaty and thick inside her sometimes pale breast. Yes, it hurt to burst into flame that first time but her anger had been there to get her through the pain. Even that burnt up though, to ash and dust and a small memory of stars etched deep into her brain.
His stars would always be a roadmap for her to follow.
His stars would always be a light beckoning her home.
But now, are his stars still her stars or not?
Questions haunt her, but she pushes them back - they are demons not meant to be loosed from her lips, for all that they bite and scratch at her throat and teeth. She dares to look at him for a quick moment, and she sees all the smooth hairless bits of him that had healed but not without leaving him permanent reminders of that night. Spark bites back a sigh and looks away, but the fire slowly goes out of her until only a few smoking steps remain and she is Spark once again as he knew her.
ooc: it's short but long overdue <3
It's in the eyes; I can tell, you will always be danger
We had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?
Gods. It is a rejoicing sigh that chimes through the halls of his mind like a hallelujah chorus; a million voices raised in invocation, appealing to the protean goddess. Thank you. He watches the fire extinguish from her skin like the sun setting over mottled earth, leaving darkness and smoking sand between them, illuminated now by his moon-core and the blind, venerable pulse of his mimic stars.
But he does not say it, it releases from between his lips in a thin wisp of a moan that bends towards her (always) finding berth where there was but unbearable heat seconds before. It says enough—it is glad and mournful, at the same time; it is thankful, for the way she disrobes herself means prospect.
Truth be told, he has never been fond of fire—(except, of course, of that which burns a quintillion miles away from here, gorging itself on gas and atmospheres of outer space)—because it always seemed antagonistic. What chases the dark away? What covers the stars, selfishly, in the bloom of its own flamed heart?
Alight had been daylight!—bright and binding him to the drift of indiscernible, blue skies. He could not navigate it, had lost his way in it. Then, of course, she had brushed noses with the sun and caught like a match to kindling. But just as the sun she had come too close to had been the stuff of dreams—an imagined thing that had managed to blow some truth into her waking reality—so had she been made lacking in comparison to Spark, who simmered wholly, from the sockets of her eyes down to the tip of her tail.
( Alight would be jealous. But he doesn’t say this, either.)
“Why fire?” Giver asks, soberly, unable to contain the dull ache in his voice that betrays his dismay, “what happened?” It had, slowly but surely, seeped into his life like a heavy, quaking divine—one of vindictiveness and judgement and cleansing—locking horns with his own quiet, desired duskiness. Gloam snorts into the darkness, expressing either interest or a grand showing of impassiveness, curling his wings around his body and shifting is weight.
Stars and fire—and thus it will always be.
It's in the eyes; I can tell you will always be danger
He sighs or moans; she can’t be sure which it is and it might even be both that come from his lips. Even she knows that he is glad that she has calmed and put out her fire, needing neither moan nor sigh to tell her as much - something in the crook of his head and his less guarded bearing told her that this small concession on her part was well received on his end. For that, she might even have been a bit glad…
If gladness did not spar so poorly with the sadness in her heart.
How could she explain it to him?
It still made little sense to her --
Sick and shaking. Sleeping and dreaming fitfully. Her skin too thick and too hot and all of a sudden - fire, consuming and cleansing and there, hers to beckon forth from inside like it had always been there, nestled deep within, just waiting for a catalyst.
Spark had known fire was in her bloodline; felt the heat come off her father’s skin enough to know that some part of it lay dormant in her but she’d thought if she’d come into anything, it’d be stars like him. Only his stars stayed his own. Lost in darkness, in wandering. So she found her own light - not like he had, in Alight’s own odd blaze but she could understand a bit better, the fire in that one’s wings and heart because it was in her too. Maybe it had always been the anger pushing at her, thick and hot. All she could see was Alight aflame and him, shocked but not, and she’d burst into flame herself. How to tell him all this? How could he not already know to some extent?
“Why not?” she casually throws the question back at him, rolling one black but somehow bright eye his way. “I rather think it chose me, and I had not so much choice in the matter.” He asks what happened and what can she say? I stopped eating. I stopped caring. I wanted to stop breathing. You were gone and my whole world went with you. Once the heart gives up, how can the body not follow suit? But she simply says, “I was sick and then I wasn’t, but I was something else - the fire found me, saved me.” Filled me up, burnt away all that I was and had become and left me - Spark, clean and new and fiery, in its place.
“The stars were always yours,” she murmurs, listening to Gloam snort and move his wings. What must it be like to feel that half of yourself missing? She was thankful to have never known despite how Spear kept to his small blossoming family now and she, well, she had this even if she was the hot tail of a comet forever following a bright bright star.
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