He wonders, sometimes, what would happen if his teleportation ever left him inside a shadow - what would happen if he stepped in and never stepped out again. Caught in the core of a moment, in the impossibility of the in between, in the dark between worlds. Would it be a place? Would it be a dimension like this one and not like this one, a mirror image but in entire darkness. A world without color, without light, without definition. 

He thinks it sounds like hell.
He thinks it must be where he belongs.

The night is a swirling chaotic thing as it churns against his skin, spilling from him in waves of black and indigo and twinkling, roiling stardust. It feels like the product of a fury that sits inside his chest, and yet he cannot name where that feeling comes from, what woke it inside him in the first place. Unease, unbelonging. Or maybe it is just him, maybe fury and stardust are the things that bind him inside this nocturnal body.

He finds himself at the Hyaline border without ever making the conscious decision to go, but even as his eyes find the silhouettes of dark mountain shapes he knows he will not turn away. At once his mind becomes a drifting, traitorous thing, and no matter how hard he tries to force the thought away, there is still a girl that haunts him like a ghost. Rose gold and wide eyes, as bright as he is dark, as good as he is wrong. She is not for him, not for the dark or the ruin, and yet she is a tether inside his chest, holding him close without ever even realizing it. 

He makes his way inwards, and it is arrogance that has him searching the mountains first, teleporting through shadow like he is moving in broken, irregular glimpses through someone’s fractured memories. He had thought, had wanted, to find her with her face lifted to the sky, searching for stars, thinking about him. To know that the memory of him haunts her as much as she does him. But when he does finally find her it is along the shores of the lake that lay in the heart of the kingdom, watching the water instead.

“Este.” And it’s strange, because now that he’s here he is unsure why, unsure of the purpose in this except to see her face again, to feel the tug and tangle of her light against the dark of his night. To know more of her or to take more of her, to protect her light or corrupt it? He isn’t certain. He had asked Este once who would save him from her, and by the gentle earnest light in those dark eyes, that furrow in her brow as she had asked why he would ever need saving from her, he knew she did not understand. That if she is the light, then he is the shadow bound (willingly?) in her wake. 

He watches her more guardedly now as he closes the distance between them with strides that are soundless and flow like the movement of dark water, predator and not, a soldier with no alliance but to himself, no war but that which rages inside his own chest. “I had thought you might come see me again.” There is no accusation in the quiet of his voice when he stops beside her to look out over the lake - he knows he cannot linger on her face lest he not have the strength to tear his gaze away again, and she cannot be allowed to see these marks she left on him. “You didn’t forget about me, did you?” And there in the indistinct haze of his mouth is something like amusement, something like a smile as he still does not turn to see soft gray and rose gold or those dark, beautiful eyes. 

She says his name in such a quiet way that it nearly drags his golden gaze to the silhouette of her delicate face beside him, just that single word enough to increase a gravity beneath his skin until he feels like he might drift away into the nebula of those soft, dark eyes. He doesn’t understand the way something knots inside his gut, the way he is pleased beyond a sense of arrogance that she remembers him so readily. Nor does he understand the way that knot clenches hard when the whisper of her apology settles against his dark and stardust ears. For a moment he can feel his eyes harden, a shade of golden uncertainty and the crook of a frown on lips made for it. But he can feel the swing of her gaze on him, feel soft eyes that likely trace the shape of things he’d rather her not find, so he pushes back the feeling, pushes back this thing that feels like regret to make her feel as though she owes him any apology.

It is the words that follow that snap his eyes to her face finally, this thing that might be an admission or a confession and even though it doesn’t feel like an important enough distinction, he feels oddly sure there is a difference. It takes only four seconds for him to see a change in her. The first to be shackled by soft eyes a shade too bright to be anything but sorrowful. The second to break free from a gravity that immediately drags him under. The third to realize it is not something he wants to fight, because the fourth has him closing the distance between them to press his mouth to the curve of a neck whose warmth and scent makes something inside his chest ache in a way some ancient part of him wants to writhe against. There is not a single rational reason why he should be sharing this truth with her, and yet, for once, he does not stand behind the armor of vague indifference. “Nor I you.”

It takes only one more second, a fifth, to be reminded of why indifference is safer.

Did you know my mother is dead?

He finds himself wondering why words feel the same as steel plunged into the chasm of his dark, roiling chest. Why seven is the number of pain. Seven words, seven daggers, seven seconds and now he frays the same as Este. He doesn’t know how to mourn a thing like this, how to accept that Ryatah could ever be anything but eternal in her gentleness. It feels like war inside his chest and beneath his skin, like his bones are eroding and the marrow must be spilling itself into the depths of the Hyaline lake. He thinks he needs to come undone, to let the night explode from him until he is fragments, until he is dust, until he is nothing, because this is a truth he does not even know how to believe.

Except when he looks to Este again and finds her face turned away, he thinks, too, that it is not his turn to mourn the archangel. “I did not.” He says, and he knows his voice is too tight and too raw, that there is pain in his dark, golden eyes and in the bitter tension of his mouth. He knows that the dark spills from him until the night is roiling with black and indigo and the twinkling of stardust, that beneath the gauzy haze of his skin his bones clench to the point of breaking - and he feels sorry to ask her this, he knows that he should not force her to this place, but he needs to know, to understand. “What happened?” Because the part of him that thinks Este would not lie about a thing like this is raging all out war against the part of him that had always assumed Ryatah would be there forever.

He reaches for her again, silent when he presses her to the cool curve of his chest, when he lets his wings fall around them and wonders with a pang of darkness if Este will balk at feeling trapped by him. She should, of course, and he wouldn’t blame her for pulling away, wouldn’t stop her from doing it. But it is as though grief and confusion have scoured away the dark in him and left behind only the indigo of night, the pinprick light of distant stars, because in this moment he feels thrown back in time to place when he was still young and uncorrupt, to when he was himself yet unmade by another.

His voice is stardust, it is the twilight of late evening and the ephemera of stars when he buries his lips in the softness of her mane and says, “Tell me what you need, Este.”

He does not miss the way she armors herself behind too much tension and a building glow of light that spills from her skin like morning come undone, come too fast, come trapped beneath her skin. It chafes at his dark until he can feel the places she carves into him - every place he presses against her because he cannot stop himself, does not want to try. He won’t let her see the way she hurts him, the way even this softest of glows is enough to cleave the layers of shadow and night from the dark of his midnight bones.

He thinks this is a pain he would choose again and again.
He thinks he would choose her again and again.

When she softens in his embrace, he notices that too. A sigh of sweet summer breath against his neck, of muscles gone slack and soft and the rose-gold light drained out of her. He holds her closer now that he knows she doesn’t mind it, traces his lips along the curve of a dappled neck and over the slope of shoulders too delicate to bear the weight of these burdens she now carries. He nearly asks her if she knows why someone killed Ryatah, if she knew if there was a purpose to this murder or if it were something random, something unrelated to the archangel. He wonders, because he wonders if that same someone will try to come take another pale angel, he wonders if Este has even spared a single thought for herself.

He thinks she has not, and maybe it is only the darkness inside his chest that makes him wonder at such things. A violent possessiveness she so effortlessly keeps at a steady roil in him simmering just beneath the surface. He thinks he can be gentle for her, that he can be twilight instead of midnight, stardust instead of dark space. But he thinks that when those soft brown eyes finally find someone better to fall into, he will not be gentle for them.

He wonders where Ryatah’s body is now, wonders if anyone thought to bury her. Bury or burn or reduce to stardust. Even in death the archangel deserved more than to sit in the sun and rot. But even he knows better than to ask Este this last question, to make her think of her mothers body with its heart ripped out. “I gave her a feather made from my dark the last time I saw her.” His words are something quiet, something distant where he whispers them into the silk of her hair. “I told her to touch it if she ever needed me. I knew she wouldn’t. Even as friends we were better with distance between us. Like stars.” A wry smile, dark and full of bitter regret.

A lifetime passes in a single moment of quiet where he is lost somewhere else, thinking of an archangel he had tried to love, an archangel who had been the only one stubborn enough to stay, to befriend him. To show him the gift and the cost of letting someone in. “I hope very much that you are not like her. Not in that way.” There is sorrow in his stardust face now, but it is something he holds close and private, something he does not allow to spillover and burn the delicate girl who tastes like flowers beneath his dark lips. “From the moment I saw you here beside the lake, I had no intention of leaving.” His eyes wander over the angles of her pale face, drinking in the way it feels to have her asking him not to go, to have her lips against his neck when he is sure he does not deserve any of her affection.

He reaches for her again anyway, tracing stardust over a pair of delicate cheekbones, over lips that are the perfect shape for the way he remembers her breath catching at his touch. “I will stay until your Queen chases me out, Este. And perhaps once she does, you will have found a reason to return to Taiga with me.” His eyes are sharper now, a shade of gold made darker with a desire he buries beneath the curve of a tight smile. "It's late, little love. Where do you sleep?"

I don’t think you are.” The hint of a smile, the ghost of one as he presses his lips to that perfect brow in what could be nothing less than a kiss. “I’d like to think I am clever enough to not be here if you were.” But there is something that clenches inside his chest, a wariness as her lips trace paths over the dark and stardust of his winged shoulder, because of course he cannot know that for sure - and standing with her like this, battling against unwelcome mental comparisons he would rather banish from his thoughts, he wonders if this angel is like her mother. If she is another moment he’s mistaken for something more.

He cannot tell if it is doubt or if it is resignation, if this bruise blossoming across his chest comes from the memory of how it felt to watch Ryatah go, but he can feel it settle like stone inside his chest, like ice around a heart both unwilling and wanting to thaw. He was never meant to be someone like this, a creature carved from all it’s broken pieces. He was never meant to hide behind this cold inside his chest, behind walls where he can be safe from everything that always wants to undo him, where others will be safe from the sinister dark that lives in the space between his ribs.

He was never meant to care so much.

But when she touches her lips to his shoulder and whispers that soft confession, that desire not to be apart from him, he wishes he were the kind of man who had the strength to let her go. She deserves more than what he is, more than this creature so willing to unmake worlds for her, to crush anything that tries to keep her away from him. He knows that this trust extending from her like a golden thread must turn black and withered the moment it reaches him, but he cannot stop himself from swelling with something that feels like more than affection as his golden eyes burn against hers. It is want and it is need and it is a kind of aching gravity that he is so sure will be his undoing. He is so much less than what she needs, so much less than what she must truly want. But if for now she chooses not to see it, chooses instead to stay among his midnight and his stars and believe that he is someone worth keeping, he will not be the one to show her the lie of it.

He will be her starlight daydream of mystery and wonder, he will trace kisses over the curve of her throat as numerous as the stars that float around them. He will drown in the sound of that breathless laughter and never once need to come up for air. He knows that none of this is anything he will be able to hold onto, knows that he is fated to always be a mere moment in the ever growing ephemera of time. But when she steps away and looks up at him, and he is left stumbling from the sudden absence of her warmth, he knows that he is already caught firmly within her quiet gravity.

That he is caught willingly.
He had been from that moment she first found him in Taiga, though he hadn’t fully understood it until after she left and all his waking thoughts turned back to her.

“She should.” He says, and his face, his voice, the slack line of his mouth are all strangely blank as he watches her look up at him with wonder and confusion and a tangle of things he is not good at recognizing because he has never cared before. His face is still something a little too firm, a little too distant as he watches her with his brow half furrowed, and it takes a long moment for him to surrender again to this gravity inside his chest. To the pull and tides of her. “You’ve been on my mind since you found me in Taiga. I haven’t grown tired of you yet.” He closes the distance again, but when he reaches for her it is with a tendril of soft, star-soaked darkness he weaves through the strands of her hair. “Only of the absence of you, Este.”

It is her smile that untethers him completely, the implication in her words that makes darkness boom from him in a soundless explosion of black and indigo and the deepest blues, a watercolor cloud of gauzy star strewn night born from the softness of her eyes and the arrogance inside his chest. She has made it no secret that she thinks the night is beautiful, and so he creates this one for her, builds galaxies that swirl around them and between them as if they are standing together at the top of the world. “These stars?” He asks, and there is gravel in the quiet of his voice, amusement as he drifts close enough to touch her again. “Or?”

He’s even quieter now, but there is nothing soft about his voice even as he presses a kiss to her throat and then her neck and then the curve of her shoulder as he pauses at the place her wings would be. “I miss these, you know.” He says, brushes his teeth over the skin as he wonders if she remembers how it had felt to have his midnight tangled there. Then he smiles, something dark and amused as he reaches higher to nip at the skin along her delicate spine, his touch turning to tendrils of shadow spilling out across the ridges of her vertebrae. "As I recall, you seemed to like when I touched them." A pause as his mouth drops in an arc over her ribs, frost and midnight against the molten of rose gold dapples. "What else do you like, love."

And he wonders, dreads, delights in the moment that she realizes it is more than just a word he uses, that she is the only one he uses it for.