and i guess i just wanted to tell you***
*******as the light begins to fade
that you are the reason*****
***that i am not afraid
and i guess i just wanted to mention***
***as the heavens will fall
that we will be together soon***
***if we will be anything at all
He still dreams of her. Every night.
“Did you remember th—”
She was stopped short by the arc-light placed in the hand she’d lifted in question. When she looked up Cian was smiling pleasantly, having answered the question before she’d been able to finish it.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, a smile in kind tugging at the corners of her mouth. Running her tongue along the inside of her cheek, she considered the little golden device in her hands. Their kind had been building galaxies since time immemorial, and only for the last twenty thousand years or so had they popularized the idea of an arc-light. For as long as Kipcha had been alive – perhaps fifteen thousand years, give or take a few centuries – Celestials had used the little guiders. They acted somewhat like a compass: place them on the ground, switch them on, and use their piercing beam to guide your energies towards the spot in which you’d rip through time to open a new galaxy.
“You want to try without it,” Cian said, speaking her thoughts. They were long, long past the point of searching for each other. She lived in his head, and he in hers. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they had created one space.
“I think we can,” she answered, a nod and a tilt of the head classed by a grin as she put the arc-light back in her bag. The breeze tangled through the leaves of the brilliantly green weeping-pagoda tree, its branches hovering over them and shifting to reveal the stars above their heads. They were dozens of miles out of the city, the air clean, the world quiet.
“I do enjoy a challenge,” Cian murmured in response, hands on either side of her face as he pulled her in to kiss her. Her body sang to the hum in his throat when she curled around him. She might have stayed there forever had they not broken apart at the same moment to step out from under the cover of the tree towards the center of the field they’d chosen to work in. They settled about ten feet apart from each other, crickets chirping at their feet in protest of the disturbance of their night.
“Ladies first,” he offered over the small distance, wearing as serene an expression as always despite feeling overwhelmed by her, by features he always found almost painful to look at for too long.
“You’re just afraid it won’t work if you try first,” she teased, a jest that lost most of its shock since he would know automatically she was joking. But she started pulling from the air around her, her center of gravity starting to feel heavier as she anchored herself to the earth for the beginning of their ritual. The crickets went silent, hopping away through their forest of grass to give the Creators as wide a berth as possible.
“I just like to watch you work,” he said in her head, the sensation of affection, his hands on her, the send-off for the light that bloomed from her palms as she raised them towards the night-sky. Her stomach was heavy with her grappling to hold on to the ground as the rift started to split between stars, but almost as soon as she felt on the verge of being flattened he joined her. Working together there was no need for gravity as they could keep each other in a perfect circle around the widening rift. As his power combined with hers, she let go of her transparent tether and they both left the ground – a perfect weightlessness.
Something like lightning crackled around the widening hole in the sky as they drifted towards it, using the Force to push each other in small increments, maintaining an easy swinging loop. It was impossible to talk this way – distance alone made that decision, but the concentration required was incredible. In minutes they would imagine an entire galaxy, thousands of star systems, give it the tools to become something incredible. For thousands and thousands and thousands of centuries, Celestials had been opening wormholes and creating galaxies. First, they would build. Second, they would close the rift they’d just made and – much like burying a seed of unknown origin in the dirt – let it grow for a few thousand years. Third, they would come back and reopen the same rift and see what had grown: new species, interesting flora, all new kinds of chemical compounds – in a nutshell, resources. Then, they would reap every single planet that had grown in to something beautiful, that held anything of value, to bring back to their homeworlds and use for themselves. Once they’d taken everything they could find, they destroyed the things they’d built and close the rift again. Worlds created and snuffed out in instants.
They didn’t need to speak. Drifting in orbit around the tear in space, they closed their eyes, drawing and painting, making music, pouring creativity in to some space they couldn’t truly see until they came back in a few centuries to peel back the cover. But it was always beautiful. He knew her notes before she sang them, her fingers over his for a brilliant dash of red across the canvas.
When they are done, it is one last effort to sew the hole and close it. It lingers as they drift back down towards the ground, a scar burned darker than the blue of the night. They both end up on their backs in the grass, legs tangled, watching the scar dissolve and fade as their new galaxy was born.
“We will come back in 3,000 years,” he suggested. Kipcha nodded, her head resting on his shoulder, a hand on his chest to feel the slow beating of his heart.
“And what if someone tries to take it?” she asked. Celestials went to war over particularly prosperous galaxies, fighting and killing each other for the rights to the precious things born out of another’s creation. She did not truly fear such an event – she just liked his answer whenever she asked.
“Then we will stop them, and we will take everything they created,” he answered, an icy edge serrating his usually neutral tone. He was fiercely protective of the things they’d made together.
She turned her head, placing her hand on his shoulder and resting her chin on it as she looked at him.
“I love you.”
Every night.
The sweet ones are rare.
Most nights he dreams of her disappearing. He imagines her dissolving in his arms, just whipping away in the air in front of him, melting to nothing and soaking in to the earth they'd once built from. He has tried for a thousand nights and more to keep her there but she always leaves.
Not by choice.
He misses her more than anything he has ever known.
He can't build anything without her.
CIAN
