"My heart is not in my throat.
It is pounding too hard,
secure in my chest,
no, the weight at the back of my throat
is not my heart."

Tell me your bad dreams and I will build you a man.

Tell me the things you love and hate and I will build you a man.

Tell me how all this, and everything else, matters very little when you are screaming at the void so hard your lungs pop and deflate like so many balloons on so many birthdays.

Paint him in like a thing out of a time, like a thing with a heavy head.
Paint him in like a falling star.

Paint him back out so you can forget his name and his wolf smile, his wild eyes like a trapped animal. Try to remember what it was. Try to forget what it was. None of it matters when you're screaming at the void.

He is the falling star, a thing out of time, a thing displaced. Andras is not conscious or at least not lucid. He has not been--conscious or lucid--since before... well, before. This does not change just because the crust of some other strange planet is rushing up to take him, to kiss his bones into dust and answer all of his impossibly morbid questions about death and dying with one clear, clangorous sentence: it is going to hurt.

He wakes just before the broken bones, tumbling and aching and he can't pinpoint what direction up is, just knows he has to find it. All the animal instinct Andras has left is begging him to live, live, live, here at the end. It does not need to yell for long.

There is the distinct sensation of suction, the loud crack of thunder as the air around him is suddenly pushed out of place. And then: light and color and silence. All around him is a black so dark it sings and the distinct, awful smell of stars expanding and collapsing and being born over and over again just as he is sure he is being born over and over and over again. Andras doesn't remember losing consciousness a second time but it must have happened.

Or, at the very least, he knows that he closes and opens his eyes and nothing happens. He closes and opens his eyes again, and is standing in a snowy plain surrounded by the stink of buffalo far older than he is, and a pounding in his head that he can hear over the meager but milling crowd. His first thought is "fuck this."

Paint in the bruises, paint in the seething and sizzling under his skin. Paint in the stern frown like your father used to give you and you have made some abomination that calls itself a man but not a man itself.

Andras takes off his glasses and brushes them gently with the tip of one ink-black feather.
His second thought, one that he says aloud: "Fine, I guess."

"My heart is not in my throat.
It is pounding too hard,
secure in my chest,
no, the weight at the back of my throat
is not my heart."

There is a buzzing in his head, an endless motion like a milling crowd. He stands at its center and each tongue around him is speaking abuse in another language, another leaf turned over to reveal a raw and bleeding underside. He is, in his quintessence, the raw and bleeding underside. There inside him the bells are still ringing and time after time they toll to the ryhthm of some funeral dirge he doesn't remember, some boxing match that left everyone bloody and no one victorious.

Such is existence at the bottom of the pit.
Such is screaming at the void.

Paint out all the scenery and make it white, so white it burns your eyes -- so white that the bleached bones laid out somewhere in the sun (a trophy, maybe? or another senseless tragedy,) grow bitter with envy and crumble to dust. Think that somewhere in the back of your crackling mind there is the inclination, to flee or to fight, and you have forgotten altogether how to do one of them. Bring this thought to the forefront for later -- it is going to be important -- and think instead: wow, it is cold.

Somewhere in the background, a drop of water that hisses and dissipates as it lands in the pot of his anger. Somewhere in the background, the steam of breath and the soft crunch of snow underfoot. Andras wheels around to see her, Sabine, and does not see much but the deliberate stride and the tense line of her neck and knows like he knows few other things that she is, in a word, tormented. He silently prays that once, just once, he could perhaps be remade into something that makes sense, something that is not saddled with rage and made to carry it night and day. He thinks that no matter what strain is put upon this mare (the thought: magic never crosses his mind, never even begins to, but the thought: panic is close enough, considering--) he would trade it for his body that he feels sometimes must be mostly bile and teeth set on edge.

So, fine.
Fine. Andras will go to the girl. Andras will open his wings, push himself into the air, and glide the short distance that has opened up between them.

Andras will say, not unkindly but through clenched teeth, "You gonna be okay, bud?" As he lands, the little black horse tucks his wings against his side. Somewhere else, several more drops of water into the frying pan. He will smooth his own hackles if he has to.