[FTB] love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra;

[Acton]

 


Even in the brittle grip of winter, Amare Creek wasn’t as cold as the heart of Solterra. Not this year, when the gods returned and set to collecting souls and punishing those who remained.
 
Already he can’t remember what excuses they’d made, to slip away here like giggling yearlings while the rational world ground to a halt. There was a girl beside him with a gaze that made his heart catch in his throat, colored a gold that pharaohs would demand to be buried with; what other way could he possibly want to spend the end of the world?   
 
The last time he’d come here, also in winter, he’d met a strange girl with ribs like barrel-slats and eyes like wells, who had asked him about death. She seemed hungry in general, but starving especially for that – to be killed, to be ended. Acton had never met anybody like her, for whom madness seemed not a question but a foregone conclusion. When he glanced at the river, sleek with ice, he saw her in it, pale as a wedding-dress or a bleached bone, saying the water was no water but blood.
 
Best not to think of that now.
 
But the girl had been right about this: his hands were hardly clean, any more than Bexley’s were. What sins had they yet to commit?
 
For the first time other than that first time, they were truly alone – no brother-Crow, no crowd gathered in a fire-lit market or a flower-strewn festival, no assembly of devout or devoted just out of sight, as at the Summit. 
 
Just a boy and a girl who seemed to enjoy what it felt like, to burn and be burned in kind.
 
Still the bare limbs of the trees leaned above them, and the river laughed beneath its veil of ice, and birds sang even in the winter. Acton paid none of these any mind; his gaze was still too full of gold.
 
“If you were a god,” he asked languidly, smiling as he traced his lips along the curve of her spine, “what would you create?”
 
Ah, but there was the second part of the question, unspoken (perhaps even unthought – but then again, likely not, not for such as him), hovering like the cloud of his breath in the cold.
 
If you were a god, Bexley Briar, what would you destroy?






@Bexley LET'S MAKE A BABY

I know the good die young
so let's let it pass, let's grow old and wither

[Bexley]

I loved him (i think) -
stupid lamb in a slaughterhouse

❀

Of course it would be around him, that her magic came back.

Already as they find their way into the Creek she can feel the ebb and flow of the power coming back like so much glitter in the veins, like the song she has been singing into the void is now, in the voice of white noise, singing back to her.

It feels good.

She says nothing of it at first. It would be better, she thinks, or at least safer, not to stroke his ego with the idea that that gift was his to hold. But as they walk and walk, the newfound energy starts to burn a pit in her stomach, she can feel it buzzing oh-so-loud under her skin, blooming floral under her skin,  and when has she ever been strong around him, anyway, or found the energy not to give up the gun - well, it’s not like starting now would make a difference.  

Predictable as ever glitter begins to glow over her skin, new heat wafts off her in waves; as they walk she tosses little balls of white-yellow sparks up into the air, letting them float a few feet upward, then quashes them again with casual ease; under the gothically bare branches the two of them shine extra-warm, extra-bright. (As is their talent.)

"If I were a god," Bexley repeats, and humor glimmers in the weight she puts on the first word: when she meets the amber of his eyes her expression is as dangerous as it can be without becoming uncanny. Still she shivers at the ghost-touch of his lips on her skin. Still this want feels like a novelty, and as she leans int this touch it is only possessiveness that keeps her anxious about how long any of this will last before it comes crumbling down.

What a mortal worry.

"What makes you think I’m not one already?"

CREDITS

[Acton]

 


At first he thought the warmth was just the two of them, the heat of bodies side-by-side – but quickly enough it became apparent that was not the case.

Like her he said nothing (also like her, he thought his companion’s ego needed no further encouragement – what a match they made) but he was glad of the heat, and pressed nearer to her side, so every couple steps their shoulders or hips brushed. So he could feel the warmth roll off of her.

More than that he was glad for her, the way her skin glitters like sunlight on snow in the desert, the way the gleam picked up, too, in her eyes. As she tossed up those spheres of energy, sizzle and spark, his gaze traced their arc – but if he thought of his own magic, his own magician’s tricks, he said nothing of it.

He had not played to a crowd in a long time, now, and there were more pressing interests to him than even his own true magic.

If, she began, and already that crooked grin bloomed on his lips at the mere promise of the word. It lingered through the rest of the question she directed back at him, as full of spark as one of her electric spheres, but Acton laughed and shook his head.

“If you were a god I’d be dead,” he said, and his mane was a black cloud against hers, the antithesis to her white-gold. “And I doubt I’d be the only one.” Were he anyone else, he might think it was a frightening idea, Bexley Briar as Divine – she would be an Old Testament ruler, all retribution and rage. Blood and floods and ashes-to-ashes.

Though that wasn’t so different from now, after all.

This thought slimmed his grin into something leaner and he appraised her with his tinder-flint eyes, burning now with a slower kind of heat. The slant of his mouth is still amused, but there was little light-hearted about his breath on her throat, his white teeth at her ear.

“If, though,” he said, still playing along with his voice smoke-thick and low, “how would you have me pray?”

Acton has never been the religious type – not even now, when the gods cast shadows and brought down destruction, sure as anything in any old story – but that in no way meant he didn’t know how to worship.

Even he could play at holy, if she wanted him on his knees.





@Bexley 

all the gun fights
and the lime lights
and the holy sick divine nights

[Bexley]

I loved him (i think) -
stupid lamb in a slaughterhouse

❀

If you were a god I’d be dead, and where Bexley should laugh or smirk or respond with some quip she almost falls silent, the smile dropping quietly off her face, the warmth in her chest slipping away as she thinks with somewhat more seriousness about how wrong he is: it almost makes her soft.

If she were a god there would be no space left between them, no vast miles separating Denocte and Solterra. If she were a god, the rest of the world would be dead, not him. If she were a god, there would be nothing left outside the two of them and the heat they make, and the universe would be quiet but for the way he breathes against her skin, as simple and awful as any one feeling can be: even the too-casual bump of hip to hip or shoulder to shoulder ratchets the heat in her stomach up to a forest fire, sets the magic-buzzing under her skin to a crackle of real electricity, not that he has any right to know that.

Anyway. If she were God he would be Isaac. Death does not become him.

Above them the elm trees sway so many shades of gray, and in their shadow she and Acton are their own gods, their own art, two hateful things painted into the heart of love. His breath, hot against the weakest part of her throat, turns the already too-loud panting of her heart so intense it beats a tattoo against her brain. The steel of his eyes is nothing against her ice.

"How do you think," comes Bexley’s reply, and the easiness of it would be convincing but for the way her voice breaks at the end, fading and falling and stumbling all over again.

Simmering with heat so potent it bleeds into the air around them, she leans closer and shudders slightly at the scrape of his teeth. How to pray: pain, gold, pomegranates. Sacrifice above all else. "I’d ask you to say it out loud, that you worshipped me."

She raises her head a little, opens the soft part of her throat to eating. The river, just beyond them, rushes as loudly as it ever has, and above that she hears her own heart, feral and lusty.

CREDITS

[Acton]

 


He’d expected a laugh; a flash of neat white teeth, another joke about smiting. It was what they’d been, before – a game of chicken that never ended, bodies that sought again and again to crash. Shattering glass was the best sound in the world.

But the solemnity in her expression reminded him that they’d been a different kind of danger to each other lately. Once brash as lions, they slunk soft-footed again and again to some new truth. Could he speak it here, in a place far holier (to such as him) than any god-walked mountain?

At last she spoke, and it was easy (this, at least, was always easy) to smile.

“Bexley Briar,” he said, thick as incense and rough as sackcloth, a testament in a name, “I haven’t been able to think straight since I met you. That’s more than I can say for any god.” Beyond them the snow-fed stream ran on and on, and Acton couldn’t care less if it carried his words to the world or drowned them in its noise.

Until there came the rough-throated call of a crow, black against bare branches, familiar enough to make him lift his head.

“Even now,” he added, and there was something like unease in his tone as his gaze slid over her shoulder and back to the east, where clouds lay piled above both their courts. It was a dark wall as formidable as the Raven Gate and for a moment the worry that settled like a stone in his heart was stronger even than the want.

But then he inhaled once more the sweet-wild scent of her and turned his face away like Lot, to bury his muzzle instead in her mane and occupy his electric nerves with a different kind of devastation.




@Bexley 

how we kiss and kill each other

[Bexley]

I loved him (i think) -
stupid lamb in a slaughterhouse

❀

It is a crime to be so terribly soft. It is an ugly thing, that the beating of her heart is so awfully emphatic. For the first time the steel of her bones, the iron of her blood, is not strong enough to withstand her heart - the emotional seasickness that washes over her as she watches him with those bright, bright eyes, luminous, extortionate, nothing but a vessel for roses and gold.

There is nothing funny about this any more. Bexley cannot laugh at the way he watches her, or the subtle, religiously dissolute tilt of his mouth. The shiver that crawls up her spine is supernatural now. Utterly humorless. Even now, he says, and she does not turn over her shoulder to look where his gaze lands, because she feels the snow and the rain and the salt of the earth even without watching it.

She does not say a word about it.

Instead she moves closer to grief, to the inevitable crash-and-burn of their zenith. In a hundred years the earth will not remember them and yet it embraces them so tenderly - in the quiet crystal water and the watchful hugging of low branches overhead, in the way the world around them sings with silence, silver, sweetness.

What words would be useful, anyway?

She leans against him, nervous, stumbling, and forces the simmer of her skin to lower to a more human kind of heat. Well, says Bexley finally, her voice catching on the roughness of it. That sounds like you spitting out a prayer. I’m impressed -

And, godly, reverent, she keeps her visions to herself, falls into his arms though she can see how it ends, in death, in fire, in a body left alone, but for now they are both innocent and arrogant and when she feels his heartbeat against hers it is all she can think about.

CREDITS

[Acton]

 


In a hundred years there might be no earth to remember. Hell, all of it – from the crashing sea to the wailing wind at the final summit Veneror – could be vanished tomorrow. If the last months in Novus had taught him anything (and Acton had proven himself a slow learner, lately) it was all the things he’d thought so certain were no more real than his own illusions.

It was freeing, in a way.

She could burn him up now with the power in her veins – an offering of blood, of smoke, of flesh – and he wouldn’t mind. He might not even notice, so intent is he on the way their bodies fit and don’t, all that space that had yawned between them closed up like a stitched wound.

There was no way she could see the crooked smile that bloomed when she spoke, but maybe she could feel it against the smooth curve of her neck. Certainly she could feel his teeth, delicate, attentive, working to earn a shiver from her that had nothing to do with the winter around them.

When he laughed it was little more than a warm breath against the bright gold of her coat. “Impressed? With me? Maybe the world is ending.”

There was more he could say (it is Acton, after all; there was always more he could say), but for once he had no interest in words.

Acton did not think of an ending. They had already had fire, and a kind of death, a body abandoned to blood and dust – what was the worst that could happen, now?

It was not the future he thought of, then, but the woman in front of him. He made a study of her with all the intent and care he once gave to learning a new trick, as beneath the bare branches their bodies melted to nothing more than heat and burnished gold.





@Bexley 

these violent delights have violent ends

[Bexley]

I loved him (i think) -
stupid lamb in a slaughterhouse

❀

She shivers at the touch of his teeth, at the way the world is quiet around them but for the now shuddering, ratcheting sounds of her breath. Not for the first time the closeness of their bodies makes her want to stumble and die: it turns the blood in her veins to a living fire, sends a vicious shudder up her spine, and the blue of her eyes, finally, finally, melts from ice to the violence and beauty and undisturbed depth of an entire ocean.

I guess it is, Bexley answers, and her voice is hoarse but not unsure.

The world is ending. This is a fact as much as anything can be - that the world is ending, and close to it, too. She is in love and utterly stupid, and the literal, physical world around them is ending too, a maelstrom of fire and lightning and godly rage, and none of it matters, not really, under this sky and its lariat of stars.

So she leans into him, and does not argue with the way he kisses her, like someone who might actually love her back.

CREDITS