Declination

By The Queen of Blueberry Toast


They were far still from the voice of the city, but he smelled the ash from 
her shores already- a fine heat tickling his lips long after the sun set and 
the sky turned the color of crows' feathers.  He could sense the busy streets 
even over the caress the rain threatened in the east; feel the metallic pulse 
through the stone-shot plains where his tiny fire burned in the coffer of a 
dead mulberry bush.

Once the flames died, he would have nothing else to sate them with until dawn.  
He couldn't leave his burden there in the halo of crackling light- he had neither 
the strength of body nor enough mettle in his heart to rise.

Zack sighed, and blew a wisp of his hair from his cheek, for the wind had carried 
it there amid the sparks it shook from the fire.  Nothing else close by to where 
he sat caught alight.

"...but I wouldn't be that lucky, would I, old buddy?"

In the nest he had made of Zack's sprawled legs, Cloud cooed and mumbled to 
himself.  The thin, phosphorescent glow his eyes cast through the dimness his 
companion put out with a touch of his palm; closed his eyes and held his mouth 
shut as he rocked him back and forth a little to the beat of his heart where it 
echoed in the empty air.  

"Yeah, I know it's no fun.  I know, Cloud.  I know.  Don't fuss.  We'll get to 
Midgaard soon, and I'll take you to meet that pretty girl I was tellin' you about.  
Man, she's a trip.  She's like a goddess that they usedta have b'fore Shin-ra came 
and tore up all the old shrines."

Cloud only sighed as if he dozed, though the tremors in his fingers pressed so 
tight into Zack's trousers named him quiet awake

"That means she'll probably want us both.  You OK with sharin' a girl? 'cause t' 
tell ya the truth, there's nobody else in the whole world I think I'd rather let 
have a little of Aeris.  Even if it JUST might just to seem like it's YOU gettin' 
shared."

Though he sought no answer, he gave his companion a calm and wicked grin.  One of 
Zack’s hands shot out after a handful of lit ash that the fire gave up to the moans 
in the rustling dells.  

"But you knew that, huh?"

The boy's face lingered an impassive little shade between his knees, even as he 
pulled his fingers through his hair- it was lustrous and dry as the coat of a 
sickly, newborn kitten, and Cloud's face, despite the summer heat, chill and 
bloodless beneath his fingers.

Zack shook his head at no one in particular and stripped off his cloak.  It fell 
over his companion's shoulders, and together they collapsed as close to the space 
scorched in the ground beside them as Zack dared carry them.  Above the swell of 
hot music in his bones, the electric symphony between dusk and the first tears of 
dawn, the voices no one belonged to... the stars roamed unattended by their 
mistress's watery gaze.  Hundred of them.  Thousands of sparks above them in the 
dark vault.  The flames at their side lent only the faintest dimness to murder of 
white hot ashes there. 

He crossed his arms behind his head, and drew Cloud to him, the boy's head tucked 
securely at his side so those vacant eyes faced the teeming tinder up above.  

"You see that?" he said, pointing somewhere towards the east, "That's the Ancient 
at the Hearth, or it was, before the church decided it was the messiah.  Above her, 
that crescent there? That's Ge, god of all earthly concerns.  You can kinda make 
outta drake, right there over that hill, but his tail's passed the horizon."

Cloud gurgled, and closed his eyes a second.  Zack feared he might have gotten 
something in them, but before his touch neared, the lashes flew open.  
"Ohhhhh..." said Cloud.

So he went on. 

"And then, we can see the keys to heaven's gate right over our heads.  That's Terra's 
Lance though the loop they're on..." He laughed.  "Well, whaddya know? The Goddess.  
She's faint- can you see her?"

Nothing came to him- no insects stealing over his arms, though now and then, despite 
that their time had long since passed, he could catch their answers to his fire in 
the bowers of dead grass; no answer; and no vision of the girl he had left in the 
city so long ago.  How old was she by now? He didn't know, didn't try to figure it 
out.  Didn't try to sleep.

"She'll love you.  Just like I love you."

So to keep himself awake, he warmed his hands close to the cradle of the flames, and 
ran then over Cloud's loins, over and over, until the boy seemed warm at last, and the 
fire crashed somewhere deep inside itself.