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.