Work Text:
Your eyes open to the world; the same one you thought you left, the same time, at the same time. Bruised and beautiful, bright and beginning. Are you alive, or are you dead?
Does it matter?
You are gone to everything you might’ve known before, as whatever used to hold its place is gone to you too. As that’s left is this: a sky and a smile, a hand in yours in heaven, and you.
(You, who has spent the entire waxing, fluttering candle of life—one salvaged, saved, spared, sustained—in pursuit of something bigger, bolder. You, who found it only when you turned the purpose of all that is great to doing something that might simply be good. You, who loves, and who has finally found that love in return, etched into the very marrow that sits beneath the kaleidoscope upon your wrist.)
You had to sacrifice it all, and you had known from the start that he has always been everything. Yet now you wake, and he is still here. That begs another question.
What happens when you nearly lost sight of each other, at the end?
The answer: you find the love of your after-life all over again.
A second chance, another trip through space and time. After all that you have endured, in tandem and apart, why question the forces from beyond if they should choose to avert their gaze? Better yet, when faced with the illogical and unthinkable without so much as a calling dropped into waiting palms, why shouldn’t they? You have built a paradox with nothing but affection, called it paradise in your embrace of outrageous joy as you lock yourselves in and everything else out. You saved each other and now you are alone, and it is the greatest reward that has never been given.
You took time to get here and now you take again, glorious and giddy, golden between where you touch. The cosmos is neither gentle nor generous, and so you gut it of its treasures even from your throne atop a dragon’s hoard, barely stifling your giggles for every moment you liberate from fate’s design. Time and time and time again, skimmed and snatched and stolen away to your home in one another, sacred and sublime. You shield your masterpiece the way you always have, an arm held out in warning rather than a snarl upon your face, even when there are no longer any interruptions keen on prying—for who is there to fight, in this neverland that should not be? Who could even dare to question the sanctity of your place at his side, the terms and conditions of a bargain spelled in runes and signed in blood, just to be destroyed so you might lay eyes on him once more? You take your partner’s hand again with a smile, the world splayed out like a veritable feast beneath your feet, and you dance your way through the lightfall onto the next horizon.
You feel like you are alive, the absolution rooted deep in your bones. The synapses of your brain continue to fire without fail, and your eyes prove to be still capable of admiring the current of the aurora as it washes over unfailing brown waves in his hair. The necessity of sleep that used to plague your presence in the lab falls away, and rest becomes instead a luxury both of you can afford. You don’t dream the way you might have, in the Before—when words choked in your throat and everything you tried as a substitute felt wrong. The harsh dissolution between the fantasies of the subconscious and the waking hours of your strife fades into the simplicity of plain pleasure, particularly when you stir before he does and discover the absence of air has no impact on the words pouring from your mouth to his. Honey drips from your fingers and your lips, smudging slow-thick-pure-light over the surfaces of the stars and the skies and the hitch of his ribs and the curve of his hip and him, him, him. You are a monster for what you’ve done, and nobody would ever know it except for the one who grins back at you—and you know that he would never sell you out.
And you’re never once regretful. You are alive in a place of wonderful, terrifying excess, and you intend to make every second of forever count.
You think that you are also dead, for nobody could’ve survived the feat you pulled. The mere idea is madness, outlandish and vain and preposterous—except you have always thrived there, in the impractical nature of the impossible. Both of you, really, coming together again and again until destiny itself gave way to your charms, snipping and tying your threads together until they were reforged, rebound, like a pale butterfly sealed in amber, like a gilded ring upon your finger. If there had been plans for either of you before, you have slipped your way from the noose with your shadows intertwined around the corner; you haunt the world of the living with your spectre and your spirit, and eventually it comes as a shock when you realize the world haunts your ghosts too.
You turn to glance at your partner when he smiles, and there you find the warmth of the sun magnified and expanded by the exponential, echoed desperately in the beat of your long-stopped heart. You find shelter in pockets of twilight behind the brightest constellations, a nebula spinning over where you make your bed and the breeze rustling under the sound of his laugh. Then, if you care enough to follow that melody straight to the source, as you most often do every time the thought occurs, you unearth a pair of lungs growing like trees in a jungle, whole and unscathed as if they had never been felled. Your mouths will meet once more, and it is the eruption of the clouds and water-weight they carry, lighting flashing behind your eyes and thunder growling like a perished hunger you have never and will never learn to satiate. The sigh he makes is sweeter than the rush of a waterfall in the distance, accompanied by the ever-more distant memory of thirst—still desire aches so admirably in its place, and you find a pearl hidden under his tongue. It’s one that you’ve had before and one that you will discover again, and isn’t that the brilliant, beaming triumph that is your life here—that something can still happen, that it swings endlessly in motion, that it already has?
There is no moon here, only the inconceivability of infinite burning stars—blisteringly cold, already dead by the time they brush what has died in you too—and still they are so beautiful in spite of it, something blazing on behalf of what was and no longer is, collapsing into a black hole or consuming itself to a supernova in stunning cataclysm; something even more breath-taking because of its passing. You only remember the corpse of its concept because the evidence stands beside you, pale and golden-eyed, growing and changing with each new phase and ever so constant just the same. You are something inanimate now, transfixed and inert to anything other than him; and if he is the moon then you must be the tide, nature over life, made to follow him as he follows you. So on and so forth into eternity.
Are you alive, or are you dead?
You are an ouroboros, unexplored and everlasting, with no epilogue to tell where one ends and the other begins. Your chapter of research has come to a close and now you simply walk a cosmos that exists for you, because of you, a butterfly effect that goes nowhere and reaches everything. It doesn’t matter, not compared to the most crucial of results: Viktor is here, smiling at you, in awe and in love, well within your grasp every time you reach for him and more.
You hope every version of you gets to be so lucky. You know that this is not the case beyond this isolated world, and it makes you even more of a bastard because it just so happens to be yours. The depth of gratitude within you could therefore ruin someone else—someone sane, erring on the side of caution, unfamiliar with the wild delirium that staggers through you, over and over, every time you see that wry smirk twist his lips.
Are you alive, or are you dead?
(For every action, there is an equal and opposite response. Hence your appreciation is always equivalent in force to your admiration that nothing other than him will ever touch you again, the heat from this phoenix flame you’ve tended to throughout your perennial lives will protect you for the rest of your ember-ashes sentence.)
They will tell stories of you, now that you are gone. They always do, once the smoke clears and the blood is scrubbed from the cracks and the victors have been declared—and that, that is what you two are. They will talk of a war that took too many, whether they were heroes or villains or the protagonist of a choose-your-own-adventure; they will whisper of monsters that died on the fringes of the fissures, a magician and the miracles he performed, and they will marvel at the millions of half-truths that never do dissipate. You think you would almost pity them, for such a paltry experience compared to the magic you have seen, if you were not busy being so extraordinarily untroubled.
However, some—very few and even fewer over time, over distance, over their own worries and fears and attempts at recreating whatever you have found through approximate immortality, but some—will also talk of love, and how it saved the world. Half a lifetime spent in devotion to invention and legacy, and you have cleared the ledger and erased the board, rewritten the facts in every fleeting moment and memory. Now and then, they will speak of two partners, within the laboratory and so far from it too; as you have chosen, as is the truth, and even that won’t be exactly what you weathered. Nobody will ever know what you have done for each other, and it is the most freeing thing of all.
Because they will get it wrong, and you have gotten so much more right.
You live or you’ve died or you are something—a wish granted, a god, a given truth worked into the universe—in exchange and in between, but you are happy. You are together.
And you are complete.