 The stars were shining brightly overhead, a shower of diamonds strewn haphazardly across the purple velvet of the night sky; I could not see them. Slick with sweat in spite of the bitter chill, each movement scorching my muscles afresh, I staggered half-delirious across the steppe. I was angry and didn’t understand why. I had to get away – I didn’t understand that either.
The earth unfolded before me like cubist’s nightmare: pitching wildly in every direction and smeared at the edges. The ground beneath my hooves seemed eager to slither away and cast me into the abyss. I wanted to turn out the contents of my stomach onto the virgin snow, but of course I could not.
I hurt.
It wasn’t a good hurt. I could not revel in my suffering as I had done before dear Althea, my bruised and bloodied flesh a resounding triumph. This pain grew inside me like a hungering cold, poisoning my mind and thickening my blood to the very knife edge of unconsciousness. I could not escape into my memories; I could only drag myself onward.
Exhaustion seemed almost a breathing thing, setting its claws deeper in my spine with every ragged gasp, every labored step I took. It felt like I’d run for days, and yet I knew I had managed perhaps twenty paces beyond the basin’s border on my own power. I gritted my teeth.
Even now, I did not fear death. Beneath the roiling agony and the panic and the vertigo and the world-swallowing fatigue, the basest part of me knew that I might die tonight. It knew, accepted, and felt nothing. What it – and therefore I – could not accept was dying here, abandoned on a flat frozen slab far too reminiscent of ‘home’.
I didn’t want to face the darkness alone.
My strength gave out; I toppled forward with my next step, legs suddenly a disobedient tangle as I half-caught myself on a knee before landing heavily on my side. The frozen ground against my cheek seemed to quench the fires raging in my brain. I chanced a glimpse skyward and immediately regretted it.
All the stars were bleeding.
@[Gabriel]
"Afraid of decision, I buried my finer feelings in the depths of my heart and they died there."
All the stars were shining down – but there was no sign of his.
Perhaps they'd finally wandered too far into a new climate, and the heavens above them had turned and wheeled and become unrecognizable. Gabriel hoped it was so. He couldn't bear it if it was anything else.
He'd waited for it, searched for it, here in the cold where his breath didn't quite fog, where he knew he would come, sooner or later. They weren't made for jungles, either of them. They were made for places like this, for cold and the clarity that came with it, for headlong runs down scree slopes, for the best view of the stars.
How did he find him? If he thought on this night again – and god knew he would, a day, a season, a lifetime from now and every moment in between – he would know the answer no more than he did tonight. The red stallion didn't believe in fate, and so it must have been luck that lead him, half-shivering under the sky, to the particular acre of pebbled and frozen ground that Konstantin lay on.
At first it was not sight that alerted him, but a whiff of scent on the pristine air that lifted his head, flared his nostrils. For a moment he thought, travel-weary and alone as he was, that it was just a trick of memory, some synapse in the brain, but he knew that couldn't be right. The only times Kostya had smelled of such despair were in Gabriel's private nightmares.
His heart thundered, pushing blood through the breakdown of veins like a flood of fire, but all he felt was cold as he searched, following the scent like a precious silver thread until he could hear labored breathing. He could do nothing but look – and there he was, a shadow moving among shadows, his coat duller than it should have been regardless of travel, of living as a wildling, a patch of black deeper than the black around him, like his body had swallowed the light.
“Kostya, he said, though his voice was nothing more than the crumbling of stone into the sea; “Kostya,” but it was nothing more than a frozen whisper snatched away by a breeze.
And he pressed his dark muzzle to the younger stallion's throat, breathed wet and warm against his cheek. There was fear flaring up in him, a fear he thought might swallow him whole.
Behind that would come anger.
But now, with his heart not in his throat but lying inert before him, he could only kneel beside the stallion, could only press cheek to shoulder, could only breath him in, the familiarity and the sudden wrongness of him.
And what would the stars see? – but two wanderers, bent in supplication, red as blood and black as death.
gabriel
Wake up, I said to myself, echoing the hour of my birth, adrift in a turbulent sea of shadow and light. You cannot dream forever. Time was meaningless: my memories ran into one another like melted wax, and every terror, every exquisite embrace dissolved in perfect silence before me like burning parchment.
Kostya.
Was this death? How long had I lain there watching as my entire life was unmade? Already the universe seemed somehow darker, uglier, and some eldritch abomination clawed for purchase at the back of my consciousness as though it meant to drag me into the abyss once and for all.
Kostya.
It reached out, the draconian heat of its breath cascading over my skin, and sank its smoldering teeth into the meat of my shoulder.
---
I came to with a horrified gasp.
The stars burned as brightly as ever in defiance of the creeping darkness around my heart, and by their light I could make out the blurred silhouette of a figure, its face shrouded in impenetrable blackness. I narrowed my eyes at it, uncomprehending – then, naturally, I panicked.
Throwing myself gracelessly upright as though Fire himself had come to end me, I managed a flurry of precarious steps before flattening my ears at the would-be assassin and hissing, “Von!” Blood rushed out of my head and into my hooves in one sickening wave. After a long, dizzying moment, my star-scorched pupils at last began to adjust, and a deeper red seemed to seep out of the very shadows of his flesh. My eyes widened.
“Gabriel?”
The word burst from my lips in a cathartic rush, and I dropped to one knee again before catching myself on trembling, burning legs.
“You...you....” I could barely have spoken even if I’d known what to say. Swallowing, fearful even now that he might evaporate into the blackness from which he had woken me, I simply held his gaze and managed a timid, broken chuckle.
"Afraid of decision, I buried my finer feelings in the depths of my heart and they died there."
It felt like years until he spoke.
Gabriel could see that the black stallion was alive: there was the irrefutable proof before him, the rise and fall of ribs he knew as well as he knew the hills of his homeland, and loved far more. There was his breath, tiny clouds of steam that curled and disappeared on the air. There was the roll of his eye beneath the velvet-soft lid, the warmth that bled from his body. All these things and yet the red stallion felt a fear he'd never felt in his life, not when worlds crumbled around him or demons asked after his soul.
Before he woke, there was time to do a brief, gentle examination, one where Gabriel found no physical wounds. There was just that smell, the feel of something off that made his stomach curdle, but he could find no blood. He shivered, he waited, he stood guard over the young stallion.
Then the gasp came, the lurch of Kostya's body, and Gabriel could only step back and watch, heart pounding as if to alert him again of its presence. He did not move as the dark stallion retreated, threatened him with flattened ears and a word hissed in his native tongue. He only waited, neck bowed, eyes dark, until he heard his name.
He stepped forward when Kostya stumbled, their eyes not leaving one another, not until Gabriel closed his to breath deep into the younger stallion's tangled mane.
“Me,” he said softly, and there was exhausted relief in his voice – but something below it, too, “is not the issue right now.”
We've got to stop meeting like this, he might have said, or something else half-serious and half-hysterical, but he did not. Maybe later, when Kostya stood steady and whole beside him, his sense of humor would be coaxed forward. But not now, not when Gabriel's heart still sat in his throat like a stone he couldn't swallow.
“Are you alright?” and that was the important question, wasn't it, even though the answer was blatantly clear, wobbling unsteadily before him; but there, on the heels of it, he asked the other: “Who did this?”Because he knew, knew at the core of him that was by turns hot as fire and cold and hard as ice, that the answer was a 'who' and not a 'what'.
And then, angry with himself for pushing questions on him but knowing the importance of the answer, he asked, “Where is Sasha?” Because even though he would never understand, not fully, the significance and magnitude and gravity of the bond between the two of them, he knew of it, just as he knew he would always be of secondary importance.
gabriel
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