Chapter Text
He’s trying to find Fabian in the dark, his golden eyes nothing but blips in the dark, picking up no color but shades of grey. It’s the perfect metaphor really, this simple confession of his turning into an unmitigated disaster.
And Fabian is just up ahead of him, looking as lost and bewildered as he is. His eyes might not pick up any color, but Riz knows for a fact that he can overlay the exact shades to fill in what the darkness has taken. He knows the different shades of Fabian through the seasons, knows how dazzling and brilliant he is in splendor and victory, and how the very same lightness can be stolen from him at a moment’s beat, the mere lack of it in Fabian’s person inherently wrong.
It’s different here, Riz senses, a stillness absent in almost all of their misadventures.
When Fabian stands up, Riz’s eyes track the motion, something ethereal and otherworldly in the complete absence of Fabian’s usual bright palette of clothes, the fire engine red of his Aguefort letterman jacket is reduced to just another shade of grey, the dark denim of his jeans washes out to something darker. It should be impossible for someone to radiate light in this pitch-black pit, but it’s here where Fabian seems to glow with unbearable lightness, the silver of his hair a bright halo around his head.
He looks like one of the saints painted in stained-glass churches, heroic and heavenly in their legacies, and when the sun shines their colors are loud and riotous, embedding in Riz a sense of faith and longing, and for a moment he suddenly feels sympathy for Kristen. In the presence of gods and all-powerful deities in the world they live in, how awe-inspiring is it to behold something so mortal and other-worldly at the same time?
Riz boxes the moment and resolves to add this on the ever growing board he has set up for Fabian in his mind, all these moments all stringed together into this unidentifiable mess in Riz’s chest, messy and unanswered in the wake of the chaos they wrought. Fabian turns to him, that same unbearable lightness of his person turned and hyper-focused at Riz, making him squint to try and protect his eyes from the luminosity. Riz likens it to the sun bearing down on him in its intensity, harsh and golden. He desperately wonders at how he must look right now, a mere fool blinding himself by staring directly at the sun.