Work Text:
1.
You meet them in a crowded bar in a city neither of you are from. They shine, effervescent like they’re the sun and moon and stars all in one, and you are just a satellite caught in their orbit. It’s immediate, this sense of reading their soul like yours have always known each other. It feels like home and a promise and a thousand things at once.
You kiss later in the alleyway outside the bar with their wings cloaking around the both of you, and you don’t know if you’ve ever felt this safe in your life.
2.
(You meet them for the first time a couple thousand years before that, though you don’t know it. The two of you have always been an eternal dichotomy, you, unbridled flame, fuel and light and passion, and them, the force that keeps you in check, maintains the balance. Your souls have been tangled together for far too long, dancing a waltz for eternity in slow, careful measures. You two have lived a thousand lifetimes together, and will live a thousand more after this, because in the end it always comes down to you and them and the stars.)
3.
They spend too much time sitting on your shitty couch in Tartarus one summer, drinking bad coffee and laughing. You’re both still so young in these bodies, curious and youthful and full of a little too much hope. They always complain about the heat, but you both know there’s only affection behind it.
That winter you spend too much time curled up with them on their bed in Chicago, the chill finding its way in through the brick of the firehouse no matter how hard you try or how close you get. It’s okay, though, because you’re there to hold them after a bad shift.
4.
You send letters like lifelines, tying you together like a telephone made out of soupcans. You send and receive one at least once a week, words filled with prose and perfection, with horror and hatred, with virtues and violence.
They’re filled with arguments and jokes with sharp edges and heaping piles of love. You keep every one you ever get in a dented shoe box under your bed, with a knot across it just in case. They laugh when they find it one day, but give you the tenderest kiss imaginable in return, smiling as wide as a thousand burning suns.
5.
The streets of Chicago are raining fire, and you have to follow it through a radio a thousand miles away. You don’t know if they’re alright or even alive and you’re nearly sick with worry.
It isn’t until 3 days later when they finally return your dozen phone calls. They’re crying; heaving, rattling sobs, and it takes everything in you to not book a flight to Chicago right then and there, and you end up doing it anyways a week later, when they phone you crying for the fifth time in as many days.
6.
You get told about the great return before they do, because the gods of the underworld pull you into a meeting and inform you in a dramatic fashion only beings who have lived a few thousand millennia too long can achieve. That is to say: they throw a party.
Tyreek finds out through the rosters being posted, and you know this because they phone you in angry tears. The omission of you mentioning you knew feels like a lie, and it’s bitter and corrosive. Instead you just let them rage, and don’t say anything until years later a thousand miles deep.
7.
That first season you almost exclusively see each other in airport lobbies. It’s stolen moments in between layovers and lukewarm cups of coffee and not nearly enough sleep. It’s whispered phone conversations so you don’t wake any of your teammates up, and it’s too many words that go unsaid because neither of you have the energy. It’s the fiery hot tears that run down your face in frustration when they don’t answer the phone and the guilt you feel later because the reason they didn’t was that they were getting sleep for once.
8.
The last night the two of you truly have together is the eve of the first election, and it’s you and them in your apartment in Tartarus, intertwined in your sheets with no clue of what is to come. You’re making the two of you the same old bad coffee while Tyreek is keeping an eye on the election results, and you hear the gasp before anything else. When you turn around, it’s to the ashes of Jaylen Hotdogfingers on the screen of your tv. You both turn to each other with horror on your face, and everything has changed.
9.
You don’t hear until hours later, but your heart drops out in the middle of the game that day, and you just know something is desperately, desperately wrong. Nagomi is the one who actually has to tell you, had seen the footage while on her phone in the dugout. You refuse to watch it, even until the very end, because seeing them turn to ash from a dozen different angles is the last thing you want. In the end, you don’t have to see anyone incinerated before you, because it happens to you before you can. You’re filled with light and ash.
10.
They’re the first sight to greet you in the trench, their light dimmed like a cloud cover over the solar system you know that they are. Their hand fits in yours perfectly, now cold and clammy where it used to be warm, but you still know every inch of it.
It doesn’t matter how hollow you both feel because they’re here, in your arms, and that’s all you could possibly want. You spend endless days and nights sitting next to each other against the carved out cavernous walls of the trench, pressing your sides together to remind you they’re there.
11.
You’ve always been diametrically opposed, in a way. You, cold and callous, a little too disillusioned from seeing the worst of people for years on end; them, with a heart a little too big for their own good, so sacrificial and kind that you’re always worried they’ll give too many pieces of their heart away and forget to save one for themself. So you watch from the sidelines as they guide people who have no idea who they are, watch as they talk people through panic and unfocused eyes, and you hold them when they cry, because that’s all you have left.
12.
You meet them for the last time on the field in baltimore, with heaving chests and burning lungs. You’re both becoming undone, unfurling and evaporating more with every second that passes. It’s crushing, the finality of this moment, the way you know it’s the end.
They look up at you and their eyes are like prisms, reflecting a rainbow of a lifetime back at you. You pull them in for a kiss and you’re cloaked by their wings one last time, enveloping you. Their halo illuminates you as you begin to disintegrate, spinning and flying until you become one with the stars once more.