Work Text:
volo but starshine fades redshifted out of their eyes and broken meteoroids weave through their wings and how could time and space be all there is in this world when mirrors and reflections do not show their wings, their talons, the way their shadows shift and wave and curl around them, the way they feel confined, in a way that no one else seems to reflect? and they want to tear open their too-thin impossibly-wrong skin and taste the blood of this reality, the ozone of lightning-crack the closest they could ever get to something fundamentally them
and then there is another, a child, with a heart like the supernova, and standing near them feels like their flesh burning to a husk and vaporizing away to leave them a void of smoke and twilight and glittering space dust, and they wonder, is this how they feel to others? because as much as they are burning, breathing, cycling in and out of sunflares and eclipses, they are drawn, dustox to flame and human to deity, and they think, i want to be your friend, for all that their very being screams, hypersonic, in protest, for all that their hearts and bones thrum, subsonic, with the unerring knowledge that we are enemies
volo but in light they dance, flittering delighted and relieved in captive ellipse around the child, forever circling and intersecting and colliding, a playful comet streaking close only to spiral and soar away, feeling their meat and bone flake and crumble away when they skate too close to the wrathful glare of the star, tugging humanity across their first face grinning blunt-toothedly, fingers gesturing dull-nailed, eagerly and willingly, to meet and know and connect, forcing their self crammed and tight to breaking in an ill-suited form
volo but in darkness they are sore and bruised and aching, how could almighty sinnoh have created all, how could almighty sinnoh have abandoned all their creation, they howl to the sky and humans and pokemon alike shriek and cover their ears and double over in pain, their voice a thousand pitches clashing and echoing like the stars set alight and blazing their fury, if only they could be heard in the vacuum of space
volo but they were ever nobody and nothing they think as they look down at their too-sharp, glimmering gloaming claws which they must sheathe and curl away or else tear reality into endless ribbons bleeding black, away and down from their dozen dozen wings that though they beat and churn and froth the air they cannot fly, they are chained and bound and locked to unwilling dirt
and they look up into the ruby-ultraviolet eyes of a being from another world, giratina they whisper, giratina feels right, giratina unseen and unseeable from this world, giratina cloaked in shadow and bearing death and darkness as xxx title
(giratina isolated and mourning, giratina unwanted and orphaned, giratina’s suffering in agony refracting and reverberating until it fills their ribs to cracking and deposits the air in their lungs as thick rime and tastes human-iron and stellar-iron upon their tongue, giratina rearing and charging, xxx jagged wings flaring to devour the sun, and the world shatters into the roar of deafening silence, rage and loss and pain pain pain)
volo but they do not know where they end and giratina begins, standing in the umbra of the forgotten god. together they will force arceus to recreate this world, for if they cannot live anywhere they shall rend this reality asunder, carve and claw and crunch their way through matter and energy until they herald the creation of something, anything new
(somewhere they can belong)
volo but their hearts pang in remembered hurt as they see the child stunned shocked still, frozen and exiled, and they reach out and tuck away their too-many too-sharp edges and though their hands are cold and their breath chills even the frosty air so that they can offer no warmth they offer instead what little refuge they can
volo stumbling in shock (and pain, so much pain) as the child’s branding touch blackens and crisps and chars their skin in a bonecrushing hug, as the world seems to sigh and the clouds split and all that lives parts before them and graced with peace are they as volo leads the child to safety
it takes only a moment to slip and break and ask for aid, though heat yet boils through their knitting wounds, though never do they expect a reply, and yet the child wide-eyed dazzling smiling agrees. startled they struggle and brace to not flinch away, to not enfold their wings about them a flimsy instinctive shield, cowering and crawling away from overflowing overeager dawn’s intensity into soothing night
and so they meet upon the shattered remains of the temple of sinnoh and this time they bare their teeth and flex their claws and display their wings (and steel their hearts, reminding themself they are crystallized naught against all the world), free at last, and hurl their challenge for they cannot hesitate now, this child not an ally but a tool, a pawn, a threat unthinkable, a threat intolerable, they must strike the child down now before it is too late
they must, they must ignore the cracking and weakening glacier of their hearts at the child’s nova burst of surprise shock and betrayal, they must push on, they force themself to push on
and still-yet-despite-always they fail
volo but they laugh for whenever has shadow triumphed over light, the stargold of their hair and the moonsilver of their eyes and nightdark of their burn scars an ersatz copy of the blistering beaming pulsar of the child, a sweeping ticking singularity that reshapes reality without a thought, for how could it do elsewise?
they, the detritus of a hundred dead stars and dimming lights, empty gas and ashen dust, the void of space-between-life, time-unbound-by-shape, each sweep of their wings gathering the lingering corpse-motes of decay and their hearts searing colder than the ice of dead space
and they think, perhaps i am no being of creation, i am entropy, all that i am is destruction given voice and terminus given mind, i am the infinite gaping maw of apocalypse
i am sorry, the child sobs still, recalling their last monster as giratina flees, gilded gleaming metal tears streaking their face and their leaking eyes that blind and scorch as brilliant sunbeams still, i am sorry, the child wails-and-commands as all that lives must bow to their sorrow, reality rippling to the pulses of their suncore heart as they are defeated, as arceus shows Its aureate hoof at last
(all but volo, volo and giratina)
and so they understand now, mortally, lethally, bitter and far, far too late. they, they and giratina are alone, outcast, two deadened nullspaces amongst a sea of singing harmonious light, two weeping gashes of silence ringing discordant in the ears of the universe, you are not like me, i was a fool to hope
and so they let themself fall
and so they let themself be consumed in the crowning glory of a new, true hero