Chapter Text
The battlefield is a sea of black and grey and blazing, burning heat.
Firefly stumbles, turns. Grips her hand into a fist, extends her arm. The mechanical suit swings its fist in tandem, and it translates her movement into a forceful punch that breaks leathery skin. Scorched by flames bursted from between Sam’s steel knuckles, the monster rears back with a screech that sends light grey spittle flying. It does not die. So Firefly does it again, and again – lifts her arm, lifts her leg, stomps down, swings, and everything is gritty and bleak monochrome.
The battlefield is claustrophobic. Heat presses in from all around her – fire breathed from her enemies, fire bursting from her attacks, fire pooling in the mech’s overheated joints, fire raining from the skies and rising from the pits of hell. Sam decimates and he destroys, and Firefly sees through his eyes, moves her weak limbs and guides the armour into killing. She drowns in the skies, burns in the seas. There is a sword in Sam’s hand. She swings it, and he kills with it. There is a great bang, and her helmet fills with the smell of gunpowder that is quickly filtered out.
“For Titania,” she whispers, and Sam speaks with her. His voice is low and smooth. Inside her helmet, their cries echo in a dissonant sound. And with her, her fellow knights yell, and the skies are torn apart by metal that brings flames pouring ablaze from every slash. Every shade of grey black grey mixes and separates in a constant swirling of colour she cannot see, and every movement burns and she does not know if it is her metal or her flesh or her mind. And they fight fire with fire and she burns away the oppressive heat with flames of her own, destructive and burning and bright – for they are the Iron Cavalry; fire is made to kill, and to kill is all they know.
On the battlefield, it does not rain.
A tell-tale pain sears itself on her face, and her arms tremble violently, falters. For a moment, she is afraid nothing connects her hand to her shoulder. Her punch is weak, and still Sam’s attack is strong. It sends a Swarm bug bursting into blood, and she does not pause to flick the black splatter off Sam’s visage. Her left leg shudders and her knee buckles, and still she remains standing.
Monsters surge forward, and he blazes an ashy trail through them, sparks scattering amidst the darkness of battle. Sam is indomitable. The pain does not ease.
The Iron Cavalry is the last line of defense. The Iron Cavalry are heroes. Until the annihilation of the Swarm, the Iron Cavalry will never leave the burning world of Glamoth. Firefly kicks, and Sam’s leg flies in an arc through the air. A spray of flames lands on his metal body. She does not notice it, just as the dark sea does not notice a single drop of rain – for it has long since consumed all.
She would know, for fire has consumed her too. She knows it so dearly. It is dark, as black as the skies and as dull as the seas. It is acrid, thick with burning flesh and gunpowder, and the stench of fire is the only one she knows. It is harsh, every edge sharp and hard as steel. It swarms her being, and it swarms the world. The Iron Cavalry has named her the Molten Knight, and molten she is. This terrible fire has seeped into her skin and melded into her bones. It is grey, and so long she is on this battlefield, the world will be grey forevermore.
(In her mind, she repeats this again: until the annihilation of the Swarm, the Iron Cavalry will never leave the burning world of Glamoth.)
So she battles.
The monstrous bugs go down, and more take the fallen's place. The wall of bodies press in, roiling and buzzing and burning, until Firefly cannot tell what is what or grey from grey. Sam’s enhanced vision activates, outlining every individual in the grey mass. They stumble and writhe, clearer than ever. It is messy, disgusting, uncouth, and her armour feels like it’s crawling with worms.
So she does what she knows best, and she burns.
Firefly feels lighheaded. Sam cuts through an enemy with a sword. In the shadow of war, where is the light? She tears the Swarm apart, and more darkness spills in from the rips. She cannot imagine salvation in a world where it is she who must save. How does she know where to go, when all light is blotted out by grey? She is lost in the dark.
So she sets the monsters alight, and the dark flames are a silent wish of red. It is a futile dream.
They fly higher and higher. Air screeches against her; every molecule drags itself down the iron with a great energy that claws heat into existence. It burns. Accelerate – the engine roars above the noise. It is deafening, and she could almost mistake it for thunder. (But on the battlefield, it does not rain). The armour strains against her skin, and her neck is so tense it trembles. Then all sound dies, bursted above chaos and into a part of untouched heaven. She clenches her fist, readies the mech to dive-bomb the monsters below. Gunpowder fills the air again. Sam’s timer starts to tick. Firefly’s glance flicks up.
Time… stops, or maybe slows.
The galaxy is weaved with threads of mystical light.
Deep and alluring, hypnotic and entrancing, something dark stirred with something bright. Above the orchestra of destruction, there lies a gentle symphony of colour. She has never seen anything like it before – she finds herself bewitched. Firefly stares, and her hands reach out without a thought. It is a foolish thing to believe you can touch the sky. But she feels it, or at least she feels something. It first grazes her fingertips, and then suddenly she is holding the world in the palm of her hand. It is not grey – this is colour, and it is a supernova to her heart.
She gazes into the aurora, and it encapsulates her in colour. The hairs on her arms stand up. She is racked with goosebumps. There is a world beyond the flames, she thinks, and it has been so close all this time. The lights gaze back, shimmering and untouchable, and Firefly distantly thinks that her soulmate must hold the nebula in their eyes.
There’s a crackle of something electric in her veins. It twines up her body and soothes the scorching flames. It is the colour of aurora, and it is colorful. It is bright.
In a trance, Firefly turns her gaze below. The dark mass of destruction looms below, writhing and violent, and she looks back up into Glamoth’s calm sky. The aurora remains, and it is warm and it is cool and it is too gentle for fire. It has kissed colour into her armor and her sword and her bones. It has leaked into her flames. It thrums in her blood, and she is suddenly aware of how fast her heart dances. It makes her feel alive, it makes her overflow with colour –
When she brandishes her swords, they glow with the brilliance of the aurora. And she feels that same colour wreath around her, flaring from her armour and blazing with a new heat. When the timer ticks to a stop and she plunges down back into grey, she brings with her colour. She is a raindrop and a lightning bug and a shooting star.
It is in the clear skies and under the gleaming lights that Firefly awakens to a new world.
The next time Firefly awakens, it is from the realm of unconsciousness.
She blinks her eyes open, and Sam’s visor disappears with a hiss. She tries to sit up – she is glued to her shadow, and she can only stare upwards. Her legs feel soft and weak, and her eyes burn. Her neck is stiff and the air refuses to flow correctly through her windpipe.
Her bones are crumbling, her throat is tearing itself apart. She feels that she is fading away.
Firefly laughs lightly, and her voice comes out raspy. Without Sam’s voice modifier, she sounds so apparently weak. She can do nothing. The grass around her smells ashy, and heat pools around her body, anchoring her down. She is being cooked alive, slowly simmered, baked on Glamoth’s ground. Her armour is her coffin. Distantly, she thinks that she does not want to die. It’s hot – unbearably hot, claustrophobically hot, and the air shimmers and wavers in front of her bleary eyes in a taunting grey –
She blinks harshly, and her sight clears. The sky is dark, but it is not grey. The flickering of the air shines with a light colour.
Suddenly, Firefly can breathe again. She wonders if she’s dreaming.
“That… light?” she whispers, and her voice warbles. With a tremendous force she props herself up on her elbows, lifting her body into the cool air. It is not the same aurora that she sees. It is not an aurora at all.
The colours continue to dance in arms length, and they skim her with the lightest touch. She gasps, and her elbows give out below her. Sprawled on the grass, something light bubbles up in her, and she giggles.
She gazes up, and it is a full watercolour picture that meets her. There is not a single hint of grey. And she bursts into a smile, still gasping for air, and feels like she is floating amidst the fireflies that swarm her with light.
They are real. Luminescent, glowing, colourful. Their shining bulbs are brighter than fire. And the sky – almost black, but not black – feels larger and deeper than it has ever seemed. So she yearns, and longs to plunge into the night and trace the fireflies and graze the auroras and –
She remains lying on the ground. Her smile fades into melancholy.
Iron armour wraps around her once more, bulky and cold. Soon, it will heat up again. Sam stands. She cannot fly, but he can – even if it’s only back into the sea of grey flames.
Firefly wishes to live in a world full of colour and light, where the skies are eternally clear. And Firefly does stay alive, but that is the extent of her freedom of choice. Until the annihilation of the Swarm, the Iron Cavalry will never leave the burning world of Glamoth. And until she can stand properly on her own, until pain no longer sears itself in her bones, until she can truly live, she will never be just Firefly, and thus she will always be bound to the Iron Cavalry – for that is Sam’s duty, and she is nothing without him. He is her sole salvation, even when his world is of darkness and flames.
Everything is a blur.
When her fist bursts with fire, it glows with colour and grows in temperature. And it is like she sucks the life from those fireflies – they fall to the ground, cooked by the heat, and blink into darkness once more. She swings her fist, lets fire rip through the sky in a billowing banner of smoke and grey heat. And then Glamoth is monochrome once more.
Firefly soars, somewhere far away from freedom, where grey whirls into black. The only bugs she sees are the Swarm, and she exterminates them, one by one, fire in his hands and her eyes and ashes in her mouth. She offers everything to the fire, and rains greyness over the falling empire.
She claws darkness from darkness. She tells herself it is salvation.
Glamoth falls. Firefly joins the Stellaron Hunters on a dark and stormy night.
There’s more to see outside of the battlefield; she no longer flinches when she sees those shades of blue and green. Sometimes light catches Blade’s hair just the right way, and dark grey transforms into navy blue in front of her eyes. She starts to notice pale yellow, and how she has to squint to notice it against a backdrop of white. Wonders how many sparks of colour she had unknowingly seen in fire that was maybe not so monochrome. It leaves a strange taste in her mouth. She stops squinting after a while.
They go to different planets, different galaxies, different places. The fights are shorter; her flames do not touch the skies. She racks up a bounty, and tells Kafka she likes oak cake rolls. She kills a man wearing a green tie, and it is the last thing she sees before everything is buried in rubble. She does not dream of him. She gets fitted for a black suit, and they take her measurements instead of Sam’s. It hugs her shoulders perfectly. The world is still grey, and sometimes she feels that her bones are crumbling to dust, and sometimes she feels that she is losing her mind, and sometimes she still spends days on end in armour, but she is the freest she’s ever been. She does not think of the world beyond the world beyond the world.
(When they retrieve stellarons, she finds herself fixated on the golden glow of raw and pure energy. She wonders if her soulmate’s eyes would hold that same power and brutality the star possesses. Wonders if it would burn.)
(On days that are simply grey black grey and uncertain, she wonders if the brilliant blues and greens and yellows were just the dreams of a sick girl. Then she conjures green flames cupped in her palms, and watches it flicker and glow and does not know whether she hallucinates.)
Her bounty hits a new high. They go to Jepella, where Kafka takes the limelight. Firefly pulls her suit jacket over her mechanical pauldrons, and this time it is not her fire that sets the planet ablaze. It goes up in grey smoke and black bullets and Kafka smiles with light grey lipstick and Sam smashes through a window and Blade’s hair does not shine that dark blue, and Firefly watches this quintessential black-and-white movie-like scene from behind her visor.
And Jepella’s sky is hazy and dark and the land is under chaotic rapidfire assault that tastes of gunpowder and revolt, and she thinks that she could do a much quicker job than an entire town of rebels. But the sky is already thick with smog, and there is no need for her foreign fire to send the heavens up in smoke.
She tells Kafka not to play with her food – but she does not step in, and they stand together and watch that world cook itself alive. Their bounties gain a few digits.
Then it’s Penacony, and there are hundreds of thousands of shades of grey, and weaved amongst them there is that familiar green and blue and yellow. It is harmonious chaos. It is loud.
Below the chatter, there is always song. It’s in the stores and from the screens and blasting through the speakers, a lady’s voice that’s upbeat and pure. In the streets, they scream her name: Miss Robin, Robin, Lady Robin, Robin, my Robin. Firefly weaves through the crowd; the Hunters had been separated a while ago, each going their own way. Penacony is deafening, rushing and bustling and it is like she has opened the dams of a great sea that has come bursting in. It is happy and beautiful. She buys an oak cake roll, and it tastes as good as it always is. She runs as she eats, and feels the breeze whistle freely past her ears.
It is happy and beautiful. Firefly sprints with the wind, colours flashing by in yellow blue green, and it is a wonderful dream.
Firefly stumbles when a jumping billboard weaves through her legs, and a bright yellow light swerves as a car barely veers around her. There’s a loud honk, and a Pepeshi yells from inside the car. She turns and runs, cake roll gripped tightly in her hands, and she grins the entire way.
The Golden Hour is grey grey grey and a hint of green yellow navy, and the looming sky is a dizzy deep blue, the rows of black blocks spiralling into the heavens twinkling with a bright yellow light. It sends her heart aching and dancing and racing. And there is always that thread of music that winds through the entire city, with that voice that speaks to her soul: Robin's. She sings of moonlight and dawn and dreams and hope. Her voice is strong and sweet and it chills Firefly to the soul. It instills in her a bittersweet sort of feeling – for the night and its auroras and fireflies are the closest things Firefly has to dreams.
It is a beautiful song. Firefly hopes to one day look forward to the sunrise.
(Plastered over Penacony, there are posters of a pretty Halovian girl in a picture of fluidity. Her back and neck is gently arched, and her hair flows and swirls with an unseen wind. There’s an eight-pointed star painted over her middle in a warm gold, and she smiles like she holds the secrets of the world. Firefly learns she is Robin, the Robin. She learns she is a beautiful woman.
When that song plays again in the streets, she looks up to the screens that rise over the gaudy buildings. They flash and flicker, first playing a Pepeshi talking while subtitles scroll rapidly by and then there's an Intellitron demonstrating something or another before it cuts to a Soulglad advertisement. Then it finally shows that singer, and her face is on every television and every electronic billboard and every screen that surrounds Firefly. Her voice echoes over the noise, the camera zooms in. Her eyes open. And then Firefly is frozen.
And she thinks, so that is why she smiles like she holds the secrets of the world. Robin’s eyes hold the nebula and the firefly-filled night and the stars’ powerful glow and all the things she doesn’t know. Her eyes hold fire and rain. They are in full colour, blazing and burning and chilling and beautiful and Firefly –
Firefly feels seen. It pierces her soul.
It is a terrifying experience. There are a thousand pins and needles on her skin, and she is hot and cold, and the world is too loud and too muted.
She –
Turns, dashes away. Sound is blinding and colours are deafening and she runs as fast as she can.
There is a thunderstorm in her heart. It pounds, and pounds, and pounds.)
(She does not think it’s bad.)