Work Text:
There is nothing so beautiful as a burning sunset.
Beautiful is not quite the right word, it can’t be. But “striking” is to glib a word for this, and “haunting” too cold.
There is nothing like sunset in the desert, when all the world is ash and smoke. Afterwards, Roy stands alone outside and watches it. Watches the charred ground turn black and sharp with shadow, watches the hazy sky glow orange and then deep red, until the whole horizon is blazing with slow, creeping light. He stands there in the quiet, and it feels like holy recrimination, and it feels like peace. And he wonders, as the heat seeps out of the world, and the red-orange is slowly engulfed by purples and blues and ink blacks, if there is anything less insane in this silence of his, than there is in Kimblee’s mad laughter. He stands in the dark and lets himself go cold, and wonders if it is profane, the way some small fragment of his soul is still left, after everything, to find this beautiful.