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When they fall together, they fall on fire. Stars grow jealous: Mikaela and Yuuichirou are the brightest to shine in the sky. When they twist, their wings create dazzling swirls that make the rings on planets scowl and curse.
That was what they were. Beings worthy of awe and jealousy.
x.
When they fall to the earth, there is nothing heavenly about it. A twisted, tangled form of bare flesh and limbs. Yuuichirou is the first to wake in the cater they’ve made. No bones broken, no flesh scarred. Yuuichirou wants to laugh and with buoyant energy, turns to his Fellow Fallen to wake him.
The smile pulling his cheeks halts at Mikaela’s tears, and his thumb comes up to erase them in a smooth flick. Yuuichirou encourages, promises, even when their new life is as mysterious a concept as the nebulas to the small creatures that walk this savage planet.
They’ll be alright.
x.
The forest is lush. Vibrant unknown shades that explode in the Fallens’ eyes, bursts that their earthly eyesight can neither capture nor name. The colors of space, of the stars and the planets and the heavens, are shaded with strikingly different hues. Everything on this earth overwhelms. Overwhelms the senses that Yuuichirou volunteers to taste the earthy stuff underneath his feet. The texture and taste are nothing like the ambrosia poured in gold cups and dishes Above. Yuuichirou delights in it. Beside him, Mikaela scrunches his face at the taste.
x.
Green are they to the first rain that falls on their cheeks, but delighted is Yuuichirou to experience it. This time, he does laugh, he does scream, and he does dance on the stage that is this wet, wet earth. Bolt through wilderness and plains. Yuuichirou laughs and dances and and sings and screams in freedom amongst this new world.
Mikaela merely observes as Yuuichirou celebrates their curse.
x.
They notice things in this world.
Like how bare flesh is weak. (Take caution to protect it.)
Like when two stones grind together and flecks of light catch on wood and bloom into a reddish, angry flicker that’s hot to touch. Peels away skin, the sensation fairly strange and invigorating, until Mikaela has to pull back Yuuichirou’s lingering palm. The skin there is an angry red, sun-kissed flesh exposed. (Fire burns. When it burns, it Hurts.)
Mikaela shrinks away from this; Yuuichirou embraces it. “An Earthly delight, isn’t it?” he declares with mirth, marveling at his singed fingers. A darling gift from nature.
x.
Even after countless moon phases have passed, Yuuichirou shares his discoveries underneath the starlight.
“Have you noticed?” Yuuichirou whispers to the night cloaked in stars, a secret between he and Her, his Fellow Fallen an intruder, “When the wind grows restless and the nights longer and the days shorter, the leaves and things die.”
“Yes. I have noticed,” and Mikaela has also noticed how the small little insects and worms break holes into those dead things, and mourns his lack of power to preserve any of it.
Wingless means weakness, he notices.
“What is that like?” muses Yuuichirou with a longing smile. If his wings weren’t shredded from his shoulder blades and obliterated feather by feather, the appendages might have given a delightful flap. “To die?”
Awful lot like Hurt, probably.
“No, wrong.”
Mikaela hears his fellow Fallen suppose with a chirp after a delayed pause, but can find no musicality in the sound. (Odd things happen in this realm. Yuuichirou’s heavenly breath and melodic chants distort to blunted metal here.)
“Haven’t we died once already?”
Mikaela’s not sure what to make of this.