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The Gift of the Gods medallion is heavy in Aerostar’s palm, gleaming up at him as he turns it over and over, slowly. Two sides, stamped together forever, inseparable.
He remembers the touch of Drago’s forehead to his own, the heat of it, the whisper-touch of scales against his skin.
He remembers other nights and other fights, outside of the stifling, closed walls of the Temple, open to the wind and stars. The way they could take to the sky there, the passion of battle becoming passion of a very different kind. Moonlight filtered through the sheltering wings wrapped around him. Clawed hands slicing through clothes of an unearthly weave with impossible delicacy. Teeth and guttural snarls.
Not a very different kind of passion after all, really.
He goes into the locker room as if going into battle. The door bangs shut behind him, but Drago does not look up, his lambent eyes dulled as he looks at the floor.
Aerostar goes to him, stands before him. Holds out the medallion, bright in the darkness. When he speaks, it is in Drago’s true native tongue, all hisses and clicks that burn the throat like brandy.
(How Drago had smiled years ago, half-affectionate and half-contemptuous, when Aerostar spoke his first faltering words in that tongue. How the contempt had faded into wonder when the words Aerostar was saying truly registered).
“If I could, I would share this with you,” Aerostar says now. “I would cleave it in two as if it were my heart, half yours for eternity. You are the other side of me, back to back together, forever. Friend or foe, it does not matter.”
Drago looks up at him, and his eyes kindle once more. He smiles.
“Truly, brother,” he says in that same tongue. “I grieve to have lost the fight, for I am a warrior as you are. But I could not have lost to better.”
He stands and closes Aerostar’s fingers around the medallion, and Aerostar feels that he has earned it all over again.
“I already have my gift of the gods,” Drago says in a human tongue, and his eyes are the pure pale stars that will light Aerostar’s strange and winding path forever.