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“Mr. Aventurine,” Sunday says with blood seeping between his perfect teeth and pretty lips, blood flowing in streams, warm and plentiful. “I’m sorry, I was not fast enough.”
Aventurine stands and stares, knee-deep in gore, cradling a backpack in his weakened arms. Red is not a color that frightens him. Red is routine, red is requirement in his line of work. The roulette table beckons as much as an open wound. Gunshots leave a lot of red and little else.
Aventurine falters, nonetheless. His voice brooks him no quarter, either, fickle and frail.
“What were you not fast enough to do?”
Sunday, crushed underneath a metal beam, laughs. Every breath shifts something inside him, something broken that once was a ribcage. There are golden teartracks on his cheeks. He is trembling like a leaf.
“Find you,” he says.
Find you. Find you. Find you.
It echoes too much under high ceilings. The Herta Space Station houses many people, too many. People can be smart but a crowd is not, not when it’s fleeing, not when it’s screaming crying wailing for mercy from fate itself. It never comes, that answer they begged for.
Aventurine stands and stares, knee-deep in gore, cradling the last vestiges of what once was human about himself. A few clothes, toiletries, credits, crammed into a backpack because his suitcase was already torn to shreds by Destruction’s claws.
“Find me,” he repeats and three months ago it might have tasted like vindication. “What for?”
There are ways a body should bend, ways for posture and limbs and bones to be arranged. Aventurine does not need to study charts of it to see that Sunday is wrong. The angle of the arm visible below debris, the distance between his torso and the legs. Like a ragdoll, like a puppet torn apart by greedy hands. Aventurine blinks, tries to blink again, tries in vain to make the image disappear.
“Say sorry,” Sunday croaks. “Get a drink, perhaps, if you had wanted to.”
Aventurine sets his backpack down into the sludge that was once people. A human face may swim next his belongings, an ear severed and hair torn from burned scalps. It smells sweet, all of it, soured by sunlight. They will rot. They are rotting already.
“If I had wanted to,” Aventurine repeats.
He kneels in blood. It is in his shoes, warm and not yet congealed. He could drown in it if he bowed far enough.
Sunday’s face twists into a pained grimace before falling into dazed blank exhaustion. He smiles weakly. Sweat beads on his brow.
“No… pressure.”
“No pressure,” Aventurine echoes because the words have been drained into the slaughter around him, into this vast lake of lost lives.
Sunday’s eyes flutter. His lips part, pretty and red. So red. His gums don’t look right. His tongue twitches, serpentine, a mind of its own. The nerves are severed everywhere.
“Mr. Aventurine,” he says, again.
Aventurine shivers.
“Yeah?”
“Can you stay?”
Until. Until until until.
“Sure,” Aventurine answers and licks his lips only to cut his own tongue on the taste of blood, on the flaking skin. “Sure I can.”
He shifts close to the debris, cuddled to ruin. Reaches out before he knows it, fingers threaded into Sunday’s damp hair. Sunday is burning up, feverish, on fire. Aventurine pushes back a few strands from his forehead, runs his fingertips along his temple. The wings are gone. Broken and torn off. He avoids the sight of their stumps. He avoids the sight of anything but the quiet serenity of Sunday’s face.
It won’t be alright so Aventurine says nothing. He stares, eyes wide, made less than person by the horror around him. He pets Sunday’s hair like he would a thing already dead.
“There isn’t much to say now, is there?” Aventurine manages as his legs begin to take root, fuse with grief and death and rot. “Sunday, you-“
Sunday whimpers like a dying dog. His tears drip hot onto Aventurine’s palm.
“Can’t hear you. Are you- are you still there?”
He feels nothing, not the touch upon his skin, not the sliver of comfort. He must be alone, cut in half as he is, crushed and butchered as he is.
“I’m still here,” Aventurine replies and then louder, wavering, pleading. “I’m still here.”
Sunday’s eyes are blind, lifeless. He is alone. He is dying.
“Sorry,” he gasps. “I don’t deserve it, I know. I don’t blame you. I’ll be fine. Fine fine fine fine fine fine.”
Aventurine cups his face, eager even within the spark of anger, of helpless frustration.
“I’m right here, you-“
Sunday’s head drops into his lap. The mass of red and white smiles at Aventurine from within the decapitated body’s neck. The dead eyes still cry. Which is Sunday now, which severed part? Which cut of meat? Which desecrated rotting piece?
Aventurine watches mutely as the wings and the halo meld into the sludge surrounding him. Sunday’s head rolls from his grasp before he can hold on, vanishing within red. Aventurine dips his fingers below the surface, chases after familiar faces. There’s nothing. Nothing.
The red does not let go. Aventurine tries, listlessly, to tug his hands out of the mire but the gore clings and his skin tears the more he pulls. Aventurine stops pulling. Aventurine sits, numb, as the red climbs up his arms. It is routine. It is requirement.
He does not scream. He cannot scream. The tide erodes him, layer by layer by letter until he is no more.
Aventurine comes to, scrambling for purchase on anything, anything at all. The sound emerging from his throat is more animal than human, a harrowing wail that aches and aches the longer it goes on. It wrenches free from him and he can’t stop it, can’t keep it in, can’t quieten it into the palatable terror he wishes.
Around him, others scream. Around him, others awaken from the glimpse of Destruction bestowed upon the gathered crowd. Their wailing becomes his and their thoughts his thoughts, a horror too vast to be contained in one mortal body. For a terrifying, cacophonous minute, he knows it will never end.
Then it does, a collective gasp running through those gathered on the busy platform. One inhale for the whole world, and then they breathe as people, not crowd, for themselves, at their own pace.
Aventurine presses a hand to his mouth to stifle the noises pouring like rain. He staggers, vision blurred, past others in worse shape, staggers while still clutching his backpack. If he doesn’t focus enough it is a severed head in his periphery.
There is a room he intended to stay at, perhaps, should the world not end. Aventurine isn’t sure if it has. He drops onto a mattress and stares at a white wall wondering if his brain and soul and heart will bleed from him if he does not gather them close.
Movement near the door stirs his consciousness. He sits up, sluggish, reaching for his gun. Then the light hair and red accents on the suit register. He drops the weapon as if burned.
“Topaz,” he croaks, with some shame, some anger, some tears still on his cheeks. Would she judge? Would she care? Would she take this, dismantle it, twist it-
Topaz, composed unflappable Topaz, sobs. She shakes worse than he does, shakes as though Nanook THEMSELVES was trying to rattle her. No full sentence escapes either of them, only half-words and half-thoughts and Aventurine scoots over so they may both ride out the dread poisoning side by side. Like children hiding from a thunderstorm, eyes averted from the flash of lightning in the sky.
“I couldn’t stop screaming,” Topaz gasps, twitching as though still in seizure. “I couldn’t-“
Aventurine nods and his neck aches. His wrists ache. Will they fall off, he wonders, will they take root and drown him?
“Same here. Quite the- quite the trick.”
“We lost, for a moment, didn’t we? To Destruction? To-“
“Topaz, I-“
Every coherent idea loses itself in Destruction. It takes hours to relent, hours to ease up into waves that only feel like half a nightmare.
Aventurine groans and fishes a bottle of water from his backpack.
“You laughed at me when I wanted to pack food and drinks,” he rasps. “Look at us now.”
Topaz laughs, exhausted and exasperated.
“You must be feeling better if you can make jokes like that, asshole.”
They share the water, share some of the cereal bars broken in half.
“After my trip to the Nihility nothing had any taste,” Aventurine comments. “This is the complete opposite.”
Topaz nods weakly.
“Too intense.”
“It’s so sour.”
“It’ll pass.”
And it does. The taste mellows and so does the pressure of the horrid visions. Dreams are not meant to stick, are not blessed by the Permanence to endure all amber eras. Dreams end, dreams shatter.
Topaz gets them both a coffee from a vending machine just outside. Neither of them says a word for a long time.
“I’m so glad I didn’t take Numby,” Topaz speaks up eventually. “I felt bad at the time but-“
Aventurine can’t find it in himself to joke. The little thing wouldn’t have known what was going on, helpless and confused. He feels no better. Helpless and confused.
“Was for the best,” he supplies.
“Once we’re back on Pier Point we should get another Doctor of Chaos to look at us.”
“They’re focused on IX’s tricks, not Nanook’s.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“No,” Aventurine mumbles and closes his eyes. “No, I don’t.”
A day ago she might have groaned and prodded him for not wanting to make plans, for being difficult with no alternative offers to make. Now, Topaz only lays down again.
“I don’t either,” she says and it is so wrong in her voice, so terribly wrong. “All I want to do is-“
“Don’t.”
“What, only you get to be depressed?”
“Don’t,” Aventurine repeats.
Don’t die, don’t go, don’t become like me. You’re one of the only friends I have. One of the only people who hasn’t left or died.
When he tries for a smile, easier words on his tongue, nothing works. Not the smile, not the words, and not the reaction he expected from Topaz, either. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t fit into the puzzle anymore. Sharpened edges. It tears the whole picture apart.
“I don’t want you to die either,” she says, no ifs and buts. “Never did. Is that such a surprise? Don’t I get to tell you the same?”
Aventurine reaches out, hectic, only to drop his hands. Too much. Too soon. His mind is raw and bleeding but that doesn’t mean things changed, it doesn’t mean they are not IPC and competitors and going for the jugular.
Don’t I get to tell you the same?
Topaz hugs him back immediately, to his surprise. Not a second of hesitation.
“All my friends regret to have known me,” he doesn’t tell her today but maybe another time. “Either from afar or from the grave.”
“You’re one of the only friends I have,” Topaz might echo. “One of the few who listen and get it and aren’t sick with greed.”
That’ll come, another day. Aventurine doesn’t have the certainty yet, doesn’t have the million backup plans. Irontomb’s vision still lingers, still tugs at his brain incessantly.
Didn’t you want the world to end? Didn’t you want those who hurt you to suffer? Didn’t you want, always, what you can’t have or take back or deserve?
The Astral Express has not left the space station yet. Aventurine ran halfway before stopping his traitorous legs. There can’t be an urgency in this, not visibly, there can’t be desperation that they may prey upon. The specter in his mind was kind, yes, but Irontomb cares not what hurts, only that it does.
Aventurine paces on the platform for ten minutes more than socially acceptable. It is itching and squirming and writhing inside of him, that memory, and every time he tries to stand and gather his thoughts it only winds more erratic under his skin. It got better, fainter, less present- but not here, not gathering courage and stepping onto the train. Topaz ran, too, to a different corner. He hasn’t yet asked why.
“I wanted to check on my friends of the Astral Express,” his excuse rests secure on the tip of his tongue. “Quite the event it was for all of us.”
He doesn’t make it through the first word. The crew is there, all of them, and whatever Destruction-addled illness remains in Aventurine’s head singles out Sunday immediately. Disheveled and rattled, feathers and halo, but alive.
Aventurine stands in the door, caught and trapped and mute. They all stare, he’s sure, they all ask questions.
“I’d like a word with Mr. Aventurine,” Sunday requests through the fog.
Aventurine says yes. He says yes or no or please or maybe or not in this lifetime, not with this toll on my shoulders and your wings.
All throughout the walk he wondered- would Sunday understand? Be disgusted, bewildered, confused, by the idea of his death implanted in Aventurine’s mind? Would he flinch away, say sorry, smile with glee and sing the Harmony’s tune once more?
Sunday hugs him as they reach a secluded corner of the Express, hugs him as though they were long lost friends or star-crossed lovers. He cries into Aventurine’s shoulder, before Aventurine himself is shaken by sobs too.
“I saw it on your face,” Sunday whispers. “I don’t know if it was the same vision or a wholly different nightmare but- but you-“
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Is this okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
And they don’t let go of each other, either. It trembles under Sunday’s skin, too, the apocalypse. The end of all things, condensed into their fragile mortal bodies.
Aventurine didn’t expect to be humored. He didn’t expect to end up in Sunday’s bed on the Express in borrowed sleepwear, the two of them hiding from the world under blankets.
“Did it fuck with the Harmony?” Aventurine asks softly, his fingers tracing the base of those soft, pretty, unscathed wings on Sunday’s neck. “You’re more sensitive than most to these things, aren’t you?”
Sunday’s touch lingers on Aventurine’s shoulders. Whatever he saw, whatever he watched Irontomb do, has healed when waking.
“I can’t say. When I awoke many others were in much worse condition.”
“Hm.”
“Also, thank you for coming here, Mr. Aventurine. I was unaware you were on the station.”
“Mhmm. Felt right. Also, you can drop the ‘mister’. We’re cuddling. That’s a bit beyond formalities.”
“Alright,” Sunday says, face warm where it presses against Aventurine’s skin. “That sounds good.”
There is more to discuss, so much more. Boundaries and expectations and apologies not pried from dying bodies. But with a simple cut a head was severed from a neck and with a simpler click Aventurine manages to close his eyes and find his whirling thoughts soothed.
“So,” he murmurs. “The Astral Express, hm?”
It could have been an accusation, any other time. It could have been mockery. It isn’t and can’t be, right here with his fingertips pressing against Sunday’s lower back where no blood pours from a wound too grave to ever be fixed.
“I was surprised, too,” Sunday admits. “I didn’t consider myself worthy of the Nameless. There are days where I still question if I should deserve a place here.”
“Not your decision to make.”
Sunday’s laugh is hauntingly sweet.
“Quite so.”
“You look… happier here.”
“I am,” Sunday replies, his touch always checking Aventurine’s ribs, making sure they are all there, all safe and sound. “Are you happy, Aventurine? Wherever you are, whatever you chose to do after Penacony?”
It would have been a punch to the gut, any other time. An insult, disrespect, willful ignorance. It isn’t and can’t be.
“Same as always,” Aventurine says even knowing it might mean little to a stranger. “IPC business.”
You know all too well what that entails.
Sunday nuzzles into the crook of Aventurine’s neck. He’s careful, so careful, as though this truly does sway his heart. It comes in waves, the realization that it might. Aventurine lays in comfort, in safety, with the last cobwebs of Destruction gently swept away, and what does that leave?
“You are a friend of the Express,” Sunday tells him. “So you can always visit to take a break.”
Aventurine laughs, the shudders subsiding. Ebb and flow.
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“Then I suppose I’ll have to consider it.”
The skin hunger returns with full force after a few days and Aventurine makes another trip to the Express immediately.
“You can come to Pier Point, too,” he mumbles into the soft feathers of Sunday’s headwings. “Hang out with my catcakes until I come home.”
Sunday pets his hair.
“Are you sure? We don’t know how we will feel when the effects pass. I would not want you to share something so private under duress and then regret it later.”
Aventurine wouldn’t mind drowning in consideration. He lets his selfish heart take and take and take of it, of Sunday’s care and thoughtfulness. Sunday is warm and soft and gentle and if it is a sickness to cling to him then Aventurine will continue to refuse any cure. He is feverish with it, sure, but what regret could possibly come from this? When the world is more stable, when the world is not destroyed and Destruction all at once-
“For now I’m sure,” Aventurine says. “Aren’t you?”
Sunday sighs.
“I’m- no, I am sure.”
He fears it, clearly, the day that Aventurine wakes up and it is all back to biting words and sleights of hand. In every caress is an anticipation, in every indulgence already a sense of grief.
“I’ll prove all your worries wrong,” Aventurine purrs. “You’ll see. Take a gamble with me, Mr. Sunday. Trust your luck.”
It feels too good. A vacation long overdue. They don’t do more for the longest while, only sleep curled around each other submerged in blankets that smell as fresh and clean and homely as Sunday does.
“Tell me about your week,” Aventurine asks, warm food and warmer mulled wine in his belly. “What’s on your mind, songbird?”
His chin rests on Sunday’s head, his arms wrapped around Sunday’s waist from behind. So pliant and relaxed, this sweet bird. Letting his guard down. Aventurine knows what he could do, what power he has. It’d be so simple to dig his claws into Sunday, to pull him apart tenderly until there’s nothing left. The thought doesn’t bring him anything but a deep discomfort. It would leave silence, the song torn from Sunday’s throat.
“Nothing all that exciting,” Sunday tells him, squeezing Aventurine’s hand. “The Express has decided to take some time for everyone to recuperate properly so it has all been very… simple. Many board games. I’ve been reading. Dan Heng has attempted to teach me how to bake a Vidyadhara specialty-“
“Board games? And I wasn’t invited?”
Sunday’s neck and ear flush so prettily that Aventurine can barely resist the urge to pepper them with kisses.
“I tried to but couldn’t get through your secretary.”
“Oh. Oh no.”
“I couldn’t exactly tell them who I was, so-“
“I’ll give you a code to reach me directly,” Aventurine says, appeased. “Hearing your voice at work would always brighten my day.”
Honeyed words, so easily poured. Sunday’s cup always runs full without spilling. It might be bottomless, it might be a well that will never run dry as long as Aventurine has a say in it.
“I think that would be nice,” Sunday agrees and relaxes even more, boneless in Aventurine’s embrace, nestling against him with all he has. “Are there any particular sweets you enjoy? Now that I have time on my hands-“
“Something coffee-flavored, perhaps.”
“I can do that.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
Sugary-sweet, all of it, all of them. Aventurine floats in it, cotton candy clouds of comfort.
Don’t leave. Don’t die. Don’t look too far past the façade, don’t discover that you get nothing-but-this nothing-but-me nothing but the fleeting barebones facsimile of a person.
“So you just… fell in love at first sight and aren’t worried at least a little bit?” Topaz asks, sipping a cocktail with decidedly too much sugar on the glass’ rim. “No suspicions at all?”
Aventurine gives her a look over his sunglasses before settling back into the lounge chair. The soothing sounds of a tropical beach lull him back into a sun-warmed stupor soon.
“I know what it feels like to have the Harmony used on me,” he replies. “That’s not what this is.”
Topaz snorts.
“Of course.”
“Are you doubting me?!”
“Nooo, never,” she says and stretches. “So, when do I get to meet him if you two are serious?”
It sends a pleasant shock through Aventurine’s system. So intimate, so lovely, the thought of being Sunday’s anything. The thought of Sunday being his in turn. He blinks, overcome with a yearning so decidedly not physical in nature.
“We haven’t made anything official,” he says. “So probably after that.”
“Uhuh. And how long is that going to take you? It has been, what, two months now?”
“You really do have no faith in me.”
“Maybe you have no faith in me, thinking I’m always making fun of you,” Topaz says and slurps her drink more pointedly. “Okay, maybe not this time. But generally.”
Aventurine reaches for his phone and hands it over to her.
“Alright. Here’s my gesture of trust. Text Sunday for me.”
The ocean waves lap at the shore. He doesn’t check for a reaction, only leans to the side to pick a shell from the warm sand and lift it to his ear. It speaks in certain whispers.
“Done,” Topaz says. “You owe me big time.”
Aventurine checks his messages.
“I don’t use tildes that much. Let alone the giant rose bouquet trotter emoji.”
“You do now.”
Mr. Sunday, would you do me the honor of accompanying me on a date later this week? My place~
“Do you think that the day the cosmos dies we will be just as oblivious to it?” Topaz asks, spread out flat on her back with her eyes on the ceiling in their shared hotel room. “That it will be just as sudden?”
Aventurine buries his face into the pillow.
“I’m not sure we’ll be alive to see it either way.”
“Hypothetically.”
“It was very fast,” Aventurine manages to answer. “One moment I thought we had it, all our forces combined, all the cosmos united against an Aeon, and then…”
“Then the lights went out.”
They did, they did, they did. One moment he was dinner plans and grocery lists and a work schedule and the next he was barely person, only fear and stress and blood. Animal, dying, suffering, reduced to primal terror.
Aventurine scoots closer to Topaz and exhales a sigh of relief the moment their shoulders brush together.
“Do you- what did you see?”
“A lot of things,” Topaz replies. “Weirdly, I saw Madam Herta the most. Maybe because she was the last person I noticed alive before it happened. She- she got torn into pieces, little mirror shards. They could all still feel, still hurt, separate from one another. A thousand fine cuts. I tried to put her back together and she kept screaming and falling apart. I kept trying and made it worse. An eye in the wrong place. The ribs the wrong way around. It was all so malleable. Fused together with some of the other researchers. One thing and many and all screaming at me to please stop and please help and please let her die.”
Aventurine lifts his head from the pillow, shuffles even closer.
“I was wondering why you checked on her so much right after.”
“Sounds stupid, doesn’t I? It wasn’t even real. It-“
“I saw Sunday dying,” Aventurine interrupts. “Similar to what you said. Not exactly the same but… bloody. Drawn out. So unnecessarily cruel. And I could do nothing about it.”
Topaz sighs.
“And he-“
“Had a similar vision, yeah, I think so. Did Herta?”
“Haven’t asked.”
“Maybe that could help.”
“Maybe,” Topaz says. “For now, this also helps.”
Aventurine exhales until his lungs are empty, for worse but mostly for better. He offers his hand and Topaz takes it.
“Yeah. It does.”
Sunday laughs, his head cushioned on Aventurine’s shoulder.
“You made Topaz ask in your stead?”
“Maybe so.”
“I was wondering since when you enjoy the trotter emojis.”
“I do like them,” Aventurine protests and wraps his arms tighter around Sunday’s waist. “That’ll have to stay our little secret, though.”
The water around them is still hot. It smells like tea, the green surrounding them where the bathbomb exploded gently into fragrant swirls.
“Noted,” Sunday sighs and snuggles closer. “Any other secrets you want to share with me now that we are… boyfriends?”
BOYFRIENDS, Aventurine’s mind screams oh so helpfully. It pulses hot in his chest, twinges every now and then as his heart gets used to the thought. The first in forever. The first ever, really.
“Did you know you’re the first I ever brought here?” Aventurine says, pressing a tentative kiss to Sunday’s collarbone.
Sunday stills.
“Really? What about Topaz?”
“First romantic partner, darling.”
“Oh, right, right.”
“What about you, hm? Any secrets to trade?”
Sunday hums.
“You’re my first everything,” he says and his flight wings flap in the water, a smooth elegant motion. “But I’m not sure how much of a surprise that is.”
“Not much of one. A tragedy, though, that no one ever spoiled you.”
“Ah, I think you prefer to do the spoiling yourself.”
Aventurine preens.
“So what if I did?”
“I want to return the gesture.”
And before long Aventurine feels those loving- ALIVE UNSCATHED UNSEVERED- fingers card through his hair, gently massaging shampoo and conditioner into his scalp. Every stroke pets him deeper into blissful tranquility. Paradise, this. Paradise, smothered in care and the warmth of the bath.
“Can you carry me if I fall asleep on you?” Aventurine mumbles. “I’m not gonna make it. Feels too good.”
“Please don’t fall asleep before we wash this out.”
“But I wanna.”
“Churin, stay with me.”
“Only because you ask so nicely,” Aventurine whines. “You’re too good at this, it’s unfair.”
The end of the world still rests in parts of him. He feels them rear their heads, the marks on his skin he does not get to witness. Sunday always cares for them most- those spots on his shoulders, the temples, the eyelids.
“What did you see?” Aventurine asks, finally.
Sunday freezes. The end of the world never ended- commenced that day and continued evermore in every scar and dream and hopeful ask.
“I-“
“I can share mine first,” Aventurine tries, feeling Sunday’s grief in every muscle. “Would that help?”
It starts with shivers, small tremors. Then the touch returns, doting and desperate, caring for Aventurine caress after caress.
“It wasn’t real,” Aventurine whispers, eyes closed, soaking up every drop of love. “I’m not dead. You don’t have to be scared of it.”
Sunday does not talk until they have finished their bath, until they are dried off and in bed surrounded by the catcakes.
“You were a saint,” Sunday says, toneless. “Blinded and strung up with your ribcage and skin spread like wings. I tried to reach you and you told me you did it for me. Why wasn’t I content with you? Why was I upset? You were giving me all I wanted, breaking yourself open to be loved. You begged me to stop crying, to stop hating you, insisting you could tear and scrape off more to keep me happy.”
Aventurine listens. The silk of his pajamas whispers as he shifts position. One measure closer.
“I tried to tell you that it was unnecessary, that I was wrong and cruel when we met and you don’t deserve pain or punishment,” Sunday continues, no less hollow. “You didn’t believe me or couldn’t hear me or couldn’t- you couldn’t. I watched you rip yourself open until you were drained of blood. All for me.”
Sesame crawls into his lap and Sunday’s expression softens. Care, once again bestowed on someone else.
“Was that what would have happened to me in Ena’s dream?” Aventurine asks, idly petting Cherry’s shell.
Sunday wrenches his head up to make eye contact so quickly it looks painful.
“No,” he says, sounding gutted. “No, of course not, I never wanted you to-“
“Then you have nothing to blame yourself for,” Aventurine interrupts. “I dreamed of you dying, too, while still apologizing to me and accepting it as something you deserved. I didn’t want that for you, either. You don’t blame me for it, do you?”
Sunday’s wings droop as he sighs.
“No. If anything, the fact that the prospect upsets you-“
“Exactly.”
“But it’s not-“
“Isn’t it the same?”
Sunday gives, reluctantly, laying down with his head on Aventurine’s lap.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize, silly dove. Get comfortable. You said your hair and feathers could use some more care before bed, right?”
“Only if you want to.”
Aventurine does want to. He wants to bury his fingers in that soft hair, stroke and brush it. He wants to groom and pet those small wings, apply oils and massage their base right behind Sunday’s ears. Then the flight wings, the spine, the lower back.
By the time Aventurine is satisfied Sunday has fallen asleep in his arms. The catcakes help, as they always do, by purring loudly and being as in the way as possible, meowing obstacles draped all over the blankets.
“You all watch over his dreams, too,” Aventurine whispers. “And mine, if you can.”
The chorus of meows assures him. It will be a safe night, a good night.
Kissing Sunday for the first time is wonderfully imperfect. Their noses bump into each other and Aventurine’s hip knocks into a table and none of it truly matters because they are kissing, tentatively and sweetly as though they were teenagers feeling the stirring in their chest for the first time, the slow-blossoming knowledge of what fondness tastes like.
“I’m not sure when or if I’ll be alright with- with sex,” Sunday admits the second time they lose themselves in slow kisses in his room on the Express. “Please be patient with me.”
Aventurine wonders, sometimes, what it must feel like not to feel pleasure from feeling pleasure. What it must feel like, for your body to crave intimacy but many a touch to bring nausea. But he is patient. But he minds it less than he expected. But he is so weirdly, wonderfully, content being cared for in any way.
“Take your time,” Aventurine says, curled around Sunday intertwined with him. “Just let me know what you’re okay with.”
The Destruction’s horrid visions wear off at the start of the third month. Aventurine notices because the feverish warmth, the skin hunger, suddenly calms. It happens in the middle of the night, one dream to the next. He gasps awake, cold and raw and helpless as a fish on dry land.
GONE GONE GONE IT IS GONE I AM GONE THE END OF THE WORLD AND ME BOTH-
“Churin,” Sunday murmurs beside him, snuggling closer. “You’re shaking. Are you okay?”
Aventurine exhales. It still feels good. It still feels warm. His heart still skips a beat thinking of the lovely Halovian beside him, his boyfriend, his boyfriend.
“Think I finally shook Irontomb’s sickness,” he admits, looking over, eyes bright. “Sorry if I was a bother.”
Sunday drags him closer, rubbing Aventurine’s hip. He is so warm. His wings hug Aventurine tight. The cold was just shock. The cold was not grief.
“Never. How do you feel?”
“Embarrassed, a little. Otherwise the same, I think.”
“Anything you need?”
“Kiss me?” Aventurine pleads.
Within a moment there are lips against his. Sunday kisses him better, kisses him in the depth of night.
“Nothing easier than that.”
“Sometimes I do think the world ended,” Aventurine says and feels wetness on his cheeks, lines that surely bleed silvery shimmering down to his jaw. “And this is not real. I’m still lost somewhere. A saint. You a martyr. Topaz forgotten.”
The wings envelop him as the shadows of night do. Nowhere to go but nothing to fear. If he asked he would be freed in a heartbeat.
“I’ll find you again if that happens,” Sunday whispers. “I promise. Wherever, whenever.”
Find you, find you, find you.
Aventurine laughs, tearful and with fear kept at bay.
“Pretty bird on the swiftest wings,” he whispers back and shudders as the last chill of the apocalypse departs. “You will be right on time.”