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The sky is alive.
Himmel does not know how else to explain the way it behaves. It can be as black as the bottom of a well, as orange as firelight, as blue as the shell of a robin's egg. It can be covered in anything from a thin patina of clouds to a veritable blanket that stretches from horizon to horizon; or it can be perfectly clear, as Himmel best likes it. He thinks that the sky must be happy when it blesses those that take shelter underneath it with sunlight and warmth, and that cold, bitter winds must be an exercise in frustration.
The sky is alive.
And now, it is angry.
Stormclouds choke the horizon line, heavy with raindrops that pelt the roof of the motley inn with so much force that the rafters creak and groan in what must surely be agony. Himmel flinches harshly when he sees lightning crackle between the sky and the tree line. He has to blink away the branching pattern burnt into his vision in the aftermath. In the space between one stuttering heartbeat and the next, he is a child again, gripping the guardrails of his bunk to stop the tremors in his muscles.
Himmel starts counting the raindrops racing down the windowpane, loses track at thirty-two, then begins anew until he is able to reach a hundred without stuttering or choking or mixing up eighty-five and fifty-eight. He feels his lungs grate against his ribcage, expanding too slowly for the heaving breaths he is taking, and then he begins again. Counting, over and over, until something that isn't quite calmness but resembles it adequately settles over him like a moth-eaten shawl in the winter. Providing warmth against the snow, sure, but not nearly enough to help with the frostbite.
"It is irregular for you to stay awake this late."
Himmel, who had been keeping his eyes shut to avoid looking at the wrathful sky, opens them to stare at Frieren. She has the uncanny habit of becoming completely silent when reading, and even Himmel—whose senses have become knife-sharp with years of practice—sometimes forgets that she is in the room with him. It has been happening less and less now, the forgetting, but his mind struggles to focus on anything but the thunder that rattles through his teeth, following closely on the heels of the lightning.
"Is it?" Himmel asks, almost amused.
"With respect to your usual pattern of behavior, yes," Frieren replies.
He pillows his cheek on his fist, raising his eyebrows. "And how come you know what my pattern of behavior is?"
"It was not particularly difficult to observe."
"Ah, so you've been observing me." Himmel smiles up at her. "I'm flattered."
Frieren closes her book and sets it on her lap. "I never intended to observe you specifically. People are seldom worth the effort, humans least of all."
Himmel understands that, intellectually. They have been traveling together for five years now. Though Frieren is oblivious at her best and apathetic at her worst, she would have to go out of her way to ignore him to not know anything about his sleeping habits. He is, after all, the member of their party who wakes up at the crack of dawn every day without fail and then makes it everybody else's problem. A corollary to that is that Himmel is usually the first one asleep as well. Someone as observant as Frieren, even if she is hopeless in the matters of the heart, would have noticed that.
"I know," he sighs. "I—"
More thunder, this time loud enough that he can feel it vibrating through the cool glass he has been leaning against. Himmel can't suppress the full-body flinch that follows. Frieren watches him with an expression he quickly categorizes as her curious face. He has discovered by now that there are flavors to her blankness, subtle but distinct. This is the face she makes when she is cataloging something, whether it be a note in her grimoire or a strange natural phenomenon.
Or, in this case, Himmel.
He feels his cheeks warm at the thought of being the subject of her scrutiny, even so briefly. He is a strange man who is hopelessly in love with a strange woman, and it makes him want strange things. He doubts ordinary men fantasize about being grimoires with dog-eared pages and annotations in the margins, whose only reason for existence is being perused by the sharp, jade eyes of a brilliant mage.
"Curious," Frieren says.
"Is that so?"
"I have never known you to be afraid of anything. So yes, this is indeed curious."
As is becoming a worryingly common occurrence with Frieren, he feels his heart break. He has been afraid, over and over, and the veneer of bravado he paints over it is paper thin. Himmel isn't trying to fool anyone, and Frieren has gotten herself fooled anyway, because she doesn't care about—
No.
That isn't fair.
"Sorry," he murmurs, then realizes that he probably sounds like a lunatic for apologizing for his thoughts.
"Why lightning?" Frieren asks. "Or is it thunder?"
Himmel's brain snags on the fact that Frieren just asked him a question about him to slake her curiosity, of which he was the cause. "Both," he shrugs. "I've never really known why."
His attempt at sounding suave is promptly demolished by another flash bisecting the horizon. Himmel tenses, holding his breath for the few seconds it takes for thunder to sound. Truth be told, it feels like he should have a reason. He is kind to everyone he meets because Frieren was kind to him first. He is on a mission to defeat the Demon King because a demon killed his parents in a campaign to terrorize his village. This strange, irrational fear does not fit with the image Himmel has of himself—or, for that matter, the image anyone else has of him.
"There does not need to be a reason. Phobias are predicated on being irrational."
Himmel nods sagely, as if he understands what the word "predicated" means. "I see."
And then, completely and without prompting, Frieren casts aside the comforter bunched up around her lap and pads over to the alcove where Himmel is sitting. She takes a seat across from him, staring at him as intently as he is trying not to stare at the sky.
"What evades my understanding is why you do not just sleep through it," she says.
"I try to," he admits. "It never works."
"Hmm."
"Hmm? I'm baring my heart and soul out to you, and all you have to say is 'hmm'?" He keeps his tone intentionally light, and he prays he doesn't sound like he means it as much as he really does.
Frieren's expression shifts from curious to bored. It is barely anything, just a shift in the angle of her eyebrows and a slight pucker of her lips. She turns her face towards the storm as well, though there is something faraway in her gaze. Something ancient. Something even time cannot touch.
"I know that the appropriate response is to provide comfort."
Himmel lets out a startled laugh.
"What?" she asks. "Is something amusing you?"
"No, it's just that you usually go quiet about now."
She frowns. "I do?"
"Yeah," Himmel says. "After you make that face."
"What face?"
"The face you make when nothing in the world is as interesting as what's in your head."
Frieren's frown scrunches up into the cutest pout. Himmel has to physically suppress the urge to kiss her wrinkled nose. "I do not...I do not make faces!"
"You do too. It's the cutest thing I've ever seen."
Her ears droop, and though she doesn't cry—thank the Goddess—she looks near close to tears. "I am not cute."
More lightning.
More thunder.
Himmel sits there, still as the statues he so loves to commission, trembling all over. Frieren watches him with renewed fascination. Careful. Calculating.
"Do you know how lightning is made?" she asks.
"No," Himmel replies. "Pa always said it happens when the sky is angry."
"The sky is the name we give the upper atmosphere. It cannot get angry."
"I know," he says. "But we were farmers; we didn't need to know why anything happened, only that it did."
"Lightning is the discharge of electricity that happens when a cloud accumulates an excess of electrical charge. When this charge—
"Electre…what now?"
"Electricity," Frieren repeats, exasperated. "It is a kind of energy. How can I explain....? Ah, yes. Have you ever tried rubbing a glass rod with silk and holding it up to your hair?"
"Uh…no?"
Frieren hurries to her valise on the nightstand and begins rummaging through it. She procures a corked cylinder probably for holding potions, and a rag in such tatters that Himmel is afraid of what she has put it through over the years. She starts to rub the two together furiously as she walks back towards the alcove, then brings the cylinder to his hairline. Himmel rolls his eyes back to see the strands of his hair pull towards it, floating as though by magic.
"What spell is that?" he asks.
"None," she replies. "The friction strips these particles called electrons from the glass, which makes it positively charged. Your hair is negatively charged, which means it has more electrons, and the excess electrons in your hair are drawn towards the glass."
"Woah."
"The other concept you have to understand is capacitance." Frieren sits back down and opens her hands expectantly.
Himmel's heart skips a beat when he feels his warm palms settle against hers. She curls her fingers around his knuckles and moves his hands so that they are parallel to one another.
"Do you remember when I said that the glass was positively charged after losing electrons?"
"I do."
"That's because electrons have negative charge. Now, suppose that electrons begin building up on one of two conducting plates—metal is better for this demonstration, but your hands will do. Now if a voltage is applied—that's just a way of saying that the charges are pushed…"
Lightning crackles between Himmel's palms. His breath catches—not from fear, but from the overwhelming beauty of the way its white light casts jagged shadows across Frieren's face.
"The clouds and the ground make one exceedingly large capacitor," Frieren says, turning back towards the storm. "That is what lightning is. Electrostatic discharge."
Another brilliant strike, fractals exploding from the clouds and into a blinding flash of light. Himmel does not flinch, this time, but he rather imagines the earth and the sky as two warm palms. When he sees the lightning dance between them, he thinks of Frieren's fingers, still curled around his. And now he can't stop staring, with terror and awe in equal measure.
And then she pulls back, shaking off his touch to wipe the sweat from his clammy hands on her nightgown. "Perhaps you did not suffer from astraphobia at all," she muses.
"Is that what it's called when you're scared of lightning?" Himmel asks, as if every inch she puts between them isn't breaking his heart. "That's a really pretty word."
"It is, is it not?" Frieren smiles at him just once before resuming her grimoire reading lesson. "I am available if you ever need an etymology lesson."
"Etymology," Himmel repeats, committing the syllables to memory even though he doesn't understand the word itself, just so that he can ask her later. "Frieren?"
"Hmm?"
I'm sorry, he wants to say. I'm sorry for thinking for even a moment that you didn't care. I'm sorry for expecting you to care the way that everybody else does; I don't love you because you're like everybody else. I'm sorry.
"Thank you," he says instead.
"…why?"
"For everything."
She blinks, nonplussed, and he returns to watching the storm again.