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I've had writer's block for weeks now, and I have a job interview on Wednesday, so I thought I'd just write something to break the paralysis and post whatever came out of it. Um. This is what did? Dieselpunk gay faerie romance set approximately in 1938, because my brain is weird. Good luck.
Title: Castles in the Sky
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Original (Rook & Raven)
Characters/Pairings: Retim, Alem. Retim/Alem
Summary: While the shadows of fresh war draw closer and the age of airships draws to a close, two tainted exiles stand aboard a poisoned paradise and wait for reality to shatter old illusions. A world full of iron is not kind to fae, and a sky full of iron wings even less so
Wordcount: 3049
Warnings/Notes: Dodgy historical fantasy, dieselpunk, World Wars I and II, airships, poisoning, sacrifice, forbidden romance, period-ish homophobia & racism, faeries, immortality/mortality, sacrifice, transformation
Claimer: This one is mine
Title: Castles in the Sky
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Original (Rook & Raven)
Characters/Pairings: Retim, Alem. Retim/Alem
Summary: While the shadows of fresh war draw closer and the age of airships draws to a close, two tainted exiles stand aboard a poisoned paradise and wait for reality to shatter old illusions. A world full of iron is not kind to fae, and a sky full of iron wings even less so
Wordcount: 3049
Warnings/Notes: Dodgy historical fantasy, dieselpunk, World Wars I and II, airships, poisoning, sacrifice, forbidden romance, period-ish homophobia & racism, faeries, immortality/mortality, sacrifice, transformation
Claimer: This one is mine
Castles in the Sky
Beyond the decorative ironwork of the lounge windows, the world slipped away beneath them like a blue-black roll of velvet, studded with yellow diamonds where towns and cities and the thin traceries of roadways made their mark. He almost had to press his nose to the glass to see it. The night had made a mirror more than a window of the panes, and reflections, a ghost world of golden luxury, had made seeing the reality of the outside world more than a little difficult now.
Not that reality was necessarily worth straining for, Retim thought absently. The illusion would a pleasant one to cling to. A bubble of gilt and carpet and light, floating high above the darkness below. A castle in the sky, its engines thrumming gently beneath your feet. No doubt it had been the line they peddled when the luxury airship had first been proposed, and no doubt it was the dream that fueled it still.
But it couldn't last much longer. That dream, for all its pleasantness, was coming to an end.
"Tell me," murmured a voice at his ear, as gentle hands smoothed across his hips and a tall body slipped in close behind him. Alem's reflection watched him wryly, nestled close beside his own. "I can feel the darkness in your thoughts from across the room. You might as well speak it now. Hmm?"
Retim exhaled, a sigh of breath like a knot letting go, and closed his eyes against illusion and reality both. He leaned into the head resting beside his own, the roughness of Alem's skin warm against his temple. Heat, strength, silence. Alem huffed softly, perhaps happily, and wrapped his arm more snugly across Retim's stomach, guiding him back to rest more firmly against his partner's body. There was strength beyond measure in that quiet embrace, a silent, ancient amusement that could not be fully broken for all the world. This one, or any other. Retim drank of it like warm brandy, and smiled faintly while his hand smoothed across Alem's.
"It won't last much longer," he explained, while they breathed together in a bright bubble of gilt and glass a mile into the sky. "You can feel it. The air smells of iron. Thunder. There's a storm coming, and when it arrives, there will no longer be a place for us here."
For a moment, Alem said nothing. Retim opened his eyes, watching the face beside his own in their reflection, the calm, placid thoughtfulness in shadowed eyes. Alem turned his face a little, brushed his nose and his lips over the edge of Retim's cheek, an absent gesture to fill the space between their thoughts. It wasn't prevarication, he knew. Simply motion, comfort, in the places between words.
"This world is made of iron and thunder," his partner said at last, raising his head from Retim's shoulder and straightening up behind him. Still holding fast around his waist, though. Still warm, still present. "It can't be otherwise, when its people bear iron in their blood. You could be smelling that. Iron ships, iron blood. We stand surrounded, after all. A nice perversity, for ones such as we. Fae suitors in an iron cage, hmm? Maybe you've only just realised it."
It was meant as a needle, a spur. A bright little lance of placid malice, the shards of it glittering in Alem's eyes, across his cheeks, where steel dust marred the ebon skin. This challenge came every so often, this reminder of weeping wounds opened long ago. They had chosen a world not their own, chosen a world well nigh inimical to them, and Alem had chosen it first. Had carved it literally into his skin, into his flesh, until his cheekbones glittered a permanent grey and his golden blood ran half-red with rust. Retim had not followed the same way. While he had given himself to Alem, entrusted himself in his entirety to the hands around his waist, he had never tasted of the iron or of Earth as Alem had. From necessity, so that one of them at least would be pure enough to carry the transition, but still. Every so often, when the darkness clouded both their thoughts, the doubts of that half-following crept once more to the fore.
It might have been painful, once. Sharp-edged, cutting at the bond between them. In the beginning, so many, many years ago, it would have torn at them. But that was long ago, and though it still surfaced now and then, the edge and the ache had dulled, and now carried something almost on the edge of humour instead. A test, seeking reassurance, forever answered between them.
"... You must think me very slow to realisation, lover mine," he murmured, and matched his grin to Alem's, two identical flashes of teeth in dark faces. "Only a half century we've been here. Amazing how I've missed the poison until now, truly it is."
Alem laughed at him, and leaned in to bite gently at his ear, the edges of his teeth only a faint pressure over the skin of the lobe. Retim shivered faintly regardless, huffing breathless annoyance. Something shifted in the atmosphere of the room around them, heads turning more openly in their direction, a frisson of something more dangerous beginning to stir. He saw the reflections from deeper into the lounge, mortal eyes in pale faces that flashed disapproval towards them. Two dark lovers entwined in the midst of a pale dream of luxury. He could feel the hatred towards them even here, a different but equal poison to the taint of iron forever in the air, and something dark and happy flowered in him in response.
Alem felt it. He had to. He sensed the red-gold edge in Retim's thoughts, the steel bloom, and his hands tightened around Retim in answer. His teeth sank deeper, threatening to draw a bead of golden blood to shine on Retim's ear and alarm their watchers all the more thoroughly, and despite himself Retim almost wanted that. Almost thrilled to it, almost tilted his head to drive his partner's teeth even deeper. Sense won out, caution, but for a second he thrilled, and would have acted on the darkness of it.
"Defiance suits you better," Alem said softly, putting his teeth away for the moment. "The iron has always been there, Retim. Even if you're only really sensing it now. It's been there from the first, and it hasn't destroyed us yet. Lets not sign away our places for it just yet. This world can bear us for another while, I think."
He looked up and out, turning his head to meet Retim's eyes in their reflection, the illusion of them hovering against the night. There was something darkly pleading in his eyes, stark above the grey wounds across his cheeks. Retim's heart staggered in his chest for the sight of it. Always, every time. But he did not flinch. He had promised not to, half a century before, and he had never broken that promise in all the years since. He could not start now.
"You know that's not what I meant, Alem," he said, holding those reflected eyes. No old and gentle malice, now, but the same stark challenge that Alem had once offered him. They'd been younger then, Alem only newly tainted, only newly freed, and Retim only newly in love. Their warmth and their softness had come later. In the beginning, it had been a harder and fiercer thing between them. "This isn't something your taint can shield us from. You know it. You feel it too. There is another war coming, as great or greater than the last. And the last wreathed the whole world in fire and iron. We barely survived, you and I. I know you remember that."
Alem looked away. Stepped away, too. He let go of Retim's waist to stand back a pace, a sense of age and weariness falling suddenly across him. And there was age to sense. The taint that freed him in that other world, their world, had not come without a price. They had walked into a poisoned realm, had bound its essence into Alem's flesh, and though they had wrapped it around with magic and fused it to create a halfway thing, they had not escaped its cost. Alem was ageing, would continue to age, as no other of their people had ever done. Not quite mortal. Nowhere near as ephemeral as they, who had been born with iron in their blood from the first. But no longer truly immortal either. Tainted, poisoned, and free. Such was the price they paid, and Alem so much more dearly than he. Alem so much more frail, and too easily lost to allow his pleading to stay Retim's hand.
"There is war coming," he repeated, turning in place to look not at a reflection but at reality. At Alem, who looked back at him in silent, pained weariness, and did not disagree. Retim reached out to take his hand, and held it tight. "You can feel it. Their wars are changing. Growing larger, colder, more full of steel. Your blood cannot protect us from it much longer, and in this world we bear the wrong faces to survive unmolested. We cannot stay here. The Great War almost killed us, Alem. We cannot survive another of its like."
Alem closed his eyes. His hand twisted in Retim's, powerful fingers lacing themselves silently through his partner's, and Retim knew then that Alem agreed with him. He knew his partner had not missed the signs, nor failed to realise their import. The dream was dying, the little bubble of peace and poisoned luxury, and it was war that crept back across the world in its wake. The castles in the sky were failing, and iron wings stood poised to take their place.
"I don't want to leave," Alem whispered softly. "I don't want to risk the mists, Retim. The taint of iron protects this realm. There is no other I know that would keep our pursuers away from us, and I cannot go back to what they made of me. I would die sooner."
"I know," Retim answered simply. He did. It had always been true, and always would be. Alem had taken a poison inside himself, years ago, because the poison was the better option, and because he had the skill and the will to make more than suicide of it. He had carved himself a freedom at the cost of immortality, and to keep it he would never balk from even that last and fatal step. They both knew it.
But alongside that was something else they both knew. A steel bloom, a defiance that suited them much better. Alem had poisoned himself, had bent that poison into a shield to protect them both, but he had not poisoned Retim. The blood that ran in Retim's veins was still the bright, pure gold of an immortal fae, and while there had been reason for that, a purpose to keeping Retim's magic pure and untainted, still it had not been coldly done. Alem had spared him for more reasons than pragmatism, and while his own death could be courted freely, Retim's was something different. For Alem, at least. As firmly as Retim denied Alem's end, Alem denied his. In that cause, they had made Alem their shield in an iron realm, and kept Retim pure ... to be their shield in another.
"I know," he said again, moving close and regaining his hand to rest it against the steel of Alem's cheek instead. He cupped Alem's face between his hands, ignoring the affronted hisses from the other occupants of this dream and the flinch in his own flesh where it met that ingrained poison. Alem startled slightly, but leaned into the touch, a faintly twisted smile on his lips for the pain and the joy it caused them both. "But you carry iron with you now, Alem. You bear a weapon now that they cannot take from you. And even you did not, my love. Even if your blood were pure weakness from here on out, and not a weapon in itself. Even then, you would not stand undefended. The magic you've spared in me will be a sight more useful in the mists than it is now." He smiled, and brushed his thumb across his partner's wounds. "I would not let them have you. Please tell me that you know that."
Alem drew in a breath, a tremor running through him while he met Retim's fierce stare with a wildness in his eyes, and then, after a second, he let it out again. One long, sighing release, before he took Retim's wrists in his hands, and pressed his poisoned cheeks into Retim's palms.
"I do," he answered, with something that was at last more humour again than pain. Something that was old, and warm, full of gentle malice, and a bright and steely adoration. Alem met his eyes, and Retim knew himself not only loved but trusted, even still. "I know it, Retim. Always."
Retim swayed a little, his eyes slipping to half-mast once more. His head felt light, the airship's engines thrumming beneath his feet and tilting his world until only Alem's touch kept him orientated. It was a heady brew, that love, that trust. As much as Alem's strength, as Alem's steel, as the red-gold poison in their veins. A far more potent thing than brandy, to be sure.
"... Then lets leave war behind," he managed, after a moment. He looked back up, met the wry warmth in his lover's eyes once more. "This second war of theirs. Lets leave them to it, Alem. One war and half a century of iron is enough poison for now." He smiled crookedly. "If we survive the mists, we can always come back later. When the illusion of safety here doesn't seem quite so fragile as it does now. There will be castles waiting for us. They may not fly, but they'll be there. I'm sure of it."
Alem blinked at him, and then he shook his head, his chuckle rich and deep. "Keep us alive out there, and we can wait for them to fly again, if you like." He smiled, pulling Retim's hands from his face the better to lean down and rest their foreheads together, nuzzling softly at Retim's nose. Distantly, Retim registered people moving towards them behind Alem, registered that they must have finally crossed the last line of propriety for those around them, tripping affronted hatred into violence. He didn't much care. "You've borne fifty years in a poisoned realm for me. With the magic in the mists, I think I can bear waiting long enough for a castle fit to lure you back."
"Excuse me, sirs," came another voice, a mortal voice, behind Alem's shoulder. There would be a hand to follow it in a second, Retim prophesied that. There would be hard hands, and hard words, and maybe even violence. They had the wrong faces for this realm, in this time. The wrong faces, the wrong love, the wrong nature. This little golden bubble was too fragile for them at all. But that didn't matter now, did it? It had never mattered before, and less than that now. The illusion was too frail to cling to and lo, they no longer needed to.
"It wasn't the castle that lured me," he whispered, bright with that defiance that suited them so very well, and always had. "We don't need a ship to fly, after all. Do we, my love."
Not a question, never that, and Alem only blinked for a second. Only faltered a bare moment in confusion, before life and love and a red-gold shining filled his eyes. Alem caught him, and Alem kissed him, and before pale hands could seize about them they were running, they were flying, they had shattered mirrored panes before them and transformed before the glass had even started to fall. Retim laughed, wild and raucous as the reflected illusions shattered out into the darkness of reality, and then the laugh was a crow, a caw, and Alem's black plumage tumbled through sudden wind alongside him. For them it was not suicide. Mortals roared in horrified confusion behind them, a crowd moved from violence to horror as they clustered at the gate of the gilded iron cage that receded above two tumbling forms, but it was not suicide. No more than iron, no more than mist. For them, for their love, there could be no death.
The airship fell away, a golden dream already fading before the coming storm, and beneath it, small and black and all but invisible in the darkness, a rook and a raven gathered their wings beneath them to halt their fall. They came together, wingtips brushing in the open air, ebon feathers like ebon fingers, and turned as one towards the dawn that breached a distant horizon. Towards the mists that gathered in that liminal moment, and opened out onto something else. Another realm, another war, another fate.
All the poison in this world, Retim thought, could not take their magic from them. True fae they may have been no longer, but they were not so tainted yet as to be mortal. They had kept it so, Alem and he. They had fought for it, and not from fear but from hope. From love, and defiance, and hope. Despite it all, despite all the costs and all the taints, they had found a freedom short of death, and they would find it now again. As many times as need be.
It had not the golden comfort of illusion, that thought. It had none of the luxury and safety of a castle in the sky, none of the warm purity of true magic. It was a tainted thing, as much as they were, half-red with rust and weeping.
But it had steel, and it had joy, shining red-gold between them, and he clung to it more tightly, to Alem more tightly, for all its glittered edges.
Tainted, poisoned, and free. Together, despite it all, they were that.
It was enough, he thought, and more.
Beyond the decorative ironwork of the lounge windows, the world slipped away beneath them like a blue-black roll of velvet, studded with yellow diamonds where towns and cities and the thin traceries of roadways made their mark. He almost had to press his nose to the glass to see it. The night had made a mirror more than a window of the panes, and reflections, a ghost world of golden luxury, had made seeing the reality of the outside world more than a little difficult now.
Not that reality was necessarily worth straining for, Retim thought absently. The illusion would a pleasant one to cling to. A bubble of gilt and carpet and light, floating high above the darkness below. A castle in the sky, its engines thrumming gently beneath your feet. No doubt it had been the line they peddled when the luxury airship had first been proposed, and no doubt it was the dream that fueled it still.
But it couldn't last much longer. That dream, for all its pleasantness, was coming to an end.
"Tell me," murmured a voice at his ear, as gentle hands smoothed across his hips and a tall body slipped in close behind him. Alem's reflection watched him wryly, nestled close beside his own. "I can feel the darkness in your thoughts from across the room. You might as well speak it now. Hmm?"
Retim exhaled, a sigh of breath like a knot letting go, and closed his eyes against illusion and reality both. He leaned into the head resting beside his own, the roughness of Alem's skin warm against his temple. Heat, strength, silence. Alem huffed softly, perhaps happily, and wrapped his arm more snugly across Retim's stomach, guiding him back to rest more firmly against his partner's body. There was strength beyond measure in that quiet embrace, a silent, ancient amusement that could not be fully broken for all the world. This one, or any other. Retim drank of it like warm brandy, and smiled faintly while his hand smoothed across Alem's.
"It won't last much longer," he explained, while they breathed together in a bright bubble of gilt and glass a mile into the sky. "You can feel it. The air smells of iron. Thunder. There's a storm coming, and when it arrives, there will no longer be a place for us here."
For a moment, Alem said nothing. Retim opened his eyes, watching the face beside his own in their reflection, the calm, placid thoughtfulness in shadowed eyes. Alem turned his face a little, brushed his nose and his lips over the edge of Retim's cheek, an absent gesture to fill the space between their thoughts. It wasn't prevarication, he knew. Simply motion, comfort, in the places between words.
"This world is made of iron and thunder," his partner said at last, raising his head from Retim's shoulder and straightening up behind him. Still holding fast around his waist, though. Still warm, still present. "It can't be otherwise, when its people bear iron in their blood. You could be smelling that. Iron ships, iron blood. We stand surrounded, after all. A nice perversity, for ones such as we. Fae suitors in an iron cage, hmm? Maybe you've only just realised it."
It was meant as a needle, a spur. A bright little lance of placid malice, the shards of it glittering in Alem's eyes, across his cheeks, where steel dust marred the ebon skin. This challenge came every so often, this reminder of weeping wounds opened long ago. They had chosen a world not their own, chosen a world well nigh inimical to them, and Alem had chosen it first. Had carved it literally into his skin, into his flesh, until his cheekbones glittered a permanent grey and his golden blood ran half-red with rust. Retim had not followed the same way. While he had given himself to Alem, entrusted himself in his entirety to the hands around his waist, he had never tasted of the iron or of Earth as Alem had. From necessity, so that one of them at least would be pure enough to carry the transition, but still. Every so often, when the darkness clouded both their thoughts, the doubts of that half-following crept once more to the fore.
It might have been painful, once. Sharp-edged, cutting at the bond between them. In the beginning, so many, many years ago, it would have torn at them. But that was long ago, and though it still surfaced now and then, the edge and the ache had dulled, and now carried something almost on the edge of humour instead. A test, seeking reassurance, forever answered between them.
"... You must think me very slow to realisation, lover mine," he murmured, and matched his grin to Alem's, two identical flashes of teeth in dark faces. "Only a half century we've been here. Amazing how I've missed the poison until now, truly it is."
Alem laughed at him, and leaned in to bite gently at his ear, the edges of his teeth only a faint pressure over the skin of the lobe. Retim shivered faintly regardless, huffing breathless annoyance. Something shifted in the atmosphere of the room around them, heads turning more openly in their direction, a frisson of something more dangerous beginning to stir. He saw the reflections from deeper into the lounge, mortal eyes in pale faces that flashed disapproval towards them. Two dark lovers entwined in the midst of a pale dream of luxury. He could feel the hatred towards them even here, a different but equal poison to the taint of iron forever in the air, and something dark and happy flowered in him in response.
Alem felt it. He had to. He sensed the red-gold edge in Retim's thoughts, the steel bloom, and his hands tightened around Retim in answer. His teeth sank deeper, threatening to draw a bead of golden blood to shine on Retim's ear and alarm their watchers all the more thoroughly, and despite himself Retim almost wanted that. Almost thrilled to it, almost tilted his head to drive his partner's teeth even deeper. Sense won out, caution, but for a second he thrilled, and would have acted on the darkness of it.
"Defiance suits you better," Alem said softly, putting his teeth away for the moment. "The iron has always been there, Retim. Even if you're only really sensing it now. It's been there from the first, and it hasn't destroyed us yet. Lets not sign away our places for it just yet. This world can bear us for another while, I think."
He looked up and out, turning his head to meet Retim's eyes in their reflection, the illusion of them hovering against the night. There was something darkly pleading in his eyes, stark above the grey wounds across his cheeks. Retim's heart staggered in his chest for the sight of it. Always, every time. But he did not flinch. He had promised not to, half a century before, and he had never broken that promise in all the years since. He could not start now.
"You know that's not what I meant, Alem," he said, holding those reflected eyes. No old and gentle malice, now, but the same stark challenge that Alem had once offered him. They'd been younger then, Alem only newly tainted, only newly freed, and Retim only newly in love. Their warmth and their softness had come later. In the beginning, it had been a harder and fiercer thing between them. "This isn't something your taint can shield us from. You know it. You feel it too. There is another war coming, as great or greater than the last. And the last wreathed the whole world in fire and iron. We barely survived, you and I. I know you remember that."
Alem looked away. Stepped away, too. He let go of Retim's waist to stand back a pace, a sense of age and weariness falling suddenly across him. And there was age to sense. The taint that freed him in that other world, their world, had not come without a price. They had walked into a poisoned realm, had bound its essence into Alem's flesh, and though they had wrapped it around with magic and fused it to create a halfway thing, they had not escaped its cost. Alem was ageing, would continue to age, as no other of their people had ever done. Not quite mortal. Nowhere near as ephemeral as they, who had been born with iron in their blood from the first. But no longer truly immortal either. Tainted, poisoned, and free. Such was the price they paid, and Alem so much more dearly than he. Alem so much more frail, and too easily lost to allow his pleading to stay Retim's hand.
"There is war coming," he repeated, turning in place to look not at a reflection but at reality. At Alem, who looked back at him in silent, pained weariness, and did not disagree. Retim reached out to take his hand, and held it tight. "You can feel it. Their wars are changing. Growing larger, colder, more full of steel. Your blood cannot protect us from it much longer, and in this world we bear the wrong faces to survive unmolested. We cannot stay here. The Great War almost killed us, Alem. We cannot survive another of its like."
Alem closed his eyes. His hand twisted in Retim's, powerful fingers lacing themselves silently through his partner's, and Retim knew then that Alem agreed with him. He knew his partner had not missed the signs, nor failed to realise their import. The dream was dying, the little bubble of peace and poisoned luxury, and it was war that crept back across the world in its wake. The castles in the sky were failing, and iron wings stood poised to take their place.
"I don't want to leave," Alem whispered softly. "I don't want to risk the mists, Retim. The taint of iron protects this realm. There is no other I know that would keep our pursuers away from us, and I cannot go back to what they made of me. I would die sooner."
"I know," Retim answered simply. He did. It had always been true, and always would be. Alem had taken a poison inside himself, years ago, because the poison was the better option, and because he had the skill and the will to make more than suicide of it. He had carved himself a freedom at the cost of immortality, and to keep it he would never balk from even that last and fatal step. They both knew it.
But alongside that was something else they both knew. A steel bloom, a defiance that suited them much better. Alem had poisoned himself, had bent that poison into a shield to protect them both, but he had not poisoned Retim. The blood that ran in Retim's veins was still the bright, pure gold of an immortal fae, and while there had been reason for that, a purpose to keeping Retim's magic pure and untainted, still it had not been coldly done. Alem had spared him for more reasons than pragmatism, and while his own death could be courted freely, Retim's was something different. For Alem, at least. As firmly as Retim denied Alem's end, Alem denied his. In that cause, they had made Alem their shield in an iron realm, and kept Retim pure ... to be their shield in another.
"I know," he said again, moving close and regaining his hand to rest it against the steel of Alem's cheek instead. He cupped Alem's face between his hands, ignoring the affronted hisses from the other occupants of this dream and the flinch in his own flesh where it met that ingrained poison. Alem startled slightly, but leaned into the touch, a faintly twisted smile on his lips for the pain and the joy it caused them both. "But you carry iron with you now, Alem. You bear a weapon now that they cannot take from you. And even you did not, my love. Even if your blood were pure weakness from here on out, and not a weapon in itself. Even then, you would not stand undefended. The magic you've spared in me will be a sight more useful in the mists than it is now." He smiled, and brushed his thumb across his partner's wounds. "I would not let them have you. Please tell me that you know that."
Alem drew in a breath, a tremor running through him while he met Retim's fierce stare with a wildness in his eyes, and then, after a second, he let it out again. One long, sighing release, before he took Retim's wrists in his hands, and pressed his poisoned cheeks into Retim's palms.
"I do," he answered, with something that was at last more humour again than pain. Something that was old, and warm, full of gentle malice, and a bright and steely adoration. Alem met his eyes, and Retim knew himself not only loved but trusted, even still. "I know it, Retim. Always."
Retim swayed a little, his eyes slipping to half-mast once more. His head felt light, the airship's engines thrumming beneath his feet and tilting his world until only Alem's touch kept him orientated. It was a heady brew, that love, that trust. As much as Alem's strength, as Alem's steel, as the red-gold poison in their veins. A far more potent thing than brandy, to be sure.
"... Then lets leave war behind," he managed, after a moment. He looked back up, met the wry warmth in his lover's eyes once more. "This second war of theirs. Lets leave them to it, Alem. One war and half a century of iron is enough poison for now." He smiled crookedly. "If we survive the mists, we can always come back later. When the illusion of safety here doesn't seem quite so fragile as it does now. There will be castles waiting for us. They may not fly, but they'll be there. I'm sure of it."
Alem blinked at him, and then he shook his head, his chuckle rich and deep. "Keep us alive out there, and we can wait for them to fly again, if you like." He smiled, pulling Retim's hands from his face the better to lean down and rest their foreheads together, nuzzling softly at Retim's nose. Distantly, Retim registered people moving towards them behind Alem, registered that they must have finally crossed the last line of propriety for those around them, tripping affronted hatred into violence. He didn't much care. "You've borne fifty years in a poisoned realm for me. With the magic in the mists, I think I can bear waiting long enough for a castle fit to lure you back."
"Excuse me, sirs," came another voice, a mortal voice, behind Alem's shoulder. There would be a hand to follow it in a second, Retim prophesied that. There would be hard hands, and hard words, and maybe even violence. They had the wrong faces for this realm, in this time. The wrong faces, the wrong love, the wrong nature. This little golden bubble was too fragile for them at all. But that didn't matter now, did it? It had never mattered before, and less than that now. The illusion was too frail to cling to and lo, they no longer needed to.
"It wasn't the castle that lured me," he whispered, bright with that defiance that suited them so very well, and always had. "We don't need a ship to fly, after all. Do we, my love."
Not a question, never that, and Alem only blinked for a second. Only faltered a bare moment in confusion, before life and love and a red-gold shining filled his eyes. Alem caught him, and Alem kissed him, and before pale hands could seize about them they were running, they were flying, they had shattered mirrored panes before them and transformed before the glass had even started to fall. Retim laughed, wild and raucous as the reflected illusions shattered out into the darkness of reality, and then the laugh was a crow, a caw, and Alem's black plumage tumbled through sudden wind alongside him. For them it was not suicide. Mortals roared in horrified confusion behind them, a crowd moved from violence to horror as they clustered at the gate of the gilded iron cage that receded above two tumbling forms, but it was not suicide. No more than iron, no more than mist. For them, for their love, there could be no death.
The airship fell away, a golden dream already fading before the coming storm, and beneath it, small and black and all but invisible in the darkness, a rook and a raven gathered their wings beneath them to halt their fall. They came together, wingtips brushing in the open air, ebon feathers like ebon fingers, and turned as one towards the dawn that breached a distant horizon. Towards the mists that gathered in that liminal moment, and opened out onto something else. Another realm, another war, another fate.
All the poison in this world, Retim thought, could not take their magic from them. True fae they may have been no longer, but they were not so tainted yet as to be mortal. They had kept it so, Alem and he. They had fought for it, and not from fear but from hope. From love, and defiance, and hope. Despite it all, despite all the costs and all the taints, they had found a freedom short of death, and they would find it now again. As many times as need be.
It had not the golden comfort of illusion, that thought. It had none of the luxury and safety of a castle in the sky, none of the warm purity of true magic. It was a tainted thing, as much as they were, half-red with rust and weeping.
But it had steel, and it had joy, shining red-gold between them, and he clung to it more tightly, to Alem more tightly, for all its glittered edges.
Tainted, poisoned, and free. Together, despite it all, they were that.
It was enough, he thought, and more.
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