[o] Throw the memories in the flames

Drinking from a bitter cup, burying the bottles with the bones

A boot scuffs against the still-glowing corner of timber, flipping it over to reveal the ember embedded in the grain, appearing for all the world like a jewel rather than a worm that has eaten through its host. The impact of the wood rolling over causes charcoal to shudder free into dark fragments against the ground, ash rising up in a plume like dust clouding over the back of a dirty dog that's just shook itself off. It's no dog though, it's her whole ranch, and that's not dust, it's all that's left.

Spurs chime far too merrily as Colt steps over the chewed on post and walks towards another image of ruin. She crouches down, leather chaps wrinkling in against denim. Reaching out for something still trying to shine among the soot, she lifts it up for inspection. The metal remnant of some pipe corral, melted and reshaped into an amalgam. It resembles abstract art, as though fire has tried to pretend gluttony is a masterpiece. Her fingers curl tighter, knuckles whitening, and she flings it. It skids to a stop not far away with another exhale of ash.

Her chin tips down, shoulders losing their line and falling inward. Beneath the bow of her hat, golden hair that could almost pass as real slowly spills down the slope and shelters the hang of her head in a curtain of yellow. Unusually quiet and still, Colt just breathes in the lingering smoke of what'd been her home. Overhead, the stars have since winked on, but for the first time she doesn't pay them any heed or duck away from their light; that loss is nothing compared to this.

Around her, ranch hands are distant figures moving horses back and forth. It's with the low noise of panic that's settled, but lingers like an echo in every motion and word. Some animals were saved, a bit of tack with them, but most have been lost to the hills, and the majority of the leather met the fate of the wood. The men are trying to gather up enough sense to go after what beasts they can, the wild unicorns likely to steal her horned stock, and the stampede of cattle sure to find themselves one mess or another beyond the erasure of her fences.

---

Colt

I kept the pain, now I only feel alive inside the flame

SUNJATA

the heartless

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

He hadn’t been made aware until it was far too late to do anything about it. And still, Sunjata arrives. Blotting out the sky in the shape of a dark black dragon, he shifts from dragon to bat as he descends, taking up less of a footprint among the ashes and charred remains as he drops down closer to the ground. He spots Colt in the middle of the scene, zipping toward her and dodging out of the way of any hands that drift back and forth in search of anything to save while he can hear the others talk about plans to go and wrangle any cows they can find before they’re gone completely.

He shifts back into himself, approaching Colt slowly almost as if he isn’t sure if she’s a spooked animal that might either bite or collapse upon being completely noticed. “Colt,” he greets slowly, his accent thick and the sorrow drumming through him as he looks at her, his hand reaching out for her before it hesitates and twitches unhelpfully, still uncertain what he can do. “How can I help?” He’s careful to avoid anything but flat ground beneath his feet, unwilling to let himself be the one that helped destroy anything else that’s among the rubble.

Feathers trickle down his neck, a display of his uncertainty and quiet understanding. He knows what it’s like to lose everything – he’d done it far too many times and it isn’t at all something he’d wish on anyone – least of all her. His jaw is set tight, an inch away from grinding or chewing on the inside of his cheek til he can taste blood, pulling his gaze away from her to look at the carnage and bones left behind.

The ranch looks like a corpse – fitting, he supposes for King’s End – but the bones linger, smoke rises, and all the meat and liveliness that had made it a beacon for King’s End are gone. The memories remain, like most things do, but without the easy reminder of walking into a room that no longer exists, it’s hard to say just how long they’ll last.

Water swirls around his fingertips, waiting for anything to crop up that he can help put out, and it becomes part of his search too – looking for anything aglow and smokey that he can pinpoint some effort of helping into.

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

Drinking from a bitter cup, burying the bottles with the bones

It’d been too hot, too fast. Outside their usual fire season, the prep time shortened, the need all the greater. Grasses have grown long and thick from all the rainfall the season prior, more extreme than years past, and this dry heat has drained them with an alarming speed and hunger. Lush meadows became a tinderbox, and Tanau’s attention the necessary spark.

If others hadn’t also blazed, spreading resources too thin, homes prioritized over pastures, maybe there could have been a way to salvage this. If it happened earlier in the season, when less channels had been spent, or if she’d been here, instead of returning from a trip to the Celestine, maybe something could have been done. If she’d prioritized water mages on her crew, or asked Frey for something other than arrows and buckles, perhaps she’d be in bed instead of ruin.

Her name bounces on the fringes of awareness, strangely muffled and distant. Enough so, that she’s surprised when she turns her head and Sunjata is so close. He must’ve called to her across her property, as likely to be a wraith as real for the sound of his voice. What he says next lands sharper, cleaner, like each word is burrowing past whatever muted curtain she’s tried to draw over herself. They’re a cruel reminder that the world is not on pause just because she wishes it so.

The clarity of what’s happened rushes back in all at once as the shelter she’d wrapped herself in peels away. Her hair shifts back onto her shoulders as she rises, turning towards him with a deliberate slowness. Her boot shifts in the rubble, bits of ash leaping into the stray winds, as liable to be parts of her drifting away as woodgrain and tanned hide. ”You want to help?” The words drag out of her throat like something caught there too long, frayed thin and pulled tighter still, threatening to snap.

Too late.

"If you'd done what you said you would and helped me with my fences, I wouldn't have been wasting time chasing wild unicorns and patching holes while this place turned to kindling." It's not fair, of course, to blame him for this. For any of it. It's the quick snarl of her anger, her grief, trying to find somewhere to land, he just happens to be in range. "When was the last time you did something for this land, Archon?" The title is drawn out as if the weight of it is pressing in on her throat. "All these years fighting fires here, and you haven't done more to protect it? Think your magic enough?" One hand gestures harshly to her side—not at him, but at everything. The blackened posts jutting from the earth like snapped bones, the hollow shell of what had been a barn, the smoke still lifting in slow, stubborn threads to blot out part of the stars as if it's pretending to be her ally now. All of it, evidence that he's not enough.

Teeth press in on one another, a grimace that better reads as anguish. Tears spill hot and furious, carving pale tracks against soot that's settled on her cheeks. She doesn't wipe them away, just bears through them, hating the tremble they bring to her breath. "When was the last time you did something for someone else, Sunjata?" She lifts her chin, frown so deep it pulls the quiver in her lip taut and keeps it from showing. Her throat works once, like she almost swallows the words, almost. "You just stay in your House and pretend the world only exists between sheets."

Colt

I kept the pain, now I only feel alive inside the flame

SUNJATA

the heartless

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

He does want to help. But he should have known that it would come with some vitriol. These days, everything did. The feathers twitch down his neck, flaring slightly as she starts to pinpoint her tornado of anger onto him, realizing quickly that it wasn’t fair to him for her to aim the knife at him, not when he’d been working on it, when he’d made the deal with Danta — and Sunjata is no rancher, but something tells him even if the fences had become electrified, she wouldn’t have been enough to prevent this.

Ah, but it doesn’t stop there, either. She continues to lob knife after knife at him, and try as he might to stop the surprise flick lightning through his features, he fails superbly as it cracks through each scar and the navy feathers start to shift. They vanish, replaced by the interlocking scales of his dragon shift as if he could prevent more of her accusations from finding a home in the hollow of his gut, like he could prevent himself from becoming her dart board.

And he could take it, let her spin and hope that it made her feel better to use him as a target, but honestly?

He’s so, so tired of being the one that took the blame. He’s tired of being the one that bends and twists so that everyone else felt better while he continued to feel worse. To smile through the holes left behind of the arrows that strike through him as though everything was fine.

He isn’t fine. He hasn’t been in a while.

And he could tell her all the things that he’s doing and has done to prove the point to her that he isn’t selfish, that he’s given piece and piece of himself to everyone fucking else and obviously that never mattered. His body was littered with the scars of everything he’d done for someone else that he’d taken the fall for. And he’s so fucking tired of it.

“Just because I don’t revolve every minute of what I do around making your life easier, doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything, Colt.” He starts, voice deep, fingertips twitching where the water that threads through his fingers warbles and drips into the remnants of ash and destroyed building.

He could tell her that the last time he’d done something for her was when she asked exactly that which she accuses him of. Of sharing her bed so they could forget about everything for a minute. Or how before that, when she had been broken with the reminders of Vesper, how he’d held her when she’d arrived torn up and not herself. How he’d talked to her, given his time to her just to help her.

He could tell her about the town he’d made for the region, the Skyport, the fact he’d just talked to Rae to make a healing river. And yet he figures none of it matters. It won’t anyway, not when she’s blinded herself by the pain and grief and has to shift the blame onto something. He just wishes for the millionth time that it wasn’t him at the end of the rope.

His jaw tightens, muscles feathering in his temple as he does chew on the inside of his cheek, raw and until he can taste blood, before he finds it in him to speak again, voice lower and controlled, a shift in the air that has him deciding perhaps for the first time that he can use his new moniker as a shield. If he was known as the Heartless now, he might as well prove it.

It beat the alternative of laying down to be a doormat for everyone to walk all over. He’d already heard how much of a disappointment he was his entire life, and he’ll be damned if Colt’s words bring everything he’d long since buried to the surface again. And maybe if she knew the half of it she would’ve been more careful to blame him.

Or maybe she’d have doubled down. “I have done things for other people almost every fucking day of my life. So if you’re going to blame me or accuse me of being selfish because I don’t have eyes on your ranch every hour of the day, maybe it’s because the problem isn’t me.” He turns from her, draconic leathery wings snapping out from his back, rustling in the wind briefly as he looks over to the groups of her hands that have started to make the recovery parties, sure that he could track them and help them out if it meant avoiding being the poster of Colt’s rage.

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

Drinking from a bitter cup, burying the bottles with the bones

Feathers flare out in a ripple effect, her words enough of a stone to leave an impact in a flood. Lightning carves him up in a clear display of unease, but where either would have normally made her pause, her gaze only narrows against the sudden streak of light and the motion of shifts rolling against skin prickling with unrest. Hers might not be so visible as his, but she’s shifting too. He wears scales, and she brandishes ash. He storms with light, and she bears smoke. Feathers to flame.

The thing with fire is it catches so easy, and it’s so damn voracious. It doesn’t take much to get it going again, and if it’s already taken all this from her, what’s another bridge? ”I never asked for every minute. I asked for what you said you’d give.” There’s no sense to it. Not the carcass of her home, not this blaze catching between them, so different from all the other times they’d melted. It’s pain—nerves so fried they don’t feel the same. ”Guess your word doesn’t mean shit though.” It’s not the fences, not really. He’d never promised. She’d always tried not to expect. It’s just finding out hope’s run out, and he stands as part of it, something that’d once been shiny turning dull in the dust.

Her arms cross over one another, holding a barrier between her chest and his, although his has long gone hollow. Maybe with a heart, he would’ve done more than bare his teeth back. Held her, like he once did, knowing tragedy hits but it doesn’t last, because isn’t he proof of that by still standing? Doesn’t matter much in the end what he might have done, what he might have been, what he might have had. Not enough, not enough, not enough. The Heartless, with a land on fire in desperate need of the Flood.

”A day must be longer in your life than in mine!” she hurls it at his back as he turns away, clenching down on the bitter swell in her throat, the strangled tears choking the words into something ragged. “You say you do something for someone every day, then where is it?” Her head tilts, eyes bright and violent through smears of soot. “Where’s the proof, Sunjata? Because I don’t see it.” Is it buried under the ashes too? Is it shriveled up in a box in his room? How convenient that his selflessness is impossible to find.

His wings flare and it fans her frustration. He won’t even stay. ”You know better than most that peace doesn’t last!” She snaps, because biting feels better than bleeding, and motion keeps her from lying down in the debris and crumbling with it. ”The Family’s been gone for seasons, but there's always something left to fight.” The land itself is a battle, half wild in a way that catches your breath, sometimes permanently.

Colt

I kept the pain, now I only feel alive inside the flame

SUNJATA

the heartless

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

There is sense to it, though it isn’t the first time he’s heard his word doesn’t mean anything – even if he, too, can’t recall promising it. Had gone through all the steps to obtain it only for something else to take priority. And now they’re standing in the corpse of her home, with the charred black spikes of foundational, load bearing beams staring back in a smoke filled mockery.

“I did get it. I just couldn’t give it to you yet.” If she’s stuck on the fences, he’ll give her an explanation. “I had to use it in the Barrows because of enenra threats.” He’s not sure if it’s a good example of prioritizing – but given that the Heartless has just fully witnessed and participated in a banshee fight, the idea of taking on an enenra is not one that he wants to do anytime soon. “I should’ve told you, I just thought I’d have enough time to organize another trade.” His jaw continues to tense.

Maybe he could force himself to hold her. To tell her it would all be okay and that life would find a way in spite of the tragedies. But she’s wrapped up in barbed wire and Sunjata’s not sure he’s got enough skin left to withstand getting caught in her thorns. The scar tissue keeps him together as much as it hides the fragility beneath, the Frankenstein’s creature made from all the pieces he thinks everyone wants to see.

He’s been trying. He’s been better. He wasn’t banned from Halo anymore as far as he could tell. He wanted to prove himself so much he accidentally went and got infected by Dahlia when all he’d wanted to do was help.

But that doesn’t matter. None of it does. And Colt just keeps prodding and tearing through the fragile flesh in a man who hasn’t slept in so long now that the mask he keeps in place is gone. He can taste blood when he takes his deep breath – not leaving yet, not willing to let her have the last word when it was nothing more than a dagger aimed at his back.

His wings ruffle again, the sound of leather against leather as he tears his gaze from the horizon where her hands are spreading out further away, sure he could catch up at some point shortly. It’s enough for him to turn back to her, to march the step or two it takes for him to get back to her. “You want more proof, then?” He asks her, surprisingly calm but the storm flares under his skin. “I haven’t tackled the fires yet because it isn’t usually this bad. You should know that as much as I do.” If she wants to brandish a knife to this fight, then he might as well play the game if he’s not going to roll over. “But I did ask Rae to help us make a healing river, because whether you believe it or not, I do care about my region.” And even if he’d called down Rae sooner to battle some attempt at the fire season here, it wasn’t super likely they’d finish it in time to prevent this.

He sighs sharply, only to take a slow inhale to steady himself. “Look, I’m sorry this happened Colt, but sometimes there’s nothing you or anyone could’ve done. Sometimes the worst just happens whether you want it to or not.” That's been his experience his entire life.

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

Drinking from a bitter cup, burying the bottles with the bones

Incredulity rears up so fast her head jerks back with it, features twisting into disbelief like they mean to wring the impossibility out of her ears. He got it, but he couldn’t give it to her? The fuck? The explanation that comes on the heels of that strips him of the audacity, and there’s some relief in knowing he’s done something, but she can’t feel it fully when the end result is the same. ”It’s been a year, Sunjata.” The words drag, scraped raw. “A whole damn year.” His apology is a comfort meant for someone who still has something left. He’s offering rain to a ruin, as if effort after the fact counts for anything. The house is already burned down.

He wheels back around, returning like a storm remembering where it meant to strike. Wings snap, leather cupping wind, and when he steps toward her the air seems to pull tight around him. Scales catch the dying flicker of light from his scars. Shadows collect along his jaw, under his eyes, turning him sharp and severe and something almost other. She meets it without blinking. Ash shifts under her boots as she shifts her stance, squaring her shoulders, chin lifting a fraction. Smoke clings to her skin, to her hair, to the charred edges of her world, and she stands there like something already burned once and daring this dragon to try again.

Tears have slowed into something that falls occassionally, more solemn than wild. ”So it’s gotta be bad before you do something about it?” Her jaw flexes once, unimpressed. ”We get fucking fires every year. Always lose a little bit of something, that ain’t enough motivation?” Hell, he’d helped stop it last year, but it still ate some of her fences and her feed shed. ”Does it need to be your House?” Her voice drops low, dangerous with accusation.

The river is another thing trying desperately to shine between the rubble. Would have been a boon during the start of the season, a place for them all to cool off, a source for the water they need to fight the fires. Could have saved her lots of days limping into town for healers or wandering to Torchline for a soak. It's something, and on a different day, she would have been delighted. She doesn't feel anything but the loss right now though, and this is just more evidence of him showing up too late. ”Doing your job Archon, glad to see it,” she drawls with all the enthusiasm of someone asking for applause just for doing the bare minimum.

What he says at the end really crawls under her skin and rolls something restless there. “That’s what people say when they don’t want to look at what they missed.” The words are tight, forced through teeth that feel like they might crack as they clench harder. Saying this just happens feels like such a fucking shrug to everything that'd just been torn away from her. The sorry doesn't even feel genuine, nothing preceding a 'but' ever does. Guess the backdrop of blackened beams and ground still warm enough to sting through their boots doesn't mean shit to him. “The worst doesn’t just happen, it builds,” she seethes, voice splintering around the force of the breath that carries it. It shakes when she drags it in, composure faltering the longer she tries to keep propping it up. Warning signs ignored, missed opportunities, priorities out of place. This is a tragedy, but she stands by it not being fate.

A hand lifts up to wipe at the drip starting from her nose. When it's done, her palm slaps on the side of her leg, the sound a bit final. "I've got shit to do," she says by way of dismissal, gaze leaving him to bore into the horizon where nightfall exists like a giant middle finger to the search they're trying to organize still. "Thanks for your condolences."

Colt

I kept the pain, now I only feel alive inside the flame

SUNJATA

the heartless

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

It has been a year. He’s well aware of that. “It has been a year, yeah, but gathering and then trading takes time.” He knows it probably seems like it was simple, but it wasn’t. Like he could just message whomever and trade the items in question without much fanfare. But it wasn’t – and didn’t work like that, and Sunjata was acutely aware of just how long it took to gather all the shavings the unicorns left across their vast region, to then have enough to trade. It took a whole season.

He realizes quickly that it all sounds like excuses anyway, even as he returns to her to talk since it seems like that might be what she wants to do – or maybe it’s just a way for her to target him again, to take the arrows shot into herself and lob them back at him, and whatever answer he gives doesn’t matter to her.

When she tells him he should have prioritized the fires over everything else, his jaw flexes and he’s grateful for the draconic plating on his neck that hide the way he swallows down the immediate retort he wants to give her. “What do you want me to say? That I should have prioritized the fires over protecting the region from the Family? From making a healing river? It isn’t always this bad.” He tries to stress the point, standing in the ashes of what used to be her home.

He sees the irony, he really does. But it doesn’t stop there, because whatever he says is from a point of view of someone where things did not get better. And there’s some seething in her voice that grinds against the way his stomach has sunk, the hurt there for various reasons he doesn’t want to name – content to leave them like ghosts lingering in the edges of his vision so he doesn’t have to look directly at it and see what he can’t deal with right now.

Honestly, he should he happy for her, that this is the worst thing that she thinks could have happened to her.

He’s seen worse. He’s been through worse. And while he doesn’t want her to deal with a fraction of what he’s gone through, he wants her to understand that he’s been trying, that he hasn’t spent the last year hidden away in the rooms of the brothel. That at least an entire season had been searching for Hotaru that had just finally ended and that he was human just as much as her when she couldn’t handle the responsibilities of the ranch immediately after everything happened with Vesper to where she’d used part of the House of Midnight. She hadn’t had the bandwidth and neither did he.

But he’d done what he could, even if it didn’t seem like it was enough. And it burns against him when he can’t formulate the words that might help alleviate his blunder – because words weren’t his strong suit and he constantly had a way of speaking where his words would get twisted around. It’s what kept him in shitty situations time and time again. “I’m not saying I don’t care, Colt. I do. But I won’t let you blame me and attack me for this when it wasn’t either of our faults. It wasn’t your fault either.” He tries to urge that point, quelling some of his anger even as his wings rustle and vibrate a touch with the tension of his restrained frustration and the lingering echo of her palm smacking her thigh. “Blame Tanau, blame Frey for all I care. Just,” there’s a crack in the armor – the lack of sleep, the destruction that weighs on him that has his emotions cracking, the build up he’s tried so hard to hide away that burns in his eyes to the point he has to look away. “Don’t blame me.” Please.

He’s been the blame for far too many things that the weight of them all now that he can feel them again starts to drag him under, sharp and fast, a riptide when he's no longer the Flood.

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

Drinking from a bitter cup, burying the bottles with the bones

A year. He admits it, and that’s something, but she’s treading water and a grain of sand offered up as solid ground is a mockery. His reasons don’t reach her now, not when they’re just words and she needs results, explanations in place of actions, apologies instead of prevention. He’s offering rationale as a counter to emotion, and maybe politics and temperature charts would’ve meant something to her if she were standing anywhere other than in the charred remains of her entire life and livelihood. If he’s endured far worse, he does not impart much of that survival expertise to her now, just compares their scars as if there’s anything to be won by it.

The outright flare of her anger begins to drain from her, settling into something colder and harder. Detachment is a way to process this, to outlast it. It’s not the best way, probably not even a right way, but it is a way, and she means to use it to handle the sheer void that’s inside her now, the one that’s replaced the steady ground she used to stand on. Past, present, future is all here, crumbling into the wind. ”I’m touched, truly,” she grinds out, tone as barren as her land is. Oh he cares, just seems to be a hell of a lot about his reputation. She’s wounded, but he’s lost himself on the show of her teeth instead of her blood, so afraid of getting bit that his own bare back in response. ”Don’t worry, ain’t nothin’ left to care about.” A flat, short laugh leaves her, lacking all humor.

She sighs, giving up the inches to him that he seems to need, literally even as she steps to the side. She doesn't look at him, hasn't since her gaze turned to the horizon. ”Fine then, I’ll call you Sunjata the Blameless, Archon of Burned End,” she shrugs, like it costs her nothing to wipe that off her shoulder now. He doesn’t want the fault, and she won’t give it to fate, so that pretty much just leaves her, much as he says otherwise. Which she already knows to an extent, but tries not to look at too closely, the same way your body shelters harm from your senses, the true catastrophe only landing once you see the bone and the blood exposed.

A tsk wrinkles out of the corner of her mouth as she makes to walk through the black snow, a sound of utter disappointment. In him, or in herself, hard to say.

Colt

I kept the pain, now I only feel alive inside the flame

SUNJATA

the heartless

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

This wasn’t getting anywhere – regardless of whether or not he’d come out of the gate apologetic and begging her for her to understand, or to go back to his old ways of taking the blame, of being the reason that everything awful always happened. Hadn’t he told her that once before? That associating with him was always going to end up in heartache of some form or another?

Or maybe that was just the ghosts of his pasts beforehand. Because, selfishly and naively, he’d imagined that this time it would be different. That each and every time after that it had to be different, right?

Jokes on him. And that’s something that settles amongst the void of his chest, disappointment in himself mainly, though that wasn’t a new feeling. It just seemed to keep piling on and on as the days went on, and with the lack of sleep he’d endured as of late, it’s a culmination of everything else that haunts him. Now the bones of her ranch, this argument, all of them just another ghost to remind him of his failings when he’s trying to fall asleep again.

He wants to argue back with her that there are things left to care about, but yet again it’s likely nothing he says will even settle somewhere it’ll matter. So he bites the inside of his cheek again until it’s raw and aching, wings rustling as he hides the internal wince of the monikers she gives him, turning away from her as each one lands and nestles.

He can hear her start to walk, to drift out through the remains and Sunjata spies the hands still on the edge of everything, still searching for the livestock Colt had and he decides that maybe his original plan had been something he should’ve left to do before it got this deep, this personal, this painful.

“Fine.” That’s all he can muster up to say before his wings snap out and carry him into the sky, a bolted fury of leather wings that zip him toward the horizon where he can actually help the hands rather than play target practice with their boss. And with his help and far reaching shifts at his disposal, at least he helps in this regard.

- FIN

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end