when there's nothing left to burn (you have to set yourself on fire)

-irishais-

She gathers the sky in her arms and folds the stars end to end, until they are nothing more than a neat little square of space, small enough to put in her pocket.

She sits down in the emptiness that she has created, her skirts spreading out around her, thin, gauzy grey. The fabric makes up clouds that overtake the nothingness. What stories will they tell about her, she wonders, of the woman who pulls apart the sky?

Her hands are cold from holding on to the scrap of space. There is no air here. It is still, perfectly silent, and even when she shakes out the blanket of space, it makes no sound, and snaps back into place like a missing puzzle piece, all the edges lining up just so.

A shooting star (a meteor, a scrap of debris), streaks across her field of vision, and she watches it, tracing its dust trail with her finger. She has a dim recollection of doing this once, long ago. A boy, a faded memory, a smile.

Something soft against her lips. A... kiss, she thinks. She remembers that, or half-remembers.

The star is gone, and the boy's face as well, a painting seen from right up close when it becomes nothing but smears and streaks of oil blobbed against the canvas. She knows colors (dark, fair, white, black).

If only she could step far enough back to get the whole portrait in focus, she might remember the boy and his quiet, awkward smile.

She touches her lips. Her fingers are still cold.

—

Everywhere he turns, there are a million little crevices, a hundred thousand billion million cracks in walls and rooms and corners and spaces and doorways and floors and windows and dirt and—

She is somewhere, and he just can't get a fix on her. Every time he does, she slips off again, always at the corner of his eye in the dark hair of a girl or the laugh of a cadet. He is running on caffeine and sheer willpower all the time, now, and when he sleeps, it is an exhausted collapse, where his body simply gives out for eight hours, until he wakes up and does it all over again.

(rinoa rinoa rinoa)

He hears her name on a hundred lips, written on a hundred forms, on the covers of cheap, mass-marketed books just waiting to be picked up and read for the scandal.

If he believed in the soul, in that strange, transparent otherness of himself, he would have said that his had walked off, gone, swept out the door when she took her mantle of feathers, her crown of thorns.

He carries a single worn, folded up snapshot in his wallet just in case someone says, yes, yes, I've seen that girl. Just so he can pretend she's simply run off on one of her stupid Forest Owl missions (I'm sorry, he thinks, immediately after, I won't call them stupid again.)

Every thought is an apology, and sometimes, in the private wee hours of the night, he hates her for it, hates her so much that it's broiling over inside of him, so bad that he has to punch something. There are many plastered-over holes in his walls now, and the maintenance staff know not to ask any questions.

(squall, you'll protect me, right? you promise?)

He rolls over in his bed and stares at the clock, watching the numbers click by in a rhythmic sequence, so reassuring in their unchanging changes. He hasn't moved since the alarm went off four hours ago; that's four meetings and a Garden Council-mandated therapy session gone up in smoke.

(...whatever.)

There are a million billion places she could be and the only one he has crossed off of his list is, "not here."

—

She drifts aimlessly, absorbing the thoughts, dreams, feelings like water, relishing in their rush and flow through her body. Her mind is infinite now, and she has space for everything, every last soul on the earth.

(rinoa, someone whispers, at the barest edges of her consciousness, and she turns, looking for the source of the sound.)

There is nothing there, or there is something— it is overlapping now, the nothingness creeping in. She drifts, drifts, drifts.

(ri

no

a.)

Time is meaningless to her now— it all flows and rushes and collapses in on itself until she is left with a package of all that was and all that will be. There is a word for it, she knows, and it is a word the witches use.

Compression?

(kompression.)

She walks across the ocean, toward the dark spot that breathes her name, and beneath her feet, there are dark silhouettes of sharks, cutting through the surface, nosing against her feet to see what they are. She watches them, great gray creatures with razors for teeth. They do not bite her. They do not even know what she is, only that she is not food; they drift away silently, continuing their hunt for other, better prey.

Soon, the soles of her feet brush rough, warm sand, and the sun is at her back, a gentle wind propelling her forward. She shifts the wind just a little— she will not be at the beck and call of any thing so insignificant as a breeze.

There is activity ahead of her, bright lights and a small seaside town. She wills herself invisible— it is a work of no great effort, and she passes through the daily routine with nothing more than the breeze left in her wake.

She drifts through walls and windows and corners and spaces, all sorts of spaces, seeing and not seeing, the details vague, a running watercolor riot of life.

This is a place she knows, or remembers. She has been here before.

(what is this?)

She knows it. A garden. Not a garden, not a garden, but a Garden.

She imagines herself part of the thin, swift streams that slide through neat man-made paths, and it is done. The water deposits her in a central concourse, and she emerges dry, a lady of the lake (turned fountain). She ignores the signs before her, guides of neon, metal, plastic. She turns down a passageway, tracing her fingers lightly along the doors, leaving trails of stardust that glitter and fade.

There. This one.

(rinoa rinoa rinoa rinoa)

She slips to that space in between, and is only there half of a second before she is on the other side of the door, the metal parting like a stage curtain. The room is small, dark, nearly empty, but only nearly.

—

His dreams are hazy long stretches of falling or running or walking through nothing, and he has gotten used to them being of so little substance that it actually surprises him when her face appears, despite all the effort he's put toward trying to find her.

She sits on the edge of his bed, a ghost, weighing nothing. The mattress doesn't even move. He doesn't touch her, doesn't speak.

(hello.)

Her voice— it's music, a dancing, lilting song that reverberates around the room forever.

(hello.)

She reaches out her hand, pale, thin fingers on his face, the touch insubstantial.

(i had forgotten.)

(what?)

(what you looked like.)

(oh.)

She studies him, and it's like only part of her is even looking at him. The rest of her mind is elsewhere, somewhere beyond the clouds. Space, maybe. She's been there, after all.

He lifts his hand from the bed, a terribly difficult maneuver— everything is so hard today, why should dreaming be any different? He touches her, finally, and his hand settles on cool, silken skin.

(i never forgot you.)

—

She remembers this room, she thinks, and she remembers this boy.

She rests her head on the pillow when she lies down next to him, and she feels his breath on her skin, even, deep, warm. Her hair stirs in his exhalations, and his hand is so light, so fragile.

(where did you go?)

(everywhere.)