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The galaxy is laced with ice and fire. Worlds collide and explode into ribbons of gold, and they have no one to save them, no one to hear their cries, spiraling out into oblivion. Not even the gods pity their creations, sat aloft in their thrones forged of iron and bloodshed. They don't despair for soldiers fallen in the war, children slaughtered by detached, cruel empires. They watch, and they wait, and they remind their descendants of how far they have fallen from grandeur.
The gods do not care of love between mortals. Love between anyone other than themselves. It pales in comparison to the magnitude of their beings, this fragile thing humans call love, love that's made of delicate shards of glass tumbling down a rocky mountainside and trying to remain intact.
They do not care of perishable love: how it ends, how it grows, how it dies, and much less how it begins.
｡･:*:･ﾟ✧ ｡･:*:･ﾟ
Din pulls away from Zoya, setting down the metal cannister and trying not to notice how the fluorescent lights reflect like glinting stars in her pupils. "How does that feel?"
Her hand lifts to the back of her head, grazing along the wound. They'd left the child dozing in his makeshift seat and gone down to the belly of the ship, where Din had sprayed on some sort of medication after cleaning the dried blood from her hair. It's formed a thin seal across the swollen cut inflicted by the hilt of Toro's blaster—both keeping infection at bay and helping dull the pain with an additional numbing agent mixed in.
"Without all that damn blood sticking my hair to my head, it's a lot better, if you can imagine that," she says, uncrossing her legs and swinging them down over the edge of the crate she sits atop. He stands in front of her, hips almost slotted between her knees, but he's just far enough back that the possibility of accidentally making contact is eliminated. Zoya's eyes flick up to lock onto his visor. "Thanks, Din."
He looks down at her and smiles. Though he knows she cannot see it, when the corners of her lips lift up almost in answer, Din wonders if perhaps she can sense his expression, wonders if she knows that she—alongside the child—is one of the only sources of his happiness.
