You Can't Wake Up, This Is Not a Dream

The name of the world is fire.

Smoke is framing her vision. The smell of burning- wood, leaves, flesh- invades her nostrils all the way down the throat. Cracklings flesh and helpless screams both echo to her ears, the Welsh fairies struggling to escape the Queen’s knights.

Artoria is burning, too.

“You… You you you you!” Her body shakes violently, overtaken by a brutal cough. She doesn’t care. She can’t look away from those bloodstained knights. Pure wrath fills her chest with heat, seeping between her ribs, inside her lungs, under her skin, and Artoria feels like she could scorch anyone by touch alone. “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!”

She coughs again, which fucks up her aim, her bomb only taking out three knights instead of the full group of five she’d intended to. Fuckers. She’s choking on her own anger, foaming at her mouth like a rabid animal. She’s going to kill them, she’s going to tear them apart and blow them to smithereens and-

“Artoria!”

It’s the sound of the slap, more than the pain, that tears her out of it. Artoria blinks, once, twice. Ritsuka is looking down at her with an indescribable expression on their face. Both their hands go up to cradle her face, tenderly despite the earlier hit.

“Ah… So-” Sorry, she wants to say, but another cough wracks her body, filling her mouth with- something that should not be here. How had she not noticed before? It’s a lake, it’s a flood, all over her tongue, dripping down her lips, something that has been fleeing out of her body without her input or knowledge.

She doesn’t see it. Ritsuka must, though, because they frown, and the next thing Artoria knows there is a mouth against her own.

It’s not a kiss. It’s consumption. Ritsuka is ridding her of this foreign object, drinking her rage straight from the source. It cannot feel any good, yet they refuse to let go, taking and taking and taking until at last her lungs don’t feel so clogged anymore.

(It’s not a kiss; though many could argue that it’s much more intimate than one. They see it all, her fury, her grief, they see it all and refuse to flinch.)

When finally they part from her, panting heavily, the only thing left is the strong taste of gasoline on the back of her tongue.

The first thing she thinks is: she almost got everyone killed here. Gasoline. Gasoline. It could have been flowers, or pearls, but no. Her body decided to exteriorize her feelings in the most destructive way possible. She would have set the whole place ablaze if she’d been allowed to run wild.

The second thing she thinks is: she’d always known she would die by fire. She is to be made into a sword. Her tomb will be a forge.

But now, seeing Ritsuka wipe the oil off their lips, she knows. She knows.

They will go up in flames too, eventually.

As all

Stars

Do.