where my heart is

---

Origin hangs in halves. Ripped as if a beast of sinew and leaves, there's no estimation possible on its intended course. Only that the pendulum, emerging to phase, must swing, and must take the lot of them as peacekeepers' makers' marks out in its pure, nondivinated path.

Nia can't bear to look at it. She built the bloody thing practically with her own two hands, and then those two of Poppi's, warm somehow even though so cold (promised warmth in colder times when all had outgrown and the reapers had oversown, a literal furnace banked within her mighty little tin-can frame), and yet it scares her. A child that contracted the inalienable disease of wishing, of being controlled by brighter, more complicated hopes and dimmer, more straightforward fears.

A child. A living machine. It knows not to behave, knows not how to behave, except along the axis of its own nature, because they did not nurture it. They'd moreover wished that it didn't exist, give as it did little more than a bizarre quasi-holy excuse for them to engage in this wholly intimate act of procreation across worlds.

What, indeed, did they think would happen to it once it had fulfilled its intended function? Just...disappear?

A child. A child does not just disappear when it's done growing. It becomes something else. No one knows what. Certainly, no one ever knows who.

So Origin, and Aionios, is, was, a child; formless, fetus being, by its very nature locked in stasis.

Or something like that. Whatever it is, she hopes it feels nice when they pass through (it? each other?) again. Although...the worlds seem to be tearing apart in opposite directions. There'll be no collision now, will there?

In her mind, there is.

In her mind...

She is in a warm room, full of tones burnt orange umbrage, and there is a beautiful woman on the couch, only calling her a beautiful woman is so impersonal and generic, so unlike...

Melia is there.

This is new.

This is unexpected.

This is a dream come true.

This is a dream.

She'd gotten to spend so little time with her, all in all.

Her. Her other half. Her gentle mirror. Her queen, the one she serves, the axis of her orbit.

A plane across which she can spirit. A spirit that flits about her head, always lower and higher.

Grounding, grounded.

Who could conceive of such love?

So now Melia is here. And Nia goes to her, runs backs of fingernails through hearts of wings, feels a cold nose pressed into her chest, feels everything she thought she'd never get to feel, everything she'd so greedily discarded in the fleeting moments because she'd thought, naturally, that she'd just...remember forever. She hadn't gotten it, truly, then.

Maybe she isn't getting it now. There's a sort of humming sound in the background. It reminds her that she can't speak.

Or can she? If this is Origin, or a shared dream (oh, and wouldn't that be devilishly darling), or...an Interlink?

Nia starts thinking in Origin's bytecode. Linguacode, apparently, as Melia had called it, via Vanea, or vice-versa,

Too technical. Just a dream. Why's there always got to be some snuffy reason why you can't talk in a dream?

The humming starts to run clear, water with feathers in it; Melia's light, tinkling voice.

"It seems to me we're not meant to be separated. Our worlds benefit too greatly from our union."

Nia scoffs, but it's an uncomfortable feeling she's not used to reconciling against the defensive motion. She is struck with the sudden urge to consume Melia, face and heart and mind. A chance to make things stay, it might be termed. All-encompassing, certainly, and powerfully terrifying.

Still. "You're saying if I wanted to cleave Origin back together, as the centre of all things, by sheer force of will, if I had you, I could do it?"

Why the sarcasm? It's perfectly true. She knows it as she says it.

"Yes," Melia agrees, cheek shuddering against Nia's. The whole of her is shaking, quivering, and Nia can only offer her corporeality as soothing, healing balm. "As you've just done. As you've always seemed to do - you never told me the details of that story, about the other Flesh Eater."

Shocked as she is, Nia knows exactly what and which the other queen means. And if that's the case...

"That's cheating, isn't it?"

"Why? It's not as if you're not so good with words."

"Teasing me for your own amusement? I should be offended, I should."

"You can't be," comes Melia's murmur again, water lapping at shore; perhaps, inversely, staunch shore lapping at the cool caress of the water. Another phase; the wills of the moon. "You're stuck with me."

Stuck? Good heavens.

Can we stay like this always? Bonded, joined?

Good, indeed.

She wants that stasis. She desires deeply to remain in this collision forever. If she thinks hard enough, it might as well snuffin' stay.

It is not an alien consideration, to her. Far from it. Why should she not be as guilty as any of the rest, if not more so, for having built the bloody thing?

(As guilty as Melia? Are they, so, together?)

Built the bloody thing. So easy to say. So easy to do. So nice, she did it twice. Without even a second thought.

(Would she do it again? Would they do it again?)

"I have to let you go."

"And I, you."

"Melia!"

"Nia."

"Promise me, we'll meet again?"

(Tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll get right to work tomorrow, I'd miss you too much, it'd tear my heart out, it would, just one more second just one more kiss just one more lifetime inside of all that you are, tell me how, tell me how, tell me how, need your blessing to do such a horrible thing--)

Melia chuckles, warm in the stirrings of Nia's chest. "I hardly think I could stop you from finding a way."