Magic

Magic

A little late, but I’m officially in love with these two, and I cannot scream enough at @theprojectava for all the amazingness of the stories she has woven for Kuro here during this week! They have been absolutely wonderful and I hope everyone has loved them as much as I have for they are beyond deserving of that!

Magic happens when a smile spins more hope than starlight.

Magic forms when a hand reaches out and calls your soul back to the home it never thought it had.

Magic burns warm beneath skin and puts a tumble in your blood flow, so much that your heart has to race just to catch up with the breath trying to fill your lungs.

It’s that odd flash of feeling lighting up your brain and sinking into your cells, reminding you that there is infinitely more to all that you are than the world you’ve known has ever told you could be.

Kuro doesn’t know what sort of tricks Lance is pulling, but he knows that there is something unearthly in the way Lance moves against him. His whole body has gone stiff, prepared for war though Kuro doesn’t know against who or what exactly. But, the anticipation is there, putting steel into his muscles and reminding him that so rarely is there a thing called peace, even during his downtime. He hasn’t gotten used to the Castle just yet in that regard, still waits for the time when pain will creep into his sleep and the nightmares will infuse their logic into his dreams until he can’t tell them apart any longer.

He still doesn’t know what it means to fight for the greater good, only that fighting is what he had been made for, and in fighting, comes injury and loss. He waits for both like a prisoner the jury’s verdict over the crimes against his own humanity.

How does one salvage their heart from themselves?

Magic.

His shoulders are the first to give up their tension, relief cascading down his limbs like a river seeking its resting place in the sea. Bit by bit, he falls into silence and marvels at the way a human touch can unravel the hurt and the expectations held by his body. Lance’s fingers trace along the edges of a scar, and while Kuro could tell him the story of that particular one, Lance doesn’t ask. He simply lets his fingertips walk the outline of it as if coming to know its shape and the story it held by touch alone. The same way one can look at a crater gouged into the earth, and know, without hearing its tale, that something of a small disaster took place here. It left its mark, and still the world continues to move, still a heart continues to beat.

Life is tenacious if nothing else.

As Lance slides his hands around to his stomach, Kuro feels the tension threaten again, rising dark as shadows at sunset, only to find it reduced beneath Lance’s laughter. The sound is soul-saving. It’s the hand pulling him to shore after months of near-drowning in the inky seas he called himself. Lance’s laugh, warm and light against his shoulder, reminds Kuro that there is something solid of himself worth building a future upon.

Reaching down, he slides his hand along Lance’s, slowly sinks his fingers into the space between the Blue Paladin’s.

Come home shouldn’t be this easy, but with Lance, somehow it is.

And as Lance’s lips continue to drift along his skin, luring the pain from body and thought alike, Kuro starts to wonder where the magic really is.