7/13/2024, 6:27 PM
TW: flashbacks/high levels of stress due to past trauma
His city. His home. His people.
His city was burning.
The fires weren't so bad - at first. The castle was most stone, any wood elements long since rotted out due to the water infiltrating the palace. It wasn't fireproof, but it was fire-resistant, and the fire wouldn't get far within before it found very little to devour. The most concerning part was the smoke, but they could go to the levels of the castle beneath it all.
They could weather the storm. It wasn't that Francis was worried their home would go down.
Logically, he was not concerned.
Emotionally, he was trapped in a hell of his own making, and the flames licked at the edges of his mind, dripping red like molten wax, like -
The man couldnt catch his breath, and the smoke didn't help, burning his throat as he cycled shallow, fast breaths through his heaving chest.
There were but a few Concord members left to gather into the rest of the flock, to stash away where the flames could not reach them. Francis wasn't leaving anyone behind. He couldn't fail his people, again.
His memories would have, had there been a merciful god to grant him a wish, waited to descend upon him until after the wildfires. All Francis could see was not the ash on the breeze that was all too real, now, all too present, here.
He only saw his home, collapsing, the last thing he had, Delythena's memory, shattered like over-heated glass. Francis took a step, flinching from the sounds of battle waged, his side the losing one, echoes of a time different than this one. Echoes of a body, exhausted, wholly human, a body not his own anymore.
The limbs feel strange, and the world feels as though through water around him - yet there is no reprieve from the encroaching heat, everywhere.
He knows they are out here.
He won't leave them.
But Francis stands, smoke obscuring the terrain ahead, embers floating on the air around him, frozen.
He can't move. He can't tell whether there are cobblestones under his boots, or grass underfoot.
It's all so hot, and he is so afraid to step forward, and find another body, another failure. How many chances does Francis get, and how long before the universe finally realizes he can't ever live up to the tests it throws him?
He blinks, squeezes his eyes shut, the tears pricking at the amber lenses unclear whether they stem from smoke or horror. He cannot give himself even that respite for long, though, and takes a stumbled step toward the flames. Francis' flanks heave, his head spinning, not sure if he can find his way home, but knowing he can't go there until he fulfills his duty.
He can hardly bear the weight of this guilt that sleeps, curled and content, upon his chest at all hours. He will suffocate if he allows any other lives lost to add themselves to the pile stealing his every inhale.
Kairos flings herself through the smoke, airy and light as all the other embers that swirl around Francis' crown.
He stares at her, slack-jawed. She doesn't know what he sees.
Clarity, amongst the collision of two realities. Stability, amongst the distortion between one life and the next.
Her tousled russet fur gleams in the light of the flame, smoke wreathing her form from the singed edges of her pelt. She looks less like a wolf, and more like a flame taken lupine form, born from the writhing smoke's amorphous features to entrance his attention and lure him into the heat.
Francis remembers the scent of smoke from a city burning, but Kairos reminds him there are other uses for the warmth of the flame.
A hearth, to come home to. A warmth, to heal by. A comfort, to remember in hours of need.
Flame flickers from one side of her familiar features, cooled to a gentler temperature by the ice within the other eye - and she stands, whole and more or less healthy, on the other side of a screen of smoke upon which Francis had been forced to watch the worst moments of his life dance across.
He chokes on a cough, blinks the smoke out of his eyes. He is too....he is unable to focus on everything in the present all at once, right now. But his vision tunnels onto the Parthenon, and Francis finds the ground beneath his feet a little clearer to feel, shaken out of his reverie to some small degree by sheer shock. And then, further still, by his concern for the woman.
The -He bent beneath a rasping cough, straightening and shuddering through an inhale to retrieve his voice with.
The castle. We can shelter there. Can you walk?
He was so disembodied at the moment, he may very well have believed her if she'd told him no and merely started floating.
