"Hey."
Kuro looked up as Reikon muttered a greeting, his black scales glittering in the soft glow of moonlight. The sky was mostly dark, and a deep fog hung in the air, but a few stars were visible through the gloom. The air was chilly, but Kuro was not cold; his cloak was wrapped tightly around him, protecting him from the night.
"What are you doing?" Reikon asked, his voice taking on the soft and melodic quality it assumed when he was relaxed. Kuro smiled slightly at that; it was not often that his friend wasn't plagued by worries.
"Oh, nothing," Kuro answered truthfully, tracing a claw through the dirt under him. He clutched his pearl in his other paw; it did not serve much purpose in death, but it brought Kuro comfort.
"I was just... thinking," Kuro said after a beat. Reikon walked over and plopped down onto the ground next to Kuro. The heat and closeness of him made Kuro blush, and he looked away.
"Thinking," Reikon repeated, a focused look on his face. "About what?"
Kuro sighed and looked up at the moon that the fog had shifted to reveal. "Well... just about life. Or, death would be more correct, I suppose." Reikon looked at him expectantly.
"Well... our little group is growing. More and more spirits and things are becoming aware of us, right? And I'm just thinking... how long can this last? How long can we fool around like this, playing with death? How long before someone tries to get rid of us, or we simply disappear altogether... and what if it is too long? If we live to see everything die, to see our world destroyed and wander the carnage for eternity? It's just... even in death, I understand so little about it. About why I am here, why any of us are here, why others aren't. We aren't supposed to exist like this. I'm not supposed to exist..."
Kuro trailed off, apprehension flashing across his face. "S-sorry, that was so negative... I said too much," he muttered, looking away.
Reikon's gaze rested on Kuro, but Kuro could not meet it.
"Hey, it's okay. It's fine to have worries. Everyone does, you know. Even spirits, apparently." Reikon chuckled, and Kuro shifted his eyes back to the dragon slowly.
The expression Reikon had was empathetic and caring and deeply sad. It was a face Kuro had seen many times, but Reikon seemed to hide it from others, only grieving behind closed doors.
"Look, the sky is clearing up," Reikon said softly. Kuro looked up, and sure enough, the fog had momentarily thinned out and the sky was almost clear. Above the dragons, several stars shone in a scattered formation, fighting to have their light seen among the gloom. Kuro smiled.
Then, something seemed to fall from above, a glittering speck cascading toward the earth. Kuro watched in awed silence as the star fell, and then another, and another. He had never seen something so beautiful before.
"Wow," Reikon muttered, and to Kuro's great surprise, he leaned his head against Kuro's body. Kuro's cheeks burned as his eyes widened.
"This is nice, isn't it?" Reikon asked. "Yes," Kuro whispered gently, scared that any louder noise would shatter this moment into shards of glass. "That's what we have to remember," Reikon whispered, his warmth causing a spark to bloom in Kuro's chest. "Everything is uncertain right now, I know, and it's scary. But there are nice moments like this. Little moments in time where everything is perfect, if even for a second. Those moments... I think they are enough to keep us going."
Kuro closed his eyes, leaning into the curve of Reikon's body. He smelled sweet, like roses and home. As the two dragons drifted off to sleep, Kuro sighed quietly.
"Don't tease me like that, Reikon," he whispered into the empty night, knowing that his partner was asleep.
But Reikon's eyelids fluttered, and he smiled slightly.

---


“Reikon,” Kuro asked one night when the fog was so thick he couldn’t see past his partner’s body, “do you love this place?”
Reikon’s eyes were trained on where the moon would have been, as if expecting to see past the fog, and with how far away they seemed, Kuro sometimes wondered if maybe he really could see beyond the sky, beyond the boundary, beyond the world itself into the gaping hole one was sure to find. Reikon’s eyes were so dark they swallowed all light, and yet they seemed to– not quite glow– but hold behind them a substance that could be compared to luminescence. Kuro was fascinated by those eyes and their likeness to the corpses he and Reikon surely should be.
“I do not understand love,” Reikon answered, his voice somnolent.
Kuro sighed. It must be a bad day, today.
“Does the fog make you tired?”
“Not tired, not really. It sinks deeper than that word conveys.”
Kuro shifted so Reikon could lean more comfortably against him. The fog nipped at his wings with a heavy, damp chill. He, too, looked at the sky, trying to understand what his partner was seeing; but it was just wispy purple, drifting slowly past his eyes.
He had accepted long ago that Reikon held a burden that could not be shared. Still, it made Kuro sad and selfishly lonely.
“Reikon,” he said, not really intending to continue the sentence, just wanting to say his name, to acknowledge his existence.
“Kuro,” Reikon said back.
They existed in a domain within a domain, a small pocket of stillness within a tiny universe that never changed. Tonight, beyond the damp grass and faintly-glowing mushrooms and their bodies, there was nothing, not even the other lost souls that called this place home.
Maybe this was the loneliest way to exist.
“There’s supposed to be an eclipse today,” Reikon whispered, breaking the silence.
“I wanted to see it. I have this feeling that I like eclipses, though I don’t really know why.”
The fog seemed to hang even thicker over Reikon’s face.
“Isn’t it funny? Even now, this place…”
He drew his wings in, let his head lower, dropped his gaze to the floor.
“I wish…”
“Ah. I can’t even finish my sentences.”
Kuro covered Reikon’s body with his wing. He hurt in a way he couldn’t place or describe, for a reason he didn’t have, when he looked at Reikon’s empty expression.
“Good night, Reikon,” he said instead, touching his partner’s head to his own.
Long after Reikon had drifted off, eyes closed and body deathly still, Kuro’s eyes returned to the sky, and the fog began to shake and dissipate. As the purple parted, a glowing ring revealed itself, almost blinding compared to the darkness in its center and the murky hues around it. Kuro couldn’t look away at this object so dark yet so bright, this object that reminded him of Reikon’s eyes more than anything he had ever seen. He looked back down at the smaller dragon, no different from a corpse in his soundless sleep. He would exist long past this domain, Kuro was sure, long past everyone they knew, and long past the sky itself, until there was no moon for him to look at anymore. Yet Kuro could imagine Reikon staring up at a void of nothing with the very same expression he wore today, his eyes dark and bright and left with no one to witness them.
Kuro lowered his head. It hurt.
He wished he knew what an eclipse was.

---