Staggering and infinite
And full of ageless grace
The universe seemed limitless
Without any time
Without any place
Staggering and infinite
The beauty of it all
I feel insignificant
Never have I ever felt so small!

—Assemblage 23, "Infinite"

Infinite

There is something incomparable to the feel of standing naked under an open sky flooded with stars.

(Just slightly out of synch, like their dissonant heartbeats, each takes off his shirt and throws it aside, feeling for the sense of moonlight on his skin.)

I could drown in that sky, Rubedo thinks, and considers the act of falling from grace. Stars spin above his boy's head, pinpricks of light as his glass soap-bubble of a home wheels its way through the galaxy. All it would take is a single pinprick to fling everyone he knew out into the void, gasping like beached fish in breaths that froze instantly into ice. He'd seen it before, ships gutted as they capsized, with bloated bodies spilling out into the starlight like sterile seed.

Albedo had done it before, tearing a ship from end to end just to listen to the occupants scream and suffocate and drown in the endless black. Rich and fertile soil, if one was a nebula or a seed of star-stuff, but then, we're all stardust in the end, he addresses himself to the black. Do you see me, stars? Every iron atom in my blood is one of your dead brothers. The oxygen I breathe was once clathrates in stone spun out from your hearts. I burn as bright as any of you, who winkle and brighten and fade in the atmosphere. How I wonder what you are!

(One turns his footsteps north, the other south, but in the grand spin of the universe they're really just tracing magnetic paths around each other, Biot-Savartian circles, a current running beneath them that not even they consider to calculate.)

How immense that darkness! There was no time out in that black but infinity, no space but endless, no up and down, wrong or right—the only natural laws those of attraction, energy, force, speed. He picks out a dizzy circle with his feet, collapsing to the sand and staring up at the stone beyond him that blocks out the edge of the sky. It feels strange, he thinks, to be vulnerable and open and exposed to the chance happenstance of a muon or a mattering neutrino, the inconstant building blocks of a world where cryptands and crown ethers and amines and DNA are miracles beyond price. How defiant the light, the sun, the moon, stumbling together to make chunks of dust that call themselves man. Albedo stretches a hand up toward those stars as if he could cut one down with his claws and compare it thus to the world that walked around him. Would existence be such a tedium if you outsized everything around you and burned so bright that all was a soup of light and air?

Where could he be, that inconsiderate other half of mine? It seems like a shame to be thinking that at a time like this, but that's how Rubedo finds himself considering the world as he sits in a huddled bundle, night breeze whispering across his bare skin now that he's tired of walking. At last he topples over on his back, stretching out the bones of a boy-body he'll never grow into and watching the stars play crack-the-whip beyond his reach.

(How does the idea come to reach out through that blackness, like a drowning man swimming for the ocean bottom, confused and groping and not bothering to watch the way his own breath bubbles? Maybe it's the feeling of the great blue-green blood-water expanse of the ocean, or the press of the universe leaning in as if it could breathe, that drives one man toward madness and the other toward loneliness as both stretch out along a line long atrophied. Contact is a shuddering surprise, like a spark nesting in tinder catching to flame.)

Hello?
Hello to you, too, my heartbeat.
Can't sleep?
No more than you can.

(At another time this would have ignited to violence, but tonight, everything is about savoring the feeling of moonlight on naked skin, the slow slither out of a last piece of clothing and the sensuous uncurling like a snake toward sunlight, skin unscrolling from places it's long been held captive. Soak in all that dark, boys, for your hearts are driven by these mysterious particles that traverse the blackness, an anti-solar power, the contagious and capricious love of weapons for the things they destroy.)

If he could, Rubedo would lay his palm to Albedo's right now and wonder at how his little brother has grown, into a man's hands and a murderer's. But instead he spreads a hand skyward by way of apology, examining the way the stars shine down between his fingers. I'm having nightmares again.

I don't dream. Laughingly, Albedo curls his fingers into the sand beneath him, enjoying the last traces of sun-drenched heat. This desert has absorbed more rainstorms than he's seen in his short lifetime, and yet it has yet to bloom, stubbornly locking up all the water and refusing to share. Cruel old bone-dry desert, dust-dry desert, all the seeds waiting beneath the surface that could burst into light if you let them have a little to drink. Same old, same old?

Yeah.

(One of them rolls to sit upright, tucking his knees before him with his feet flat on wet beach-sand, arms folded around them. The other remains lazy as a cat, tracing a pattern on his own skin with one claw before flicking the blood away to soak in the sand of the desert. Nothing benefits from this water-blood being thrown away like this, and it's sure to amuse.)

Lucky you, to sleep at all. There, now, clawed fingertips splayed across the bare skin of his chest, feeling one pulse and then another, syncopated beats like a drunken hummingbird who can't even fly straight. Lucky, selfish you for murdering my sleep.

Lucky you, not having to dream. He grimaces, brushing bangs the color of blood out of his blue eyes. Nightmare waits beyond the edge of exhaustion, wearing a giggling and beautiful and beloved face under a shock of white hair, twisted into everything broken and sick and wrong in his pretty glass-soap-bubble world. Lucky, selfish you for being so twisted up inside your nightmares are a picnic.

(They have matched each other year for year since their conception, growing after that into healthy boys of twelve, just old enough to begin getting in trouble with love but not with lust. And then one outgrew the other and puppy-love and all love, at least he thought so, but he found love's tawdry whore of a cousin, while the other was content to drift along in daydreams on a beach, knowing where the whores went but never following them. So when one spiders his other hand down across his own thigh to find himself responsive despite the desert cold, the other turns his head aside and makes a noise of disgust.)

What's wrong? Jealous?
Of a sick, lonely bastard who's only got his hand for company

(Momentary shame flushes across both faces and the night air is happy to steal the heat of core blood brought to the surface of the skin.)

It's more than you have.
Shut up.
And whose fault is it that I'm lonely?

I told you to shut up! Rubedo bites his lower lip, tasting salt-copper blood between his teeth and trying to erase the feeling of his brother there waiting for him, drowning for him somewhere very far away. I should never have— he thinks.

Albedo laughs, covering both eyes with his hands in a see-no-evil mockery. —even tried this, he completes, letting the wind steal his breath and his laughter. Fine! Fine. I'm quite as a mouse.

(They are both quiet for a long while then, each listening to his own twin heartbeats and contemplating the sky; one considers particle motion and the other just how stupid his life has gotten. One debates the perpetuity of the soul after death, and the other contemplates how much he detests politics. One wonders if he's going to have to be lonely much longer and the other considers this thought and giggles a little and sighs with a schoolboy's shame that maybe they will have to be, maybe this world isn't ready for them. Or maybe it's just their fault, and they're bad, stupid, horrible, monstrous creatures who deserve everything that's happened to them. This, both consider, might be the answer, Castor and Pollux damned perpetually to hell for their sins.)

Look, I—
—Don't say it if you don't mean it.
—I—
I told you, don't!

(Both sit upright now, one twisting around to glare up at the stars in a paroxysm of rage, the other knotting his hands in his lap and considering how that two-step heartbeat of his moves the blood so efficiently through his fingers. And one considers how nice it would be to end that two-step heartbeat and hurry on to the assigned hell, because even if they bicker like tomcats in heat at least they'd be together, and the other considers how nice it would be to end that two-step heartbeat so it would just be quiet. Both consider and exchange these ideas; one laughs, and one sighs.)

I'm sorry.
I told you not to say it! Now I can't believe you!
Fine. Whatever.

You idiot! I told you not to! Albedo chokes on his own laughter, ducking his head and trying to catch his breath in the momentary fermatta between thought and the emotional burden behind it. Then he's laughing so hard that when he tips his head back a salt-water rain patters down to the sand he's sitting on, soaking in and leaving the desert thirstier.

I'm still sorry. What's a little more saltwater on a beach? No one will ever notice it, Rubedo thinks with a sniff, and scrubs his knuckles against his eyes.

(For a while then the silence stretches out, the chord and cord of knotted thought dying as both tip reddened eyes back to consider the flooded sky. Clouds and rain, sandstorms and desert wind and thunder, lightning and tears, the meteorology of the heart; both consider this, one in straight lines and the usual progression of Hegelian thought, the other throwing away thesis, antithesis, and synthesis entirely in favor of shoving around shards of broken mirrors and interpreting the pattern his blood leaves on the floor.)

So am I.

(Both hiccup, the same little noise they've always made since they were pulled screaming too soon from their mechanical womb, cut apart, and put back in to gestate a little while longer. One sniffs, trying to hide his tears because big boys don't cry; the other pretends it never happens as he gets to his bare feet and begins tracing his way back to where he was.)

But it doesn't change anything.
Nope.

But still for a moment they remain naked together under the stars, separated by only their own stubbornness, each one waiting with his heart in his throat for the other one to reconsider.

The jury's still out on their case, and deliberation will never close until their two heartbeats stop. Even then, every night will still flood with stars and one might look up and the other stop to consider, sapphire eyes and amethyst turned skyward and reaching back out and wondering at how there is something incomparable to the feel of standing out under a naked sky with your soul left open and bleeding.