Inspired by BlindRider's "Starward Vortex"
Time – Time flies by when contemplating life, the universe, and everything...
It's been so long since they walked together.
Ei walks very close to him, through the rustle of the rain Aether hears her steps, feels her movement and warmth of her body, and for a brief moment it seems to him that this is the only warmth that is still left in the world.
Suddenly she stops. Her face is pale and determined, her once bright purple eyes appear almost black now.
"You don't love me enough!" she suddenly declares.
Aether looks at her astonished.
"I love as much as I can," he answers.
"No. Not enough. You can never love enough!"
"Yes" he agrees, "I guess, you can never love enough. Throughout our lives never and no one. People never love enough and its humankind's greatest misery and regret."
"Not enough," Ei repeats, as if not hearing his words. "Otherwise, there wouldn't be two of us."
"You mean to say, we would've been one?"
She nods. Aether can't help but remember Lumine, his sister. Their birth, their journey across the stars and –
"Alas, there will always be two of us, Ei," he remarks cautiously. "But we can love each other and believe that we are already one."
"Do you think we were once one?"
"I do not know this. Nobody can know such things. Even then, there would've been no memory left."
"That's the point, Aether," she whispers. "We don't have memories. None. Why don't we have them? You search and search, but it turns out that everything has disappeared and forgotten! But so much has happened! But nothing more! Why do we forget? You and I, didn't we already know each other once? Tell me! So, tell me! Where is all this now, Aether?"
The wind splashes them with a whole flurry of rain.
And it seems like a lot has already happened, Aether thinks.
Sometimes it comes close and stands in front of you, and you know that it was once exactly the same, and you even know how everything will be in a moment, but you just want to grab it, and it already disappears, like smoke or a dead memory.
"We couldn't remember ourselves, Ei," Aether says. Removing his gloves, he catches small droplets of rain and looks up at the grey sky. "It's like rain. After all, it also once arose from the combination of two gases, oxygen and hydrogen, and they no longer remember that they were once gases. They are now only rain, and they have no memory of what they were before."
"Or like tears," Ei remarks. "But tears are full of memories."
They continue walking down in silence for a while. Aether thinks about this strange moment when suddenly the glimpse of some forgotten memory suddenly rises from the depths of many lives and seems to look over them at him.
The gravel creaks under their feet.
"Then it is like death," Ei finally says.
"What?"
"A Love. A perfect love."
"Who knows, Ei? I don't think anyone will ever know. We know only as long as each of us still retains his separate 'I'. If our selves merged with each other, then the same thing would happen as with the rain. A new 'I' would arise, and we would no longer be able to remember our separate, former 'I'. We would turn out to be someone else - as different from us as before, as rain is different from air - and each would no longer be a separate 'I'."
"And if love was perfect, so that we merge into one, would that be the same as death?"
"Perhaps," he answers hesitantly. "But not eradication. No one knows what death is, Ei. Not even us. Therefore, it cannot be compared with anything. But, probably, each of us would no longer feel that we were ourselves. A new lonely 'I' would arise again."
"So love is doomed to be imperfect?"
"It's perfect enough," he tells her.
"Do not shy away from the answer, Aether! It must be imperfect, now I understand. If it were perfect, instant lightning would flash and everything would disappear."
"Something would remain, but already beyond the limits of 'our' mind."
"Just like death?"
Aether looks at her.
"Who knows," he answers carefully so as not to worry her even more. "Maybe death has a different name. After all, when someone perceives it as end, for another it may seem like liberation"
The wind again throws torrents of rain on their faces, but they continue forward not caring in the slightest about the weather.
Ei is silent for a moment.
"Isn't that why love is so sad?" she asks.
"Love is not sad, but only brings sadness, because it is unrealizable and cannot be kept."
Ei stops.
"But why, Aether?" she asks very sharply and stamps her foot painfully reminding him of his floating companion. "Why should it be like that?"
He looks into her pale worried face.
"This is happiness," he says.
She looks at him in amazement.
"Is it happiness?"
Aether nods.
"It can't be! It's just misery!"
She throws herself on his chest, and he hugs her tightly. He can feel her shoulders trembling convulsively from sobs.
"Don't cry," he says. "What would happen to people if everyone started crying because of this?"
"What else is there to cry about?"
'Yes, about what?' he repeats to himself. About everything, about disasters on this damned planet, but not about love.
"Why is this misery, Ei?" he says. "This is happiness. Only we so foolishly define love - perfect, imperfect..."
"No! no!..." She shakes her head emphatically and refuses to be comforted. She cries and clings to him, Aether holds her in his arms and feels that he is not right, but she is.
"This is not misery," he continues to insist. "The misery is quite different, Ei."
"And what is it?"
"The misery is not that it is impossible to merge to complete unity and that one has to part, every day and every hour. You know this, and yet you cannot hold love, it spreads between your fingers, but it is the most precious thing in the world, and yet you cannot hold it. One of the two always dies before the other. Always one of the two remains."
Ei opens her eyes.
"How can you leave what you don't have?"
"You can," he answers bitterly. "And how! There are many degrees of abandonment and forsakenness - and each is painful, and many of them are equal to death."
Ei's tears dried up.
"How do you know all this?" she asks. "You are not that old yet."
"I just know," he says. "Experienced."
Experienced, Aether thinks. How many times he had to leave such a day and hour, and a life, and a tree in the morning light, and his feelings, and his thoughts. And each time he left them forever. And if he returned to them, he was already different person.
He had to leave so much behind, and he is constantly forced to leave everything behind.
When you walk between worlds and stars, aside from memories, you always have to appear naked before travelling to your next destination, and if you return, you have to reconquer everything that you have left behind.
But for him Lumine was always by his side, a single constant in his long life.
Ei's face glows in front of him in the darkness of the rain, and suddenly a wave of unexpected tenderness floods him. He again feels how alone she lives; fearlessly, face to face with the threatening ghosts of the pasts in whose power she is given, without shelter, without rest and calm, a soul open to all winds, without support, without complaints and self-pity.
'You are sweet and fearless, you are my beloved,' Aether thinks and plants a kiss on her forehead. 'Like an arrow, invariably and directly directed to the very essence of things, even if you are unable to reach it, even if you are mistaken. But who is not deluded? And haven't almost all of us renounced any search for a long time? Where does delusion, stupidity, cowardice end, and where does wisdom, the highest courage, begin?'
First time writing so heavily dialogued fic, but as the saying goes "First time for everything!".
Constructive criticism is welcome!