And inside you're burning... Pollock

[Pollock]

He is connected to many, by now, it seems, as if by destiny. They are a web of stars making up vast, cruel constellations. (She, perhaps more so than others, because their divided halves call to each other like severed twins.)
They come together.

Of course they do.

He had never doubted it, even if she had. Their world is too small and he is too hungry. If he must be sated once, let it be because he had put the period on it himself. He makes it final, or else he seeks seconds voraciously. She had left, star-studded and expectant – alive – and so she would never have been free of his prying, wolfish wants.

“We with working eyes,” he does not miss it, her sharp tongue. He returns it with equal bite. Pollock has come to like that dance. But if they are both plain, and both more vulnerable than before, she cannot hide from the softness of her skin, now. That striking difference he feels when she takes to him and touches is self-evident. 
He steels himself against it instinctively, as he had last time. It is the most infuriating thing about them, and he is sure she likes the way he pulls his head back and groans, irritated, deep from his chest.

He would have liked to push her back, deflect her by invading her mind.

(Things have changed since they last came together. He has grown into touch. He had numbed all the meaning once attached to it – not forgotten. 
But he will never grow to welcome it like a lover, because it has never been a loving thing.
He likes best when it is at his disposal – she uses it, so brazen and forward.) “I do,” he grunts, he remembers everything that burns as hot as that had, before and since.

When she retorts, he smiles, but her question rankles him. He steps back from her, winter cold replacing the space.

“Like I was before.”
His eyes narrow, warning slits, his word are glowering and cautioning (maybe a tiny bit thoughtful), there is none of the irksome tones of the memories they incite. He doesn’t let the jagged edges of that grief and havoc surface and arm her.

Is festers where it belongs, down in his belly.
“Much like whatever it is you are without your pretty stars, I expect,” an impasse. They are two on-coming meteors. “Except, I know what it’s like to be without. I’ve built myself once.” It is a promise, and perhaps a veiled rallying call. 
They both lost things, inborn and things fought for (—in the same northern warfare… but nevermind that…), and are pale leftovers. 

“Oh. And I can fucking fly,” he stretches out his glossy, bright wings (so virginal and out of place), over-large in their span, acid burning his mouth to bone.