she's smoke; Hestoni

[Hestoni]

you were the lightning and i was the tree The afterlife is both wonderful and awful. There is no in-between, here. Everything is white or black or gray. You are either dead, or you are not. There is a place where they are all borne from (or fall into once their bodies cease breathing), where they rise on steady, ghostly legs like newborn babies. There is the intriguing rip in the curtain where either the dead arrive or the living visit. He watches the gap daily, hourly, waiting for his children to pay him a visit. He is still strong and sturdy and earthly in this afterlife. He is still serious (his smile only comes out when his fire comes around, or if any of his family would ever visit), he is still strong (his body has been refined into its old self, when he was in his prime), and he still himself (riddled with scars, deep in his beliefs, loving his fire with every fiber of his ghostly body). Her touch startles him from his solider-like watch of the entrance and exit to the afterlife. It is fluttering and brief, nothing like the solid and flaming touches in their lifetime. He feels a slight stirring of ghost nerves sparking at her touch, but it fades away too quickly. Gray eyes turn toward hers and he mourns for a quick moment how the world has dimmed into a lack of color. But her voice forces those saddened thoughts away and he manages a gentle smile. “My darling,” he croons. His lips reach to kiss just behind her ear. “Do you think they will ever visit us?” Serious eyes latch onto the gap, seeking out a head or leg or neck of color that would mean someone real and breathing and alive visiting them. His worry begins to clash against his chest. “I hope they’re okay.” He turns away, toward her instead, and focuses his dark gaze on her broad face. “Have you found Kagerou or Echion yet?” The afterlife is a maze of old and lost and dead souls, and both of them have found it is incredibly hard to find anyone they might have known who passed away before them. Nonetheless, he knows she will not stop looking until she reconnects with her old comrades. She is too fiery and passionate to give up, even here. your words were the fire that burned the best parts of me