Follows pretty as a car crash.

He had forgotten how it felt, but his body didn't. After the first breath, the pain left him. After the second, he felt lightning flood his veins. After the third, he felt his fire course so boisterously in its cradle that he swallowed cinders in his mouth. He felt thrill, power, vigor. His muscles chased with borrowed energy, and there was no way to return it now.

What started as a scoff erupted into laughter. How long had he put it off? This feeling – how long did he fear it, how long did he cower in pain? He felt the fool now, so suffused with a giddiness that he stole from another's livelihood. Murikabushi, now long gone, had staked his death warrant on someone he never met, and Faustite was left with an empty bench and a full belly. He was left with his own scathingly sharp senses as he walked aimlessly, suddenly motivated to burn off his newfound energy.

Before he understood where he was going, his thoughts carried him out of the park. They brought him to the city proper, where alleyways fed like tributaries into the streams of streets, where people drifted between their tragic routines.

His thoughts took him to the top of a towering hotel, which presented an egregiously beautiful view of the city. Gunmetal clouds had drifted in and gathered behind the city's skyscrapers, framed like black teeth against the promise of rain. Only in scant breaks did crepuscular rays preek through, catching windows, painting walls in liquid gold. In the beginning of a breath, he saw rainfall like an errant brushstroke in the distance.

At the apex of that breath, he saw the hem of a dress flutter in a burgeoning crosswind. He felt her as he looked at her – Squire by feel – and his hand raised to catch the scepter that she swung at his face. On the exhale, he smirked; he turned with the inertia of her weapon, hand still clasped around its delicately wrought handle. The world slowed, each second stretched to a minute, and in each minute, he memorized a photographically accurate scene. Watched her demure, gracile face shift from aggression to confusion in a series of half-steps, like microexpressions, like microtransactions written across the receipt of her decisions. Next came surprise, and invariably, the pinch of her eyebrows so endemic to concentration.

She was pretty, he observed. Long brunette hair, suffused with rolling waves similar to his mom's. She had a prim, upturned nose that looked a margin too narrow for her face, and cheeks ruddy from either crying or drinking. She had a habit of chewing her lip. She had a dimpled chin, that possibly matched dimpled cheeks when she smiled or laughed.

He wondered with no intent to ask – when was the last time she smiled?

They were far enough into Faustite's redirection that she realized she was falling forward with the force of her attack. She hadn't made her decision of how to recover herself when Faustite kicked her in the exposed flank. Suffering the full force of it, she flew from him toward the edge of the building in a series of gravel-scattering rolls, and when she came to a stop, she only held torn skin from her palms.

Faustite approached, each metal footfall highlighting his increasing gait. In his hand was his spoil from the ambush – a scepter to which he paid little heed. He cared not for its origins, for its symbol or its magic. He didn't want the name of her Knighthood. Didn't want to hear her speak.

She wrenched herself to her feet. Straightened her skirts. But Faustite was ever a vigilant one – he saw the skinned knees. He saw the train tracks down one leg.

She spoke nonetheless – a wash of nonsense, calling him an abomination, a perversion of nature, telling him his starseed must have been desperate, must have been on the verge of collapse. Pronouncing him a crazed thing that slaved mindless for a master that would use him to destruction.

Faustite had already stepped into a throw. As she warned him about Metallia, the scepter just left his grip, headed straight for its owner. She gasped, but she was ready this time. Her wrists were near her chest, her hands curved like catcher's mitts.

The burning General vanished as she braced for impact. She caught her weapon, yet she felt a second thud against her chest. As she glanced down, she saw a rich gold damask pattern that wove up a black velvet sleeve. She saw that the sleeve ended where her chest began. Then there was nothing else to see.

Faustite didn't stay to watch her fall. Hunger drove him now, and he starved for starseeds to slake his flames. He already bit it in half, already chased another thrill that lit the world behind his eyes. He felt like he was flying.

As he savored the thrum of a hundred million fireflies buzzing behind his grate, he had thought: if Albite were here, they could've danced. Waltzing, swing, line dancing, he wouldn't have cared for the genre; he only needed the boy. He could've danced with each of his boys, one by one, then all at once. Could've kissed them all and felt the buzz from each of their wily affections as the night wore on.

But he was alone with a tongue that ran dry and hands that shook with want.

He ran. Let his legs carry him with all their indefinite energy, launching him into leaps adorned with flips or corkscrews. Led him into careful, ricocheted descents to the street level, where smarter strangers went on their ways as if they never noticed him. Still afloat on his own euphoria, he dwelt too long on his own immaculate giddiness and left his body to instinct alone. He marveled at the sharp contrast of a street lamp against a darkened building. He fell for the way his body flowed through space like so much water in a river. Loved that he was the wind that passed through the street.

He hadn't remembered the third. When his thoughts caught up with him, he was already standing over the youth. Gangly thing, sporting a bowl cut in what Faustite guessed was his natural hair color. One arm twisted at an angle that might have been broken. His backpack, sporting some ugly green dinosaur with red eyes, had sagged off of one shoulder. Looked younger than the Negaverse's smallest recruits; Faustite guessed the boy might've been twelve, or a newly minted thirteen.

His hands were empty. Kneeling down, Faustite searched the boy's chest for a starseed. Finding none, he searched himself. Panic rose like a thickened wave in his throat as each sirch, however meticulous, however methodical, turned up nothing. Then he checked that nowhere pocket of space and found only popcorn, jerky, and a cellophane-wrapped wad of cotton candy. Then he picked a few scant shards from his mouth, checked their colors.

Three blue, one gold, two red. Three colors. The burning boy's hands shook. He sucked a breath between gritted teeth. The world felt tilted, pitched, overexposed. His mouth ran dry, his tongue cottoned.

He was still staring at the prone form of the boy when he vanished, leaving only dancing cinder in his wake.