Welcome to Gaia! ::

And he remembers—

The lightning skating up his skin after striking hard enough to take him and his boy off their feet. Like they were drawing it down onto them from the strange, enraged weather above; the kind that’d been going all day, that the city had regularly sent out warnings about, (the frequency of, if not the intensity with which it struck.) But lighting was lightning and even Eternals were not immune to nature at its pissiest..

The thin, faint lines left behind from that incident tingled as he thought about the marks buried now beneath refreshed ink. And much like every other ruinous, bisection of raised scar that he’d earned proudly on his own. It didn’t matter much to him if they weren’t earned intelligently. No, the point was that they were all his, he owned them, and the stories that lived behind them were more than worth the risk he’d taken in their gain.

And he remembers—

Fighting Encke in a snow field, again across an open one, amidst a mob (how shocking that careless sphere of magic was). How that man never played or pulled his punches. ******** clearly, and he felt for poor Jayce and Sy and the others who’d had to face that kind of wrath in an enclosed space. He felt another way entirely over a trail of scars lanced up along a slender, pale, curved spine. One almost more familiar than his own.

Almost as familiar as this, now,; the taste of ozone, static, hairs-rising-on-end. The kind of charged lull that sets in just before a dry rain, air heavy with tension that could be cut with a knife. Lightning, of all taste, color, and variety. That would leave permanent scars, and do damage to the mind; born of Magic and the Rift and of freak-a** Earth skies.

But none like this. He was sure of it without needing to be told. He’d been told anyways, had chewed through the knowledge like one walked over glass; painfully, loudly, with sparks under his skin of a different kind.

It drove him to move.

To act.

Because he didn’t know much. Hell — he didn’t know ******** all, rarely ever, or on any given occasion; and it wasn’t that he felt things were beyond him so much as he felt like they were far above him. This distantly intangible thing he couldn’t begin to wrap his hands around, yet alone his mind. Pictures full of the kind of clues made for far brighter minds. Orders that made his eyes cross—-

But what he did know? Intrinsically animal and base at its very core—-

People.

He could do people, seek people, and ******** it, but he would! Perching himself atop concrete and steel that ran miles high, accessible to those it needed to be. The only kind of people he cared to encounter over the next few nights.
Albite remained there for a set of nights, looking as intense as he did carefree. Like a road flare of an invitation, radiating aura and the echoes of vaguely skittering creatures alike.

His presence all but screaming:

‘For a good time call-—‘

‘For a bad time too.’

As boldly as a phone number in a bathroom stall written in wild sharpie, even wilder still to see it also written on some of the menus at the local Space Dennys. Or the napkin dispensers at the 7/11. A good omen, a bad tide, knowing it could be taken any number of ways depending on how whoever noticed him chose to perceive his presence. The point being that he wasn’t trying to hide anything of the sort….

He’d been struck here once, afterall, hadn’t he? The scorch marks remained as proof of it, even if the rest of the rooftop had obviously been patched in places over the years. But once — once there had been lighting — and he thought, maybe if he was lucky?

He would get struck twice.



To Taste Lightning