𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒅𝒆𝒔𝒊𝒓𝒆 𝒕𝒐 𝒌𝒊𝒔𝒔 . ( a series of kiss prompts . ) || @youmaythinkyouknowme || ❛ 17 . a kiss last thing at night .
When he was a child, his mother allowed him to collect moths.
He found them far more fascinating than butterflies, far more difficult to find in a world of sand and an inclination for war strategies. The poets he pored over told him that moths would do anything out of love for a flame. One evening, his mother had gifted him an Emperor moth. He recalled watching it for hours, and lit a candle for the sake of it. Free from a prison of glass or flesh, he’d watched as the moth took off once again. It circled the room and circled him and he’d stepped back to watch; it lost rudder control, smacking into the wall on each round. It circled lower and lower, spinning around the candle in tighter revolutions, water down an open drain. A few times it seemed to touch the flame, and danced away unhurt.
Then it ignited like a ball of hair, curling into an oily puff of fumes with a hiss. The candle flame flickered for a moment, dimmed; then burned as bright as it had before.
A beetle will chase after an opening of light, while a cockroach will scatter at a crack of it. How are the two of them different from insects? The moths that explore the day and butterflies that play at night. Polarity was an integral part of nature– human or not human. Khan recalled Lilly's facade of docility in her glass prison. She had proven him wrong in the grandest of ways. From a guilded bird to a maelstrom of chaos and to a girl who just wanted a comfortable pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt. He wondered if he should be afraid even now, if she could turn on him like a cornered animal; to sew his moth-wings onto the flesh of his back and push him toward the fire.
Would he burn out? Or would he flit away?
For the moment, the two of them clung together, one particle to another. The darkness before them, beyond the hull of the ship, expanded exponentially with a sparse scattering of light. No flame to be found outside, when it was burning away between them. Khan wondered if he should have left her on a forgotten planet or forgotten her all together, for either’s sake, and the ruin left in the wake of them. He wondered if letting the emptiness of space swallow him whole might have been better; a moth with frozen wings.
The dawning of night was just as much of a lie as anything he could spin. They'd been following the cycle of the last planet they'd docked at, finding that sufficient though neither required much of a routine. In space, no one can hear you scream, and no one can hear you laugh, or cry, or find something else in the shadows of a person-shaped amalgamation of emotional baggage. (But which of them is that? How do you know? How do you measure it?)
He hadn't meant for this. It was something like grasping at whisper-thin wings and expecting to fly-- delusional, entirely selfish. It might've been the fascination; Khan knew better. It wasn't the darkness inside of her or the way she could tear apart the universe with a flick of the wrist: it was everything in between, the gears and cogs that made Lilly.
So he was pathetic when he kissed her there, at the edge of night where night was eternal, bared for the stars to judge through the viewport of the ship. Or perhaps he was brave, fingers grasping gently at her face, keeping her near. Burning in the flames-- they were cold and his wings fluttered before turning to ash. Pathetic or brave, or falling inescapably, dangerously in love with her.
