Chapter Text
Kravitz only faintly remembers feeling the rush of blood in his veins, the breath in his lungs, the gentle radiant warmth of his own skin—everything within him coming together to make warm, vibrant life. After his death, Kravitz has lost all of that heat, and the chill of death now clings as closely as the suits he wears.
This is one of the worst parts of dying, Kravitz privately thinks. The warmth dies with you.
It’s been a long time since his mother held him and shared her warmth during cold winter nights, sitting with him tucked in her arms as she sang to him. He would sing along with her, in those days, his own song a childish imitation of the voice he loved so dearly as he gave her his own warmth in return. A tiny furnace, his mother had called him, you’re so warm, my darling, my sunshine , scooping him up and drawing him close until he insisted that he was too old for cuddling, mother. He wishes now that he’d let her cuddle him as much as she wanted, but he supposes regrets are just part of being dead.
And at the beginning, he hadn’t even noticed the chill sinking into his skin. After all, he could still feel the warmth around him, and that hasn’t changed even to this day. He can feel the searing spark of a stray ember on his skin. He knows the brush of a Scorching Ray that comes too close for comfort, and the way that his dark hair and black robes heat too quickly in the light of the sun of the Material Plane. He can feel the fire roaring in a hearth, and the flickering flame of a candle, and the dying embers of a campfire.
That makes it tricker, Kravitz thinks now. It masks the cold clinging to him sometimes, so that even he forgets. And he had been distracted back then, too. There had been a new life to get used to, and a new and fascinating job as a bounty hunter for the Goddess of Death. Coping with all of that had been difficult enough, and then he had needed to learn the ropes of a whole new branch of magic.
It’s hard to focus on being a little cold when you’re dealing with being very dead .
He knows now.
He learned after the first time he felt the Raven Queen’s touch against his cheek, fingers brushing like feathers across skin. Gentle and soft and motherly, but colder than they ought to be from someone that moves with such life. He hadn’t been surprised—why shouldn’t the Goddess of Death feel as cold as the grave? He hadn’t realised that he had been remade in her image until some time after this careful touch.
In the end, all it takes is a blush. A while after her chilled touches had become routine to him came his first hunt, and it had not gone well. He had endured her soft teasing, which had still made him blush—he had been sure the colour had risen in his cheeks—but he would have felt the burn in under his skin from embarrassment, had he been alive. It was only then that he had noticed the absence, and he had quickly excused himself, gone to his own little corner of the Astral Plane, and quietly freaked out in the face of a loss he hadn’t even noticed until that moment.
Kravitz knows that he’ll never have the chance to come back to life. He’s come to terms with that over the years. He has his own existence now, and a mortal life means very little compared to the life he’s built for himself. He has a boss who’s more like family, a job that keeps him on his toes, and time to travel and see all the places he had never managed to go in life. He’s seen lifetimes upon lifetimes of things that he never dreamed of, and he’s happy with what he has now. Yet even now—years and years later—Kravitz can’t help but feel like something is missing.
Still, here he is decades down the line, standing by his queen, and there is no living warmth within either of them. A queen with a crown of feathers, with eyes glowing crimson under a skeletal beak of a mask, with limbs too light and too long to belong to the living, with hair flowing in liquid shadows over her shoulders, with a cloak of obsidian feathers. And next to her, a reaper made of bone and cloth and blade and spirit, with eyes like the embers of a fire that would never exist within him again. Both of them absorb the chill of the Astral Plane and carry it with them—a ball-and-chain that Kravitz will never escape.
He misses the warmth so much that it aches.
He takes to lingering in the Material Plane, sometimes, when the loss becomes too much to carry. He manifests a human form and finds a nearby beach where he can feel the warm sand against his back and the sun on his face. He lays there for hours, letting the sun bake its heat into his skin. He knows that when he steps into the Astral Plane, he brings sand in his cloak and the smell of the ocean in his hair. Kravitz is sure that the Raven Queen can feel the last bits of heat dissipating into the chill of his home as she embraces him when he returns. She never asks about where he goes, even though he can see that she wants to.
He appreciates her waiting more than he can ever say.
“I just want to feel...warm again,” he whispers one day, when he finally tells her where he’s been going.
His queen sighs. She reaches over and carefully tucks one of his dreadlocks behind his ear.
“I’m glad you told me, my raven. You must know that. But I hate to see you so unhappy.” Her hand draws him closer, and he finds himself leaning into a sharp shoulder cloaked in inky feathers. Long arms wrap around him, pulling the edges of her cloak with them.
Mother and child.
Kravitz closes his eyes and lets himself be held.
“I’m not—” He stops. His fingers sink into the feathers by his face, and he takes a moment to think. To breathe. His queen remains silent and lets him find the words.
“I’m not unhappy ,” he continues. “I think I’m just...unsettled. Sometimes. Maybe a little lonely.”
A hand scratches gently at his scalp while the other continues to hold him tight. Kravitz is glad for the arms around him. He feels ready to fall apart at any moment—to crumble into ashes and blow away into nothing.
“I understand,” his queen says, and he can feel that she means it, that it’s true. “If you need anything at all from me, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”
It’s the stern tone that makes him say, “Yes.”
It’s the way that she’s holding him, the way that she’s listening, and the love running underneath all of the hard steel of her voice that makes him mean it.
And so Kravitz visits every beach he can find in the Material Plane. Sometimes he invites his queen to come with him when he can’t stand the idea of being alone with his own thoughts and the loneliness threatens to swallow him whole. She calls it “tea time,” and she seems to delight in bringing along a dainty skull-patterned china set for them to drink piping hot tea from. It’s her way of warming him from the inside, he thinks, and he always finds his smiles all the more genuine on those days.
He never tells her this, but he’s sure she knows.