plingo_kat: Ritual (Ten/Jack) [PG]

[plingo-kat.livejournal.com]

Title: Ritual 
Author: plingo_kat
Challenge: Myths
Pairing: 10/Jack
Rating: PG
Spoilers/Warnings: Uh, nothing really.
Summary: Inspired by the Time Crash.

“To days to come.”

“All my love to long ago.”

The two men held up their glasses and brought them together, solemnly. It was time-old tradition, dating back more than centuries, more than millennia, more than anything. It had been there since the beginning, and nobody could ever imagine anything different.

Two men.

One was blue and one was brown (though not literally, it was probably just the colors of their clothes, everyone agreed) and the two of them were the sun and the sky, the earth and the moon, the universe and the stars. It was written that they came in a gust of wind, one second there and another second not.

They left behind the world.

In the beginning, it was told, there was war. Humans were no better than – no, they were worse than animals – and when they grew old enough (some started at four, some made it up to nine) they went to war, blood staining their hands and their teeth in a futile attempt to fulfill an unfulfillable bloodlust. Nobody knew how the war started and nobody cared; it just was. Humans weren’t big thinkers back then.

And then came the Immortal and the Storm. The two names were pretty much interchangeable – where you got one, you had the other, and each of them had both characteristics. It was said that they couldn’t die (or that they could, but would just get back up again) and wherever they went, there was chaos and conflict and change.

Humans changed.

No one knew exactly how the Immortal Storm stopped the war except the two themselves, but there were theories aplenty and some new ones still got made up hundreds of thousands of years later. They sang the world to peace. They touched a man, and that man touched another, and through that rational thought and the ability to be human was spread from person to person. They were Immortal, and they were Storm, and they just did it.

And every once in a while (oh, a hundred years, maybe) a bar or a hotel someplace would receive two mysterious visitors (always men, always young and charming) and they would ask for a bottle of 1436 Immorm wine. Everyone knew who they were. Nobody bothered them. But when they filled their glasses, and brought them up in the time-honored toast…

Every other glass in the room rose with them.