A bright streak of blood slashed across Lightning's cheek, although it did not belong to him. Nor did any of the scarlet haphazardly decorating his hair, his clothes, the exposed skin of his slender hands and wrists. He knew a total, all-encompassing euphoria as he danced through the hot summer rain, its scent heavy in his sinuses, mingling with the familiar, slightly sickening perfume of blood. The moon was bright in the sky above the city, not quite full, and its pearly light picked out the stains covering him in dark relief against his light clothes. Air always wanted them to wear dark colours, but Lightning almost never did. He obeyed their eldest brother in most things he ordained, unquestioningly. But he could only obey the things he heard, and sometimes he chose not to listen.
He had chosen not to listen about being careful and discreet as he returned after business, and about making a mess of himself. Somehow he never noticed, in the heat of the moment. And those were moments, when he was a bright fury of flashing silver blades and a heavy dullness descended over his consciousness, making him scarcely aware that the object of his attentions was - or ever had been - human at all.
There was a storm coming, and he was covered in blood, and he was happy, fiercely, with a kind of knuckle-whitening intensity which cared nothing for the future, or for the dark arches of the nightmare world he would find himself in if he allowed his guard to drop and sleep to steal upon him.
He entered their wing, their private wing, and hugged Earth around the middle leaving bloodstains on him. He didn't say anything, immediately, because there was no need to. His small warm body, smelling of rain and death, communciated everything his elder brother needed to know.

