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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    i've never fallen from quite this high; aegean
    #1
    Pteron often dreams of violets.

    Sometimes he is back in the Brilliant Pampas, where the spring-fresh earth was covered with them. In other dreams, they’ve washed up on a white sand shore; in others still they grow amid craggy peaks. He dreams of them, and yet each time he moves toward them out they are just out of reach, and his lips find nothing but bitter grass or rough sand or cold stone. He dreams of amethysts too, embedded into stone that he cannot pry them from, and of lavender fish that dart too quickly to catch. He wakes frustrated each time, grasping for something that remains ever out of reach.

    A gust of bitter air forces him abruptly from sleep, and he blinks away the snow that has built up on his pale eyelashes.

    The dream slips away before he has time to remember it, but it was something good, and a sleepy smile remains despite the fierce cold. Tucked inside the warmth of his feather-and-leaf nest, only the pegasus’ face is exposed to the winter weather. Winds always pick up at dawn, pushing away the heavy snowfall like they push away fog in the warmer months. Cold winds, but good winds for flying, and Pteron doesn’t mean to waste them.

    After shaking off the clinging debris from his coat, the tobiano stallion walks the few feet to the opening in the tree where he has made his home. Then he steps over the edge, plummeting down toward the earth a hundred feet below, only to snap his wings open at the last moment and soars. His blue hooves scrape the soft snowfall from the night before, leaving shallow furrows in the untouched whiteness. He lets the wind carry him ahead and rises between the trees, forced to dodge and duck and turn sharply in the maze of ancient trunks. He’s carried east toward the sea, and once there the winds gentle and he is left circling the iron grey waves that make up the waterway that further southeast will become the Silver Cove.

    Directly south are the high white mountains of Hyaline, sure to be bitterly cold. Pteron smiles, and then the smile abruptly disappears. The rest of him is gone too, nothing at all remains visible in the air where he still hovers. The sensation is still a little strange, even after all these years: being carried by invisible wings, unable to see even the nose on his own face. He pushes past it though, intent on his southern goal. The mountains are easy enough to dart around after his time in the Taigan woods, and he keeps as low as he can, not eager to freeze. When the frozen glitter of the lake catches his eye, he rises again, and circles a good half-mile above the lake. His quarry is somewhere below, difficult to see against the powdery snow, but Pteron is patient.

    There. The pegasus bends a wing, floating lower and lower until he settles in the snow a few yards ahead of Aegean, with only his wings visible .

    “Tis I,” he says in a voice far deeper than his own, one that tries and fails to hold back the laughter, “the Ghost of Winters Past.” And then he reappears entirely, unable to hold his partial invisibility and laughter at the same time.

    @[Aegean]

    -- pteron --

    #2
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    Aegean crafts his own dreams.

    They are quick and slow—as majestic as the depths of the ocean or the stars above them and then as slow as intimate moments curled around one another like smoke. He grows more and more isolated, the more he is able to create such things. He spends more and more time on his own, fascinated with the way that his mind can find such things—can carve them from stone and then from nothing. The way that he can wander forever and never get lost, never find that he is bored or alone or anything but utterly happy.

    So he does not know how long he has been alone.

    Only that he has been alone for a while.

    He has managed to find himself back in Hyaline, although the concept of home is an increasingly fuzzy one, and he wanders the mountains. Before him, he paints illusions of wildflowers and then ocean floors and remote, icy places. He paints them in fascination and awe, his heart stuttering with each new one.

    And it is only when he catches that wisp of scent that he pauses.

    Slowly, he brings his handsome head up, amethyst eyes peering into the nothingness.

    The wind is disturbed around him and the snow flutters as the pair of instantly recognizable wings appear before him. Aegean’s face does not change much, but his eyes darken just a little and his smile teases at the edge of impossibly white lips. “Have I dreamed you into existence again then?” he questions, as though to himself, as Pteron appears before him. His skin warms, despite the snow that falls gently around them, muffling the sound of his voice but not dulling the milky glow that he gives off.

    “I have dreamt of you so often,” he says, unashamed. “I would not be surprised.”

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    #3
    ‘I have dreamt of you often,’ Aegean says, and Pteron sighs. A little louder and it might have been a swoon, but the tobiano keeps his balance, drinking in the antlered stallion as though parched for the sight of him. And he had been, Pteron can admit to himself. Finding him again is like finding a coldwater spring after ten miles of summer scrubland; a long draught is the very smallest thing he needs. He would recognize the expression on his face were he able to catch his reflection: a stunned sort of satisfaction. It’s what Pteron enjoys eliciting in others; making them stumble over their words, flattered and dazed in equal parts. Yet Aegean has done nothing but smile and speak to him of dreams.

    “I sometimes think you are a dream,” Pteron admits to the other stallion. “I worry you might turn back to a star, might return to the sky.” How else to explain the way Aegean glows even on this sunless winter afternoon, the way his eyes are every shade of purple at once and yet one single perfect color. There’s even a glow about him, Pteron thinks, that makes the hair along his spine stand on end when he takes a step nearer. He seems as ethereal as the ghost Pteron had been playing at, just as likely to disappear in a blink, carried away on a puff of snow.

    Yet warm clouds of mist rise from his pale mouth, as visible as those from Pteron. A creature of flesh and blood after all, and he almost reaches out to confirm, but instead settles for watching the way their steaming breaths catch and mingle as they rise. He does not want to shatter the illusion, to break Aegean into the several thousand bits of stardust that Pteron is still half-sure he really is. The thought of him shattering keeps him distant, yet his olive eyes caress each smooth curve and follow each hard line of the overo in front of him.

    There is something almost painful about the way he feels near Aegean, like his chest is just a little too tight to breath, like his breaths are just a little too short. He inches closer, curious despite himself, and finds that his pulse races just a little faster with less space between them.

    “Or perhaps you are the sun,” he says quietly, watching the snow settle on the stallion’s white skin and disappear. “Even when I close my eyes, I still see you.”

    @[aegean]

    -- pteron --

    #4
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    Aegean’s heart has always been an easy thing to win. Perhaps it is the impossible nature of his life—that knowing in the back of his head that each moment is a gift. He was never meant to be alive and so he intends to live to the full extent of it, even if that means falling in love often and spending his hours exploring the depths of his mind as much as the expanse of the world around him.

    But, even still, he knows there’s something different about the way his heart reacts to Pteron.

    It is a strange, wondrous thing and, for all of its discomfort, he has no desire to see it leave. He relishes in the way that his pulse slows into a slow, looping rhythm, the way that the rest of the world quiets as if the snow around them muffled it. His amethyst eyes darken further and his lips hint in the corner at a smile as Pteron closes the distance between them just slightly. They have never touched, he realizes, and the tension of it is a beautiful, aching thing. It is poetic, he thinks, and makes no move to change it now.

    “Perhaps I will,” he replies, tipping his antlered head back to stare at the sky that spins above them. His smile is lazy and slow and he steeps in the quiet that stretches around them. “The sky is so beautiful, after all.” He closes his eyes for a moment and inhales slowly, his breath coming out in a slow fog when he finally does release it. Mesmerized, his gift reaches toward the slow curl of smoke in the air and begins to weave around it. It expands and twists and curls, turning whiter and more substantial, snaking upward.

    It becomes lace and then breaks into beautiful snowflakes, as large as a fist, that slowly fall down.

    As they suspend in the air around them, the light reflecting off the winter illusion, Aegean finally brings his head down again, angling his head and feeling his chest tighten just slightly with the boy’s words.

    “Perhaps I am the moon,” he breathes, “and you are the sun.”

    His eyes roam over Pteron’s face.

    “Perhaps I will spend my whole life chasing the shadows of you.”

    A smile, a sigh.

    “I can think of worse fates.”

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    #5
    finger trips across my cheek----------------
    ----------------kiss me until i can't speak


    There is a crunch of snow from beneath him; Pteron has stepped forward. He had not meant to, but how could he not, when the fall of those magnificent snowflakes highlight every bit of the boy in front of him that so fascinates him? Aegean wields powers Pteron cannot fathom, spins the world to his pleasure. There has never been anyone more perfect, Pteron is sure, no one more handsome or with a tongue more gilded or with the ability to make him question if he himself is flesh and blood. Perhaps he is the sun, Pteron thinks, or he would become one only to share one more thing with the amethyst eye-boy in front of him.

    They are closer now than they ever have been, and he wonders that the sensation in his chest does not pull him apart, shatter him into a thousand pieces of light like he feared Aegean might

    “I would not run fast,” he promises, breathless at his own daring, “I would let you catch me.”

    Another crunch.

    “I want you to catch me.” Pteron admits, his voice barely more than a whisper. It does not need to be, not with how his cheek is all but pressed to Aegean’s. The wind is all that is between them now, and it gusts about them. He can feel the way his feathers bend and his mane and tail are tugged this way and that. It is a marvel that he doesn’t blow away himself; every single part of him feels adrift. His words were hopeful, and though he longs for Aegean to answer that he wants the same, Pteron finds that he is suddenly unsure what the antlered boy might do once he’s been caught.

    It doesn’t matter, Pteron decides; if Aegean would turn him inside out and leave him for buzzards, Pteron would gladly let him. The electricity that hums between them, already intoxicating, already quickening his heartbeat. It might beat out of his chest, he thinks, and it would be worth every agonizing moment. “Tell me what you want.” He says, praying that the fire of their nearness does not consume him too quickly, and certain that even if Aegean pulls away that just this moment will be enough to warm him for the rest of his life.

    @[aegean]

    -- pteron --

    #6
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    The entire moment is suspended—caught between breaths—and Aegean feels a gentle ache in his chest because of it. It lingers, and he lets it. He holds onto it in his lungs and memorizes the way that his heart feels like it is beating too fast and too slow all at once, as though the laws of gravity have somehow changed around them both. He closes his eyes for a moment and just breathes, focusing on the inhale and the exhale and the sweet taste of wine that is Pteron—the way he can smell him so distinctly here.

    When he opens, he feels like Pteron is closer, but he doesn’t reach out.

    Even though there is a gentle curiosity scratching at the back of his mind—a prodding, a want. The desire to trace patterns into the swirls of blue and cream and ivory. To know the velvet of him. To know. But Aegean lives in the ache instead and lets it become part of him. He watches him, listening raptly, and when the other boy admits his desire, his laugh is low and soft like smoke, breathy and warm.

    “Wild things are not meant to be caught,” he whispers quietly, studying the angles and dips and curves of the other. “I dream of so many things, but never of you being caught.” He could hardly imagine a world where his Pteron (he feels that now, a tug of it in a dreamer’s heart) was anything but free.

    The snowflakes still dazzle around them, spinning and throwing their light over the pair, and Aegean angles his head, purple eyes unreadable as he considers the question—the demand. Tell me what you want, the boy says, and he wonders if he could ever find the words to describe it. The way that his heart races for things that he can never see and yet dreams up all the same—the beautiful illusions of it.

    “I want beautiful moments,” he admits, a slight frown crossing his face in concentration before he looks up, holding onto the other’s gaze and letting the tension continue. “I want the impossible.”

    A brief smile, gossamer thin as it plays at the corners of his mouth.

    “Maybe that means I want you.”

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    #7
    finger trips across my cheek----------------
    ----------------kiss me until i can't speak


    Wild things aren’t meant to be caught, Aegean tells him, and Pteron feels his heart fall. It had been somewhere near his throat, but it surely lands in the snow beneath him, a cold hard impact. Catch me, Pteron has said, keep me. And Aegean tells him no in the kindest of ways, in that gentle voice that sets each bit of him afire even when what it has to say is denial of his affections. His lips start to move in protest – Aegean is no cage, not when nearness to him frees every part of Pteron. The pegasus has always slipped away from any sort of shackles, and yet when tells Aegean that he wishes to be caught the other boy turns him down.

    The objections melt unspoken on his tongue.

    His heart still beats frantically at the space between them, despite where Pteron is sure it lies in the ice and mountain grit beneath him. It is a wonder, truly, that he can breathe around the jagged wound of unrequited love so abruptly torn into his, and yet he does. He even manages to not react at all, and even when Aegean pulls away to thinks of all the things he wants that are not Pteron, the winged boy still cannot bear to put any more space between them than the overo does.

    Beautiful moments, Aegean tells him, and Pteron realizes that what the two of them find beautiful must not be the same. For surely every moment he has spent in Aegean’s presence are the most beautiful moments. The impossible, he wants, and Pteron realizes with a bittersweet pang that the impossible is what Aegean deserves. No, better than impossible, and the futility of that squeezes him tightly. More than Pteron could give him; that is what Aegean deserves. Of course, of course. It stings but it is true. The violet-eyed boy deserves the stars, and Pteron will only weigh him down.

    This hurts, hurts worse than the time he’d been crushed in an avalanche, yet that is the nearest comparison Pteron has for this cold impact. He will always have these memories though, Pteron reminds himself, he will never forget the way that Aegean’s soft glow seeps into his own bones and lights him up from the inside.

    ‘Maybe that means I want you,’ Aegean says, and Pteron learns what heartbreak feels like.

    The antlered boy offers Pteron something not unlike what the pegasus shares with Aquaria – or at least this is what Pteron thinks. Friendship and fervid kisses and the occasional fuck, but never anything more. What works so well with his favorite nereid though, that is not what he wants from Aegean. He wants more, is sure that Aegean knows he has offered more. He wants to wake each morning beside him, to tell the whole world that this is his Aegean, to raise a child (a little girl, he’d let himself imagine, antlered like her father but with Pteron’s wings).

    But Aegean wants something simpler, and Pteron is so head over heels that he will never dream of denying him a single thing. Aegean does not want all of him? Then Pteron will break himself into a thousand pieces to find the parts of him that Aegean does want.

    “There is no maybe for me,” Pteron breathes against his white cheek, marveling that the electricity does not spark between them, so bright and sharp that he can forget the growing hole in his chest. “I think I’ve wanted you since the moment I saw you.”

    @[aeagean]

    -- pteron --

    #8
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    It never once crosses Aegean’s mind that Pteron might read his words as a rejection. It never occurs to him that the other could possibly mistake the ache in his chest that spreads low and slow like wildfire as anything but what it is, anything except the want that he does not yet understand, cannot define. It feels so clear to him—feels so undeniably pure and right—that there is no other viewpoint, no other explanation.

    So while the other stallion simmers in the feeling of heartache, Aegean feels quite the opposite.

    His purple eyes study Pteron, mesmerizing the way that he has grown—the strength of him and the kindness of his eyes, that joy that somehow always sparks just below the surface. There is so much of him that he has yet to discover and although there is a greedy part of him that pushes for more, he restrains himself. There is beauty in the slowness, he thinks. Beauty in the build, in the tension, in the want.

    Pteron’s word cause a slight glow to warm within him, as if he has swallowed his own illusions, and he closes his eyes for a moment to savor it—his lips turning upward. The other’s breath fans across his cheek and he feels the way that the hairs move in response, ruffling just so beneath the quiet movement of air.

    When he does open it, his gift reaches for the snowdrifts around them, letting the snowflakes fall to the ground with a loud splash. He hums underneath his breath as he continues to weave the world to his own pleasure, turning the snow into a low, dense fog—supernatural in the way that it crowds around them, weaving between them. Soon, he pulls in the dull crash of waves and the smell of saltwater and brine.

    It is the Cove and the memory is such a beautiful one that he crafts each and every detail with care.

    The fog crowds them both, muffling the rest of the kingdom until it is just the two of them, and his eyes clear slightly when he is content with his creation. “I remember,” he breathes, glancing around them at the place where they had met in his childhood home, brought to life in the place that should have been.

    “I remember thinking I had never seen anything more beautiful.”

    A smile, a breathy laugh.

    “If only I could have known how beautiful you would become.”

    He considers reaching out, indulging, but the self-control in the face of such want is a heady thing—

    and he restrains.

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    #9
    finger trips across my cheek----------------
    ----------------kiss me until i can't speak


    Pteron refrains for fear that his bumbling efforts might shatter them, that he might break whatever this breathless, agonizing, glorious thing between them is. To touch him would be to break this, maybe even to push him farther away, and Pteron cannot bear the thought. So he waits, and waits, and waits for contact that never comes.

    His fallen heart starts to roll down the mountainside, each moment of nothing a torturous thunk against the cold ice and sharp stone. Aegean doesn’t mean to do this, Pteron reassures himself, no one so perfect as Aegean could ever want to cause pain. And yet there is some part of Pteron that is sure, so incredibly sure, that even if Aegean does it purposefully it is for a good reason. And the reason is good enough for Pteron, even if it leaves him with a bloodless bit of muscle at the bottom of the mountain rather than the heart that had so desperately wanted to be aflame.

    Aegean’s eye close then, and Pteron pulls away, unsure how to read this reaction, unsure what he has done to make the sight of himself unbearable. He will fix it, he thinks, he will do anything, and just as he opens his mouth to beg for the chance to correct whatever he has done…the world around them shifts.

    It is Aegean, he knows, painting the world around them. The relief that that he had not ruined this after all is nearly sickening in its strength, and Pteron releases a breath that becomes a happy sigh as he looks at the world that Aegean creates.

    It is the Silver Cove, just as it was on the day they had met.

    Well, almost. There is no orange spotted girl today, and the Aegean in front of him is not the half-grown boy he had been. No, this Aegean is taller, wearing a crown of antlers rather than the adolescent spikes. The boy from the Silver Cove had made Pteron’s heart flutter and this one makes it soar. Soar and crash, but Pteron gathers up the broken bits. Aegean’s words are a balm on the shattered pieces, but Pteron cannot bear to hear them, not when he fears they are said only to soft the rejection. Yet he cannot look away, not from the man surrounded by the cove, from the memory of the day he now recognizes as the moment he gave his heart away. He cannot look away and he cannot hear anymore so he does what he fears might ruin them, and closes the space between them.

    This time he does not stop a breath away. This time his mouth crashes against Aegean’s, and there is no elegance in it at all. He tastes like snow and light and magic and everything Pteron had never known he had wanted.

    @[aegean]

    -- pteron --

    #10
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    For all of the ways that his heart beats too fast for too many, Aegean has strangely never been one to give into physical affection often. It’s not that he is opposed to touch, but he has never found the opportunity to indulge. In this manner, he is wildly inexperienced—untouched and unlearned in such areas of life.

    So he has no defense for the way that Pteron crashes into him.

    He has no way to respond except to let himself be dragged into the undertow.

    What he finds is that it comes to him as natural as breathing. The boy’s mouth on his own feels like taking the very first breath of air and his lungs expand in his chest, his vision swimming as he closes his purple eyes on a soft moan. He steps forward, finally, the fog of his own creation snaking around their legs and pressing in on them. It reacts to the way that his pulse spikes, the way that his mind colors itself with the sensation that spreads through him, and suddenly the dark grey glows as bright as starlight. It shifts to the blue of Pteron and then the ivory and then a black shadow that leaves the two of them at the heart of it.

    Intrigued, drunk on the moment, Aegean finds that his mouth wanders up Pteron’s face. They trail across his cheek in a whisper and then dip down to his throat where his teeth gently grasp at the flesh in a testing bite. It is a tender and yet the sensation of it makes his head as foggy as the world around them.

    “You are the sun,” he repeats, wondering if the other boy can hear the way that his heart thrums like a drum inside of him, the melody of it beautiful and yearning and increasing in temp with every moment.

    He presses another kiss, gentle and fleeting up the boy’s neck.

    “The very sun.”

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)





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