chances are we bruise the same
Uncertainty fluttered in her small chest like a jar of trapped butterflies. Not for the first time in the past few minutes, Faultline finds herself wondering if perhaps this wasn’t all just a part of some strange dream. After all, the mind of someone half starved and wholly lonely was not the soundest place to be and currently she was both. More-so was the fact that dreams tended to take impossible routes that made sense in the moment but became impossible to explain immediately afterwards. Like portals for instance, or an elk the size of a tree, dragon wings on the largest horse she’d ever seen. Once, twice, her heart stuttered in her chest as she looked wildly between Bright and Vanquish.
But then the purple one had the audacity to point out the way Vanquish had her rattled so deeply that the blood in her veins ran cold like ice and her bones clacked together like stones. Faultline felt her chest puff a little as she allowed the black giant to tuck her close beneath the cool leather of his wing.
Immediately, she thawed.
His warmth was intoxicating after so many days alone. She can smell sand and sun on his skin and she buries herself against those thick legs as he tells her impossible, fairytale things. His nose touches her cheek and she tilts her small face up to him, pressing the soft of her delicate nose to his cheek in return. Some part of her stills, the fluttering in her chest and the quiver of bone, and so too do the colors shifting like a bruise across her skin. They fade away completely and are replaced by her birth colors, the shimmering opalescent white and champagne, the imperious crimson of a blood red mane. She didn’t feel like hiding herself from them anymore.
But then a thought creeps back inside her mind, latching on like a parasite and she sways just a little beside him. Her color remains the same, but dark shadows appear in the depths of her eyes when she turns suddenly to look at them both. Her voice is impossibly small and sad and there is something so close to heartbreak there that even Bright seems to flinch with displeasure.
“I’m not dreaming this, am I?”
.
But then the purple one had the audacity to point out the way Vanquish had her rattled so deeply that the blood in her veins ran cold like ice and her bones clacked together like stones. Faultline felt her chest puff a little as she allowed the black giant to tuck her close beneath the cool leather of his wing.
Immediately, she thawed.
His warmth was intoxicating after so many days alone. She can smell sand and sun on his skin and she buries herself against those thick legs as he tells her impossible, fairytale things. His nose touches her cheek and she tilts her small face up to him, pressing the soft of her delicate nose to his cheek in return. Some part of her stills, the fluttering in her chest and the quiver of bone, and so too do the colors shifting like a bruise across her skin. They fade away completely and are replaced by her birth colors, the shimmering opalescent white and champagne, the imperious crimson of a blood red mane. She didn’t feel like hiding herself from them anymore.
But then a thought creeps back inside her mind, latching on like a parasite and she sways just a little beside him. Her color remains the same, but dark shadows appear in the depths of her eyes when she turns suddenly to look at them both. Her voice is impossibly small and sad and there is something so close to heartbreak there that even Bright seems to flinch with displeasure.
“I’m not dreaming this, am I?”
.
faultline
tarnished x bly