"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
It is cold, like the heart inside him that throbs slow and dull in the dead of winter.
Each snowflake that kisses his fur, is like a memory of nothingness that he turns his broad, bleak face up to. He can feel them resonate in his bones, down into the very marrow of him until it is shaken, frozen, fixed in ways that cannot be undone like the winter will be by the first warm touches of a spring he plans to look away from. It is spring that hurts him the most, because she came to him in spring with her salmon-pink hair and by summer’s end, she had his heart and all of him.
Gone, the brain shrieks.
Gone, the heart echoes sadly.
Gone, he thinks.
Summer and she, both.
Gone, gone, gone.
He sucks in a sharp breath; it burns, like only cold air can but he savors the burn - it tells him something still works, still knows what feels right and what doesn’t. Mandan has trouble recognizing that himself, or maybe it’s just the feelings that he fails to recognize let alone think still exist in him, a tiny seed squirreled away until the time is right. (Always that! - rightness, of moments and beings, like love and dreams, always that and yet it can never be - never again, the flash of eyes in that face beneath that unusual shock of hair and the ever-present smell of flowers that makes him sick to this day!)
His gaze jumps from the snowy backs of bushes to the snowy backs of horses that move through the snow. He does not envy them the fact that they have somewhere to go; he prefers it this way, no fetters of home and herd. Not since the Reckoning took it all away, and his horns too, he feels so naked without them! To the point that he cannot even look at his shadow and see it as part of him, it’s just a dark shape on the ground that mocks him - dark and creeping, like he feels he should be but something keeps him from crossing that divide to become more than he is, miserable, piteous, a thing meant for ending. (Beginnings are like stories, he has none.) Even his shadow, unrecognizable as his, suggests that maybe he is lonely but he scoffs at this suggestion and stamps his big feet in the snow.
Lonely, cries the heart.
Never, shouts the brain.
He settles, his brief seethe is over, and the snow claims his back once more until he too, is pale and poorly dressed to receive company.
(The sneer on his face ought to keep even the bravest of them at bay.)
your mouth is poison, your mouth is wine. i don't love you, but i always will.
Love.
A powerful, deceitful word.
One wrapped delicately with ribbon and lace, as sweet as arsenic.
And no less destructive.
Her own heart pined and ached within the bitter end of winter, though she could not and would not submit to the sheer weight of emotion that weighed so heavily upon her sinewy bones. Too often, she would swallow the swell of emotion that lingered within her throat, tasting the acidity of bittersweet memories and knowing well that her own fierce yet bristling heart could not be loved in any capacity.
She is covered in proverbial thorns; her heart and mind both guarded with the rusted barbed wire of weariness and reluctance. Though she had only allowed one to taste the sweat upon her skin and feel her bindings come loose in heated moments of vulnerability, tucked beneath a dense blanket of stars in the dead of night, she had yet to confess her bare-boned sin of ..
She dare not say it. Love, she quietly mulls to herself with the faintest of a sneer, her golden legs carrying her forward though her rampantly rampaging mind unravels within itself, and her wandering is aimless. a waste of time. Wasted breath.
Still, it burned within her like a flickering ember, burning low and slow in the very pit of her stomach, sating her with the faintest sensation of warmth and yet depriving her of the deep, searing burn she ached for. It was only a matter of time, she knew, until his eye wandered elsewhere, until his demons unsettled his mind yet again and the memories returned to haunt his dreams, and he would sate his desires with another - as he had many times before her. She held no significance in time - she was but a blemish in his flawed, already bespeckled history, and she had known it from the very moment his whiskered lips had first touched her white-hot skin.
It does not quell the ache, but the knowledge has long since settled in the back of her mind. The way her heart yearns will remain unspoken, buried beneath a forced smile and scathing, humorless remarks thrown at will. Still, she will burn. Burn, burn, slowly burn.
And smile all the while.
A long, wistful sigh finally emerges from her, as a cloud of carbon dioxide pools before her. The ice has yet to melt away, and the biting cold lingers still - a gentle dusting of snow settling along her curved spine as she presses deeper into the dense foliage of an unusually quiet and still forest. Her golden flesh scratches against the dull, drying bark of an old pine, which rattles a branch looming precariously over her - soon, the nape of her neck and the tightly folded lines of her thick, white wings are doused in a layer of heavy snow, eliciting a gasp and a shriek of displeasure.
Frustration sears through her veins, and with a growl of irritation, she tosses the tangled, now damp locks of hair to and fro, shaking the snowflakes away from her now shivering skin. With her brow furrowed, she presses forth into the clearing, the wide expanse of her wings outstretched to each side as she writhes and stirs the snow away from her feathers, her blunt teeth preening wildly in an attempt to remove the offending ice from within the woven pieces.
Suddenly, a feeling of dread pools within her belly, and her hazel eyes search the bleak landscape - only to meet a deeply set, scowling set of eyes. An unfamiliar face, but still, she sneers at him - matching him quirk for quirk.
Love,
Deceitful and destructive.
How it savaged him!
Mandan’s heart had shrunk, shrivelled up. Or the part of it that could know love and hate so intimately that it could pine or ache for either. Hate, he thinks, is more preferable but he doesn’t even have that left in him. Every emotion had been gobbled up by nothingness and he felt blank, hard like stone and bone, and raw like a scab picked at one too many times.
Life kept picking at him, would not leave him be to scar over too much.
No, it said breathe and keep the dumb muscle in your chest beating, feed your stomach and slake your thirst and Mandan, slave-animal, could not ignore it.
His eyes follow the sudden flight of a few birds that clatter and caw their own displeasure from on high as they fly away from the shriek that came from within the forest. He does not look to the source of it, bending his too-light head back to the snow to lip distractedly at the pale particles that have built up layer upon layer of cold on the ground. (Built up, like him, layer upon layer.) More noise makes him lift his head again, still far too light to ever be comfortable as he suffers the loss of his addax horns more acutely than a lover, and his face falls back into a familiar scowl, lips naturally set in a sneer.
Great, a mare.
How they plague him!
(Granted, he has little in the way of good interactions with his own sex, let alone the opposite!)
She is snowy and damp; he can tell even that from this distance, or more so from the way she picks at her wings, determined to groom the feathers back into formation. The sneer starts to fall away from his mouth, matched by hers or perhaps undone by it because she looks so ferocious, or could be if she wasn’t awash in clumps of snow (just like he is, though it has formed to his back, smoothed itself over like a blanket he has forgotten about) and he is tickled by the garish sight of her. So much so, that all he feels like doing is laughing! It comes out in a short, sharp bark and then he shuts up, back to silence as he thinks about how to answer her.
“I haven’t figured that out yet.”
He was either too honest or never honest enough, either way - it came out rude and brutish, like he always is nowadays.
your mouth is poison, your mouth is wine. i don't love you, but i always will.
The frigid ice weaves it way through the dense thicket of her feathers, gently touching the hollow bone structure hidden beneath the surface, provoking an agitated grunt from her throat. The warmth of her insulated wings soon melts each individual ice crystal, leaving little but the dampness of it behind – though her tepid breath soothes the ache. With her jaw tense and tightened, her teeth grinding together, she watches with wary hazel eyes, a fire burning within the dilated pupils. He is broad, much broader than she, but no taller in stature – her eyes meet with his own on equal ground, fierce and drenched with disfavor. The defined lines of his muscles shifting beneath what little of his russet skin peeked out from beneath a heavy blanket of snow, but she is far from intimidated; his repugnant outburst of laughter only provokes her gaze to narrow and her observation to become condemning.
”Aren’t you funny?” She drawls, her voice laced with contempt. The length of her expansive wings stretch to each side, allowing the bleak sunshine to touch the bristling feathers, all the while her gaze never veering away from his own. A few long moments pass between, examining the way his smile (crooked, lopsided – a quirk derived from disuse, she could only imagine) faltered as his momentary amusement fades into obscurity. ”You should be grateful you aren’t looking at what I am looking at.”
Disgruntled, her blunt teeth resume their tedious task of perfecting the placement of her pristine feathers, until satisfaction has settled into the marrow of her bones. A shiver courses its way along the rigid line of her spine, though it is cloaked in muscle, curving in a gentle slope along her back. Her shoulders remain rigid, her posture erect – a guarded but curious eye swiveling his way. A low, thoughtful waft of air emerges from her lungs; a heaving sigh. Alas, the tension seemingly dissolves over time, and soon she is unable to quell the insatiable desire to fluster him further. It is not often she comes across another that is as mouthy as she; if nothing else his brooding, moping presence may present itself as amusement for her.
She delighted in the plight of others – though too often, the feeble shred of compassion lying still beneath layers of callous ruthless dialogue and indifference made itself known in time.
(Though she would never confess to such a thing. Weakness had no place in her life.)
Quietly tucking her feathered appendages against the curve of her body, she emerges from the thicket she had only just been victim to, her elegant skull tilted slightly to the right – though her eyes never wander from his own. He is decidedly plain (a strong jawline; broad chest – handsome, but it was almost as if something were missing), but wholly intriguing, in part because of his boorish humor. ”I am certain there are worse things to look at;” she muses, though there is no humor in her flattened tone, head cocked and the ridge of her brow furrowing. ”who are you? I thought ..” A pause. ”I assumed I was alone. I haven’t come across anyone else here before.”
The condemnation in her gaze ought to burn him but it only chafes him in the slightest.
He has been met by many a condemning eye and hers are not likely to be the last in his lifetime. It makes his lips lift in their familiar sneer that seems to become more and more permanent, lasting longer and longer than the last. He’s not sure if her disfavor stems more from his stark presence or the dampness of her wings and fur, and he gives no thought to how it might be a combination of both - he could be as frigid as the snow, as bothersome as the damp that he ignores the feel of on his own back.
“Not hardly,” he counters, every bit as contemptuous as she is.
She blathers on and he half listens as she hurls insults about having to look at the disastrous mess that he is. It plucks him up and out of his obscurity and scowl as he looks at her, incredulous even if it is feigned and pointedly so as he barks out more laughter and a short statement of his own self, “But I am a beautiful disaster am I not? You can hardly take your eyes off of me.” he scoffs, looks her over and away again, like she is one to talk.
He failed to delight in the plight of others; preferred his self-imposed hermitage from every aspect of life except the simple things like breathing and eating, and if only he could be as mindless as some of their kind, too simplistic to grasp those aspects of life such as love and the damnation that follows it. Like her, he thinks that weakness has no place in life and the weak deserve to fall beneath the strong. (But you are weak, his heart whispers to him.) He ignores it, trusts to his lying brain that tells him he is formidable and unconquerable, not this time - not ever again.
That too, is a familiar lie and even more so for the flash of green eyes and apricot skin that slips into his mind. He shuts his eyes against it - against her, for more than a moment until he realizes that she is still there, still full of snark and spit. Her rancor is appealing, even if he would never admit it aloud and certainly not to her face - it might swell to match her ego, a thing that seems more befitting of stallions than some mare that stands before him like his equal in most measures, but he begrudges her that much, like a frail ounce of unconventional respect as his eyes rest dark and humorless upon her own. “Like you?” he muses, equally flat and devoid until the furrow of her brow and her candid admittance of being alone piques his interest for reasons he cannot fathom. He should have walked away, but maybe he was frozen to the spot. After all, all that snow was terribly cold and good at keeping him mostly immobile…
“One should never make assumptions,” he mutters. “But I am no one and maybe that is why I am here because no one is expected to be here.” She has given him rare insight into her character, to be so bold and brash but also foolish enough to think herself completely alone in this place, this forest of perils and surprises that never ceases to amaze - no wait, to thwart their attempts at pure solitude (he assumes that she too, sought peace and space from all of them and everything like he did) from the smallest squirrel to the largest horse, none of them were never far from ever being entirely alone because there was always something knocking about the forest and going bump in the dark.
“So, you’ve been here before…”
There is almost a glimmer of curiosity in the dulled darkness of his eyes as they revert back to hers.
