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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


    [private]  wanna hear my beating heart one last time; levi.
    #1
    let me pick your brain, girl.
    and tell me how they got that pretty little face on that pretty little frame.
     

    And the breakdown of this moment was simple - 

    Levi was a butthole. 

    He was a manwhore, he thought with his dick instead of his brain, and he obviously was missing those vital red blood cells that should have been going to his brain, instead of flooding his groin... or being used to feed that good for nothing female of his. The one who should have been his prisoner... 

    Instead of his bedfellow. 

    And so, Warrick's decree has been set down, and when he leaves, Ceara find's she's too mad to feel the quickening in her heart. Levi was given instructions to escort Karaugh across the border, and to leave her there. Knowing Levi as she did in all his pigheaded boorishness, she would not put it past him to stretch out his orders...since it was something he was so very good at. 

    Since Ceara is pretty sure that Ellyse never said once to 'fuck the prisoner, oh and by the way its okay if she drinks your blood.' 

    Talk about Stockholm syndrome. 

    Ceara felt the acid in her stomach turn to dust, the bile in her liver rising to her thoat as she looked on her favorite person in the world with new eyes. The innocence fell like scales from her thick dark lashes, and it was with an emotional, angry sob, that she turns her velvet tinged body towards the border. 

    Fuck Levi she thinks. He obviously doesn't need me, so I don't need him. 

    Ceara was going to Nerine, and apparently she was going alone. 

    Because women are the only ones with sense in this god-forsaken Kingdom. She trudges on, making her way past the islands, and when she hits the field, she runs. 

    She runs in a way she has never had to. The lactic acid burns as she pumps her legs like a wild machine, tears flying into the wind behind her, putting as much distance between her and Tephra - her and Levi, Warrick - as possible. To try and find a place that made sense. A place where her innocence still meant something. She was still a young thing, who had wanted to grow up so fast. And now she finds, that she wished she could take it all back. To bear so much love, only to be let down, was an emotion she never wanted to feel. It made her sick - her stomach clenching and turning in on itself as she continues to pound salt, pushing the dirt and the soil behind her with every sure stroke of her strong legs. 

    She was running for the forest, and when she finally reached it, she felt that there was enough cover to slow down. 

    She has never seen such trees before. Massive pined needles with large red trunks. A quiet mysticism fell over this place, like it held many stories that Ceara herself would never be able to understand. 

    Tears continue to fall silently down ash-colored cheeks as Ceara quietly makes her way between the trees. She has come here to disappear for a while - perhaps forever. 

    At least until she has figured out what she wants to do next. 

    ceara
    offspring x reagan, smoke healing & fire negation


    @[Levi]
    Reply
    #2


    The scent of the volcano is easy to trail. Foliage crushed from a wild run, heavily spiced with his sisters sweat and tropical fauna is her trail of breadcrumbs. These warm scents are dramatically out of place in the winter fields and dry, hibernating forest.

    Levi had followed the Overseer's orders, although he had hardly been needed. Karaugh had left easily and without a fight, happy to again have her freedom. Perhaps she had known what troubles waited for him as soon as she cleared out. 

    He had felt nothing as he watched the jerky flight of the bat as she crossed the channel. It had been his sister he was thinking of as the five of them (Amorette unseen in their wake) had wordlessly traveled to the channel. He told himself she had a right to be angry, but he doesn't want her to be angry alone. He had harbored his anger alone for years (forever) nestled warmly in his belly of flames, and look where it go him. Friendless, partnerless, and positionless - except for the dirty jobs this or that oversee neede done.
    She deserved more than that.

    “Ceara!” He calls, his smokey voice booming across the meadow, in the distance he can see a dark smudge along the horizon just as it disappears into the woods. He picks up the pace. “Cera!” He repeats as he reaches the forest, but only his own voice calls back as it echoed off the trees which surround him.

    Levi damns her willfulness then, as he stands alone literally steaming under the pines. He waits a moment to catch his breath, plumes of white smoke leaving his nostrils. Then her scent is there again scent and his head jerks sharply to the right, sure enough, the signs of a recent traveler are there. 

    Several strides bring him to her, and a sigh of relief escapes him. 

    "Sister." The thick ebony trails that tears have left on her ashen cheeks cause his anger to dissipate. His voice is soft as the morning fog over Tephra's warm streams as he slowly approaches her. Mismatched eyes scan her body quickly for any signs of harm and when he sees none they again rest on her tearstained cheeks. 

    Sorrow, guilt, shame
    He feels it deeply, profoundly

    It dampens his flames, it achs in his chest. He stallion halts beside her, not reaching but hoping she will.

    "I lived in this forest for a year when I was about your age. I ran away and no one chased me down," his voice is compassionate, far from accusatory. "but I'm here for you, and I'm sorry."

    Did she know he had never said those words in his life before? 

    He doesn't expect his words to fix everything and he still braces himself for her attack, fully expecting a display of rage. But he will not shy from it - because there is now someone who he cares about more than himself. 

    She just needed to know that. 

    Levi
    so scream you, out from behind the bitter ache.
    Reply
    #3
    let me pick your brain, girl.
    and tell me how they got that pretty little face on that pretty little frame.

    She stopped, but she did not speak. Her eyes stayed steadfast on the path ahead of her, blindingly heading anywhere she could that would get her as far away from Tephra as possibly as she could. She had known that one of them would follow her - whether it was Levi or Warrick, she could not be sure - but she had known from the start that she would not get far before she was caught. And yet, she did not have it within her to forgive and forget. To put away her anger, her frustration. Her sheer loneliness at the situation that she led. The one who meant the most to her - the one she had grown up with, sheltered her, loved and cared for her - would not only lie to her and keep secrets from her, but that he would think that this interpretation of orders was okay.

    She snorted, her flared nostrils and sheer boredom settling into her bones as she angrily put out his mane and tail again, snuffing out his fire, and taking away his smoke. Her ears are the only thing that show her attentiveness to her brother - but otherwise, she is still as stone. And she realizes that there is another focus here too.

    Warrick did not come.

    Was he with Tangerine? What was so busy that he did not care for her any longer? A lightning bolt went off in her head and her face became truly angry for the first time. There was something different to holding it inside, and putting on a serene face - she knew how to play the political game. But this was no longer about Tephra - this was about her, and about all the shit that went on around her that everyone thought she was either too stupid, or too young and naive to know about. Ceara was not a child anymore. And she wished that they, Levi in particular, would stop treating her like one.

    "Karaugh was someone's mother. If Reagan had been captured... Would you have treated her like that? Would you have treated MY MOTHER like that?!" Ceara screams at him, teeth bared. Ceara and Levi were only half siblings, but it was never something they talked about. They were family, through and through. Except now, when Levi was a stranger that Ceara no longer recognized.

    That fact caused a lump of emotion to rise to her throat, and she choked on it.

    "You disobeyed orders. I don't know what they were, but I know for a FACT that Ellyse would not have have said for you to SUBJECT yourself to being fed from that FAT BAT!" She huffs, before sobbing outright...not sure if her emotion was coming from being kept out of the loop, from Levi not trusting her, from what she saw in the cave, or from Warrick not being the one to come find her.

    Maybe it was a mix of both.

    "Did you fuck her, Lard Ass? I hope it was worth it. I hope you got your fucking rocks off." She was spitting now; hot angry tears streaming down her face in earnest. "You know, I'm not a child anymore. I may not know the ins and outs of Kingdom Politics, but I know that what I saw in that cave was wrong. On every level." Ceara stops and turns to him, her active power on holding his fire in check keeping him from re-lighting his hair. "I thought I knew you better than that, Levi."

    "I thought you knew you were better than that."

    She sniffs. And takes a single step towards Nerine. Towards anywhere.

    And yet, she is not sure she has the heart to move any longer.

    She is not sure of anything anymore.

    ceara
    offspring x reagan, smoke healing & fire negation


    @[Levi]
    Reply
    #4

    "Reagan is not Karaugh," he states flatty after her first sentence, but she is screaming now and he closes his mouth to accept the punishment he had known was coming. But had that been anyone other than Karaugh (possibly Reagan or Kolera) his history would be different. 

    Even though it is no surprise, the passion behind each word she spits causes him to flinch. 

    Levi doesn't have a good excuse so he doesn't fabricate one. What happened in that cave still confused him, and it would be a long time before he understood himself well enough to try and figure it out. In the dark below the earth, he had been King of their small world- the shroud of poise he wore for his father's benefit had slipped from his shoulders the moment he stepped into the privacy of that cave. 

    Karaugh: the explicit, the unshakable temptress - seeing her vulnerability had made him lose the delicate control he held over selfish, starved, and suppressed darker nature. He knew she had brought out the primal in him, but he struggled to see exactly where he had crossed the line which was so obvious to everyone else. The fact that he cannot see this line makes the distaste he feels for himself even more potent. His moral compass is not calibrated, he decides, he is broken.

    Not that he wanted to be good, not that, but the thought that the stallion in the dark had been the true Levi - that Ceara would understand this - nearly paralyzes him.

    His usually orderly thoughts are in a scramble, but Ceara drives them all away. She takes a step away and he is there, pressing his muzzle to her tear-dampened cheekbone if she will let him. The furry of her emotions terrifies him, but this can not drive him away, he would not leave her for selfish reasons again.

    A storm is raging in his chest as he watched the hot tears pour down her face, his own directionless anger morphing into self-loathing. Her brother knows her better than she thinks he does, he probably knows her better than he knows himself and her pain moves him. Each hurtful word she hurdles at him hits the mark, but not for the reasons she thinks. She does not insult him, she can think no lower of him than he thinks of himself, each word burns because he knows that her displeasure is only so potent because he let her down. Each word she speaks would only cause him to turn a cold shoulder on the speaker if they came from any other mouth. 

    "I'm sorry," he says for the second time, with all the pain in his belly behind it. "I'm sorry that I did anything that hurt you," he murmurs into her tears because he is struggling to find his breath. 

    Levi
    so scream you, out from behind the bitter ache.
    Reply
    #5
    let me pick your brain, girl.
    and tell me how they got that pretty little face on that pretty little frame.

    Ceara looked at him, her body was trembling.

    If only he had known what she had been through. It almost seemed that time had frozen, and she had gone off and left this conversation, lived a hundred lifetimes, before being dropped surreptitiously back inside her own body. She studied Levi, looking at him with new, unfettered eyes. She was no longer the child who had taken off in a panic underneath the trees, looking for an escape from her problems to Nerine.

    She listens to him, and her heart is breaking. Not just for the pain he inflicted with his dishonesty, but for the pain he is feeling. What are we doing to ourselves, behaving this way?

    Wordlessly, she steps forward, and embraces her brother, wrapping her head around his neck and bringing him close. The words fall from her mouth like hot ash, her body trembling with the heat that has entered her body, almost begging to be tested. “I know, brother. And I am sorry I ran.”

    She steps back, a heaviness in her eyes, and awkwardness there. It was so weird being back home, on 4 legs instead of 2. How long had she been different? How long had time been frozen here, in this spot? She shook her head, a slight dazing effect swirling around her eyes as she tried to retain focus of her brother. She smiles at him coyly, before narrowing her eyes and looking at him, attempting to heat him from the inside out - seeing if her powers had any effects. The Creator had told her… well. No matter what he told her.

    She was a daughter of Offspring, fire was in her blood. And she hisses, albeit sweetly, to make her point abundantly clear. “I would go to the ends of the Earth for you. I would keep your secrets, I would protect you. I would kill to keep you safe, if need be.”

    And then, her tongue runs the line of her lips, smiling at him again, her ears erect and facing forward. The flames lick at her heels and touch her belly as she is slowly enveloped in fire. No, this was not the same Ceara who had run from Tephra. She was not the gangly girl unsure of her spot in life, just barely out of puberty. She was changed - different. Older. Her words come again, looking at him - a fire there that moves within, sass that just won’t be denied any longer.

    “But don’t fucking lie to me again, Levi.”

    ceara
    offspring x reagan, smoke healing & fire negation


    @[Levi]
    Reply
    #6


    He had been overly confident in his knowledge of her - but no more. As her eyes take on an evaluating glint and the confusion clears from them he understands she is someone he no longer knows - suddenly she is the adult and he the child. She comes to hold him, to sooth away the confusion with a breath against his skin, but he does not relax into the comfort she offers. There is a threat in her air; there is love there too but it is an intense, dangerous thing which frightens him. 

    “I would go to the ends of the Earth for you. I would keep your secrets, I would protect you. I would kill to keep you safe, if need be.”

    He realizes as she steps away, cool and collected, that she had been broken and rebuilt in a day (little does he know it is actually a lifetime) and he admires the ferocity which had always been there but never fully broken free. Until now.

    He admires her, but he does not trust this new Ceara as she swaddles herself in flames, further obscuring herself from him. He steps back as his insides begin to burn, confusion and anger cloaking the features of his face in shadow. 

    Her tongue runs across her lips the same way it so often had when they were children - when she played her games to test her powers and he accommodated. It is clear to him, as the pain inside causes his teeth to draw blood from his lips, that she is still the same force just amplified - that he had never truly understood her, and that their relationship is a fracturing with each step he takes backward. 

    "I don't know you," he grimaces and his mismatched eyes burn with the pain of the confession. He wouldn't accept an apology when someone burned him from the inside out with a smile, he didn't want to be a plaything anymore. "I thought you were better than this."

    He hates the next thought which comes to his mind - that the only reason she had never hurt him before was that she couldn't. 

    Levi
    so scream you, out from behind the bitter ache.


    @[Ceara]
    Reply
    #7
    let me pick your brain, girl.
    and tell me how they got that pretty little face on that pretty little frame.

    Ceara stood there, looking at him with a glint in her eye that was telling. It was hereditary. Suddenly the little sister had become a force to be reckoned with, and Levi did not know how to handle her any more. Suddenly, the student had become a teacher - perhaps not of her big brother, but clearly not his protege any longer. The heat in his body subsides as the molten carbon that takes over his fibers releases the warmth of movement seeping into the recesses of his mind that yes, big brother, I can control you. She considers him, following him as he continues to step away from her, keeping their same distance apart. She was not going to allow him to walk away from her - she was not the baby any longer.

    “You knew the side of me you wanted to see, Levi. The child - your doting little one. Did you once consider my happiness when you went off and acted like you did? Or was I the little pretty thing you could place in a corner?” She chuckles, the shadows chasing away as they go alight with the power of her newfound fire. She really was a child of Offspring, flame-licked and gorgeous, and not afraid to dabble with the dark. “It just turns out that I am no better than you, Lard Ass. You can either accept that from me, or you can turn tail and go home. But remember. I live there too.”

    She smiles at him, dousing her flame, willing it away in a puff of smoke that whirled around her and healed her back legs - and any bruising or scars she may have sustained in her previous life. The one she could not wish way, however, was the nasty red scar that took over her entire chest, rising and falling with every beat of her heart. A reminder - a memory. Slight wrinkles were around her eyes now, not to show her age, but to show the stress she endured. She knew well what it meant to be someone’s plaything - had been one all her life. Loved, taken care of perhaps, but she had always been the girl so easily cast aside for the wishes of greater men.

    She approaches him one more time, her charcoal colored lips placing a kiss of familiarity upon his handsome features. “You cannot sin and not expect Satan, my brother. Next time - just take me with you.”

    She blinks, lowering her red eyes to the ground as she continues on past his body, the heat of her pelt radiating in a sort of heat. Her voice is thrown over her shoulder, an almost peace in her voice, a death to her old self, and an acceptance of things to come as they were. “I find now that the plight of the every day feminist bores me. Shall we go home?”

    ceara
    offspring x reagan, smoke healing & fire negation


    @[Levi]
    Reply
    #8


    Together his ivory molars clash, and the mistrust in his mismatched eyes hardens into something close to disgust. Her bitchery had been charming when she a girl, foul-mouthed and wild, but now he finds that he (and her aging parents) have formed a monster in their carelessness. Never had he expected her to manipulate him in such a way. She had played him for the fool he was, and the pain in his chest is caused by more than just the heat she sought to control him with. But despite the boiling anger he does not think to retaliate with his own powers. 

    "One day you're going to figure out this whole world isn't about you," he spits after her first little clip, he hadn't given her a single thought when he was fucking Karaugh - and he thought that was probably a good thing. 

    As a child, she had slipped under his defenses quietly letting herself into his heart before he had a chance to decide if it was right or wrong, but as he listens to his sister's speech amble on he realizes his mistake. He had shown her softness - the exceptions to his rule - and he had been rewarded with a slap in the face. It served as a stark reminder of why he had the rules in the first place. 

    "Rember, the man who's king isn't your daddy anymore, try that shit on Tephra and your dreams of Nerine will be your reality."

    A part of him wants to hurt her; to sow some raw truth in her heart to fester. But monster or not, he would still love her - it just may take a few days before he realizes it. 

    "I'm sure you can find your own way home," he growls before quickly turning from her, unsure of everything except for his need to be alone. 

    Levi
    so scream you, out from behind the bitter ache.


    lol, bitchery

    @[Ceara] i guess we can fix this later :|
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