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  • Beqanna

    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


    tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us; any
    #11
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    His mind is certainly a labyrinth, monsters included. Shadows and turns and puzzles, all lurking. Even he hasn’t solved it – he skirts the edges of the maze, content in this. Content in not knowing.
    She speaks of the ocean with fondness, which suggests she knew a different ocean than he. The ocean he knows is dark and black, the ocean he knows spit him back out, onto a beach where others come to die.
    (Where he, once, came to die.)
    He thinks of the ocean and he thinks of darkness, of an abyss. She thinks of it, and…and what? Something happy; her eyes glisten. Quite suddenly, he envies the ocean, for its ability to make her light up in such a way.
    “You know a different ocean than I,” he says, but he smiles.

    She accepts his invitation, and here his smile grows. And then she is close, overwhelming in her presence, and her mouth touches his shoulder and for a moment he’s gone, focused on the brief moment of contact, of the heat of her mouth and the pressure, the realness, and who needs wildflowers when she’s there, blooming in the sun?
    But.
    But.
    He walks. His feet know the path before his mind does, take them to a place near the river, near where the meadow ends.
    He knew this place, once. He wonders what happened here.
    Flowers bloom, all sorts, undisturbed in this quiet corner. A willow at the river’s bank moves in the breeze and that seems familiar too, the willow with this delicate fronds that shiver over the back.
    “It’s funny,” he tells her, though it’s not really
    funny, “I remember this place, but I don’t. I look out here, and I feel happy, but I can’t tell you why, or what about this place made me happy.”
    His shoulder brushes hers. Happy.
    “It is a beautiful place, though.”


    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #12
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    The river is not the sea – but if she closes her eyes, and listen to where the rain has turned slothful, idle waters that move little but for the brush of wind against its surface into a rippling murmur she can almost remember. But the river is not the sea, and there is no sand here, only wet-earth, muddy and brown and owing nothing to the softness of dune at the ocean´s edge. So she turns her head instead to the north; to the distant rise of mountains and the muddled tufts of tree and leaf at their feet. She admires the flowers and the willow and she wonders if it is there that Garbage´s heart lie, deep with the roots of growing things, knowing the eternal solemnity of sap and bark and bough.

    ”I have a dream that escape me every night; water I try to catch on the sand” she muses in response to him and her words are soft, with the sound of wave-breaking in their tone. ”Maybe sometimes the why´s and what´s are best left forgotten”

    Her cheek turns rosy with the dawn of Armageddon at their closeness.  Has he sensed how part of her longs for his touch; for his boy´s heart; for the gentleness she brought to the surface like dew?

    She wonders if his would be a serpent´s embrace and an Antarctic kiss.

    But she is starch white and pristine like a porcelain-doll in this new world - and she should not harbor such thoughts, for if she does – she will slough this skin in favor of something else.

    She realizes this and shame softens the lines of her face and returns them to Saedís and away from the ghost of her past, and in regaining herself she is childlike and small once again. 

    ”I suppose anything that makes us happy is a gift to cling to and cultivate”

    She smiles, and in the knowing, she finds some sort of strange respite from the heart-knowledge that there is something more, something further and wider and wiser than herself, something deeper than the deepest elm-roots, deeper still than ocean depths.

    ”I think I could be happy here” she says.

    With you. She doesn´t. For to do so would be both lie and insanity.


    SAEDÌS


    Reply
    #13
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    She looks out at something, a brief nostalgia crossing her features. He almost asks, but then she turns back to him, responds to his nonsensical explanations.
    “I just worry,” he says, “that if I forget too much, I’ll lose myself. Or part of myself. But maybe it’s a part that should stay lost.”
    He wakes sometimes from nightmares. A woman’s shriek, blood on the sand, a sudden blackness. Touches of bodies, bodies gone, a boy, shivering in the cold. Another boy, on his knees in prayer, sunlight on his back. A woman smiling as a piece of her skin falls from her cheek.
    Things best forgotten.

    Maybe he could forget. Could drown those hints of memory, that persistent feeling of sadness. He could drown it and then maybe it wouldn’t be wrong, to be here in the meadow with her. If he was someone else, maybe things wouldn’t repeat.
    How much of yourself can you forget before you’re not yourself?
    (What if you never much liked yourself, anyway?)
    It’s a fantasy, perhaps. A trick of the mind. Because god, she’s close, so pristine in the meadow, and the smile on her face eclipses all the wildflowers.
    “Showing you this makes me happy,” he says, soft, “you, being here, makes me happy.”
    It’s always so quick, with him.
    He shouldn’t.
    But he touches her. His muzzle to her shoulder, tracing the line of bone there, from shoulder to wither. He pulls his muzzle back.
    “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m sorry.”



    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #14
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    She smiles in the darkness and her smile is melodic; her smile is birdsong and tree-bough, rainstorm and cloud cover – her smile is bright-seeming and shadowy, invisible against the bone-white of her hide and the ripples of sunlight between the trees. She could love him: she knows this, it is a thought that passes idly by, swimming through her mind lazily, as though it has no errand to run, no task to dash off to; it is a thought which is altogether disturbing, for she was once a lonely and solitary creature, loving none, needing none, content in her solemnity and seclusion. Once

    She sometimes wishes that she can bury her memories among the waves of her dream-sea.

    What a different world it would be, then.

    ”I wish I had an answer for you, but I often ask myself the very same thing. ”

    ”But it´s hard to lose something you never knew you had.”

    It is a strange remark, and as it leaves her tongue she is not certain it will make sense to him; and yet, somehow, it will – he will read beneath the syllables to the slow, mellow tone of her voice, to the inflection she has used, to the slight uplift at the trailing end… as though it is more question than statement. And she does not move; she does not turn away from him; she does not take a step toward the darkness of the trees and the shadow of the bracken. She stays still and silent – waiting? Perhaps. But for what?

    ”I am happy you brought me here”

    But there is another question in his eyes which she longs to answer, and a countering query in her gaze which begs his response. She is happy that she had drawn to his doorstep – though uninvited and unsought, there is something within her – that run-on sentence, that complex puzzle – which implores his company. She shivers despite herself as he touches her – and in that moment, beneath the leaves and sky and sun, she is beautiful in her curiosity, rendered lovely by her insecurity.

    ”Don´t apologize” and she is surprised by the strength that carries the sound of her voice, how abruptly it flies from her throat and how callously clear it is as it rings the silence asunder.

    ”Don´t apologize” she begs now.

    Through the eyes of stone and tree, he is no more than boy – but ah! The paradox! For through the eyes of horse-flesh and muscle, she is no more than girl. And so here they stand: boy and girl, again, and silent. A courtship of less than words, but more than answers.


    SAEDÌS


    Reply
    #15
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    He knows a sense of loss, knows it like a deep well in his ribcage. Loss is a memory, imbued in his cells, in his blood, even if his mind cannot yet put names to the feeling, to the absences. But loss is familiar, an old friend, an integral part of him.
    But he doesn’t feel loss – or lost – right now. Right now, he feels found, he feels discovered, like she is unearthing parts of him that should be dead. It is a dangerous feeling, a drug-high, because it’s those feelings that lead –
    (I could keep you warm)
    Well.
    They are dangerous.

    She doesn’t flinch from his touch, and when he apologizes she refuses it. He sees now that he has fooled her, that she thinks him something worthwhile, and this is why she asks him not to apologize. She doesn’t know how his touch can poison. Or, how it once poisoned.
    “You deserve better,” he tells her, “not someone who barely knows who he is.”
    You could change, his worst self whispers, you could change for her and maybe it would be different this time maybe maybe maybe -
    The self loathing comes strong, a hideous tide, and he shrinks from her.
    “I’m sorry,” he apologizes again. He’s so, so sorry.
    He moves away. He leaves behind the flowers. He leaves behind the woman he’s falling for, because he’s fallen so many goddamn times, and he isn’t yet ready to hit the ground.


    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.




    (given that she's since quested i thought a time jump would be fun if you wanna start a new thread??? he'd love to see her again with her new aura and also with some time passing for him to Thoroughly Regret his poor life choices. hey and also i love them so much and your writing kills me with its prettiness)
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