"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
The ocean melts into static when she pulls at the ends of his mane.
It shouldn’t snare him, but it does. The touch, simple and empty, brings his thoughts home from the sea and he notices for the first time that her eyes are violet (that they could drown him like the sea if he’d only let them) as his own linger just a half beat too long. She asks him to elaborate, and with her skin this close to his own it’s a wonder he hasn’t told her everything already. “Oh,” he says, stumbling, and his eyes find the sea again as he conjures the lines of Wax’s face, and finally breaking his intrusive gaze.
“I have a twin,” he says, absently, seeing her face in the white caps of the ocean waves. Or he had a twin; it had been years now despite the closeness they’d shared in their youth, despite the simple truth that she was supposed to have left home a mere twelve hours after he had. He wonders what became of her. He can’t help himself. It clouds his wild eyes until a rakish grin finds his face and makes it bright again.
“A sister, before you get your hopes too high. And regardless, I’m the better looking one.”
A lie, because she is as bright and alive as the fire she resembles, though Wane was narcissistic enough to let the idea run away with him on an occasion. He swallows every word she gently asks him for; how his sister is beautiful, how he followed in her wake his entire existence until he couldn’t, how it felt now like there were oceans between them.
And he looks at her again, like he can see inside of her to what she is made of, and he thinks to himself that the soft colours of her body come together like continents because something about his sister always made his edges softer.
She notices the moment he sees her, their gazes connecting for a heartbeat too long. She suddenly isn’t just a trifling whisp floating on the surface of his ocean but a barrier reef breaking through the surf. Anxiety swirls in her chest, she takes a breath to tamp it down. And it quiets.
He has a twin, a counterpart. He is missing them, they are far, or gone. Does he regret the having had them because of the sorrow of separation. No.
The lines of his features go wistful and her own mirror them, she wants to follow his mind down the paths it takes toward the ones he cares for, and watch the way he wanders through his memories, picking up treasured moments and turning them to catch the light. He doesn’t share those sparkling gems with her but she knows they are there, knows he is regathering them like a dragon’s hoard and she hopes they are myriad.
She sighs with an appropriate degree of drama when he turns his grin on her, as if disappointed to learn there is not a better looking brother lurking dustily in some forgotten corner of the world. A smile tipping up the corner of her mouth as she continues to watch him. But then he’s looking at her again.
She is a broken, broken thing and he is looking at her like she is whole and real, and more than empty Agnieszka. Her smile fades, giving way under the weight of his question. She doesn’t frown, only looks very still.
“No.” She says slowly, lowering her face to the water near his body, tracing meaningless paths through the water near his shoulder as she appears to think but is really just throwing herself against the nothingness in her memories. “What I miss is knowing what to miss. If I could just remember who or what I should be wishing for…” That would be easier? Is that how she wants to finish that sentence?
“There are some things I think are better to remember, even if I had to be without.” She finishes this way and lets her amethyst eyes find their way back to his. She wants to see the pity or incredulity, to temper her armor with it.
Wane doesn’t know when she changes, cannot pinpoint the moment that she shifts from sea foam to reef — just that she does. Just that here, in these quiet moments, with the course breeze tangling and untangle the length of her hair and the waves breaking over and over and over across her back and turning her dapples dark she becomes something just a little more interesting to him. She is tracing paths in the water near his shoulder, and all he thinks about is the distance between their bodies — one inch, four inches, two inches. There is a coalition begun beneath his flesh and it is rioting now for the feel of her skin against his again.
He is so greedy for pretty things.
Or, perhaps it isn’t beauty at all. A smooth scar runs down her cheek, reminding him that she is ruined (or has been before). Perhaps it’s that he likes the way she humours him, pausing and chiding, simpering wherever it fits best. He doesn’t realize that she is reminding him of Wax, that he is taking small comforts in the distant revery.
The smile melts from her lips and drips into the sea, and when it does he is sad to see it go. Does the ocean have it now? Will he see the glimmer of it when the sunlight hits the tips of the waves just so? She is speaking again, trying hard to explain what must be an impossible situation. He can’t relate, but he does furrow his brow in consideration. To see inside her mind would be beautiful, albeit painful, he thinks.
“There are some things I think that are better to remember, even if I had to be without.”
He agrees, but doesn’t say so. He is inside himself, thinking of Wax again — how the memories of her are all he’s had to keep him satiated for so many years now. He wouldn’t trade them even if it meant not missing her. He would never trade them. And then something in him shifts and he wonders, fleetingly, if Eszka will miss these moments in the sea with the warmth of the sun on their backs when they are gone.
Wane
and i was just a stone
@[Agnieszka] I was thinking this might be a good point to end it, and then we can jump forward in time if you want (/care to risk the plague) to continue writing them. He's staying to show Wax his new egg so he'll be around anyways. Up to you though!
