"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
In the early hours of morning the sky is still rolled out above her like black velvet. The darkness permeates the air and envelopes everything; cradles it. Here and there the starlight breaks through in fragments, illuminating wildflowers and landmarks alike in fragile bursts. Eilidh lingers at the meadow’s edge, bathing in the river and the moonlight because she cannot bring herself to look at her mother’s grave anymore today.
She’s still thinking about the soft cheek that she used to kiss, and tired of wondering how long it took the earthworms to bring Moselle back to dirt.
She’s been here before, too.
Of course.
With Moselle, just before the last time. Though much of the meadow had changed over the years she remembers the oak with the twisted trunk that stands to her right; it had seen them then, bathing in river water and sunlight alike, witnessed all of it - the heat of the sun on their backs, and the way that daughters body fit perfectly cradled against mothers, and how when the both craned their necks at the snap of a twig on the shoreline they were nearly mirrored images. Briefly, Eilidh wishes that she could reach inside and pull those memories free and keep them for herself, but she wonders how many of the bad ones live there, too.
She was so small, and Moselle a god in her own right, both literally and figuratively. She’d looked into her large, soft eyes and said: “You are my light in the darkness, Eilidh.”
And she was trying to be that still, but it was harder somehow.
Because the problem with loving something so absolutely is learning to let it go when the time comes. Eilidh is afraid to let go, even a little - like letting go might mean Moselle was somehow less important, that it might mean closing her eyes and forgetting how to conjure the lines of her face in recollection. Moselle was the only home she’s ever known, and letting go feels like losing everything.
The river is lazy tonight, slow enough to reflect the stars, and so Eilidh watches galaxies drift past her into an eventual ocean.
And she holds on, with white knuckles and tightly clenched fists.
He had flown late into the night, letting the warm summer air sweep him where it would in drafts and whorls. Eventually, he climbed; higher and higher, watching the stars illuminate the dark sky as they appeared beyond scattered clouds. For a while, he had almost felt he might touch them – if only he could reach just a little further – but his lungs had squeezed in protest until he finally had to let himself fall through the twilight instead.
Leander had always liked the rush of feeling as he plummeted from the skies, wings tucked tight against his sides until the very last moment; a mimicry of the hawks and eagles his father had taught him to study as a child. His mother hadn’t been very fond of the trick when he was young, but he’d done it so often that Rayelle had learned to simply shake her head in wry exasperation whenever he alighted next to her with a flourish of wings and a lopsided grin.
He missed his parents on nights like these. By their mere existence, Leander had come to believe that his was not meant to be a lonely one – and thus it wasn’t often he let himself feel that way. For the most part, his contented nature allowed him to appreciate being on his own, and despite his nomadic past he’d always made friends rather easily wherever he went. Still, when he’d spread black-specked wings to halt his plunge and touch down near the river’s edge tonight, the old ache of their passing had come over him in fresh waves.
Sleepless, he had decided to rinse the sweat of his exertion in the mild currents. Riagan had also seen to it that his son could navigate all types of waters from an early age, which brought the story of how his parents first met to mind. He smiled to remember it. He could almost hear Rayelle’s silverbell laughter as his father recounted it. If he closed his eyes, he could almost see the way his father had always looked at her – like she was the sun he revolved around.
When Leander next opened them again, he saw with a start that someone stood in the river ahead. He slowed the idle rhythm of strong legs beneath dark waters and stood, too. Perhaps it was the lingering memory of his parents that made him pause, or maybe it was something about the shadows that haloed her face in moonlight. “You look cold,” he said then – she seemed stricken, somehow, and he wondered at how long she’d been standing still like that in the cool streams.
leander
take a bullet to the heart just to keep you safe; like a dream in my arms but i’m wide awake
@Nev you are a darling and I'm so happy you wrote to me <333
Some are fearful of the night.
Eilidh isn’t. She knows better than most that danger doesn’t fear the daylight, either.
The night was Moselle’s favourite, and so it became hers - her light in the darkness, in a strange twist of irony. So when he comes she doesn’t shy away, even though her eyes are closed and the sounds of his moving wings are lost by the faint trickle of moving water, lazy though it is. She’s counting the freckles like stars in galaxies that ran along the tops of her mother’s cheekbones, to see if she can still conjure them exactly. She does so often, closes her eyes and wills the lines of Moselle’s face to come to life against the backs of her eyelids.
If she’d been looking, Eilidh would have admired how weightless he had seemed in flight. And now that she is blinking her eyes open again and can see that his wings are strong and wild, she will covet them discreetly. She’s always had a gravity to her; a quiet soberness, that draws her mouth and dark eyes into only straight lines and fragile smiles. She wouldn’t realize that they are both missing something tonight.
He tells her she looks cold, and while she offers a meek smile in response she’s wondering, fleetingly, if he can see inside of her, past the flesh and fat, between her bones and to the middle of her marrow - if he knew that at first it had felt like half of herself was missing, and that she’d thought for longer than she’d ever admit aloud about burying herself next to her mother - that the months fell away from her like petals off wildflowers afterwards.
“It’s not so bad,” she says, lying through her teeth because it could be. It could eat you alive, if you let it.
“You’re numb before too long.”
Then, she stops to reflect on whether or not she is still talking about water. For the first time in hours, Eilidh pauses in consideration of the feel of her own body. The truth was that she hadn’t felt physically cold tonight, not with the warm summer wind teasing her flaxen mane, not with the peace of nighttime all around her. Inside was a different matter altogether.
“I’m Eilidh,” she says, before his x-ray eyes could see her truths again.
“Am I in your way?”
The truth was that he couldn’t see through her – not really – but maybe it was the old sorrow in him that recognized itself in her; younger, fresher, haunting the edges of her mouth even as she smiled. It’s not so bad. You’re numb before too long. The way she said it made him tilt his head, damp forelock falling away from his gaze. It was a warm night, and the tranquil waters felt comfortable enough to him – yet while Leander couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was about her, he found himself wondering whether she was all right.
“Numb? That’s not a good sign,” he replied, his brow creased a little. Before he could go on, the mare had interjected her name followed by a question that made him give a quick shake of his head. “You’re not,” he returned swiftly, noticing how it might’ve appeared that way. “I’m not really headed in any particular direction – not tonight, anyway.” Hearing himself say so felt oddly sobering. The years he’d spent in relentless pursuit of his parents’ homeland had culminated upon his arrival to Beqanna; yet only now does he realize that the sense of urgency which had been his constant companion throughout his travels had simply fallen away.
Refocusing his gaze, the cobwebs of memory are swept from his brown eyes as he smiled in a friendly gesture. “Eilidh, I’m Leander.” The stars reflected by the river seemed to make her pelt shimmer. “You sure you don’t need to warm up a little?” Only a few seconds went by before he caught how that might sound and reflexively blurted, “I mean, out of the water – without me. Well, I’d be here – if you want the company, that is – platonically speaking.” Fearing his well-meaning concern had been entirely misconstrued, Leander hastened to cast a wiry grin her way and thought it best if he just stopped speaking altogether.
leander
take a bullet to the heart just to keep you safe; like a dream in my arms but i’m wide awake
@[Nev] welp your post was a beautiful work of art and this is word vomit, but as the kids say, full send :|
Eilidh’s never been religious, but she hopes that whatever higher power might exist that it takes pity on her and that her soul gets to meet Moselle’s again, somewhere, in another world or another life and that their hearts just recognize each other. Almost like Leander recognizes her now, tilting his head again like he knows what she is made of.
“Numb? That’s not a good sign.” He says, but she knows it could be worse. A scar was more manageable than a bleeding wound, wasn’t it?
He tells her he isn’t going anywhere; lost, like she was, and perhaps it’s in this moment that she sees something in him she hadn’t before when she notices the way that his eyes seem to cloud. He hides it better than she does, but it’s there. She studies the lines of his face then, and thinks he has a kind one. And then, when his mouth betrays him with clumsy sentences, she does laugh - genuinely, and not from cruelty. The sound is startling to her, and so the laugh, soft and sweet, does not last for any discernible amount of time.
“No, I want to stay.” She answers, decidedly.
The thing about loss is that it’s easier to let it eat you alive.
It’s harder to stand tall, to hold your heart up and keep it from drowning when it feels as heavy as iron. And it’s easy to lay out all of your memories from every year you’ve ever known and count them like christians, Before Death and After Death.
Because when she took her last breath, Eilidh’s heart threatened to break every rib in her body so that it could follow her to wherever she was going. And it destroyed her, the first time that it rained afterwards, and she’d looked down in regret just in time to realize that she’d washed the last traces of her mother away, the last skin she’d ever touched. But it was too late. She was clean, even if she’d never felt more ruined.
And she still haunts all of the places she used to be (this meadow, this river), even if she knows she can’t see her there again, because that’s what happens when you grieve; all of those beautiful shared memories become one-sided tics that you keep doing even though they don’t make sense anymore.
The lilting sound of her laugh fell through the air between them, clean and delicate, reminding him of early spring rains. Leander could almost breathe it in – a mixture of purity and earthiness combined – and he had found it refreshing. It was a fleeting moment, though he wished it could have lasted just a little longer; for the night’s melancholy had blanketed the world in a subdued quiet which her laughter had briefly lifted.
Still somewhat mistrustful of his tongue, he nodded in wordless acceptance of Eilidh’s reply. While neither mention their losses, they were both in mourning – though the cloak of it had settled on their shoulders differently. Perhaps time had something to do with it. As the years went by, perhaps it had lessened grief’s weight, softening the fabric of his sadness so that it no longer dug into flesh and pierced bone. Instead, it had come to rest about him like a second skin. For the most part, he now found it could be worn lightly – always there, but in many ways less pressing.
Perhaps all that Eilidh needed was time.
She asked why he was here, giving the splashed stallion pause once again. “That’s probably what you’d call a long story,” he said with a try for levity, so as to counter the fact that the cloak felt a little heavier upon him tonight. Despite his efforts, his brown eyes grew more serious. He shifted in the water and resettled his wings, causing beads of moisture to scatter along feathers that were white and gold and black.
“I’ve spent most of my life looking for this place – for Beqanna.” Briefly, Leander hesitated; but then he reached out and drew the old sorrow close as he admitted, “I suppose the truth is that I’m here because of my parents.” The corners of his mouth turn gently upward in remembrance of them, of Riagan with his kind eyes and of Rayelle with her sunbeam smile. “This was their home, once… But that was a long time ago.”
leander
take a bullet to the heart just to keep you safe; like a dream in my arms but i’m wide awake
10-31-2018, 12:16 AM (This post was last modified: 11-08-2018, 04:11 PM by Eilidh.
Edit Reason: grammar alludes me
)
Eilidh
Time heals all wounds.
That’s what they say when they don’t know how to keep your blood inside your body, or how to sew up the exit wound of a cannonball — when they want to save you but they don’t know how. They aren’t wrong, entirely. Of course time lessons her anguish, because the passing of time brought with it the eradication of memory.
Because at first you remember everything. Even if it kills you, you remember the way that last breath rattles from their lungs and the exact moment that you notice for the first time they’re no longer breathing. You remember the way that the angle of their neck was jarring, and the way that they couldn’t possibly almost be sleeping because their eyes are still halfway open in a vacant stare you’ve never seen before. Every detail is a grain of sand, and you’re alone on a beach and for miles and miles and miles there’s nothing else but sand.
And time is like the tide. It reels them back into the ocean, grain by grain — because next you can’t remember what the last conversation you had together was. You can’t remember how many flecks of green were there in the fractures of her irises, and you know that her skin smelled like something beautiful, but you used to say that it was lemon balm and now the words escape you. That was the problem with the way that time healed.
Grain by grain you lose them.
Grain by grain until there’s nothing left.
Maybe one day they would both shed these skins, molt their anguish like the birds did their feathers in the springtime — but Eilidh isn’t ready yet.
He tells her it’s a long story, and what she keeps to herself is that she wouldn’t mind hearing it if he tells it the way he seems to say most things; kindly, and with humor. In the moonlight she can see his eyes each time that they cloud, though, and she doesn’t fault him for not diving deeper.
“I’ve spent most of my life looking for this place — for Beqanna.”
She smiles gently at the irony of that. Eilidh has spent what seemed like most of her trying to leave it behind. When he tells her about his parents she smiles softly in comradery, and says: “My mother and I used to bathe in the river here. I think it’s beautiful still.”
It’s all she can bring herself to admit while she’s careful to mind the floodgates; the ones that keep her sorrows tucked safely under her skin — the ones that would drown them both if they were to break.
“Is it freeing to have finally found what you’ve been searching for all these years?”
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Lydia] I won't apologize for how obnoxiously fast I wrote this. :|
Hearing Eilidh’s quiet statement about her mother, Leander wondered whether she was the reason the mare hadn’t left the water. Not yet – not when memories drifted more clearly in the languid currents. Not when they were so close that you could almost drown in them. And while something in the way she said the words struck a chord with his own sadness, he couldn’t help but agree. “It is beautiful.” He smiled, too, though reliving the past like this would take its toll on them both, in one way or another.
Perhaps he hadn’t fully considered what it meant to have found this place until she posed her question. Perhaps he’d been avoiding it. He gave a slow shake of his head, blonde mane tangling as it fell against his damp neck. “Not exactly,” he confessed then, the truth of his own words striking him silent as the water swirled around them – and when he looked down he could see that the clouds had cleared in its glassy reflection, for the stars were there in the river, shining in vast constellations as vibrantly as if he had actually flown among them.
“We were meant to find it together. I guess I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that they’re gone.” He had to look away, away from the stars that seemed so near even though he knew they were beyond his reach. “They’re gone, but somehow I’m supposed to go on existing without them.” Leander hadn’t meant for his own floodgates to burst forth, but suddenly he can no longer contain the ache of their absence, especially now that he was here – he was here, and they weren’t, and nothing was as it should have been. “They were my home,” he said, and he had to close his eyes against the sudden sting.
He would never hear his dad’s reassuring voice again. His mother’s lips would never form another sunbeam smile. Never again would he feel the way the very existence of their love had steadied the earth beneath his feet – grounding him, giving him hope and direction and purpose. They had found one another, and they had held on. Through everything, they’d had each other. Yet without them to hold onto now, what was he meant to do? Without them, who was he meant to be?
Leander tried to clear his throat, attempting to push past the overwhelming longing that came over him and failing miserably. The sound of the river seemed impossibly loud now, for despite the water’s gentility there was a rushing in his ears. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, simply, his brown eyes averted from her – sure that his obvious emotion would have unsettled her by now.
leander
take a bullet to the heart just to keep you safe; like a dream in my arms but i’m wide awake
They’re standing face-to-face, wading in the stars.
Each alone in their own right, each aching in ways where there aren’t enough words existing to describe exactly how much. And it’s almost cruel that they can’t see inside each other, peel back the flesh and sift beyond the bone, see all the way back to that empty little patch of land inside both their bleeding hearts — the one that makes them feel so lonely. Because maybe if they could, maybe if they did, then each would realize that the other is made of the same things they are — that each has been carefully crafted with all of the same pieces.
Maybe then they would see that they’re not alone together.
Maybe there is still time for that.
Leander tells her that she’s right, that he can see the beauty here among the river stars, too. He smiles for her, and she sees that he is considering it, but she can also almost heart the atoms around them as they shatter like glass under the weight of his own feigned delectation. She didn’t see it at first, but when his eyes fall into the river she can see the wound on him, glittering and fresh; it’s small, almost imperceptible except for the way that he bleeds out his truths in the quiet moments that follow.
She learns that his parents are gone, too, and Eilidh doesn’t know how but she feels a gentle twinge in her heart that has somehow found the room to feel his pain alongside her own.
“They were my home.”
Of course they were. Moselle had been her home, too. It had never been the meadow. It had never been the way they would wade through the long grass as though it were an ocean, or the warm summer sun on their backs. It had never been the cradling embrace of the ancient oak tree’s heavy, draping boughs. It was her. It was the heat off her skin when they lay against each other breathing in unison with their heartbeats syncing. It was the way they shared the same eyes, and the same lyrical laugh when they’d been alive in a time when laughter felt possible. It was the way Eilidh had curled against the gentle arc of her shoulder and seen forever in the soft smile lit inside her mother’s dark eyes.
He tells her he’s sorry, and she shakes her head: No.
“Don’t be sorry. I know exactly what that feels like.”
She is compelled to move forward, to reach out her nose to his as though they are opposite poles connected by gravity. She almost does, and her head moves forward just slightly before she stops herself. They are just strangers, aren’t they? Perhaps she’s only projecting. In compromise she reaches inside herself to give him something else, a piece of her, in some small but significant way.
“I lost my mother, too. Years ago, and I can’t decide if it feels like only yesterday or like I’ve been without her for forever.”
Leander’s gaze remained downcast until she next spoke, her voice a melodic rhythm that quiets the rushing in his ears when she tells him not to be sorry. He looked up then and saw her wading toward him. The river rippled softly around her movements as though the waters were made for her, creating a fabric that trained gently about her hips – dark silk scattered with starlight. Undeniably, and despite the melancholy that had been stirred by the mirrored wounds etched upon their hearts, Eilidh was a part of the night’s somber beauty.
Disarmed by the way her words expressed how he felt about losing his parents so precisely, the brown of his eyes deepened with feeling. “It’s the same for me,” he said quietly. Then Leander extended his muzzle to close the small distance she had left between them, his breath warm against hers. He was affected by the commonality they shared, and it only seemed natural that they would share a moment of intimacy like this – and when he drew away, he didn’t go very far.
“What was her name?” It was a gentle question. While he didn’t want to cause Eilidh further grief, Leander found he would like to know it – as though hearing it would serve as a tribute, somehow – and in return he offered, “Riagan was my father, and my mother was Rayelle.” His gaze drifted to the river then, his mind sifting through memories.
“I wonder what they’d say to us right now,” he mused, his eyes slowly finding their way back to hers. He didn’t truly expect an answer – for he was sure they could both imagine them saying a thousand different things. After all, imagining was the easy part. The hard part was knowing that they would never hear their voices actually say anything again.
leander
take a bullet to the heart just to keep you safe; like a dream in my arms but i’m wide awake
