"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
10-24-2018, 11:07 AM (This post was last modified: 10-24-2018, 11:10 AM by vulgaris.)
Vulgaris
More and more, he understands what Larva meant when he said a darkness followed him everywhere he went. Vulgaris was only a child when he said it, barely older than Adna is now. He’d laughed and told his father to just wait for the sun to come back out again. If only it were that easy, the old man had said. He remembers now how he used to mumble to himself, ‘When is it ever enough?’ It had all been lost on him in his youth but everything has begun to click into place in the worst way for him lately. He dwells on the lessons as he replays Shiya’s last visit over and over and over in his head. Somewhere in his memories it twists and melds with Leliana until he’s sick to his stomach.
Adna said she was going to go play early this morning and he watched her go, waiting until she was out of sight before he moved an inch. A single misstep might give him away. She’s too perceptive for her own good and he’s well aware of the fact. He hardly lifts his eyes from the ground in front of him as he walks through Loess now. A cactus snags on his hip and he hardly seems to notice the way it draws an angry red line across his skin. The shallow cut beads with blood but today he takes no pleasure from the sting.
He sees her nearby, red like passion and life. Vulgaris hesitates to go near her but his greed is too enormous not to. Each step is slow and calculated now as he comes closer, finally lifting his head to look at her now. Her sides have only just begun to swell and it brings him some small comfort to know they’ll have another baby come spring.
But there’s something different today. It is something familiar that throws gasoline onto the quiet embers of his rage until they consume him entirely. His lips lift to bare his gnashing teeth in disgust. Even with his hands drenched in sin, he has the audacity to indulge his vile temper.
“Where have you been, Leliana?” he asks, each syllable curling into a hiss saturated with fury. “Maybe you’d like to live there instead?” His head twists as he watches her, daring her to reply. Vulgaris keeps his distance so that he’s just out of reach from her.
His self-loathing chews a little harder now as it cripples him, poisons his every thought. If he hadn’t been so preoccupied with Shiya, she might have never gone. If only he loved her as she deserved then she might have stayed with him instead. All his fault, all his fault, he chants like meditation in his innermost thoughts. When is he ever enough?
But his tongue won’t cooperate. It won’t confess the hurricane in his head or name the skeletons piling up in his closet. It just takes and takes until she’s certain to leave him. That’s the only way he could keep her safe from him, after all.
" ancient language, speak through fingers. the awful edges where you end and i begin. "
I've never loved a darker blue than the darkness I have known in you
Exhaustion trails her these days. The fight for Warrick’s life, the incident at the river, the request of Dov, the pregnancy that now stirs in her belly once more—it all collides in her chest, seeping into her bones. She does her best to hide it from Adna and Vulgaris, although she has not seem him as much lately as she would like, but it continues to show in the subtlest of ways. She sleeps fitfully. She rises tired. Her face, although still lovely, has taken on a new sharpness, the skin pulled tighter around her hazel eyes. Her ribs are more prominent on her sides now, the shadows of them showing when wings are not wrapped tight.
Still, it is a relief when she finally sees Vulgaris coming.
That is, until it’s not.
The venom in his eyes, the heat in his voice, is enough for her inhale sharply, confusion contorting her features as she studies his face, trying to understand. “Where have I been?” she repeats, the words softer on her tongue, slower, as if she can break them apart and try to comprehend them. “I’ve been here,” her voice trails off as she’s hit with the second accusation and she takes a step back, her wings turning to a defensive, glinting copper, responding more to her internal reeling instead of any physical threat.
“Do you mean Dovev?” his name slips easily passed her lips, Leliana seeing no reason to lie, no reason to keep anything from him. The wind is soft today, and it plays along the edges of her crimson mane, teasing it as it fits gently from her mahogany neck. “He needed my help. There was a mother—she was hurt.”
Her heart aches in her chest, her mind racing back to that day at the river, the scene that still makes little sense to her, the image of Vulgaris standing over her, Heartfire trailing Dovev down the river. But she can’t apologize for what she is, and she can’t apologize for something she doesn’t understand.
The confusion begins to bleed from her face, but it is not replaced with apology. Instead there is a steely stubbornness, the velvet of her strength showing in the way she lifts her chin.
“I will not apologize for going to heal someone who was hurt, Vulgaris.”
She desperately wants to reach out for him, to find that spot on his chest that feels like home, to hear his heart thudding reassuringly, but she keeps the space that he seems so intent on placing between them. She looks to find his serpentine eyes and holds them, letting silence stretch between them for several breaths before she shakes her head, the silk of her mane cupping her jaw and then falling away once more.
“You shouldn’t ask me to.”
like fire weeping from a cedar tree, know that my love would burn with me
It’s do or die and he’s never felt more awful. He watches her dissect his words and analyze them until they begin to make sense to her. His lips draw closed over his teeth when her wings turn to copper to defend herself from him. Did she really believe he could ever harm her? When his eyes look at her throat, all he can see is the place he kissed a thousand times before he drifted off to sleep. The blood in her veins does nothing for the hunger always lurking in his bones. No, her life is to be guarded at all costs – even if it means tying himself to the chair in the house he’s set fire to.
She speaks his name so casually and explains that she was needed. It twists the knife in his heart and he wants to claw his own spine out to make it all stop. He memorizes the curve of her cheek and the way her lips move when they speak his name and then he looks away. Vulgaris trains his sage-colored serpent eyes on something miles ahead of here and lifts his head so she’s barely in his peripheral. Pull the fucking trigger, he thinks.
“Good. Then you can go with your head held high,” he spits, and his words are sharp enough that they cut him apart on their way out. She has to go before his sister finds her and their children. If she hates him enough then she’ll never dream of coming back here. All his fault, all his fault.
“Go build your perfect life with him in Nerine so Shiya won’t hunt you.”
He realizes the words are a mistake even as they’re rolling off his tongue but his body doesn’t obey. Vulgaris grits his teeth and bites down on his tongue until he tastes blood. His vile mouth can’t give away anything else if it doesn’t work.
“Take Adna and get the hell out.”
She’ll claw her way into his secrets and drag them out into the sunlight if she doesn’t think he actually wants her to go. He prays his voice doesn’t crack and that he can summon enough strength to keep her safe. (And maybe she would be happier there. Maybe her smile wouldn’t be so exhausted if she left.) But it’s too much, too much. He turns and begins to walk away before he begs her not to leave him. Leliana is his sun but he has resigned himself to an eternal winter without her if it means he can’t break her heart.
" ancient language, speak through fingers. the awful edges where you end and i begin. "
I've never loved a darker blue than the darkness I have known in you
And, like that, her world implodes. The confusion that had crept so quickly into her veins splinters, fractures, pressing metal shards into her flesh until she is nearly crying out with pain. Her lips part on a jagged breath as he continues to toss daggers at her, each one finding purchase in her breast, the wounds opening up beneath his assault. He has never been cruel to her before—not her. He has never turned the edge of his fang her way; if she didn’t know better, she could have assumed he didn’t even have them.
But she knows now.
“Shiya?” She continues to echo his words, letting them sit like stones in her chest, the names of the one she doesn’t know. “Who is Shiya?” But she knows—she knows in her bones. She does. All of the ghosts that she thinks she has suppressed come roaring back into life and she feels her legs nearly buckle beneath her. Suddenly, she is a young girl standing in a meadow, watching Dovev race after the golden stallion. She is a young girl in Tephra, watching the little eyeless girl wander up. She is a young girl and she’s learning that the boy she gave her heart to was never hers to love; there are others, there are others.
There are always others.
She cannot stop the tears that begin to softly fall, silently making their path down the curve of her cheek. She cannot stop the trembles that begin in her spine, the edges of her vision going spotty as she tries to hold onto some semblance of control, some semblance of reality. She wants to fold to the ground and slip into the darkness that now crawls around the edge of her consciousness. She wants to give into the numb, into the tide. But he says their daughters name and it gives her a lifeline, something to hold onto.
“Why weren’t we enough for you?” The question escapes before she can hold it back, and she nearly chokes on the words, the surprising bitterness of them as they cut her tongue. She suppresses the soft cry that builds in her throat at the thought of their daughter, of the way this will break Adna.
Vulgaris is her whole world. Her hero. The earth around which she rotates.
“Wait,” she calls after him, hoping he will stop long enough to hear her. “Adna.” The request builds in her and she swallows the poison down, refusing to think of it fully now, refusing to acknowledge the enormity of it. It’ll break her, if she does. “L-let Adna stay.” The words shake and her stomach twists painfully. “Please, Vulgaris.” His name, once so sweet on her tongue makes her throat close up now, turns to dust in her mouth, ash in her throat as the agony she withholds threatens to slip and overcome her now.
“I’ll go. I’ll leave you alone. But please let her stay.”
like fire weeping from a cedar tree, know that my love would burn with me
In a way, he understands. He choked all his emotions down whenever they bloomed and told himself that he didn’t deserve that kind of happiness. Any time his heart rattled its cage, he beat it into submission and left it too bruised to ever feel some semblance of love again. Because monsters don’t know how to love and they shouldn’t pretend they do. Of course he asked Leliana to love him for just a night – he knew that alone was more than he could ever deserve from an angel like her. But she came looking for him and she breathed life into the mangled pieces of him that he buried in the back yard.
He can hear her crying and it hurts worse than having his face ripped open, he realizes. Who is Shiya? The question makes his stomach knot itself until he can hardly breathe and so he says nothing. When she speaks again, he pauses and answers without looking back at her because he knows he’ll give in.
“You are perfect, Leliana. I don’t know how to love someone like you,” he says and for once he’s telling the truth. She’s the golden light of morning and he’s the black depths of silent oceans. They were never meant to know one another, let alone fall in love. Monsters like him found other abominations and simply reproduced, turned the ancient wheel of time until they died. Monsters like him were meant to be forgotten while she was born to be memorialized.
When she says his name this time, it sounds like a bullet wound and it rips straight through him. Maybe Shiya wouldn’t try to eat Adna but he would never take even the slightest risk when it came to her. He’d slaughter all seventy of his brothers and sisters before he let anyone harm her. But she deserves a home where that’s the furthest thing from her mind.
He turns his head to watch her from the edge of his vision and he forces himself to speak. “I can’t ever see her again. I can’t let anything happen to her or you.” Vulgaris replays their mornings on loop in his head. “I love you both too much to ask you to stay.”
He sinks deeper into the tar-black pit of himself and drowns in the familiar ache of being alone. It hurts worse than before he met her but he doesn’t fight the way it floods his lungs and hurts all the way into his ribs. But the sounds of her sobs draw him to her without him realizing. His lips find her cheek in their old familiar way before he curls his head over her neck.
“I’m nothing without you but I’ll die a thousand deaths before I let anyone hurt you. That’s why you have to go.”
" ancient language, speak through fingers. the awful edges where you end and i begin. "
I've never loved a darker blue than the darkness I have known in you
He softens, but it does nothing to stem the ache that floods her.
She is already shattered and falling apart and his reassurances do nothing to dull the roar that is growing in her ears. They are just lies, she tells herself. It’s a kindness. It doesn’t matter because the name, Shiya, is already rooted and blossoming thorn bushes in her chest. She feels the prick of each and every thorn on her fingertip and is surprised how each fresh wound hurts so completely on its own. One would think that she would be used to it by now. One would think that this would be a familiar pain, something that she could map with her eyes closed, drawing a finger along the familiar ridges of her own heartache.
But it is new, this time.
It is fresh and she has no defense against it.
The chasm between them widens and still, even now, she wants to race across it. She wants to unfurl her wings and carry herself over it, but she can’t. He pulls her close and she presses her lips to his chest, to taste his pulse one last time, but they are worlds apart already. “Don’t lie to me,” her voice is quiet against him and she aches with it. They've shared so much love in the years spent together and now, the rest of her life unfolds before her, empty and alone. “It makes it so much worse. Please don’t lie.”
Nothing hurts more than the way he rejects their daughter though—because, even if he softens it with his concern, that’s what this is. She feels a blade buried in her belly and it causes agony to spread through her even further as a mother’s rage builds in her throat, the feeling entirely foreign to her. She cannot be mad over him rejecting her, but rejecting their daughter? Pushing their own flesh and blood away? It’s enough for her to tremble with her anger, hazel eyes growing wide. “You should have fought for her,” she says quietly. “You should have fought for them,” because even now, she feels the life growing in her.
You have fought for us, she wants to say, but she can’t ask that of him. But their daughter? That, he should have fought for. He should have moved heaven and earth to keep her at his side.
It’s then that she realizes that she has to protect them. She has to shield them from this.
Even though she wants to sink into this anguish. Even though she wants to cradle this hurt and let it seep into her breast, this isn’t about her now. It’s about Adna, and the beautiful baby that sleeps in her belly. She has to be strong for them. Tears still fall down her cheeks but she forces herself to step away from him, forces herself to draw in a shaking breath, forces herself to stand instead of crumble.
She wants to ask him so many more questions. Why there were always others. Why she could never fill a heart alone. Why, even with a daughter, she couldn’t hold onto a love by herself. But she knows the answer lies within her own inadequacies and she’s not quite ready to face that truth just yet.
So instead she lifts her hazel eyes one last time to trace the handsome angles of his face, studying them, reminding herself of a time that they looked at her with love, with hunger, with loyalty. Reminding herself that she had once been loved. (It will be enough, she thinks, to remember.) And then she begins to turn, stopping with her head angled his way but her eyes averted. “If you change your mind about Adna,” she swallow painfully. “I won’t keep you from her. She’s your daughter. She’s there if you want her.”
She doesn't say the same about herself, because it’s clear he no longer wants her.
Then, without another word, she unfurls her wings, copper turning to crimson dragon, and begins to run before lifting herself into the sky, flying to find her daughter and a safe place for them to rest their head.
Alone.
like fire weeping from a cedar tree, know that my love would burn with me
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