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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


    however bent and badly drawn; malis
    #1

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife



    He thinks, sometimes, that he is getting better.
    He learns to compartmentalize, to place certain memories away, to bury them like corpses in a mass grave. It works, mostly. There are stretches of time where he is not consumed by memories of a world that did not exist.
    (It did, though. It did!)
    They are not long, these stretches, something innocuous will happen – a whiff of smoke, a glimpse of purple – and then he spirals again.
    It’s progress. Slow and limping, but it’s progress.

    One thing he hasn’t forgotten is her. She’d been one of the first he’d seen, After, and their conversation (“There was a girl--” and “There were two girls”) had affirmed that perhaps his madness was not so mad, or that it was, at least, somehow shared.
    It was a queer intimacy, that, to share in what could only be a delusion.
    And so – he does not forget her. Malis.
    She’d touched him, nose to his cheek, before leaving. Her horns had been cool to the touch.

    He winds through the meadow, the cold air searing in his lungs. He doesn’t mind, it makes his mind feel sharper, forces him to focus. The sunlight is thin and watery, yet when he sees her, it’s like light, dazzling, glowing.
    Blue as anything, horns curving from her forehead and down to her nose, just there, and he suddenly doesn’t know what to do with himself, he stumbles.
    “Malis,” he says, and the words feel like they’re stumbling, too, “hello again.”

    It’s only then that it occurs to him she may not remember him at all, that she’s long moved on from a shared delusion, that her life has not devolved from one stupid catalyst. But it’s too late now, so he’s left before her, waiting.

    sleaze
    cancer x garbage
    Reply
    #2
    Her life has moved through too many cycles, too many events forced into just one lifetime when there is enough to be strung through the lives of so many generations. But there is only her, just the one mare with her broken mind and her broken heart and body that refuses to be so fragile.

    She remembers him, but it is not with the same weight that he remembers her. His memory of her - or the memory he has bound her to - has a gravity all its own, drawing everything to it as though it is the only aspect of his life that still matter. But she is her own gravity, drawing more than just one defining dark to the soul she has become.

    Malis, he says, and she is struck suddenly by a sense of nostalgia that displaces her in time, takes her back before the loss of her children, her husband, any home she has ever known. To a time where she had not known how love could change her so, make her better.

    Except it hadn’t, not really.
    She had ruined that too, killed him and everything still left in her heart with a doom that followed her as devotedly as her shadow.

    Until she had grown fat again, heavy with children she might’ve expected to resent. Children from a dark god she did not love, a man who was not a man at all, and certainly not the one she had given herself to. But in them she had found hope again, found a peace she did not deserve, a happiness that snuck up on her in fleeting smiles in one corner of her mouth, a flash of amusement when her daughter so gently outmaneuvered all of her wild twins efforts to bully her.

    They were everything in her that had ever been, and would ever be, good.

    But looking back into this face, this shade of purple so impossibly dark, so unmistakable as it claws to the surface of her memories, she thinks of nothing but her furthest past. Of a girl with plain brown skin and wings in her heart, of the faith she had held in such a gentle, loving world. So protected by parents who still loved each other so easily. And she finds herself asking, the muscles in her tense jaw drawing furrows in her cheeks, “Who would you have been, if the choice had not been made for you?”
    Reply
    #3

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife



    In the time that she’s grown, birthed children, loved, what has he done?
    He has drifted and so little else. Fleeting conversations that ended as soon as they began. He has no children, no lovers (there had been the woman, the one who stripped his power, and he might have loved her, but he has not seen her in many years, so all those mights are just that – might). He could disappear tomorrow and no one would mourn it, and though this thought pains him, in a distant way, he does not focus on it overmuch.

    She does not match his greeting, but she does look upon him. He sees the change in her eyes, the new hardness there, the gravity of hardship that’s been bestowed upon her since they last met. He wonders what’s reflected in his own eyes – while there’s been no real happiness, there’s been no particular despair, either, just the aching cyclical nature of his near-madness.
    Instead, she asks a question – an impossible one, really. Because even before the events took place, wasn’t he shaped by his father? Knees worn bare from kneeling in prayer, and prayers themselves that were half-remembered, spoken with the faith of a boy who had known no other choice.
    (A boy who had not known the particular wrongness of his father’s head lain across his back, for too long, and the sharp inhale when he withdrew.)
    “The choices were never mine,” he says, and this is a coward’s response, as if he does not bear any responsibility for his fate. He considers this, too late.
    “Even as a boy,” he says, “I was told what to do, how to act. I don’t know how to exist without such things.”
    Coward. He might have glimpsed bravery, once, but that was in another world. Another delusion.

    sleaze
    cancer x garbage
    Reply
    #4
    She has grown and lived and loved in this time that stretches so vastly between them, makes his face so much less familiar than it might’ve been years ago. But it was less so the decision to be something, to become, than it was the consequence of being trapped in the flow of time. Always forced onward and forward and into things she had no business experiencing.

    This Malis, this creature of gleaming indigo, with horns in a cascade down the bridge of her nose, a body that refuses to acknowledge the mortality she had once known, she should never have become a mother. Should never have found such love and meaning in a life that only wanted to ruin her. All she had managed to do was to bring that ruin down on others, break hearts and families and eventually the only man she had ever truly loved.

    Perhaps it would have been better for everyone if she had done nothing, become nothing.

    She is surprised by the nature of his answer, can feel the furrowing of her brow beneath the whorls and tangles of a dark and indigo mane. It had never occurred to her that he might have started their adventure no better off than when he finished - that while she had been something soft and wild and unnoticed by the wickedness of the world, he had already begun to be unmade. She softens, and it is so subtle, so slight, that the only indication of it is in the way she lifts her nose to his, breathing him in with a sharp flare in her chest.

    It is the scent of him that unlocks more of the memory he had been trapped in within her mind. More of the fear and the fury and the unknowingness of what had happened, and why it would have happened to them. She takes a step closer, forgetting him, forgetting herself, forgetting everything but the urge to lean into the pain this lances in a wound across her chest.

    Pain is something she understands.
    This dark horror is easier than anything else.

    She opens her mouth against his neck, breathes hard against him as she runs her teeth from the soft place behind his ear all the way down to the hollow of his shoulder. She is hardly seeing, hardly aware, hardly there at all until the sound of his voice again draws her back to him.

    Her mouth pauses against his shoulder, and then she is leaning back to see his face, withdrawing from him with a shadow spreading across those ragged emerald eyes. “I find it hard to believe there has never been anything you have wanted that wasn’t already laid out for you.” Her teeth grind shut, lines of tension appearing in those dark indigo cheeks as she watches him with eyes that are both quiet and skeptical. “I think you must have some idea of who you would want to be, even if you don’t yet know how to be it.”
    Reply
    #5

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife



    He’s yet to know love in any real sense, anything he’s had has been corrupted – and besides, what he’s had amounts to so little. His father’s orange eyes on him, inscrutable. The woman who’d calmed his mind when it was at its most fitful, stolen away his unwanted power, who he has not seen since.
    And Malis, too – a winding conversation of a shared madness, and then, nothing else. But she is so memorable to him still.
    He has so little worth remembering, see.

    He’ll remember this, though – how she presses against him, warm in the chill of the autumn. How her teeth scrape against his flesh, and maybe it should hurt, but he almost loves it, the sting of his raked flesh, the heat of her breath. If he could, he thinks he would freeze this moment, with her close and tasting skin in her mouth, and he, ready to be felled.
    He has no such power, of course – and she withdraws, and cold replaces where her mouth had been.
    “There are things I have wanted,” he says, though his throat is tight. Because this, now, is such a thing – her closeness. Her teeth on his skin. But he does not know how to want, not proper, not without making a mess of himself. He is too cowardly to express it even as it claws across his skin (raking, hot, like her teeth).
    “But I have never deserved them.”
    This, then, is the truth – for he is a stupid boy. A stupid, undeserving boy. He should not want.

    “Are you who you want to be?” he asks, teeth set against saying anything else, anything stupid. She is a stranger, he reminds himself. A stranger who might have once supped on the same madness he did, but she is no longer sick from that feast, not the way he is.
    She is a stranger, but he still wants her.

    sleaze
    cancer x garbage
    Reply




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