Home was the eternal green of the jungle. It was the warmth, the moisture, the way everything smelled of earth and dirt. It was the jungle cats stalking through the undergrowth and root systems, the cubs she had played with as a child. It was the monkeys shrieking in the trees, swinging wildly from branch to vine to branch. But home had never been the Amazon herself. Home had been something darker, a weight in her chest that pulled her to the northernmost edge of the vast jungle expanse. She had not noticed it at first, that sense of quiet longing curdling in her stomach, the inexplicable way her adventures had always brought her to that same tree line where her heart swelled with doubt and those emerald eyes flashed with wanderlust. But Makai had noticed it, she was sure of that now. She couldn’t help but wonder if it had anything to do with why he had left his family. She wondered if he had known that she’d followed him to his last kill, observing with silent, horrified curiosity from the nearby shadows.
Curiosity had gotten the better of her, and she had let it be her ruin.
Her shoulder bumped against the bark and sap of a hollowed out pine and she paused for a moment to look at the indigo hairs caught there. They were so bright, brighter than any sky she had ever seen, nearly luminescent. Her emerald gaze lowered to her legs, missing the stark and plain white where there was only blue now. There might have been a time when she would have been so delighted to be painted brighter than any of the jungle birds sweeping across the small patches of sky through the leafy branch ceiling. But now, after everything, she felt false, gaudy, fake. If she could have shed her skin, she would have. It did not make a difference to her that this was flesh and bone and beating heart, she hated the colors for the way they reminded her of that wretched plastic prison.
The copse of burnt out trees opened into a small pond with a thin stream that filled and emptied it. It was the only reason she came to this part of the kingdom. Most of the trees and vegetation had recovered from the volcano and subsequent fires, but this place hung at the edge of life like a graveyard. The small forest had been furthest from the volcano, so the fires had not wiped it out entirely. But the heat had scorched the grass and soil, had sucked any moisture from the trunks, and the trees had withered and rotted leaving only half-hollowed skeletons behind.
It was eerie, but it was solitude.
Malis eased from the boggy shore into the water until it swelled up past her ribs and over her back, swallowing everything but her refined indigo head. She stayed that way for a moment, not minding the stink of mud bubbling up as her hooves churned in the murky bottom. Then, sighing, she turned and heaved herself onto the shore, found a dry spot in the dirt where the grass had not yet returned, and rolled. When she got back to her feet, and turned back to the pond and eyed the reflection tentatively. Staring back at her was a slender creature, more sinew than flesh, with a look of quiet uncertainty flickering in the green of her eyes beneath a furrowed brow. But the indigo wasn’t so bright anymore, except on her face through the patches of dust-dry dirt. It was a muted dirty color, a better color. Her muscles relaxed a little. Even the gold and fuchsia of her mane and tail had faded out beneath the mud, though it was drying quickly in loose tangles against her neck.
The mud felt awful as she turned from the pond, and she struggled not to make the connection between it and the way her plastic casing had felt so tight and stiff.
MALIS makai x oksana
07-28-2015, 11:49 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-28-2015, 11:55 AM by Erebor.)
some are lost in the fire some are built from it Her home was heat, and yet he's the one with heat in his blood.
If she was born in the melting of the jungle, if her heart was buried in the warm, wet earth, if she was christened by the holy water that drips from trees and spills from overhanging flowers, he was born of ash and ruin. He was the Chamber's new hope, its shining prince, its golden boy. He had been born so soon after the disaster, mere years after the Chamber had nearly burned to the ground in a cataclysm of magic origins. And sure enough, for a time they had been ruined – for a time the Chamber had slumbered.
But then had come Straia, and soon after Straia, Erebor. He grew up with the land, turning tall and stalwart alongside the trees, his height growing with theirs, a beautiful synergy – the boy and the branches. And in the woods, he had always felt at home. In the woods, a blanket of silence hung heavy, snug as a hug around his shoulders. In the woods, the chill was his companion, the delicate beads of morning dew a welcome quench to his thirst. In the cool pine forests, he did not know heat.
But now? Now, he burns.
Perhaps if he were not so busy burning he'd have more time to worry about his coloring. God knows he hates it; it's so unlike his mother, so unlike his father, so unlike anything. It is a constant reminder of everything that he had gone through, of all the friends lost along the way, of everything that he could, arguably, want to forget. But the more distance he gains from the experience, the more it begins to become a part of him. It melts into him, almost as though his new power over heat has given him power over memory too, as though he can use it to bend and shape things to his will – even things like memories which shouldn't be touched, shouldn't be tampered with.
But even the most perfectly welded thing, twisted unnaturally by heat, is never truly perfect. And so it is that he does struggle with what had happened in the toybox, in the mansion, in the little hut. It haunts him sometimes, and he feels like he is boiling. It is a strange and impossible sensation, because he can never truly boil again. When you command the heat, nothing can ever burn you.
He discovered that early. When he'd first come back, when he'd been struggling with his new powers, when he'd been struggling with his memories, he had tried. He'd turned the heat on himself, fighting to singe the unnatural hair from his body. He'd tried to incinerate it, to leave himself hairless rather than wearing the strange, unnatural hair that reminded him so much of a still-raw experience.
It hadn't worked. The hair hadn't changed. He was still the same, the dark wine-red of his body, the dark blue and dark green of his mane, none of it so much as singed.
A newfound immunity, strange, as strange as the dreams - not so much of the toybox, the teakettle, the torture – no, what he dreams of, and what unsettles him the most, is the little girl who had treated him with such incredible care. It's Lena he thinks of, Lena who haunts his dreams, Lena with her precious eyes and sweet smile and quiet voice. Lena, who was weak, Lena, whom he should disdain.
Stockholm syndrome, he thinks, and goes to lose himself in the trees.
He wanders for minutes, or for hours, or forever. The air is crisp out here away from the center of the kingdom, and the chill of it is delightful. It's not that the heat hurts – it could no more hurt him than burn off his unnatural coloring – but it's simply so constant, so omnipresent, that the difference is a delicious thrill. It allows him to refocus, to draw inside himself, to become (once more) the stoic boy that he'd been born to be. Here, he is in control. Here, he knows every tree and every branch. Here, the world is his oyster. Here, he is free from strange powers he struggles to control, and strange dreams he cannot puzzle out. Here, there is blessed solitude.
That is, until there is not.
If he hadn't been so lost in his thoughts he'd have noticed her far sooner. He comes upon her as she starts to go into the water, and he is immediately paralyzed. He recognizes the coloring instantly, and he knows what it means. It is as though he's struck by lightning, as though he's rooted to the spot. The images that he thought he'd successfully dominated, successfully tamped down rush back into the forefront of his mind. He feels all the pain again, all the helplessness, it all comes rushing back, threatening to overtake him as the water overtakes the mare's body.
He swallows hard, clawing his way out of the memories. It's never even a question, he will approach her, he must. But his legs (so dark, so wine-red) are unsteady, and his usually suave, unflappable demeanor is somehow shaken.
By the time he reaches her pool she has emerged and is staring at herself in the water. He approaches tentatively, drawn like a moth to a flame, simultaneously exultant to find a kindred spirit and aghast at the prospect of rehashing the memories he knows they must share.
And so he comes before her, her muted coat the strange echo of his own unnatural coloring, dimmed by mud but still far from invisible. His brown eyes (his one remaining unremarkable, anonymous feature) are riveted to her. So many emotions clash within him, fighting for dominance on his handsome features, that his face becomes a mask of polite interest – but his eyes seem deep, deeper than forever.
And for the first time, the confident boy, the stoic boy, the eternal diplomat, finds himself entirely at a loss for words.
Perhaps it will be enough, he hopes, to let his coat speak for him. Perhaps his eyes, with their depths and their darkness, will tell the story. Perhaps she, like he, will know the moment she sees him. Perhaps she too will feel the magnetic pull of everything they've been through. Perhaps there simply aren't words for it.
"You…" His usually deep, confident voice is hushed and quiet. It's a question, and a plea, and a prayer – he recognizes her, yet he doesn't know her. He pauses, shaking his head, closing his eyes for a moment, trying to collect himself. "You too?" erebor heat manipulating lord of the chamber warship x straia 
<3 I'm literally the worst ever.
She gasps when he appears before her like a ghost plucked from one of her nightmares. Just like when she had seen Sleaze in the meadow with the color on his skin and the ghosts in his eyes, she knows that she has found another one. Another what though? For a long moment she says nothing, her jaw clenched far too tight to allow for words to slip past like whispered secrets. But the wait, this silence, it’s almost worse than the way she rehashes these thoughts, these memories that stick to the inside of her mind like burrs.
“Me.” She agrees when her muscles slacken enough for her lips to shape around that single word. “And you.” She thinks of Sleaze again, of how neither had found another like themselves until they had found each other, of how hard it was to understand, to believe, and how impossible it had been to say goodbye to him and return to the Chamber alone. Alone. For who else could possibly ever understand her heart like he could, who else could recognize her indigo as a flaw, a scar. And yet she had left, she had found the strength.
But it was like this nightmare would never been done with her, these ghosts would always find her. Impossibly, ironically, it made her feel less lonely.
She looks down at herself, at the mud caked around the blue. “It’s ugly.” She tells him in a whisper when she lifts her head again, and there is new pain, new regret etched into the delicate hollows of her dark face. “Ugly.” She says again because she needs to explain, even quieter, caught in the word like a bug in a web. And she doesn’t mean the dirt, not the mud, she means the blue that still hadn’t faded, the blue that stained her skin like an impossible scar.
And just as with Sleaze, when the trembling starts in the marrow of her bones, she goes to him. She pushes her mouth against his jaw, tasting the tension, steps closer and presses her chest against his. It’s so much easier when she can’t see their faces, can’t see their ghosts (and hers) staring hungrily back at her. Her mouth falls against his shoulder, her cheek against his mane, “We’re impossibilities.”
MALIS makai x oksana
some are lost in the fire some are built from it Ugly.
The word hits him like a splash of water, like a thousand rude awakenings all at once. He has never been ugly – that is, except for when he was there, that place where he was melted and ruined and mutilated and made beautiful only for it all to turn terrible. Ugly, ugly, ugly – ugly are his scars, no less real than hers for being a bit less physical. She may be forever blue whereas he will fade, but both of them have the reality of what they endured etched into their skin.
And then, equally impossibly, he feels her against him.
He's never been touched this way before. Not for lack of opportunity, so to speak; he's never wanted for female attention, being the handsome little devil that Straia and Warship were simply bound to create. But at no point have any of them actually gotten to the step of touching him. Not like this, not tenderly, tentatively, as though it matters.
And he welcomes it. In fact, he finds that somewhere deep inside him, something about the strange fire is soothed by her presence.
The mud from her coat tracks onto his, and the coolness is welcome. He closes his eyes too as they come together, embracing, finding solace and comfort in each other. They are two impossibilities, it's true, he knows the depths of the truth of it as she speaks the words. But with her here, somehow the very impossibility of it seems…all right. The strangeness he's felt since his return feels a little less…strange.
He lets the silence hang between them for a moment. He presses himself into her, lets his mouth drift up against her spine. He is warm, a gentle heat that tries to beat out the chill in both of their bones.
He wants to tell her that the blue may be ugly, but that she is not. He wants to tell her that she speaks to him like poetry, that her touch is like warmth and ice all at once, and that this surprising contact is more beneficial to him than breathing. He wants to tell her that they should never move apart, that they should stay like this forever, pressed close, riding out the waves of a terror that few others could experience.
He wants to be ashamed of himself for feeling this way. He wants to burn with the shame of it, to wither in the knowledge that he, the good, stoic boy loyal only to the Chamber, has found something (someone) that does what even his home could not. He does not want to admit that there could ever be anything more than home in his life. But there is, there is, and he knows it in his bones.
"It is easier, together." his voice is both a question and a statement when he speaks to her, murmuring the words. He almost thinks he can smell the indigo. But perhaps it's just the mud.
And suddenly he's seized with an idea so impossible that it sears through his mind like a brand of hot iron. If he were to be careful – so careful, so impossibly careful – perhaps he could sear the offending indigo from her body, burning hair by hair and leaving the skin underneath untouched. It would never be that way for him – he could never sear anything off himself, and even if he did, what's inside his head could never be seared out – but perhaps he could do something for her.
"I…" he starts, unsure how to even begin. "If you wish…." he watches her, uncharacteristically unsure of himself. "I have an ability with heat. I could try to...sear it away." he pauses again, and then realizes he must need to clarify. "The indigo. I could…I could at least try."
He watches her carefully, tense, thinking that perhaps she'll find him a lunatic, that perhaps she'll hate him, that perhaps she'll run from him and he'll lose her. And it's that thought which terrifies him the most, because now that he's found a kindred spirit he wants nothing more than to keep her close.
And that fact terrifies him.
erebor heat manipulating lord of the chamber warship x straia
She forgets herself sometimes, forgets that touch is not something everyone is so used to giving so freely of. Makai had not seemed to mind her embraces, or when they crashed together chasing the jungle cats in the earliest memories of her childhood. He had never resented her touch, even when it was something that seemed stiffer in him. Or maybe that stiffness was normal, the way he reserved his hugs for important moments, for his daughter and her mother. Maybe it was because Oksana was so quick to pull her daughter close, to brush her nose against Malis’ cheek, her lips across her plain brown back, that Makai seemed more reserved. She had resented the embarrassment she felt at being coddled so often by her mother, but somewhere along the way that very same trait had buried itself within Malis’ DNA.
And when Erebor, crushed against Malis’ bright indigo chest, responds by pulling her closer with the heat of his breath chasing shivers down the length of her spine, she finds she no longer minds. She does not pull away, even despite the sense of vulnerability that buries its gnashing teeth in the soft of her throat. There’s something strange, something she does not recognize (and, oh, how that scares her) growing like a planted seed in the pit of her stomach. It makes her feel uneasy, suddenly unsure, but the feeling is not entirely bad.
But then he speaks and his words fall like a wedge between them. She pulls away and there is agony in the reluctance etched into the shadow of her black and indigo face. “Is it?” She whispers and it’s hard to know which trembles more, her voice or the heart betraying her within her chest. “Is it easier together?” She looks away for a moment, desperately trying to knit back together the fraying pieces of a darkening expression. She ignores the way together had caught like a burr on her tongue before she managed to spit it out.
“If it’s just me, just me, I can believe that I’m insane. Because nightmares aren’t real, they don’t exist, and neither do little girls with plastic toys and toy boxes like prisons.” And when she looks back at him it feels like there’s a hand plunged into her chest, struggling to rip out the beating heart trapped there. “But I don’t think you’re crazy. I don’t think you’re a liar. And if you’re right, and your memories are as they are, then so must mine also be.” Her jaw clenches and unclenches with worry, a worry that bleeds shadow into the raw, aching green of those bright eyes.
He speaks again and she can practically taste the indecision that bleeds from his words. But she does not think him crazy, does not recoil at an offer that should seem so dangerous, so ridiculous. Instead she can feel something in her chest, a dangerous flicker of hope struggling beneath the ash and rubble. “Do it.” She tells him quietly, urgently, her mouth stretching out to touch his cheek before falling away again. She has not an ounce of concern for the fact that he intends to burn away a part of her, not even a shadow of indecision as those bright eyes catch and hold his gaze. “Please.”
MALIS makai x oksana
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