• Logout
  • 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


    you see your faith inside a ditch; brigade
    #1
    and the walls kept tumbling down
    in this city that we love
     
    She hadn’t known she was a coward.
    It was not a word she associated with herself, not really. Granted, there had not been much that had tested it, for as strange as her upbringing was it had always been a good kind of strange. She had not crossed paths with terror, had never had her life threatened, had never suffered terrible injury or even heartbreak.
    But when she’d complimented him, so casually (he was handsome – and young. Too young) and he had turned it back to her, she had frozen.
    She was stuttering goodbye before she even knew what she was saying, and turning, and leaving, her mind already replaying the moments in her head, mocking all the ways she had gone wrong.
     
    In time, she convinced herself it maybe didn’t matter. She did not see him again, though her eye fell on a few red horses, they were never him.
    So, it didn’t matter.
    So, she was a coward.
    It was good, she supposed, to learn such things now. She will try to do better. She has not felt it since, that urge to flee, though she also has not engaged in conversations of any depth that matched theirs, the words she exchanged with others were nothing but brief pleasantries, airy and lacking any kind of substance.
     
    Her eyes fall again to a streak of red in the meadow, and her gait falters, because it is matched by antlers, a familiar form.
    She’d looked for him but had not actually expected to see him again, and now, confronted with the option of approaching him, she is once more a coward.
    But she takes a deep breath, steadying herself (though her heart still beats too fast), and she approaches him again.
    He looks older, more grown, but his eyes are the same. She smiles, all relief and fear.
    “Brigade,” she says, “you look well.”
     


    Irisa
    tarnished x heartworm



    @[brigade]
    Reply
    #2

    oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.

    He has thought of her since they had last met.

    He has dreamt of her.

    She with that delicate, frothy beauty. The kind of mature beauty that lives outside of those his own age; the kind of beauty that does not belong to this world. Something so fleeting in her smile, in the way that her wings had touched his own. He holds onto it, buries it deep within the soil of his soul and lets it grow wild and untouched. He carried it within him during his quest to the island when the monster of the sea had gripped him tight and dragged him down deep, when his wings had severed its mouth.

    He had carried it within him when he finally returned home, the clinking of onyx shells in his mane.

    (He does not enjoy them, that faint noise they make as he moves, but he doesn’t mind them either.

    Perhaps they will go away with time.)

    But none of that matters because the dream he carries with him becomes reality when she steps out of the crowd. His grey eyes go stormy and quiet all at once as he focuses on her, his head sweeping upward with the growing reach of his antlers stretching. “Irisa,” her name is softer than he had intended, something cherished in the way his tongue wraps around the syllables. He doesn’t soften the intensity of his gaze as he studies her, not blinking as he takes her in, as he feels the space between them as a tangible thing.

    He has grown, now sitting upon that precipice of youth and maturity, but he is not yet full grown and she is—she is. But that doesn’t stop the wild and dark hunger that spreads in him, that sharpens his gaze, that brings everything wild within him to the surface, a stark contrast to the dreaminess of her curves.

    “You look the same.”

    A compliment, in the only way he knows how.



    @[irisa]
    Reply
    #3
    and the walls kept tumbling down
    in this city that we love

    She’s dreamt of him, too. Normal dreams, not the kind like her mother had. Fleeting and insubstantial, and maybe for a moment or two there she’d wished she’d inherited her mother’s power, so that she might have prolonged the experience, enriched it.
    (It was a brief and terrifying wish – a glimpse, perhaps, into how her mother became what she was. A horrifying sense of understanding.)
    And she’s thought of him, in waking hours, replaying their conversations. The feel of his wing beneath hers, the sharpness of his gaze. Those thoughts make her feel strange, like she’s been set adrift in the sea, lost and thrilled both.

    She smiles when he says her name, almost bashful, glances at the shells in his mane. Those are new, and curious, but and she wonders what they would be like under her touch. They look smooth, cool to the touch, or perhaps they’d be warm from the proximity to his skin.
    Anyway --
    “How have you been?” she asks, and immediately cringes at the banality of her question. She inhales, once, as if she could breathe in bravery, and speaks again.
    “I’m sorry, by the way. For leaving how I did.”
    Abrupt and choked on emotions she did not name, she means. A coward, she means.



    Irisa
    tarnished x heartworm



    @[brigade]

    sorry to make you wait 100 years for this garbage but my life is insane!!
    Reply
    #4

    oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.

    If only he could unravel all of the pieces of her to fully understand them. If only he could hold onto it for long enough to study them, to comprehend them, to take her into himself and hold onto them forever. But she is like the wind and she passes right through him. It is frustrating, and he doesn’t have the words to explain just how frustrating it is, so instead he grows nearly sullen, the storms in his eyes intensifying.

    But she smiles and the anger that rages in him—this fury of all he wants to do and know but cannot—releases, leaving him with a tight knot in his chest, but one that does not contort into further rage.

    Instead his steely eyes find her own and hold it, hold onto the lifeline of her gaze, letting himself get lost there for a moment. “I have been,” he pauses, wondering at the question, wondering how he could possibly answer it, “I have been okay.” What he wants to say is that he has been hungry and wakeful and just waiting for the moment when he can find her again. “I’ve thought of you,” he admits, although it doesn’t feel weak to do so. On the contrary, it feels brave and he feels the courage flooding through him.

    He knows that he should ask her in turn how she has been, and it is not that he doesn’t care, but her next apology catches him, snags his attention, startles something like a breath into his lungs. He angles his head toward her, eyes growing a touch darker as he studies the feminine lines of her face.

    “Why did you?” he asks, the husky tones of his voice turning a touch harsh. “Why did you leave?”



    @[irisa] i love her and you and your words. <333 take your time!
    Reply




    Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)