"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
she said “oh, I know that love is all about the wind how it can hold me up and kill me in the end”
She doesn’t sleep much, but when she does, he is there in her dreams.
She dreams of him, and of Dovev, and of her children, and of Magnus. They take on the feel and pitch of a fever dream and, when she sees him, she cannot decide if her heart is racing from love or fear or if it is something else entirely. She cannot decide if it is perhaps a melding of the two and what that would even mean, but she cannot deny the way that her dreams go sweet and then harsh, loving and then terrifying.
She cannot decide if she is grateful when his scent begins to fade on the wind,
or if she feels an absolute ache in her gut that she cannot even have those horrifying pieces of him.
She grows thin, again, and although such things never completely wear away at her natural beauty, it does dull it. Her coat is no longer glossy and her face grows more angular, even more so when she bears her latest child. She names her by herself again, this time pressing “Linnea” into her poll with a kiss, and she does what she can to be a loving, present mother. She tells her stories, weaves tales of beauty and wonder, and does not let her recognize the captivity that her mother lives in—partially because she is afraid to try and leave and partially because she doesn’t even know where she would go, what she would do.
So she stays and waits.
She stays within Loess and listens for the whispers of rumors, for the voices that carry further than intended, and she tucks them in close, doing her best to stay alive for her daughters.
And she does this for months, for years, maybe.
Until she catches the viperous scent on the wind again and her brain goes foggy with remembering. She feels that familiar, dual pang as she rises to her feet, making sure that Linnea remains tucked away, sleeping peacefully within the caves that are now their home. Her wings remain folded and crimson by her sides, so rarely shifting nowadays, and she stumbles into the sun, blinking against the sudden brightness. When she finds him, that fear and that love grab at her throat, leaving her quiet.
There are things she wants to stay, wants to ask, wants to confess, but instead she says nothing.
All he had to do was breathe the words and she came running, careless and hurrying to lean against her baby brother as he wept. She kissed his tears and cooed soft words until he grew still against her breast. Darling always found herself like this. There was always someone crying out for help and she was always a bleeding heart aching to catch them as they fell. It has cost her so much but she fears her heart may stop beating if she ever stops offering it up on a silver plate. At least with Vulgaris she knows what to expect. She knows the anguish he carries and the torment he will bring, but she embraces it all and smiles so sweetly every time the knife is plunged between her ribs.
She returns to his side when she sees a stranger approaching, all red wings and eyes that hold an ocean of pain behind him. Once false move and all that hurt would come flooding out, she thinks. Vulgaris says nothing to explain who this is but offers her a nervous sideways glance and lowers his head in shame. Just like his father. But she just continues on smiling as she nudges him forward. He swallows hard and obeys as he sulks closer to his (former?) flame. Everything in him wants to wrap her up in his embrace and blanket her skin in delicate kisses but he keeps the space between them for now.
Silence. A thousand different apologies die in his throat and choke him. Darling sighs softly as she steps closer to Leliana. Her eyes are tired but lively as she looks over the scars on her wings, the thin curve of her cheek and the face so tired of crying.
“My name is Darling, Vulgaris’ sister. The eldest of the bunch,” she adds with a light laugh, though something in the corner of her lips hides the glimmer of truth to her words. Not the actual oldest by a long shot, she thinks, and not his sister in the way Shiya was. But she hasn’t reminded Vulgaris of all that just yet. For now, he only knows a handful of family names and he’s told her of the little family he has here in Loess. (Even though their names felt like broken glass across his tongue, he spoke each of his daughter’s names proudly. He fell in love with saying Leliana’s name all over again.)
They must look strange, next to one another. Vulgaris favors their father with his sharp edges and awful teeth all exposed like a crocodile while Darling favors their mother, all soft and summer with the kind of strength you can only learn the hard way. Finally the serpent boy lifts his head enough to meet her gaze fully.
“I.. I thought you left. I had hoped you found something better than.. all this,” he admits as he turns to gesture at Loess, the dungeons, and their past as far as he could remember. “I didn’t want to be king. I didn’t want to be anybody.”
He shakes his head in slow disappointment. His eyes remain trained on something far off from here and this moment, anything but this reality. Darling turns her gaze from him and back to Leliana then as she moves closer to lightly brush her forelock from her face with gentle lips. Her smile grows pained as she tries to gather the right words to make all their ugly past just vanish. But she’s only one woman, pale and weak.
“Some day he’s going to get tired of running, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait for him,” she says softly against the tired girl’s cheek. “Just because you won’t break your back for Vulgaris doesn’t mean you don’t love him.”
she said “oh, I know that love is all about the wind how it can hold me up and kill me in the end”
It hurts to stand here before him, to feel it all come back and rush through her. It hurts to feel all of the edges and the broken glass in the back of her throat—to know all of the different ways that she has fallen apart in the recent months. It is easy to think back to a time when she had thought she had been broken, when she had stood next to a river and let it flood in her, when he had come with his handsome face and held her and loved her and pieced her back together, when he had given her these gifts of her daughters.
But she doesn’t, she can’t, just remember the golden glow of their love.
Because she also remembers when he came to her with a blank expression and when the rhythms of love had meant something else entirely, when the edges of his fangs had sunk into her wing and held her. When he had led her from the island and straight into this trap that she now lives within.
The glow of her has dulled over time, and she knows it, but she still smiles when Darling speaks to her. She flinches slightly when she mentions their relationship—how could she not think back to his other sister, to the other threats whispered into her ear—but she does her best to not hold it against her. She just remains silent, her crimson lips pulling into a frown as she studies the face of her serpent husband.
“I don’t believe I have permission to leave,” she says softly, holding her wings tightly against herself. “I didn’t the last time I checked, and…” her voice trails off and she looks to the ground. “I have been so tired.” She feels the fatigue even now. She feels it in her bones and stretching through her veins. She can feel it like a soft beckoning—come home, lay down your head, just stop fighting so much.
Leliana closes her eyes when Darling reaches for her and accepts the tender touch.
“I only know how to love him,” a quiet confession as she finally looks up again, trying to see the man beneath the monster, the man she has known to be gentle and kind and good. And even though she has been rebuffed before, looking at the way his lips curl back, ripped away, she cannot help herself. She feels the golden light of her healing reach out for him, unpooling in her chest. She makes a soft sound in the back of her throat—something like a whimper or like a plea—and she lets it find its way into him.
In his mind, he swims in midnight oceans where the water is so thick and black that forgets what the sun feels like on his skin. He’s been down there so long that the idea of the surface above is like a distant dream from a past life. There, in the perfect dark, he is safe and everyone is safe from him. But every time she comes near him, he’s pried from the frigid depths and tossed onto the shore while his life is pressed like a hot brand against his heart. How much farther could he possibly fall? She speaks and he forces himself to keep watching the lines of her face as they spell out her infinite sorrow. Look, look upon the woman you ruined. See how her heart shatters every time you’re close?
Darling has seen a hundred different kinds of pain but they all manage to tear right through her like a fresh wound every time. She tears her heart open and lets all of her love come spilling out over Leliana. She isn’t a healer and she has no magic to suture the ragged scar tissue but she’s got a doormat soul just ready to serve again.
Her head curls over Leliana’s neck the way her own mother used to when she was first born, hugging her tight so the tired girl might find some stability in this awful world. Darling knows he’s just like their father and she wants to tell her to save her strength, save her love for someone else, but it’s never any use. Her parents loved each other until there was nothing left of them, awful as her father was.
Vulgaris feels his breath catch in his throat when she tries to heal him once more. He even takes a step back. But before he can flee from them both, Darling is already back at his side as she speaks so softly in his ear. The serpent strains to hear her even being this close.
“Hasn’t our family suffered enough, Vulgaris? Can at least one of us find happiness?”
The words ache to hear and he feels his shoulders slump at the sound of her voice cracking. How selfish, to be the one child in the family offered such a perfect life, only for him to smash every bit of it to pieces. His brothers and sisters each suffered some new level of agony while he alone found love. A slow sigh escapes from his lips as he leans his head to hers, the warm golden light of Leliana’s magic curling around his face like delicate hands.
“I’m sorry, Darling. I don’t mean to be so stupid,” he mumbles softly before she finally pulls away, nudging him from her side. He swallows hard and hesitates before finally moving closer to Leliana. Each step is slow and careful but, after an eternity of fear and uncertainty, his lips (newly formed and aching for her) find her jaw to place a thousand gentle kisses against her face and down her neck.
“I still don’t know who I am, Leliana, but I know who I want to be.”
she said “oh, I know that love is all about the wind how it can hold me up and kill me in the end”
How much hurt can one heart hold?
How much pain can one soul suffer?
These are the questions the plague Leliana. These are the questions the dig deep into her soul, anchoring down into the core. She doesn’t know. Once, she might have said that she had an infinite capacity to love, to bear the burden for others. She might have had an endless trust in the strength of her heart, in the way that she could expand to take in the hurt of others. She might have trusted in her ability to bounce back, to endure. She might have said that for all of her weakness, there is one thing she does better than most:
Survive.
But now she is not so sure.
She does not feel like herself any longer. She doesn’t recognize the face that greets her in still waters. She doesn’t recognize the very beat of her own heart. She is hollow and quiet and broken. She shies from others where once she flung herself into the worst of it. She pulls away, tending to wounds that may never heal. It all becomes so much, too much, and when Darling pulls her close, she can only collapse into it.
It is almost too much when Vulgaris begins to make his way toward her.
It is almost too much to bear and tears escape to fall down her cheeks. She flinches at his touch but doesn’t pull away. Instead she just closes her eyes because she so desperately wants it to be something that she can hold onto. She so desperately wants it to be something that she can trust again.
And so she does.
Foolish, perhaps, but she cannot hold out against it. Despite the fear in her throat and the million things that tell her she should turn from this, she succumbs to it. Despite the logic and the sense that rage in her mind, she merely turns herself over to the wave of emotion that rises in her throat. “I want to believe you,” she finally says, her voice low and soft. “I need to believe you.” When she opens her eyes again, they are bruised, the curves of her red mane curving around her jaw, the flowers blooming in her hair.
“I need to know that my Vulgaris is still somewhere in there.”
Behind the man who caused the scars on her wings.
Behind the man who dragged her to this prison.
Behind the man who abandoned the home and life that they had been building.
She searches his serpentine eyes. “Please tell me I can find him."
Despite all his best efforts and well made plans, the world insists on crashing down around him a little more each day. He shoulders the weight of all it as much as he can stand. Yet his hands are too clumsy to craft a perfect life for Leliana or their daughters regardless of his tireless efforts. Every fragile fraction of carefully sculpted adoration gets crushed in the palm of his hand like spun glass. But each time he’s prepared to start again. These ugly hands will find beauty and offer it all up to her as a sacrifice someday.
Darling takes the hint and slips off into the shadows as she always does. He knows she’ll lurk around the very borders of the kingdom for a while, to keep an eye on Leliana to ensure she doesn’t get hurt again. But this time they’re going to begin again; they’ll take these broken shards of their old life and shape it into something built to last.
The serpent kisses along the frail line of her jaw as she speaks and the words ‘my Vulgaris’ send a shiver up his spine. Something like lust but deeper claws its way into his spine. He needs more than her body, more than these words and sad eyes. God, he wants to bite into the candy red of her heart and keep it all to himself. He wants to dive into her bottomless love and drown in it. She’d let him. A thousand times, she’d let him wrap himself up in all her affections but he has to promise her safety this time.
He can’t demand anything of her if he can’t swear to her that this really is the last time she’ll have to forgive him.
“I’ll find a way to get all my memories back. Someday soon I’m going to deserve a wife like you,” he says softly as he kisses her forehead. “I promise we’ll be happy again.”
His lips rest there against her head as he breathes in the smell of the flowers in her hair. He doesn’t know where to begin with recollecting all the memories locked inside his mind but for now he’s thankful to have this moment with her.
she said “oh, I know that love is all about the wind how it can hold me up and kill me in the end”
Would they ever break this cycle? Could they? Heavens knows she wants to. Heavens knows she wants to find the core of their love and cling right to it. She wants to unravel herself for it. She wants to sink into it. She is starving for the bright joy of the beginning. How often can she find herself hungering for the past? How often can she orbit her memories, clinging tight to their reflected beauty?
But she doesn’t turn him away.
She leans into him, feels hot tears on her cheeks at the gentle brush of his lips against her skin. She shivers in spite of it, feeling the ghosts of them rise between them. “I would whisper our story to you until I have no voice with which to tell it,” she says quietly, slipping closer into him. Their chests meet and she runs velvety lips down his spine. His broad back is so familiar that she could cry with relief.
“The first time we met, it was by a river,” she says, whispering it into him. “You asked me to love you, but just for the night.” Her voice waivers slightly and she closes her hazel eyes against the memories that slam into her, the emotions that leave her breathless. “But I couldn’t love you for just then. I have never stopped.”
Not when he found her again. Not when he took her home.
Not when his sister threatened to come between them and he drove her from Loess.
Not even now.
She rests her cheek against his scales and breathes him in, finding the comfort through the fear and the pain. The comfort of being surrounded by him, by being held gently by him. There are other memories, other ghosts, that whisper in the back of her mind, but she closes them off for now. She focuses instead on this sweet gift, this chance to start over, this beautiful moment pressed into her palm.
“I have never healed a mind. I have only healed the body,” she swallows, finding that golden light within her once more. “But I can try.” A sob breaks in her throat, the desperation to crack through this wall to find him again—to pluck him free from this void of nothingness. “Please let me try.”
She reaches into herself, and with a soft cry, pushes her gift into him—
and desperately tries to save the man she knows still lives within him.
She dreams of adventure, of being an explorer like daddy, of discovering places bigger and better and brighter than the caves she lives in with mommy. So when she stirs from her slumber to the gentle resonation of Leliana’s hooves against the dirt and stone floor, she is quick to blink the sleep from her eyes and climb up on those long, willowy legs. But she waits until the echo is gone, until she is sure mama won’t hear her scrambling footsteps following after her and come put her back to bed - waits almost too long, and her eyelids get heavy again, her ears sagging softly to either side. But when her head droops low and her body sways to follow, she lurches awake again with a gasp, rolling her shoulders into a full body shake that ends with the waggling thump of her little scrub-brush tail.
Yawning, she peers off into the half-dark of the route mama took, wondering where it is she’s going and why she didn’t bring Linnea with her. She doesn’t need that much sleep, she’s already a few months old! That’s practically grown up.
She flaps her tail again, leaning forward to stretch her little body, and then sets off down the buried stone aisleway after her mother. She cannot remember a time where this dark ever bothered her, where the caves and the tunnels linking them ever felt too small or confining. There were so many places where the caves opened to reveal hidden water, or hard, sparkling stars buried in and among the flat rock. But now, as the sound of Leliana’s footsteps fade and mix with the sound of Linnea’s soft breaths and the padding of soft foal feet, she feels a flare of something she would later come to know as envy. It is still gentle though, still sweet, still the innocent indignance of being left behind on an adventure -
and perhaps, a very secret, very dark and deep rooted fear that maybe someday mama will leave to go on an adventure without her like daddy did.
But as the path beneath her feet smooths out with so much wear of hooves and weather and the rivulets of rain that tend to gather and race along the gentle hollows, she is startled to find that mama hasn’t gone far at all. She is standing a short ways outside their cave, all dark and dapples with splashes of red, always so beautiful. Linnea has never noticed the way her mothers wings sag with the weight of such sorrow, or the way her bones try to stand free of her skin. She has never seen her mother in any other way, as anything more or less.
She noses forward all wide green eyes and her dark head tilted curiously to the side, having forgotten to be sheepish for leaving the cave while her mother thought her to be napping. There is someone with her mother though, someone large and pale, a contrast all tangled with the earthy mahogany of her mama. She is wordless as she steps around Leliana’s hindquarters, puzzled and with her brow furrowed beneath her forelock as, suddenly, a face the color of storm clouds is revealed to her. She pauses, focused only on that face as she leans against mama’s back legs and tries to understand who he is and why she holds him in this way.
Mama has told her stories of daddy. Of a strong, handsome man the color of storm, of stone. Of the scales in wide patches over his skin in places that break up the soft dapples like ripples of rain in the puddles of their caves. Off on an adventure, but he’ll be back when he can, because he is a good man, because he loves them. But she isn’t thinking of these things as she shyly creeps forward with her nose trailing along moms belly, as she lifts her face and rubs it against that bay, dappled shoulder and waits to be noticed. “Momma I’m not asleep anymore.” She whispers, nudges her, because it can’t possibly count as interrupting if she says it all soft and polite, right?
05-01-2019, 11:39 PM (This post was last modified: 05-01-2019, 11:39 PM by vulgaris.)
" every scar will build my throne. "
He can’t remember their first kiss or Adna’s first steps but his heart could never forget how to tremble like a bird with a broken wing in the palm of her hand. The memory of her touch lives in the depths of his soul rather than the mind and so he burns for more of her affections. He settles into her embrace and sighs as she plucks the armor from his rough exterior. Beneath the fangs and scales, he is raw and vulnerable, but he lets her in without even being asked. She is ice to a fevered head. He kisses at any inch of skin he can reach as she begins to tell him their story.
It hurts, trying to remember the river. It feels like an ice cold nail being driven into the base of his skull but he grits his teeth and bares it for her. He wants to remember why his heart churns and howls for her in the ink black depths of night whenever she’s down in the prisons. Why would he tear the sun from the sky for her? The taste of copper flows over his tongue as he continues to bite down, ravenous for his memories as the agony threatens to tear him apart. He can’t even hear her when she says she wants to repair all the broken pieces of their past for him.
And then it all goes white and static, like the blood can’t reach his eyes amidst the hell unleashing in his mind. His lungs seize and a slow groan of pain finds his lips despite his best efforts. A trickle of blood drips from his nostrils as it all comes crashing back into place. The river, the way he wanted to ruin her like spring morning spider webs, but she was too beautiful to harm. Adna blinking her eyes open for the first time. Fast forward to the winter Sabbath was born, when he was terrified they wouldn’t make it home. To Wolfbane naming him champion and calling him friend. To Shiya swearing she would find them and kill them all.
He coughs and red spatters across his lips. He went to the mountain for her, all for Leliana. And then he tried to rip her apart. Vulgaris finally sucks a breath in as his chest heaves and everything clicks back into place for him. How could she love him after so many broken apologies? He takes a step back and the cold wind quickly fills the gap between them. How could she love something like him?
But then Linnea speaks and he’s pulled from his thoughts long enough to focus on her. Their baby. His heart feels as though it may tumble right out of its chest as it tries to make sense of all the emotions flooding it. Vulgaris realizes, though, that he has to stay this time. He has to be a father and a husband – a good husband – this time.
He swallows, licks the blood from his lip and tries his best to look presentable as he meets his youngest baby for the first time.
“Hello, tiny girl. I’m your father,” he says, trying his best to smile without showing too many teeth. “Did your mother give you a name as beautiful as you?”
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