"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
j a r r i s and at once i knew
i was not magnificent
How could he have known that eventually he’d go mad?
He had never fancied himself especially smart.
He had never fancied himself much of anything, in fact.
For a once-king, he thought himself perfectly ordinary.
So, he could not have known that someday the stitching in his over-tired mind would begin to unravel, that someday he would entertain conversation with ghosts.
But maybe he was dreaming. Perhaps he had been felled by exhaustion in a desert somewhere, tongue parched, throat aching, and lapsed into this fever dream. Because Plumeria had touched him and her breath had been warm and he’d touched her, too. He did not know much about the physics of ghosts or dreams, but he was almost certain that neither of those things should have been possible.
And now he’s standing on the edge of the meadow – always on the outskirts of things, always just out of reach because some things never change – and he’s spotted another ghost.
He calls out to her before he can stop himself, “Charity!” Because he is dreaming. Or maybe something killed him, finally, and this feels like home but doesn’t look like home because it’s someplace beyond.
“Charity!” he calls again and moves slow, leisurely, across the meadow because he has all the time in the world. Because when you’re dead or dreaming, time does not adhere to the same linear formula.
She has wings now, but she is still made of glass. He exhales a sigh that’s meant to sound like a smile. “It’s been a long time,” he says. “Too long.”
son of caden & fray
once-king of the hidden tundra
I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
Once, her heart had thrummed in her chest with the need for adventure. It had fluttered and frantically beat in her veins until she could hardly breathe around the want of it. She had hungered for the wild yonder and the great beyond in ways that she never should—foolish girl. She had wanted the things that she never could, the things she could never see, the places that she could never go.
She had wanted for a life that her body had simply not been made for.
And then—oh, then—she had been given a taste of it. She had known heartbreak and fear and even, for a glorious moment, the joy of a body so normal. But it had all been stripped from her, and she cannot do anything but feel the blame of it heavy on her shoulders and sitting like a stone in her belly.
She had loved someone she shouldn’t.
She had torn a love from him and wore his blood on her hands as a result.
She had made a deal to save him that she still cannot face.
(It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.)
Today, like so many days before, she rises and keeps to herself. Afraid to see the fear or the disgust in someone else’s eyes. Afraid to see the one she wants to see above all else. In another world, another life, perhaps she would have seen the beauty in herself—alien and unusual but beautiful nonetheless—but she can only see the papery skin and the glass bones and the delicate spiderweb of veins as hideous.
And she knows her heart is not different.
So she almost does not recognize when the handsome stallion moves across the meadow, some stranger’s name on his tongue, that he means her. A frown creases her brows and pulls at her delicate lips and she can only angle her head slightly in thought. “Charity,” she says the name quietly, wondering if it is a name or a plea, and then her soft pink gaze moves upward, catching his and studying the depths of his eyes.
“Have we met before?”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
Perhaps he was arrogant.
Perhaps this is where he learns all of the things he failed to learn in life.
Perhaps now he will have his heart broken for all of the hearts he broke.
How arrogant of him to believe himself memorable. It has been years, decades maybe, and she’s looking at him with eyes so soft they cannot be real. She murmurs the name, her name, and goes on studying him and he can feel the fissure cracks as they splinter through his chest.
She does not remember him.
But he does not allow her question to take him to his knees. He never could allow himself the luxury of weakness. So, his expression softens around the rounded edges of a patient, wayward smile.
“Yes,” he says and nods once, his gaze darkening in concentration as he meets her eye again. “In a different life,” he continues and then looks past her at the swath of light unfurling across the meadow. “A long time ago, we knew each other quite well.”
He catches the rest between his teeth. He does not tell her that he loved her once or that they’d had a daughter and she’d been so impossibly beautiful.
“Jarris,” he adds, almost as an afterthought, dragging his focus back to her face. “My name is Jarris.”
jarris
now I’ve been crazy, couldn’t you tell? I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell
I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
There is something haunted in her eyes that stays her hand. It makes her heart hurt in her chest, a feeling that she can’t quite understand or comprehend or even begin to give a voice to. Her breath catches in her throat when he tells her that they have met before and confusion blossoms in her expression, unfurling to take over every inch of her face, beginning with the slackness of her mouth as she inhales sharply.
“Oh,” is all she can say at first, and she feels a sharp pain—a dagger that slips between her ribs. Was this to be her payment? Was she to have these memories ripped from her hands? She had known that eventually she would need to pay for the bargain she had made. Had the gods grown tired of waiting?
There is a tear that meets the corner of her eye and slides down a slender cheek.
“I am so sorry, Jarris,” his name feels new on her mouth and her tongue has to work to make the syllables that she echoes after him. It is like she has never said it before. It is like she has never even known it before and that hurts all the more. She takes a step closer, letting her lips rest against his own cheek.
“I have made mistakes,” she whispers, because it feels right to make these confessions with him. It feels right to tell him if they were as close as he claims. “And I think my payment was forgetting you.”
Something about it doesn’t sit right in her throat, but it makes sense so she swallows it down.
“I never wanted to forget you,” she says, because she knows that if and had she known him, it would have been a memory she cherished—a memory that her sister must have cherished, if she even knew of her.
“Will you help me remember?”
Because now, all she can feel is blackness, all she can feel is the fear of what she no longer has.
in the darkness, I will meet my creators and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
Oh, how it pains him! How violent the start of his heart as that solitary tear cuts a path down her cheek. But he does not trust himself to touch her. How had he ever trusted himself to touch her at all?
So, he stands there with a vicious twinging in his chest and he watches her and the brow furrows, puckers in a concentrated frown. He had not meant to hurt her, but then he never did. “Don’t cry, Charity,” he murmurs and then he sighs and he shifts and thinks that the dead and the dreaming should be so thoroughly consumed by such tangible pain.
There is a violent ache in the parched column of his throat and he exhales a shaky sigh. She touches him and this feels real, too. How could he have known that the dead and the dreaming were capable of so much feeling? “Don’t be sorry,” he whispers in turn.
He drags in a shuddering breath then, forces open his eyes. “What mistakes could you have possibly made?”
But the bastard heart swells when she speaks next. It means perhaps more than it should to hear her say it. She does not remember him, therefore could not possibly know that she never wanted to forget him. But she packages it up so sweetly that he does not hesitate in stowing it away in the hollow cavern of his chest.
“If I can,” he murmurs and nods and takes one shuffling step backward to look her in the face. “Do you remember Dusk?” he asks then and swallows thickly, steels himself against the inevitable.
Perhaps it is cruel, the way he pauses and then says, “Dusk, our daughter.”
jarris
now I’ve been crazy, couldn’t you tell? I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell
I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
Fear can do such strange and twisted things to your heart.
It can rend and manipulate, taking a potter’s hand to the clay and molding it into something new. This morning she had been but the broken glass girl. She had been Adaline. In love with a brother that she could, should, never have. A girl who had stoked the wolf’s rage and watched it burn her life now.
But now?
Oh, now.
Now, she feels memories beginning to form in the back of her mind. Memories that are not her own. Memories that are only ghosts of the truth. They are but shadows of the truth. She doesn’t know the fullness of her sister’s heart. She doesn’t even know that she has a sister, let alone that she wears her face. She doesn’t know how gentle her sister had been—how soft and kind and deeply in love.
But she slips into Charity’s life so easily and it fits so well.
As if she had been made for it.
As if, as if.
He says her name is Charity and she has spent so long dreading this day that she doesn’t even try to fight it—doesn’t deny it. She isn’t Adaline. She is Charity. She is Charity and he is Jarris and there is something that means something between them. Oh, oh—how long as she wanted someone to look at her with the quiet look he gives her now? How long has she wanted to feel this swelling in her breast?
How could she possibly fight it?
“Dusk,” she whispers, the name filling her mouth with sawdust because the words he says next send her reeling. “Daughter?” she repeats and she blinks away the tears that touch the corners of her eyes. She feels something like a scream that tears open her throat but she makes no noise; she just drowns in the ache, she just drowns in the sorrow that suddenly floods through her—the fear, the loss, the guilt.
“I have,” she shakes her head, “we have a daughter?”
Her slender, fragile chest heaves as she struggles to take a breath.
“H-how,” her breath catches, “how could I forget?”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
She does not answer him and some vicious thing swells to take up all the space in his gut and in his chest so that the bastard heart struggles to beat around it.
What has she done?
He has no right to jealousy, of course, he never has. But that does not stop it from staking its claim and rearing its ugly head and dousing him in something cold and dark. There must be a reason she hasn’t answered and in this, he thinks, he has his answer.
He had been gone for a long time, such an impossibly long time. He could not have expected her to wait for him. Had he told her that he would be back? Had he told anyone that he was going? Or had he simply vanished with the wind, as he was wont to do? It was so long ago that he does not remember now.
She murmurs the name, the same way she’d done so many years before, and he smiles again. It is a wayward thing and his gaze softens and he exhales long and slow because it hurts. Oh, how terribly it hurts. And knowing that the pain is of his own doing makes its sting all the more powerful.
He registers her surprise, lets it sink in, lets it tear him apart. How he wishes it would reach into his chest and carve out his still-beating heart. He presses his mouth into a tight line then and finds that he has to look away. This is his doing, his own selfish fault, and he knows now that he should not have said anything at all.
“She was beautiful,” he tells the horizon, swallows thickly, “like you.” He gives pause then, though he does not drag his gaze away from the faultline where the earth met the sky. “Just like you,” he murmurs, his throat tight with something. Sadness, perhaps. A certain nostalgia for what once had been and would never be again.
It is her question that finally forces him to shift his focus back to her face, though it pains him to look at her now. “It’s been so long,” he says, “it was another life.” He tilts his head and smiles ruefully, “and I don’t know how many of our memories we’re allowed to take with us when we go.”
jarris
now I’ve been crazy, couldn’t you tell? I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell
I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
Entire earths open up beneath her, and she has no idea how to navigate any of them.
Galaxies spin in her chest and she feels it threaten to rip her apart. Oh—oh—it is too much for her to possibly ever understand. It is too much for her to understand. It is too much, too much, too much, and she finds that she cannot even begin to swallow it down. He looks at her with that handsome face that suddenly feels like hers (her heart is so selfish, so desperate, so much hungrier than her gentler sister) and she wants to claim it. She wants to sink into this moment; her fractured mind wants nothing more.
“I have never been beautiful,” she corrects him without thinking and the pain that registers on her delicate face is clear. It washes across the glass and the paper and the pink eyes that suddenly turn dark. “Usually people can’t even look at me,” she confesses and looks down at the ground, thinking back to the memories of disgust and fear as she swallows, trying to not get lost in the riptide of them.
“That’s why,” her voice catches slightly and she has to pause to gather herself, “that’s why it’s so hard to imagine someone like you—like you,” she looks up through her lashes, delicate tears on her cheeks. “It’s so difficult to imagine anyone wanting to touch me.” Other than her brother, she thinks, but even he doesn’t feel real in this moment; even he is difficult to imagine right now. Is he just a memory too?
But Jarris tells her that she has a daughter and she closes her eyes trying to remember her face.
“Was she cursed like me?” she asks, her voice small.
“Or did she look like you?”
She has to hope for the best. She has to hope that she did not bring forth such tragedy again.
in the darkness, I will meet my creators and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
Her pain is his pain, too.
It takes up residence in the valleys between his ribs.
It tightens a vise around the aching column of his throat.
How completely he has loved her. How selfishly, recklessly, foolishly. So, when her expression collapses around the sharp edges of all that pain, he does not hesitate before he wedges himself into her space. He touches her gently – just as gently as he always has – and breathes warm across along the curve of her delicate shoulder. He kisses her there. He kisses her there and he remembers.
“Charity,” he murmurs. He murmurs it so sweetly and he revels in the way his mouth and tongue curl around the shape it takes. “My darling Charity,” he whispers, feverish as he lifts his head to study her face. With such great care, he tips up his chin to collect those tears on his lips.
“I will spend the rest of this lifetime and all of the next showing you how beautiful you are, if that’s what it takes.” He pulls back that greedy mouth to look her in the eye and there is a glint there, a glimmer of something in his gaze as he searches hers.
Cursed, she says, and it puts such a vicious ache in his chest that it hitches his breath. He swallows thickly and he shakes his head and his expression softens. “She looked like me,” he murmurs. Not exactly, of course, but she knows that this is the only distinction she is looking for. She had not been made of glass and paper, their daughter, she’d been made of flesh and bone.
jarris
now I’ve been crazy, couldn’t you tell? I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell
I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
Is this what love is supposed to feel like?
His touch is unexpected and she flinches at first because she expects violence—she expects disgust. Instead he is gentle and there is a soft noise in the back of her throat when she recognizes it. Her heart pounds in her chest at the feel of him wrapped around her, the touch of lips to her cheek, his mouth gently caressing her shoulder and the glass trapped beneath the paper thin skin that remains stretched taut atop it.
The name doesn’t feel strange anymore. It feels liker her own. It feels like a second chance and all she wants to do is sink into it; she wants to pull on this identity and give it roots. She is not Adaline, the broken, greedy girl with a heart that hungered for the stars and broke apart on the valley floor instead.
No, she is Charity, and she is loved. She is wanted. She is held.
She doesn’t know how to reply to the words that he gives her—these beautiful and precious words that feel like a gift—and so she just cries softly. She leans into the touch and presses her forehead into his neck and breathes him in. Breathes him in and tells herself that he is hers, that she is his.
When he mentions their daughter, it takes everything in her to not collapse with relief. “Dusk,” she says the name again and feels a warmth blossom in her chest. She had a daughter named Dusk who had looked like this stallion of flesh and bone. Her daughter had lived a wonderful life. She had been normal.
“I’ve waited lifetimes for you,” she says because it feels true. She grows brave and reaches out to press her delicate lips into the crook of his neck, against the sturdy feeling of his jaw. It feels like trespassing and she has to remind herself that she belongs here—that she belongs curled into his side, in this moment.
She breathes out and feels the exhale curl against him and then back onto her.
“Jarris,” she closes her petal pink eyes. “My Jarris.”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
