she's still out there and the chasm grows; any

[brigade]

Whatever softness may have been born in him died quickly.

Whatever may have dulled his edges and brought out the beauty of nature instead of the violence of it died the second that Starsin told him the truth. It died the second that Kensa was honest with him. It left him crueler than before—more hateful because it was easier to let it slip out instead of swallowing it.

He ends up, eventually, by the river where the roar of it can almost dull out the screaming in his head. His wings are still useless and charcoal by his side, jagged and heavy and rough, leaving his merlot sides scraped and raw. His expression is furious, heavy, and he feels the heat of it rise up in his throat.

How ridiculous of him to think that he would ever get a happy ending.

How ridiculous of him to think that he would ever be able to fall in love.

The poison of his disappointment, of that brutal and toxic hopelessness, seeps through him until he is nearly swollen with it—every inch of him seeping in the strange, feral rage that consumes him. For a second he closes his light grey eyes and tilts his head back, feeling the starlight fall down on him and catching the cold bite of autumn as the spray of the river carries through the wind to his red chest.

He considers stepping into the water until it rushes around his legs and cleans the droplets of blood from his side. He considers if it will make him feel cleaner; if maybe he could walk away new.

But such things are futile hopes now.

Once, he had told her that she would maybe help him sleep through the night. Now, with the heartache so fresh a wound and her memory a dagger in his ribs, he knows she will be the reason that it rarely comes.

BRIGADE

when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake

he is grumpy and bad company. come talk to him anyway.

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

The dreams have left her raw, left her shaking, because there is a leaden familiarity to them. She remembers that imprisonment (that’s the word she uses, now, as she is older and wiser and realized her childhood had been usurped by a mother on the razor’s edge of madness) all too well. She remembers the weighty, particular quality of the dreams, because for so long they had been her reality.
She dreams of castles, and rivers, and birds large enough to ride on.
This sounds idyllic, except these are not her dreams.
She sleeps and she wakes in the mystical world and she is alone there, which is strange, there is no gray woman with tired eyes and a loving smile. The world continues on, but she can never find its puppeteer.

It is a long time before she realizes she is the puppeteer – staring at the castle, hating it, she thinks I wish you were gone, and poof, it is, blinked out of existence, and the world is stranger for it.
The next night the castle is back, restored, and again she thinks it gone, and again, it obeys.
She does not push her seeming ownership of the place far, because the wrongness of it is a heavy thing to bear.
She changes her own shape, in the dream. She makes herself look like her mother, for a moment, but that makes her uneasy, brings too many thoughts to the forefront.
(If this is my world now, what’s happened to her?)
She makes herself into a monster, a snapping snarling thing, which is entirely satisfying. She makes herself impossibly beautiful, pushes the limits in front of a skewed reflection in the glass of the castle, until she surpasses beauty, circles back around to something hideous. There is satisfaction in this, she finds. Making and unmaking.

She is tired, for a dreamer, because the times there are not restful. She does not yet know how to escape – she wakes into Beqanna, but it is of her circadian rhythm’s accord, not her own whims. The tiredness has settled into her bones, it makes it walk slowly, as if she has aged beyond her years. Her lids are heavy, but she fears sleep, trying to prolong the moments to which she is made to haunt a dream that is not her own, so she keeps walking, one foot in front of the other, a plodding pace, but enough to keep her awake.
She does not expect to see him. She had forced him from her thoughts when her thoughts turned too often to him, until he was almost a thing buried.
(Fortunate, or she might have tried to make him, in the dream.)
Her tired eyes nearly do not recognize him, the world is heavy around her, blurring. Bur the redness of his skin sharpens, those twisting wings, and she remembers, quite suddenly, how they had felt against hers.
“Brigade?” she asks, though she doesn’t need the confirmation – she’s awake, now, and she knows it’s him.

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm

@[brigade] sorry i couldn't resist

[brigade]

His life has drastically changed since the last time he saw her.

He had been just a wild boy with a howling moon for a heart, and she had been an older girl (a woman, he knows now) who had caused his pulse to quicken. She had talked to him about dreams and other worlds and the forest and fern of him had not been able to imagine it, but he had wanted to make a world for her. He had wanted to to carve a home for her out of the stars; he had wanted to do it for her.

But they had grown apart and his life had crumpled around him.

He had ruined everything—absolutely everything—and now his life was a monster of his making.

And then she is there before he can even wrap his head around it, with his name on her tongue, and his gaze flicks up. Confusion ripples around the red-wine of his face, his brow furrowing, his lips tightening. “Irisa?” he isn’t even sure he knows how to pronounce her name anymore—not even sure he deserves to stay it like he was the same boy that she had once known with kindness buried in him like a seed.

So much swells in his throat, all of the things he could tell her. About the way that he abandoned his home or the way he hasn’t seen his family in years or the fact that he sold his loyalty for a healer and hasn’t had the strength to break from the contract and face the destruction he caused in the rest of his life. He wants to tell her that the wildness in him caught up and he’s been twisted in the trap until his leg nearly snapped.

Instead he just stares at her, his light grey eyes storming.

Finally, a confession:

“I wasn’t sure that I would ever see you again.”

BRIGADE

when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake

@[irisa]

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

The world she’d told him about was no longer such a distant memory as it had been in those times. Now, it threatened at her, an unwanted inheritance that she does not understand. She can almost smell the fecundity of it, the dense forest with is impossible growths, and it makes her stomach turn.
It is not her world, not her dream. She wanted to be done with it.
But the dream, it seems, is not done with her.

That doesn’t matter. She’s awake, now. Awake and still taking him in, and something in her chest feels sharp, cuts at her breathing, and she doesn’t have a name for it, doesn’t want a name for it, she just keeps breathing through the pain.
She forces a smile, or maybe it’s more honest than that. She doesn’t know yet if she’s pleased to see him, or scared, because he represents strange things, and he knows that she once lived in a dream land, and his wings have a hundred different shapes.
(It’s both, maybe. Happiness and fear colliding like comets inside her.)
“Me either,” she responds, and she tries to keep her voice light, though the weariness sinks in, “but here we are.”
She looks at him closer, sees another kind of weariness on him. She doesn’t know what the years have done to him, but she can tell it’s something – he’s changed. Of course he’s changed. So has she.
(She dreams, now.)
“How have you been?” she says, a Pandora’s box of a question, but she asks it nonetheless.

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm

[brigade]

He has changed.

Like the earth after a massive quake or a valley after a millennia of river running through and carving out its sides. He has changed—evolved, devolved, perhaps—and he is not the same boy that once looked at her with wilderness in his eyes and a cautious hold on his tongue. But the walls of him are the same. The cliffside of his heart remains steady, despite the battered and bruised nature of it under it all.

She has the same sheen he remembered looking at when he was a young boy and his wings shift at his sides in almost memory, taking on the white and oil spill of her against the rich red of his coat.

“Here we are,” he echoes, and he feels a strange desire to tell her about the ways he has broken his world and how it still had the strength to break him back. How it is a disconcerting feeling to hear your own spine crack beneath the weight of your own foot. How you can know something is dangerous and still be surprised when its teeth sink into your jugular. How you’re never as smart as you think that you are.

Instead he just gives her a sad half-smile, exhaustion anchoring the edges of it so that it never completes and he’s left with just the broken pieces of it in his hand.,

“I have been…” his voice breaks and he furrows his brow, swallows, looks past her.

To where he had left Kensa and her love and his heart, he thinks. To Sylva, where he lives and yet struggles to imagine returning. Would Starsin look at him and know instantly all of the foolishness that lives in him? Would she look straight through him and laugh when she saw how foolish he had been?

He shakes his head, antlers swinging.

“How have you been?”

BRIGADE

when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

She watches his wings change, take on her color – that particular white and oil-slick rainbow. A whisper of the dream reflected back at her, and it’s strange, and disconcerting, but a lot has been strange and disconcerting lately, so she does not press it. She moves her own wings, as if in response, though they stay the same as they always have.
(Were this a dream, though, she could change – make them red as his skin. She wonders what he would think of that.)
He doesn’t answer her, not really, which in a way is answer enough in itself – that weary smile, the hollowed eyes, the fracture in his voice. She finds herself wanting to comfort her, but she doesn’t know how – she’s not used to giving comfort. Not used to giving anything. Besides, she doesn’t know if he wants comfort, she had always thought him to be a man (or boy, when they’d first men) who didn’t mind rough edges. Who was made of them, perhaps.

“I have been…” she echoes, but there is more. He is one of the few who know of the dreamworld – she hasn’t confessed this to many (not that there have been many friends in Irisa’s life to confess it to anyway). Her sister – her twin, the one left behind – knows, but she doesn’t know what’s become of Nyxia. Mother knows, of course, but she fears mother may be mad or dead.
“Strange things have been happening to me,” she says, slowly, wondering how to best phrase it, “I sleep, and I wake up…back there. Where I grew up. Except I’m alone.”
Except I’m its queen. Except it’s my kingdom. Except I’m terrified of it.
She swallows. She hasn’t been clear. She doesn’t have the words to explain what it does to her, returning there, with no idea why or what for.
“I’m tired, mostly,” she says, “I’m very tired.”
It is exhausting, to dream.

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm

[brigade]

He would lose himself in her dreamworld now if he had the chance.

He would so gladly face nightmares of her creation instead of the ones of his own. It would be so much easier to face something that he cannot control instead of feel his world tilt and slip beneath him and have to face the fact that he is the one who has caused it. He is the one who has lit the match that started the forest fire. He’s the one who started this, who caused the damage, the one to blame, the one to blame.

But such things soften a little as she begins to talk, as she gives him something to chew on other than the gristle of his own misery. It gives him something to focus on other than the ship sinking down around him. She begins to talk and he is helpless to do anything but listen, but sit and sink in the meaning.

When she is done, he almost takes a step forward—lifts his red leg before setting it down again—and he instead just angles his antlered head, studying her with his storm cloud grey eyes. “You look tired,” is all he says at first without thinking that such a thing could be taken as an insult. “That sound tiring.”

He wants to tell her that he’s tired to. That sleep does not come to him easily.

But his fitful slumber feels so thin, so flimsy compared to her own.

“Do you have to be alone?” he asks suddenly, flint in his eye as he studies her. He has no idea how such things work—how her mother’s dreamworld operates. He doesn’t know whether she is allowed to bring someone or if she can control anything about it at all, but it suddenly feels very important to ask.

“I would go,” he swallows hard. “If I could. If I can.”

BRIGADE

when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

“I don’t know,” she confesses, and her voice wavers, as if she is about to cry. Frustration and exhaustion and fear, all heavy as cement, because there is something in her, some switch flipped, and she knows so little of it, of what it is, or why.
She wants to cry, but she rolls his offer about her mind. She doesn’t know to what extent the power may extend. Mother could take others, sure - that much was obvious, as Irisa lived years as a perpetual child in the forced dream – but Irisa doesn’t know how to begin. She doesn’t remember how her mother put her to sleep, because she’d known only dreams, at first.
Even if she could – would she want to? It seems like the oddest kind of intimacy, to open up that world to outsiders. What would mother think?
(Mother hadn’t even let Nyxia in. Her own daughter. She’d chosen Irisa, and this is a guilt Irisa will bear for the rest of her life.)
She shouldn’t.

But she steps closer. She imagines an invisible hand, reaching out to touch him. She doesn’t know what she’s feeling for, but there’s something – impossible to describe, but it comes from time. Dark and intangible but something heavy, like weighted smoke.
Exhaustion, manifested.
Another step closer. She can almost smell the exhaustion, now that’s she’s feeling for it. She thinks she could push it into him.
“I think I have to…” she begins, but she doesn’t finish, she just touches him – barely, just enough to connect them, tether them. His skin is warm and her eyes close and she savors this moment, and then she exhales, and she pushes.
Sleep, she thinks, follow me.
He crumples surprisingly fast, and for a moment she thinks she killed him, but she watches his stomach move as he breathes, and is briefly reassured that she is not, in fact, a murderer.
She lowers herself to the ground, unsure of what will come next, and turn that heavy smoke of exhaustion back upon herself. Her head falls upon his chest as sleep overwhelms, keeping the tether.

To her, it is a blink, and she is back in the strange jungle, except this time, she is not alone.

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm

[brigade]

Brigade takes a step forward, unbidden, when he hears the tears in her voice.

Something like concern would cross his features if he knew how to express it. Something like concern would blossom beneath the surface like a bruise but instead his face remains carved from stone, his light grey eyes watching with just a pinch of tension on the brow. He doesn’t know how he could possibly ever relate to her. He doesn’t know how he could possibly ever understand her world.

So he doesn’t try.

He doesn’t pretend and instead remains still as she works through her own thoughts, processing his own question and then reaching out to him. He nearly braces against it but he looks for her gaze and he tries to relax into it. He compartmentalizes the rest of his pain—forcing it in the back of his mind as he focuses on hers instead—and lets the exhaustion that she offers like candy slip under his tongue.

She touches him and his lashes flutter and the ground rises up to meet him.

He doesn’t feel the impact because the second he falls, he rises as if through water on the other side. The first breath that he takes feels strange—how does one breathe when they do not need it—and the body that he inhabits is his and yet not his all at once. He frowns, feeling a shadow of a headache forming (for him to deal with later, he is sure) and he looks to his side where she stands, small and fierce and there.

Brigade doesn’t say anything at first but instead takes a step forward, lifting his merlot head and looking at the vines and the jungle that feels so real. His lips press together in thought, a muscle working in his wide jaw, before he glances down again, angling his gaze back to her. “It’s warmer than I thought it’d be.”

In so many ways, it feels like his home, like Tephra.

But when he draws in that phantom breath, he knows it could not be further from it.

BRIGADE

when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

It's a strange place, the dreamscape. A jungle, the plants impossibly green, bathed in light. There is a river, she knows, not far from here, and a palace of diamonds, the remnants of her mother’s dreamed godhood. There are animals aplenty, too, though she does not see any of them, but can sense their presence – the birds as large as she is, the panthers with their jeweled collars, the white stags with branches growing from their heads instead of antlers.
It is beautiful, for a prison.
(She has never tried to change for of her. She knows not know the world could be hers for the taking.)
She watches him take it in, is a little amazed that it worked, that he’s here. He, too, is almost like a dream-creature, with his antlers and shifting wings, he is at home in the jungle in a way she is not, even though she’s the one who grew up here.

“I’m surprised it worked,” she says, as much to herself as to him. She is surprised, and grateful, because it feels better to be with someone here, instead of alone. The jungle feels like smothering, this way.
Perhaps that is why she feels bolder now, her head held higher in the face of this strangeness.
“I can change myself, here,” she tells him, though he didn’t ask, but it has been too long and too lonely in this world.
Without waiting for a response, she paints herself gold, shimming in the constant light, and she changes her wings, too, until they are translucent and glowing. She does not change any other feature, just the color, but it’s enough to bring a smile to her face, albeit a wary one.
“What should I be?” she asks, as the birds chatter around them, and a foreign river flows.

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm