"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 cannot keep her face turned away. Brigade’s touch drifts down her face and she is following it almost before he nudges her chin and turns her face back. There is a painful delicacy in the way he kisses her neck and Kensa closes her eyes to hold in how right it feels. Had she expected it wouldn’t? No she hadn’t expected anything at all and now that Brigade’s lips are pressing to her skin once again the heat spreads through her veins without hesitation.
Roughened words and teeth against her skin. I wanted to see you too. Shifting herself nearer, Kensa presses her muzzle his neck and exhales the breath she’d been holding, breathes him in again slowly as though it could calm the tumbling in her chest. Instead it makes her ache, and she presses her lips to the sweat dampened side of his neck, nipping lightly between that kiss and another. “...and now, do you want to sleep?” Her whisper rolls against his skin, warm where his sweat has made the skin cool. She shouldn’t ask, not that silly question or any other but he is getting in the way of her thoughts.
To a point anyway.
Kensa feels herself slipping, drifting off on heady desire but she and Brigade burn too hot for it to be this simple. As if to drown out the confused noise in her head she presses her face into his neck, a frustrated, strangled sound catching in her throat. “Brigade.” She doesn’t know how to do this. She knows that she loves him even if she should never have allowed herself to, that she fell and it was wrong even if now there is nothing left to keep them from one another.
The fire burns brighter, keener, sharper, and he leans into it.
If the knife slices, if his flesh parts around it, he doesn’t notice. Doesn’t care. He will deal with the scars from his later—will deal with the pain and the agony and the trauma later.
Now, all he cares about is the fire that burns through him.
“I can’t imagine something I want to do less,” he whispers, teeth finding her skin and feeling the pressure of it building in his chest. He kisses her then, soft and then fierce and then edging to the very cliffside of violence before backing down. He feels something like it within her too—an answering call to his own.
He can’t imagine backing down now. He can’t imagine stepping away from this or feeling anything but the answering call of it, but he gladly rises to the challenge. There is no running from this now, he knows, and he finds that he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to turn from her, from this.
Even if it’s a mistake.
Even if it’s the biggest mistake he’s ever made.
Brigade can only growl light and low in his throat, can only graze his way down her curved neck and then to her withers. He continues to kiss his way down her spine, teeth grabbing at her hips as he curls around her. His wings are molten gold at his sides now, bright and fierce, and he gives into the storm.
“Kensa,” he says her name one more time—a whisper, a question, a promise, perhaps.
And then he pauses, breathing in deep, feeling his chest tighten, as he stands and waits.
For just one more word before they completely lose control.
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
The only return to his answer is the catch of her breath, his teeth pinching and grazing her flesh and driving away any idea of teasing or trying him. Brigade’s lips meet hers tenderly, soft in a way that reminds her of the night they’d slept side by side in Loess. That same kiss edges toward something hungrier though and she is waiting for it, her teeth catching at his lip before she presses in again intensely. Doesn’t he know she’ll meet him at the very edge every time?
He holds something back from her but only just, and the restraint makes her ache. It is not deprivation. Even if he never says it she feels something in that, the care beneath the hunger. He knows the edge and pulls back but only just… and doesn’t stop this time. Brigade makes his way along her body and the muscles beneath her skin tremble, aftershocks, a chill at the absence of his touch. Her lips trace his shoulder, the edge of a golden wing.
A soft squeal follows the fall of his teeth against her hips, Kensa arches her neck. Pressing against him as she tucks her chin and looks back with ochre eyes gone dark gold. There is a fleeting feeling of sinking hesitation, an uncertainty she’s unaccustomed to. This matters, and she isn't ready for it to matter as much as it does, to feel the shock of him right down to her soul.
This man does not know how often such encounters have meant nothing to her, or how easily she would have once allowed him to cover her and then forgotten all about it. He does not know that she wont ever forget the way his breath falls against her hip or the rise and fall of his breathing as he waits for her word. My Brigade, but she doesn’t say it because he is not hers. He never was.
Brigade is beautiful, glorious, and he wants her despite deserving so much more. “I want you close to me.”
The tension continues to build until he can hardly breathe around it.
His vision swims, his head pulses, and the only thing that he knows is the feel of her against him. That strange warmth that bursts into heat and them sets him aflame. She doesn’t rebuke him or ask him to stop and he almost expects that she will. He expects for her to finally nudge him away.
Maybe he expects himself to run.
But she doesn’t. He doesn’t.
Instead she breathes that she wants him and he nearly groans in response, his mind already split amongst the many paths of his desire, of the feral instinct that cleaves him in two. With a growl, low and heady, his teeth find her again, sinking into the flesh and then he is lifting himself up and over her.
As he enters, his inhale is sharp and the exhale that follows is shuddering. There is a wild pulsing in his throat as he finds the rhythm of the ocean, as he feels that flame fan hotter. He touches what he can reach. At times a gentle kiss on her shoulder. At other times a fierce, demanding teeth against her neck.
All he knows is her. All he can feel is her. She surrounds him and he loses himself in her, in the wild and natural roaring of the sea and the storm and the hurricane that whips through him.
He says her name, he thinks.
Maybe just once. Maybe a thousand times. A plea, a demand, a question.
He doesn’t know how to keep track of it all anymore and he doesn’t think he’d want to even if he could. Instead, he just lets everything natural and right consume him until it is just them and the cliffside that yawns open before them and the world that is suddenly completely and totally theirs.
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
Maybe she should tell him no, shift away to a place where she is not between a man she loves and a violent sea. So that she can think about what is happening. Make sure that he wants her for reasons he won't regret, or ask him if he’s just “settling up” taking what he is owed for her betrayal. That might be the sensible thing to do, but this is Brigade and he does not lie to her or give her anything that isn’t real. Kensa knows that in a soul deep way that makes him all the more consuming.
The crash of the waves was meaningless a moment ago. Now each break speaks a carnal language, ancient words for hunger and need. A free-verse thrumming against the cliffs, against the waves rolling together and coming apart.
His teeth sink into her flesh and she makes a low sound in her throat. Cold mist sprays over them and she shifts her weight to support him, whispering his name as he settles against her. There is a soft encouragement in her voice, but a strain of impatient desire almost drowns it out.
Brigade presses into her and she forgets her impatience, the worry that tugged at her. She savors his sweetness, welcomes his ferocity. Kensa is so aware of him, and when he presses a kiss to her shoulder her head is turned back to catch his lips—fleeting, desperate.
Neck arched, her chocolate-chestnut coat is dark with sweat when she shudders for him, gives him the pleasure of feeling her succumb beneath him. He says her name and the sound is far away but all around her like the sound of the ocean and the sunrise glowing on the pale beauty of her face, flashing over the gold buried in her skin. Kensa says his name like a siren, summoning him, praising and pleading.
There is a part of him that expects the sky to split open with a storm.
He expects the world around them to be set aflame. He expects the very ocean to rise up and then swallow them whole. Instead everything becomes very small. It all implodes until it is just a seed in his belly. It is a rising tension that makes him feel like he might fall apart; like his very body might come undone.
He can hear the sound of her voice low and needing; he can hear the way she calls him.
Later, he might imagine all the ways she is the siren and this is the rocks that he breaks himself on.
He might think about all the ways she is there to destroy him.
But not now. Not in this moment when they are snarled around one another; when they are curled around this heat that is like a dagger between the ribs. He breathes her name and feels the pressure rise until it finally happens. He sees stars and his head drops to her shoulder and for a moment, he just rests there, feeling the ocean mist and her and the sun that detonates in his chest until he is nothing but aftermath.
Brigade is not certain that he even remembers dismounting, but he does.
His neck is darkened with sweat, his eyes a stormy grey, and despite the exhaustion that slips through him like a drug, he comes up her side and pulls her close. He presses his lips to her brow and just breathes.
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
Each of the tears that roll down her cheeks captures the sunrise, makes a miniature world of light, and then disappears against her skin or drops away to the earth. They come unbidden and inexplicable, rising from her chest and tightening her throat so that her breaths in those fleeting moments of passion are all the more ragged. Her heart is aching when he slides from her back but she says not a word.
Brigade pulls her close and Kensa closes her eyes slowly when his lips press to her forehead. There are no words between them as they drift through the haze together. The waves are just as loud as before, but their music lulls and sleep wants to pull her under, heavy and intoxicating. Though there are things that need to be said his body is too warm and her will to resist completely lost. Kensa bows her head, tucks it against his muscular neck and exhales giving up the last of her waking breathes for the sweet rhythm of sleep, wordless.
Waking comes slowly and too quick. Vague thoughts, warmly wandering, turn themselves ever more quickly into the sharp edged things of a fully conscious mind. Kensa is surprised by the anxiety that courses beneath her skin when her lashes flutter up. She is drenched in the scent of him, still cannot tell where he begins and she ends. With a soft groan the chestnut turns her face into his neck sighing and blinking against the morning light. “Brigade…” Her voice feels out of use though it can’t have been long and she isn’t sure what else she meant to say. Once she had known how to be vulnerable, to ask the little nagging questions and voice the aching fears but it’s harder now.
It takes her another breath to say something, to ask. “Was this alright?” Was I enough? Have I disappointed you?
She hates to seem fretful and so pulls back to press a kiss to the strong line of his jaw, then just beside the bright white of his fractured blaze. In her chest her heart, ever acclimating to the cruelties she inflicts upon it, flutters in terror like a trapped bird.
Instead he holds her as she does and watches the ocean that rages in front of them. He feels the cold of the winter settle into his bones and he shifts his wings to something larger, something warmer. He flares them and then settles them over her back, drawing them closer so that he can keep her warm despite the ocean mist that rises up and continues to rain across their face, settling the bite of the cold in more.
When he feels her begin to stir again, his eyes are gritty and his throat sore. Exhaustion is so close to the surface of him but he doesn’t give into it. He just smiles, the curve of his lip small as he presses it into her forehead. He feels the storm of his emotions trapped in his chest and wonders why he doesn’t feel peaceful now. He feels it like a surge and wishes that he could be better for her. Wishes that he could give her the kind of love that she deserves but he knows that there’s something terribly broken within him.
Her question catches him off guard though and his handsome face sharpens and then folds, his frown reaching the light grey of his eyes. “This was more than alright,” he answers and wishes that he was more articulate so he could explain to her what he’s feeling. Wishes he could tell her the way his broken heart clenches in his chest and the way his pulse beats in all of the wrong ways. He should say more, he knows, to try and alleviate her fears but his mouth is dry and all the words flee from him completely.
All he can do is hold her quietly and listen to the ocean wake up before them.
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
Warm beneath his wing she feels guilty for having drifted off, but it is only tuppence added on to her massive debt of mistakes. Kensa is certain her selfishness reaches down into the very marrow of her bones and she will never be clean of it. That is not the source of the anxiety. She looks upon Brigade, exhausted handsome Brigade and knows her love for him has not subsided, yet she cannot bring herself to show it to him again. It will kill her to be rejected now. So it is pulled close, smothered in her hands and then buried in the dark wet earth so that it cannot shine. Maybe she can stop herself from poisoning anyone else.
She gives him a smile—false, steady—and eases carefully from beneath the massive wing held tightly over her side. The smile fails though, and she waits there behind it when she stands apart and can really look at him. Her expression flickering into sadness and then smoothing swiftly into calm. “We should go, you need to rest.” Kensa knows that when there is something tangled here, something trying to break. She should try to kill it. Strangle away the connection while it feels weakened. “I would see you again...I...” Shut up you stupid woman, before he finds his wings again and leaves you here like the fool you are.
“I have go.” Her lips find his, a fleeting kiss that tells him she’d rather stay. She backs away before she can linger and offer to guide him home or to a place where he might rest beside her. The wind pulls her mane around her face and the strands snatch the tears before they can make their way down her pale face. “Take care Brigade. I’ve missed you. I just can’t stay. I don’t know how to do this.” Pulling herself out of reach. The safety of Hyaline feels far off but once again she is about to go racing back to it. “Goodbye.” She’s always known she could love him but not how much it would hurt, how lost it would make her feel. Kensa is halfway home before she stops regretting leaving him, and when she stands upon her own border and turns back to look down on the forest path and the river falling away into the trees she tells herself to forget.
Not knowing that in days his child will be growing swiftly inside her womb, a tender green seedling rising from what she’d just tried to bury.
