"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
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
Adna does not consider Rupture and Bela anything to be jealous of. They are her children and she adores them as much as she adores Gospel, although they could be not be further from her. Except they could not be rooted in anything more different. Because as much as she loves them, she cannot help but remember the way that she had cried into their necks when they had been born. She cannot help but remember how lost and alone she had been when she realized that they were born of something that could never be love.
Something that never had roots in her the way that Beth did.
So she doesn’t consider that he could feel jealous—that he was even capable of it. All she knows is that he is quiet after she speaks and she considers that perhaps she really was dumb. That he was doing her a small mercy by not acknowledging the question that she had presented; he was simply brushing it off.
When he does reply with the fog curling through the trees and slowly approaching, she nearly startles and then inhales sharply. She feels the press of her fangs to her lips and the sharpness is a reminder that she doesn’t have the benefit of giving into the riptide of her emotions. She needs to be in control.
“Maybe I’m the ghost,” she muses, tipping her head back to look at the dusk that settles so much sooner than she would have imagined. The nearly faint quality of the skyline. “Or maybe I’m so haunted that I just don’t know the difference anymore.” She laughs, but it is a hollow sound on her tongue.
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
It calls to mind their very first conversation.
How she’d told him that she didn’t know where she belonged.
How she’d asked him how she could stop looking, stop caring.
Had he had an answer for her then? It seems a lifetime ago. And maybe it has been. He does not remember, really. Though there are so many things he doesn’t remember. He’d been chasing a memory when she’d found him, an anguished cry ripped out of his throat. All he remembers is the feeling of chasing something he’d never catch and the way she’d bore down on him, gnashed her teeth, threatened his life. All he remembers is her anger and his bitter helplessness.
He casts a sidelong glance in her direction, his head tilted as he considers it. He reaches out for her as they walk, pressing his mouth into the smooth, scaled plain of her shoulder briefly before pulling away again, reorienting his focus with the path unfurling before them. “You seem pretty real to me,” he says and there, a slanted smile.
“What’s haunting you now, Adna?” he asks. He has not forgotten why they have set out, what they are looking for. There is still a troubled beating to his heart. But this is an unfamiliar softness, a kind of peace in the eye of a hurricane. He is still aware of the chaos, but they are safe here, for the moment.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
She thinks about the first time they met often—perhaps too often. She thinks about the way he had managed to stir life into her. It had been ugly, but she had been alive for the first time in months. He had made her feel the entire spectrum of her emotions. From rage to helplessness to sorrow to heat.
He had made her want.
He had made her need.
Perhaps most dangerously of all, he had made her hope.
The memory of it is something she carries with her often, tucked against her breast. She remembers all the ways she had come apart. How she had beat fists against his chest and pressed her fang to his throat and hunted for purchase on the granite walls of him. How he had finally melted into liquid heat and the way that he had lit her on fire—how he had showed her everything she had known existed but never found.
That heat is always with her now, simmering just below the surface, but she is too focused on the way that the pain rises to notice it now. Even when he touches her and she shivers, her skin nearly flinching beneath it, she can only swallow. His question digs into her and she thinks about all of the answers she could give him. She could tell him that she’s haunted by his daughter that he doesn’t know about. That she’s haunted by the look on her sister’s face when she had talked about Bethlehem.
How she had known it was too late for her to change course.
How the only option seemed to be swallowing the poison alone.
But she can’t bear to talk about it now and so she gives him an answer, but not the full one. “Fear, perhaps,” she whispers. “Fear that I won’t be able to out run my past. That I will lose myself.”
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
He thinks he would love her if he could.
He had felt it, his heart resuming its post where, for years, the chest had been empty.
She had coaxed out of him things he had not felt in years – if ever.
For her, he has softened. It has been in degrees and perhaps not enough, but the difference has surprised him even if it is microscopic to most everyone else. He has spent his entire life behind steel, plate glass, razor wire. And then, quite simply, a brick wall.
He knows that he is not capable of the kind of love she deserves. He is not capable of wrapping himself around her and kissing her head freely, smiling and laughing. He is not capable terrible and merciful softness. He can whittle away at it, but he will always be made of stone.
Were he softer, he would have acted on the stirring in his chest. He would have looked at her and told her that she would never lose anything, she would never have anything to fear. He would have tried to reassure her, to offer her some semblance of comfort. Instead, he takes her words and he files them away. He tries to understand them.
He has never had anything worth being afraid of losing. Until now. And, though he has not and likely will not ever say it, she is it. She and their daughter. Even if his reactions are not big enough, his emotions not demanding enough. Even if he does not take up enough space. He does not want to lose them.
“What are you trying to outrun?” he asks. Perhaps it is unfair, the way he capitalizes on the opportunity. But she has always been unflinchingly honest, hasn’t she? She has never shied away from telling him the truth and he has no reason to believe that this is any different. He has no reason to believe he’s taking advantage of anything at all.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
She is terrified of the magnitude of her feelings. She is terrified of how quickly they sit on the edge of herself—how quickly she could succumb to them. She would drown in the way she feels about it; she would never grow tired of it. But she has made a promise that she wouldn’t push that on him any longer. She wouldn’t ever force her love on him and instead she wakes up every morning and swallows it down.
So they walk in silence, edging toward the border of Taiga, and she feels her throat close around it.
She will burn with it one day, she thinks, but she will never say it.
She burns further when he asks her questions and she prickles underneath it but doesn’t flinch. She refuses to turn to the venom that rests on the back of her tongue. Because he has always been there with his questions and his honesty and the way that his eyes never close off or never become guarded.
But she doesn’t answer right away.
She walks for several minutes in silence as she tries to sort out her thoughts.
When she finally reaches a place where she feels like she can articulate her thoughts, she takes a deep breath. “Myself, maybe.” Her brow furrows. “I have a habit of ruining all of the good in my life—or, at the very least, taking the bad and making it worse.” She thinks of the secrets she has kept. She had not been the root of that poison, but was she not to blame for not thrusting it into the sunshine? Was she not the true villain for knowing and not telling Sabbath, not telling Beth? Even if she hadn’t intended to do wrong, she cannot help but wonder if she didn’t because she was scared of losing him.
Scared that he might choose her sister and not her.
Choose that family and not theirs.
She swallows hard and fights the fear that forms like tears at the corners of her eyes.
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
It is in these moments he feels closest to her.
When she is soft. When she allows him to feel as if he can be close to her.
And he so desperately wishes things were simpler.
Or maybe he merely wishes that he were better.
He has spent a considerable amount of time wondering how he might best explain this to her without hurting her feelings. She deserves so much more than him. Even with her rage and her venom and her unflinching need for it to be heard and felt and experienced. What he does not realize is that perhaps what she needs is him – a stone to soften her edges against.
She is quiet for several moments before she answers and he is quiet for several moments after. He cannot relate, really. He has never had any real valid reason to loathe himself. He has never wanted to scratch his way out of his own skin. Even in the beginning, when all he’d wanted was to be loved. He had thought himself unworthy of love, certainly, but he had never blamed himself for it. He had never really thought there was anything that he could have done different. He had merely accepted it as gospel and never thought to place blame.
After awhile, he drags in a shuddering breath and asks, “why do you think that is?”
He does not mean to play the part of some sort of therapist. It is not that he has any overwhelming desire to bring her face-to-face with her problems, it is simply that he wants to understand her. Despite his lack of softness, his inability to love the right way, he does want to help her. He wants her to catch a glimpse of herself through his eyes. Strong and fierce and fearless. Absolutely lethal and devastatingly beautiful.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
His questions do not strike her as odd. Do not do anything but sit her heart into something like a frenzy when she realizes that he is so easily could get to the heart of the matter. With each question, he cuts to the core of her and she realizes that she has no real defense against him. Even when she tells herself that she does; even when she tells herself that she can protect herself. She knows in the end, she can’t.
He sees right through her.
And when he finally decides to be rid of her, she will have nothing to recover.
This fear rises in her throat and she inhales slowly as they walk, their pace still quick and the concern for her daughter still very much present. But it quiets as she wraps her head around the questions that he presents, trying to unpack the years of turmoil and trauma and the broken way her heart beats.
Trying to unpack it for him.
“Maybe I want it too much,” she says and although she wants to lean into him again and find courage in the slope of his shoulder and the press of her mouth to his jaw, she keeps herself separate. She keeps her gaze on the horizon and on the shadows, wondering if each one is the shape of her daughter.
“Maybe I just want the good so badly that I break it before it can be broken.”
She thinks all the different things that could mean. How badly she wants him—all of him. How badly she wants to find her way back to her family. How badly she wants their family—whole and happy.
She realizes how out of reach these things are and exhales slowly.
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
Perhaps he understands it on some visceral level.
Were he to stop and really think about it, he might have been able to relate.
He had wanted something so fiercely that he had let it destroy him.
So, he’d stopped wanting it.
He’d forced himself to stop believing that it existed at all.
It’s not the same, really, but it’s close.
But he is a simple man and he has never felt any particular urge for introspection. So, he does not think about all of the ways this could apply to him, too. He does not contemplate whether or not he’d ever destroy something just to know that he’d broken it, just so that he could know that it had been his decision. Just so that he would not have to feel powerless in it. Just so that he could know that he was the master of his fate.
He watches her out of the corner of his eye but does not immediately speak. He has nothing useful to say. He has no wonders of encouragement, nothing left to ask, really. He swallows his breath and exhales it long and slow.
He should say something, if only to assure her that she has not said the wrong thing. She has not driven him into his own head. But he scrapes the bottom of his soul for something and comes up empty-handed.
They reach the edge of Taiga and Loess swims into view. He pauses only briefly, just long enough to fully shackle his focus to her face. Long enough to ask. “Are you going to be all right?”
He knows nothing of her history with this place but he’d felt the acid in her voice when she’d said it.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
She should ask him questions, she thinks. She is so hungry for everything that he has to say and everything he thinks, but for some reason, she cannot find the questions to point to him. She cannot find the words for everything that she needs to ask him—everything that she wants to learn about him.
So she lets the silence fill between them.
She thinks about how often she bares her soul to him.
How she cannot find it in herself to truly regret it.
As the edge of the forest looms before them, as she can see her home—her first home—through the trees, she feels her throat tighten. Her vision swims a little bit and she struggles to breathe. When he pulls up next to her, she stops and shakes slightly, feeling the tremors race through her.
She imagines being a little girl and running up those hills next to her father.
She imagines being a little older and her mother shepherding them out with lies on her tongue.
She imagines being older still and watching the only boy she’d ever cared about with another.
It’s a physical reminder of all the ways that her life has fallen apart but when she catches the sight of him, solid and sure by her side, the ache lessens just a little. She frowns and feels her brow furrow just a little. She looks up and looks at him, studies him, breathes until she feels the bands around her lungs lighten.
“I think so,” she finally answers when she realizes that she’s walking in there with him.
When she realizes that she’s not alone and he’s right there.
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
He watches her.
Studies her, even.
But her expression betrays nothing beyond the soft furrow in her brow.
She turns her face up to him but does not immediately speak.
And he lets her soften her edges against him. He lets her look at him and he remains still and steadfast as long as she needs him to. He just goes on staring back at her, breathing evenly despite the way his pulse still beats around the sound of their daughter’s name.
Finally, she speaks. Or relents. Or summons whatever courage she needs that he cannot give her, whatever strength she needs to cross through this hallowed ground. He wonders, if their daughter came this way, if she felt any pull to the land. If she could feel her mother’s connection to it in the muscles and the sinew and the bone marrow. He wonders if the vipers share any kind of special connection.
“I’m right here,” he says and he kisses her head when she offers up that slanted, uncertain smile. It is perhaps the first time he has ever offered comfort without being asked for it. It does not corrode his throat the way he might have thought it would. It does not stick sideways, does not shred the surface of his tongue. It does not make him bleed. Not even when he kisses her head and takes the first series of steps into the unfamiliar kingdom.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
