"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
Gale started under neon lights, then it all got dark i only know how to go too far
She doesn't remember him.
He had waited amongst the flowers, hardly daring to breathe the thickly perfumed summer air, certain he was prepared for whatever reaction his presence might elicit.
What he hadn't expected was no reaction at all.
The smile she'd given him (her mother's smile, he'd thought) was polite and hospitable. Her welcome sounded genuine, and there were no shadows behind her blue-grey eyes. She'd invited him into the Gates - she'd called them Heaven's Gates - and he was too bewildered to refuse. Gale had walked beside her, not really listening as she described the landscape, the handful of residents, her dreams and desires for the place.
He was too busy remembering what she'd look like the last time he'd seen her.
Smaller, younger. Dead.
He'd killed her, and she showed him her favorite patch of daffodils.
A few weeks have passed since their initial encounter, and summer has faded into fall. He's seen her a half dozen times, and each time she greeted him with the same warm smile.
Gale cannot bring himself to remind her of the past she seems to have forgotten. Though he knows himself beyond redemption, he still finds himself floundering, unsure of how to proceed.
This is the child that he harmed the least. Starting with her had seemed the most logical choice. Should he seek out the next one?
Lost in his thoughts, the navy blue stallion walks aimlessly along a trail that skirts the very edges of the Gates. Dusk has dimmed the colors of the flowers blooming around him, but the evening air is still heavy with their scent. A few bolts of lightning flicker across his skin, briefly connecting the glowing perlino stripes.
A sound, perhaps the sound of someone else, causes him to raise his head and look in that direction with a startlingly electric blue gaze.
06-19-2023, 04:49 PM (This post was last modified: 06-19-2023, 04:51 PM by Kennice.)
I was a dreamer before you went and let me down —
It has been years since she was last in the Gates, and she wishes she could say whether or not it looked the same. But her memories are hazy things, worn from time and not so clearly recalled. Her mother had lived here, once, so very long ago—she remembers Magnus and Joelle, she remembers her father sometimes visiting and the way he had smelled of ice and snow, and she remembers how she had left this place behind to trail after Cronus to the Chamber and let her life be pulled apart at the seams.
Returning to somewhere old seemed like an odd place for a new start, but somehow it was the only place that made sense.
To go back to the beginning, to see if there was any chance at all that she could rewrite her story.
Changed or not, it is still a beautiful place, and it is no wonder that it had once been known as Heaven’s Gates: the lush hills that were covered in wildflowers, the trees that sat gilded by the setting sun, and the faint scent of lavender on the breeze. The tension that she had not realized was there slowly uncoiled in her chest, her large, doe-like brown eyes seeming to soften further as the worry ebbed away. She tried to let herself hold onto the tranquility, to not chase it away with the fear that it would not last long, or that it was not meant for her to have.
The path that she is on follows the outskirts of the kingdom, and while she did not expect it to be especially crowded, she is not surprised when she happens across someone else. She knew where to go if she did not want to be found, a path in a kingdom is not one of them. When her eyes first meet his—and the first thing she notices is how vividly blue they are—there is a smile that starts to form as a reflex, but the sight of electricity sparking across his skin causes it to falter, and she comes to a stop.
She had been gone for a long time, and the sight of magic still sometimes caused her to grow wary, but though her smile is now a cautious one it is still nonetheless friendly. “Hello,” she starts off kindly, but her eyes cannot seem to tear themselves away from the lightning on his skin, and after a pause that stretches for a moment too long she cannot stop herself from asking, “does that hurt at all?”
Gale started under neon lights, then it all got dark i only know how to go too far
The mare in front of him is a stranger, one with dark eyes and flowers caught in the sable fall of her mane and tail. She is unfamiliar, but the way her smile fades as she takes him in is not. Gale watches her expression flicker and adjust as she comes to a stop, watches it like he watches the rest of her rather than respond to her friendly greeting.
His intent blue gaze flickers much like the lightning - irregular, bordering on erratic as he takes her in - but it is not nearly so brief as the flashing light, lasting the entirety of the silence that Kennice feels has stretched one moment too long. He has always stared too long, born with the Sight that ran deep in his family. The rest of his expression is remarkable only for its stillness; there is nothing to read beyond his too disquisitive eyes. His interactions with others tend toward brevity, due in no small part to his lack of effort regarding social niceties.
Does the lightning hurt, she asks?
“No.” He answers. Not anymore.
He tries not to think about when it did, or what it had taken to get it under control. He shivers anyway, involuntary. The memory of ripping away every bit of his own skin is etched deep.
He closes his eyes, breathes in, then out, then opens them again to meet the stranger’s gaze.
“Do you live here?” He asks, his voice as bare of emotion as his too-still face. Will he run into her again, he wants to know? Should he be making more of an effort to be something he is not, something more polite? Should he try to elicit within this stranger a positive impression of him?
He certainly makes no effort to do so now. He only stares.
The world has made her wary, but not unkind, and for that reason alone she is not deterred by his cool demeanor.
She would take indifference over the cruelty that Cronus had so often shown her any day; the cold she could shield herself against, but poisoned barbs fashioned from words were far harder to dislodge and forget.
“Oh,” is all she says in response to his short answer, but she nods her head in understanding that it is all she is going to get. Such a small word carried with it a heavy weight, but it is a weight she is well-acquainted with; not everyone had a story they wanted to revisit. She does not press him for anything else, even though his reluctance to speak further only kindles a new kind of curiosity, one that she does her best to mute from her expression. She is too similar to her mother in this regard—always wanting to fix things, thinking that she could mend broken hearts and coax trust from those most hesitant to give it.
She doesn’t know his story, she reminds herself, and he does not owe it to her tell it.
Besides, she is too broken to fix anyone.
“I used to,” she answers him, her tone perhaps a little too bright, at least in comparison to the flatness of his own voice, but she doesn’t mind. “A very long time ago, when it was still called Heaven’s Gates.” It felt like several lifetimes ago, and when her heart twists, it is not out of a longing for the past, but instead a disappointment in herself—that so much time has passed, and she is still largely the same. Still a wide-eyed girl that did not seem to fit in anywhere, unmoored and without a purpose. For a brief moment a shadow seems to pass over her face, but in a blink she shutters it away, replacing it with another smile. “My name is Kennice, by the way. Do you live here?”
