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show me, who i am and who i could be; laura pony - australis - 09-03-2016 She is with Tobiah when the world ends, watching the colors of the sun bleed across a brand new sky. It is subtle at first when the earth trembles, when it rises and falls like a chest beneath their feet. Subtle, until the rocks from the peaks above loosen and rain down against their backs, until the trees sway with no wind to force their branches. It is subtle until it isn’t. Until suddenly the mountain is stolen from beneath their feet and she is falling forever into a sky with no end. There isn’t enough time to say anything, not enough time to see if the horror that etches across her face is reflected in the pale curve of his. There is only enough time to reach for him as she falls, to try and catch his mane between her teeth, to steady herself against his side. But she cannot reach, and when her mouth closes it is only around a single white feather which pulls free from his wing. She has enough time to wonder if he can fly on those wings, with one so much smaller than the other, enough time to wish for it to be so before the dark reaches out to take her. She wakes in the dirt and she is alone. It takes roughly the length of a heartbeat to notice first the soft white feather resting beside her nose, and second that Tobiah is not there. None of her family is. There are strangers in the distance and some of them yell, but most are quiet like she chooses to be. She takes a moment to struggle to her feet, sore and bruised, with red peering out like tears against the white, but startlingly unharmed for having fallen from one mountain to the next. Dropping her nose to the ground she picks up that feather, twisting again so that she can wedge it into the knots and tangles of mane near her withers. It holds fast beside the bone snowflake, stark against her dark mane, and with an ache in her chest she wills it to stay. It takes nearly an entire day to make her way back down the mountain, longer than some, perhaps, because she had stayed so long looking for her family. But when the sun peaked in the sky and began to drop again, she mirrored its descent, picking a trail that looked well and recently travelled. It was dark by the time she reached the bottom, darker still as she made her way across unfamiliar land to a forest she did think she recognized. She couldn’t be certain in the endless blue of night, lit only by the water light of a narrow moon and the pin pricks of stars, but this place felt familiar. Quietly she found a spot in the among the trees, an empty spot, a spot not already filled with someone as lost and lonely as she, and settled in. At the first light of morning she would go searching for a familiar face again, but until then it felt stupid to explore a world that had only just erupted and dissolved all alone. Her breath shudders, trembles, and her heart feels too tight in her chest, her bones too tight beneath her skin. There are no tears on her face though, no sobs catching like burrs in her throat - and when her eyes lift again, peeling apart the leaves in the trees to watch the moon climb in the sky, she wears this isolation like a mask against a crumbling face. This is not the first night she has spent alone, nor the first night spent away from home and her family, but it is the first time she has ever had to wonder if there was any family to go back to at all. RE: show me, who i am and who i could be; laura pony - tobiah - 09-03-2016 my memories are full of only black and blue; I should’ve cut my losses long before I knew you.
———————————————————— tobiah RE: show me, who i am and who i could be; laura pony - australis - 09-15-2016 The night is anything but quiet and she finds it is impossible to rest, impossible to keep her eyes closed for the nightmares that form there when she tries. The world still settles, heaving and shifting and groaning, the aches of being undone and remade again, she is certain. At the least the meadow is still, and the forests around it, because she is tired from climbing down the mountain, bruised and sore and her heart hurts with the loneliness of feeling lost. If it changed again, if the world took another new shape, she might let it swallow her now. She shifts beneath the trees, trying to find a spot where the branches are more slender, where the leaves do not knit together like fingers to keep the sky from her. Right now the endless blue of the world above her, the fat moon and the flecking of silver stars in wild constellations, are the only things left that feel even a little same, even a little safe. She is used to hours and nights tucked into the mountains, used to sleeping among the stars. Being buried so deep against the earth, hidden beneath the trees and in the shadow of the mountain makes her uneasy and she can feel knots tying and untying themselves in the pit of her belly. The groan of branches being pushed aside, the crunch of cold ground being crushed underfoot pulls her face towards the dark, and she waits tensely for a shape to solidify in the black. She imagines a thousand terrible things, an endless parade of creatures who would mean only to do her harm. She remembers first the story of the wolves, of how their teeth and claws had pulled apart her family as the journeyed back from the Chamber – she had been born later that day. But she thinks, too, of impossible things, of creatures long since buried beneath the earth but set free when the world exploded and fissure raced like spider webs through all that was. She inches back a step or two, uneasy and broken, quiet despite the way her heart hammered in her chest - and she would’ve run if not for the voice that found her in the dark. Australis? She gasps and it is a whispered sound, mangled only by the way her chest tightens around her lungs. Her mind races to place the bodiless voice, but her heart beats her to it. “Tobiah?” The word sounds small, even to her, and so she says it again, just a little louder this time. “Tobiah?” But he is already peeling away from the shadow, already bathed in the same silver starlight as she. Without thinking, she pushes forward and collides against him, burying herself in the comfort of his pale side, beneath the soft of his white feathered wings. “Tobiah.” She says for a third time, closing her eyes and pushing her cheek against the strong curve of his neck where she remains until the trembling beneath her skin starts to ease. For a long moment she can think of nothing more than the way her hurt seems to fade buried so selfishly against his skin, the way even the knots loosen in the lonely pit of her stomach. But she realizes he must hate this forced closeness, wonders why he has even come to the forest at all for the way it teams with endless, disoriented faces, and so she peels herself away from his warmth, pausing only to touch her nose to the curve of his ancient face. She does not drift far, staying close enough to feel the warmth drifting from his skin, close enough to touch him because she is sad and she is greedy. His question makes her laugh though, not the kind of laughter she had shared with him on the mountain, but something darker, something more twisted and strange on her lips. “Am I okay?” She pauses and she is silent, her brow furrowed as she turns from him to look at the details of the world around them. She counts the nearest trees, traces their branches and memorizes the shades of their leaves, and when she finally turns back to him she is careful to hide her brokenness from him. “Home is gone,” he will have noticed this too, their home had been one in the same, “I haven’t found anyone I love.” Her voice catches and her eyes drop, darkening like bruises against the dapples of her brown face. “I don’t know Tobiah, I don’t know how to be okay.” Her voice shatters quietly, coming apart at the seams, and she reaches for him blindly, desperate for the way he reminds her of home, of safe. Greedy for the warmth he stirs in her chest. “I’m glad you’re here, Tobiah, I’m glad nothing happened to you.” She inches close enough to touch his chest, to press her nose to the place where his heart beat just below. “I thought I’d never see you again.” RE: show me, who i am and who i could be; laura pony - tobiah - 10-01-2016 my memories are full of only black and blue; I should’ve cut my losses long before I knew you.
———————————————————— tobiah RE: show me, who i am and who i could be; laura pony - australis - 11-04-2016 He stiffens and she realizes her mistake. She can see it in the way that he straightens, in the way that his expression flattens and changes. This hurt, this loss, it makes her selfish. It builds a barrier between them that forces them apart and she is not quick enough to knock it down again. “Tobiah,” she tries, her eyes sad and round and uncertain, “I’m sorry.” Her gaze peels from his, flung skyward and away because shame makes it hard to look at him. “I’ve never hurt like this before,” she whispers, and it sounds ridiculous even to her ears, “I don’t know how to do this.” But he is better than her, more than her. He makes it better and it is effortless. Always. He tells her, and it feels like a promise even if he fumbles when he offers it to her. She pauses, wide-eyed and uncertain, and then reaches out to trace the lines of confusion etched into his pale, curved face with the soft of her trembling lips. Always. The word echoes in her ears until the pounding of her heart has matched the rhythm and it is all she can hear, all she is aware of until she remembers how to breathe again. And then- “Always.” She agrees quietly, urgently, from beneath the furrow of a dark and white brow as she steps close again to fold herself into the warmth of his broad chest. Her cheek finds his shoulder and her lips find a spot of pale gold where she can trace the outline of color, following the edge where cream ends and white begins. “Promise me,” she whispers against his skin, closing her eyes because it is so much to ask, too much, and yet she will because she must, because she cannot help herself, “promise me you’ll stay. We can discover this place together, we can make it okay.” She pulls away so that she can see his face, so that she’ll know if he promises her something that he doesn’t want. “I don’t want you to have to come looking for me,” she tells him at last, vulnerable, and her chest heaves with the effort of speaking, of confessing, “I just want you to stay.” RE: show me, who i am and who i could be; laura pony - tobiah - 11-05-2016 my memories are full of only black and blue; I should’ve cut my losses long before I knew you.
———————————————————— tobiah RE: show me, who i am and who i could be; laura pony - australis - 11-05-2016 It is so much to ask of him, more than she even realizes – she does not understand what it is he has to lose by making such a promise. If she did, she would not have asked. But he makes the promise anyway, leaning down to press his cheek against her neck and for a moment she is breathless with the familiarity of this gesture. How many times had she seen her father do the same to her mother, press his ragged worries to her skin and breathe deep so as to find that peace again. Her heart stutters in her chest, but she is quiet when she presses her mouth against his shoulder in return, tasting that impossibly pale gold with tremulous lips. Always. She thinks again, and she finds that word has an entirely new weight. Instinctively, uncertainly, she shrugs back from him, touching her mouth to the soft hollow at the corner of his lip so that he will know it is not him she is shying from. But she needs to see his face now, to trace the quiet dark in his eyes and the lines of faint tension where they coil beneath his skin. He is a stranger. He is distant and silent where she is loud and reflexive with her embraces. He craves solitude where she craves a world with no boundaries, no edges, no separation between the wilds and civilization. But, he is her stranger. He is hers and she can feel him like a weight in her chest, and that weight is appeased only by his promise, by that strange word, always. “Tobiah.” She breathes, a sound like tempered birdsong, a release of pain and sorrow and longing – for many things, though mostly for a world erased. But she finds solace in the way he watches her, and so she reaches out to push his forelock aside, to find the impossibly soft whorl of gold fur beneath it and press a quiet kiss to it. “Thank you.” It is in this moment that she knows for sure, that even despite the new weight of an old word, an average word, she wants this always. This promise, this stranger – and the notion is terrifying. It steals the air from her lungs and leaves her heart pounding in her chest until it is just an unrecognizable ache and she is sure there is only pink and ragged pulp left to mark that it ever existed at all. She thought home was gone, ruined, obliterated when the world unbecame, but suddenly here it is, just as it always would have been, and it exists within that single promise. She feels uncharacteristically shy when she folds back against him, fitting easily beneath the curve of his neck. There is less desperation in the gesture now, less wild flashing in her eyes when they fall against his face for a single second before disappearing once more beneath the dark tangles of an unruly forelock. A sigh builds in her chest, climbing to her lips and steadying the racing of her heart when she closes her eyes and leans into him. “Where do we go, Tobiah,” a pause, breathless, an impossible half-smile pressed into his chest, “where do we start?” RE: show me, who i am and who i could be; laura pony - tobiah - 11-13-2016 my memories are full of only black and blue; I should’ve cut my losses long before I knew you.
———————————————————— tobiah |