"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
Mandan is at a loss; no horns, no canyons, no children.
Why then, is he still here? Because, murmurs the heart.
The bulk of him is persistent, resistant even to the thing that afflicts them all in the end - Death. Life rides his back hard, flays his bay sides to strips of tough leather and does not let him slow, even as he grows that much more older.
Why not? Because, the heart talks a little louder.
That dumb slick muscle just won’t shut up. It fails to cease its erratic babble - thump, thump, thump. He is no fool to wish an end to it, though sometimes… No! It can’t stop - won’t stop, and he is miserable. This is no life for him, no horns atop his head to fuel his look of menace. No badlands to hide himself away in, even in his pathetic attempt to keep a herd. No miniatures of his massive self to dot the landscape on their stick-thin legs, to make that dumb slick muscle inside him grow in pride and joy. Nothing, there is but nothingness there now as there has been for years.
He is used to it, he tells himself.
Nothingness is not new to him, even as he stalks in long strides beneath the snowy branches of the dark sparse trees. He hates it here, a little less than he hates the meadow, but hates it just the same - these places hold too keenly to their memories, make them shiver and shake like ghosts or smoke, and his eyes keep sliding away from the edges of the trail. If he looks straight ahead, he cannot see them - only the snowy path, the way before, not behind.
while collecting the stars, I connected the dots. I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
She does not like the deep forest – has not liked it since the day she fell in among these branches to find her wings trapped in briar and bramble. But even more than she dislikes the forest she finds that she dislikes the way such resentment feels when it bubbles and sits in the pit of her stomach. So she is here now to reconcile, to forgive the branches for pulling her out of the sky, to forgive the thorns for burying their teeth in the soft skin beneath those deep russet feathers.
Exist is quiet as she slips through trees, noting how different everything looked with the life leached out of it from heavy snow and bitter cold. She hardly recognizes anything Lior had shown her when found her trapped and set her free again, not even the paths they had use to trace back to the meadow, worn and faded like an eraser dragged through the dirt.
Her eyes lift to the sky for a moment, tracing the pale shapes of soft steel clouds gathering below the horizon, clouds that promised more weather, more snow. As if in reflex, her dark wings lift and widen, trapping the wind and gathering it beneath them as they do when she flies. Even when her eyes drop again, settling like smooth pieces of jade among the brown and grey of slumbering trees, her wings still stay aloft. They know what she chooses to ignore, what she tries to amend – that her place is not in these dying woods, it is with those stark steel clouds in the skies above.
There is a sound to her left, and it is not a quiet sound, not padded steps carefully concealed. It is the shuffle of legs in deep snow, the rattle of bone-dry branches pushed aside. She turns and she is curious, patient, though her wings angle forward as if they mean to see him before she can. He spills from the trees and first he is unremarkable - tall and strong and as brown as the trees had been the last time she had seen them. But when her eyes find his, when she traces the hollows of his face and finds only shadow waiting to greet her, something stutters in her chest.
It is a look she knows well – dark eyes in dark face, a mother of two children she knew not how to raise, with wounds in the deepest part of her soul that could never heal. These were her mothers eyes, Victra's eyes. It was the kind of hurt that Exist most wanted to heal, the kind of pain she most wanted to ease. But her abilities worked only on flesh and though the heart was a muscle, these wounds were not physical ones. She doesn’t notice when it happened, when her feet carried her close enough to press her face against his neck (she must, she must, he feels so familiar), but suddenly she is beside him and her wings are tucked to her ribs, her face delicate and upturned to help carry the weight of the shadows that spill from him.
“You must be a friend,” she tells him in a whisper-voice, pulling away long enough to see the dark again, “these woods keep bringing me friends. That’s how I know.” She pauses to press her nose to his shoulder again, her eyes furrowed and a frown hiding in the corners of her lips, “I’m Exist.”
Love hurts, says the heart. I know, mumbles the brain.
He cannot reconcile the land and love; they are two thorny tumors that prick his heart and turn it cancerous and black. If possible, it is shriveled and shrunken, like yesterday’s apple picked fresh from the orchard and then carelessly tossed away after a single bite.
Love is foolish, says the brain. I know, sighs the heart.
Look ahead, he reminds himself, as his eyes start to stray towards the ghosts that spin themselves into existence out of the snowfall. They leap and twirl, and he is afraid to look at them in case they bear familiar shapes - lover, mother, and child after child. It is cruel how memory claws at his gut, hungry for acknowledgement but he turns his face away from it. Memory holds no power, he thinks, if he does not give in to it.
His hoof knocks against a submerged root and he nearly sinks to his knees in the snow. Once, he was never this careless! It catches him in a halt, momentarily surprised as his dark eyes find the culprit that tripped him - a wizened thick leg of an oak snaking underfoot. He snorts, shakes his head, and stumbles onward; his knees feel bruised (what part of him doesn’t?) and in time, they’ll heal unlike the other parts of him that stayed black and blue, becoming a memory in the membrane and tissue of him. (Cut him open, he just might bleed bruises, not blood.) That misstep makes him hate the forest that much more, even as he tries terribly to break from it but the trees seem endless, like everything else these days.
When he does break from their stranglehold upon him, he does so near another that gets no look from him. He does not see her for the space around him that is suddenly gratifying in its openness and freedom, and because of it, he sucks in a great rattling gasp of air that scalds his lungs and he coughs up that first taste of something other than forest from his throat in a phlegmy hack. Still, even that cannot chase the shadows from his face, almost rendering it gaunt and fierce in the way that it has ravaged his flesh - he may look strong, but looks are decidedly deceptive, and though the muscle is not weak in him, it thirsts less and less for stamina and speed, begins to deteriorate until he is but a brown pathetic shadow of himself.
Mandan snapped his head around at the sound of snow sliding over hooves trying to be quiet and creeping; but as it happened, she was too small - too quick - too close, and her face is already buried in his neck before he can do anything about it. He cannot help it, but his lips lift away from his teeth as she pulls back and turns that delicate face up to him - he longs to bite it, rend it to shreds, leave only bone to show for it all. Except, he does nothing but sneer and look down his long nose at her because she is too small to harm, too reminiscent of his own daughters who used to press themselves against him like she does. Maybe it is something in her smallness that undoes him, softens the sneer until it is a ghost of a smile lurking in his black lips.
Friend?
She is so certain, it almost breaks his heart all over again. He has never been a friend to anyone - not his brothers or sisters, not his lover or those he mounts in the midst of their frenzied fits of animal passion, but almost maybe to those small coltish beings that gamboled around him, impish smiles on their faces and pure adoration in their unchanged eyes until the world seized them in her harsh grasp and in the end, even they left him. Just like she will, thinking him a fair enough whim for now as the two of them stand alone in this snowy corner of the forest, just looking at one another. It is the press of her nose to his shoulder, the offering of her name from that little mouth that makes him blink away the thoughts that steal through his brain.
“Mandan,” he says gruffly, shrugging her off of him in a careless but somehow benign (as if he tried to be gentle, for her sake - only, for her sake) way.
while collecting the stars, I connected the dots. I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
She has enough sense to think that this gesture should scare her, that dark lips peeled back over flat, pale teeth are meant to frighten little girls with earnest faces. But no one has ever shown her their teeth before, never buried them in the soft angles of skin the shade of rust and pale copper, so she does not recoil from him. Instead she watches, brow deepening to a frown beneath that dark red forelock, with eyes like cool, smooth jade against his face – and when the bared teeth fade to a sneer and the sneer fades to the ghost of a smile, she knows she will not be afraid the next time either.
Still though, some part of her is ruffled, offended, and she steps away from him so that the cold air filters in to the place where once she warmed with her body. Her wings lift from her withers but they do not unfurl to their full and arrogant length, hovering instead over the small of her narrow back. Rapidly, the russet feathers melt together, thinning and stretching to form the deep gold membrane of dragon wings. The bones that slash through the gold like the veins in leaves are the same shade of deep apricot that darkens the rest of her skin, and they end in the gleaming curve of a steel grey talon.
She shifts where she stands, turning first away and then back towards him, the effect much like pacing – though her eyes never leave his face. It is only when he offers a word, his name, that she stills again and finds herself perched at his shoulder with eyes that narrow in indecision. “I could be wrong though.” She says at last, softening, and there is a smile on her lips that pulls at the edge of her frowning mouth. “Maybe you’re not a friend.” It is an accusation on any other lips, but from her the words are not pointed, not sharp like the edge of a steel blade. “Maybe I’m the friend this time.”
This time she doesn’t reach out to touch his neck- though the impulse is strong. Instead she falls in beside him, careful to tuck the red and gold of her newly taloned wings against the curve of her ribs so that they do not brush his side. And then, in a voice that is equally soft and stubborn, “Where were you headed Mandan, I’ll come too.”
The heart says be nice.
The brain snaps back with a forceful no; all the niceness bled out of him long ago.
He has misplaced his manners in a forgotten corner of lands as feral as he is. The land and the laws of it said manners had no business there, or feelings. Only instinct and perseverance could rule and he gave his head and his heart over to them. Lawlessness is all that he has known in what feels like forever until he came back to this godforsaken realm, not sure why he even bothered to be here.
(Each time he came back, it was like dying all over again - only he never died, just kept living and living, and losing.)
Baring his teeth does not scare her in the least bit; some animal part of him finds that admirable that she does not quail in the face of his meanness but bears it stoically and earns his begrudging respect in the process. His black gaze takes in her frowning face and the jade eyes (a green not at all similar to his daughter, but it is a green all the same that makes him think of Ceremony and her dark green skin) even as she steps away from him and the cold air comes rushing in to take her place. The cold he can tolerate, it is the heat of her tucked up against him that makes the memories loom large in his mind - a lover, pink hair, and a line of sons and daughters afterwards to take her place.
He thinks of his son, but only because of the way her wings express her agitation. It almost pulls a chuckle from his laughless gut but he squashes it back down as the feathers dissolve to membrane and gold. Mandan eyes the talons at the ends, and in a fit of desperation, misses the horns that once graced the top of his head. The spiraling black threat of them are gone and instead of the freedom he should feel at the lack of their heaviness, he feels only an innate sorrow that feels a lot like a thorn in his side. He’s not sure why her talons are reminiscent of his addax horns, and puzzlement lifts the shadow from his face for a brief moment - he almost looks handsome, but haggard, made old before his time.
She disturbs him; in ways he cares not to explore.
His eyes track her pace, every shift towards and away from him and the sneer almost returns to his mouth. It is the sour offering of his name that brings her back to his side, to perch there like a nervous glaring dragon - it’s the apricot and jade of her, he tells himself, and not the fact that he finds her mesmerizing, if for all the things she reminds him of that he was never meant to have.
You are, (wrong that is) the brain says in response to her. Maybe, says the heart, more than a little desperate to taste more small kindnesses from her - he’s starved it for so long, it is dry like a desert, and cracked.
He sighs; it seems he cannot shake her - she is worse than fleas in the summer, but he almost smiles again. Soft, but stubborn, so alike to his daughters… he almost softens towards her but she is too pigheaded, too curious, to naive to think she can fix it all. He’s been broken for so long that he knows nothing else, cannot conduct himself in any manner other than than in abject meanness. But he remembers that baring his teeth did nothing to scare her, if only he head his horns! His face is pinched and sour in its expression, like he has tasted something overripe and rotten. Pah!
“I had no destination in mind, here is the same as anywhere else.” it is the most he’s said to her; none of the lands he could have gone to still exist besides the meadow and the field, and he has no business in either - not any more. He has no business here; no horns, no sons or daughters, no lover - just a terrible engulfing emptiness that somehow makes his heart heavy with sick sad life still. He looks down at her, small and determined against his side and just sighs, what else was he going to do with her?
(Kick maybe, chase her off. Hurt her, like he’s been hurt. He can’t, a dim forgotten part of him that is still nice makes him tolerate her.)
while collecting the stars, I connected the dots. I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
There is a small, sad part of her that warns her to leave him be, warns her that she should know better than to stay when he would clearly be so much more pleased with the quiet of solitude. She can see it in the stiffness of his body, in the shadow-sneer that still ghosts his lips when he turns to glance at her with dark, void eyes. She saw it, too, in teeth bared and ugly, flashed like a warning in her face when they should’ve been buried in the soft of her pale copper neck.
But the same thing that drew her to him before, that broken familiarity, still holds her close and fast to him now. It is the dark that clings to his face, the bottomless depths of eyes like the night sky. When she peers inside it feels like falling forever, like loneliness. Mothers eyes were like that now, sad and defeated, sharp where once they had been soft – or so Malis had told her. But something had happened and it had changed the bay mare, cut a chasm through her chest that only ever seemed to pull further apart – a chasm that must have torn her in two when the whole world changed, because the mare that was, she never came back.
It makes her wonder about Mandan, about the dark in his eyes.
But for a moment, when her wings stretch and lift restlessly against her back, when feather becomes membrane and the talons gleam like steel, his face changes. It only lasts a moment – the tightening of a dark brow, the gleam of something flickering in those eyes – but it is like seeing the man beneath, the man from before. The one still buried under so much life and scar tissue that he no longer remembers how to be.
Her brow furrows beneath her forelock, and she does not notice the way her head lilts uncertainly to one side when she takes one single small step in his direction. Her indigo nose lifts to him again, hovering hesitantly, but she lets it fall back to her chest before it has a chance to brush against the dark of his face. “I think I saw you, just for a second.” She isn’t sure she even means to say it aloud, but the whispered words are gone before she can stop them, gone before she can put them back in her chest. But she did see him, she feels sure of it, like an escaped memory of that man that was.
It is hard to pull her eyes from his face, harder still to look away. But when his face sours she finds that it becomes much easier to do, that suddenly she does not want to look at him. ‘Here is the same as anywhere,’ she hears him say, and the wrongness of it snaps those pale green eyes back to his wild face. Nowhere is the same as anywhere else, not in this changed world, but something keeps her quiet, holds her tongue – and she finds that she does not want to risk pushing him further still than he chooses to be. “You should visist Tephra sometime.” She says instead, uncharacteristically quiet, soft when her eyes lift and fall from a face that remains closed off from her. “There are streams of magma that light the plains like shooting stars, it’s beautiful at night.”
02-21-2017, 11:38 PM (This post was last modified: 02-21-2017, 11:40 PM by mandan.)
She begins to wear him down, like water against rock until his tolerance becomes grim acceptance. This is a shadow that he cannot shake; cannot begin to admit to himself that he does not want to shake her off because she clings, insistent, to the crags of his hard flesh with her own tantalizing softness and naked vulnerability. Some dim monstrous part of him begs to eat her up in whatever way is possible for him to destroy all that soft sad innocence but another part of him holds him back, keeps the monster at a distance and it looks out of his dark eyes, sometimes, angry and hungry.
He thinks she stares too much, like she can divine in his face all the pitfalls and troubles that led to the here and the now, and the hush of her beside him. Mandan still thinks he ought to bite and kick, act out in all manner of brash hate but he can’t - it just isn’t in him. She is too much like his daughters - all of them, like his lovers, and there comes a tumbling of memories in his mind that is painful to bear and he turns his shadowed face away from her because she is too sweet to behold the abject sorrow that fills his face. He thinks that she should never know a heart as broken as his, but the world will break her heart in two because that is the way of it, like it broke his and nothing, not even a kick or a bite can spare her from it.
Then he thinks, why should he care? Why should he want to protect her from all the world’s sorrows that it will throw at her? And he snorts, because she has weakened his resolve by her simple beautiful stubborn persistence. It confounds him, that she remains in his terrible sad presence and dares to look upon his old rough face. He swings his face around to her, his surprise blatant and black like the blaze of anger in his eyes. Mandan cannot think of a single thing to say to her except that she is crazy to think she caught a glimpse of him - he’d been long dead and there was nothing left but the bits of heart that crumbled to dust, and he felt so barren beneath her unwavering (maybe all-seeing) gaze.
“You think you saw something that no longer exists,” he says gruffly, at last.
The tiny whispering spark of wistfulness in her voice is like a punch to his gut and he takes in a sharp breath, the air sucking past his teeth in a slight whistle as she speaks of magma and stars. It sounds too good to be true, too beautiful to behold and if he was a sucker for anything, it was a land as wild and rugged as his face. She almost had him, almost suckered him in with her vision of some place that most likely is the same as any other - something they call home, something that he sees and leaves in the space of a few breaths, never still and never staying, even if he thinks some things were once worth staying for. Except, nothing ever made him stay - not her face, not this face, but the things that come out of his mouth are not designed to drive her away; they are adamant, as hard as he is, but somehow different - she has worn him down, grim acceptance that clouds his face, makes it hazy but less dark somehow. “Show me,” he barks, intrigued but not - it seems like a lie, even to himself, and not - something, her maybe, draws the slimmest glimmer of his old self out, adventurous and brash and charming, but he none of those things now and maybe never was, just delusional and vacant.
He feels empty, exhausted even in the brightness of her bright copper self. (Like a star that he cannot touch.)
while collecting the stars, I connected the dots. I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
She does not see the monster in those eyes, the hungering beast that is so enraged by her soft and her sweet and the quiet way she cannot pull her eyes from his dark face. Or if she does, she mistakes it for shadow, for some shade of brokenness that she wants to soothe away. It is worse when he turns his face from her, worse because it feels like burrs in her chest and only his eyes can soothe the points back down. She does reach out to touch him again, forgets the bared teeth and the sneer, forgets that he does not want this because is greedy and she is stubborn and she does not like the way he makes her ache inside.
Her mouth is soft against his neck, a question this time, laced with an uncertainty that is so rarely reflected in that beautiful copper and blue face. “Mandan?” She asks, she wills him back to her, wishes he was not so insistent on pushing her away. She sighs and her nose drops to his shoulder, her breath light and warm in the crook of deep mahogany skin. Her lids close over her eyes, pale emeralds returned to their graves, and she focuses instead on the magic curling in her belly. “Mandan.” She says again, a whisper and she is breathless, tremulous. Inhaling sharply she pushes the magic towards him, a tendril of curling, coiling blue light that settles and dissipates across his skin, seeping in to kiss the broken places – the bruises and the aches and the things she cannot see. When she opens her eyes it is because the magic has returned to its sleeping place in her belly, it is because he is healed in the only way she can reach him.
Not his eyes though, not those quiet shadows.
Not his heart either, but she is not done trying.
When he turns back to look at her and there is only harshness in his expression, gruff barbs in his voice, she merely flicks her ears at him, uncertain. “I think maybe I saw something that you’ve forgotten how to recognize.” She tells him at last, soft, aching to reach out and erase the tension from his face with lips that are warm and gentle and the color of buried gems. But she holds back at it makes her chest ache, makes her skin tremble because is not used to being denied this closeness she has always known, even before she took that first breath. Then, softly, touching those tremulous lips to the curve of his jaw before dropping her chin again because this indecision is ruinous, “But it’s okay if he doesn’t exist, I like this man, too.”
Her brow furrows, deep enough to crease that beautiful copper face, and this time it is her turn to shift away from him. She means to hide that treacherous ache from him, that vulnerability that slips across her face so that he might notice and stop forcing her away. But she doesn’t want him to notice, doesn’t want him to bear the burden of the quiet affection she feels gathering like warm coals in the hollow of her chest.
She is surprised, though, when he asks her to show him Tephra, her almost-home of light and dark and fire stars. It is enough to tug her eyes back to him, like a hand beneath her chin. “Now?” She asks, surprised, but she recovers quickly and speaks again before he has a chance to change his mind and tell her no. “It’s this way.” She amends instead, touching her lips to his jaw before turning to lead him back through the trees, looking for where the trunks began to thin to indicate the edge of the forest. They cross the meadow next, and when they reach the shoreline she turns again to touch his neck, though this time there is a smile on her mouth, light and eager, “How do you feel about swimming, Mandan?” A pause and she turns from him to look out past the ocean, those pale eyes settling instead on the ripple of land in the distance, hazy and dark in the fading light. “I’ll admit, it’s been a while for me,” she lifts her chin at him to catch those dark eyes, “I usually just fly.” She unfurls her wings pointedly, and they are soft and sleek, tawny and copper and gold and the feather tips brush delicately across the deep mahogany of his gleaming skin.
His heart has become an onion.
(Meat, vegetable - it is the one and the same to him.)
But she starts to peel back the layers of him one by one; she becomes his undoing.
It is beautiful how it happens; how it hurts. A heart can only suffer so much and his can no longer bear the looks that she gives him - both hopeful and stubborn. He thought he suffered her because she was both of these things and that reminded him of his daughters, but he realizes it is something altogether wholly hers’ that they never had - some sense of spirit, unflinching and bright, that rises up through her copper skin and he thinks then, that he is far too old for her and too battered, too bruised, for her to waste time on. Except that he cannot turn her away now (besides, his feeble attempts to do just that had failed him!) nor does he wish to, not now, not now.
Because she undoes him, layer by layer, until he is raw and exposed and something like how he once was - bright, like her. Hopeful, even.
It is the feel of her mouth on his neck, the way she uses his name against him as a question.
He cannot look at her just yet, even as her nose drops further to his shoulder and finds a home there - no, nestles, like she builds a nest of breath and being in the crook of his skin. Mandan almost sighs; the thought of home was never a thing within his grasp but she makes it almost possible, and with just those small meaningful touches that he never thought he’d know again, not from a mare - not from a… a what? What exactly is she to him? That is the darkness talking; it rises up, rears back it’s ugly head and pummels him with doubt and reservation, and years of guilt that try to drag him back down again. Until she says his name in a tremulous breath, and only then, does he almost look at her.
Not yet.
There is magic afoot; he feels it spiral up and out of her and he squeezes his eyes shut against the things that she does with those brilliant blue fingers of light. He can feel them moving through him, a pulse different from his own that sparks and beats and begins to heal things in him that he never knew needed healing. The one thing that does not heal is his heart, and the light cannot drive the shadows from his eyes but he feels changed, somehow. Because of her.
The darkness reacts;
It grabs him, makes him look harshly at her and bark at her in a gruff voice when all she means to do is soothe him.
(Dimly, some part of him is sad that he acts this way towards her but knows it is the best way to keep the hurt from repeating itself all over again. In the end, he knows how it will be - she’ll leave, or he will, it doesn’t matter who but that’s how it always happens.)
Her eyes and her mouth are magic too.
They undo him further.
“I don’t know what you think you saw…” he begins, falters. How can she be so sure? He doesn’t even know if that self still exists despite her soft assertion that it does. It is her trembling lips on her jaw though that cracks the hardness of him until it crumbles right off and leaves him starkly vulnerable and soft like he has never been. He swallows back a lump of feeling when she confides that she likes him this way too, harsh and unforgiving. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to be those things to her. He wants to be so much more but has forgotten how to be anything other than just that - harsh and unforgiving.
Mandan relents;
He reaches for her at the exact moment her face furrows and she turns away from him.
It is good that she has turned away because she cannot see the panic stricken look that takes him then, as he thinks a stupid thought - that the act of him almost touching her turned her away, like flesh scalded and withdrawn. He has to shake his head to relieve himself of this terrible feeling and misses the heavy press of horns on his head, misses the way her lips felt on his skin. Even those are things he should forget. But her eyes find his and everything that feels like it should falls back into place (like stars falling into familiar constellations in the night).
Mandan was about to open his mouth to say yes but she charges on ahead before he can think better of his commitment to follow her (not that he could or would now), and his dumb stupor deepens the moment she touches his jaw again. He follows her, like a diligent dog, through the thinning trees and across the familiar meadow’s back until they reach a shoreline and though he has never been one to balk at water, he hesitates. He is about to indulge in a deep masculine laugh but it catches in his throat as she smiles, lifts her chin and looks him square in the eyes. Too late! He knows he is caught and the way the tips of the feathers brush his skin does something new to him.
“I…” he starts to speak but stops. He doesn’t feel right all of a sudden. Fly, she had said. His flesh bubbles then breaks open; damn the gods, it hurts! Hurts in a way that his horns emerging had not hurt but this is new, like she is, and in the breath of seconds and heartbeats and a sickening rip of skin and crack of bone, he staggers away from her to disappear in a fury of swirling air and one sharp noise of pain that leaves his newly panting mouth. When the air settles, he is left in a puddle of fallen feathers and tufts of horsehair, small rivulets of blood trickle down his sides and there is now a great glossy black crow’s wing on either side. He looks at them in shock, then turns accusatory eyes to her. “Did you do this to me?”
It must have been her magic that pulled something else out of him. Not healed it, but made it come alive. He is not sure how he feels about having wings instead of his horns, but the pain and the exhaustion and the overwhelming sense of her breaks him for the last time. Mandan starts to laugh, it is boisterous at first but subsides in a fit of further panting from him as he gapes at her. “I don’t even know how to use these things.” he admits, crestfallen as he takes a weary step towards her. Of its own volition, his lips find her neck and press there as if the feel of her skin beneath him can steady him. “Exist.” he mumbles into her neck, before he pulls back to look at her.
while collecting the stars, I connected the dots. I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
He reaches for her while she is turned away, but she must know, must feel his eyes against her face or his breath roiling like fog against her neck because she turns, pale eyes soft and narrow, and watches him. But she is too late, waited too long, and by the time her eyes find his, drift down to touch those pooling shadows, he is as he has been. Distant, stoic, gruff when his brow furrows and he watches her darkly from beneath it.
She finds that she does not mind though, or maybe does not believe him anymore, because her lips have touched his shoulder and his neck and the curve of his elegant face and still, he has stayed. It feels important, relevant, good that he has, for now, chosen her prying over the safety of leaving, and it stirs something deep inside her. A curiosity, an instinct, the barest flicker in her belly. A heat, an ache, a longing that she can barely make sense of. But when he turns those dark eyes on her, when he does not disappear each time she noses his skin, that flicker deepens and darkens until she is knotted by it.
He follows so easily, almost willingly, she thinks, as they leave the forest and cross the meadow together. It makes it easy to forget his earlier gruffness, the way he had bared smooth teeth in her face and pushed her back with the same, dark scowl. They walk slowly, and she slows her stride, dropping back so that she is by his shoulder and her eyes can jump to his face, his neck, the ripple of sinuous muscle beneath smooth mahogany. Part of her is making sure that he does not change his mind and leave – she would follow him, she is certain, coax him back with her stubbornness, or her quiet affection if sheer will was not enough. But there is another part of her that watches him just to appease her curiosity, to be lost in the beauty of his wild face and that heavy expression, to be close enough at his shoulder that she can smell winter on his skin, the forest in the dark tangles of his mane. Her lips wander too, slipping against him to touch his shoulder and taste the hint of salt and earth, a musk that is so uniquely his, and she does so unabashedly, with a growing affection that even he cannot miss.
They are both still once they reach the shoreline, quiet and unmoving, carved from stone while they trace an unending blue that roils and waves and splashes near their feet. I.. He starts and stops, and the pause is like a hook in her belly pulling her close because she can see in his face that something is different, something is not right. At first she wonders if it is the water, if there are demons beneath the surface waiting to pull him under, memories like shark, like weights around his heels. “Mandan?” She asks, quiet and uncertain, slipping beneath his neck and against his chest, soft and sinuous and meant to distract from whatever it is that is trying to steal him from her. Her lips are hesitant at first when they roam across his skin, tracing shapes and tasting shadows, more urgent when he stays quiet and she imagines some distance widening between them. She touches his chest, his shoulder, the nearest ribs, up higher and –
“Oh!” She says, breathes, is startled by the new bulge beneath his skin, horrified by the way the skin stretches and bursts, spider-webs of flesh come undone. It is the beads of blood that spur her into action, small rubies filled with him, with pain, gleaming in the cores of those bulges, and she pushes her nose against him, pushes her magic into him in a way that is almost desperate. But he staggers back and away, pushing new distance between them, and it takes everything not to follow, everything to just stand back and allow the hurt to find him. She can hear the moment bone and feather rip through his skin, a wet tear and the way he pants when he finally turns back to look at her, and all these things make her flinch. Did you do this to me? He asks, and she is not ready for the accusation that is etched into the shadow of his dark face.
Her ears pin themselves to the tangles of a copper mane, wounded and offended, and her words are sharp when they find him. “Of course not, Mandan,” a pause and she softens just a little, her eyes drawn reflexively by her healers heart to the rivulets of blood tracing down his shoulders, “I do not have that ability.” She is firm in this, but her wings betray their pleasure at this new happening, at the pair of black wings that now perch at his withers. Her wings have always been arrogant things, and they unfurl to their widest, shifting suddenly to fire - though it is not real fire and there is no heat or smoke, nothing that burns. Instead they flicker and gleam, flashing gold and orange and red, blue at the tips where the flame would be the hottest. When they are satisfied that his own wings have noticed, that they are instinctively impressed in the way wings should be, the fire flattens to feather again. The colors are all the same, but they are soft and smooth when they resettle against the curve of her back.
“Mandan,” she says, and her ears have unpinned, her face is soft again, softer when he laughs, “I won’t ever hurt you like that.” She wants to close the distance between them again, wants to collide with his chest and push her healing into his veins, clean away his wounds, his blood, with gentle strokes of her tongue. But he was the one that had pulled away, he was the one that had searched for the distance to put between them. So she stays frozen, unhappy, her eyes on his face, his neck, his wings, his wounds again. I don’t even know how to use these things. He confesses and steps towards her. She smiles, faintly, unfurling her wings again for him to see. In the wind they lift and lilt, angling the breeze beneath them in a way that is reflexive. “It is instinctive,” she says, taking a step closer, willing the same from him again, “wings are arrogant things, they will know what to do. You just have to let them.”
Then he is beside her again, his lips against her copper neck and she is so soft beneath him, reflexively arching her neck to be closer. “Exist.” He says, he mumbles, he breathes against her skin and she cannot help the shiver that races beneath her skin. “Mandan.” Her voice is whisper soft, uncertain, but when he pulls back to look at her she follows him, ducking beneath his neck again to curl against his chest. It is as much out of selfish affection as it is out of necessity, because she means to heal him and she has no way of knowing how deep the wounds run – if it is just the knots at his shoulder or the skin beneath, maybe even the bones of fragile wings erupted too quickly. Her mouth finds his shoulder, and it as much a kiss as it is anything else, but she uses the contact to push her healing into him, finding all of those broken places and filling them with pieces of herself. When she is done she is tired, not exhausted, but she droops against him softly like a wilted flower, lifting her mouth to his withers to clean away the blood. She makes no effort to peel away from him – and even though she is tired, she is not too tired to stand on her own, to step away and fly to Tephra. There is something good about this closeness, about how his lips had felt against her neck, how her name had sounded carved into her skin by the mumble of his voice. So she stays because she is selfish, because despite the way he always scowled at her, she is stubborn. “Mandan?” She asks after a moment, subdued in the curve of his chest and with her cheek against his shoulder, “we should probably go, it’ll be dark soon.” She needs him to be the first to pull away, the one to put that distance between them again because she cannot, because it feels too right, too safe, too perfect pressed against the beating of his heart and she knows she is too selfish to pull away. “Have you decided which we will do?” She asks again, twisting beneath him to run her lips along the underneath of his jaw, we because she is unwilling to leave his side now, unable. “Will we fly or swim?”
