"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
02-19-2017, 06:50 PM (This post was last modified: 02-19-2017, 06:51 PM by leliana.)
goodbye, my almost lover goodbye, my hopeless dream --
It was difficult, impossible, for Leliana to discern just where it all went wrong. Was it the moment that she woke up and saw Dovev curled next to her? When she healed him instead of pushed away? Was it when she followed him to Ischia? Slept so peacefully next to him? Was it when she nearly killed herself trying to heal him from the bear attack or when she let herself get swept away in embraces she knew where not hers to enjoy? In hind sight, it all had become convoluted in her head, the threads of the past few months weaving in and out, tightening a noose around her slender throat. They all were killing her, every day.
She wandered, more and more often from Tephra’s borders, but no matter where she went, she found that she was haunted by his face. There was no corner where she was truly safe from it—no place where she had not had a small piece of her dug out and expelled. She settled for the Forest, but stuck to the borders of it, the darkness of night slipping through the cracks and illuminating her with a silvery glow.
When she reached a small enclave, the trees clearing just a little, she came to a stop and tipped her head back to look at the stars as they swam in the constellations above her. The wings by her side shifted without her knowing, turning the same silver as the moon, the feathers gleaming as they pressed to her side, wrapped her in their down embrace. A single tear fell down her mahogany cheek but no more.
She couldn’t wallow like this forever; she couldn't break apart. Somehow, she would need to find a way to piece herself back together, to be strong for Exist. She had seen what had happened when her mother had given herself over to the darkness, and she couldn’t do that to her scattered family.
Leliana swallowed once and then closed her eyes.
Just one more night to mourn, and then she would heal.
It’s a wonder, to be made whole.
A boy who was born a glass house in a world of stone-throwers – a boy who died - is the kind of boy who most appreciates this particular fact. To most, it was a thing they bemoaned – the stripping of their powers, a great equalizing shriek across the land – but to him, it was a miracle. His body, thick and solid, his wings changed from useless paper-thin things to something strong, the kind of wings that can bear things aloft.
(What’s the opposite of a wonder? Of a miracle? The opposite of this is dying beneath a wolf-girl’s feet, the opposite is falling in love with things that would destroy him.)
(Though waking up, alive, was a miracle, though it was only one side of the story, his side. Her side: a bargain, a promise to a magician with shadows in her eyes and venom in her smile. Not a miracle, after all.)
Though he is whole now, a normal horse, by anyone’s eye, he does not seek a kingdom. Kingdoms leave a bad taste in his mouth (he remembers waterfalls, and slick rocks that would shatter him if he took one errant step), he prefers the meadow and the forest, prefers a nomadic nature. It’s in the forest that he now wanders, stepping along a path lit in moonlight.
He doesn’t meant to startle her, but he does, her small motion catches his eye. A darker mare, wings folded to her back.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t meant to interrupt.”
He says this as if he had happened upon a conversation rather than simply upon her and the stars, and he chides himself a bit. He wonders if he should continue on, but he is alone – much too alone – and he is braver, when he is whole, when he is lit by moonlight.
goodbye, my almost lover goodbye, my hopeless dream --
Leliana had never felt fragmented—not by her gifts.
Even when she had wandered off the Mountain, her hip pressed into her sister and her hazel eyes widening as her wings were stripped from her to be replaced with something static and unchanging. Even when she felt her healing, that thing as part of her as her bones, her marrow, leave her breast. Even then she did not feel unwhole. It was enough to have her sister by her side, to have her laughter ringing in her ears. Even when they had realized their mother was not coming back, it was enough to find solace in Tephra, under the watchful eye of Magnus, to grow up wild and free under the constant rain of ash, untethered, unbound.
But now—now she knew the meaning of it. She knew what it was to wake in the morning and feel a hollow in your chest, an ache you could not fill. She knew what it was to learn the meaning of wholeness, to find passion and fire in the touch of another, an unyielding need that drove you on, that weaved through your very soul. And then she knew what it was like to have that very fire taken from you. To have it burn so bright that it singed your fingers, left nothing in its wake. That’s what she was now: just the remains.
When she heard him, she dropped her head down and startled, a soft “Oh,” flying from her lips with the lightness of a bird. She turned her head to find him, delicate and yet deceivingly strong, the angles of his body belying the glass that would one day rise to claim it once more. “Oh, you’re not interrupting me.” Nothing but selfish mourning, nothing but the silent drowning. She turned her head toward him and ruffled the silver on her back, the motion moving them like water. “My name is Leliana.”
She took a step toward him and then paused, lifted leg slowly rooting to the ground once more.
“Please don’t leave,” she whispered, unable to stop herself reaching for the company.
He knows, quite literally, what it’s like to be shattered by love.
(Torn – again, quite literally – asunder between two impossible romances, women dressed in red flags, a woman he loved and a woman he still loves.)
What he cannot recall so distinctly is the exact feeling of the pain, of dying – memory has done its part, has blurred the memory, because pain such as that can only be experienced in the moment, but when it’s gone, all that’s left is a vague memory of the hurt. It’s a way of surviving. Of persisting.
There is still an ache in him as he thinks of her (how it had been like looking in a mirror, different colors but built by the same architects), he still carries this weight and perhaps that weight can be noted on him, but only if you know what to look for.
(Love – and the loss thereof, or the unsure nature of it, or the impossibility of it – has a gravity, a weight, pressing on the skin. These two strangers know this.)
She refuses his apology with a sweetness that keeps him there, and he smiles.
“I’m Contagion.”
(An ugly name, but his.)
She comes closer – not much, only a few feet – and it allows him to see her more clearly, see some of the crimson on her skin, as if she had walked through blood several days ago.
“Do you live here?”
He asks because he is unsure of what else to say, and because he wonders. Home is a queerly fascinating topic, to him, as most things we have never had are fascinating to us, strange and glimmering things just out of reach.
02-19-2017, 10:20 PM (This post was last modified: 02-20-2017, 03:24 AM by leliana.)
I waited for something and something died so I waited for nothing and nothing arrived
He seemed kind and part of her was surprised by that fact. Not because she had never encountered it before (she would be appalled if someone thought that—her life had been brought up by the kindest of hands, surrounded by the kindness of her sister, of Magnus, of the numerous Tephra residents), but rather because it had not become the default—not lately. Even Dovev, in all of his painful and soul-wrenching glory, had not been kind to her. His touch had been possessive, branding—a need that had stirred a fire in her belly, a passion in her soul—but it had not been sweet or soothing. It had broken, shattered…
She had always been the one left to heal the remains.
So she is surprised by the kindness in his voice, the softness in his gaze, and she repeats his name with like, her voice of fog wrapping around the syllables. “Contagion,” a name like a disease, like death, but it didn’t match the gentleness in his eyes, the sensitivity to the slopes of his face. She didn’t know who would press such a name, such a fate, upon a young boy, but she decided it was not his burden to carry.
“I do not,” she answered with a quiet, sad smile, her gaze turning toward the trees as they gathered around them, pressing in on all sides. “I actually live in a land called Tephra.” A light laugh. “It’s the one with the giant volcano,” a pause as she brings her light eyes back to him. Her expression dropped a little then, the control slipping to reveal just a hint of the sadness beneath the calm veneer.
“It doesn’t feel like home anymore though—even though I love the people who live there desperately.”
A pause, the confession feeling treacherous on her tongue.
“I’m not sure why I just told you that.”
it's our dearest ally, it's our closest friend it's our darkest blackout, it's our final end
02-22-2017, 06:21 PM (This post was last modified: 02-22-2017, 09:33 PM by Cassi.)
He might not have grown up kind had he been born into different circumstances, with a different form, a less frail form. There’s no way to know, if kindness was his natural state or if it was something begotten because of his fragility, the two things are long entwined.
(His parents were kind, in a way, but they were also cruel; leaving them there like that, their glass children. A passive cruelty, that act – not looking back as you followed her into the ocean.)
She offers her homeland’s name, and it’s distantly familiar, the way many of Beqanna’s lands are – names he knows indirectly, names overheard but not directed at him. This is common, for him. He nods, listening. She mentions the volcano, briefly, and he wonders what it’s like, to live near a thing capable of such destruction.
Something else follows, a confession - it doesn’t feel like home anymore - and this makes his heart twist for a moment. Had the waterfalls ever felt like home, or had it been the blinding nature of love, bewitching him? He has no answer, suspects he never will. Like his kindness and fragility, they are too entwined to be parsed out, made sense of.
“It happens, sometimes,” he says, “home stops feeling like home. Or it changes.”
And the meadow, the forest – do they feel like home, now? He doesn’t think so – more, they were the default, they are what he accepted.
“I used to live somewhere else,” he says, “but it stopped feeling like home.”
That’s easier to say than I died there.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, “it’s gone now, anyway.”
I waited for something and something died so I waited for nothing and nothing arrived
Being with him is easy in a way she doesn’t fully understand and yet wholly appreciates. He does not press demands into her flesh, does not brand her with his past, does not wring her dry. And so she does not stop herself when she takes a step closer to him, bridging the gap between them, the space between them beginning to feel somehow wrong. “Does it?” she questions, the sadness unmistakable in the lilt of her voice and in the bruises around her eyes. “Can home not be permanent? Can it not be unchanging?”
Another step toward him, her wings shifting at her sides, turning from the silver of the moonlight to the rich red of his coat, dappled with the same white that finds its way across his haunches. “Don’t answer that,” she finally decides with the smallest of smiles, now that she is close enough to feel the heat that rolls off his body, to feel his very presence. Reaching forward, her mouth finds the slope of his neck, the curve of muscle that lies beneath the flesh, and she whispers. “Don’t move for a second, okay?”
Closing her eyes, she hums low, the sound pleasantly feminine as she concentrates on loosening the healing gift from her chest and finding its way into him. She breathes low and deep as she focuses on the task at hand, at the way her gift navigates through him, rooting out the different pains and easing them.
His body is different though—and she frowns as she works, as she heals the various wounds both old and new in his body, the worry knotting in her chest the longer that she did. When she breaks from him, red muzzle leaving the red of his neck, there is a slight sheen of sweat on her, the effort clear in her gaze.
Her brows knit together and concern blossoms in her eyes as she finds his gaze, their breath mingling. Questions tangle on her tongue, but only one manifests in the air between them: “Are you okay?”
Because no matter how she tries, she cannot shake the cold fear for him that wedges between her shoulders, the concern that snakes up her spine, the worry that now pulls her lips downward in thought.
it's our dearest ally, it's our closest friend it's our darkest blackout, it's our final end
Nothing is permanent, not even skin, it seems, for his own has changed, warped from paper-thinness to this new red-roan state, thick. This, of course, is a changes he welcomes, is glad to be shed of his delicacy (and there are nightmares aplenty of it returning, of waking to frail and tearing skin).
She wants a different answer, though, he can read this in her eye s- the words themselves, too, are tinged in something pleading and he wants to say yes because something in him wants to give her the answers she wants, wants to reaffirm some kind of rightness to her world.
Ah, but he can’t. So he compromises.
“I don’t know,” he says, though he thinks he does, but he doesn’t give this answer. He gives a nothing answer. I don’t know.
Too late, she says don’t answer that but the words are gone, hanging between them, an answer unwanted by both of them. And then she is closing the distance, and he can catch a bit of her scent, and sighs, because it’s nice, and strange, and those two things should maybe be mutually exclusive but aren’t. Don’t move, she says, and he doesn’t. He is still as stone.
She hums, a pleasant noise, and he feels a distant tickling sensation in his body, and he can’t place it until it settles on a particularly fresh bruise, and the distant pain of it goes away, and he realizes she is healing him, all the small pains.
Are you okay, she asks, and he almost laughs.
“Yes,” he says, “better than okay.”
There are other things that go unhealed, of course – for all her power, she cannot dip into the gullies of his mind – but the mere fact she cares causes a sort of warmth in his chest.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” he says, which is foolish to say – why should he have known that?- but then, “it’s wonderful, what you can do.”
I waited for something and something died so I waited for nothing and nothing arrived
She breaks apart from him, if only slightly, the scent of him still thick in her nostrils, still tangled around the whorls of her mind. “That makes me happy,” she says simply, because it is enough to know that he is okay—that she has helped, in whichever manner, to change his day, to make it easier. Experimentally, she reaches forward and brushes her lips against his cheek, a motion at once comforting and innocent.
“I don’t know you well, Contagion,” the name still feels wrong, weighted, but she doesn’t deny him it, “but I think that you deserve to be happy.” She had to think that there were those out there were those out there who deserved it, those who deserved to have their hearts cherished, their love returned.
She had to believe it.
At his next statement, she had to laugh, the noise soft and silver on her tongue. “I don’t know either, but it has been something that’s been a part of me since I was born.” Something that had been ripped away from her, if only briefly, and then pressed back into her chest. “I am glad that you think it is wonderful.” She drops her voice slightly, a secret for the two of them. “I think so too, although I do not say so often.”
How could it not be wonderful to heal? How could it not be wonderful to be given the gift to stitch others back together again? To take broken pieces and create an uninterrupted whole?
Still, she was uncomfortable with the conversation resting on her, and she shifted for a moment before motioning toward the wings that blossomed from his shoulders. “It is wonderful to fly, is it not?” Her own wings transformed at her sides, matching his own, and she ruffled them. “Would you like to go now?”
it's our dearest ally, it's our closest friend it's our darkest blackout, it's our final end
She is almost unbearably kind, with her soft eyes and the way she thinks the best of him, because she heals, she flies, she does not read minds or know the things his heart desires.
(His own twin, beautiful and as broken as he. She is kind, too.)
Something in him feels heavier for it, to have her wish him happiness, and he wonders if that’s an achievable goal. Perhaps now it could be, with his body fleshy and solid, with his wings strong and feathered, his former delicacy gone.
He almost tells her how he was born – entangled with a girl he would love in all the wrong ways, two impossibly breakable bodies left on the shore to lovers too entrenched in their own doomed romance to say much of a goodbye. But this is too intimate a secret, and one he does not want to share, he perhaps himself like this: a solid thing, remade.
He watches her stretch her wings, watches as a breeze moves through them. His own extend, in mimicry of hers, though his are far plainer – he doesn’t mind this, for his wings are whole, and that is all he’s ever wanted.
(The first time he tried to fly his wings had no business bearing heavy things aloft: there was a snap, a twist of pain, and a bone that healed crooked. He didn’t fly again.)
Now, though: now he knows, these wings support him in all his study architecture, these wings live out their purpose.
He rises, not far, only a foot off the ground. And then, the unexpected: he laughs. He laughs because he had not expected to fly with a stranger (though she is less a stranger now: Leliana, who has healed his aches and touched him). Laughter’s a strange beast in his mouth but he welcomes it nonetheless.
“Yes,” he says, then, imploring – dangerous – he adds, “show me a favorite place of yours.”
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