"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
I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
It is harsh but she does not cower now.
He snaps it at her but she does not grimace as she swallows it down.
It tastes bitter but she welcomes it.
Because it makes sense.
She remembers the first time she’d met Velkan in the meadow. How he had extended her a kindness that she did not know how to translate. It had unsettled her, made her wary, she had skirted around it with wide eyes and flared nostrils (figuratively speaking – physically, she had only eyed him wearily). Her friend’s kindness had troubled her perhaps even more than Brigade’s serrated edges.
She shakes her head. And finally, finally, there in the furthest corner of her mouth is the glimmer of something that might have resembled a smile if it had lasted a beat longer or if it had been worn by someone else. “It’s okay,” she says, sincere.
“What did you do, except try to save me from myself?” she asks then, a rhetorical question. But it is asked with patience, tenderness. Forgiveness. But she knows, perhaps better than anyone, that it does not matter that she forgives him if he cannot forgive himself.
She considers his words, considers the weight and the gravity of them. She wonders if he tells her this in the same way she’d told him about all that crippling loneliness – in the hopes that sharing it with someone might make it lighter, easier to carrier.
“Me, too,” she whispers. She wishes she could be someone different, too. Someone worth being saved, maybe. Someone worth the effort and the anger. Then she shrugs her shoulders and shakes her head with a mournful sigh.
Could he tell a stranger the full weight of his crimes?
He hadn’t told anyone, he thinks. Not even Kensa with all of the hours that they had spent together and the ways that they had shared so much of themselves. But she had asked and he had skirted around the question entirely. He had been unable to bring himself to peel back the layers for that particular wound and she had not pressed him on it. She had not asked him to be vulnerable in that way.
And neither does Lilian, he thinks.
Although the pressure she applies unknowingly is close.
His face folds at her question, rhetorical though it may be, and feels the way that it slips between his ribs like a blade. What hasn’t he done, he wants to ask. He loved a woman who had not been his to love. He had abandoned a home that had been nothing but kind. He has turned his back on his family because he was too scared to see what had come of them in the war. He had failed to stand up to the dragons.
He was a coward, and he was cruel, and he knew the full depth of the sins he bore.
Would she run if she knew it all?
He chews on the thought as the silence continues and part of him wonders if maybe the silence is not quite as uncomfortable as it had been in the beginning. Perhaps there is even something within it that is close to companionship although he has never been the type to find, let alone keep, friends.
Brigade supposes that he should ask her why she would be different, but he doesn’t want to push.
She has not pushed him, after all.
“Would you like to check out Sylva?” he asks suddenly, his wine red head tipping to the side. “I know that I didn’t do much to sell it, but it actually is better than the meadow. That is, if you want a home.”
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She registers the change in his expression but says nothing.
She does not try to call into focus all of his transgressions.
They are none of her business and she does not ask him to share them.
Something shifts in the center of her chest and she buries whatever impulse she has to reach out and touch him, to lay her mouth against his shoulder as if it might bring him some semblance of comfort. She swallows it down deep and just goes on watching him as if she has any right to look at him at all. As if she has any right at all to wonder what he’s thinking.
She has perhaps gleaned enough from this interaction to know that he is almost certainly warring against something and she grits her own teeth in sympathy. She is curious, steeped in intrigue, she wants to reach into the center of him and pull out the parts that hurt.
Because she knows what it’s like to hurt. Because she knows how it aches to carry the pain and the darkness in your chest and never having anywhere to set them down, even if just long enough to catch your breath. And there is a vicious twinging in her heart when she thinks about his guilt – or what she registers as his guilt. He’d said he’d prefer being alone to hurting people and then, minutes later, had forced her to entertain the possibility that he hurt people on purpose. She couldn’t make it make sense.
His question catches her so thoroughly off-guard that she actually takes one shuffling step backward. She blanches and then frowns and then scrambles to smooth her brow and adopt a more neutral expression. Did she want to go to Sylva?
“With you?” she asks before she can stop herself and then, realizing what she’d asked, launches herself into her next statement. “I don’t know that I have much to offer a home.”
Brigade has been at war with himself for as long as he can remember.
His heart has been a vicious, bruising thing that has put him at odds with himself for as long as he knows. He has been wild and ruthless and then guilty and cruel. He has lashed out at those who have deserved it the least and then bit his tongue until his bled in his mouth. He is a contradiction of storms and he has no more tools to handle it, to curb it, then he did when it first began—when he was but a boy.
There is something like pity in her gaze, or something close enough that he cannot discern the difference between the two, and although it should cause him to bristle, it makes him ache. Makes his throat nearly close as he thinks of all the reasons that he does not deserve and would never deserve such a thing.
But it’s only when she steps back, so flustered by his question, that he frowns.
His face creases, brow furrowing, the broken edge of his blaze bright against the merlot of him.
“With me,” he affirms and wonders if that is maybe why she looks so frightened in the first place. Was it so terrible to have to live in the same land as him? He wouldn’t blame her if it was. “Although it is a big place so you wouldn’t have to see me often.” Or ever, if she didn’t want. It’s not like Starsin and him have run into each other frequently. They could avoid each other as often as they would like.
“To be fair, I don’t know if I have a home to offer you, but it’s there if you want it.”
It was the first time he had ever extended the invitation and it was a queer sensation. It was his home, after all, but it didn’t always feel that way. In some ways, he still felt like a captive of it, even though he knew he was just a captive of his own making. He just never could shake the shackles off completely.
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She doesn’t know why she asked it.
The question had alighted on her tongue and plunged itself into the charged air between them before she’d even had a chance to think it.
Should it have been edged in hope?
Should she have asked it with some kind of glimmer in her eye?
It sounds like reassurance, the way he insists that the chances of them ever running into each other are low, but it brings with it no comfort. She resents whatever in her had told her to take that one shuffling step backward, away from him. She resents the darkness that had not allowed the last scrap of hope to leave her on the back of that question.
He had snapped at her, stopped just short of calling her a stupid girl, but he had appeased her, too. He had not softened but he’d offered her an olive branch in trying for a smile once, for entertaining the idea that the meadow was any kind of home at all. He has not been kind to her, except to throw himself down the bank toward her so that, if need be, he could drag her back to shore. He has not been soft but he’d insisted that he would not have let her drown. She thinks this must count for something.
She grits her teeth and she studies his face and she wants to look away, knows that she ought to, but she cannot force herself to drop her gaze. “What if I wanted to see you?” she asks and, for the moment, she is impervious to the self-loathing the surges through her, reckless and unfettered.
“Would I be able to find you?” She doubles down on her foolishness in asking, she knows. But she doesn’t know how not to ask.
He has never stopped to consider that someone may actually want to spend time with him. It has never crossed his mind that it might actually be enjoyable to be in his presence. And why would he ever think that it would be? Look at the way he has botched this entire interaction. He has no social graces to speak of and no way to soften himself for a conversation. He has no way to be gentle or kind.
So the surprise shows visibly on his face when she asks her dual questions. His light grey eyes widen just slightly and it takes him a second to compose himself again, to pull himself back together again.
“Oh, uh,” his breath, gravely and stormy, catches on his lips and he nearly stutters as he tries to force his tongue to work. “I mean, yes.” He wishes that he could tell her more about what an unsuitable friend that he is and how ill-fitted he is for company. How he has never had a friend outside of his twin sister and how he has miserably messed that up—let her down in all of the worst ways. How no one should ever want to be friends with someone like him and how he can’t imagine why anyone would want to.
But the words don’t come and he’s left with the silence and their breathing.
“I mean, if you want to. I don’t know why you’d want to.”
Another shake of his antlered head and a flash of confusion as he looks up to study her.
“You shouldn’t want to, but you could find me.”
He swallows hard and shrugs.
“If you wanted to.”
And then, finally, thankfully, he is quiet again.
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She has no reason not to believe him.
He knows himself better than she will ever know him.
But weathering his fury, swallowing down his disdain, is preferable to the crippling loneliness. Because she has shackled herself to the memory of how their figures had collided at the edge of the river as he’d scrambled to save her from herself just as she’d salvaged what remained of her self-preservation. The thought that some part of him had cared enough to be angry that she had put herself in danger. The thought that he thought her worth saving.
She drags in a thin breath and nods her understanding. “Okay,” she says, finally. She tries for another smile but the corners of her mouth don’t even quiver. Her heart trembles, though, in the cavern of her chest in a way that hitches her breath. Her father had taken her shortly after her birth and the two of them wandered for years until time and distance stole him away from her. She has never had any place to call home and the idea of co-existing fills her with bitter trepidation.
But she swallows and she nods again. “I’d like to go to Sylva,” she murmurs, blinks up at him and then adds, “with you.”
Hadn’t expected that she would agree with it when he had continued to stumble over his words and provide her with no real reason why she should. It stills his tongue and he feels the storm growing in his chest. He nods his head for a moment, feeling the length of his snarled, tangled forelock falling down the straight length of his nose. There is a strange pride in knowing that she had agreed to come.
A strange pride in knowing that he had been able to give her a home.
Perhaps he had not been quite as bad as he had thought that that he was.
“Okay,” he says, bringing his gaze back to her, studying her with that fierce intensity, just banked behind the grey of his eyes. For a second, there is nothing but the breath between them, the silence of the winter that curls and snaps. Then he steps forward, brushes the velvet of his nose against her neck and stills, hates himself for breaching her privacy, bites his tongue and then just exhales slowly.
“It’s this way. I’ll show you the way home.”
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
