"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
Even when autumn breaks through and begins to cool the air, turning the leaves and breathing a chill across Beqanna, he does not turn from his perpetual summer. It grows as he does. The air is no longer just a slight difference from the norm when he steps forward, but instead entirely so. Summer crackles in the space around him—shifting all aspects of the weather until he is the center and the gravitational pull.
And he does not think anything of it.
Does not think it strange that the sky above him rumbles with the promise of monsoon. That the heat smothers the grass and the drying trees. Does not think anything but the fact that it feels like home as he stands on the edge of the river, the sky above him pregnant with rain that has not yet fallen.
He tips his head back to consider it. Pupiless eyes expanding and chest heaving as he wonders whether he should crack open the sky and let the storm unleash around him. Whether he should hold it back and live in the moments before—that unspoken promise somehow more tempting and exciting than anything else that he could bring. Flames lick up his legs before he dampens them, letting them curl away into nothing.
Until it is just him and the promise of a storm and the world around him.
Until there’s nothing but his own thoughts to follow him, his own dreams to crush his chest, his own hopes to flare dangerously to life within him. Until he’s nothing but that pending storm, pressing up against the barriers of his own mind and just waiting to unleash, waiting to become, waiting, waiting—
Summer follows him, and repels her.
She has never liked summer, has always found it hard to breathe in the humidity. She couldn’t sleep in it, either, even if she built up snowbanks around herself – they always melted too quickly, leaving her soaked in tepid water, breathing in that stupid, thick air.
She is made for snowstorms, and mountains, and for most of her life that was all she knew – a woman left at the pinnacle of some jagged peak, unaware of how inhospitable the conditions really were, for she was bred and built for such things.
She was not bred and built for summer, and even autumn has its difficult moments.
(Still, she prefers autumn to spring. Autumn is a harbinger of the colder months, a promise that she can finally breathe.)
She should not approach him. He is the anthesis of what she is – even in color, he is dark and rich red, and she is white and ice blue. She can sense storms about him, the heavy inhale of a thunderstorm in the wings, and yet she is compelled.
She walks to him and snow follows her, a trail that melts soon enough (though not so quickly as it had in the peak of summer). She pauses a healthy distance from him and watches, for a moment – she’s waiting, too.
“Hello,” she says, voice cautious. Ice melts and refreezes against her skin.
“What are you doing?” she asks, even though she should leave, because he is likely dangerous to her. But she lived years on a mountaintop, and knows both too much and too little of danger, so instead she stays, curious.
I can’t cut any language open wide enough to give you this story
He feels her in the way that he feels the promise of winter. It is an alarm bell that rings in his head—a warning that flashes through his veins. It crackles like the first lightning strike of a monsoon and he whips his face upward at the sound of her voice. His lips want to peel back and he wants to reveal his young, blunt teeth as though a predator were staring him down. But he is also a predator. The son of the sand and the storm turned into summer incarnate, the sun shining eternal in his ashen chest.
So he doesn’t bare his teeth and he doesn’t run.
His red, unending eyes just find her own and he studies his opposite in a way that few are afforded the ability to do. “Hi,” he says and the word booms from him, laced with everything that has gone unsaid between them. The opposites of the seasons clashing together, their own gifts blossoming around them.
“Existing,” he answers honestly and the flames he had smothered crack back into life around his legs once more, rising higher and then whispering down his spine to dance harmlessly amongst his mane.
“What are you doing?” he counters, finally moving his gaze from her eyes to the rest of her—noting all of the ways in which they are the same and yet wholly different. The way the cold clings to her while the heat drapes over him, melting and lazy. His broken lips crack into a smile that is anything but and he nods toward the ice that reshapes over her shoulder. “You look cold.”
She watches him still, with a rapacious curiosity, the way people flock to water natural disasters unfold. Not that he is anywhere so deadly, but his body is crafted so opposite of hers, she feels that same fascinated pull. When his red eyes meet her blue ones, she doesn’t look away. She wonders, now, what he thinks of her. She knows that fire melts ice. She wonders what would happen if she got closer.
She doesn’t move, though. She can live dangerously, in her mind, but in actuality, Annapurna is quite practical. She avoids things that might hurt her, she does not hurt others, she simply moves and breathes through the seasons and sometimes, in the winter, she thrives. She thinks often of returning to her mountaintop, where the winter is unending and the air thin enough to kill those not built like her, but she doesn’t follow through with this. It had been lonely, on the mountaintop. She hadn’t known what loneliness was, as a child, because it was all she knew, but when she came down into Beqanna, she learned. Even though she has no lovers or close friends, no family she is bound to (she has countless half-siblings here, of course, but she has not found them and why would they care for her, anyway?).
He speaks, his voice loud and booming across the river, and when the flames dance over his skin she watches, transfixed. She doesn’t like fire, of course, but can admit there’s a beauty to the way the flames shift endlessly. She almost asks him if it hurts, to burn like that, then considers how stupid her question is. After all, does the ice hurt her? Of course not – she revels in it, she savors the cold. She imagines it’s the same for him and these flames.
She smiles, though. This is different. He is different. She likes that.
“Existing,” she says, mimicking his reply, then add, “and watching. I haven’t seen anyone quite like you.”
At his next comment - you look cold - she smiles again and thickens the layer of ice on her skin, refreezing it as it melts.
“Not nearly cold enough,” she says, then, “I’m Annapurna, by the way.”
I can’t cut any language open wide enough to give you this story
Were she to get closer, he knows he would feel the beginning of pain.
Pain more than the way his skin cracks and falls apart—a pain that he now so used to that he doesn’t even notice it anymore. Pain more than the ache he feels when he sees the grass rot beneath him, the heat of him killing spring before it has a chance to flourish. He would feel true pain. Pain rooted in his weakness. Pain that thrives on everything in him that cannot stand up to everything in her.
And yet, there is a part of him that longs for that.
Longs for the sharpness of pain that her presence would bring.
(How quickly would she smother his flames? How fast would she devour his heat?)
“Existing always sounds so simple,” he says with a quirk of his broken lips, flame peering through the lacerations there. “But it is the most complicated thing in the world.” Spoken as though he has decades of life experience when he is instead barely upon his second year. His smile remains though. Still as it may be, carved upon his ashen face, quiet and unmoving. “I imagine not,” he says and there is an arrogance in the way he rolls his shoulders, something fitting for summer, as though he knows how magnificent he is.
“And I am not nearly warm enough.”
Another smile as he studies her, taking in the cold and the mountains and the ice.
