[private] i'm addicted to the 'if only', illum

[Ryatah]

Ryatah

WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU

IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU

I knew someone who looked like you,she had said to the star-spun stranger. She had looked at her from behind her blinding angelic light, and been reminded of a man colored like the darkest of night skies, remembered the way he had whispered the sweetest things into the heat of her skin, how he had loved her in a way she never once deserved to be loved. No one had ever been able to love the wrongness out of her, but she had loved letting them try. Illum, she had thought to herself, his name breaking through her daze, and yet she had ripped the stranger’s heart out anyway. A twisted kind of poetry, maybe, a reminder that it didn’t matter how much someone loved her or if she loved them back, there would always be a dark god and his control over her wedged between them.

Letting go of Illum had been maybe one of her only selfless acts; to let him live a life free of her and her thoughtless heart and all the hurt that it would cause. To let him go before they inevitably imploded, just as all her other relationships have done, because it’s unreasonable to expect someone to stand by and watch as she destroys herself over and over again.

And so she had stayed away, for years.

She had slipped back into her life with Atrox, and never once gone back to Illum. Not under the guise of friendship, as she so often did with the others. Not when a rumor floated back to her that he had found companionship with Este and she had been forced to sit with the envy and guilt (because how can she be jealous of her beautiful daughter, who is far kinder and far more honest than Ryatah could ever be) that that knowledge lit in her chest. Not when she thought loneliness might eat her alive, because even though she always had someone, sometimes she just didn’t want to beg. She wanted to be revered, she wanted someone to look at her the way she looked at them; the way Illum had once looked at her, as if she were the one worthy of being worshipped.

She had stayed away, until she couldn’t.

Something in her had shifted that night in the Ruins, when she had left with another’s blood sprayed across her skin, with a still-warm heart cradled in her magic. It was the aftermath—after Carnage had gone again, as he always does—when she was alone, the coming down from the high that left her crashing. It all felt wrong, even though she had done exactly as he asked. And maybe that had been the wrong choice; maybe that had been the safe choice, and her obedience would become too mundane, and she had shed blood for nothing.

All she knows is her skin feels electric, like there is a current in her veins, humming and errant and in danger of getting loose. She can’t remember the last time she felt like this, like her heart is a bomb and all she needs is for someone else to pull the pin.

All she knows is every time she closes her eyes she sees blood and stars and then Illum’s face.

The forest is quiet at night as it often is, the shadows cool even in the summer air. It did not feel so different from when she had found refuge with him in Taiga, when she had let herself pretend that they had a forever instead of an ending. Her chest tightens at the thought, the way it does when she knows she is about to make a beautiful mistake, chased away by the fluttering pulse of her heart.

She finds him, and the way her halo-lit eyes lock with his and there is no surprise to be found on her face it is evident that she had been looking for him. She does nothing to hide it, makes no show of pretending to be startled to have stumbled across him. He is there because she had known he would be, just like she had ensured before she found him that Este would not awaken until after sunrise. She stands there before him, looking as she always had—golden stardust spilling from her wings, an amber glow radiating from her ethereally white body, and impossibly dark eyes that can’t look away from him, wistful and sad and unsure. His molten gaze feels like a blow to her ribs, and when she speaks her voice is a whispering, breathless gasp. “I’m sorry,” she apologizes, because she has no right to go looking for him. She had forfeit her right to him years ago. He wasn’t hers, and she is not deserving of being his, but the way her wretched heart beat the same thrilled, broken beat at the sight of him said otherwise. “I just needed to see you.”

AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE

@Illum

[Illum]

ILLUM

Time is a thing meant to heal all wounds. It is meant to take all these broken pieces of him, jagged and fractured and barely recognizable, and wear them smooth again so that he might be able to rebuild himself as he was before. But time is not kind to him, it does not care for him or for the way he was, the way he should be–and he has always known that this concept of who he was had been reduced to fractures, to splinters, to dust so thoroughly that there would be nothing left to put back together. He had not been foolish enough to hope for something like that, for something like peace to find him in the dark and pull him back out again.

He wonders, sometimes, why Este loves him at all. How something so soft and so kind and so utterly gentle has not torn herself apart on the jagged pieces of his heart. She should be flayed open from loving him, broken from the way he drifts in and out of her life. She should resent him for the way he stays and curls around her in the dark, for the kisses he presses to her delicate brow and the cool brush of night he trails over the curve of her hip, because he never stays for long. He wonders, in the quiet of night, in the solitude of the shadows that carry him away from her in blinks of star strewn midnight, whether he loves her at all. If he did, would he not stay away? Would he not spare her the ache of wondering, of worrying, of wanting something he will never know how to give her. But he thinks he does not know who he is anymore without the light of her to define his edges.

It is love in the only way he knows how to give, love in the way he never strays far, in the way he seeks no one but Este even when the demons hold him away from her. But he knows she deserves more.

Night always leaves, the stars always disappear, the moon always vanishes.
It is something one can rely on to be true; a constant.

It is true now, too. He stands alone in the night, and though he knows Este is only a heartbeat away with his ability to spill through the dark like living shadow, he doubts she knows the same of him. It is a guilt that gnaws on his bones and leaves him feeling hollowed out. His golden eyes are turned in her direction, an empty gaze on the ancient trees that stand between them. He knows he will return to her tonight, knows this ache in his chest to hold her again is something he cannot ignore, something that will consume him until he burns with it, until he returns to her side and burns her, too. He wishes, sometimes, when the dark illuminates the fissures of his broken soul, that she would just go, just leave him. He wishes that if she did, he would find the strength to let her. But wishes are for the same fools who hope.

There is a sound, soft and sure, and his gaze shifts sharply to find the source of it. He is, in one single heartbeat, completely disarmed by the delicate face illuminated in the dark. “Hello angel.” He says, and his voice is the silver of stars, the inkiness of space between them. He knows he needs to look away, but she is exactly as he remembers and there is an unwelcome ache building within the cage of his chest as his golden gaze settles on those impossibly dark eyes. “Sorry?” He repeats, and his voice is lower now, dangerous if she were anyone but his angel. “Tell me, love. Are you sorry that you came to find me, or sorry that you left?” He cannot help the way he drinks her in, all bone white and shimmering stardust, cannot help the way he closes the distance between them when he should be creating more. They have never been good together, they are too much the same. He knows, because he has broken open against the jagged edges of her. He knows, because there is a part of him that aches to do it again.

She whispers, breathless, and he remembers another time she had sounded like that, with his shadows around her throat and his lips against her neck. “Do not make that sound, angel.” He tells her as he comes to a stop a mere step away, and there is genuine warning in the gravel of his voice, in the way his golden eyes burn and ache. Midnight spills from him, indigo and cerulean and fathomless dark, sparks of stars and inky twilight swallowing them both. He pretends not to love the way the light of her carves out space to exist in his dark, pretends he is a better man than he truly is. “Why did you need to see me, love.” And he is only just now seeing the shape of the sadness on her face and in her eyes. The corners of his inky mouth turn downwards, his brow furrowing beneath the floating tendrils of hazy black. “Come here.” He says, and his shadows are hands that coax her closer, wandering fingers in her mane and in the silhouette of each feather of her wings. But he does not close the distance between them, does not reach out to pull her against his chest and drown in the scent of her.

[Ryatah]

Ryatah

WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU

IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU

Angel. She has heard the word from his mouth more times than she can count, in every way possible; whispered with passion across her back, or teasing as they lay tangled together in the forests of Taiga, and then desperately when he had been trying to convince her to stay. No one else has ever called her that, and in that moment when their eyes first locked she had wondered if he still would. Somehow, it makes it worse that he does. It feels intimate in a way that she knows is dangerous, because no one can fall back into an old habit faster than she can. She hates that he looks the same, too, that he still looks like her Illum. He should have turned into something else, should have broken down to the molecular level and rebuilt as something that had never been hers, so that she was not standing here staring at him aching with longing and every type of regret.

He steps closer and her breath catches in her throat, unable to tear her eyes from his, searching for a glimmer of resentment, a flicker of disdain. “Yes,” she answers his two questions with a single word, and somehow she still nearly chokes on it, on the knot in her throat.

She is sorry that she couldn’t stay away, that she is here tearing open their scars and digging right into their open wounds with the ludicrous idea that they can just fix them later.
She is sorry that she left all those years ago, that she disappeared into the dark with his unanswered I love you haunting her dreams until some other hurt rose to take its place.

He should hate her.
He should be sending her away, telling her that whatever she has to say, she is too late.
And she is too late. She knows that he loves Este; she knows, too, that Este loves him in an infinite, unfathomable way that Ryatah never could. She’s never had a full heart to give him—she has been surviving on fractured pieces for so long that she does not remember what she had been like when it was whole. All her sharp, broken fragments are still there, still waiting to cut him, and she isn’t sure now if there had been a point in saving him from herself all those years ago if she was just going to show up in front of him again.

But then he is pulling the night over them, shrouding them in stars and shadow, and her heart jumps in that exhilarating way it always has and she knows all at once that this time she is going to be the one leaving undone.

Her golden glow spills into the darkness around them, the stardust that cascades from her wings almost too bright in the darkness he has created. It illuminates his face, carving it into slants of shadow and light, reflecting off the frost on his body. She remembers what it had been like to press her mouth to his skin, how she had delighted in being able to see the trail her lips left behind, an impermanent mark branding him as hers in that moment of time. “I met someone who reminded me of you,” she begins, her voice soft even inside the cocoon of darkness. She feels his shadows as they tangle in her hair, as they brush against her skin, beckoning her closer. There is half a heartbeat where it seems as though she is going to cave instantly; that she is going to press forward and melt into his chest, to curl beneath his wings like she once had. Her eyes close for a moment, willing her heartbeat to slow, for her skin to stop shivering at his touch.

She does move closer, but she does not let herself touch him.

But she is close enough that she is certain he must feel the way her heart is a languished rhythm beating against her ribs, that he must sense the way something is unraveling inside of her and there is nothing she can do to slow it. “I did something awful, I think. I don’t know. I just did what was asked of me,” she says, her words breathless and tumbling, but she does not mention Carnage. She is not sure if Illum would know to fill in the blanks but expects that he might, because she is unchanged and still the same foolish, wretched thing she had been before. She did something terrible and instead of feeling guilty for that specific act she was instead consumed with a resurgence of regret for what she had done to him. “I just wanted to see you,” she says again, and she can taste tears in the back of her throat but she knows better than to let them fall, because all of this has been a mess of her own making. “But if you want me to leave, I’ll go.”

AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE

@Illum