"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
He is a ship without sails, set adrift in a sea without stars to guide him.
He is all splintered, wooden bones with an inside left hollow, and the sky is black, and the sea is black, and he would sink into nothing if he only knew which way was down. To exist is simply easier. To float in time and space, directionless and wanting nothing, is simply easier. To be a ship lost in the night is easier, and he will take simplicity when it comes.
It rarely does, after all.
Today he is floating in a sea of grass rather than water and empty skies. He could sail to the ends of the earth (and he has, oh he has!) but when the world runs out, he will always end up here. He will always end up where the world made sense once, even if only for one summer’s red-washed night, even if only for the span of a blink. He will always end up thinking of the night they had before everything was ruined, of her skin and the way it looked in the last of the sunlight, of the sweat beading down her neck. Sometimes he still tastes her. Sometimes he still smells jasmine and sweet grass.
Sometimes it’s like she never left at all.
He isn’t trying to linger, but there were always magnets between them; a gravity that was undeniable to him, but she could talk herself out of without tongues or teeth left in her skull. He isn’t trying to linger, but his eyes pick out the grass that they laid on once upon a time from the millions of others that all look exactly the same. He isn’t trying to linger, but his knees buckle there and he falls into the grass where they once fell together.
He isn’t trying to linger, but he rubs his face against the dirt in the hopes that maybe, somehow, there will still be fragments of her there that will rub off into his flesh; some smell, some hair, some cells – anything.
He isn’t trying to linger, but he is a ship without sails set adrift in a sea without stars to guide him and Margaery is the only North that he knows.
Dominion was well acquainted with grief. Loss was her oldest friend, her lifelong companion. Everyone she had ever loved had in the end only renewed that bond. Parents, siblings, her entire people lost to drought and disease and warfare. Four tribes scattered to the wind, the last of the survivors drowned in the cold, bitter sea that had spit her back out on strange shores. The entire life she’d made for herself since, with friends and family, a lover and babies, all stolen by the cruel mountain that had sheltered them and lulled them into complacency. All lost, because the world was always only ever ending. And yet.
And yet, once again Dom had survived. Once again, she was healing. And once again, Tarnished had found her at the end of the world and helped her pick up the shattered pieces of her life and forge them into something new. He and the mysterious goddess of the sea had helped her through yet another tragedy. And now once again, Dom was not adrift in the bitter sea, tossed about by waves more wild than she could rie out, just fighting to keep her head above water. Once again, she was healing. Once again, she was standing tall.
He, on the other hand, was lying in the dirt.
She saw him, cheek pressed into the grass with an aimless desperation, looking as though he wanted to melt into the patch of earth beneath him. And because she knew that ache, knew the way it rang inside a hollowed out body that felt like it was made of broken glass and splinters, she ambled over, her nose low to the ground so that it brushed against his neck when she got close enough. “So what happened then?” she murmured, her voice uncharacteristically gentle. But she didn’t want to be the one to shatter him, and he looked on the verge of it already.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
It’s too late for lighthouses and life rafts. It’s too late for anchors, and radars. Isn’t it? He is unsalvageable, but they always toss their lines. He is a wreckage, but they always want to pull him from the sea and scrape the barnacles from his skin and call him found and shabby chic, but he is not an item to be repurposed. He is not something that can be sanded down until the splinters don’t exist. He is cracked and sharp. He is old and damaged.
He is lying, cheek against dirt, and this is easier.
If he is still enough it’s almost like she’s there beside him.
If he is still enough, it’s almost like that day, when the sun bathed them in red light and she was lost and blind and broken, and he saved her. If he is still enough he can bask in the memory of the day when he wasn’t wretched, when he loved someone else without hidden motives, or broken promises.
So when she touches him and spills warm air against his cheek, he will not stir. He will not rise. He will not open his eyes for the fear of the memory of her faces dissipating into the ether of reality. It’s become so hard to conjure the lines of her face. Sometimes he draws them out in his mind, and the lines are wrong, and it can feel like fresh wounds instead of those that have been festering for eons.
He isn’t trying to linger.
He isn’t trying.
So when she asks him what has happened, he isn’t trying to linger, he simply cannot bring his lips to move to mouth the word: everything.
Instead, he croaks out her name: “Margaery.”
Instead, he slides his cheek against the grass, coats his skin in the memory of her cells, and pretends that he can smell jasmine and sweet grass instead of earth worms and stones.
“Margaery.” Ah, not a what, then. A who. Dom knew just what whos could do to a heart, just what devastation they could leave in their wake. Her who had pushed aside every lesson she’d learned from a childhood spent surviving when no one else had. Her who had barged into her heart and claimed it as his own with his irresistibly charming grin and those deep brown eyes that just sparkled with playful teasing and the kind of innocence she had lost to life before she’d left her mother’s side.
“That explains a lot,” she said, and her voice was huskier, empathy with a touch of rueful self-deprecating humor. “Whos do a lot more damage than whats.” She lipped at the silky black of his mane and tugged. “So are you going to get back up, then? Or are you going to lay here for the rest of your life waiting for her to come back to you?” The question was simple, almost flippant, but his answer would tell her a lot. Was he the type to spend forever lost in the past, in what had been and what could have been and what never was? Or did he have it in him to stand back up even when life knocked him on his ass? She’d needed a swift kick in hers from a goddess of the sea. Maybe she could return the favor, as it were.
Or maybe he was too far gone to be brought back. She had seen those too, had known them well. Sometimes even the strong of spirit broke badly enough that they couldn’t mend. They usually fell to predators or starved or fell ill, their bodies giving in to the breaking. Ah, but here. Here, there was food in abundance beyond the telling of it. Here, there were healers to repair bodies ravaged by illness, and somehow despite the proliferation of prey animals, the predators were at a baffling minimum. Even the broken survived here, far more easily than Dom could understand. Maybe he would be one of the walking dead, unable to escape into oblivion. Unable to find their way back to the stars. Lost in a world that had forgotten how to lead them home.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
He pretends that they are made up of all the same atoms, and that he skin is red instead of black and white. He pretends that he voice sounds like someone else’s, that it’s raspy and quiet and sad instead. She asks him if he’s going to get back up, and then the pretending falls short. Margaery would never ask that of him. She would let him disintegrate into the earth. She would let him rot if it suited her.
“I’m not waiting,” he says, because waiting would imply that on some level he thought she might come home to him. He isn’t waiting because there is nothing left to wait for. He isn’t waiting because he knows that she will never come back. There is a difference between waiting, and mourning, isn’t there? Waiting means maybe. Mourning means never.
“This is my life now,” he says, cheek against dirt.
This is his life, the earth and her cells.
The sandpaper feels coarse against his skin, but she’ll learn soon enough that he will not be made smooth. He does not come clean; the stains now are well past the surface, they’ve sunk deep into his bones. He is a masterpiece of mess and colour, of stains and scars, of black seas and black skies. He is a compass, and Margaery is north.
So this was his life now, huh? Dom lowered herself to the ground nearby, laying her cheek against the grass and rubbing it the same way he was. Yep. “Well, seems like a pretty shitty life to me. If you want, I can probably find something to come over and finish you off if you’d rather. A wolf or something. You know, get it over with.” She launched herself to her feet and shook herself to dislodge the dust and the dirt and the bits of grass clinging to her spotted coat, then looked around. Not that she was likely to find any hungry predators in the area. They were inexplicably rare despite such an easy meal.
“Or I guess you could wallow until one comes along on its own. It might take a while, though. I haven’t exactly seen many of them around. You’re more likely to be killed by rockfall than eaten around these parts,” she added, old pain that had long since been left in the past reaching forward to color her tone. She wondered if that counted as joking about the horror that had befallen her family – all too literally – and if joking counted as progress.
With a mental shrug of fuck it she continued. “Guess you could always just starve to death. But that’s long and slow and extremely unpleasant.” And took months to recover from if he decided to change his mind. It had taken her three or four months at the lake with Tarnished for company before she was feeling fighting fit after the sea had spit her back up on Beqanna’s shores. But then, she’d had fight in her. This one seemed to be all fought out.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
It touches his skin, and he could grab hold if he wanted, but he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want the rope in his hands. He doesn’t want the lifeline. Margaery wouldn’t have grabbed hold, either. She would have opened her mouth, let the water into her lungs. She would have drown in a black sea, under a black sky. She would have done anything in the world if it meant never having to touch his hand. She would have done anything other than look him in the eye.
“I didn’t ask for you,” he snarls, but the words are hardly menacing, not here, cheek against dirt, pretending that her cells could fuse to his. He is not the monster he sees in himself. There is no black blood. There is no poison. Only poor luck made poorer by the inability to cope.
She talks about starving like she knows. She cannot, he thinks, but he does. They all saw him waste away until he was only waif and regret, only bones and hardships. They saw his insides on the outside. They saw him fragile. They saw the crack in his smile, and how it wavered, and they’d made him king even still. “I am already starving,” he says, even though his belly is full and his ribs are not yet turned xylophones. He is starving, but not for food.
His insides rattle, they groan and tremble, but not for nourishment.
He is hungry, but there is nothing left in the world to satiate that need.
