"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
09-03-2016, 10:16 PM (This post was last modified: 09-15-2016, 06:00 PM by australis.)
show me, who I am and who I could be,
She is with Tobiah when the world ends, watching the colors of the sun bleed across a brand new sky. It is subtle at first when the earth trembles, when it rises and falls like a chest beneath their feet. Subtle, until the rocks from the peaks above loosen and rain down against their backs, until the trees sway with no wind to force their branches.
It is subtle until it isn’t.
Until suddenly the mountain is stolen from beneath their feet and she is falling forever into a sky with no end.
There isn’t enough time to say anything, not enough time to see if the horror that etches across her face is reflected in the pale curve of his. There is only enough time to reach for him as she falls, to try and catch his mane between her teeth, to steady herself against his side. But she cannot reach, and when her mouth closes it is only around a single white feather which pulls free from his wing. She has enough time to wonder if he can fly on those wings, with one so much smaller than the other, enough time to wish for it to be so before the dark reaches out to take her.
She wakes in the dirt and she is alone. It takes roughly the length of a heartbeat to notice first the soft white feather resting beside her nose, and second that Tobiah is not there. None of her family is. There are strangers in the distance and some of them yell, but most are quiet like she chooses to be. She takes a moment to struggle to her feet, sore and bruised, with red peering out like tears against the white, but startlingly unharmed for having fallen from one mountain to the next. Dropping her nose to the ground she picks up that feather, twisting again so that she can wedge it into the knots and tangles of mane near her withers. It holds fast beside the bone snowflake, stark against her dark mane, and with an ache in her chest she wills it to stay.
It takes nearly an entire day to make her way back down the mountain, longer than some, perhaps, because she had stayed so long looking for her family. But when the sun peaked in the sky and began to drop again, she mirrored its descent, picking a trail that looked well and recently travelled.
It was dark by the time she reached the bottom, darker still as she made her way across unfamiliar land to a forest she did think she recognized. She couldn’t be certain in the endless blue of night, lit only by the water light of a narrow moon and the pin pricks of stars, but this place felt familiar. Quietly she found a spot in the among the trees, an empty spot, a spot not already filled with someone as lost and lonely as she, and settled in. At the first light of morning she would go searching for a familiar face again, but until then it felt stupid to explore a world that had only just erupted and dissolved all alone.
Her breath shudders, trembles, and her heart feels too tight in her chest, her bones too tight beneath her skin. There are no tears on her face though, no sobs catching like burrs in her throat - and when her eyes lift again, peeling apart the leaves in the trees to watch the moon climb in the sky, she wears this isolation like a mask against a crumbling face. This is not the first night she has spent alone, nor the first night spent away from home and her family, but it is the first time she has ever had to wonder if there was any family to go back to at all.
initiate the heart within me until it opens properly
my memories are full of only black and blue; I should’ve cut my losses long before I knew you. ————————————————————
It had been quieting to be with her.
It had quelled the loneliness in his chest to be near her, although he would never admit it. She had been a burr that seemingly stuck to his skin and in those moments, he had realized that it would be difficult to shake her. It had surprised him to know that he was not overly bothered by the fact. If he was going to be stuck with someone, he figured there were worse companions than the curious, wide-eyed mare.
But then—then, everything changed.
The earth had shook loose between them and the air had smelled of fire and magic, crackling along the edges with powers beyond his comprehension. He had cried out, reaching for her, but she was already gone. And then he was gone too, knocked unconscious. He had slept fitfully, his dreams punctuated by the sound of her scream and the tempo of chaos. When he had awoken, the Tundra had been gone.
The land of ice and solitude, the only home he had ever known, had been ripped from him. He had stood shakily, his muscles aching as if he had run for miles, and looked around him. It was beautiful up there and quiet in a way he had never experienced, not even in the belly of the Tundra where ice had replaced companions. This was a suffocating silence, a forceful reminder; he had felt shaken to his core.
The trek down the mountain had been quick. It had been similar to finding his way across the icy plains in the Tundra and he reminded himself of the lessons he had learned as a colt: move slow, watch your step, be careful. Lessons that had, at one point, been painful, but were now useful. Lessons that carried his heavy build down the mountain with few bumps and bruises to show for it minus the ache in his bones.
Of course, the lack of physical hurt did not quell the concern that had settled deep into his marrow. He had no family of note to find, no friends to care about his well-being—only the bay mare who had shaken his sense of solitude. She had family, he told himself. She had others to look out for her well-being, but he could not stop himself from looking for her. He wandered the forest, moving quietly amongst the bodies and feeling his skin crawl from the proximity. He had never been around this many horses before—ever.
At one point, panic rose in his throat and he reached for the invisibility to hide himself. But it had not come. He mentally called for it louder, commanding the ability that had always been second nature to him. But it had not responded. It was then that he realized that he felt—different. Had felt different ever since he had left the region around the mountain. Craning his neck around, he ruffled his wings and his eyes widened when he saw that his right wing was…stronger. Larger. As a test, he extended them both by his side and felt a joy rip through him when they unfurled powerfully, each side a match for the other.
The joy, however, was cut short. His wings may be unaffected, if not boosted, but his invisibility was cut from him; what did that mean for his immortality? He certainly felt different. Time felt less fluid, more concrete; the electricity that had once hummed inside of him had dimmed. He laughed, the sound harsh in his mouth. How often had he worried about preserving that piece of him? How long had he secluded himself to protect the one gift that carried any real weight? And it had all been for nothing.
In the end, it had been ripped from him anyway.
Confusion raced through him—peace melding with acceptance pouring into bitterness.
And it was like that he found her. Alone, washed with the silver light of the moon. The familiar bone wound into her mane and next to it a single feather. His feather, he realized with a jolt. “Australis?” he called as he made his way toward her, his voice rusty from the day of silence. He walked up to her, suddenly awkward—vulnerable with the armor of his gifts stripped from him. “Are you okay?”
The night is anything but quiet and she finds it is impossible to rest, impossible to keep her eyes closed for the nightmares that form there when she tries. The world still settles, heaving and shifting and groaning, the aches of being undone and remade again, she is certain. At the least the meadow is still, and the forests around it, because she is tired from climbing down the mountain, bruised and sore and her heart hurts with the loneliness of feeling lost. If it changed again, if the world took another new shape, she might let it swallow her now.
She shifts beneath the trees, trying to find a spot where the branches are more slender, where the leaves do not knit together like fingers to keep the sky from her. Right now the endless blue of the world above her, the fat moon and the flecking of silver stars in wild constellations, are the only things left that feel even a little same, even a little safe. She is used to hours and nights tucked into the mountains, used to sleeping among the stars. Being buried so deep against the earth, hidden beneath the trees and in the shadow of the mountain makes her uneasy and she can feel knots tying and untying themselves in the pit of her belly.
The groan of branches being pushed aside, the crunch of cold ground being crushed underfoot pulls her face towards the dark, and she waits tensely for a shape to solidify in the black. She imagines a thousand terrible things, an endless parade of creatures who would mean only to do her harm. She remembers first the story of the wolves, of how their teeth and claws had pulled apart her family as the journeyed back from the Chamber – she had been born later that day. But she thinks, too, of impossible things, of creatures long since buried beneath the earth but set free when the world exploded and fissure raced like spider webs through all that was.
She inches back a step or two, uneasy and broken, quiet despite the way her heart hammered in her chest - and she would’ve run if not for the voice that found her in the dark.
Australis?
She gasps and it is a whispered sound, mangled only by the way her chest tightens around her lungs. Her mind races to place the bodiless voice, but her heart beats her to it. “Tobiah?” The word sounds small, even to her, and so she says it again, just a little louder this time. “Tobiah?” But he is already peeling away from the shadow, already bathed in the same silver starlight as she. Without thinking, she pushes forward and collides against him, burying herself in the comfort of his pale side, beneath the soft of his white feathered wings. “Tobiah.” She says for a third time, closing her eyes and pushing her cheek against the strong curve of his neck where she remains until the trembling beneath her skin starts to ease. For a long moment she can think of nothing more than the way her hurt seems to fade buried so selfishly against his skin, the way even the knots loosen in the lonely pit of her stomach.
But she realizes he must hate this forced closeness, wonders why he has even come to the forest at all for the way it teams with endless, disoriented faces, and so she peels herself away from his warmth, pausing only to touch her nose to the curve of his ancient face. She does not drift far, staying close enough to feel the warmth drifting from his skin, close enough to touch him because she is sad and she is greedy. His question makes her laugh though, not the kind of laughter she had shared with him on the mountain, but something darker, something more twisted and strange on her lips. “Am I okay?” She pauses and she is silent, her brow furrowed as she turns from him to look at the details of the world around them. She counts the nearest trees, traces their branches and memorizes the shades of their leaves, and when she finally turns back to him she is careful to hide her brokenness from him. “Home is gone,” he will have noticed this too, their home had been one in the same, “I haven’t found anyone I love.” Her voice catches and her eyes drop, darkening like bruises against the dapples of her brown face. “I don’t know Tobiah, I don’t know how to be okay.”
Her voice shatters quietly, coming apart at the seams, and she reaches for him blindly, desperate for the way he reminds her of home, of safe. Greedy for the warmth he stirs in her chest. “I’m glad you’re here, Tobiah, I’m glad nothing happened to you.” She inches close enough to touch his chest, to press her nose to the place where his heart beat just below. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
initiate the heart within me until it opens properly
my memories are full of only black and blue; I should’ve cut my losses long before I knew you. ————————————————————
She collides with him so fast that he almost does not have time to brace himself. He takes a step backward to adjust to her weight and then straightens, his face a blending of confusion, joy, and relief. The instinct to put distance between them rises in his throat, but he quells it for now when he sees the way that she shakes and the way that she reaches for him. Instead he simply reaches down and holds her awkwardly, the motions uncertain and he certain that he was somehow botching his efforts to console her.
“Shh,” he murmurs into the gentle curve of her neck, ignoring the way her scent curls around and into him, the sweetness of it tightening his chest. He has no platitudes to offer her—no words of comfort or lies to soften the blow. When she peels away, he feels it like a blow to his heart, a punctuated statement of his inability to comfort and he does not move after her. He should’ve known he would be useless at this.
At the sound of her laugh, he cannot help but stiffen, the sound one that would belong more coming from his throat than her own. He cringes slightly. What a stupid question to have ask her. Of course, she wasn’t okay—of course she was grieving. She had something to lose, unlike him. She had people who loved her. People she loved. Of course she wasn’t okay. Internally, he berates himself, but he only straightens, his pale eyes looking away with forced disinterest before glancing back. “I am sure that your family will find you and that they will have found a new home,” he lies because that is what seems right.
Plus, he is sure that they will find her. Family always did. At least that is what he had heard.
When she sneaks near him again, he aches with an unfamiliar want, the distance between them so acutely painful that he almost closes it himself. “I will always come looking for you,” he blurts out before he can help himself, and then, confused, drops his gaze. “I mean,” he pauses, shakes his head, “I don’t know what I mean.” He reaches out hesitantly to brush his lips against her jaw, a shiver running up his spine.
He stiffens and she realizes her mistake. She can see it in the way that he straightens, in the way that his expression flattens and changes. This hurt, this loss, it makes her selfish. It builds a barrier between them that forces them apart and she is not quick enough to knock it down again. “Tobiah,” she tries, her eyes sad and round and uncertain, “I’m sorry.” Her gaze peels from his, flung skyward and away because shame makes it hard to look at him. “I’ve never hurt like this before,” she whispers, and it sounds ridiculous even to her ears, “I don’t know how to do this.”
But he is better than her, more than her.
He makes it better and it is effortless.
Always. He tells her, and it feels like a promise even if he fumbles when he offers it to her. She pauses, wide-eyed and uncertain, and then reaches out to trace the lines of confusion etched into his pale, curved face with the soft of her trembling lips. Always. The word echoes in her ears until the pounding of her heart has matched the rhythm and it is all she can hear, all she is aware of until she remembers how to breathe again.
And then-
“Always.” She agrees quietly, urgently, from beneath the furrow of a dark and white brow as she steps close again to fold herself into the warmth of his broad chest. Her cheek finds his shoulder and her lips find a spot of pale gold where she can trace the outline of color, following the edge where cream ends and white begins. “Promise me,” she whispers against his skin, closing her eyes because it is so much to ask, too much, and yet she will because she must, because she cannot help herself, “promise me you’ll stay. We can discover this place together, we can make it okay.”
She pulls away so that she can see his face, so that she’ll know if he promises her something that he doesn’t want. “I don’t want you to have to come looking for me,” she tells him at last, vulnerable, and her chest heaves with the effort of speaking, of confessing, “I just want you to stay.”
initiate the heart within me until it opens properly
my memories are full of only black and blue; I should’ve cut my losses long before I knew you. ————————————————————
Tobiah had never promised anyone anything. It’s not that he did not trust his word, only that he did not think he had a right to offer it. His word was built on the foundation of an utterly selfish life, one that had been carried out in secret and in the dark places of the world. He had kept to himself, watching the Tundra revolve around him, affecting him but never shaping him. He had watched on as a silent observer, never touching it or letting it touch him. Not until he had met her and the axis of the world had shifted.
Not until he met here and suddenly everything he had thought was enough was hollow, shallow, weak.
She was a the honey-gold drop of sunlight—beautiful and vibrant and he felt selfish for even dreaming that he could hold it. She deserved a life that was lived to the fullest and he could barely force himself out here where others surrounded them. What could he possibly offer her? She would tire eventually of being loved in the shadows but the hermit stallion who could not stand the raised voices and heat of a crowd.
She deserved better. She deserved better.
Still, he could not stop himself from aching with want, for stretching his fingers toward the sun, even when he felt his flesh sizzle. “Always,” he repeated and it felt like blasphemy on his tongue, a promise that he desperately wanted to make even when he wasn’t sure that he could, that he should. She looks at him again and he feels himself come undone, feels the knots in his chest loosen even as the fear tightened its grip on his throat. He knew the prices that were to be made for feeling this way; more than anyone.
What he could lose. What he could never gain back.
“I will stay,” he finally says because he cannot say what else lingers in his heart—not yet. He cannot allow himself to feel it, to admit to it, to cave to its strength like an oak before the storm. But still, he leans, slightly, downward to place his check against her neck and breathe in deep. If he was to die a sinner then he would revel in the sin for whatever moments he had left.
He would be a thief in the night to steal but a moment with her.
It is so much to ask of him, more than she even realizes – she does not understand what it is he has to lose by making such a promise. If she did, she would not have asked. But he makes the promise anyway, leaning down to press his cheek against her neck and for a moment she is breathless with the familiarity of this gesture. How many times had she seen her father do the same to her mother, press his ragged worries to her skin and breathe deep so as to find that peace again. Her heart stutters in her chest, but she is quiet when she presses her mouth against his shoulder in return, tasting that impossibly pale gold with tremulous lips.
Always. She thinks again, and she finds that word has an entirely new weight. Instinctively, uncertainly, she shrugs back from him, touching her mouth to the soft hollow at the corner of his lip so that he will know it is not him she is shying from. But she needs to see his face now, to trace the quiet dark in his eyes and the lines of faint tension where they coil beneath his skin. He is a stranger. He is distant and silent where she is loud and reflexive with her embraces. He craves solitude where she craves a world with no boundaries, no edges, no separation between the wilds and civilization. But, he is her stranger. He is hers and she can feel him like a weight in her chest, and that weight is appeased only by his promise, by that strange word, always.
“Tobiah.” She breathes, a sound like tempered birdsong, a release of pain and sorrow and longing – for many things, though mostly for a world erased. But she finds solace in the way he watches her, and so she reaches out to push his forelock aside, to find the impossibly soft whorl of gold fur beneath it and press a quiet kiss to it. “Thank you.”
It is in this moment that she knows for sure, that even despite the new weight of an old word, an average word, she wants this always. This promise, this stranger – and the notion is terrifying. It steals the air from her lungs and leaves her heart pounding in her chest until it is just an unrecognizable ache and she is sure there is only pink and ragged pulp left to mark that it ever existed at all. She thought home was gone, ruined, obliterated when the world unbecame, but suddenly here it is, just as it always would have been, and it exists within that single promise.
She feels uncharacteristically shy when she folds back against him, fitting easily beneath the curve of his neck. There is less desperation in the gesture now, less wild flashing in her eyes when they fall against his face for a single second before disappearing once more beneath the dark tangles of an unruly forelock. A sigh builds in her chest, climbing to her lips and steadying the racing of her heart when she closes her eyes and leans into him. “Where do we go, Tobiah,” a pause, breathless, an impossible half-smile pressed into his chest, “where do we start?”
initiate the heart within me until it opens properly
my memories are full of only black and blue; I should’ve cut my losses long before I knew you. ————————————————————
For a long time, always had been a precarious promise given to him.
Always for him was longer than it was for most; it was a gift both dangerous and delicate, beautiful in its own fragility. He had lived his life sheltering that forever, precarious around it, knowing that he had to shield it—knowing that he had to carry it in his chest and guard it from those who would steal it from him. Those, like her, who would rip it from his grasp and replace it with vulnerability. With death.
But now, curled around her, her mouth pressing to the slopes of his shoulder, his wings resting along her back and draping along her side, he realized that the vulnerability did not come from opening himself up to the possibility of her, but to the denial of her. Vulnerability came from trying to protect himself.
His heart beats quickly in his throat as he leans down to touch her again, to feel the silk of her mane beneath his velvet lips and the beginning of the feather she had stolen and wrapped into the tangles of herself. He lingered there for a second before he answered her, his voice slow and small. “I don’t know.”
He didn’t. He had nothing to offer her—nothing to give. Yet, here he was hoping she’d accept.
“I have something to tell you,” he began, clearing his throat and straightening, nerves crawling along the edges of his nerves. “Before…before, everything, I was immortal.” He frowned, his face serious, grave, the lines harsh along the edges of his mouth. “But it wasn’t unlimited—it wasn’t a gift given freely. It had a catch.” Another inhale, this one longer and more ragged than the last. “You see, I was immortal up until the point that I fell in love…and then, well, then I wasn’t. And that thought was terrifying to me.”
He leaned back slightly so that he could look her in the eye, his own pale gaze open and vulnerable for perhaps the first time ever. “But I’ve started to think that there are worse things than death.”
