"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
05-04-2020, 04:09 PM (This post was last modified: 05-04-2020, 04:10 PM by Rapture.)
The days stretch, long and empty. Lonely. And she waits. Foolishly, she waits. Some days she struggles to remember why. Not because the memories elude her, but because it is easier. Because the only thing that waits for her on the other side of those memories is the yawning ache of loneliness and the knowledge that she hadn’t been enough.
Never enough.
She had been naive enough to believe once that she could be. That there might be more than a moment’s heartbeat in time for them. That the tides would not wash away what had been so much like it does the prints she leaves the sands of the beach. And yet she lingers, day after day. Watching those very same tides erase every piece of evidence that she might once have existed there.
She had finally abandoned the island. It had left her feeling only hollow. Everything with any meaning that had once existed there had vanished. Nothing more than the glimmering flash of a dolphin’s fin, leaving behind distant memories of a better time.
Of a time when she had existed as more than the shell of a broken and forgotten woman. When desperate love had beat through her heart rather than the echoes of despair.
Today, as she had so many days before, she stands on the beaches as sunset gleams pastel hues across wet sand. Though elsewhere fall had begun to stretch long fingers across the earth, here nothing seems to change. The air is heavy and warm, the breeze lazily stirring foliage that remains vibrant. A place that seems lost in time, just as she had been.
all i want is to flip a switch before something breaks that cannot be fixed
He has abandoned everything in his life. His home, any friends he might’ve almost made, his family. There is nothing he allows to perpetuate, because he knows that the longer it lasts, the more it hurts when it finally ends. And everything always ends.
The only thing he has been unable to give up is this forest with her ancient trees - and perhaps that is why, because her age makes him trust her. Trees wide enough to run circles around, with more branches than there are stars in the sky - even the ground is old, layers of dead pine needles that make everything feel soft and spongy. If this place has lasted so long, maybe it will be here forever. Or at least long enough to see him to his own end some day.
He wanders through the deepest parts of the forest, always drawn to the border of Tephra (where fires burn and angels are born from the ash). It’s the way the deep fog of his forest thickens with the drifting smoke from Tephra and makes this whole area like a wasteland of gray with ghost trees and no real life.
No one ever comes out this way.
So he is startled, physically flinching, when he steps out onto his beach and there is a small blue and white shape forcing the quiet fog to billow around and past her. His ears pin reflexively, disappearing into his dark mane as something like a snarled grimace warps the prior quiet of his face. He is offended that the evening he had imagined in his mind is suddenly stolen away, that his place is no longer a secret, his solitude no longer his own.
He’s so mad, that he almost doesn’t notice the words her body tells him. The soft slack in her ears and her neck, the hunch in such slender shoulders or the way she hasn’t even bothered to turn her delicate face to track the heat of the sun as it dips low over the horizon. She seems ..sad. But whatever, because he definitely doesn’t care. She can be sad on someone else's goddamn beach.
So it's strange then, isn’t it, that he doesn’t turn and head further up the beach to claim his own lonely place. That instead he stands there behind her, frowning and scowling and staring, with those quiet piebald wings lifted to catch the last breaths of a drowsy wind beneath them.
She's not entirely certain what makes her turn. A shiver across her spine perhaps, telling her she is no longer alone. She nearly doesn't look. Nearly doesn't, because it never seems to matter anyway. No one is coming for her.
But when it doesn't go away, she does turn. The soft blue of her gaze falls on him, as hollow as she feels inside. For a moment she only stares. He doesn't seem pleased to find her here, the glowering gaze and downward turn of his lips speaking volumes despite his quiet stillness.
"Oh," she whispers, fighting the urge to wilt beneath his stare. But she does. How one look can make her feel so terribly small and insignificant, she's not entirely sure. Were she in a clearer frame of mind though, she might realize it's not truly him.
No, it's her. She is small and insignificant. She'd been shown, over and over, just how true it is.
But the longer she watches him from beneath downcast lashes, the more more she begins to question. Beneath the soft rays of the setting sun, diffused by lingering fog, he looks surreal. The way the light seems to halo around him, refracted and ethereal, he looks almost like a dream. So much so, she breathes moments later, "Are you real?"
05-11-2020, 01:45 PM (This post was last modified: 05-11-2020, 01:46 PM by Illum.)
all i want is to flip a switch before something breaks that cannot be fixed
Oh, she says, as though she’d just realized something important, and he frowns even more deeply than before because he does not understand whatever it is she has. It makes him uncomfortable, this not knowing, and it takes every bit of self awareness not to let his dark body move away from hers. She is not allowed to realize things about him, no one is.
But the longer she watches him, the longer he watches her back, until that dark and marble face is so frozen in the frown he wears like a mask - a mask that he’s forgotten is anything but real now, anything but him. He’s like a furious quartz statue, severe and beautiful in a way that is not entirely attractive, in the way a wolf is before it downs it’s prey. But he is not violent now, he is merely uncomfortable with her quiet and her presence and the way she watches him with such sad eyes like she knows.
His wings fluff larger, the piebald feathers spreading wider to look more full at his sides, more imposing, more intimidating. He thinks he is trying to convince her to leave, but his eyes have started to say something else. She is like watching a sunset, a hundred subtle changes over such a stretch of time, a hundred shades of sad and broken hearted. He doesn’t like it, but it doesn’t surprise him. There is much to be broken hearted over in this place.
But then she speaks, and their twilight silence is shattered like a dropped piece of glass, leaving shards of uncertainty and wariness and regret buried recklessly in the dark of both their bodies. Is he real? Of course he’s real, and the scowl on his brow says so loud enough that he doesn’t need words to repeat it. His ears pin, disappearing into the roil of his dark mane as he moves past her to stand at the edge of the water - and it’s almost as though he’s dismissed her until the rest of the world goes dark around them, walls he builds to keep her close.
He isn’t sure why he does it.
But the dark funnels her back in beside him where he can feel the heat of her eggshell blue skin, touch wandering lips to the sad curve of a far too delicate neck and breathe out into the tangles of a cornsilk mane. She is beautiful, as all fragile things are, and the dark in him is not blind to it. It hungers. “Tell me what it was that broke you.” He says it with a strange kind of patience, with his attention not on her but off towards the ocean where his shadows have left the view untouched. There is no real note of kindness in his voice, no hidden compassion, just a curiosity to know her truths. The truths that mirror the ones in his own heart, the ones he’ll bring quietly to his grave.
It must be so easy to see the cracks in her surface. Cracks that run deep into her soul. She doesn't see the beauty in those fissures, only the hideous imperfection. She would never be whole. Would never wear the strength everyone else seemed to so easily. She had inherited only the worst parts of her parents and none of the pieces that made them so formidable.
Though she does not move, her gaze follows him as he brushes past her to linger at the water's edge. She wonders then if he would leave her without a word. As impermanent as the phantom he had briefly appeared to be.
But he doesn't.
Perhaps she should have left, but she doesn't either. There is something about him that draws her. Something that stirs a long suppressed thread of memory. Of what it truly means to be alive. It shouldn't matter so much. And yet, it does. Neither should it keep her here, but she can't seem to turn away.
As darkness closes swiftly (too swiftly) around them, he returns to her. The dangerous gleam in his eye should repel her, but it does the very opposite. And though she stills beneath his intensity, she doesn't try to move away. Not even even the cool touch of his lips whisper across the curve of her neck, or when the dichotomous warmth of his breath fans her skin.
Tell me what it is that broke you, he demands. There are so many answers she could give to that question, but only one that matters. "Love," she replies, her voice barely a thread of sound.
Not once had she even considered denying his command.
all i want is to flip a switch before something breaks that cannot be fixed
He finds it strange and more than a little irritating when she doesn’t outwardly react to the sudden dark. Surely she must’ve noticed it, and noticed that it came too soon and too fast, falling around them like a sprung trap. But she hardly even bats an eye as she comes to stand obediently beside him, a lamb beside a wolf. Is she truly so broken that the world cannot reach her? That even the dark has lost its teeth.
Now he wants to find out.
It rises inside him like a quiet obsession, small and inconspicuous until he looks it in the eyes.
But for now he simply scoffs at her answer, glancing down to try and read her face, read anything she hasn’t said aloud to him. But there is little to find, she keeps it all hidden so well behind a mask of sad, though he is certain her heart must hold more intricacies. “Is lost love really love at all?” He probes, just barely on the right side of kindness and cruelty. “Or have you come to learn that love itself does not exist, and that is the loss you mourn. The thing that broke your heart.”
His gaze is sharper now as it settles on her, not unlike a hawk might watch a small rodent rustling below in the grass. It gives him an air of cold imperiousness, and he deliberately draws it tight around him lest she notice somehow how intimately familiar he is with the way it feels when love dies.
She should fear. The dark should stir something in her, primordial and ancient as it is. But it is lost in the hollow of her broken soul. She had known true fear once. Felt the shredding bite of evil, it’s foul breath holding her life in an uncaring grip. And she knows this darkness is not that. There is bitterness and anger, but no true evil.
The faded mark on her hip bears eternal witness to her firsthand knowledge.
Her breath shudders from her lungs as he scoffs, breaking the sharp intensity left in the wake of her admission. His gaze falls hard on her, but she cannot seem to meet it. Her chin dips as she curls into herself, uncertainty and an irrepressible longing for connection warring within her. She has lived as a ghost on these shores so long now that, even beneath his accusatory demands, she feels far more alive than she has in eons.
She should agree with him. Should not give him a reason for anger. She knows the dangers housed within the crimson depths of that emotion. But she doesn’t. She finds herself, against all better sense, shaking her head in response to his assertions over the fallacy of love.
Even now, after everything, she still believes. Foolishly, she believes.
“It’s real,” she replies, her voice soft and thready, even in the crushing stillness of the dark. “My heart has the scars to show for it.”
She shivers, still not quite able to lift her gaze to find his. If he had never loved, she’s not certain he would understand. Even less certain he would wish to. But she understands far too well. It echoes inside her even now, undeniable even in the face of his certainty. So loud that she cannot help but add, “The loss is easier.”
Nothingness is so much easier to lift than the weight of her own heart.
