"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
With each passing moment, he realizes just how much he craves her: her thoughts, her touch, her attention. All of it is toxic, seeping into his skin and settling into his marrow like poison, becoming something that will only fuel his addiction, his utmost need for her to be his. She’s so delicate, poised with perfection and sculpted by magic itself - it’s seen in the way the moonlight dances across and through her translucent body, the diamond-like droplets of water that drip gently down her perfectly chiseled face. He wonders if she’s ever known hardship or trauma - would she break? Would she shatter like the glass she is, piece by perfect piece?
Molech isn’t sure. He does, however, decide that he would be there to witness it. Maybe even cause it.
But, of course, he’s more than ready to be the one to pick up those dazzling, galaxy-laden shards.
He smiles; it’s enchanting and warm on his golden mouth. It’s also genuine - her perpetual happiness within her dreamlike mind is like a drug to him, soothing all those rough and burly edges that are normally fissured and cracked within him. He’d burn the world for her, he realizes, but he wouldn’t hesitate to watch her melt along with it. The young stallion’s head tilts methodically at the thought of it, imagining her crystalline body pool into nothing but glitter and stars, and how beautiful she would even be then. His sweet Clementia.
Molech leans into her touch, satisfied and elated that she has chosen not to lift the coolness of her mouth from the darkness of his teal neck. She’s caught in his web (though it is quite easy to see that he is entangled within her own, though she is much less a web - more like a field of soft meadow grasses, warm and inviting), murmuring into his skin with an intimacy that he knows has granted him not only a cold winter’s night but perhaps all of the nights to come.
Lavender eyes are calm and cool as the twirling of her galaxies reflects in them. Fate. Such a small word, but it holds more power than she could ever imagine as it tumbles like a cloud from her crystalline lips. He’d be whatever she wanted him to be, he muses to himself, but only hums a sound of agreement in his throat. “I am,” he reassures (corrects) her, leaving no room for doubt. He will be her finale, nothing else. “Will you be mine as well, Clementia?”
A question, poised soft on the night air so that when she reflects on this moment, she will remember she had been given a choice.
She is a foolish girl, Clementia. Half-drunk on the folly of her youth and the warmth she can still feel radiating off his skin. How real he feels. And, in some strange way, she fears he might be even more fragile than she is. She wonders how easy it would be for the skin to tear. Not that she would tear it - no, she would never. It is not any suppressed cruelty that leads her to wonder it, just some bone-deep worry for this stranger who has revealed himself as her fate.
They have found each other and that cannot be an accident. Not with the way the water loves them both. How it curls along her smooth, smooth sides and lends her the gift of flight. How it loves him so tenderly that it takes him with it when it goes.
She is perhaps too naive to realize that it is no coincidence that they have both ended up here at the water’s edge. Where else would they have gone? She might have gone home to the meadow but she would have found her way here eventually.
She draws in a smooth breath and holds it. Cages all that air in her chest as she studies him. Admires him. How lovely a fate to have, she thinks. And she still goes on touching him, unwilling to relinquish the heat that gathers along the soft edges of her mouth.
She thinks so briefly of her father and his water and how his fate was almost certainly her mother. It takes her a moment to return to this moment. It takes him speaking to shake her from her thoughts and she tilts her fine head and exhales another contented sigh. He is her fate, there is no question.
Will she be his?
She sinks closer still. Touches her glass mouth then to the feathered edge of a wing before she lays her head against the heat of his shoulder. “Yes,” she murmurs. “Of course I will.”
There is danger here, certainly, but she does not recognize it as such. There is no frantic pulse, not now. There is only the feeling that she has stepped into some fever dream. As if she does regularly live within them. As if her dreams are not where she is most comfortable.
Foolish, maybe.There are other things about her, of course. Her beauty, her gentleness, her ability to see past all sins. These things are not necessarily foolish but, perhaps in the future, she may liken them as such - especially when laying them all out so openly to a stranger she barely knows; an offering to a monster she doesn’t even realize he is. He is not even aware of his own brutality (not yet) and the way he’ll use her to bring about his own fantasies. For now he is just a young boy that is high off of her, not yet realizing that she is only a puppet while he will be allowed to pull the strings.
There is genuinity within the pale lavender of his eyes and perhaps that is what makes the web that he weaves so enticing; there is no lie in how he feels about her, none at all. That is what makes it all so believable, all so enchanting - even to himself.
She draws in a breath and his gold-tipped ears press towards her to listen to it, to watch as she holds it there listlessly. He likes how her glittering eyes hold him so carefully, as if he had become precious to her, and he revels in her crystal glow.
Of course you will, he whispers into her mind, solidifying her confession with such an intimate prick into her own thoughts. He doesn’t even need to wrap his aura of fear around her like he had at the beginning - there is no hypnosis or magic in the way he makes her drawn to him. He prides himself in such a task, creating the perfect moments and saying just the right things to guild her into exactly where he needed her (exactly where he wanted her, within his grasp, already bent on becoming his).
“You don’t have to leave, do you?” he asks her sweetly (almost forlornly), and he wonders if she sees the thin black of his forked tongue slither unconsciously from his golden mouth. When it disappears behind his smiling lips, there is no break in his facade, as if it hadn’t even happened.
“You know how to find me - but how will I find you?” His brow furrows, the concern that shadows across his face quite real and contrite in the way his expression falters. He’d follow her home, he’s already thinking, but he doesn’t send this thought to her. He keeps it to himself, wrapped up tight for his own delight.
10-14-2020, 03:08 PM (This post was last modified: 10-14-2020, 03:08 PM by clementia.)
be still, my foolish heart
don't ruin this for me
She will have to go eventually. And what will happen when she does? Will he forget her? Such thoughts have never troubled her before. She has never felt any particular need to be anything exceptional. She has never wanted to be different or special. She has always been content to just be. Perhaps this the most troubling thing of all: the fact that she feels some sharp twinge of wonder, some misplaced nervousness that he won’t think of her at all when they eventually part ways.
Her heart beats sideways only briefly before it rights itself again and she presses her forehead into the soft feathered wings, exhaling as she does. Perhaps she can burrow herself into the spaces between his ribs, live there instead of the meadow with her father and her sister. Isn’t that where she belongs? In those valleys in his ribcage, in the meat of his heart? Is that not where the fates live? Certainly she will carry him there when she goes.
For now, though, she shakes her head and exhales her soft, sweet sigh. “No,” she murmurs into his side, wondering when he will dissolve back into the water. Because, in her mind, he will be the one who leaves.
She is not cold, not really. But there is a series of tremors that steal down the ladder of her spine. Buried there in the galaxies along her back, it kicks the air out of her chest. She is so soft for someone whose edges are so stiff. So willing. Pliable. Keen to be shaped in whatever way he sees fit.
Still, she wears that dreamy smile as she considers his question. They are young, certainly too young for the gravity of the things they say, but she draws her fine head back far enough to meet his soft, lavender eye. Her own eyes are galaxies as she studies his handsome face.
“Easy,” she murmurs, reaching out to nudge him gingerly, “I will be wherever you need me.” They are just pretty words, of course, because she has know way of knowing if he should need her. But it is a heavy sentiment and she means it as much as she can.
She’ll have to leave. Molech knows this and though her absence will leave him with a certain emptiness that he will not be able to satisfy, he will have to allow it. He wants her to return to him, always, and in order to bring that to fruition, he will have to let her go. He can feel the idea of it twisting inside him, a gnarled and ugly thing that he would soon know to label as selfishness, but for now calls adoration. He loves her and that is why she cannot leave. But she must, for how else will she prove she loves him too? He wonders idly what would happen if she doesn’t, but it is fleeting, for he knows it will not come to pass.
His golden lips twitch slightly into a dashing smile at her thoughts - that he would not remember her, that she will be forgotten by him the moment she is gone from his sight. He smiles because there is no way he could and just as equally, there is no way for her to escape his memory.
The young colt feels her gentle shivers beside him, taking a moment to pull his wing from his side somewhat, the curve of it draping slightly over her starry-glass spine. It would be up to her if she fills in the tiniest of empty space between them, though his gesture coaxes her in like a delicate moth to a flame. He gently laughs - a warm sound, heavy in his throat. “Will there be no one missing you?” The question is light and airy, nearly flirtatious, but his pale purple eyes snap to her possessively. Who are his contenders?
She touches him affectionately, offering him more than she realizes. There is a calmness about him then, a gentle flick of his golden tail against a deep evergreen flank. “What if - ” he begins playfully, pausing for effect and bringing his face close to hers, lipping carefully at the smoothness of her cold, sparkling cheek, “I need you always?”
Molech drops the question with a soft curiosity, once again adorning her cage with affection and the ache of young intimacy, so that she may not realize the trap she so willingly walks towards.
She thinks of her father, her sister, her mother.
Certainly they are the only ones who would qualify as someone who might miss her. But her father has steeled himself against the leaving by now. She can see it in his face. And Hourglass, her darling sister, it has been months since Clementia last saw her. And her mother? She understands that her mother never belonged to them.
She thinks of Pollen, too. And she allows herself to entertain some foolish, fanciful whim that perhaps Pollen would miss her. Still, she smiles that dreamy smile and shakes her fine glass head. Just barely. “Not yet,” she murmurs, bell-song soft, “they’ll be alright without me for a little while longer.”
She wonders what would happen if she never went home to the corner of the meadow where she’d lived with her father, her sister, their mother. And, for a time, a boy who had not belonged to their father despite how fiercely the glass stallion had pretended otherwise. A boy who belonged only to their mother and perhaps to the sister’s, too. Would they look for her? Would her father worry or merely accept the fact that he had been left again?
It makes her heart ache to think it and she focuses on his second question instead. To save herself the trouble of mourning something hypothetical. There, the same dreamy smile when he reaches for her, when he touches her cool cheek and she savors the warmth of his mouth. And she laughs like porcelain.
“You won’t,” she tells him. Certain. Her voice does not waver but she smiles all the same. She is a dreamy thing, a whimsical girl, but not even she is foolish enough to believe that anyone should ever be so desperate for her company. Least of all him.
Molech grasps at her words greedily, hungrily. Not ever, he muses to himself, finding that her response still manages to keep that same gentle smile fueled on his lips. He inhales deeply as her mind gives him an idea of who waits for her: a mother and a father, a sister. But it seems complicated and he saves that information for himself and wonders if the way she clings to him now will fade in time, or if their not missing her would keep her close. Perhaps he could stretch out this ‘little while longer’ further than she imagines.
There is some sort of sadness in the final pieces of her thoughts and even Molech feels the effect of them; his smile quiets into a straight line, gently tipping his head away from her to catch her eyes with the inquisitive gaze of her own. He does not like it when she is sad and he decides that he will make her happy - happier than when she is with her family and enough to where she would leave them behind for him.
There is no power in the family, he thinks to himself but is careful to not let it seep into her own mind. It would have to be her own choice - otherwise, she would never leave them for him. His smile slowly creeps back onto his face as his lips quirk upwards. Maybe one day she would even die for him, in the name of love.
“You doubt your value to me, Clementia,” he replies softly with a gentle roll of his deep green shoulder, enjoying the way that her crystalline body not only reflects the water that runs beneath them but the green and gold of his body. His brow furrows slightly, becoming slightly somber. “I have no one else but you.”
