"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
Although the excitement was arguably to the west, when Mazikeen leads Firion out of Hyaline she travels east. She could worry about their home disappearing into the sea next from where she was without seeing the evidence of how it had wiped out the southern lands. They still go towards the sea, since it seems to be everywhere these days, but hopefully a more peaceful side of it. He could, she’s sure, just teleport them but it feels good to grow wings and soar through the mountains where the summer night is still cool.
She keeps waiting for her restlessness to return - it had been such a constant itch in the back of her mind for such a large part of her life. But it hasn't yet. Things may not be perfect, there may still be grief and the looming threat of Gale and she may still worry that she’ll wake up one day and find out this was all a dream, but for the most part she enjoys the relative peace that has enabled her to heal and she does not waste time on wishing for anything else.
She enjoys the thrill that sparks through her still when she glances over at Firion and knows he’s real and close and for some unknown but wonderful reason - he loves her.
Silver Cove is quiet in the moonlight, the water radiant as Mazikeen lands on the beach and the white feathered wings disappear. Her glowing horns twist their shape too, moving away from her face becoming more antler-like as her thoughts drift back into the past.
Bright orange eyes scan first the water and then the surrounding area, those watchful instincts searching for threats (even if she's confident in their combined abilities), before she looks to Firion with an easy smile. “Sometimes I forget I used to live here.”
His magic thrums beneath his skin as the world collapses around them. It is nearly unbearable to focus on anything but the thrashing of it in the back of his mind, like a migraine getting ready to form, but he finds relief in her company. Relief from the grief and the curiosity and that nearly unrelenting pain of holding onto this power that has adopted him. He is nearly normal in these moments. Nearly entirely and wholly the boy he might have been before he was cursed. Before he was damned. Before everything.
Instead he gives her a roughish smile, something heartbreakingly similar to the one his father wore in his before, and he follows her west. He doesn’t point out that his gift could fold the distance like cloth for them to cross. He just opens the wings over his back, golden and dappled with his jaguar spots, and he follows her into the air. Magic does not bring innate talent and he struggles with the motion at first. It is not graceful or effortless, but he grits his teeth and tries anyway. Tries to emulate what he has seen her do and what he has practiced in the quiet of his own company. And he laughs when he shudders or falls.
Laughs when he finally lands, sweat-slicked and invigorated, body trembling from the effort.
He comes up her side and brushes his nose along her neck, feeling that heat pool in his belly, as the night sends his skin softly glowing. “What is the favorite place you have ever lived?” he asks as he bites along the curve of her neck, smiling into her skin. “I want to hear all of the stories you haven’t told me yet.”
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)
The laughs that come from Firion help ease the shocking jolt in her heart whenever his flying isn’t smooth. Even believing there were no limits to the things he could do, including heal and stop himself from falling, she can’t help that flicker of fear for him that appears every time. Smaller echos of the way she had once been filled with shock and dread when he had dropped dead in front of her just to be a jerk.
(It still wasn’t a funny joke, though now she could actually name the reason why Firion dying bothered her so much.)
And she appreciates that the learning process doesn’t frustrate him to the point of fury. There's no anger radiating from him when they land - just that laugh she loves so much and the thrill of exertion.
She hopes she will stop looking for these darker reactions, the ones that don't belong to the golden stallion she's with - the ones she had learned to expect and sometimes needed to actively squash and remind herself they had no place in her life anymore.
Her pale skin twitches beneath his touch as he joins her, words and smile and teasing bites spreading heat through her - like the soft glow he radiates is the sun itself. “The answer to that is not a new story, but it is a good one.” It’s an answer both honest and a little embarrassing to say out loud so she doesn’t look at him as she says it. She leans in close, a lingering touch against his skin and a smile accompanying the quiet words. “My favourite place I’ve lived is with you.” Hyaline, yes, but though Mazikeen had many ties to the mountain kingdom it was this time she had been given with Firion that was her real favourite. The changing of the tides that his presence marked.
And though when she was alone she feared they would run out of that time, it didn’t feel that way right now. It feels, as it always does when he was close, like this was still just a part of their beginning and there was so much more to come.
It would be incredibly easy to just linger in those thoughts but Mazikeen does resolve to try to come up with an actual story he doesn’t know while her grin still burns bright with the fluttering heat inside her.
She thinks of the Cove here with Breach and Daye and Sochi, of Hyaline with Sabal before the darkness had come - both metaphorically and with the eclipse. And though she loves so much about these lands she’s lived in, it’s another answer that she gives Firion.
“But I guess second to that… I think it'd be the short time when both my parents raised me. We didn’t live anywhere specific - somewhere around the forest and the meadow. And even though I felt restless, even though I ended up finding a different family in the pack… I had a good beginning with my mom and dad, all things considered.” She hadn’t appreciated it at the time and it hadn’t lasted. Her mother’s sadness, the duplicity of the lives she was living, had torn that small bubble apart before it could really form. Mazikeen leans into Firion and tells him all these things about her family she often lets herself forget - and of how she didn’t really know any of her siblings, or how many there even were, except for a pair of twins born a year or two after her.
He does not stop touching her as she talks. Just smiles and lets his mouth wander along her neck as she answers his question. He smiles into her at her first answer, nipping gently at her throat. “That’s the answer you were meant to give,” he teases, before pressing a gentle kiss against the bitten flesh. It was the answer that he would have given, he knows, if only for the fact that it was the only place he truly feels he has ever lived. The only place that he has stopped long enough to consider a home.
(That was her doing. Her influence.)
But she gives him a fuller answer and he listens—or, at least, he tries. He continues to pay attention to the smooth ivory of her jaw and throat, then the curve of her neck. He murmurs as she talks, and finds himself distracted by the way his glow reflects off the sheen of her, by the way that she looks bathed in moonlight. His shadows rise up around them, arching through the air and he pulls them back with considerable force. Firion is not surprised that his darkness seeks her out too, but he loves her in the light.
“That sounds wonderful,” he whispers, honestly, laughing against the sweep of her belly, “but I have to be honest, Maze, I cannot tell you how much I do not want to hear about your father right now.” He glances back up to her with a wicked gleam in his golden eye, nipping at the side of her again.
“Even if it is my fault because I asked.”
He laughs again, but there is smoke to it, a question in it, as he feels heat pooling beneath his skin, as the shadows draw close again around them and, this time, he does not banish them away.
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)
Mazikeen doesn’t know why she is so determined to answer his question despite the way Firion isn’t exactly just standing still and listening. She assumes he had really wanted to know the answer right this moment. And though it is hard to string together coherent words, nevermind complete sentences, with the way his his muzzle moves against her jaw, she resolves not to be distracted.
Until he laughs, until he tells her that he does not want to hear about her dad right now. Confusion crowds in as she looks at him, at first stupidly not understanding the contrast between her story of family and that wicked gleam in the golden eyes that meet hers. “Oh.” And then a second later that syllable is repeated as her mind finally catches up as his smoky laugh seems to roll across her skin and leave goosebumps in its wake. “Oh.” And then she laughs too but it is a soft, embarrassed noise. She wins against the urge to turn her head away but even still she can feel some of her defenses begin to grow upwards again as she remains flustered over how she hadn’t caught on sooner. How she’d stood there rambling about her past thinking about the words rather than what else was going on.
She really was terrible at this, wasn’t she?
That thought inspires her desire to run from this embarrassment, that instinct taking over just enough for her to take a single step before reason settles back in. She uses that small bit of space to move so that when she reaches for him again, her muzzle brushes against golden skin on the opposite side of his neck from where she had been standing a moment ago.
As if it had just been her intention to face him more directly, pivoted towards him - her orange eyes illuminated by his glow but bright with something even more as her flustered thoughts shifting to the back of her mind.
The grumble that comes next is half-hearted, and the effect further minimized by the way the words are spoken so her lips just brush against an ink-dark rosette, paired with a gentle nip as punctuation. “It really is your fault for asking.”
Even Mazikeen cannot quite twist her way into understanding her worries because she knows they’re absolutely out of place here. Even Firion’s shadows have stopped inspiring fear in her, and she enjoys the way they close in around them - the way they cool her over-warm skin (flushed with more than self-loathing and embarrassment) combined with the glow he casts makes her feel safe.
Feeling safe is important, but at this moment it is not exactly the thing that’s on the top of her mind as she focuses her attention on him (where it should've been all along). Repaying each touch he had given her, answering that question of his and meeting his heat with her own. She is not good at this, but as with all things with Firion - she does not hesitate to try. So her next words are as teasing as her touch. “If there’s something you’d prefer to hear right now, I’m open to suggestions.”
He feels bad for not listening to her story—he had cared to know, he thinks, and vows to ask her again one day when he was not so distracted—but his guilt is quickly overpowered by something warmer, something smokier that pours through him. He gives her the space of the step between them, ignoring the pang it spears through him, but when she steps back, he meets her like a wave crashing into the shore. He laughs into her as she nips him with the reprimand, his own teeth skimming over the velvet of her.
This moment is impossible, he thinks. Utterly impossible. They never should have found their way here. They never should have ended here. But as he feels her pressed against him, he doesn’t care. The darkness pulls in around them, blotting out the stars and the moon, and he sighs into it, a liquid pull in his belly. “Trust me,” he asks, his voice taking on a roughened edge, and although there is a command in it, it is wrapped in an inherent question—the knowledge that she, always, held the reins between the pair.
He feels his senses dulling as the darkness pools, the shadows running over them with alternating ribbons of heat and cool. “I have so many suggestions,” he says into the endless dark, mouth skimming over her hip and he nips her there again. There is something growing in his chest, a pressure that he is not sure that he can contain any longer—a desire that he has struggled for so long to chain and tether for her.
But he doesn’t want to hold it back any longer.
He doesn’t want to pretend that they are just friends.
So he pauses near her hip and breathes against her once more,
“Trust me.”
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)
She’s nervous and it’s a funny thing to realize - she didn’t think she would be. There are fears that go deeper than not being good at picking up signals but then Firion says trust me and a small shiver runs through her. She almost says ‘of course’ but there’s nothing of course about them. It is surreal that they are here together, it is beyond anything she could have imagined. And she loves that they are.
Trust, especially right now, is vital to her and against all odds, Mazikeen trusts Firion absolutely. With all of her heart. And that’s nothing short of a miracle.
These are things she might have said out loud, but it’s becoming harder for her to nervously ramble as her attention shrinks to this world of darkness - a world of just them. So at first she just nods mutely, her mind beginning to lose focus as a thrill courses across her skin and causes her heart to hammer in her chest.
Mazikeen lets go of the nerves and the worries - there’s too much building energy inside her to relax but it’s anticipation instead of fear keeping her on edge. What little of her shapeshifting she was holding onto is released as well, her horns reforming themselves into their natural twists - so she is just herself. No alterations, no softened edges. Not quite the Mazikeen he had first met, but her truest self nonetheless.
She turns her head back to look at him, unashamed of the desire and love and trust written clear in her eyes. That bright gaze only adds weight to the sincere, breathless words she manages. “I do, Firion.” Her tongue turning his name into a caress. Smoky and sweet and so unlike the times she has spat it out that it is difficult to imagine it's the same word at all.
There isn’t any need to say anything else, even she can tell that. And with her head still turned, she shifts the weight of her back legs so her hip bumps into him - a smoky grin, a dare, a spark flashing across her face as she does.
