"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
02-21-2018, 02:04 AM (This post was last modified: 02-21-2018, 02:37 AM by Cinzia.)
The wind sweeps across her high cheekbones like a bed sheet; silky, smooth, and early in the morning. In essence, the wind is her true lover, a gentle hand slipping the covers across her delicate skin until she lies in a heap of vulnerability, all ankles and wrists and collar bones. The wind to her is to her both commanding and soft-hearted, for some mornings dawn with a whistle and a slash against her ivory skin, and others dawn with trails of kisses brushing down her stomach.
But the window is closed in their room tonight. There's no wind to distract her from the way her shoulders ache, and that trail of kisses is leaving burn marks. And oh, though the wind be her true lover, her false one takes all the more precedence: formed in such a way that his being demands her first attention, steals away her love for the unseen forces around them.
They've been fighting.
“You know it's not my fault!” There's tears streaming down her freckle-strewn face, discarded by black-blue eyes that feel too much, want too hungrily, break too easily. Around her naked figure (cloaked thinly by the gauzy sheets), feathers are strewn - black and blue, like her eyes. The girl clutches a handful of them in one hand, too aware of where they should be, nestled in her wings. The awareness comes from the pain: a slowly increasing ache, a sensation that over the course of their relationship has been harder and harder to deny.
“Please stop pacing like that Adrian, I can't concentrate, I'm scared.” She's crying more now, too-thin shoulders trembling. The black tendrils of her hair are strewn messily across her wet face, some strands stuck in her mouth, but she doesn't move them. When she hears that he does not stop - or perhaps when she hears that he does - little Cinzia crumples in on herself, a dying star, bony arms around bony knees around bony heart.
They'd been trying to be intimate.
It's been harder lately, and tonight was supposed to go well. Romantic candle-lit dinner, hand-holding that caused no ill effects to her health. For a few minutes, she'd even forgotten the pain he puts her in, and the way she can see his heart break through his beautiful red-blue eyes each and every time he does hurt her.
There's snot on her arms, she's getting louder.
“I love you but - but -”
“I'm just so scared.”
Cinzia
cobalt skies like midnight lies warm hellos and cold goodbyes
"baby, please don't go
if i wake up tomorrow, will you still be here?"
It’s been this way for as long as he can remember.
They crumble in his presence, their resolve shatters to pieces—beings so mighty that some people considered them Gods fell at his feet and he has kept quiet about it. Secretly enjoyed it, even. They never suspected him, never took the time to consider that kind and quiet Adrian was the one making them sick. Some of them deserved it, others didn’t; she didn’t deserve it at all and he hated to look at her this way. She thought she was the problem, she thought something was wrong with her and he tries telling her otherwise but the words never come out.
It’s easier to blame her than lose her.
“Have you been taking the pills?” Adrian asks, running a hand through his dark messy hair. He stares at the hardwood floor, tracing the patterns in the wood with his eyes.
Honestly, he can’t bring himself to look at her so he avoids it while he runs through their regular checkpoints: He’ll ask if she’s been taking the medicine, she will insist she has, he’ll ask to look at the bottle and then insist she make another appointment with the doctor. It’s become routine. She’s so frail now that she hardly resembles the woman she was when they first met and the thought brings a dull ache to the forefront of his chest. He’s killing her.
Adrian bows his head, wrestling with the idea that maybe—just maybe—she will be better off if he lets her go. It’s better to do it now than never. He has turned her own magic against her, turned it to poison in her veins and what will he do one morning when he wakes up and finds that warm body wrapped in the sheets cold and stiff? What will he do when those pretty eyes of her have glazed over, when there’s no life left in there—just the pale, milky, dead film of a corpse? He shakes his head, wrings his hands, and then gets back up and starts pacing the floor again.
“It’s not my fault!”
She screams at him and he fights back a flinch—he knows, he knows it isn’t her fault—and yet the words still don’t come. ‘I know,’ he wants to say, ‘it’s my fault, it’s always been my fault. I’m sorry.’ Instead he ignores her and continues pacing until she starts to plead with him.
That’s when Adrian stops to look at her, truly look at her, and what he sees nearly makes him sick to his stomach. She’s beautiful despite her failing health and he eases forwards until he’s at the edge of the bed; he leans down, kissing her on the head and smoothing out her hair because it’s a mess and it’s all his fucking fault. All of it. She has black-blue feathers tangled in her locks and he gently picks them free—feathers in her locks, feathers strewn around the room, some of them still drifting through the air that they’d shaken them loose during their short-lived tryst.
Simply touching him had been enough to make her scream and not in the way he’d wanted.
Better now than never.
“Don’t cry,” he whispers, trailing kisses from the top of her head down to the tip of her nose before tentatively pecking her on the lips. Anything more and he might have figuratively burned her again. “I love you… but I’m hurting you.”
Her first true love, or at least, the first love that felt true. The boy with star-blessed eyes and hands worth holding at every second - in the car, in the bed, in the grocery store, when her mom died, at his sister's wedding, when they're mad at each other; when they're tearing apart at the seams. It was him, with his warm embrace (made up of shoulders just broad enough to squeeze her her form between them, and of arms that perfectly encircle her waist), that her heart attached itself to.
A poor choice, though it'll hear no such thing. Hearts are funny that way.
Funny, too, that even though the words better off without him have forced themselves to the surface of her conscious, she has never genuinely thought them herself. Not once. Even when she peaks up from her crumpled position to glimpse her lover with his head bent and his eyes furrowed, a flinch barely concealed in the movement of his upper body - even then, through the tears, the only thought is of how vastly she loves him. It's not a healthy thought. But it is true.
She tenses at his approach (gentle, kind Adrian, with fingers that shatter the steel they only brush), but when his lips meet her head it's like he's pressed a button. Without any hesitation Cinzia is leaning into his touch, praying to the gods that he would never stop petting her like this, easing the hair from her wet mouth and pale cheeks. It's not what one normally looks for as a foundation for a relationship. But she would look anywhere, even the darkest places, if it meant keeping him around. If it meant that he, would be hers.
He's speaking then, more softly then when he asked about the pills - she hadn't the courage to answer, not brave enough to fight the recurring nightmare. Her stomach turns, unsettled at her most recent dosage. But that's not important now. He's kissing her, shyly, as if they haven't been together for months, years, whatever it may be.
A cool, blue-shaded hand reaches out as he pulls away, about to say I love you. She's pulling him back in for another kiss, more passionate this time, except it's not that kind of passion - it's a dying passion, the passion that possesses someone when all else has failed and the thrill of desperation takes hold. It's a dying passion, and they have been dying for a long, long time.
He says it, then. I'm hurting you.
"No." It's quieter than before, but its the only word she can choke out before her face is screwed up and the sheets are clutched to her mouth and her breathing has stopped because of the sobs. But before he can retreat back to their hardwood floor she stops herself, remembers that she will lose him if she shows too much pain, remembers that the pain of losing him would be far worse.
She's still crying, but it's softer now. The kind she knows he can handle - that inspires more pets, more softly spoken words.
They're holding hands again.
"No, Adrian, this isn't your fault either." Cinzia unravels her knotted legs, makes room for the beautiful boy, pulling him to her chest even though the angle is awkward, half of him hanging off the bed while the rest of him finds her delicate figure. "You are my boy and I could never blame you for this." A snivel. "Maybe I need some new meds.. The doctor said that some people need different prescriptions."
Her face is screwing up again, the daunting reality of their situation all too blatantly fucking obvious, fuck, she's sobbing again and she doesn't want to let go of him, doesn't want this to be the last time he holds her, doesn't want to say goodbye, doesn't want to lose the only person who ever made her not want to die.
"There's got to be a way around this. I won't - can't - I'm not losing you."
Cinzia
cobalt skies like midnight lies warm hellos and cold goodbyes
"baby, please don't go
if i wake up tomorrow, will you still be here?"
She kisses him back and for a moment, his world stops spinning; he lets her pull him in, sliding his hand beneath the sheets. His fingertips brush gently down her side and though he tries to be cautious, he grips her hip and tries to pull her in closer to himself—but he can’t, he can’t keep doing this to her when he knows it’s killing her. Adrian brings his hand up to cup her face, murmuring things that ought to soothe her, but they’re both aware of what’s happening here and nothing he says is going to make any of this better.
“Yes it is,” he stresses those three little words because she needs to hear them.
She needs to know.
“It’s me, it’s always been me—” he’s cut off by her declaration, it almost sounds more like a plea to whatever God is listening than a statement and he presses his lips to hers again to shut her up. She shouldn’t be saying things like that, not when he has his mind set on leaving; it’s for her sake, he keeps telling himself, because deep down this is fucking killing him and he doesn’t ever want to leave this room.
Adrian remembers the first time they saw it; big and bright, her eyes had lit up as she gushed over the empty space and went about telling him just how she wanted to decorate it and where she was going to put everything. She’d done up the whole goddamn apartment shortly after they moved in and made it a home, their home—you’d be hard pressed to look around the place and not spot a picture of them together or with their friends and family—and for the first time since his dad left things had felt normal and everything was going to be fine.
Of course, it’d all been a lie.
He should have known better.
Adrian pulls back from her, kneeling at the side of the bed with her hands in his and his blood hammering in his ears. “I make you sick,” he tell hers, straight-faced and dead serious. “The pills won’t help, the doctors can’t help. I don’t know how they didn’t realize—look, I’ve always been like this. Magic just breaks when I’m around.” And she’s magic, pure fucking magic. He doesn’t want to leave this room.
It's a lie, she knows, but there is no pain when he touches her this time. And she wants to believe that this time can last them forever. His hand is on her jagged hip and she's opening her mouth to welcome more of his, her hips lifting in response to the gentle (so, so gentle) pressure he places there and --
-- And he stops. Cups her face. Whispers those sweet nothings that are becoming less sweet, and more nothing, though it's no fault of his own, nor of her own. It simply is.
But a nothingness with him is worth more than an everything with anyone else.
Cinzia can't help it, can't help the way she bawls into his patient hands, into hands that carry the burden of knowing the right thing to do. She can feel it in him, see it in his eyes (that's why hers are so tightly shut): she sees the resignation, the submission to the fact that this isn't working. But her nails are digging into the wrists that attach to those beautiful hands, and she's holding her to him, and there is nothing that will make her let him go - because maybe, just maybe, if she can hold on to him forever, then he will change his mind.
Of course, she can't hold on forever, and her mind is too shattered to maintain such an overwhelming thought for long. He is kissing her, shutting her up, pressing the softest part of himself to her as a final reminder of exactly what that feels like before the cutting edge tears through her jugular.
"No, no, no, no," he's moving away and her eyes flash in panic, her voice raising in pitch and volume, nails tearing at his skin in attempt to slow his retreat. "Pl-ea-hea-hease, please do-hon't leave me, I can't live without you, I can't, I c-can-an't." Her back buckles with the force of her sobs, but her grip on his wrists never loosens. Her mind barely registers what he's saying; and the voice in her head that usually warns her not to cry so violently, not to reveal exactly how damn dependent on him he is, not to make herself look the fool, the child, the idiot - it is silent. It, too, has given up on her.
She can feel the panic in between her ribs and it's trying to tear it's way out, shredding her flesh and bones like paper, and with every moment that he is sitting there on the floor away from her, it becomes more and more desperate, fighting its way up her throat and behind her eyes and into her ears in such a way that she is utterly senseless. Lost to the chaos of a panic attack so violent that, in the back of her mind, something says: He'd be stupid not to leave you.
But this isn't all she is - and this, them, in pieces, is not all that they are.
They are walks through the forest trails in any season but especially summer, hand in hand. They are the occasional cigarette out on the deck, and the smiling kisses exchanged between each drag. They are the grocery list that evolves with each new diet or craving. They are the sleepy Sunday mornings spent in half-sleep, each of them moving around every ten minutes, but always settling in a new position tangled together. They are the fights about whether or not to get married now or wait. They are the slamming of car doors when one of them messes up the schedule. They are the tissues that littered the floor the week her mother died, and they are even more tissues on the floor from the day that he told her about his father. They are picture frames, immortalized, captured in stillness and smiling for all their worth - not because they have to, but because they genuinely feel the happiness that inspires such expressions. They are... love.
She's quieted at these thoughts, praying that he can read her mind and witness all the beautiful memories. But perhaps he doesn't need to. He has memories of his own - and they will remind him, just as they have, her.
"Sweetheart.." Her hands have finally let go, and like him, they move to cup his face, asking for its weight, reassuring, saying you can trust me. I will hold you - no weight is too great when it is you in the palm of my hand.
"Come to bed. It's just a bad night." Her fingers slide up and run along the length of his shaggy iridescent green-red black hair, soothing the poor boy, and softly pushing his head into the palm of her other hand. "I love you, and I choose you. And I choose to find a way past this." Her voice is low, her eyes wander sometimes, to his lips, his freckles, his nose - but always back again to his eyes. Where she belongs.
"Come to bed baby boy, and we will talk in the morning."
"My aunt gave me a number to a healer - a real one. She's booked full, but I want to see her."
"I want us to see her."
"Please, Adrian, my love - won't you come to bed..."
Cinzia
cobalt skies like midnight lies warm hellos and cold goodbyes
