"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
She thinks this as her chest rises and falls, as the world seems to pass around her in slow motion. A lady of the fall: broken and naked amongst her ruins, ash fluttering around her like gentle snow. There is nothing beautiful about the way her teeth sharpen her words into knives, nothing endearing about such a callous attitude.
“Perhaps I was always a shell . . .” she whispers, eyes eons away from her cool afternoon in the meadow. Vadar is no longer there, as far as she is concerned.
That is, he is but a wayward crack in her windshield, a tiny spider-like breaking of glass. One day she notices him, not sure when or how he got there, and then the next it is as if he was always there (just a crack). Jude hardly sees him, hardly hears him. When did he get there? Perhaps tomorrow she will remember; perhaps she will be able to visualize the exact pebble that crashed into her view. Perhaps -
The glass shatters.
Finally, his lips against her skin register. Each brush of his body along hers sends another waver through her barrier. Like a rock at just the right speed and density, Vadar crashes right through the middle of her. Jude gasps, breath lodged in her throat, chest tightening against the feeling of his words at her neck. Her eyes are wide, vacant for a moment and then flooding with thousands of unprocessed emotions.
What the fuck do you want from me? There are hundreds of tiny Judes screaming in her mind, all desperate for something different - something she has never felt before - she cannot even begin to describe it. Half of them beg her to fold into Vadar and the other half want her to rip the flesh from his neck. Their cacophony is too loud, too overwhelming, too belligerent and ugly and useless -
“Stop.”
One would think Jude’s command would be a yell, but it is not. It is a word she does not mean to utter aloud; and yet, it fits into the air so nicely, like the last puzzle piece one accidentally knocked under the couch. All of the imagined Judes dissipate. Her mind falls silent.
The pegasus leans into her companion’s touch, eyes squeezed shut against all of the confusion.
“I do not want to shelter you,” she whispers, once saccharine accent now melancholy. Her mouth finds the bare skin of his shoulder; her teeth wrap around his bone. “I don’t want to fuckin’ shelter you, Vadar.”
She wants to be whole. She wants so fiercely to shake the sadness from her voice.
Now, she bites down, tearing in as deeply as Vadar will allow. She pulls away, the metallic taste of blood on her lips, then leans in to press her mouth to his. Her kiss is messy, her aim shaky. She smears the crimson across his maw.
Seven characteristics are in an uncultivated person, and seven in a learned one
This is what he does.
This is who he is.
Happiness evades him, normalcy is revolted by his very existence. How can something born from horrible circumstances escape a fucked up existence? Fate drew Vadar’s lot and decided that he should miserable. Miserable for something he didn’t do and couldn’t reverse. Every time he thinks about wanting something for himself he’s driven to a place of constant indecision and it makes him fucking mad as hell.
Stop
So he does. This is all too familiar anyways. He stops and then he frowns, and the quivering water around them holds perfectly still again. Despite him trying to play it her way he still wasn’t good enough. The thin veneer begins to bend under the pressure of trying to remain calm but he just can’t. Nah, fuck that… he doesn’t want to be calm anymore.
“You just want to be a tease.” The white-marked stallion brands her. Each word is sharp and precise. In the same instant her mouth grips down into his flesh and he yanks away on purpose, swings his eyes around in a flash of red-colored hatred and sneers an ugly smile. “Oh no you f-” But she cuts him off. Pushes her whore lips onto his.
And that’s the last straw.
Who does he become in the moments that pass by afterwards? Is he the Vadar he was meant to be? When he stares directly into the topside of her overlapping, beautifully feathered wings and shoots a violent flash of light their way, is the satisfaction he feels justified or just a dark side? The stout black stallion couldn’t say. He wants to leave her helpless, wants to see her struggle in pain.
The creek churns when he glides forward. He can smell what he wants, rushes forward to reach out and grab at the smooth curve of her haunches, pull her close and hear her scream. Desire or dread would probably sound very similar. Hadn’t he warned her? Are you the gambling type, flamingo?
Peregrine Jude has known pain her whole life, as most have - though she feels as if the universe wants her to suffer especially so. There is a small voice in the back of her head that tells her that is how most feel, that their suffering is particularly terrible; even still, she struggles to take a step from her own brain, and broils in her heated destruction.
When she presses her lips to his, it is without any thought of what the stallion may be feeling. A lot can shift in a mere few seconds, and Jude hardly recognizes how her voice sounds like a rejection. What she feels next can only be the physical version of the churning emotions within him, and initially she thinks only of him. She thinks how he must be entirely different to do this to her; she thinks he must be engulfed to flames to hurt her like he does.
She thinks he must know how much she deserves this, how much she wants this.
So, when the pain finally does register, and the delicate lavender of her feathers blackens, the pegasus only gasps. It is all she can do in the face of the brutality she brought upon herself. She gasps, a swift exhale, then draw back in an even more pained breath. The toughest part is her squeak, a tiny and high-pitched yelp she wishes Vadar could not hear.
It is only when the stallion latches onto her hindquarters that she lurches back into reality. The world goes from spinning in slow motion to heartbreakingly clear. “No,” she snaps, whipping her head around to gnash her teeth in his face. Jude throws in a small buck for good measure, hoping she can take pleasure in feeling his flesh bend beneath her hooves. Instead of facing him, like most would, she takes a few steps forward and sneers at him with one turned eye.
“If this isn’t good, Vadar, then I am going to fuckin’ kill you.”
