"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
Things after getting back from the afterlife had been… well, they hadn’t been boring. Certainly, it had given her a lot to think about - and she was not even currently aware of the full ramifications of what they had helped do that day on the beach. She had no idea just how not boring things had gotten all across Beqanna.
Still, she had no shortage of things to think about. Agetta was still unsure what memories had been taken from her but she felt happier than she remembered being in a long time.
Seeing Plume, both in the afterlife and somehow here had certainly helped as well. A small smile danced across her face as she moved through the forest. She hoped to find him soon, longed to spend the rest of this night with him, and hoped like she hoped every day that his presence in the meadow had not been a mirage or a trick. That a glimmer of good luck might be in store for her.
Night had come, clouds obscuring the stars even in those few spots between the canopy where the sky could be started. A spring rain was due, she suspected, but her mind was not on the weather. It was buzzing and whirling with so many other things.
Although she was certainly happier than she had felt in a while, it did not lessen the list of things the white mare worried about. Who would she be if she was not fretting about one thing or a hundred things?
She had just pulled on her snow leopard form to change the nature of her eyes, making them more feline and give her the ability to see in the dark, when the snap of a twig in the woods nearby her disrupts her thoughts and causes her to jump a little in her skin. In that same moment light flashes out from her body – beams of it emanating from her and cutting through the trees surrounding her. It is gone in a moment, plunging the woods back into inky blackness.
“Well, that’s new.”
Stopped now, she’s momentarily blinded from the transition of deep night, to bright, and back into the darkness – midnight blue eyes blinking rapidly to try to help her eyes readjust.
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
He’d been trying very, very hard to ignore everything that had been happening lately. Nothing to do with him, for fuck’s sake. The dumbasses that had done whatever idiotic thing that had torn the gates to the afterlife open could deal with their owned damned mess. Not his circus, not his monkeys.
Not like the stupidass place had ever managed to actually keep in there anyway.
In any case, he’d gotten very good at minding his own damned business at this point. Not like anything would be changing in his life. Unless some jackass decided to drop a boulder on him or some shit.
Regrettably not the first time that would’ve happened either.
This particular evening he’s making his way idly through the forest. Really, he doesn’t have a fucking clue where he’s going. But, when one has the endless responsibilities he does… well, one avoids them, right? Right. We’ll pretend that’s what he’s doing.
In any case, there he is, minding his own damn business, when some random ass beam of fucking light bursts through the trees, slicing past trunks and singing the pale feathers of one wing. Startling hard, he flinches sideways, a surprised snort escaping as he all but ends up in a fucking tree.
“Goddamned mother fucking COCKSUCKER.” He doesn’t even bother to try and hold back the expletives as they pass his lips. Once upon a time, he might’ve been on instant alert. But, well, when one couldn’t actually die, that shit ceased to matter. “What the actual FUCK?”
He’s not quite sure if the idiot who’d expelled that beam of light is even still there, but someone was going to damn well hear about it.
While she had suffered through the blindness from the flash of light in relative silence and discomfort, someone else had an extremely different reaction. Words Agetta has never heard before (or, at least, not in a very, very, very long time) blast her ears in much the same violent way that the light had blasted her eyes just moments ago.
She’s confused about the light and over the words themselves (what even was a cocksucker? Maybe she could ask Ryatah or Plume and see if they knew) but the angry tone that accompanies them makes her bristle. It does not help that she is nearly blinded and feeling vulnerable - and annoyed at her vulnerability. “There’s no need to be rude. I’m sorry.” She spits the word out, making it rather clear that she wasn’t really. “It was an accident and I got myself as much as I got you if that makes you feel any better.” Though she was mostly guessing at where to project her voice, she couldn’t yet see fully enough to know exactly where the foul-mouthed stranger was so that she could look in his direction when she was speaking to him.
Gradually, her sight was beginning to clear from the blinding spots, but not fast enough for her comfort. It was only mildly comforting to know that while she was blinded, anyone else in the area would have been too. But hopefully the number of victims would just be limited to her and whoever else was near her.
She continued to shake her head, speaking out loud again - muttering her annoyance at this new development. “I thought after a century of life I would’ve stopped learning new tricks but apparently not.”
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
“You wanna talk about fucking rude,” he growls, not quite under his breath, as he squints into the trees, trying to figure out what kind of goddamned idiot is spraying beams of light into highly flammable trees. Scowling, he finally manages to find a vague figure not too far from him, her clearly feminine voice irritated as she continues. The fucking gall. “You wanna make me feel better, you can shove that fucking light where the sun don’t shine.”
Honestly, considering the way that shit had singed it’s way right through everything, one would think he might keep his mouth shut for once. Of course, one would be very wrong. Not like she could do any fucking worse to him than he’d already had done once or twice.
As his vision clears, he finds himself glaring at a pale and prim visage. Clearly someone who would want absolutely nothing to do with an ass like him, under normal circumstances. Not that that had ever stopped him, of course.
He snorts derisively at her annoyed comment, decidedly unimpressed with that kind of piss-poor excuse. Not that she needed to give excuses, least of all to him. But hey, she’s the one who’d offered. “That’s bullshit,” he says after a moment, a faint bite to his voice as he leans almost idly against a tree. “And if you’ve lived more than a century, you fucking know it.”
For all his faults, one could never say he isn’t an honest asshole at least.
Instead of accepting her apology like any decent stranger would, more vile words match her irritation. She’d roll her eyes if they weren’t still burning from the light. It takes her a second to guess at what he meant by shoving the light somewhere, but instead of asking what she wants to (how he expects her to shove light anywhere especially when she clearly couldn’t control it in the first place) she bites back, ears flattening with annoyance. “Well turn around and I’ll be happy to shove it somewhere.” It’s all she can do not to stop one of her hooves in aggravation.
She wonders if she could do it on command again, maybe a good blast would rid her of the company she has found herself in by accident.
Her sight comes back to her, though she’s not particularly impressed with what it reveals. Especially the part where he is leaning against a tree, as though he’s settling in instead of moving on.
There may be only a faint bite to his words but she spits venom back at him, still full of frustration and enjoying the chance to vent it somewhere else other than at herself. “It’s not bullshit.” The word is awkward on her tongue, lacking the harshness it held with his voice (though she tries her best). It is, after all, the first time she had ever said it. The second time goes a little better, at least, as she takes a step towards him and there’s a lace of a growl in her words. “And who the hell are you to call bullshit on my life experience? I’m not in the habit of pretending I’m old just for an excuse.”
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
She’d clearly lived a very sheltered life if she’d never run into any assholes of his caliber or greater before. The kind that, almost exclusively, don’t accept fucking apologies. Her irritability, rather than further aggravating his own, does just the opposite. Honestly, he really only lived for watching others get pissed over petty shit anyway.
So, to no one’s great surprise except probably hers, rather than getting upset over her lackluster insult, he lets loose an abrupt bark of laughter. “You know, I’ve heard of some pretty fucking creative invitations to get inside someone, but I give you credit.” His smirk is decidedly lewd as he pins her with his dark gaze. “If you wanted to bump uglies though, all you had to do was ask.”
He half expects her to run screaming for the hills at this point. A disappointment, but hell if he wasn’t used to disappointments.
He’s just getting warmed up though.
He never moves from his casual stance against the tree despite the suggestive words. Based on her reaction thus far, he suspected the words would be more than enough to get her back up. He might be a shitty opportunist, but he’s a lazy shitty opportunist. Hell if he was doing more than fucking necessary. Unless, of course, it involved said alluded activities.
Somehow he thinks she’s not the fucking type though. All puns intended.
“It’s either bullshit, or your fucking boring as balls,” he counters idly, his voice dropping to an amused drawl. “Either way, same goddamned thing.”
His taunting about bumping uglies only earns a glare and her ears flattening against her skull in annoyance. It’s like he’s speaking half of another language, but she gets the jist of it (and is a little flustered that her words had inspired such a response) and she does her best not to let her confusion over the rest of it show.
It’s what he says next, in his idle manner, that causes more of a reaction.
Agetta without her memories believes that this foul-mouthed stranger is right. She is boring. The majority of her life has been spent as a spectre lingering on the outside of the world, hesitant to forge new connections, eager but unable to return to the past. She had lived a life already and has been a ghost ever since, only just starting to regain some semblance of being whole again. It is greedy to think she could live fully twice and she has kept the world at arm’s length, believing with all her soul that isolation was best until eventually she just faded away completely.
Her rage seeps out of her almost visibly. Her eyes don’t shift from him and, if he cared to look back at her, he would see the change (she was never very good at hiding her emotions). With that one observation she’s returned to being a bystander, something that haunts rather than participates. She hates this reaction, wishes she had stayed furious - wishes she had the inclination to shift into a snow leopard and leap at him to see if claws could remove that smirk from his face when words didn’t.
She would take anything over this sadness - anger or lust, anything that she could feel in comparison to the emptiness that she felt normally. The respite from herself that this conversation had offered was, in the end, only temporary.
There is nothing but a century’s worth of hollow heartbreak in her midnight eyes when she finally responds. It’s only been a few seconds, but so much has changed in her demeanor in that small flicker of time. “You’re right, I am boring. There are greater sins out there, perhaps, but that is mine.”
And then, just the faintest hint of a spark in that dark gaze. “What’s yours?”
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
Rage he understands. He’d been fucking raging at the universe since around the third or fourth time he’d died, after he’d finally realized he would never stay dead. He’d tried, of course. Had tried so goddamn hard. But he’d been an idiot to believe after the ninth time it might work. And what was it they said about insanity? Doing the same fucking thing and expecting different results?
After that, he’d given up. There’s a reason he’s such a pessimistic asshole after all.
The sadness though, that is shit he wants no part of. The anger kept him going. It fueled him in his endlessly doomed existence. He couldn’t let it go. Because if he didn’t have that, what the fuck else did he have? The bitter understanding of an eternity of misery? Years and fucking years dying and living and dying all over again? When one stripped everything he’d barricaded himself with away, all he’s left with is that goddamned knowledge. The inevitable march towards death, knowing he would only get to taste if for a moment, over and over again. Knowing he would never have the peace of a true death. Only the pain and agony of it.
So, where the anger had drawn him in, the sadness makes him retreat. The amusement slips from his pale features, leaving only the harsh, unforgiving lines. There’s no pleasure in her admission. Not for her, and sure as hell not for him. But when she asks about his sins, he can’t help the derisive snort that escapes.
“How much time ya got?” he returns a bit caustically, dark eyes glittering. “It’s a whole fucking list of shit that’ll no doubt make your ears bleed.” His lips quirk up faintly as he adds after a moment, with vague suggestiveness, “Unless you wanna expand your horizons. Add to your own list of sins maybe?”
