"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
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
Trouble. Reckless.
The words sound juvenile as they settle. She is neither of those things, she thinks. But she does not let slip the edges of her diligently crafted facade. Instead, she lets loose another breath of laughter. As if she cannot make the words make sense in relation to her. (Which she can’t, of course, but for much darker reasons).
She is not reckless because she knows exactly what she’s doing.
And he had not looked dangerous at first glance, but she’d be lying if she were to claim she’s disappointed to find that there seems to be a darkness in him, too.
They all serve their purpose, though.
The ones with the darkness and the ones without.
“Trouble,” she echoes, neither in agreement nor disagreement. She says it like it’s a word she’s never heard before.
She feels him touch her and imagines him coming away bloody. How wonderful this ability to draw blood without any effort at all. To make them hurt simply by existing. But he draws no attention to it and neither does she.
She thinks briefly of her brothers but does not mention them. Instead, she cranes her neck to press her mouth to his chest. “What have I lied to you about, Crowns?”
Crowns does not know how to pretend, how to be anything other than what he really is - a disciple of chaos. He expresses his joy when it thrums proudly in his veins and he gnashes his teeth whenever a scalding rage envelopes him. She could solve every mystery about him if she only asked. But she doesn’t, and she keeps her own secrets held tight to her chest like rosary beads. Her mask doesn’t slip the way Rosebay’s does when he shakes her just right. But does this fact excite or infuriate him? He isn’t sure.
She says the word ‘trouble’ like it’s nothing at all.
He sucks in a breath when she touches him and it feels entirely foreign to be the target of someone’s affection, however ill-intended it may be. A part of him would like to step back from her and avoid anything like it. Her stars were not worth the vile shiver that ran across his spine at being kissed. But he forces himself to stay put.
She doesn’t flinch or salivate at the scent of blood so he decides to continue his poking and prodding. Crowns leans in closer and kisses the corner of her mouth so his drop of blood smears across her skin there. All the monsters in the jungle came to him eventually when they smelled his blood. Of course, he never harmed them. He just liked to watch them move beneath the moonlight. Their perfect bodies, all built for one purpose: the kill.
“You act like one of the Pretty Things, but I’ve seen your teeth. I see how you hunt, now,” he says with a smile because he does not care for damsels. Crowns only wants the things that are wrong for him and nothing less. He calls her reckless and trouble because likes the girls who are reckless and trouble for him.
But if she truly isn’t, then this is another lesson learned. He will carry on his search for a friend that always goes for his throat.
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
There is this: a flashbang of anger that craters out the center of her chest, a flare of fine, draconic nostrils. To feel him smear his blood across the corner of her mouth, to hear him say these words. As if the Pretty Things cannot also be hunters.
She knows the part that she has played here, the damsel. This is the lie.
The lie is not in her being a Pretty Thing, but being a helpless thing.
She flashes her teeth now, draws her mouth away, plunges it into the cold depths of the water in the hopes the current will cleanse her of his blood.
“Pretty things cannot have teeth?” she asks, her mouth dripping water when she lifts her head to look at him steadily. The anger that had infected her chest cavity does not show in her expression, though the damsel is gone. The big, doe eyes are only reptilian now. They flash some electric color as she considers him.
Whatever magic he possesses is greater than hers, she can smell it on him. She’d felt it in the tethers that had dragged her backward into the water. But she is no small thing. There are entire cosmos trapped in her chest, stardust in her lungs, nebulas clinging to her sides.
She is forged from stars and she glitters beautifully no matter what shape her heart takes. Altar will be beautiful for every second of every day, and he knows this very well. But he is born from infinite night: the black hole that tears galaxies and their stars down to their parts and licks its fingers clean when it has swallowed them all. He wants to break her down slowly, with surgical precision, to see what piece of her keeps drawing him in.
But she plunges her face in the water and defies him once more.
He watches, the subtle glow of his eyes studying her. Her question is entirely sidestepped when he leans his face close to hers with a wild grin on his lips. “You don’t like my blood? You don’t wonder how my throat might taste?” he asks with a gentle laugh. Crowns quiets the fire burning between his ribs to leave his body vulnerable for her. The quiet pulse is there, flexing so delicately along his neck as he leans close to her.
“I like you, Altar. I’m offended that you haven’t tried to hurt me once,” he confesses at last. “I won’t stop you. I won’t even bite back, if you like.”
He tips his head back to expose the thin flesh of his neck then. Altar is difficult to read and he doesn’t intend to spoil any surprises by scraping through her mind. Instead, he waits, holding his breath.
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
She has grown tired of her own game.
And she is grateful that she has loosed her grip on the damsel’s facade.
There is nothing here but the dragon. In her flared nostrils and narrowed eyes. In the sinister something that snakes its way down the length of her spine.
She has no taste for blood -- his or anyone else’s -- but she can still taste it in the corner of her mouth. Blood and water and something else, too. Something she does not know to identify. But she does not answer when he asks if she wonders about the taste of his throat. She is a hunter, a Pretty Thing with teeth, but it is not the flesh she’s after.
She exhales sharply but does not speak. She merely watches as he exposes his throat to her, confesses that he likes her (though she does not know what this means and does not know if she should wonder) and that he has taken offense to her lack of want to harm him.
“There are so many other ways to hurt one another,” she tells him, blinking slowly, “and when there is a whole universe of possibilities it makes blood seem rather boring.”
How easy it would be to sink her teeth into the meat of his throat, but she does not. She doesn’t feel even a glimmer of want to do so.
