"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
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
It is quiet.
And in the quiet he remembers.
Remembers the heaving chest, the blood, the way the bones had bent and broke beneath the pressure. Most of all he remembers the darkness that had edged its way across the sky in the aftermath, when he had stood there on the battlefield and watched the moon overtake the sun.
In the quiet he craves the chaos that had followed.
(And he had believed then, just as he believes now, that it had been all for him and the darkness had fed him with new power and he had gorged himself on it.)
But is he not still Jamie beneath it all?
He had believed himself destined for more than that pathetic cripple he’d been in his youth and he had proved that he was greater than the death rattle of his breath and the aching in his joints. He had proven himself the victor and together he and the white magician had crafted daughters who commanded life itself.
But he is still Jamie beneath it all.
The breath still wheezes and rattles as he drags it across his ribs.
Today he calls upon the pain, injecting it into his joints, reducing himself to the thing he had been once. Each step jars his teeth, ropes of saliva dripping from his ink-black mouth because the pain makes his mouth water.
He hits his knees in the red clay and remains there, staring up at the sun. How relentless the thing is while he struggles to breathe around the smarting in his ribs. He closes his eyes and exhales shadows, shrouding the immediate area in impenetrable darkness.
She watches him sometimes, because he is someone that intrigues her.
She likes to think herself good at reading others, at deciphering their wants and weaknesses, but Jamie has remained largely a mystery. He is no easier to read than the shadows he controls, and this is something she finds both annoying and interesting. She remembers that he had believed he played a part in the eclipse, and while logically she thinks it was something larger at play, she also can’t really argue it. His darkness is unlike any that she has ever seen—even Darkling, a wielder of shadows in his own right, did not come close to what Jamie could do.
It’s why when she comes across a swath of darkness in the middle of the afternoon she knows it is him. She stops for a moment, watching the way the shadows shift and turn, like the darkest of storm clouds. The sunlight above does nothing to weaken it, cannot illuminate this shield he has erected no matter how hard it tries, and without hesitation, she steps into it.
It reminds her of the eclipse once she steps inside, the world outside of his shadows disappearing. Here in the dark the stars scattered across her body begin to glow, her face cast in silver moonlight from the halo above her head, and she has no doubt that he will feel this faint light that encroaches on his darkness. It doesn’t matter, though, because she finds him easily enough, and if she is concerned at the sight of him lying on the ground it is an emotion that she quickly checks.
“Jamie,” the velvet purr of her voice is even softer in the dark, but should he look at her he would see that cheshire cat smile perched too easily on her lips, would catch the sharp glint of almost amusement in her black eyes when she asks him, “you alright?”
so we're slaves to any semblance of touch, lord we should quit, but we love it too much
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
Perhaps he knows she is there, senses her even before she speaks.
But he does not lift his head from where it lays in the dust, not at first. For a time, he only breathes and listens and remembers as ropes of pain splinter outward from the center of his chest to infect every inch of him.
It is only when she speaks that he lifts his head and looks at her and remembers, too, but it had been like to have to avert his eyes from beauty. Because it made the dark heart beat sideways, because it hit him like a physical ache.
First Beyza and then Evia. And perhaps, simply because he is remembering, he averts his eyes again. Because she casts her own light in the impenetrable darkness, a halo of moons arcing around her head. No, he is not worthy of casting his gaze upon these things of beauty.
Her question elicits his own shark-tooth smile, the mouth dripping ink-black. For a moment, his only response is a loaded silence. Before, finally, he draws the pain back into the cavern of his chest where he has kept it buried and hauls himself back to his feet and turns to face her.
His edges are soft in the light she throws and he wonders if he could manipulate the moons that circle her lovely head. But he does not try. Instead, he calls upon a new moon. A moon that hangs fat and bright just above them, a thing that belongs only to the heavy darkness that surrounds them. It amplifies the glow of her stars, throws into sharp relief the razored edges of his teeth when he smiles again.
“It serves me well to remember where I came from,” he tells her. The crippled child he had been. He draws in another rattling breath. “I was not always as able-bodied as I am now.”
The silence builds between them, empty of sound but full of his dark and her glints of light.
She cannot even begin to imagine the things that he is thinking in this quiet, what he thinks when he looks at her, and if he were anyone else she might have tried to see what his heart wanted. It was the closest thing she had to being able to get an idea of how someone truly felt despite the way they may act, and it was a skill she had perfected over the years.
But with him, she does not try.
A part of her is afraid of what she will find—not because she thinks his heart is malicious and twisted, or entirely nonexistent, though those things are certainly possible. No, the way he has cocooned himself inside the dark makes her think she will be met with a barrier or a wall of some sort, and she is not sure if she has the means to break it down.
Something about him seems so utterly impossible that she does not even test it. Failure was not something she was accustomed to, and not because she was so good at succeeding, but instead because she was so good at avoiding things that were too risky.
Jamie was a risk.
Dark and unreadable, powerful and unpredictable.
If he weren’t someone she needed to try and keep on her side she would likely avoid him entirely, but instead here she is, risking rejection and his wrath should he decide her intrusion is unwelcome.
But he stands, and she does not miss his sharp smile—she lacked the teeth, but her own smiles tended to share that same razored edge, though the one that she offers him is something a bit softer. In the light of his new moon curiosity brightens in her black eyes, and she further closes the space to him. “You’ve said before you used to be weak, but it’s difficult to imagine you like that,” she tells him truthfully. “Weak is never a word I would use to describe you.”
so we're slaves to any semblance of touch, lord we should quit, but we love it too much
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
They have been here before, though he has no memory of it. But he feels no embarrassment for having repeated himself. (Thoughts and memories are fickle, fleeting things. It is truly no great shock that he has told her this before or that he tells her this again. Perhaps because he does not want her to think he is something that he is not.)
But she edges closer and he stands his ground, watching with those electric yellow eyes.
He has watched her from afar, just as he has watched the rest of them. He knows that there is something cruel about the magic that lurks beneath her skin. Though there appears to be softness, too. He has seen the glass stallion, their children.
She contains multitudes, which intrigues him.
Which is why he does not move to wedge any space between them when she moves to eradicate it. He simply lets her come closer, her stars glinting in the moonlight.
Were he susceptible to the wiles of women, he might have felt a surge of something. Pride? Arrogance? He has been hungry for power since the earliest days of his youth, when he’d turned his gaze to his mother and seen how she bent the shadows to her will. Because he had been something altogether less. He, a child who could not walk without feeling as if he might collapse.
And now he has it. It is not limitless power, no. He knows his weaknesses still. But he flashes her that same shark-tooth smile and recognizes that hers glints with the same dark things his does.
“Not all things are as they appear,” he says. And he lands her with a pointed gaze. As if he knows the way she shapes herself around the desires of others. Desire. And perhaps he does. Perhaps he has watched this from afar, too. Power recognizes power, after all. But he does not come right out and say it.
“You flatter me,” he continues, “but I assure you it’s true.”
jamie
